Irina Pino’s Diary

Watching the sea is a way to alleviate stress. I usually do this because I have the sea nearby, I live in Miramar in the neighborhood called La Puntilla, an idyllic place in the early ‘90s.

When they premiered the movie Farinelli, a friend told me, telling me that it was about a gay singer who didn’t have any balls… and that made me burst out in laughter. However, I soon became interested and went to see it.

“We’re going to play”, I’ve heard my son, who studies at pre-university (senior high school), say this frequently, but it’s not playing an instrument that they’re talking about…

The friendship between a boxer and a former soldier, within the context of the “Los Cocos” sanitarium, an institution where they kept every case of HIV and seropositives in confinement, in Cuba in the ‘80s is the setting for of film “El Acompañante” (The Companion).

On September 15th, I heard about Cuban poet Juan Carlos Flores’ suicide. He’d suffered from schizophrenia and in the last period of his life, he’d decided to be by himself, his wife had gone out of the country.

We have lost an actor of a thousand characters, Jose Antonio Rodriguez passed away on September 7th. Government media report that he had been suffering from a degenerative disease.

When a friend talks to me about broken families, I see the portrait of my own family: those who have stayed here in Cuba, those who have left, and those who are getting ready to say goodbye.

The wretched state of the Rex Cinema, on San Rafael Boulevard in downtown Havana, doesn’t stop me from seeing it and what it once was, with super comfortable seats and excellent air conditioning.

It seems that adversity stood in your way and wanted to erase your name, dark horsemen didn’t want you to continue on living, they tried to silence you…

In the holidays, the kids in my neighborhood enjoy going to the coast, bathing in the sea. They also play bul-le, that’s the slang name for it, but it’s just a game of cards which up to six players can play.