Irina Pino’s Diary

Dying at the age of forty, when the sap of experience leads to a new blossoming in our lives, is too unfair. The death of John Lennon isn’t a trivial or even logical incident. It was a devastating event that has always stayed with me. I recall hearing the news over the radio, late into the night.

It caught us by complete surprise in the 90s, and no one expected it to last the many years it did. Even today we continue to be haunted by those infernal years, as though we were unable to find a way out of the crisis. One need only mention it to conjure up those dark memories.

Woody Allen once said that “the heart is a very flexible organ”, and I agree with him in every sense. A colleague at Havana Times gave me a compilation of essays on free love by 19th and 20th century thinkers, put together by Osvaldo Baigorria.

I took part in Cuba’s “countryside boarding school” program while in junior high school back in the 1970s. At the time, young people were obliged to go work in the countryside and contribute to the country’s agricultural output for 45 days each school year.

I recall that the portrayal of the Battle of Borodino in Soviet director Sergeui Bondarchuck’s War and Peace, an adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel, made the film a true work of art, as did that ballroom dance scene, with its costumes, lights and dancers performing a delicious and interminable waltz.

I’ve noticed that some of my previous articles dealing with the issue of sex have stirred up a number of debates and also a bit of mockery. I would therefore like to touch on this issue again. I imagine I’ll find other related topics of interest later, as this is a rich and multifaceted issue for discussion.

We should have relationships made up of three or four partners. Love and sex know no rules – we are not monogamous by nature. People merely imagine that we are and live with this false concept as something pre-ordained by nature. Breaking with these rules would be a form of liberation.

Talking a walk around this old and refurbished quarter of Old Havana, where one always seems to find something new, something one missed during a previous stroll among the ancient buildings, is very agreeable experience.

It would be worth asking ourselves, however, what “normal” would be when it comes to sex. Can sexual preferences be classified in any way? I don’t think they can. There are so many different forms of sexual conduct that any treatise on them would be endless.