Jorge Milanes’s Diary

“Sir! Sir! Excuse me!” someone yelled to me while I was dozing off in the sand, lying under an umbrella. “Is this your stuff? he asked.

Since he was a child, his mother suffered miserably because she wanted him to change. It didn’t matter how or even what he became, she just didn’t want him to be like that. She would use any method to achieve that aim – punishment, hitting, screaming and even the most absolutely ignorant methods.

It was Osmel’s decision to become a poet, a task that implies major challenges. But he says that since people are born into lives that are full of challenges, then in his case he’s not going to give up on what he knows how to do best.

After having had a tumor removed from her colon a year ago, this morning I went with my mother to one of her monthly exams with her doctor at the hospital. So far the results of her analyses have been fine, though she’s lost some of her vision – according to her.

“Hey, it’s hard as hell to get it. It’s a mother… I don’t have any family, so for the past several days I’ve been visiting some friends who stay there.” He then gestured with his head, pointing to the psychiatric hospital that we were riding past in the bus just then.

I had the opportunity to visit some sessions and listen to the performance-style poetry readings, a trend that — because of social and cultural circumstances — the Caribbean is now being forced to assume, despite it having reached its peak elsewhere back in the 1950s.

“The pregnant women’s seat, please?” was heard in the center of the bus. It was a woman who was asking for that seat. It wasn’t for herself, though, but for a young woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Still, no one replied.

A colleague of mine invited me to her 50th birthday party. It was in held at a rented beach house so it had a pool, a bar and a beautifully landscaped garden.

Marginality is a description given to a certain social strata of people. It is a phenomenon influenced not only by economic resources as its main link, but also has cultural, political, ethnic, sexual and racial factors associated with it.

On the corner near my house, a group of neighborhood men always get together with a bottle of rum. Each will take a sip and then pass it on to the next guy. A greeting by one of them made me stop. He then asked me if I had any books of adventure stories or novels at my house for him to read.