Jorge Milanes’s Diary

From when I was a child, I remember my father going off to participate in the sugar harvest at a time when the country was engrossed in the attempt to harvest no less than 10 million tons of sugar.

For a person who has never set foot outside of Cuba and for the first time they finally do, it’s very difficult to get over the psychological trauma caused by such a long time here with so many questions.

A friend of mine from back in senior high school (what we in Cuba call “pre-university”) had become very ill. Back in those early days we used to share tastes in the music of Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, to name just a few.

In the former home of the Cuban poet Dulce Maria Loynaz, now an institution which bears her name, I was amazed during my visit there a few days ago.

Robin is the driver for an important trade union leader. In our conversation we shared jokes and exchanged anecdotes. He even made a few confessions about his job that he’s had for three decades since he was eighteen.

I have a friend who got sick during his last trip to Cuba, maybe because he didn’t adjust to the hot weather and the high humidity that persists on the island most of the year round.

We walked through the downtown streets lined with taxi drivers, street vendors and artisans, among the other “hawkers,” each braving the streets touting their products – almost in your ear.

Not too long ago I read an article which presented the thesis that if cellphones had existed in the age when Romeo and Juliet was written, the work wouldn’t have had its fatal ending.

“Don’t you remember me? I’m Reymundo’s nephew. I was one who had the accident with the machete hitting the electric cable,” a young man asked me at the market.

I went to the shop located on the first floor of the Florida Hotel in Old Havana to buy some cologne for my mother’s doctor. I’d already bought him a couple pairs of socks and she had insisted on cologne.