Jorge Milanes’s Diary

What astonishment I felt when I got home to find two plastic water bottles, one sitting on each side of the entrance! I wondered, what reason could there be for those bottles, which for the first time I had seen between the two columns out front.

Yesterday, when I was walking briskly to the Payret Cinema (it was just about time for the movie), I saw that a young guy standing against the wall on the side of the cinema had gotten caught up in an embarrassing situation.

“Buy mine! I’m telling you, they’re the cheapest and tastiest, but also inside there aren’t any,” the vendor suggested, using one of the most amusing selling strategies.

It’s a tradition in Cuba to make offerings to the orishas. For a long time this has been used by people seeking harmony with those Afro-Cuban gods.

While I was listening to my brother, I thought that he better not return to the central warehouse because one of these days he’s going to get himself in hot water.

In Cuba it’s a tradition to hang a red ribbon in your car to protect the vehicle. It’s said that this disperses negative energy; in other words, it can reduce the effects of the “evil eye”.

What struck me as odd was that neither the driver nor the guide had ever been there. In any case, the bus left Havana taking a highway on the north shore.

I accepted the invitation of some female Swedish friends who had come to Cuba for 15 days to practice the well-known dance form of “Cuban Casino,” internationally referred to as “salsa.”

Sitting in the front room of our house, we were watching the nine o’clock soap opera when suddenly we heard an unusual sound.

“Look at this! Years back, a spectacle like that wasn’t allowed. The police would have come and carted them all off. Today they hang around all over the place,” commented a man who was also waiting for a bus.