Jorge Milanes’s Diary

The promotional message which ETECSA sent to mobile users recently illustrates why I don’t own a cell phone. The message read, verbatim: “If you add 20 CUC (Cuban Convertible Pesos) of credit to your line from April 15 to 19, you will receive 40 CUC of credit.”

The large bus substitute people in Cuba call “camels” – a means of transportation created in the 1990’s to address a critical period of shortages in the country – are a dying species. Once, Havana was teeming with these two-humped lorries with noisy doors which were always packed with passengers.

“Out on the street with my kids, helpless, I started to yell outside the apartment Roberto and I had bought. The lady in the apartment took pity on us and offered me and the children a room to stay in while I looked for a place to settle,” my friend Lila tells me.

“Jorge,” said the faint voice of a silhouette I see behind the window. It’s Lila, a friend from junior and senior high school who did a Bachelor’s in Economics (while I had studied Naval Engineering). I thought she had left for the United States.

Recently, I was finally able to meet with my Internet pen-pal Lo Lai Hing in person. He travelled to Cuba from Hong Kong with his mother, Yue Wing. They were very happy. It was their first time in Cuba.

Plaff, o demasiado miedo para vivir (“Plaff, or Too Afraid to Live”) is a Cuban film from the late 80s starring Daisy Granados, Luis Alberto Garcia and Thais Valdes, premiered at the close of Cuba’s decade of material abundance.

When I got on the bus, I saw that the driver had his hand over the fare-box. Everyone who got on was paying him a peso. “Driver, I don’t have any change,” said a woman who had just boarded the bus, wrestling past a crowd of people.

Not long ago, a friend of mine went to pick her kid up at his primary school and I tagged along. In the hallway, I saw the collages that are always hung on the hallways or at the back of the classrooms in these schools. Only one of them was more or less acceptable, the rest displayed tasteless information and decorations.

At ten in the morning, I was returning from Vedado on a P-5 bus (which goes all the way down to the ocean drive in Old Havana). I got off and crossed the street, heading towards the Plaza de Armas. Suddenly, I hear two young men call me.

From the moment they arrived to the time they left, the Yubonas controlled absolutely everything that took place at the ceremony. In Cuba, Yubonas are the women responsible for all aspects of the ritual whereby a practitioner of Santeria is initiated into the religion.