Osmel Almaguer’s Diary

“Yadira has always been involved with painting. When she was little she would spend hours sitting at the dining room table painting sheets of paper with her little art set.” That’s what her grandmother told me, because I didn’t know her back then. Yadira now makes her living as a manicurist

Juan Carlos Fuentes is one of my neighbors in Cojimar, a small fishing village on the eastern outskirts of Havana. He’s a retired fisherman who now makes his living in a rather strategic manner: buying clothes in Panama and selling them in Havana.

“Doña Laura” is a privately-owned cafe that’s very successful right now. It’s located on F Street, between 21st and 23rd streets, in Havana’s downtown Vedado district. Its dishes consist of acceptable quantities of reasonably priced and well-seasoned Creole food.

The Isle of Youth (the smaller island off the Cuban mainland), long ago ceased being a paradise that attracted immigrants. The repopulation project that was initiated and undertaken by the Cuban government was the impetus for the island’s 1978 name change (previously it was called the Isle de Pinos, or the Island of Pines).

We don’t have a wealth of alternatives when it comes to improving our health, but we don’t have the desire to do this either. We have ideas but we don’t put them into practice. In the end, sometimes we even lose the desire to talk about these kinds of things.

In 1993 — when I was 14, during one of the harshest years of the Special Period crisis — I went to the Latin American Stadium to see my favorite baseball team, Havana’s “Industriales.” The idols back then were German Mesa, Javier Mendez, Juan Padilla, Lazaro Vargas, Lazaro Valle and, of course, Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez.

I had been sitting a few feet away and had heard all this in a state of somewhere between discomfort and amazement. I knew exactly what she was talking about because not long ago I had the difficult task of teaching at one of those schools.

The achievements of Cuban medicine — which are more than a few — are tarnished by cases that are not as isolated as one might think. Just a few weeks ago my cousin gave birth to a baby, during which time her life was threatened because of a series of bad decisions by staff attending her.

The Cuban national television network “Tele Rebelde” has again started showing prime time reruns of the legendary American series “Little House on the Prairie.” Rather than a marathonic soap opera deserving to be reshown twice in a span of less than three years, it exists more like a museum fossil.

He seemed more like a cartoonist, one of those who charge ten pesos or one CUC for a job that often isn’t even that good and only takes a few seconds. My first reaction was to ignore him and to continue the conversation I was having with some friends…