Osmel Almaguer’s Diary

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…

The landscaping could easily be that of any one of the many green spaces that often adorn our city. The sparkling water could be a river, a small pond or something of that sort. But it’s not. Rather, it’s a flood of sewage waste caused by a leak.

The Electric Company is changing the lines to every house on the block; but during this work, several explosions have occurred and several street lights have burnt out. One lady’s television tube in her house even went up in a flash of sparks and smoke.

Little by little, the fluorescent tubes that used to light my house and my father’s house have proceeded to burn out. He has, in turn, replaced them with energy efficient ones. Now his evenings watching TV are colored by a bothersome light he put in the dining room.

A few days ago I attended a literary presentation that featured writer Abel Prieto Jimenez as the guest. I stress the title “writer” because — although we all know that he was the Minister of Culture and currently functions as an advisor to the president of Cuba — his presence there was due only to his role as a scholar.

“There are two types of revolutionaries,” a friend of mine said to me, though I didn’t respond, since I completely disagree with him. “There’s one type of revolutionary — I’d like to tell him — that you can identify by their level of honesty.”

Berroa is a community to the east of Havana. And while it’s a “community,” properly speaking, its only current importance is as a commercial zone. In it is located Havana’s famous duty-free zone, within which lie numbers of warehouses.