When I walk through the historic district I get this strange impression that they’re never going to stop making repairs. They finish renovating one building and the previous one has already fallen into disrepair.

The P-15 bus was stuck on the train track as a locomotive was bearing down on us. I was in the middle part of the articulated vehicle, where there aren’t any windows, which is why I couldn’t see what was going on.

“Let Me Tell You” is not just a comedy show, over the past several years it has become the sole program on Cuban television that has faced up to the most pressing problems confronting our society.

I met Yoilan in one of those brief periods when he wasn’t in in jail. Our relationship wasn’t really what you’d call a friendship; it was more like company, or guys who’d occasionally hang out on the corner together.

Those present roared with laughter because we knew that he was referring to the fact that this sound system had arrived in Cuba when it was already antiquated technology, but for us it was a something new.

The “plaza” in my neighborhood —where the State sells its agricultural products— has more rallying power than Havana’s Revolution Square itself.

People will point it out to me every now and then with a tone of concern, as if I had grown a tail without realizing it, or as if they were breaking the news of some terminal illness.

Nothing reminds me more of the army than Cuban schools. They are institutions for the perpetuation of the dominant ideology.

I sat there thinking to myself: Young people have always been the same, with their virtues and defects, with passion and the ideals necessary to make societies advance, with their malleability that makes them conducive to change, and their inexperience that allows them to make understandable mistakes.

In the “before” times, in addition to having variety of alternatives and plenty of places for recreation, people had a different concept of amusement.