Osmel Almaguer’s Diary

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.

The changes in Cuba resulting from the Special Period crisis of the 90s, causing an opening to external influences, a gradual process of privatization of life began, if not at the institutional level (which has indeed begun to some degree) then at least in terms of family life. In this, Cojimar has been at the head.

Fidel Castro’s return to the Cuban television screen generated almost as much interest as the issue he was raising there: the imminence of war in Iran. The matter had to be very serious for him to interrupt his reclusive and prolonged retirement.

Fortunately, my cement-block house was —like the third pig in the fairy tale— able to stand up to the huffing and puffing of our own big bad wolf. My uncle’s wooden place, however, almost fell down on him.