Osmel Almaguer’s Diary

My father is a lovely person: open, supportive, intelligent, sincere, and possessor of countless other human virtues. Nonetheless, he has one defect that overshadows the rest; he gets angry too easily, to the point of verbally attacking anyone who is contradicting him at that moment.

We begin cutting the wood and it suddenly began to rain. Since it had rained for several previous days, the ground was saturated, and soon we were almost up to our knees in water. The afternoon was going by and it would soon be dark.

From the very beginning of the trip, everything was new. To get the airplane tickets we had to get up early and get in a long line, which allowed us to journey through the streets of the downtown Havana’s Vedado district and delight in the dawn from the Malecón seawall.

A few years ago, a carpenter used to work alongside our house. With my father’s consent, he set up a little workshop there and paid us 400 pesos a month (about $16 USD) as rent. Over time the carpenter became friends with my father, who then reduced his rate to 300 pesos.

Something I won’t forget about our trips to Holguin was the welcoming parties the family threw for us; our relatives would sacrifice a few of their farmyard animals. I also recall us taking strolls through the city, but the only thing I remember is that there were a lot of parks.

We quickly found a place to stay the night, and for 40 pesos MN (US $2). It was a comfortable place, with a bathroom, front room and kitchenette. We didn’t have a lot of money, and we needed it to last us the entire week.

The Isle of Youth doesn’t make its inhabitants younger, or those who visit it. It owes its name to the camps of hard-working youth that lived there in the 1960s and 70s; they came there from all points of the country to urbanize the island.

However, back pains, thirst, hunger and fatigue were not obstacles to enjoying the beauty of the fields of the Cuban west, until we finally took a little siesta. We took pictures that we would never see, because the camera broke and the film was exposed.

My girlfriend is named Milaisy. She lives in the capital of Pinar del Rio, the most western province of Cuba. She’s trained as a psychologist but works in public relations for Cauce Publishers. Our relationship is influenced greatly by the distance between us, which conspires against our romance.

When I was little, my parents made me obey them by telling me that “El Loco” (the lunatic); would get me if I misbehaved. Though I never saw him, I imagined he must have been a hideous creature. Then I discovered that El Loco didn’t appear when I acted up, but only sometimes when walking down the street.