Osmel Almaguer’s Diary

My uncle has a dog on a leash in his back yard. Though I’ve often heard him bark, I have never once seen him wag his tail. The poor creature has a very hard life, at the mercy of the rain, the cold and his fleas.

Though exchanging a house or apartment with “hidden defects” is punishable by law in Cuba, people continue to do it (and successfully, in more than 90 percent of cases). Hidden defects are all such flaws a household may have which are concealed when the property is shown to its future resident.

Imagine you don’t have a broad range of recreational options for the evenings that came after long days of work, that your one alternative is TV programing and that this is the one means of warding off boredom in the time spanning dinner and bedtime. Now, imagine your television set doesn’t have very good reception.

Though I thought I’d gotten over the enthrallment that this island and its people invariably inspire in visitors, I couldn’t help but feel, again, as though I were in heaven, a place where poetry, music, love and friendship ruled the roost. For four straight days, I lived on the edge, almost without sleeping…

I’d always thought of the whole dengue fever business as something that happens to others, something people can die from, but not anyone close to me. I imagine a lot of people think this way and will continue to do so. I don’t think this way anymore.

I recently paid the province of Mayabeque (formerly the eastern part of La Habana) a visit. I was invited to a meeting of writers at the Casa del Joven Creador (“Young Artist Community Center”) located in San Jose, the province’s head municipality.

When a Cuban doesn’t know what a rissole is made out of, they say it’s a “hoonos rissole.” Whoever’s next to them then says: “Who knows what it’s got inside!” and everyone has a good laugh. In addition to the few ounces of ground soy-meat you get through your ration booklet every so often, sometimes they sell you a type of mincemeat (at market price) which is practically inedible.

The receptionist at the polyclinic kindly explained to me that the ultrasound request I’d brought had been filled out incorrectly, for, according to her, it wasn’t possible to examine the liver, gallbladder, bladder, kidneys and biliary tracts in a single ultrasound procedure.

I titled my first book of poetry La Pendiente (“The Slope”), in reference to the place where I live, located at the foot of a hill to the south of Havana’s peripheral neighborhood of Alamar. In La Pendiente, I get a number of things about the place and its people off my chest.

Ciego de Avila is a province experiencing vigorous development. Created relatively recently, as part of the political and administrative restructuring of 1976, most of its infrastructure is of recent creation. This is a piece about my visit there not that long ago.