Diaries Archives - Page 555 of 646

Today the Ice Cream Tastes Different

I can’t figure out what type of iconoclast revolution has occurred at the Coppelia, but the ice cream tasted especially rich on that occasion, and it was easily digested.

Havana Debate Space Exclusion

Officials of the Cuban Institute of the Art and Film Industry (ICAIC) arbitrarily prevented me from accessing the Last Thursday forum, a monthly setting for debate organized by Temas magazine.

As it turns out, the country’s recently initiated process of economic restructuring aimed at ending waste has hit higher education. The number of professors —by no means squanderers— has been reduced on various community-based campuses.

We Will Be Like Fantito!

If I were a little girl again among ranks of the Young Pioneers, wearing my uniform and with my hair well combed, instead of chanting the motto “Pioneers for communism, we will be like Che,” I would like to chant, “We will be like Fantito!”

Los Confidenciales: ‘The Group I Work for’

My cousin burst into our house almost sprinting. He said that because a change in the schedule, he had to go by and pick up his colleagues in front of our house.

A Strategic Zone?

I was asked by another guard to leave the area with my camera because this was a “strategic zone.” This time I mustered my nerve and asked why this bus stop was strategic?

Questions of Race (II)

All those present reaffirmed the idea that the problem of racism is palpable in our society and that no campaign undertaken since the beginning of the 1959 Revolution has been able to eradicate this disease.

A Toy Car

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.

A Whisper of Lovers

A soft breeze whiffs through the trees in the Plaza de Armas, the site selected by the Spanish conquistadors for the founding of Havana in 1519. Today this is the place where many lovers meet up to be together.

Calzadilla Gets a New Job

Right now everybody’s happy at home because my father, Calzadilla, has just gotten a new job. Now he’s not moaning and groaning all the time —at least not in front of us— when things don’t turn out like he wants, which is almost always.