Diaries

Are We Serving as an Example?

Over the last few years, I’ve heard many complaints from Cubans who frequently travel abroad. Upon returning to their homeland, at the Jose Marti International Airport in Havana, they always run into new regulations, difficulties and various restrictions.

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The Resin Tree

I’ve just seen how a more than 20-year-old tree with medicinal properties has been thoughtlessly cut down. It was felled by a neighbor of mine who lives in an apartment bordering the common garden of a building on the well-known calle de Los Almendros (Almond Tree Street) in the Alamar community.

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The Future of a Monumental Institution (II)

I believe that the best thing that can happen to OFICODA is to turn it into the basis of a future retail trade cooperative in Cuba. That solution, in my humble opinion, would maintain fairness while instituting the democratic leadership of citizens in the self-management of such cooperatives.

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As Bad as the Round Table

La Mesa Redonda is a Cuba in miniature, full of superb specialists who arrange themselves carefully so as never to be off the mark; and where true discussion and plurality remain sequestrated. In short, it is a round fraud, so terribly bad that I thought I’d never run into anything similar.

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The Future of a Monumental Institution (I)

As bureaucratic offices at the grassroots level, with their time-worn tables and crumpled files, the storefronts of the OFICODA branches constitute a complete symbol of a social paradigm or model. At these facilities, various officials —usually women— are in charge of keeping a list of everyone who has permanent residency in the area.

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A Red Hot Summer

May is the month of rain in Cuba, and also the month in which the temperature begins to go up. It’s when the habits of Cubans begin to change; we substitute hot water for cold showers, lukewarm milk for ice-cold juice, and the evenings at the cinema for trips to the beach.

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More on the Los Aldeanos Concert

Just like everyone who wanted to be there, I went to the concert with the mental image of those cimarrones (fugitive slaves) that Aldo and B had always represented, and I didn’t expect anything like what occurred. Therefore, I wrote expressing my surprise with everything that was heard with my own ears and by those of others, as well as what I and others saw with our own eyes.

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Saint Che in the Heavens

As a result of having spoken of Che with untruths and emptiness, he has been made a symbol for the great majority of adolescent Cubans. So now they wear his picture as a fashion statement, so as not to be outside the group, not for Guevarian ideals.

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Message Received, Over and Out

No, this is not the sign-off call from a Cuban police officer from their checkpoint, but the guarded voice of a generation that is seeing the culmination of an entire era of sterile sacrifice crowned always with the yearning for what’s basic.

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