Diaries

Squalid Sunday

It was one of those days I longed to walk down the foul smelling and semi-destroyed back streets of Old Havana. Someone suggested that we go see a Venezuelan friend of theirs. My response was “why not.”

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My Friend Wilay & Being An Artist

I’ve always believed that being an artist is an attitude. It’s not enough to create a work that is sold or published; it’s not enough that in certain circles of power you’re seen as an artist, or that you see yourself as different. You have to feel a sense of anguish when a certain amount of time passes without writing, without photographing, without painting – in short, without creating.

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Reconstructing Reality

Do human beings have souls or are we made only of matter? This question has been posed for centuries, yet without finding a conclusive and definitive answer. I came up with the solution a while ago, so if you want to find out what it is, you have nothing more to do than follow the lines below.

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Better Public Transportation Is Possible

Perhaps other people accompanying me on such an unpleasant journey through the city do not share that hope since their suffering is double; that’s the product of having to endure the immediate situation while lacking the long term dream that a better future is possible.

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I Don’t Want to Be an Aspirin

About a week ago, a conversation arose between co-workers regarding the phenomenon of how, at the street level, people have thousands (millions?) of common ideas about how to improve the country’s situation.

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Negritude in Cuba

Each one of us has felt discrimination at some time in their life: for being fat, bald, homosexual, or very thin, for being left-handed or shy, elderly or a kid, for belonging to the female sex, or for being slow or very intelligent, for being Russian, Arab, Chinese or African. My goodness! – the list is long.

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Fencing Off Public Parks

Havana had its private clubs and beaches long before the 1959 revolution, however, for as long as I can remember, the parks have always been public. And that’s how they are today.

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Losing the Adult Game

The people who surround me are increasingly serious. Their faces contract increasingly. They spend increasingly more time with unfriendly looks. They remain increasingly silent. Their silence is interrupted only by laconic comments in whispers.

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