Diaries Archives - Page 584 of 645

Havana’s Usual Suspects

The usual habitual suspects are easy to identify: They’re standing around the doors of cultural events and debates that they’re prohibited from entering.

I saw him knock on the door of Pedro’s house. He stretched out his hand holding money and left with the packet in hand. He must have been barely nine. While he was walking I saw him raise the little box to his nose, close his eyes and take a deep whiff. Anyone would have thought he had breathed in the aroma of some kind of extremely rich candy.

100 Years of the Working Women’s Day (Part II)

How can we eliminate sexual commerce and trade without attacking the State apparatus, which both promotes and conceals it, and without attacking capitalism, which has as a condition for its survival the physical and psychological destruction of women and the transformation of them into commodities?

Aunt Kika

It’s common for us as people to be obsessed with judging others: evaluating what they do, what they think, how they dress, who they associate with, what they spend their time and money on… We judge everything. In that way we lose out on a lot of good feelings, relationships and experiences, and can even do harm to the person we judge.

100 Years of Working Women’s Day (I)

March 8 for me is a day representing the value, discipline, courage and determination of working women, not the false bourgeois values depicted by almost all the broadcast media, blurring that day’s distinctly socialist and revolutionary origin.

With a Plastic Bag Under My Arm

It’s not exactly because I’m turning into an old gossip, or that I find certain pleasure in seeing how people make their way down the street struggling against this chilly weather. Nor have I succumb to paranoia: watching out for an enemy that’s watching me. It’s nothing like that.

Not Stopping till 120

When leaving the house in search of text books for my studies, at the corner I passed by an older man, tall with white hair, but whom I didn’t know. In his face, time reflected each mark of his enjoyment, and judging by my own eyes he was about 70.

The Importance of the Dead

I’m by no means an expert in death, but with half a lifetime covered, I’ve now accumulated some experience. Heading for abyss, I’ve seen the loss of one grandfather, four close friends (three by suicide and one from an accident), several dogs and cats (who were also good friends), distant relatives and many others. The conclusion I’ve drawn from all this: if death is ugly, the wake and the funeral are uglier.

The ‘Caribbean’ University Games

Given my habit of running five simple laps around the track at the University Stadium, I noticed the number of people coming out to the field was increasing as the beginning of the games approached.

With Venezuela…in My Heart

The arguments around “imperialistic hostility” and “media terrorism” are losing their genuine value in the face of abuse exercised to hide a totalitarian bent.