Diaries Archives - Page 585 of 646

Going to a Restaurant

If someone invites me to a restaurant in Havana, I don’t hesitate to accept. It’s tempting especially if this involves a restaurant that sells in convertible pesos (CUCs), where supposedly the service is first class.

Cuba’s Repudiation Rallies

Several generations of Cubans never witnessed acts of repression in full public view. Recently seeing people on television violently “repudiating provocations” frightens me, regardless of towards whom it’s directed at. To again view acts of explicit violence committed by human beings arouses much sadness in me.

Condoms for Men Who Have Sex with Men

The conversation I had the other day with three friends came out of the almost naked phallus of that actor who played a bull in the play “Fiesta Brava,” which was dedicated to an analysis of the brutality of bullfighting.

My Neighborhood Bulletin Board

Although the concrete problems of the neighbors will never directly end up on this bulletin board, I’d say there existed a better relationship between the abstract and the concrete…that’s to say between the heroes and our leader on the one hand, and real flesh-and-blood people on the other.

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.

Buying Poison

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.