Diaries

See You Later Cuba

Living my young adulthood outside of Argentina and the contact with Cuban society had made me feel closely attached to the island: to its happiness, progress, frustrations and future. The time it was taking to resolve my passport problem was eating away at the roots of my decision and making me question my returning to Argentina.

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No Fear of the Ugly

I was walking along one of those long roads, walking just to walk, looking calmly at things we hardly see when speeding by, squeezed together and paranoiac inside a city bus.

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How Things Should Be

Being a veterinarian can be quite lucrative profession in Cuba. I know several of them who are good people, but there are others who think only of their businesses (be they legal or informal) and not of the animals.

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Cuba’s Press & Telling the Truth

I’m not a faithful follower of the popular Brazilian soap operas shown on Cuban TV. However, a character in the current soap, La Favorita, has inspired me to spend a few minutes watching that series at least once a week. I admire Ze Bob, a young journalist who constantly criticizes the corrupt legislator Romildo Rosa, and who doesn’t fear being beaten or murdered in the defense of his ideas.

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Negligence: A Curable Evil

When I first began to write for this website, I published a diary entry about stray dogs. The problem of the abandonment of our loyal companions continues – so a question tormented me: loyal to whom? To be honest, I believed negligence was an incurable evil rooted deep inside many human beings. But a recent experience has given me a hope that once again lights up my days.

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Swimming Among Dictatorships

In my daycare center, and later in all my schools, all of the teachers were in one way or another fond of this same dictatorial method. This was the most effective way (they believed) for controlling brats, of which there were plenty in the classrooms of marginal neighborhoods like mine.

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Me, Afro-Cuban?

There are people like myself in Cuba today who struggle to eliminate racial prejudices. Some of them have begun to refer to themselves using a term that to my way of thinking, far from dignifying the struggle obstructs it.

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Battle at the Art Institute

A video recently fell into my hands on the events that occurred about three months ago at ISA (the Superior Institute of Art). This came to me through means more efficient than Cuban television, which instead of being a medium of enlightenment can wind up being a medium of disinformation.

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We Need More Not Less

But what is most unsettling to people (the majority of whom are not vegetarians) has to do with children. For a long time, with more or less frequency, the State butcher shop provided each person —monthly— only five hot dogs, three-quarters of a pound of soya-burger and a pound of chicken.

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Forgetting Ethics, Anything Is Possible

Years ago Rocío shocked the Cuban visual arts world with her exhibit “Machos Marineros, Marinos,” which exposed one of the paths of human desire: that experienced by sailors every time they confirm their loneliness on the high seas.

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