What I know about my paternal grandparents I owe to my father, who occasionally after dinner talks about his childhood. Most of what he mentions are references to his father, who would take my dad by the hand and bring him along on walks to neighboring towns during Grandpa Juan’s drinking binges.
Read MoreWhen Rodolfo approached me yesterday as I came in to work, the first thing he said was that he needed to talk with me about something that had happened to him in my neighborhood, Cojimar (located to the east of Havana bay). He said he felt bothered by what had occurred there.
Read MoreIn the taxi, you can talk politics more openly and without fear of any type, or about the cockfight you went to over the weekend, the latest model Ipod that your cousin is trying to sell, or all the news that’s not fit to print. It is like a rolling duty-free zone, or a confession box.
Read MoreI went to bed and immediately fell into a deep sleep, until a neighbor woke me with her yelling. A worker from the electric company had just cut off our electricity and was taking our meter. When asked why he said the bill hadn’t been paid for two months.
Read MoreThis summer, two anniversaries were commemorated: one was the first landing on the Moon by a human (astronaut Neil Armstrong), and the other was the momentous Woodstock rock festival. Both events well recalled on specially-dedicated Cuban television programs.
Read MoreWhen I discovered that the people who were going to take care of life on the beach were – at the same time – going to mistreat it, this seemed so paradoxical and unreal to me that I experienced some really difficult moments.
Read MoreOn a recent Saturday morning I was once again overwhelmed by Leibniz’s “New Essays Concerning Human Understanding.” I was sitting there astonished with how obscure and muddled the great philosophers can be – or perhaps their translations – when my grandmother came in all worked up and flustered about what she had just seen.
Read MoreWhen I lived in London, my neighbor was an attractive young teacher from Ireland. One time we were talking about history and I mentioned to her the victory of the USSR over fascism. “But that’s not true… You’re kidding,” she said, stupefied, “The Americans won the war!”
Read MorePreviously the fares were affordable, but today they’re simply outlandish. It costs 75 pesos to travel to my province from Havana, and the fare shoots up to almost 200 pesos if you want to travel from Havana to eastern Santiago de Cuba.
Read MoreFor over a month now, I have been listening from my house in Cojimar to the penetrating noise of the infamous fumigation apparatus that invade our sound environment every summer, year after year, in hopes of eradicating the dangerous Aedes aegypti mosquito.
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