Diaries

The Van Van Effect

Inside I found with the lowlifes that I had expected, but there were also students like me, Latin Americans and people from all parts of the world, and even older people, and young kids – lots of kids. There were even people in suits and ties.

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The G Street Park rockers (I)

In our city, youth are as dissimilar as they are in any other country, no matter how much the propagandists insists on dressing them up as all having the same likes and outlooks. But the most insufferable occurrence always has to do with having a good time.

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About to Lose my Teaching Job

Something convinced me to recount the conflict that caused me to leave the university classroom as a philosophy professor. I am raising some of the points here, but not all of them, only because I do not wish to affect the next steps of my struggle. Likewise, decency prevents me from speaking openly about these problems.

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Cuban Women Are Fabulous

It seems to me that the only thing holding Cuban women back is Cuban men’s machista attitude. Cooking or cleaning does not emasculate a man; it just shows his desire to make his wife’s life a little easier.

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Generation Clash

This semester I’ve got another class with my 70-year-old civil defense teacher, but now he’s teaching a new subject matter that I believe even he doesn’t know what to call. Unfortunately for him, he began by asking us questions that we knew the answers to concerning international news.

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Team Cuba’s “Silver Era”

By 1959, baseball was the island’s most popular sport. Gradually it became a political problem, especially when we played the United States. There were also difficult times in which our victories at the international level contributed to us forgetting our hunger and other needs.

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Reflections of a Reflection in Old Havana

I’m not Jorge Luis Borges and I don’t have any complexes or phobias related to mirrors. But every time I go down Obispo St. and pass by that old heliport my sensation of strangeness before the old/new architectural work is even denser than when I went there to fulfill my rite of passage into the scientific elites.

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At First Sight

From the very beginning contact with Cubans was smooth. The sympathies were mutual, and one could note a special appreciation for Argentina; there was always the comment that we came from the “land of Che.”

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View from another Balcony

I’ve lived in this neighborhood for more than a decade. Barely three blocks from my house there’s a modern six-story building, probably from the fifties. This cold, or rather chilly morning in February, the aristocratic penthouse balcony and I met each other for the first time.

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Will We Ever Do it Right?

Those like me who have spent years working in culture know that this is not the first time such a situation has happened. We also know we haven’t -like the song goes- ‘tripped on the same stone twice,’ but a million times.

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