Rosa Martinez’s Diary

Around 9 o’clock last night, while I was passionately reading an autobiography, my youngest daughter interrupted me. With the face of a good little girl, she announced: “Mummy, I’m hungry.”

Several days ago I read a comment online saying that, except for people who receive family remittances from overseas, all Cubans are starving, with young people appearing to have come out of concentration camps and it being rare to find an obese person on the island.

It would have been even more difficult if it hadn’t been for those relatives and friends who are always close, the ones who help you when no one else thinks about you, those who call you when others forgot and who make you smile when you’ve begun to believe that everything’s over.

This Saturday, the first rays of light announced that it would be an ideal day for just about any family plan. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was flat broke, it looked like it would be a perfect day.

In several posts published here at Havana Times, people have commented about the increase of violence in our country. As for me, I refer particularly to gender violence in my town, Guantanamo City.

When people from other countries hear the word “Guantanamo,” the first thing that comes to their minds is the existence of a prison that infringes on basic human liberties and the area’s occupation by a United States military base.

I imagine that at some moment in our lives almost all of us have wanted to disappear, die or at least be far from our job, our house, the neighborhood, our family and even our friends.

If it wasn’t for the Creole humor that characterizes Cubans — making us act the same way at a party, in a baptism or at a wake — I don’t know what would have become of us during all these years of extreme shortages and dire economic crisis.