Veronica Vega’s diary

Lately, I seem to sense a light breath of optimism in the official slogans, something of an attempt at modernization, like this slogan that I’ve seen on several Havana billboards: “NEW CHALLENGES, NEW VICTORIES”.

After watching Away From Her, a touching film about Alzheimer’s disease, that mysterious and devastating affliction whose depredations I’ve experienced up close, I can’t help ask myself whether everything else in life isn’t governed by a similar, fatal destiny.

While reading the article “Love in Times of Indifference” posted by my friend and colleague Warhol P, I find myself talking to him in my head because we live at opposite extremes of the city and neither of us has a home phone or a cell phone, much less internet service.

Watching Cuban filmmaker Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s legendary Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) with my son, I somewhat cynically mused that the author of the novella on which the film was based, Edmundo Desnoes, could have said much more on the subject – hell, he could have written a whole saga and even a soap opera.

Although I don’t watch a lot of television, I think that the most familiar aspect of Indian culture promoted here are the products of Bollywood. These Indian films repeat the same formula over and over again: sentimental songs, an ultra-standardized type of beauty and every kind of figurative cliché in a dazzling visual vertigo.

While often I have heard that Cuba’s gradual moraI regeneration is unlikely in the short run, I began to reflect on what we could do if a legitimate will to change things existed (not only among the people, of course, but also within the government). These are the points I came up with…

As one who spent her childhood watching the horizon that stretches past the ocean surrounding this island and thinking about the many who have left (and still leave) and the mystery of their inaccessibility, I’ve thought that blue line is a fatal demarcation for Cubans.

A monopoly over information is power. I don’t doubt this, but the truth has its own wings. When I come to feel that we’re in an invented country, where mountains of drowned voices wander in the fog of omission, I recall the movie “The Truman Show.”

In a recent post, fellow Havana Times blogger Dariela Aquique comments on the thorny issue of abortion. The piece focuses more on the right to abort than on the responsibility of avoiding an unwanted pregnancy, which ought to be the guiding premise.

A friend who is about to take her first trip abroad tells me she has already packed her bags and that she’s borrowed nearly everything she’s taking with her. As we know, in Cuba, not even thirty-seven years of work in the public health sector gives one enough for a trip abroad…or to have things to pack.