Veronica Vega’s diary

That the pangs of nostalgia can deceive us, painting our memories of the past with bright colors, is a feeling I had for the first time some years ago, while reading a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As I’ve grown older I have become slightly more suspicious of any romantic perception of the past.

We are going backwards in time, journeying back to the bud, as Alejo Carpentier would have put it. This regression is gnawing away more and more of our integrity every day. In Cuba, Darwin’s theory about the evolution of the species is proven wrong again and again.

Sexual offenses seem to be one of the world’s thorny issues today. I am constantly reading of gang-rapes involving a woman, a teenager or a little girl, about victims who commit suicide and even about rapists who publicly boast of their crime.

I am terrified by competitions. As a kid, the mention of any competition in gym class was enough to give me cold sweats. If, by chance, I start watching one of those reality shows from abroad, where amateur performers are catapulted to stardom (or into the worst of depressions) overnight, I also get cold sweats.

I must confess I feel a profound aversion towards hospitals and polyclinics. This is not only because of the physical pain, misdiagnoses, indifference or mistreatment I have experienced in these, but also because of the association my mind invariably makes between these places and the time spent in waiting rooms.

The media have always dictated the fashions and had an influence on the tastes of young people. However, the question that arises for me at the moment is how much happiness can really be derived from consuming more and more materials that distort the dimensions of the real in order to be attractive. And when we return to the real world?

A while ago, someone I think highly of said to me: “Yeah, that student (Eliecer Avila) had the courage to ask those questions to (National Assembly President) Ricardo Alarcon, making the official look ridiculous, and the student himself even became a popular figure. But what did he achieve with all that? Today he can’t work in his field and all the doors are closed to him in this country.”

The dynamics that every revolution puts in practice are too complex to be predictable, but in more established groups of thought, the mechanisms of empowerment begin articulating automatically. This is a natural law.

A few days ago, the partner of a friend of mine started beating her up in the middle of the street here in Havana in the presence of several other people they knew. I wasn’t there at the time, but I learned that my husband was the only person who ran over to defend her.