Caridad’s Diary

I had never flown abroad, at least not physically. This first trip took me by surprise; I didn’t even have time to say goodbye to all my friends and family – that was the bad part. Nor do I like the fact I’ll have to go several months without seeing them. But I can’t complain; thousands of Cubans would love to be in my place.

It’s common for us as people to be obsessed with judging others: evaluating what they do, what they think, how they dress, who they associate with, what they spend their time and money on… We judge everything. In that way we lose out on a lot of good feelings, relationships and experiences, and can even do harm to the person we judge.

This afternoon a rooster was brought into the Latin American Stadium. It wasn’t the first time that the fans came with a bird, but it was the first time —at least the first time that I know of— that they tied one by the legs and sent it sailing like a rock from a sling.

I was walking along one of those long roads, walking just to walk, looking calmly at things we hardly see when speeding by, squeezed together and paranoiac inside a city bus.

When I saw a certain title in Havana Times, revealing deaths at this psychiatric hospital, I thought it was from some diary entry by one my colleagues; perhaps they were alluding to the situation at that center before the revolutionary victory.

It is a myth, a dream or a half truth. Movies, websites, books and all type debates have been generated concerning US government projects aimed at controlling people’s minds, to turn them into robots that obey the most senseless orders. Power is the obsession, the motivating force behind that idea.

Since Cuba’s television networks cut back on the production of telenovelas a good while back, the past few months they’ve been showing reruns of the popular police series “Día y Noche” (Day and Night.) In this series is a character known as “Tavo” (short for Octavio), who is a police agent with the mission of infiltrating the ranks of the murky Cuban underworld of the 1990s.

“Around the world, the pharmaceutical industry is a profit-making business. In Cuba, however, it is responsible for the health and well-being of people, sparing no expense,” said a television reporter, as hyper-sanitized lab technicians sorted piles of pills in the background. But since when is people’s health ensured with pills?

They give them all a uniform: dark pants, light shirt and sometimes a cute necktie that neither the police nor the military use, nor anyone else within the realm of those who wear uniforms. It’s as if they wanted to give this civil army made up of those commonly known as Watchmen, that tragicomic touch possessed by clowns.

If I was a rock singer I would write a song in the style of Simon and Garfunkel, or maybe that of John and Paul…”Oh, look at all those lonely people…”
Are policemen lonely types? I believe that even if they were able to gather all the women in Havana around them, policemen would continue being lonely.