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.
I imagine that a lot of people (who do not live as I do) think that I am making a mountain out of a molehill; or that if I am not married, there is no reason for me to have a child; or that if the rest of humanity had thought like me, we would have become extinct a long time ago.
I could write thousands of pages about these amusing anecdotes, but I believe the examples are sufficient. Yet just one sole anecdote is enough for most women to identify with the male-political-official slant in this country.
Last night I was walking down 23rd street, not in any particular hurry to get home, so I stopped in front of the Coppelia ice-cream parlor. It usually closes its doors at 9:00 p.m., but this month they decided to extend their hours until midnight.
In the taxi, you can talk politics more openly and without fear of any type, or about the cockfight you went to over the weekend, the latest model Ipod that your cousin is trying to sell, or all the news that’s not fit to print. It is like a rolling duty-free zone, or a confession box.
I was no more than 10 years old, but I had already seen enough Russian (war) movies in which the bombs had no respect for anything. They might blow to pieces a cute little dog, or obliterate a house or explode right on top of a child.
To make the walk through the dark streets of Central Havana go quicker, I began to think about what might happen to me before reaching home that could serve as subject matter for one of these diaries. Then several meters before arriving at my stop the bus came to a halt.