Yesterday my father went to a store to buy a towel. The saleswoman looked at him and declared, “Here we charge in hard currency” and then turned her back. To her it appeared that he was incapable of possessing the other Cuban money (CUC). To her my father looked like somebody unworthy of her attention.
I am from Cuba. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be Jamaican, Dutch, or South African. Why? Right now, while you read my thoughts, more than half of you have already begun to judge me. Why? Because for too many people, being Cuban is a moral, or even more so, a political matter.
Its keys, a bit obstinate, helped me to become stricken with numerous bouts of tendonitis, but also with more than 10 books. Most of these were lost among my various friends, submitted to literary competitions or eaten by the island’s always ravenous cockroaches.
Yokira didn’t have her own room, so to be alone and give free rein to her illusions she went to the only public place that remained open all night: the mortuary. There nobody bothered her. But her parents found out and wanted to take her to a psychiatrist. Yokira the nut, the impossible one. Yokira makes her mother ill.
A hermit crab was in the middle of the road as a car was approaching in the distance. If one of the vehicle’s four wheels lined up with it, good-bye crab, not even its hard snail like shell would save it from being squashed.
It’s a long way to get to my house. I leave work in the evening, and the bus drops me close to a mile away. Last night, like almost always, I had to make that trip after ten o’clock. Walking in front of me was a man, who I tried to maintain a certain distance from.
I had a couple of regular clients (who were doing pretty well financially). Since they were friends of the family, I charged them half the normal rate. With that money I bought the massage oil … and therefore wound up providing the service for free again.
Though most of us here have ever known the terrible experience of war, no one in Cuba is unaware the word “fight.” No one here escapes having to “fight” or “struggle.”
Even if you don’t have the knack for being a merchant, somehow we find a way to sale any object that might have any value.
Whenever I come to visit, my uncle is under his blue blanket. It’s made of thick wool and it covers him up to his ears. It doesn’t’ matter if it’s one or three in the afternoon. He says that his headache prompts him to hide that way: under his own blue sky with no clouds.
One afternoon, while we were playing in the schoolyard, the leader of the group decided to play a new game. We weren’t more than seven years old, and all of us wanted to be on the same team as Ricardo, the liveliest.
Most of us were happy when we could be with him and his group, because they were white.