Caridad’s Diary

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.

At the moment the camera flashed, she didn’t complain about what she’d never had, though maybe she should have complained about what she wasn’t going to get, what she was losing by marrying a man she didn’t love.

Tato is the owner of a few pigs and a handful of goats-and in Havana, that’s something. However, it’s still not as much as he’s always wanted; like the chains he wears around his neck, which appear to be made of silver, but they aren’t.