I met Andres two months ago. We would often catch the same bus and eventually started talking, or — more accurately — I listened; being in his sixties, he has a lot more to tell. He’s an engineer; he taught during times when there were teacher shortages; he served on nine international missions for Cuba; and he came up with production innovations that saved the country tons of money.
You might think that a majority of Cubans are passionate about baseball – and you’d be right. In Cuba, people breathe baseball, they thrive on baseball, they cry over it, they have heart attacks over it and even die from the game.
What remained clear to me on Friday is that the generation that succeeded us has taken up the torch. Perhaps many things will change, and plenty more to come, but there will always be slogans to shout, and of course there will always be those who shout them.
Christian was one of the people I interviewed for the article “Cuba as Seen by Tourists.” On his last trip he said he wasn’t going to return to my country, but a few weeks ago he wrote saying that he was coming back to Havana for ten days.
One of the solutions found by the Cuban government to confront the “Special Period” economic crisis at the beginning of the 1990s was to open the country to international tourism. That happened during my adolescence and up until that moment I’d never even met a Russian.
Yenisey now has a two-year-old boy and has also stopped working for the government. She showed me the table where she displays crafts that she makes and sells, now as a self-employed worker.
When I came off the stage the rappers told me: “You really did that ‘Spoken Word’ great.” I still didn’t know what it was. When investigating into it I realized that it was about doing your poetry or that of someone else’s on a rhythmic base of sound, and live.
Many Cubans would like a foreigner to send them a letter inviting them abroad, since this is one of the few paths islanders have to leave the country, whether temporarily or permanently. Bernardo not only had friends willing to send him such a letter, they were also prepared to pay for his trip and help him to get established in Spain.
The alternative world in Cuba has been dealt another blow over the last few weeks with what can be called the seizure, theft or hijacking of the Rotilla Festival. This most recent occurrence is not an isolated event if we keep in mind the history of alternative initiatives on the island.
I generally have a lot of work. This isn’t new for me; I began in 1993 and it has always worked out well for me. You just got to understand that this type of business has its rules…and it’s important to know them and how they’re applied.