Colliding with My Cuba Reality

By Eduardo N. Cordoví Hernández

HAVANA TIMES – I brought a Toshiba laptop from Costa Rica in 2014, which was already five years old, both in terms of manufacturing in Japan and use. By then, the battery could only store enough charge to properly shut down the Windows operating system every time there was a power outage in Havana. After a couple of years with me, the battery eventually collapsed. Back then, I was told that batteries for that model, the Satellite-Pro, were no longer being made, and if I managed to find one, it would either be extremely expensive or already used or too old.

The option was to use it as a stationary PC. But that was only a half-solution because I could still use it by connecting it directly to the power supply and keep it in a small, cozy space I call my little office. This way, I avoided further damage to the cable that connects the board to the screen, which is like the Achilles’ heel of laptops. However…

It was also gifted a wireless keyboard and mouse, but after two and a half years, the USB connector that linked these peripherals to the board collapsed. I had to start using the laptop’s touchpad, which felt like a kick in the stomach, though I ended up becoming quite skilled with it, as I’m pretty handy with my hands.

Using the laptop’s keyboard from the start was a hassle. It was too high on the little table I set up. I was used to the height of a regular peripheral keyboard, and on top of that, it was farther away, making it a struggle to type, especially since writing is the main thing I do with the computer.

“And time passed, and an eagle flew over the sea,” as Martí wrote in Los zapaticos de rosa. But the eagle “in my poem” was that the Toshiba keyboard gradually stopped typing certain letters, and as a result, it also stopped executing commands that require pressing a key along with the Ctrl key. First, it was the letter E, or its lowercase form, so I couldn’t select text with the keyboard anymore. Then the W, nearly all the numbers (which I could only get using the on-screen keyboard), followed by the letters G, V, M, and the left Alt key… Writing like this was as masochistic as wanting to cut my veins with an old saw.

In the end, I had to redirect my meager income in a sacrificial move to replace both devices via USB.

“But everything passes, everything will pass…” as that old song by Carla Morrison foretells, and which Matt Monro, Nelson Ned, and Los Angeles Negros, among other voices, helped spread.

And again, like an eagle, a few months ago, the not-so-new keyboard completely aged. At first, thank God, the S key stopped working, which I resolved by hunting for it on the laptop’s keyboard—a truly annoying task. Now neither of them has the “x” key activated. As if that weren’t enough, the screen is cracking or deforming, and it has some white light leaks, meaning no color… Still, with some effort, I can write, but I must seriously start planning to request time on friends’ PC or begin selling a painting or a wood carving to raise funds to replace the equipment… because making an intellectual career or writing a novel at the expense of others, of public charity, or whatever you want to call it, is something almost degrading or at least embarrassing.

In reality, if I were someone who types with two fingers while looking at the keyboard, like many people do, I wouldn’t care much about this. But the thing is, I can type at a decent speed like a stenographer: with all my fingers and without looking at the keyboard, at a speed of over 120 words per minute, which was the minimum threshold for any freshly graduated stenographer at an academy when I was a teenager.

The problem is that now I can’t type as fast as I think (well, I’ve never been a fast thinker); I’m also at risk of losing dexterity, and worse yet, of making mistakes, because my conditioned reflexes for finding the keys collide with a reality of error, since the letter IS NO LONGER THERE.

Anthropological damage, socio-political-economic cultural accidents, intellectual misery. I don’t know. I don’t even think knowing it will solve anything. But it can be seen as a historical curiosity, like the time in the mid-1980s when one could buy a really good individual pizza for one peso and twenty cents, sitting in a pizzeria with regular stainless steel cutlery and porcelain plates, and drinking a locally brewed beer for just sixty cents.

Today, a pizza of that kind, the kind you buy to eat while walking because there’s nowhere to sit where you buy it, costs over three hundred pesos, and with one hundred pesos, you can’t even buy a Cuban beer if you can find one.

These are the kinds of curiosities that don’t mean much, but they can give an idea about “where things are headed.” To be precise and leave no loose ends, I must say that the issue has to do with something that can overwhelm the patience of an aspiring writer like me or others who have already become writers and bump into it. I’m referring to something known technically as: planned obsolescence. For more rigor, the reader can find it by Googling or searching on Wikipedia.

Read more from the diary of Eduardo N. Cordovi here.