I Have Lived in Two Centuries
HAVANA TIMES – Some young people make fun of older people, seeing them as inferior, as if they no longer had anything to offer life—a mistaken way of thinking that undervalues each person’s history and past experience. Without the past, it is impossible to build the present, for it is the foundation of any construction.
In my particular case, I have lived in two centuries, the last one and this one. The truth is, I was born in the 1960s, poor and in a country in crisis. My mother told me that when I was a newborn there were no plastic bottles, not even glass ones, so they fed me milk in a beer bottle fitted with a teat. It sounds funny, but that’s how it happened.
I think I have never known this land’s flourishing. It’s true there were better times, when food was more varied, much healthier, and the Cuban peso had value. In my adolescence I often went to restaurants with my maternal grandmother, and she paid with her pension. Now pensions are so tiny they aren’t enough to buy even a carton of eggs.
At the ration store, quite a few products were sold. I especially remember white lard, which was used for frying meat and root vegetables, later replaced by refined oil, which is excessively harmful to health. They also sold condensed milk and soda crackers, salty crackers, and “royalitas.” And that delicious gofio, which mixed with condensed milk, my brothers and I loved so much.
Life was simple. There was enough public transportation. We communicated by letter with family abroad. There were those wonderful rotary telephones with the central dial, which could fall to the floor and remain completely unharmed. They came in different colors, though the one in my house was black.
The music I listened to was quality—both classical and popular. No vulgar lyrics or monotonous beats. We had an analog record player, and later a mono Sony tape recorder.
One of my teenage hobbies was buying second-hand books from street booksellers. I also spent afternoons at the Jose Marti National Library, reading and listening to records in the music room. Cinema was an appealing option; I often went with friends and with my parents. Going to a movie theater to see a film was exciting, and people dressed for the occasion.
I come from another century. I began writing by hand, then with a typewriter, and finally on a computer keyboard. I enjoyed and owned several analog Russian wristwatches sold in stores. I remember a Poljot I gave my father for his birthday.
I’ve seen changes that don’t appeal to me, for example, canned drinks and electric motorcycles. Not because I am against this type of motorcycle, but because our motorcyclists are not careful, and few respect other vehicles. And since these motorcycles are so quiet, you hardly notice them when they pass behind you. As for cans, I prefer drinks in glass bottles. People throw cans away anywhere, with no respect for keeping the environment clean. In my youth, there were no garbage scavengers either.
I can say I have lived in two different worlds—when Cuban television had only two channels, 2 and 6, in black and white. I have witnessed events that are part of my country’s history, and some I experienced up close: the Mariel exodus (1980), the Maleconazo (1994), the Rafters’ Crisis (1994), the asylum of Cubans in the Peruvian Embassy (1980), the hate rallies, the great scam of the House of Gold and Silver, the ban on Cubans entering hotels, the criminalization of the dollar, the invention of invisible currencies such as the CUC and MLC, the July 11 protests (2021), and the lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Any Cuban of my generation knows everything I’m talking about here. Each could tell their own story.
I will not speak in this diary entry of the degradation of the citizenry, which is the result of an anti-system, but I will state that, at this moment, social classes have become more marked and there is blatant corruption in high places. No one is ignorant of what is happening anymore.
Fortunately, one of the attractive things about the modern world is the internet: being able to experience fast communication with those far away, to have access to information, even though there is a lot of toxic and superficial content, and fake news is never absent. Even so, one is free to choose the material one wants to consume.