Ernesto Perez Chang

Cuba, a Provisional Country

No matter where you are, it isn’t hard to come upon people of different ages talking about their vision of the future, where Cuba figures simply as the country they had the terrible misfortune of being born in and the place they must get out of as soon as possible.

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Erick, the Malecon Acrobat

Erick has witnessed the future of his family in the situation of other neighbors, so he understands that gradually the damp and salt water battered walls of his home will someday give way under the tropical sun.

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Hong Kong Soldiers & Cuba circa 1980

Ideological diversionism could be in any place, in an object, in a meal and even in sweets. In the same way that the enemy had been able to condense the destructive power of a thousand conventional bombs into a medium-sized device, they had also done this with bourgeois ideology when compressing it into a simple piece of candy.

This candy that seemed so inoffensive to the rest of the humanity we referred to, in low voices, as chewing gum.

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The Mark of the Eggs

In 1980, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser murdered his wife during an attack of schizophrenia. Also dying that year —though not at the hands of Althusser— were Sartre, Roland Barthes, and Bon Scott (the lead singer of AC/DC).

In Cuba, though, we remember that year because one could buy a dozen eggs for a peso [about five cents USD]; these had not yet been reduced to sales through the rationing system or on the black market.

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