Frank Simon

The Cuban press is getting old, it’s mummified and wrapped up in the same old issues, the same faces, colors and designs. People pretend like they’re reading, or they read between the lines what they would like to read.

It happened during an afternoon/evening in spring, down Havana’s once-glamorous Prado promenade. This time, the thoroughfare’s bronze lions were joined by the new lions of the jungle, the human lions, the men and women of lion-like mentalities, laws and secrets.

The tough guys in the neighborhood are the perfect oracles, the guides, the seers of today. They fill the night with their smoke and words loaded with double meanings or no meaning at all. Havana has lost all its elegance.