Translator: Unstated, Yoani Sánchez
karl_marxThe interior stairs of a building collapse on the same corner
where the socialist character of the Revolution was declared. A
desperate group of thirteen people occupy the Church of Charity in
Central Havana and are taken out by force in the middle of the night.
The television shows a report about the bridges vandalized by people who
dismantle them to build houses. The Archbishop publishes a note in the
Communist Party's newspaper, with a tone that emulates its official
editorials. Potatoes appear only sporadically on the stands at the
farmers markets, and at higher prices in the black market. A hip-hop
musician is arrested for protesting his son's treatment at school and
taking a photo of Camilo Cienfuegos from the entry of the high school.
The Cardinal makes a speech on prime time TV, on the same date that 55
years earlier a young man forced his way into a radio station.
Hugo Chavez spends his postoperative time in Cuba surrounded by secrecy
and rumors of a return to the Special Period. Fidel Castro's book is
presented to Latin American intellectuals, using up in its thousands of
copies the paper destined for the entire annual production of a
publisher. A doctor declares a hunger strike so they will restore his
right to cure patients. The "cyberwar" rises to incredible paroxysms and
manipulates the social networks as nothing but a weapon in the struggle,
or an enemy to be defeated. A man with a mobile phone films a fire and
later the police confiscate the gadget for showing "the ugly side of
things." In the midst of the information battle against secrecy, a
journalist rails against those who buy enormous quantities of cookies
and pastries to resell them. Winter says goodbye to Havana without our
barely having taken out our coats. It was announced that an illegally
exported crocodile will return to our Island from Italy in the same
retinue as the Pope.
And I wonder: all these signs, these events, are they indications of the
end or of the beginning? Are we all going crazy or is it only now that
we've arrived at sanity?
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