Rosa Martinez’s Diary

Those who follow my articles (which I hope are quite a few) should know that I live in a suburb of Guantanamo city, the fifth most populated city in Cuba.

I have a friend I studied at university with who was very poor when he used to live in Cuba, I think he was the one in the worst financial situation out of all the people on my degree.

I have a neighbor who can’t even leave to go to work before she’s told her husband where she’s going. And when she needs to run a few errands, she has to go into great details about the places she’s thinking of going to.

There are many things that ordinary Cubans do all over the island in order to survive in a country where wages are purely symbolic. I can name many examples off of the top of my head…

A few years ago (too many ago for my liking), I was invited to spend a whole day with my daughters at Los Corales Hotel, one of the hotels on the beach in the beautiful city of Santiago de Cuba.

December didn’t bring many surprises for the Cuban people, just another end of the year, which wasn’t very different to previous year ends, which everyone celebrates as best they can and people aren’t expecting much from this new year, not even with a new president.

Like many women who are abused, Tamara felt she was to blame for what had happened: that she should have gone straight home after work, that she didn’t tell her partner she was going to go to the market, that she really did take a long time, that something else or another…

Conner Gorry’s article, Me too: Gender Violence in Havana, took me back to an incident that happened a long time ago, which I still remember, even when, let’s just say, my memory isn’t the best.

According to the announcement published by Granma newspaper, the Cuban Communist Party’s official press, Pelayo Terry Cuervo, the director of this newspaper, the country’s main one, was “released” from his position because of mistakes he had made.

Danay and Juan are two regular young people out of the many here in Cuba who have been wanting to emigrate for a long time. They were born and raised during the cumbersome Special Period crisis of the 1990s and they became adults in the middle of the transformation period of Cuban Socialism.