For several days I have been coaching my son for his final secondary school exams. I dusted off my notions about quadratic equations, formulas for calculating the area of a pyramid, and factoring. After more than twenty years of not encountering these mathematical complexities, I reconnected neurons to help him prepare and to avoid paying [...]

With a tight sweater and gel-smeared hair, he offers his body for only twenty convertible pesos a night. His face, with its high cheekbones and slanted eyes, is common among those from the East of the country. He constantly moves his arms, a mixture of lasciviousness and innocence that at times provokes pity, at others [...]

You could have been a prostitute selling her favors, or equally an interrogator for State Security.  The needs were so many, that to exchange your body for a bottle of shampoo or some soaps, was always a possibility.  Only your figure was too frail for the trade and your skin so pale, for those foreigners [...]

More than five years ago a sensual and extroverted rhythm flooded all the nightclubs discos in the country. It arrived accompanied by an unabashed physicality that openly expresses the desire for fun, sex and the good life. Many salsa bands began adapting their music and writing new lyrics to the reggaeton beat. The songs clearly [...]

My grandmother told me about it with the same rapture that, decades earlier, her parents had spoken of the old dream of El Dorado. She divulged that its mass was between yellow and orange, dry at first bite but pleasant and soft once inside the mouth. Her favorite game consisted of explaining the [...]

I do not know where to begin to tell what happened in the debate about the Internet that took place yesterday, organized by the magazine Temas. Undoubtedly, the blonde wig I put on allowed me to slip through the controlled entrance of the Fresa y Chocolate Cultural Center. That and high heels, lipstick, shiny earrings [...]

The idea of combining study with work in high schools looked very good on paper. It had the air of an immortal future in the office where they turned it into a ministerial order. But reality, stubborn as always, had its own interpretation of the schools in the countryside. The “clay” meant [...]

A Generation Y reader sent me a piece of the Berlin Wall. The fragment of concrete has come to me, a person also surrounded by certain limits, not less severe for being intangible. The stone painted with remnants of graffiti suggests to me an impossible collection of what has contributed to the separation [...]

Andy is one of those who doesn’t wait.  He had a mobile phone when they were only for foreigners, bought an apartment at the margin of the obsolete housing law and sells—since last year—the toasters the newspaper Granma announced for 2010.  He wanders around to the large stores that sell in convertible pesos and offers [...]

A curious end of the year in which the surprises accumulate, Christmas trees return and sexologists start to use the language of the machistas [macho women].   Mariela Castro has called me gallita [female cock] and, in her language as a specialist in gender and sexuality, the word has homophobic connotations.  Perhaps because I am ignorant [...]