I was introduced to Yoani through my Leadership and Social Change class this summer. Yoani is a native Cuban who is a trained philologist. She was denied a career in the Academic realm and has thus supported herself off tourism. However, she is not your ordinary Cuban living under the strict thumb of dictator Castro.
She blogs about the situation in her country, and living under a dictator. She does what so many in her country cannot do - she speaks freely! I believe she has the balls of Brahma bull but I admire her courage dearly! I do hope that she remains safe and does not someday disappear...
This entry is really worth reading.
Search and capture
Today I got up with a sore throat. The guilty party was the impertinent cold wind in the Malecón, to which I exposed myself last night while talking with a friend. During an hour we talked –thinking that we were fixing the world and the Island- without realizing that the temperature was falling. That’s why this morning I woke up with a cold and my whole body was asking for a hot lemon tea.
With that imperative I went to the closest agricultural market and asked for the green citrus of my cravings. One of the vendors told me: “Lemons are lost. You better buy a guava”. I didn’t let him convince me and continued with my whim of a warm lemon with a hint of black tea. I walked then towards Old Havana and in passing through several markets I realized that they didn’t have what I was looking for either. My throat was hurting even more and at that point I had to rethink if would be better to take a C Vitamin pill; but since my stubbornness is genetic, I insisted in searching for the missing fruit.
Close to two in the afternoon I gave up. I could barely swallow because of the burning in the throat, nothing compared with the disgust that provoked in my the “disappearance” of the lemons. The useless “search and capture” has generated in me an ill feeling more long lasting than the cold. I has left me with some hard questions: How is it that with so much fertile land and so many people with desire of producing, commercialize and sell, they don’t combine themselves and materialize an abundant offering of lemons in the market? Why is still Marabú the “king of the Cuban countryside” (go in a road trip by the highway to Pinar del Rio and you’ll see), while oranges, tangerines and -not to mention- grapefruits, go to the inventory of the exotic? When will the land belong to those who will make it produce and not of a State that sub-utilzes it in its abandoned parcels? Do I keep the hope or forget about the flavor of
lemons?
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