Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious / Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado

Summer hits Havana hard these months. Its scorching ferocity makes us sweat over the texts and the words melt us. I know I exaggerate, but if the heat were a product in high demand around the world, Cuba would be a rich country. I’m sure we were exporting it for years; I don’t know if it was canned, or “crude” in barrels at wholesale, what I am sure of is that the countries with “friendly presidents” may have been selling the excess “Cuban heat” that we send them as solidarity assistance. This concept of solidarity, gives me an idea: don’t we help the needy? When someone resells something they’ve been given it’s because they don’t need it any more. Isn’t that speculation? If it’s motivated by profit, then, why do we offer solidarity when we’re not a first world country?

What remains to us of August, we pass along signalling to the sky to send us a snowfall. I would settle for air conditioning to help me sleep, to rest all night, because my system of air displacement is insufficient. The fan pulls warm air in that is suffocating rather than cooling, and of it occurs to the bureaucrats to save the electric company they cut off our service, and we wake up “in the devil’s cauldron.” No even Mary Poppins can invent a word to describe what one feels in these circumstances!

August 9 2011