Old fashion magazines allow a woman to imagine, for a few minutes, a world far from the everyday precariousness of Cuba.
14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, October 3, 2026 / The model in the magazine is wearing an outfit that must once have been advertised as a must-have for the season. Perhaps she was photographed in Madrid, Paris or Miami, under carefully placed lights and after several hours of makeup. Now her fate is considerably less glamorous: she lies on the lap of a woman sitting in a doorway on Reina Street, in Centro Habana, a few meters from a garbage dump that has swallowed the sidewalk and is beginning to conquer part of the roadway as well.
This Saturday, the vendor carefully leafs through several fashion magazines rescued from the trash. Judging by the haircuts and the designs, they look like issues from the 90s or the early years of this century. Anywhere else they would be wastepaper; here they can still have a second, third or fourth life.
The rest of the business is displayed around her. A pair of old black high-heeled shoes rests on a box; there are brightly colored garments, scraps of fabric, the odd accessory, a purse and a small yellow basket. Everything seems to have passed through other hands before and, very probably, through one of the heaps of refuse that keep growing in the area.
She turns a page, brings the magazine close to her eyes and lingers over the dresses, the shoes and those models with endless legs
To set herself up, the woman has chosen the pedestal of an enormous column, with layers of peeling green paint and damp stains. She wears a blue scarf knotted over her hair and several bracelets. She also has a bottle of water and a small bag. She doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. She leafs through the magazines like someone consulting a catalog to decide what to wear next season.
For long minutes she seems to forget about selling. She turns a page, brings the magazine close to her eyes and lingers over the dresses, the shoes and those models with endless legs who pose in hotels, on avenues and in salons where nothing seems broken or dirty. For a while she can try on all those lives without paying a cent: walking in heels through a clean city, sitting down at a well-laid table, opening a closet full of clothes or, simply, getting up one morning without having to calculate which used object might be turned into a few pesos.
Then she turns another page and takes flight again. It matters little that the models have already aged twenty or thirty years, that those dresses have vanished from the stores or that the magazines ended up thrown away by someone. For her they still hold an intact world, a paper door to a less harsh life. Sitting against the old column on Reina, she is not just leafing through a fashion magazine: for a few minutes she is rehearsing the possibility that her life might have been different.
Translated by GH.
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