Today is July 11.

For many Cubans, inside and outside the island, this is not simply an anniversary belonging to the past. It is a date lived in expectation.

We check social media. We refresh. We return a few minutes later. We look to see whether people are in the streets again, whether pots can be heard from another neighborhood, whether a road has been blocked, whether a small fire has appeared in the darkness, whether someone has managed to upload a video before the connection disappears.

From Havana, messages reach me a deshora, extemporaneous, late and out of sequence:

Estoy bien, pero estamos incomunicados.

I am fine, but we cannot communicate.

The sentence contains one of the central contradictions of contemporary Cuba: survival alongside isolation, the insistence on speaking alongside the constant possibility of interruption.

This week, the national electrical system collapsed twice. Between one collapse and the next, residents in several Havana neighborhoods took to the streets, banging pots, honking horns, and demanding electricity. In May, hundreds had already protested in the capital, blocking roads with burning piles of garbage and shouting in the darkness. These protests do not have the magnitude of July 11, 2021. But neither are they separate from it.

The government has worked relentlessly to prevent the simultaneity and national visibility that made the original 11J possible. Protests are kept local, fragmented, difficult to document and easier to repress. But they continue. They have happened this year, this month, this week.

In the epilogue to the dissertation I defended in 2022, I wrote:

Las protestas continúan, aunque no siempre llegan a la Red. Internet en Cuba se va y regresa, siguiendo lo que todos sospechan es una de las maneras preferidas por las autoridades de controlar el flujo de información.

I wrote those words about the aftermath of July 2021. They remain, disturbingly, in the present tense.

11J happened, and then it remained.

It remained in the political imagination of the country. In the reflex of looking toward the street whenever the electricity disappears. In the government’s fear of crowds becoming visible to one another. In the families who continue waiting for prisoners to return home. Rights organizations estimate that hundreds of people connected to the July 2021 demonstrations remain imprisoned, some serving sentences of more than twenty years.

It remains, too, in the body and uncertain whereabouts of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara.

Luis Manuel was arrested on July 11, 2021, before he could reach the protests. His five-year sentence should have ended on July 9. Instead, authorities removed him from Guanajay prison and transferred him to an undisclosed location. He remains in state custody, apparently awaiting permission to leave the country. He has completed the sentence that was unjust from the beginning, yet the state continues to decide where his body may exist and under what conditions he may be free.

A cacerolazo cannot repair an electrical grid. A burning pile of garbage cannot empty a prison. A spontaneous protest does not by itself produce a political program or resolve the crisis that brought people into the streets.

Protest is not the solution. It is the symptom.

But a symptom is not insignificant. It is the moment when private suffering becomes audible, shared, and therefore political. It reveals the rupture that official discourse tries to conceal. The sound of the pots does not tell us what comes next. It tells us that the present has become unbearable.

Perhaps that is why we continue looking at the networks today.

We are not waiting for history to repeat itself exactly. Historical events do not return on command or according to the calendar. We are looking because 11J demonstrated that scattered frustrations could recognize one another, that one neighborhood could see another, and that what appeared isolated could suddenly become collective.

The Cuban government knows this too.

That is why 11J is not over. It is being contained.

Subscribe now

Share Between Tongues

There are invitations that arrive like a knock from another island. Punzantes y con olor a salitre.

A few days ago, Susana Draper — now a friend, but also one of my former professors from Princeton’s Department of Comparative Literature — sent me a warm note inviting me to a screening of La Pecera, by Puerto Rican filmmaker Glorimar Marrero Sánchez. She said she had been thinking of me lately.

Ya tú sabes, for Cuban reasons.

She did not have to spell out the bridge between Puerto Rico and Cuba. The connection was there, quietly pulsing under the invitation.

She did not have to perform the familiar choreography of “two islands, common waters, common wounds.” Yo sabía. Las dos lo sabíamos.

Sometimes intellectual kinship works like that. No explanation. No footnote. Just: I thought of you.

So I went.

And then I sat in the dark watching a film where everything was wet: sea, bathtub, hurricane, archive, skin. A film where the Caribbean was not a postcard but a contaminated organism. A film where the real question was not how to survive, but who gets to decide what survival means.

Un filme lleno de agua y circunstancia.

Agua,

y circunstancia

y muerte,

por todas partes.

Una muerte que está llena de vida, o viceversa.

La Pecera began, according to Glorimar, somewhere in the orbit of Princeton’s Program in Latin American Studies in 2019. Cooked, as I wrote in my notes, in PLAS. Which is to say: it had already traveled through the strange institutional kitchen where ideas become scripts, where islands enter classrooms, where grief becomes research, where research becomes art, and where art, if it is honest enough, refuses to stay clean.

Menos mal.

It is beautiful, yes. Painfully so. But not in the sanitized way institutions sometimes prefer their “Caribbean” beauty: palm trees, turquoise waters, folkloric dignity, a little suffering but not too much, preferably framed for the grant report where “native informants” have the second-to-last word.

No.

This beauty is inseparable from the pain.

El dolor se derrama en la pantalla y no queda más remedio que seguir mirando.

This beauty decays. This beauty metastasizes. This beauty has scars. This beauty has military waste underneath it. This beauty smells like salt, medicine, humidity, abandonment, the ugly labor of staying, and the intimate violence of choosing for oneself.

Share

The Fishbowl Is Not a Metaphor, or Not Only

The film follows Noelia, an artist whose cancer has returned and spread. She refuses further treatment and goes back to Vieques, where the island itself is also sick, marked by the toxic aftermath of U.S. military occupation and bombing practices. But the film does not flatten her into metaphor.

That matters.

The sick woman is not simply “Puerto Rico.” Puerto Rico is not simply “a sick woman.”

The body and the island touch each other, echo each other, contaminate each other, but they do not collapse into one lazy symbol.

There is a difference between resonance and reduction. La Pecera knows this. Some criticism, bless its laminated heart, does not.

Ay, la crítica cuando quiere portarse bien.

Origin stories can become cages too. A mother dies, a script begins, an island appears, and suddenly everyone wants the key to the symbol. But I do not want such a key. I want the texture of the lock.

The temptation, of course, is to turn the film into a clean equation: body equals island, cancer equals colonialism, water equals enclosure. Neat. Elegant. Ready for the panel, con cafecito y todo.

But La Pecera resists the laziness of perfect metaphor. The more I think about it, the less interested I am in what the body “stands for” and the more interested I am in what the body does: leaks, refuses, tires, desires, wraps itself, listens, chooses.

When someone asked Glorimar why the title — La Pecera, the fishbowl — she said it had to do, above all, with looking. With being watched. And then the question opened like a wound: Who is looking? The person inside? The person outside? Who is kept in the microenvironment? Who gets to stand outside the glass and call that distance objectivity?

There is, obviously, a difference between the fish and the owner of the fishbowl. Between the one who breathes inside a controlled toxicity and the one who can tap the glass, observe, interpret, leave.

That difference is political.

It is also colonial.

And also intimate as hell, por supuesto.

Because Noelia is watched by doctors, by lovers, by family, by the island, by memory, by us. And yet she is not passive. She is not merely the patient, the daughter, the partner, the woman being cared for. She is also the one who refuses the script of care when care becomes control.

“Estoy cansada de que me digan lo que tengo que hacer,” says María, a character rooted in fiction and in Puerto Rican reality at the same time.

I wrote that line down because, honestly, same.

How many islands could say that?

How many women?

How many sick people?

How many colonies?

How many mothers, daughters, artists, teachers, writers, exhausted citizens of countries permanently being “saved” by the wrong hands?

I am tired of being told what to do.

I am tired of being saved into another form of obedience.

I am tired of cleanings that contaminate.

I am tired of solutions that arrive wearing boots and calling themselves help.

¿A usted quién le ha dado vela en este entierro?

Subscribe now

Official Cleaning, Bureaucracy with Gloves On

During the conversation after the film, Susana mentioned the so-called official cleanings in Vieques, cleanings that do not necessarily heal the land but may continue polluting it through methods such as open-air burning. That phrase stayed with me: official cleaning.

Official cleaning.

It has the obscene elegance of bureaucracy. It sounds stamped, filed, approved, and morally dead. A little disinfectant sprayed over a crime scene.

As if contamination could be corrected by the same logic that produced it.

As if the wound could be managed by paperwork.

As if the island were a dirty kitchen after a party and not a place where people live, breathe, bury their children, and wait for hospitals that do not come.

Someone mentioned that Vieques has had no hospital since María. My Puerto Rican colleague leaned toward me and said, almost in disbelief, although disbelief has probably expired by now: “No tienen ni una ambulancia.”

Not even an ambulance.

There are two cemeteries in Vieques, one full of children.

Let that sit there.

No metaphor can survive that sentence without shame.

Share Between Tongues

Self-Determination, the Least Obvious Obvious Thing

And yet La Pecera is not a film about helplessness. That would be too easy, too consumable, too festival-friendly in the worst way. It is about grief, yes. Contamination, yes. Cancer, yes. Colonial abandonment, yes. But also about self-determination, which sounds obvious until someone actually practices it.

What is self-determination when the body is dying?

What is self-determination when the island is contaminated?

What is self-determination when everyone who loves you wants to keep you alive, but their version of life feels like another enclosure?

What is self-determination for Puerto Rico?

And who gets to respect it without quietly trying to supervise it?

Self-determination is easy when it behaves. When it wants the future we already approved in our heads. When it fits the poster, the petition, the panel, the grant language, the family meeting. It becomes harder — and therefore more real — when the other person, or the other island, chooses something that terrifies us.

Self-determination in Spanish is libre determinación. The emphasis is right there, where it should be: libre. Freedom is the whole point.

Noelia’s refusal is not romantic. The film does not turn illness into a Pinterest board of freedom — all linen, sunlight, and toxic positivity in a ceramic bowl. Her desire changes. Her partner becomes doctor-like, or maybe the system makes him so.

This happens to people who love the sick: suddenly love becomes surveillance, medication schedule, dosage, reasonable argument, fear disguised as tenderness. Desire disappears under the white coat nobody asked him to wear.

Share

Difficult Love, or Kissing the Contaminated Body

And still, one of the most devastating scenes in the film, for me, is when Juni kisses Noelia’s scars, her marks, her contaminated body. There is something almost unbearable there: loving what is sick, what is changing, what cannot be returned to its previous version. Not fixing. Not correcting. Not conquering. Kissing.

He kisses the body that no longer performs health for anyone.

The body that has stopped auditioning for normal.

The body that says: this is not a comeback story, behave accordingly.

Illness here is not only symbol. It is maintenance. Bags, wounds, leakage, fatigue, appetite, medication, touch, smell, timing, embarrassment, rage. The body does not become political only when we compare it to the island. It was already political in the amount of work required to keep it bearable.

Real care, here, is not intervention disguised as intimacy. It is accompaniment without occupation. It is the discipline of staying near without taking over. It says: your body, your terror, your timing. I am here, not as warden, not as doctor, not as empire in miniature.

Acompañar no es mandar bajito.

What would it mean to love an island that way?

Not as property.

Not as nostalgic homeland.

Not as fantasy.

Not as tropical wound for metropolitan empathy.

But as a body with its own will.

Subscribe now

You Cannot Look Away from Sound

This is where the film becomes more than cinema. After the screening, Glorimar spoke about sound, archives, field research, community leaders, her interdisciplinary practice. She also told me that part of the remaining underwater footage will become an art installation: three screens, the spectator as a kind of fourth wall.

The film already feels like it is leaking beyond the frame. It wants to become environment. It wants to surround us.

Landscapes and soundscapes.

Not just images, but frequencies.

Not just archive as evidence, but archive as residue. The documented pieces of military pollution are not neutral objects. They are what remains when power leaves and insists it has left nothing behind.

And the sound — actual hurricane sound, she said — does what images cannot. It enters the body without asking permission. It makes the spectator porous. You do not simply watch the storm; you receive it.

Images can be analyzed from a chair. Sound is less polite. El sonido se te mete en el cuerpo before interpretation can put on shoes. You can look away from a wound. Good luck looking away from a hurricane once it has entered your ear.

Maybe that is why the fishbowl works so well as a figure. A fishbowl is visual, yes, but it is also acoustic. Everything is slightly distorted inside it. Sound travels differently. Bodies appear close and unreachable. You can see the fish, but you cannot know the water from the fish’s side.

“Vamos afuera,” the mother says, taking Noelia to the bathtub on the patio.

But that outside is also an inside.

A bathtub outdoors. An open-air enclosure. A fishbowl under the sky.

There is something almost Caribbean in that contradiction: afuera that is adentro. Freedom that is fenced. Sea that is border. Island that is prison and refuge. Home that kills and holds you. Body that betrays and belongs to you anyway.

Subscribe now

Tela, Cuerpo, Vieques

The fabric in the film — la tela — also stayed with me. Tela, cuerpo, Vieques. Cloth as care, art, shroud, performance, preservation. Embalsamamiento is a hard word, in more than one sense. Embalming. To preserve the body by preparing it for death. But what happens when one performs that action on oneself? Autoembalsamamiento. The word is almost too heavy to carry. It drags its own funeral behind it.

And yet, in the film, that wrapping is not only death. It is also agency. Ritual. Art. A gesture toward form when the body is losing form.

Noelia is an artist, and when Gabriella Nouzelles — another admired friend who used to be my professor — said that, at the end, art takes over the film’s narrative, I smiled. Of course she would see that. Gabriella has that rare skill: she can read almost any cultural artifact as if it had been waiting, patiently, to confess.

Only later did I begin to wonder whether “takes over” was quite the right phrase — or whether the ending is doing something more difficult than that. Maybe art does not take over. Maybe art is what remains when control becomes impossible. Maybe Noelia is not overtaken by art, but by the inevitable; and by embracing the path of the sick, she turns refusal into composition.

Not cure.

Composition.

A different thing.

I do not want to stay only with the mother, the cancer, the island, the obvious symbolic machinery. I want the form: the fabric, the bathtub, the sound, the underwater pressure, the way the film makes the audience feel watched while watching.

There are caracoles in the ceiba. There is spirituality, poetry, and honestly, aren’t those sometimes the same? Not religiosity, exactly. Something older than doctrine. In Cuba, I thought, this would immediately vibrate through Afro-descendant memory, syncretism, santería, the stubborn intelligence of shells, trees, saints, waters, and names that survived under other names. Todo eso que la gente llama superstición cuando no quiere admitir que también es archivo.

In that sense, the ceiba is not scenery. It is a library with roots, and the body knows how to read it.

Share Between Tongues

No Decorative Caribbean Sadness, Please

Puerto Rico and Cuba are not the same. Let us not be lazy. But the Caribbean keeps producing these echoes, these contaminated kinships, these mirrored violences with different accents.

Comparison is not sameness. Comparison, at its best, is listening sideways. It is letting one island illuminate another without turning either one into a footnote.

Glorimar said the contamination is not only Vieques. Other islands live versions of the same condition. The Caribbean comparison is not decorative; it is structural. Islands become laboratories. Military laboratories. Tourism laboratories. Debt laboratories. Climate laboratories. Disaster-capitalism laboratories. Resilience laboratories, which is just a prettier way of saying: how much can people endure before they are allowed to stop being inspirational?

Hasta cuándo, mi gente.

Share

The Fishbowl Has Excellent International Distribution

In my notebook I wrote: Abreu. Garbageland.

Juan Abreu’s Garbageland is not an incidental association here. As part of Cuban diasporic speculative fiction, the novel imagines the island through waste, technological distortion, and postnational ruin. Critics have placed it within Cuban cyberpunk and science fiction, but what interests me here is less the genre label than the intuition: the island as dump, archive, and future tense gone wrong. In La Pecera, the waste is military, environmental, embodied. In Garbageland, it becomes a whole world-system. Different registers, same Caribbean lesson: what empire discards does not disappear. It becomes atmosphere, infrastructure, and inheritance. Se queda. Se pega. Se hereda.

Even the film’s circulation has its own colonial grammar. A Puerto Rican film passes through Sundance as “world cinema,” through Spain as Ibero-American recognition, through U.S. art-house and university spaces as political testimony, and then back into community conversations where the people closest to the wound are also asked to explain it. The fishbowl, apparently, has excellent international distribution.

And still, beauty insists.

Glorimar mentioned bringing a sense of beauty to the work. I believe her. But it is not beauty as anesthesia. It is beauty as confrontation. Beauty as rot with light on it. Beauty as a sick body still capable of being touched. Beauty as an island that refuses to become only its damage.

This is a difficult love.

No easy answers. No inspirational bow. No “healing journey,” please, for the love of all contaminated waters.

No me le pongan moñito al derrumbe.

Healing is too often sold to us as a clean narrative: wound, awareness, treatment, recovery, gratitude. But what if there is no recovery? What if cleaning is not healing? What if care is not solution? What if the most ethical thing is not to rescue, but to listen?

Subscribe now

Grief Opens One Door; Ignorance Opens Another

Glorimar said people tend to respond to the film in two ways. They open up about grief. Or they confess that they did not know about Puerto Rico, about Vieques.

Both reactions matter.

Grief opens a private door. Ignorance opens a political one.

And somewhere between them, La Pecera asks us to look again at what we think we are seeing when we look at an island, a sick woman, a contaminated place, a body that says no.

Noelia does not want to be made into a lesson.

Neither does Vieques.

Neither does Puerto Rico.

Neither does Cuba, though God knows everyone has tried.

Share Between Tongues

The Island Looks Back

Maybe that is why Susana thought of me. Cuban reasons, yes. Razones de isla. Razones de agua mala. But also because those of us formed by islands have this in common: we learn early that the fishbowl is never just glass. It is history. It is policy. It is family. It is language. It is the gaze of others. It is the gaze we internalize. It is the water we swim in while being told we are lucky to be visible.

The trapped thing is expected to be visible, knowable, interpretable, moving beautifully in its limited water while someone else enjoys the privilege of perspective.

And sometimes, from inside the bowl, someone looks back.

That look is the film.

That look says: I see you seeing me.

That look says: do not confuse my enclosure with your understanding.

It says: I am tired of being told what to do.

And then it goes outside.

Into another inside.

Into the open air.

Into the Caribbean waters.

Into the body.

A lo que quede. A lo que aguante.

Into whatever remains when the island refuses to die politely.

I’m writing this from New Jersey, but you already know where my head is.

Havana.

Always Havana, even when I’m grading in suburbia, reheating coffee, answering emails with the fake optimism of someone who has opened too many tabs and too many wounds before noon.

And from here, from this distance that is not distance, I keep watching the same spectacle: the island squeezed from the outside, hollowed from the inside, and narrated to death by people who either want to own it, save it, sell it, or flatten it into a tidy little parable for export.

Meanwhile, Cubans — on the island and off — are left staring at the rubble and the rumor of more rubble, waiting for the moment.

You know the one.

The transition.

The collapse.

The shift.

The opening.

El gran después.

As if history were a dentist’s office and we were all sitting under fluorescent lights waiting for someone to call our number.

But here is the thing: I have spent too many years watching people wait for the future as if waiting were a political program. It isn’t. Waiting is what people do when they have been trained to believe that power arrives from elsewhere. From above. From abroad. From some glorious before-and-after diagram made by somebody in a think tank, or Miami, or Washington, or both.

I am no longer interested in waiting.

I am interested in building.

Share Between Tongues

Not the moment. The structure

Because whatever comes next for Cuba — transición, implosión, negotiated farce, soft auction, brutal makeover, whatever flavor of disaster gets marketed as possibility — the question is not simply whether change will come.

Change always comes.

The question is much less glamorous and much more important:

What are we building now that will still be standing when it does?

That is the question underneath everything I am doing.

Not just writing. Not just teaching. Not just editing. Building.

Because the older I get, the less patience I have for seductive language with no material consequence. I still love language. Obviously. I am a genderqueer-sometimes-woman of my words. A person made of syntax, digression, rhythm, side-eye, and an unholy amount of commas. But words alone are not enough. At some point, the poem has to become a structure. The critique has to become a method. The idea has to become a practice someone else can actually use.

And one of the things I have learned — in Havana, in academia, in classrooms, in little improvised cultural trenches, in the departures and dislocations of this life — is that what gets built in the margins often becomes the foundation later.

Not the center.

The margins.

Not the institution.

The workaround.

Not the official archive.

The thing somebody kept alive with no money, bad Wi-Fi, borrowed software, and unreasonable faith.

I know this because I have lived it.

Share

Infrastructure. Not a sexy word. Too bad

For years, I worked in precisely those spaces that institutions usually notice only after they have become legible, successful, or dead. I edited Revista Desliz. I helped circulate literature through informal and alternative networks. I moved between academic spaces and underground ones, between the sanctioned and the fugitive, between what counts as culture in the polished sense and what actually keeps culture alive.

That work taught me something fundamental: when official systems fail — and cariño, they do fail — what remains is whatever people have managed to build anyway.

Skill by skill.

Text by text.

File by file.

Network by network.

Favor by favor.

Against all odds and several bad governments.

And right now, one of the things Cuba does not have enough of is cultural infrastructure for the after.

I do not mean nostalgia.

I do not mean slogans.

I do not mean another panel where people say “resilience” three hundred times and then go drink mediocre wine under grant-funded lighting.

I mean infrastructure.

Places, systems, practices, archives, networks, platforms, skills, methods of circulation. Ways of documenting cultural production while it is still alive, not years later when somebody with tenure decides it has become historically interesting. Ways of connecting writers, artists, teachers, editors, and readers without waiting for permission from the state, the market, or the algorithm.

Because here is one of the absurdities of this moment: there is extraordinary cultural work being made by Cubans right now, and there is still no sufficiently robust, living, transnational infrastructure to track it, connect it, circulate it, and preserve its context.

Not enough places documenting who is publishing what, who is exhibiting where, what conversations are emerging, what experiments are taking shape, what forms of language and art are being born under pressure.

Subscribe now

The disappearing act, Cuban edition

Pressure is not new to Cubans. That part, sadly, is classic.

But cultural disappearance has a very contemporary speed to it now. Things vanish faster. Platforms die faster. Attention fragments faster. Work circulates briefly, precariously, then sinks. A poem appears, a show opens, a digital project flickers, a musician drops something brilliant, and unless someone is paying close attention (unless someone is committed to making a record), the moment dissolves.

The state does not do this work in the way it needs to be done.

The market does not do it either.

Academia does it late.

International media does it badly.

And social media does it for three and a half seconds, then gets distracted by a man with a microphone and a skincare fridge.

So no, I am not waiting for someone else to build the archive, the network, the practice, the platform.

I am building it myself.

Share Between Tongues

Enter: The Ethical Press

Which is to say: I am launching The Ethical Press.

If you want to follow what I’m building, you can join the waitlist here: The Ethical Press.

Not as a vanity brand. Not as some cute little passion project with a mood board and a manifesto. Not as “content.” Dios me libre.

I am building it as a transnational literary and cultural infrastructure rooted in a simple conviction: our work should not have to pass through extractive systems in order to exist with dignity.

That applies to Cuba, yes. But not only to Cuba.

Because the truth is that the broader publishing world also runs on a familiar scam: symbolic inclusion paired with material extraction.

If you are bilingual, Caribbean, Latinx, queer, formally unruly, aesthetically disobedient, intellectually excessive, or otherwise inconvenient to the market’s fantasy of universality, you probably already know the drill. You are told your work is powerful, timely, necessary, singular. Qué maravilla. Qué belleza. Qué voz tan importante.

And then the material terms arrive looking like insult dressed as opportunity.

Too little money.

Too little control.

Too few readers reached with care.

Too many rights handed over.

Too much gratitude expected for too little in return.

You are invited in, but not quite on your own terms. You are visible, but not structurally supported. You are celebrated, but not sustained.

It’s colonialism with better fonts.

Share

No, I am not turning crisis into aesthetics

And if I sound a little intense, it is because I have spent more than two decades thinking about these questions not in theory alone, but in practice. Through editing, teaching, writing, curating, mentoring, translating, documenting, and making cultural work in systems that were never designed to support it well.

I have worked within institutions and outside them. I have taught in elite spaces and improvised ones. I have circulated literature through formal channels and fugitive ones. I have spent enough time in the machinery to know which parts are broken and enough time outside it to know that alternative systems are not only possible, but necessary.

So The Ethical Press grows out of that long practice.

At its core, it is not complicated.

Teach the skills.

Share the tools.

Invert the economics where possible.

Keep ownership with the creator.

Build structures that outlast the event.

Make community part of the method, not the decorative language around it.

That means thinking seriously about editing, design, bookmaking, digital circulation, pedagogy, archives, fellowships, and the ethics of who gets access to what.

It means refusing the model in which a handful of institutions decide whose work becomes legible and whose disappears.

It means building spaces where literary and artistic production are not treated as luxury objects for the already initiated, but as living practices with social, cultural, and economic consequences.

And yes, it means Cuba is central to this vision.

Subscribe now

Why Cuba Is the Wound and the Method

Not because Cuba is the only place that matters.

Not because I am interested in nationalist sentimentality.

And certainly not because I believe Havana is the whole island. It is not. Nunca lo ha sido.

Cuba is central because it is one of the places through which I understand cultural precarity, invention, improvisation, censorship, circulation, artistic survival, and the long psychic consequences of systemic scarcity. It is one of the places from which I learned that if you do not build your own channels, somebody else will either close them, own them, or narrate you badly through theirs.

And because what is happening to Cuban culture right now deserves better than occasional pity, stale binaries, or ideological tourism.

It deserves record.

It deserves rigor.

It deserves attention.

It deserves structure.

I am already at work building it.

Part of that work will look public-facing: writing, conversations, dossiers, archives, resources, workshops. Part of it will look quieter and slower: systems, methods, collaborative models, ways of making books and making circulation possible without surrendering the whole soul to a platform built in Silicon Valley and powered by your exhaustion.

Share Between Tongues

Not just theory. A first release

For now, I want to begin where I know how to begin: with language, with relation, with a direct line between the work and the people who want to be in conversation with it.

That is part of why I am making my first poetry collection available directly to readers in digital form.

You can get the ebook here.

Not because I have any special love for the rituals of self-promotion.

But because if I am asking people to trust my thinking about literary infrastructure, then I should be willing to place my own work inside that experiment too. Not only as theory. As practice.

And because this project is not only about supporting other writers. It is also about creating the conditions under which I, too, can keep making work without handing it over to systems that extract more than they return.

That matters to me. Deeply.

What I am trying to make now is not just a publication model. It is a different relationship between cultural labor, ownership, community, and continuity. Something more ethical, yes, but also more lucid. Less innocent. Less dependent on fantasy. More honest about money, labor, access, and what it actually takes to sustain creative life.

That is also why this project is transnational by design.

Not because “global” sounds sexy in a funding application.

But because this work already lives across languages, geographies, economies, and broken systems of legitimacy.

As my life does.

I write across English and Spanish.

Across Cuba and the U.S.

Across books, classrooms, criticism, and cultural labor.

Across the official and the fugitive.

Across the code-switching I know best: between popular culture and high culture, the vernacular and the theoretical, without asking either one to behave.

And as a queer woman — and often not only that — I know something about moving across categories that others mistake for fixed.

So no, I am not interested in building a neat little brand with one stable identity and a very consistent font package. I am interested in building an ecosystem that can hold contradiction, movement, translingual work, precarious knowledge, formal experiment, and the people who have been told, repeatedly, that what they make is too much, too strange, too political, too specific, too bilingual, too undisciplined, too difficult to market, too alive.

Those are usually my people.

Maybe they are yours too.

Share

A few doors are already open. ¿Vienes?

Join The Ethical Press waitlist.

Get the ebook

Ebook + Conversation (this week only)

And if they are, then this is my invitation:

Not to consume.

To build.

To read, yes.

To join, maybe.

To pay attention, definitely.

To become part of a conversation that is also a structure, and a structure that is also a wager.

Because I do not know exactly what comes next for Cuba. I do not know what the next political performance will call itself. I do not know what institutions will survive, which ones will calcify, which ones will rebrand, which ones will continue pretending they were never part of the problem.

But I know this much:

What we build in conditions of precarity often becomes the groundwork later.

The unofficial archive becomes the historical record.

The improvised network becomes the trusted one.

The workshop becomes a method.

The folder becomes a library.

The small platform becomes the place people return to when everything larger proves itself unreliable once again.

That is the faith I have. Not abstract hope. Practice-based faith. The kind earned by repetition, by work, by watching fragile things endure because people insisted on making them endure.

So this is where I am placing my energy.

Not in waiting for the moment.

Not in begging institutions to grow a conscience.

Not in mistaking visibility for power.

In building.

For the after.

For the now.

For the work that should not disappear.

For the people making culture in conditions designed to exhaust them.

For the writers and artists who deserve more than symbolic welcome and material neglect.

For the record.

For the next structure.

Para lo que ya está llegando.

¿Vienes?

What’s available now:

My first poetry collection, is available as a Direct-to-Reader Edition (PDF, no middlemen, no Amazon). TEP-2026-001, the first release from The Ethical Press.

Get it this week and you’re also invited to the first “Conversations with Lizabel Mónica” (live Zoom, 30 people max). After this week, Conversations will be Café members-only.

Ebook + Conversation: $27 (this week only)

Just the ebook: $12

More coming soon: workshops, community space, the full infrastructure.

Join The Ethical Press waitlist.

Subscribe to stay posted if you haven’t already.

Between Tongues runs on reader support, cafecito, and the stubborn belief that some conversations can’t happen in just one language. If that matters to you, subscribe.

Here’s what I’m holding this week: Acuerdo por una Cuba Libre. A transition document signed across the island and the diaspora — including me — by people who rarely get to share a table, much less a text.

Antes de seguir, let me say who this is for.

No escribo esto para los cubanos de adentro. To ask them to sign a letter like this, when the request comes from the outside, is not a fair ask. They are not free. If they sign, their lives will be profoundly altered by the repressive apparatus that the government has spent decades perfecting. (Perfecting, yes. They learned from the best and added innovations of their own.) The cost is not abstract. Ellos lo saben mejor que nadie.

Lo escribo para los de afuera, como yo, y para los que, unlike me, have not gone back to the country since the day they left for good. Y también para el que salió hace dieciocho or so years ago, as a kid, taken by their parents who were looking for the opportunities their country did not offer them. That person may still have Cuba inside, in their chest and in their syntax, plus a cousin or two in the island, and a Spanish that comes back slower than it used to, con un poco de esfuerzo.

Eso también es la diáspora.

I’m going to share a link to this transition document at the end of this post, along with the FAQ, and yes, I’m asking you to sign it. Consider it less a pledge of optimism than a refusal to keep outsourcing Cuba’s future to the loudest men in the room, the oldest scripts in the drawer, or the convenient fiction that “after” automatically means “better.”

But first, we need to talk about the real problem: this document is a map, and it’s missing a country.

Share Between Tongues

I. A PDF Walks Into an Imagined Political Community (It Doesn’t Get the Joke)

Hay algo que incomoda en un documento como este, something that has nothing to do with what it proposes. Most of it is reasonable. Some of it is urgent. A few points will make you argue with the page; which is fine, la página no te va a responder. (Trust me, I tried.) But the discomfort isn’t in the proposals. It’s in what the document assumes. Que sabemos qué es Cuba. That we agree on what it was before. Que el horizonte hacia el que nos dirigimos is legible, shared, obvious, already drafted in the air like destiny with bullet points.

No lo es. (Surprise.)

El Acuerdo por una Cuba Libre is a transition document. Un mapa. Journalists, lawyers, doctors, artists, writers, presos políticos que ya salieron, presos políticos aún en prisión, people living in Havana and Houston and Bern and Brussels put their names to it. Eso importa. The breadth of it matters. The fact that someone in Guantánamo and someone at Yale signed the same piece of paper — que eso haya sido posible — is not nothing. (Miracles do happen. Small ones. With a lot of work.)

But a roadmap only makes sense if you know where you started. Y ahí es donde nos perdemos.

Share

II. Cuba Is Not a Before/After Filter

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

Cuba no es el castrismo, ni tampoco su ausencia. The country did not begin in 1959, and it will not end — will not begin again — simply because the regime falls. Creer lo contrario is its own kind of exceptionalism. Shortsighted. Ahistoric. The kind of thinking that can’t produce a future because it won’t honestly evaluate the past. We’ve been doing this for sixty-something years, measuring all of Cuban history against a single revolution, the way you’d measure an entire ocean by one particularly dramatic wave. (Bad science. Worse history.)

El binario es el problema. Imperialism versus revolution. The Cuba of Batista against the Cuba of Fidel. El exilio contra la isla. We inherited this frame from the Cold War, and it has been doing damage ever since. The revolutionary government needed that binary to survive. It needed an enemy the way a campfire needs oxygen. It is considerably less clear why the rest of us still do. (Habit? Narrative convenience? The fact that binaries are easier to tweet?)

So when a document asks us to imagine a transition, la pregunta debajo de la pregunta is: transition from what, exactly? And toward what version of Cuba. ¿Cuál Cuba? ¿La de quién? The Cuba that existed before 1959 was also not paradise. (I know. Shocking.) It does, apparently, need saying.

Subscribe now

III. Two Wings, Clipped Unevenly

Martí lo sabía. He called Cuba and Puerto Rico de un pájaro, las dos alas. Two wings of the same bird. Lo decía en serio: two Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, two independence movements, one shared flight toward something new. He died in 1895 before he could see what actually happened. (Quizás fue mejor así. The man had enough heartbreak.)

Lo que pasó fue 1898. The United States intervened in the Cuban war of independence against Spain — intervino, note the word — and when the smoke cleared, la guerra había sido renombrada. Ya no era la Guerra de Independencia de Cuba o la Guerra del 95. It was now the Spanish-American War. (Notice who’s missing from that title? Yeah.) Cuba had been written out of its own liberation story before the ink was dry. That move (rename the war, rename the protagonist) is an imperial party trick. Sleight of hand with bayonets.

Y la paz que siguió vino con condiciones: the Platt Amendment, which gave the United States the right to meddle in Cuban affairs whenever it saw fit. Cuba got its republic, pero nos pasaron gato por liebre. A leash dressed up as sovereignty. (Lovely gift wrapping, though.) We’ve been untangling that particular knot ever since, and anyone who tells you the revolution of 1959 has nothing to do with 1898 is selling you something. (Probably cigars. Or nostalgia. Same difference.)

Puerto Rico recibió otra cosa. No republic, no leash. Just direct annexation. Un territorio. An island of people with all the obligations of proximity to empire and few of its rights. Los Estados Unidos ni se molestaron en construir la ficción de la soberanía. ¿Para qué? Why bother with the theater when you can just own the stage? El pájaro que Martí imaginó, with its two wings beating together toward freedom, well, the United States caught it in 1898 and clipped both wings. Just unevenly.

Share Between Tongues

IV. Puerto Rico, or The Open Question

¿Y Cuba? Cuba had its revolution, sixty years later. Tenía su gran narrativa, su épica, its before-and-after, and that narrative was, in part, una respuesta real to the colonial inheritance that 1898 had left behind. To the Platt Amendment. To the distorted economy. To the American-backed governments that followed.

No se puede entender 1959 sin 1898.

The revolution knew this.

Y luego convirtió ese saber en coartada perpetua, a way to avoid accounting for what it had itself become. (There’s a specific kind of government that treats history like a credit card: it keeps charging the past to avoid paying for the present.)

Puerto Rico nunca tuvo esa narrativa. No revolution, no dictatorship, but also no decolonization. La pregunta sigue abierta. The wound stays legible because it never got a myth thick enough to cover it. (Myths are excellent scar tissue. Also excellent blindfolds.) Which means, paradoxically, that Puerto Rico might have a clearer view of the colonial question than Cuba does right now — because Cuba’s view has been filtered through the revolutionary epic for so long that it’s hard to see the frame around the painting.

Y por eso, la comparación sirve. Not because the two cases are the same (no lo son), but because they share an origin and then diverged at the exact moment when an outside power decided what each island would be allowed to become. Esa es la historia debajo de la historia. The part we keep skipping because it doesn’t fit in anyone’s epic storyline. (And we do love our epics. They make such good postcards.)

And that is what no transition document, however well-intentioned, however urgent, can fully address on its own.

It’s not a criticism of the document. It’s a description of the limits of the form. Documents fix things on paper. History is less cooperative. (Also ruder. And it doesn’t return your calls.)

El documento no va ahí. Maybe it doesn’t need to. Es un documento práctico, not a philosophical one, and practicality matters when people are hungry, in prison, leaving however they can, as soon as they can. (The body has a way of clarifying priorities.)

Bien.

Pero nosotros sí tenemos que ir ahí. We have to hold both: the urgency of now y la historia más larga; the longer history that will outlast any particular regime, and that will be waiting for us, sin prisa pero sin pausa, on the other side of whatever transition comes. (History is patient. It has nowhere else to be.)

Share

V. What the Acuerdo Does Well

The Acuerdo refuses triumphalism. Doesn’t promise a Cuba libre as if *libre* were a switch you flip. Habla de justicia transicional, of archives, of the gradual reconstruction of institutions. It acknowledges that functionaries and soldiers are also human beings who will need to be integrated, no simplemente castigados. Sabe, quietly, between its numbered lines, that whatever transition comes to us will be slow, painful, incomplete.

Eso tampoco es nada. That is, genuinely, not nothing.

What it can’t do—what no document of this kind can do—is supply the political imagination the moment actually requires. “Not a transition plan”, just a “civil society campaign” that wants to “offer the opportunity for an orderly transition to democracy” is scaffolding. First steps. The kind you need before anything else can happen. It does not foresee the future. It lists what must be dismantled and leaves the architecture of what comes next to someone else, otro argumento, some harder conversation, someone’s future insomnia.

Esa conversación es la que nos toca.

A sidenote: I signed, despite the *hijos e hijas* opener, a quick reminder that the future keeps getting drafted with yesterday’s templates. (We really need new templates.) Put me down as present, nonbinary, and not optional.

Subscribe now

VI. Desenredar: el trabajo sucio de imaginar

Comparto este documento not as an endorsement of every clause, y no como veredicto sobre las personas que lo firmaron, many of whom I admire, some of whom I’d argue with over coffee for hours (the good kind of argument, with hand gestures), and a few of whom I suspect would argue back just as hard. Lo comparto como punto de partida. Como provocación. Evidence that something is being imagined, however imperfectly, by people who don’t have the luxury of waiting for the perfect framework.

Léanlo sabiendo lo que es: a proposal, not a promise. Un comienzo, not an answer. And read it knowing what it isn’t: a reckoning with the full weight of what Cuba carries: colonial, imperial, revolutionary, post-revolutionary, todo enredado, all of it tangled in ways that sixty-something years of dictatorship did not invent and that removing the dictatorship will not automatically undo. The rope doesn’t disappear when you stop pulling it. (If only. Would save us all a lot of time.)

El trabajo de desenredar is ours. Siempre lo fue. The document just finally gives us somewhere to stand while we do it.

Agreement for a free Cuba

Agreement for a free Cuba: FAQ

More about the campaign

Correction / fe de erratas: Professor Enrique Sacerio-Garí kindly emailed me to point out that the “dos alas” verse I attributed to Martí (“Cuba y Puerto Rico son / de un pájaro las dos alas”) is actually by the Puerto Rican poet and revolutionary Lola Rodríguez de Tió, from her poem “A Cuba” (1893). I love mistakes like this: they force the record to sharpen, and they return the line to the woman who wrote, who and fought for the same Antillean horizon.

But I can’t take Renee Nicole Good out of my head.

One week after her death, my child’s school sent a message to parents. ICE was in town. Recess was held indoors. The kind of “containment” usually reserved for weather events or loose dogs. But this time, it was immigration enforcement. My child stayed inside while agents with long guns roamed the outside. And I thought: so did hers.

This death doesn’t feel like a headline; it feels like a bruise.

Not because she was a poet. Or because she was a mother. Or because she was a woman. Maybe because, in the very footage of her killing, the ICE agent who shot her can be heard, after pulling the trigger, muttering: “fucking bitch.”

Yes, I mind the language. I’m not adding asterisks to this one.

That phrase — hear it and let it settle — is not an afterthought.

It is linguistic violence.

It is the sound of banality and evil colliding on a snowy street in Minneapolis, of ordinary bureaucratic brutality made audible.

And here’s the part that haunts me: Good saying to her killer, right before he shot her, “I’m not mad at you.”

That hurts.

It’s the kind of line that stays lodged in the chest. Not resignation, not forgiveness, but something quieter and more piercing: the recognition that the machine is bigger than the person pulling the trigger.

That sentence lives in the same neighborhood as something Hannah Arendt once wrote: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

That’s how banality works: coffee, paperwork, small talk… and somewhere between all that, someone signs off on brutality without blinking.

Subscribe now

I. A Neighborhood, a Car, a Bullet

It happened in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. Renee Nicole Good, 37 — mother, poet, wife, neighbor — was shot and killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent while trying to drive away in her SUV.

By sunrise, two versions of reality were already circulating:

• Version A: The federal script. From DHS and friendly mouths: “domestic terrorism,” self-defense, a lethal threat neatly boxed and labeled.

• Version B: The footage. Bystander videos showing Good in her car, moving away, shots fired, and agents then restricting medical help in the minutes that followed.

Since then, another civilian has been killed by ICE, and the city feels like a militarized zone. Long guns. Drones. Agents parked outside buildings like they’re waiting for the next target on a spreadsheet. The response, too, has been escalating: protests, vigils, and now a call for a general strike.

Podcasts are already calling it a “battle over truth.” Some go full allegory, comparing it to Bloody Sunday. In Substackland, the takes came fast:

• Moral-collapse essays about the soul of the nation.

• Think pieces on the ‘Domestic Forever War’ against dissent

• Intimate elegies for an ordinary woman killed near the same streets that remember George Floyd.

All of that matters. None of it quite cuts into the core of what I’m after here: a language-and-power autopsy, a transnational look at how states manufacture killable subjects in words long before anyone touches a trigger.

I’d love to join the strike. I really would. But I can’t. Not because I don’t believe in it, but because I’m a mother, and let’s not forget it, an immigrant. A naturalized one, yes, but I still carry an accent I have no intention of erasing. I’ve been told it’s charming. I’ve been told it’s dangerous. I’ve been told it makes me interesting and also less employable. But here’s the thing: I don’t want to pass for American.

I’m not American.

I’m the intersection of languages, histories, and fault lines.

My identity doesn’t come from the soil or the flag.

It comes from the stubborn refusal to be just one thing.

Share

II. The State’s Favorite Words for the Dead

When a government says “domestic terrorist,” it isn’t speaking descriptively. It’s building a scaffold. The term doesn’t just frame the incident: it clears the moral space around it.

This isn’t new. Latin American regimes spent decades perfecting the lexicon of preemptive guilt: subversivo, enemigo interno, elemento desestabilizador. The grammar migrated. The software updates, but the source code is the same.

Label first, shoot second. Then control the scene.

Multiple videos show agents blocking, delaying medical care. Medics were reportedly told, “We have our own.” Fifteen minutes of nothing. That’s not protocol; it’s choreography. It’s the second act of state power: stage-managing the aftermath.

Subscribe now

III. Bureaucrats with Badges (and Arendt in the Margins)

Arendt warned us: Evil can look like a paper-pusher with a clear desk. It doesn’t snarl. It clocks in. It uses acronyms.

Apply that lens to ICE. These are not cartoon villains. They’re people in uniforms with PDFs and paychecks. Their menace is procedural.

So when an officer fires at a mother in an SUV and then casually drops a misogynist slur, that’s not rogue behavior. That’s tonal consistency.

Share Between Tongues

IV. The Well Is Pixelated

Here’s the art history you should feel: Truth in its most honest form is not pretty, and photography helped convince 19th‑century artists that the world could no longer be prettied. Back in 1896, Jean-Léon Gérôme painted Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind. Photography, then new, was believed to have forced her out, a mechanical witness that couldn’t lie.

But now the genie has multiplied. AI-generated images flooded the internet within hours of Good’s death. Fake agents. Fabricated unmaskings. A synthetic truth, in scrollable format.

Photography once anchored us to reality. AI floats us in something else: belief-shaped pixels. Truth doesn’t just come out of the well anymore. She’s competing with avatars.

And while federal spokespeople and government officials are still busy laundering language like “domestic terrorism,” the Grammys were having a moment.

“Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ICE out,” said Bad Bunny, who just won Best Música Urbana Album. Subtle, right?

“We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens,” he said, staring down the camera like it owed him back taxes. “We are humans, and we are Americans.”

Even Billie Eilish chimed in: “No one is illegal on stolen land.”

In other words, you don’t get to celebrate our culture and cage our communities.

Subscribe now

V. Read. This. List. Out. Loud.

One is already too many, but January didn’t stop at one. Or two. Or three. Let’s name them, since the official language won’t.

Keith Porter Jr., shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve.

Geraldo Lunas Campos, dead in custody on January 3 in El Paso, ruled a homicide after reports of a struggle with staff.

Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, gone January 5 in a Houston hospital, still in ICE custody.

Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz, heart stopped on January 6 in Indio, California.

Parady La, died January 9 in Philadelphia, while in federal hands.

Víctor Manuel Díaz, found unresponsive in his cell on January 14 in El Paso. Suicide, they say.

Heber Sánchez Domínguez, also found dead January 14, this time in Georgia.

Nicole Good, shot by an ICE agent while trying to drive away.

Alex Moncada, died in transit between facilities, the details still fogged in euphemism.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti, gunned down January 24 for standing too close to the truth.

Ten names. One month. And that’s just what made it out of the shadows.

This isn’t enforcement. It’s accumulation. A ledger of erasure, dressed in badges.

Share

VI. No contaminado: Love as Discipline

I won’t lie. Most days, what I want to say is “Fuck ICE.” And I know I’m not the only one.

But I keep returning to Bad Bunny’s word — contaminado — that smog of hate that creeps in when rage feels easier than hope. It’s hard not to get contaminated these days. To hold onto tenderness when the air is thick with state violence and bureaucratic coldness.

I want to stay uncontaminated. Not neutral. Not nice. Just fiercely committed to a language of love; not the Disney kind, but the hard, conscious kind. The kind you choose when your fists are already clenched. The kind you train for, daily, like a discipline. Like resistance.

Because what’s the alternative? That I mirror the same contempt I’m trying to fight? That I wear their hate like a hand-me-down uniform?

No. I want to remain porous, bilingual, angry, and still breathing. I want to mother, speak, write, live without disguises, without euphemisms, and without letting the Lie dress me.

Love, like truth, might not win. But it sure as hell won’t be wearing a windbreaker and calling it justice.

Share Between Tongues

VII. A River Story

Meanwhile, from the Caribbean — my Caribbean — the tension is more than metaphor. U.S. intervention just landed in Venezuela with its usual humanitarian PR. And now? Cuba’s turn. Friends and family are being thrown into state marches, threatened with losing jobs or being harassed by the State Security if they don’t perform allegiance. They’re waiting for an “external correction” to their internal disaster. Social unrest is rising. The state’s theatrics are getting clumsier. The sanctions are squeezing. And behind it all, another empire’s appetite for regime change twitches like a hungry nerve. One narcissistic circus may simply collapse into another chauvinist mayhem.

I mean, when the spectacle gets sloppy, the costume matters more.

Wardrobe comes from guarderobe. Robe from Old High German roub: looted clothing.

In an Afro-Cuban patakí, Truth and Lie enter a river. Lie emerges wearing Truth’s clothes. Truth, refusing the borrowed wardrobe, steps naked onto the shore. The people, scandalized, turn away.

That nudity is defiance. It’s camouflage rejected. No euphemism. No performance. Just bone and truth.

And still, we turn away.

Because when the state calls a mother a terrorist before the facts are known, and then immortalizes her death with a slur, it isn’t just killing a person. It’s training the public to look elsewhere. To accept the robe. To praise the disguise.

But I’m not looking away.

Truth doesn’t need new clothes. We need new eyes.

I. This. Has. Been. A. Year.

Not just globally (although: what a mess), but personally, profoundly, soul-churningly so. A year that didn’t ask for permission to enter the room: it kicked my damn door open, rearranged the furniture, and asked me to make us some tea.

And so I did, made lots of tea, and I also did lots of learning. Not because I wanted to, but because life dropped the syllabus mid-semester, then changed the exam date without notice. Classic.

Some lessons were welcome. Others were not. Some came wrapped in poetry and friendship. Others showed up as ash in a box too small for what it held.

II. The Presence After

I won’t make this post about my mother. Not entirely. She wouldn’t have liked that. She’d be rolling her eyes from whichever dimension she’s now bossing around. She hated fuss. Hated aging too, and hated even more that we couldn’t bring her to the States.

She came anyway. Later. Just not in the way we planned.

Her absence has become an overwhelming presence. Not a hole, but a fog I walk through daily, sometimes sweet, sometimes unbearable. I talk to her. Sometimes I win the argument. That’s new.

Still, this isn’t a post about death. It’s about learning to live with a different kind of presence. One that doesn’t hug back, but still smells like Café Bustelo and says “lo que sucede conviene” when you’re spiraling.

III. Control Is a Myth. Lentils Are Real.

We all know that control is a bedtime story for grown-ups. That “doing your best” often means showing up while mentally screaming into a pillow.

That adapting expectations isn’t failure; it’s a survival skill.

That sometimes, learning comes disguised as chaos.

Or lentils.

Yes, I cooked. On New Year’s Eve. Me, who once considered boiling water a betrayal of the feminist agenda. I made lentils. Yellow, spiced, smugly perfect lentils. And reader, they slapped. They were my edible manifesto: I can change.

IV. Sueño Realizado (¿En Serio?)

At the beginning of the year, poet-friend Soleida gave me a runa (a rune, for those not raised in Caribbean mysticism with Green seasoning). “Estás premiá,” she said. “Sueño realizado.” A dream fulfilled. I smiled politely while panic bloomed under my tongue. Because I’ve been taught that dreams, once named, are at risk of vanishing. Or worse: coming true in a twisted kind of way.

And yet. Maybe she was right.

Somewhere last year — between deadlines, airports, grief, scares, and hospitals — I got to live three full days and nights entirely devoted to poetry at Empoerá, surrounded by other glorious women poets. We laughed, cried, read, shouted, drank, stitched metaphors into each other’s skin. If that wasn’t a sueño realizado, I don’t know what is.

Actually, maybe the dream didn’t end there. Maybe it multiplied. Because in the middle of those unfiltered, gloriously messy conversations, I realized: this can’t stay private. So I’m turning the interviews I’ve teased (and spiritually over-edited) into a podcast. Not polished monologues, but conversations. Unruly, multilingual, alive. Poetry not just on the page, but in the breath, the tone, the hesitation, the laughter that breaks the thought in half. That’s what I want to archive. That’s what I want to share.

I’ll be talking to poets, yes, and to visual artists, musicians, interdisciplinary shapeshifters, and artivists with three passports and no chill. As a transdisciplinary writer, I collect those voices like charms on a loud, jangly bracelet.

Subscribe now

V. Things I Can’t Fix (and What That’s Taught Me)

Powerlessness in a thousand flavors. I had a front-row seat to other people’s messes in 2025. Sometimes maddening, sometimes infuriating, unfixable situations.

Some of the people closest to me have gone through it. Real, not theoretical, not metaphorical stuff. And despite my instincts (and my résumé-worthy ability to overfunction under pressure), I had to accept a frustrating truth: I can’t live other people’s lives for them. I can’t reroute their decisions. I can’t control their timing, their coping styles, or airlift them to better judgment.

And honestly, sometimes I didn’t even like how I felt about that. Sometimes I wanted to fix things, but also judge them a little. Sometimes I didn’t know whether to help or walk away. Sometimes I remembered that love is not a to-do list. Or a moral high ground.

What I can do: show up without a script. Offer help without a scoreboard. Care without collapsing or turning into a puddle. Be clear on what’s mine and what isn’t. And hold room for the mess, including my own.

That’s also learning. And it doesn’t come with a certificate.

VI. The Space Between Us

This last year has made it excruciatingly clear: I won’t always be there. Not metaphorically. Literally. Emotionally. Logistically. Cosmically.

There are situations in my now-teen child’s life I wasn’t present for. And they handled them. Everything was fine, technically. But the emotional math hit different: it was one of those moments when I saw the future rushing in, that growing expanse between us.

And it shook me. Not in a violins-in-the-rain kind of way — I’m Cuban, not Victorian. But in the kind of way where your stomach drops and you realize: they’re becoming someone who will make decisions without me. Who will face strangers, accidents, and weird train rides. Who will eventually tell me about it, or not.

That’s the gig, right? You raise someone to walk away from you. It’s beautiful. It’s terrifying. It’s wildly underrated in the list of things we’re supposed to accept with grace.

So I’m learning — not always gracefully — to hold space instead of holding on. To trust their instincts. To prepare, not to prevent. And to admit that part of loving them now means learning to live with not knowing everything, not managing everything, and choosing to be there, regardless.

VII. The Learning Is Mutual (And It Better Be)

My students have no idea how much I learn from them. Sometimes it’s humbling. Sometimes it’s annoying. Often, it’s both. But if I’m not learning, I shouldn’t be teaching.

I started the year doubting everything. I changed age groups. I fumbled. I flopped. I floated. I stood in front of a classroom and thought: Is this still it?

And when it got really bleak, I walked over to my German colleague and asked if I could learn the language. Not for any job. Not for a degree. Just because.

He said yes. I instantly felt better.

That “yes” realigned something in me. Teachers need to be students too. Preferably frequently. Preferably with some sense of humility.

No, I won’t come out of this speaking fluent German in a few years. That’s not the point.

The point is to return to my classroom with more generosity — toward them, toward myself. My students and I are meeting halfway: they learn from me, I learn from them, and I adapt my materials and methods to make the learning possible. Not perfect. Possible.

Sometimes “possible” is the most radical thing you can build.

VIII. Learning is a Love Language

I learned to stitch again. Thanks to Grisselle, my fashion-designer-turned-language-department-colleague (you can’t make this up), I now rework my clothes instead of just yelling at them.

And every time I sew, I hear my grandmother, the original costurera in my life, whispering “costura, niña” while I pretend I’m not tearing the seam again.

Or when I spread the pages of my novel on the floor and thought: this is very Juan Carlos Flores of me. Or when I mark up drafts using symbols I saw my mom use while editing. Or when I take a walk mid-essay, like my dad, who believed writing begins when you leave the desk.

We inherit learning even when no one calls it that.

Subscribe now

IX. And This Is What Poetry Is For

Our post-holiday tree didn’t get tossed. We turned it into an altar of sensations: a day for sounds, a day for colors, a day for smells, a day for contradictions. It’s weird. It’s poetic. It’s definitely ours.

This is what I wish we taught in schools. Not just grammar and algebra and how to calculate your GPA while suppressing emotion. But how to make meaning. How to lose someone and not lose language. How to burn the lentils and still laugh. How to survive.

At a recent meeting, my kid’s advisor said, almost in passing: “That’s what poetry is for.”

And I fell in love with the school all over again. I mean — who says that?

Also, yes, I believe poetry is more important than sports. I said what I said. We need art like we need oxygen, especially now, when public language has become a grotesque parody of itself. But the state of education belongs to another post. (Stay tuned.)

X. The Next Line Is Coming

My kid wanted us to set goals for the new year. I said okay, but also: maybe we don’t do bullet points for that.

Maybe we live weird. Slow. Live like we’re part altar, part draft. Maybe we stitch new clothes, make our own ceremonies, boil the lentils differently next time.

Maybe we say yes to the runa, even if it winks.

Let’s be clear: I’m not ending the year with clarity or closure. I’m ending it mid-sentence. But now, at least, I’m listening for the next line.

On one side of Prado y Colón, a central intersection in Havana that tourists might breeze past but locals navigate like muscle memory, there’s a rooftop where everything is salvaged, reused, and repurposed, from the wood to the visions and ambitions. It’s the home of Criollxs, a cultural project and sanctuary curated by one of the DJs from Negros Finos, where the vibe is half domino tournament, half underground set, and fully anti-capitalist patio chic. You sit on chairs that were never chairs to begin with. You sip warm rum from a mismatched glass while the DJ plays something that seems to be aimed at smoothing or shaking the economic forecast. People aren’t just vibing, they’re surviving with style.

Then you tilt your head slightly north, and bam, the view shifts. Across the street, at a slightly higher altitude (both physically and politically), you’ve got a rooftop hotel cafe-restaurant owned by the Gaviota Tourism Group (from the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, MINFAR), and managed by the Canadian hotel chain Blue Diamond Resorts. Sleek seating, clean angles, and menus in USD. One week after I arrived, the establishment officially dropped moneda nacional like an unwanted Tinder date. Now it’s cash, tarjetas clásicas o nada. Dollars only, baby. A financial altitude adjustment for a clientele that lives in the clouds.

Subscribe now

How to Pay Like a Local (Hint: You Can’t)

Quick sidebar, because what’s a post about rooftop inequality without a detour into plastic money politics?

You might be wondering: What exactly is this “Tarjeta Clásica” I keep name-dropping, and why does it sound like something reserved for people who brunch in USD?

Let me walk you through it with something that may look like part explaining, part national pastime: complaining.

Launched in early 2024, the Tarjeta Clásica is Cuba’s latest financial invention: a prepaid foreign currency card in USD, designed for both Cubans and foreigners. Yes, both. But let’s not pretend they’re swiping from the same starting line.

For foreigners, especially those with U.S. passports (and embargoed bank accounts), it’s a lifeline. You buy it for $4 at a Cadeca booth — airports, banks, wherever they still pretend there’s a queue system — and load it up to pay for things your Visa can’t touch: fuel, hotels, bars, rooftop mojitos. It’s the workaround to a workaround, dressed up as tourist convenience.

For Cubans, though, it’s not a perk; it’s a necessity. The Clásica has quickly become the required key to enter Cuba’s MLC economy (that’s Moneda Libremente Convertible if you’re new here, ironically, the least “libre” of currencies on the island). It’s how you receive remittances from abroad. It’s how you buy goods in stores where Cuban pesos are suddenly no longer welcome.

So yes, Cubans use it. Not because they want to join some modern payment revolution, but because this is the only lane left open. It’s swipe or starve, and nobody’s laughing at the punchline.

In short, it’s not just a card: it’s a microcosm. Of privilege. Of remittance economics. Of survival strategies shrink-wrapped in plastic for the more efficient operation of the global food chain.

But rooftops wait for no one. Let’s climb back up, shall we?

Share

Drop the Beat, Not the System

Where were we? Oh yeah. Two rooftops. Two Havanas.

And then there’s the third azotea, the party that charged 500 pesos moneda nacional to get in. DJ spinning old-school jams, from pre-my-birth Raffaella Carrà’s classics –– nothing like listening to “Hay que venir al sur,” the Spanish version of “Tanti auguri,” in a crowded small rooftop in Centro Habana –– to those way too familiar nineties heartbreak bangers. Yes, I am 40, but feel older than that and look younger than that; age in the 21st century is a sticky business, so get over it. That right there was the soundtrack of a generation, but with a price of access measured in nostalgia and inflating currency. It was fun. It was sweaty. It was also sad.

Real talk: Havana has always been a showroom for someone else’s joyride. A place where tourists come to feel something — alive, inspired, bohemian — while locals do cartwheels just to stay upright. Lately, it feels like we’re all extras in someone else’s destination wedding. And yes, sometimes that’s not even a metaphor.

If you’re from a Caribbean country or any place labeled “exotic,” chances are you’ve been a silent background actor in countless vacation pics — smiling, sweating, selling something, or just surviving. If you’re behind the lens, here’s a question: how many times have you asked for permission before snapping that “authentic moment”?

Which brings me to Bad Bunny. Ay, Benito.

This man just threw a whole concert, raised serious funds for Puerto Rico, and reminded us that joy, visibility, and care can exist in the same beat. The gesture was real. And powerful. But so is the dilemma: when an island becomes both stage and symbol, who’s really being seen, and who’s just being watched? Because the spectacle doesn’t end with the performer. It continues with the audience: posting, hashtagging, consuming the place as much as the music.

That’s the tension that many of us in the Caribbean know too well: when visibility meets marketability. Culture performed. Crisis aestheticized.

The same thing happens in Havana, every damn day.

The message? “This island is an experience.” A vibe. A backdrop. Something you visit, post about, and leave.

Subscribe now

I’m from Your Favorite Filter

Patricia Encarnación said it best with her painting series: I am from where you vacation.

(Seriously, go look: https://www.patriciaencarnacion.com/paintings).

Her work explores womanhood, race, and post-colonial reality in the DR, and the framing is equally effective here. Because to be from Havana in 2025 is to be endlessly visible and invisible. You are scenery and labor. You are the mood. And the footnote.

Meanwhile, what passes for “professional” work here is a job at a Vedado boutique hotel reception desk, whose owner is an Italian married to a Cuban woman from the elite. Real professionals — doctors, professors, economists (poor souls) — are still under the boot of a government that calls itself communist but functions like a bureaucratic casino where only the house wins. And the house is crumbling.

The formal economy is a unicorn.

We’ve heard of it.

We’d like to see it someday.

In the meantime, what keeps Havana spinning isn’t socialism: it’s sociolismo, that charming system where your cousin’s girlfriend knows a guy who can get you a part-time gig teaching salsa to Canadian retirees.

But there are two sides to the coin. And maybe that’s why the emotional economy in Cuba feels so rich: because favors still matter more than fortunes. Because a shared story is worth more than a shared bill. One night this summer, someone leaned in and said: “Quiero saberlo todo.” I didn’t tell them everything. I listened. And I gave back the empathy I’d been given all week. It’s a different kind of currency, and one that’s still in circulation.

Share

Socialismo, Sociolismo, Whatever Works

And yet, somehow, I’m still hopeful.

Why?

Because Havana still has time. That most luxurious of non-renewable resources. People here, some of them anyway, still have time to think, learn, and try new things. DJ. Paint. Make jewelry. Decorate the city’s walls at night with a distinctive, highly artistic leitmotif that serves as social commentary and a new brand of clothing. Design furniture with natural textures. Build cultural platforms out of social networks that use WhatsApp as a plus, but are really happening in real life. They’re not just hustling. They’re training. They are, against all odds, acquiring skills for a capitalism that’s always almost here but never quite lands.

Socialism is fading. The informal economy is mutating faster than a reggaetón remix. And those who know how to weave between the ruins (the DJs, the craft makers, the writers with side hustles and cracked phones), they’re preparing, whether they admit it or not, for a future that still hasn’t RSVP’d. Maybe it’s ghosting us. Maybe it’s fashionably late. Either way, people keep moving. Keep rehearsing. Keep remixing. And while they wait? They kill time, and most nights, they kill it on the dance floor.

That’s what I hold onto when I’m back, that I get to just be Liz, or Lizy, or Lizabel Mónica. Not a teacher, not a writer, not anyone’s translator; just a person with a few stories, and a decent sense of rhythm. In Cuba, people aren’t their jobs. They’re their anecdotes. Their nicknames. Their timing. And I love that. I need that.

Subscribe now

The Credits Roll, Havana Keeps Spinning

Every time I come back to Cuba, I find love, or love finds me. I am not talking about romance, but affection that’s messy and magnetic, the kind that makes you forget what time it is. And when someone asks if I still have family there, I never know how to answer. Of course I do. But also: I go back for friends who act like family, who know not to ask too much when I say it’s still hard being back without my mother. In Cuba, “chosen family” isn’t a term; it’s a daily practice.

Because what pulls me isn’t just memory: it’s extrañar.

In Spanish, to miss someone is extrañarle, a word that sounds tender, but comes from extraneare, to estrange. So when I say te extraño, I’m not just saying I miss you. I’m saying: you’ve become strange to my days, foreign to my mornings. There’s clarity in that pain: a recognition that love, when displaced, turns alien.

I wanted to wrap up this series of Havana posts with these images because I need to move on to other topics. But Cuba? I’ll return to it. Not with “takes” or “solutions” (please, spare me), but through its people. Through their work and their words. Because that’s where the real story lives. Not in the rooftops themselves, but in the people who dance on them.

Share

If you liked this, subscribe. If you didn’t, go sip a mojito on a rooftop you paid too much for. Either way, te estoy mirando.

Subscribe now

But it’s not just about streaming the latest Marvel flick or catching up on Succession in 240p. This is how Cuban music videos get play, how indie series go viral, how local telenovelas circulate beyond prime-time state TV. Here, El Paquete doesn’t just distribute content; it equalizes it. Pirated media cohabits without hierarchy.

But now, the state — veteran pirate of its own — suddenly wants to play copyright cop. “Las nuevas normativas no prohíben la circulación de material audiovisual,” they say. Right — if you have a license, follow the Author and Performer Rights Law, and don’t get too visible or too digital. Same remix, new rules. Alegalidad, but with paperwork.

Read more

Subscribe now

Read more

Sweat Games: Havana Edition

Havana in summer doesn’t “do” heat. It commits to it. Sweat here isn’t a side effect. It’s an identity, a civic status, maybe even a currency.

In Cuba, we say sudar la gota gorda — sweat the fat drop — like it’s a national sport, each bead a contribution to the collective struggle.

Sweat seeps into your pores, plasters your clothes to your body, and rebrands your skin as a damp national treasure.

Subscribe now

Sadness, Now with SPF 50

Sadness here behaves the same way. It’s clingy, stubborn, impossible to towel off, no matter how many fans you angle like you’re auditioning for a Beyoncé video.

Still, there’s hope.

Not the kind stapled to a flagpole and recited with a loyalty oath. Definitely not the “homeland” fantasy shrink-wrapped in nostalgia and handed out like scripture. Sorry-not-sorry to those who confuse essentialism with culture; my hope isn’t for sale at that souvenir stand.

Hope grows feral in the cracks, exactly where the slogans forgot to look.

It sprouts muscling through ruins, roots wedging themselves between decaying walls like they got lost on the way to somewhere respectable.

Subscribe now

Roots That Ghost the Exit

Hope it’s the twenty-somethings who choose not to board the plane, who answer their family’s weekly ¿Cuándo te vas? with a silent refusal and a stubborn grin. Dreams still in blueprint form, sketched on naked rooftops littered with the city’s abandoned bones, re-engineered into open-air art shows: visual art that jumps the frame and takes over the streets instead of hanging in galleries.

I’ve seen a duo of DJs spinning on rufxsted scaffolding — the kind you wouldn’t trust to hold a cardigan but perfect for bass drops. A trans DJ who didn’t need a mic — her tracks did the yelling for her, slipping bass-heavy side-eye into every drop while she chain-smoked like each cigarette was a punctuation mark.

I’ve stepped into parties that bled into afterparties, with fashion shows staged in rescued and restored mansions — some with plastic “injerts” that jar against the marble floors and decorated high ceilings, like a giant inflatable flamingo parked in a cathedral´s narthex. Jewelry and furniture designs paraded alongside the models, the whole thing playing out like Wes Anderson went tropical — only with the high-production gloss and insistent, unblinking smiles of the latest American Airlines inflight safety video, selling you on the idea that you can be happy, even glamorous, while the country tilts into freefall, cabin lights flickering, emergency exits glowing — except in this version, there are no oxygen masks, and the crew has gone quiet.

I’ve seen writers who were once legends of my generation trekking for hours because they can’t justify the ad usum taxi fare or endure the purgatory of waiting for the who-knows-when bus. They cross the city just to trade books and coffee with another writer, parsing world literature with the precision of scholars who know every shift in its canon, even as they accept it will drift on just fine without them, leaving them stranded in the cheap seats by the ruthless arithmetic of geopolitics and literary borders. Most are chronically sleep-deprived, thanks to the unpredictable, middle-of-the-night blackouts that leave them sweating in the dark, scrolling through novels on their phones in a heat-drunk daze — a flimsy shield against the disorientation, the frustration, and that razor-thin edge before the whole mind wobbles over into breakdown.

I´ve seen a circle of Black women in a sweltering room, plotting how to entertain and teach sick and vulnerable kids — for free, because free is the only price that makes sense here.

I’ve seen clothes passed from hand to hand, food served without ceremony, and strangers — yes, the same ones the Cuban National Assembly recently labeled as actors or trash-pickers “looking for an easy way of life” — invited to cultural events just so they could eat that night. Like any abuela here would say, donde comen dos, comen tres — where two eat, three can eat — and you’d better believe there’s a fourth on the way.

Subscribe now

Hope, Packed in Carry-On

I’ve seen this and more. And I’ve stayed just long enough to observe, to participate, to follow my own ethics — always contingent, never sanctified. Until the rest of my life, the part that feeds my child, my classes, and the never-ending to-do list, called me elsewhere. But I leave with hope. Hope of telling it all. Because writing is the only way I know to process how we all fight to survive — and, somehow, while we’re at it, live.

Incoming: Trouble You Can’t Put Down

And speaking of leaving with hope, consider this your advance warning. A new interview series is about to land, and it’s not here to play nice. We’re going deep with the artists, writers, and cultural conspirators who aren’t just reacting to the world but rewiring it in real time. Think less polite Q&A, more field notes from the fault lines where art, culture, and activism collide at unsafe speeds.

First stop? Cuba, obviously. Because the island isn’t a postcard of cigars and salsa (bless the tourist brochures for trying); it’s a pressure cooker of invention, defiance, and beautifully unmarketable truths. You’ll hear from people who make work that’s less “home décor” and more “visual Molotov,” who are breaking chains, flipping scripts, and, yes, occasionally doing both at the same time. These are voices that don’t bother asking for permission — Cuban, unapologetic, and fluent in the language of creative troublemaking.

Expect raw, unfiltered conversations about survival, desire, scarcity, abundance, and the occasional absurdity of trying to make art in a place where reality itself sometimes feels like performance. Stay tuned, because if you’ve made it this far with me, you already know these won’t be interviews you skim over coffee. They’ll be the kind you carry around for days, side-eyeing the world a little differently, maybe even plotting some trouble of your own.

Subscribe now

Coda

At some point, the long game is to throw these artists into the same room — or screen — with others across borders and watch the sparks (and maybe a few fires) fly. Think of it as a perpetual beta desliz: a cross-border, high-voltage remix of the earlier project, only louder, hotter, and impossible to look away from.

P.S. While We Wait..

The upcoming interview series will be available to paid subscribers, not to leave anyone out, but to support the time, energy, and care it takes to create these deep-dive conversations. If you're not ready to upgrade, no worries: I'm glad you're here, truly. But if you are curious, want a closer look, or join the inner circle, I'll be sharing a few annotated photo dispatches from the trip exclusively with paid subscribers this week. Think of them as postcards from the edge, glimpses of what didn't fit into the main story but still want to be seen.

Share Between Tongues

The Role You Can't Return

This week's post isn't quite about mothers. It's about the role — the trapdoor that opens under your feet the moment you step into it, the contradictions it holds, and the long shadow it casts on a woman's time, identity, and solitude. About how you lose your hours, your name, and sometimes even your reflection. 

We just survived another Mother's Day, not just here in the U.S. but also in Cuba. Other countries are still celebrating — Mother's Day in Nicaragua today! — or will soon enough. The timing differs, but the mythology is shared: mother as giver of life, caretaker of generations, unpaid laborer of love.

But let's pause the Hallmark soundtrack and talk plainly. Motherhood is not a job; it's worse. It's a full-time, no-clock-out vocation with emotional overtime and no union. You're on-call even when your child is away. Especially when your partner is a man. And because gender is never just a detail but the architecture of our lives, the mother remains the primary parent in most households, even when the father lives under the same roof. Even when she works just as many hours outside of it.

Subscribe now

Linguistics and Other Maternal Myths

In Cuban Spanish — Castilian, to be precise, though not the imperial kind with the lisp, but one of many Spanishes that splinter and bloom in exile — we say something is de madre when it defies reason. Unbelievable. Absurd. Chaotic. It's a phrase soaked in affect. Sometimes awe, more often misfortune. If someone tells you "eso estuvo de madre," they might mean it was wild — or that it sucked. Both meanings coexist, as they tend to do in motherhood.

And since we're already playing with mothers and meanings, let's talk semantics. In Mexican Spanish, de padre means something is fabulous, amazing — a total win. Your party? De padre. Your outfit? De padre. But flip the parent, and suddenly: vale madre — worthless, irrelevant, a cosmic meh. The math is suspicious. Fathers get cool points. Mothers get spreadsheets and unpaid internships in human development.

In Argentina, they say la madre de los tomates to describe something massive, absurd, or out of control. The mother of all tomatoes. It can mean everything or nothing. It's the exaggeration, the chaos, the humor — the tomato-based shorthand for "this is a lot."

Turns out, mother is a verb, a role, a metaphor, a punchline, and a political position. Especially in Spanish.

Share

On Drawers, Beds, and Second Shifts

I'm a mother. One day, not long ago, I had a quiet realization: my child will hate me. Not because I failed, but because I mothered too much. Because I remember, remind, anticipate, and absorb. Because I am the invisible net they don't notice until they fall. I know this because I once ran away from my mother, too. And it took years to come back — not just to her home, but to her humanity. To see her as someone other than "mami."

When I think of my mother, I remember her through objects. Her metal desk. The typewriter she used before the computer arrived. A file cabinet tucked into a bedroom column at my grandmother's house. A small wardrobe that traveled with her from her married apartment to our post-divorce life. It once held our toys. Later, it held her memories — mementos from her travels abroad as a cultural journalist and cinema critic, the kind she had to stop taking after the divorce when being the one who had to account for every hour meant she could no longer do it all. I now see she was curating her selfhood in these corners — staking out a life beyond motherhood, even if it was just a few drawers.

After the divorce, we all slept in one room. Three beds, one radio, and books we read aloud before sleep. I still remember the sound of her voice narrating stories after her second shift ended. Those readings are some of the happiest memories of my childhood. I now realize what it cost her: to get home from work, to cook, to mother, to read, and still have no door to close. No time that was hers alone.

She didn't watch TV like my grandmother did. She liked cinema — big screen, not small. And she loved books, though I can't remember her reading much until retirement. There was no time for that. Just like there was none for me when my own daughter was younger. I'd go to bed bone-tired, dreaming of silence.

Subscribe now

The Village, Re-imagined

We don't understand our mothers. And as mothers, we are rarely understood. Much of what we do — what we track, worry about, fix, soften — is invisible. Not just to outsiders, but to those closest: our partners, our children. If we care too much, we smother. If we step back, we're neglectful. If we plan and schedule, we're annoying. But if we stop, nothing gets done.

We're asked to keep the village running, but be cool about it. Don't look like you're trying.

Sometimes I wonder — what if the village were real? What if mothers raised children together, not siloed in nuclear family units where one woman becomes the operating system of everyone else's life? What if it takes a village didn't mean it takes a mom plus dad's occasional assist?

I think of Virginia Woolf and her room. She said women need one to write. I say: mothers need time. And not just the permission to take it but the structural possibility of having it. In capitalism, time is a commodity, and mothers are expected to give it all away.

Of course, my story isn't the harshest. I remember a friend from childhood. She lived in a two-room house. When she first visited me, she stood in my bedroom doorway and just stared. That was the first time I felt the weight of privilege. I was thirteen.

Her mother cooked meals my friend delivered to her stepfather, who worked long hours as a security guard. For her, it wasn't about having a life of her own — it was about getting by.

So, how do we write — how do we live — without a life of our own?

Share

Oxygen Masks and Breathless Arithmetic

The 21st-century family narrative tells us to center the child, make them happy, and prioritize their growth. And I do. I love being a mother. But I also need space for myself. That doesn't mean putting my oxygen mask on before my child — something Melissa Verhey mentioned recently in her Substack Varieties of Humanist Experience. The unspoken agreement is that I am — and have always been — the designated adult in charge of my child's continued existence. So how do I handle this impossible math? I lean forward and try to put both masks on at once. Which, let's be honest, is possible, but exhausting — like planning tomorrow's class while reciting everyone's schedule from memory — while hoping no one notices I'm running on crumbs and caffeine.

That can't be the only way.

This can't be fixed with better time management or mindfulness apps. We don't need hacks. We need a complete rewrite. We need new scripts. A new social imaginary. One where mothers aren't expected to whisper their needs or trade sanity for guilt. One that makes room — not just for a door to close or the chance to lose yourself in a book — but for mothers to be brilliant, bored, loud, quiet, selfish, gloriously mediocre, or unapologetically excellent, and still be seen as whole. Not as a favor. Not as a break. As the baseline. To own your life? That's not self-care. That's self-respect — and the damn minimum.

In the meantime, when someone says something was de madre, I'll nod. Yeah, it was. Not just because it was wild or terrible, but because it was real. And chances are, there's an exhausted mother behind it, holding the world together with one hand and the coffee cup in the other.

Reader, tighten your laces and tune your ears; grief has me quilting Chaucer onto Eliot, appliquéing a shiny Rachel Cusk fate patch, while Havana pigeons screech train alerts at my kid. Strap in: we’re headed for a ride going medieval, modernist, and mildly unhinged.

The Crash Course (Emphasis on Crash)

My mother, Azucena Isabel — literal lily in the Cuban family garden — took a wrong turn on a Havana staircase, and the universe promptly updated my operating system to “Beta‑version Orphan 1.0.” You never forget the phone call:

“Profound coma”

“We tried everything.”

“No pulse in the wrists.”

As if describing Wi‑Fi connectivity issues, not a human life. Meanwhile, I was booking the next flight, hoping grief respects carry‑on limits. Spoiler: it doesn’t.

Subscribe now

Time, Meet Blender

Several weeks in, the clock and I are on a break: breakfast blurs into bedtime, and I call the result brunch‑for‑insomniacs. Capitalism insists I be showered, scented, and grading by 8 a.m.; grief lobbies for horizontal hibernation scored by random bird choirs. My middle ground? I stride into school wearing lipstick, yesterday’s dry shampoo, and migraine‑chic sunglasses.

Wait, why the birds? I know you’re dying to know. Which brings us to…

ck. We say nothing. The pigeons keep chanting their off‑brand doom.

“Es increíble,” she marvels, “que el zureo de un animalito diga eso... que me diga eso a mí.”

She drills the last pronoun into me with an eyebrow that’s read three lifetimes of omens. I still don’t reply, but a line from an old poem flashes in neon across my brain: a character named Filomena equating train tracks with la Muerte. I’d written that “De alguna forma todas nos parecemos a Ana Karenina.” Women, in my verse, die by locomotion: steel, speed, inevitability.

So I sit there, lips zipped, cataloging yet another echo only literature seemed to catch in advance. My mother hears pigeons. I hear prophecy. The train, invisible yet punctual, keeps rolling toward us in coo‑coded Morse.

Frida, Blood, and My Syllabus of Doom

I walked into Spanish IV with Las dos Fridas queued on the smartboard: arteries, scissors, geysers of destiny. My students gasped; I thought of the blood on those Havana stairs I never saw but can’t unsee. Teaching tip: when life starts mirroring art a little too closely, toss in jokes like confetti, or you’ll risk drowning the class in existential hemoglobin.

Subscribe now

The Unfinished Trilogy (Because Fate Loves a Cliff‑hanger)

Mom and I were buddy‑reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. I texted her a smug photo of Book 2 the day before the accident. She never got to crack the spine. Now I’m eyeing Book 3 like it’s a defused bomb: do I open it and finish our conversation or leave it closed as a memorial? Either way, Cusk keeps whisper‑heckling me about fate. Thanks, Rachel.

Control Is Cancelled (Sorry, Mom)

Mom believed in surgical precision: plan, execute, repeat. She even kept euthanasia on her to‑do list just in case reality turned tacky. Fate laughed and shoved her down a staircase instead. Lesson learned: the universe uses slapstick, not spreadsheets.

Word‑Nerd Interlude: From fatum to azar to hazard

Latin fatum — “what has been spoken,” as my colleague William has pointed out — is the script already printed in cosmic ink, exactly the vibe Rachel Cusk catches when she says life feels like “reading to find out what happens next.” Spanish deals that decree as azar, the coin‑flip of chance; Portuguese keeps the spelling but loads the dice toward bad luck. Persian lets it blaze as āzar, holy fire; French trims it into hasard, well-dressed randomness; English slaps on a tough hat and warns hazard. Same root, five paths, one pre‑written line we’re all busy “reading” into being.

Share

Lilies in Free‑Fall

Colleagues sent bouquets. One white lily drooped overnight — no brown spots, just surrender. Apparently, flowers, like humans, sometimes skip the warning lights and go straight to “Nope.” I kept her for an art project and a daily reminder that randomness runs the show.

Fun fact: Lizabel is mom’s personal remix of lis (French lily) + Isabel. Yes, I’m literally named after her floral alter‑ego. It clings tighter than any last name.

Compass Spinning, Silence in the Margins

Grief arrives in many disguises, but the most disarming is the sudden hush where a lifelong interlocutor used to speak. My mother was equal parts pep‑talk and red pen: first reader, ruthless line editor, and strategic nag who mailed my childhood stories to contests and then circled my weakest paragraphs in merciless blue ink. When she fell, the dialogue stopped.

The room didn’t merely go quiet; it lost its counterpoint. You don’t just lose a mother — you misplace the future self she was already debating into existence: the author of that next book, the scholar she kept daring me to outgrow. I’m still writing, but every paragraph echoes back un‑annotated, no laser‑focused “¿Pero por qué dices esto así?” slicing through the draft. And that, reader, is a pain no etymology can soften: the ache of arguing with the air where your sharpest sparring partner once sat, pen poised, ready to push you one sentence further.

Yet beneath the critique was a gaze no editor can replicate — the unwavering attention of the woman who quite literally wrote my first line into being. Losing her means losing the one reader who believed in the story before there were any words at all.

Subscribe now

The Cruellest Month (Apologies to Eliot, Not Really)

April. T.S. Eliot’s month of lilacs and mixed feelings. Also, the month Mom almost died in 2019 and, plot twist, actually died in 2025. If poetry had a customer service desk, I’d be returning that stanza for excessive accuracy.

Centuries before Eliot fretted, Chaucer was already listening: he heard sweet showers; I heard them too — on the drive back from the crematory when the sky cracked open. My sister‑in‑law murmured, “El día se puso triste,” but the rain spoke a language I didn’t have to translate, a gray lullaby rinsing the ache into calm.

Community, a Love Story

My grief has been crash‑cushioned by an unlikely orchestra. Family and chosen family stepped in like first responders, brandishing casseroles, plane tickets, and the kind of hugs you don’t need to request. Teenagers (perpetually duking it out with accent marks) wrapped me in shy squeezes that landed heavier than any elegy. Colleagues kept the school gears grinding, while those who had long since become close friends smuggled last‑minute lesson plans into my desk. Then came the blast‑from‑the‑past brigade: old classmates, distant cousins, a midnight poet in another time zone — all resurfacing from the digital deep just to type Aquí estoy.

My partner took it upon himself to dig through his Havana bookshelf for something in Portuguese — unprompted, but on point — since I’ve decided to romance that language again — and returned with As Flores do Mal. Baudelaire, because nothing says emotional support like decadence and doom in translation. Damarys, my ride-or-die in this life and likely the next, moves through crisis like water: steady, quiet, essential. Her care has no scoreboard, no audience — just the kind of love that builds a shelter and doesn’t ask who’s watching. And my kid, who during that first brutal week, dropped everything — every time — and came running from across the house just to hold me. No instructions, no questions, just instinct.

The care keeps looping. Pocket‑sized poems and micro‑stories ping my phone like lightning bugs in a blackout; some callers steady their voices long enough to anchor mine, others leave trembly voice notes that trip over words but refuse to stop talking. A playlist titled “Crying in Spanglish” pipes empathy straight to my earbuds. And only days ago, a family member by choice sent me a raw recording of the pigeons my mother adored, along with a voicemail saying their cooing now sounds like the shape of her absence. He had no idea about my mother’s own remark — or the train that’s coming for all of us. Paradoxically, the moment I hit play, I felt less of a train wreck than I had in weeks.

Every gesture — shy teen hug, rogue birdsong, texted haiku — stitches another square of daylight into the fraying quilt I’m clutching, proof that grief is less a solo act and more a messy, miraculous jam session with unlimited guests and a bottomless box of tissues.

Share

Legacy in Motion

My mother was that rare force who turned my friends into hers, stayed intellectually charged well past midnight, and met every curveball like an elective she’d already aced. She was a cultural journalist and an activist who believed fiercely in the power of ideas — their ability to shift things, even if only slightly, stubbornly, beautifully. I got a lot of my ways from her. What set her apart, especially in the Havana of her generation, was her refusal to get stuck. She kept learning. That alone kept her moving — past dogma, past easy certainties, always evolving. She followed the news like it was air, never missing a beat, whether it came from home or halfway across the world. She always stayed attuned to architectural shifts, art world tremors, literary currents, the next thing before it was the next thing.

Let it be enough to say I hit the cosmic jackpot: she was my mother. Our dialogue will keep unspooling — sometimes faint, sometimes loud, always there — even if I can’t catch every syllable on the wind, in the pigeons’ songs, or in the sound of trains passing by.

Closing the Loop (Sort of)

Naturally, I’m still talking to her. In bookstores, lesson plans, this post. If writing keeps the conversation alive, then pass me another notebook. Control is canceled, randomness reigns, but the dialogue? Non‑negotiable.

So here’s the deal, reader‑friend:

If you’re grieving, time‑blind, or just haunted by rogue pigeons, you’re welcome in this lily‑strewn mess. Comment with your best coping playlist, your worst fate joke, or the book you can’t finish because someone didn’t live to see the last page.

I’ll be here, sipping rainwater lattes, practicing my mother’s two favorite verbs: fall and rise.

This post was meant to go out on the night of Monday, April 7. Turns out, grief has its own editorial calendar:

Two Saturdays ago, I went to the funeral I describe below. It was quiet grief, but it left a deep imprint. The reflection wasn't just personal — it was unexpectedly prophetic. Early Monday morning — April 7 —everything changed for me. My mother died suddenly. I had to travel urgently to Cuba, and in many ways, I have not returned the same. The experience of mourning, of movement, of memory — those belong to the next post. This one, unintentionally queued, remains exactly as I wrote it before that rupture.

There's something eerily precise about the timing. Two days before losing my mother, I was at a funeral reflecting on someone else's absence. That I could sit with death one day and then be undone by it the next — that still stuns me. The post that follows waited in the queue while I unraveled. And somehow, that delay feels now like part of the story.

Together Is a Verb

On Saturday, as people marched and chanted, "Hands off our rights, our bodies, our people," I didn't go to the protest. I went to a funeral.

Don't get me wrong, I wanted to go. I've gone to many over the years, and this one mattered. But I couldn't. I had a funeral to attend, and tutoring lined up right after that. I felt bad at first. That specific kind of guilt we feel when we're not out there holding the sign, chanting the chant, walking the walk.

Subscribe now

Retaliation Hits Different

I don't mean just microaggressions or bureaucratic coldness (though yes, those too). I mean policies. Rhetoric. A growing, grotesque nationalism that makes sure to remind folks like me, like us: you're a guest. A tolerated one. For now.

With new tariffs announced and the markets already twitching, I've been thinking a lot about retaliation. Not the political kind — the economic kind. And the emotional kind. Because let's be honest: when the economy takes a hit, immigrants, queer folks, and families with school-age kids and six-figure student loans are not at the top of anyone's rescue list. We know what it's like to be left holding the bag. Or the bill.

And as I left, I went to tutoring. Because life doesn't pause for mourning or outrage. That hour of helping a teenager prepare for their future reminded me of something Rancière once argued: protest is a form of privilege — you have to have time to do it. And time, as we all know, is a luxury. Especially for immigrants. For queer folks. For mothers. For teachers juggling side gigs. For anyone trying to keep things afloat, the kid fed and clothed, and the student loans from swallowing them whole.

Share

Still One for Protest, But...

And yet, I've always been one for protests. Since my days in Cuba, I've believed in the necessity of taking the streets, of shouting truth to power. I still encourage my students and friends to do their fair share of civic protest and disobedience. I believe in the power of showing up.

But since the pandemic, something in me hesitates. That era of masks, curfews, and fractured trust left us with more than fatigue — it left us with the aftertaste, maybe even the conclusion, that we are in the middle of a global political crisis and that protests, activism, politics themselves — need to be rethought. If not reinvented altogether.

Remember how much we protested in those years? How many voices were raised? How many fists went up, masks soaked with sweat and rage?

Remember where all that went?

Subscribe now

Micropolitics: The Real Front Line

I believe deeply in the politics of everyday life — or what some may call micropolitics. Revolution sometimes sounds like a pan on the stove, a pencil on paper, or a child's voice. We must find ways to fight back every single day — because it is in everyday life where cultures are made, remade, or unmade. And culture shifts, as we all know, are one of the most terrifying forces for those clinging to systems of power.

Everyday life is where we can be the most radical, the most enduringly transformative.

And it's also the place where people like us — the ones who don't always have time, access, or energy to protest — can wield our full might. We can bring about tangible change by creating not just slogans, but shifts in how we live, relate, and imagine what's possible together.

Share

You say pencil, I say broomstick

So I leaned into something quieter but just as radical: staying close to my people — and let's define people because I'm not talking about some nationalistic trope. Juanita, the woman who died, is also my people. So is my partner. So is my child. My people are my chosen family, scattered across Cuba and the globe. People I may not see often but who live in my decisions, my care, and my refusal to let the world flatten our joy.

My kid, ever the wildly creative planner, came up with a schedule for the weekend so we could spend it as a family. In the plan, each of us had to throw in an activity of our choosing to do collectively. My partner chose reading. I picked a trip to the local bookstore — the one that actually has a solid literature selection (shout out to Farley's Bookshop).

My kid's chosen activity was to draw comics together. And we did. And what I drew was actually my child and me drawing. And then, finally, we were flying on a pencil like it was a broomstick. Because I am a witch, you know, a woman in total control of herself, as that song that my kid listens to on repeat says.

Subscribe now

Togetherness as Political Practice

That's how we fought back this weekend: living in togetherness. Rooted, laughing, reading, sketching our survival into the margins.

And as I did so, I also remembered this: creativity is survival. It's not a quirk or something to save for a more stable time. It's how we name what's happening.

If you're reading this and feeling that quiet panic —the one that creeps in when your savings account blinks back at you like "cute, but not enough" —I want to say this to you:

Review your resources, not in fear, but in clarity.

Ask for help even when you'd rather swallow your pride. Community isn't charity.

Reclaim your calendar: cut out what depletes you and guard what feeds you.

Turn what you're feeling into something: a text, a poem, a spreadsheet, a damn meme if that's your language.

And most of all: spend time like it's your real wealth. Because it is.

Share

Who Says I Didn't Protest?

Hands off our people, yes. But also: hands on your joy. Your messy Sunday rituals. Your angry scribbles and uncertain prayers. Your chosen families and unchosen commitments.

Be together. Host conversations. Tell stories. Cook. Dance.

Prioritize togetherness as much as you can.

Because togetherness is resistance.

And togetherness, when chosen fiercely, is how we move from surviving to transforming.

Monday mood meme for immigrants

There's this 1994 performance called "Miedo" — fear, for those still chasing Duolingo streaks — where Tania Bruguera is stuck inside a flimsy small boat, patching it constantly like a DIY survival YouTube gone wrong. A clear reference to the iconic Cuban balseros: imagine tiny, shark-attracting vessels held together by sheer ingenuity, welding together adapted car parts, barrels, and a desperate dose of hope. Honestly, it's less of an artwork and more of a Monday mood meme for immigrants everywhere.

For clarity (and legal purposes), I didn't paddle my way into this country. I am privileged, after all. I elegantly cruised here in a seat narrower than my patience, sipping microscopic overpriced beverages, invited for prestigious talks, and eventually ending up doing a PhD at an absurdly fancy Ivy League institution (think stone buildings and scarves that scream, "I'm elite and I know it!").

Still, that boat speaks volumes — permanent instability, constant improvisation, and secretly hoping no one discovers you're just figuring it all out as you go.

Subscribe now

Words We Write, Fears We Whisper

Our World Languages Department has this adorably geeky ritual of daily translating words into Latin, German, French, Spanish, and Mandarin on a communal board. Honestly, translation is about as believable as unicorns and good politicians, but we pretend anyway. Yet, as I wrote this, it hit me — miedo (fear) rarely gets airtime on that cheerful board. But I get it: existential dread doesn't precisely scream communal joy.

Speaking of awkwardness, remember the new group chat ghoster that I mentioned in the previous post? Surprise, it is me! Well, I am not exaclty a ghoster, but someone that basically lurks silently until dropping dramatic bombs such as "It was dark there, but now I'm back to the American nightmare" when asked about my family visit to Havana. I'm clearly the life of every virtual gathering. After winter break, during one of those pre-meeting shrug-filled silences — when people are casually chatting about vacation trips, family reunions, and other sunny small talk — a fellow Latina faculty colleague from that same group chat leaned over and admitted, softly, "Tengo miedo," confessing genuine fear for the first time in her 25 relatively secure American years. I mean, who isn't walking around these days with a Plan B brewing quietly in their head? Fear: 1, Confidence: 0.

Subscribe now

Speaking Through Closed Throats

Here's the fun thing about Spanish: you never become fear itself; you carry it around like that gorgeous but broken oversized suitcase you bought at a discount store —wobbly wheel, busted zipper, and forever inconvenient. It's external, a cold that lingers annoyingly — "me da fiebre," "me dio catarro," "eso me da miedo." You're not "in" anxiety; you coexist "with" it, swimming desperately alongside it, head barely above water. "Miedoso" (fearful) might sound like fear becoming identity, but in Spanish, the suffix "-so" roughly translates to the English suffix "-ful," making "miedoso" "full of fear" — like your psyche temporarily overdosing on anxiety rather than permanently defining who you are.

Speaking of chilling (pun absolutely intended), isn't it intriguing how fear has this sneaky talent for muting us? Take Spanish, for instance: we got the root "ang" in words like angustia, angosto, and angina — all swirling around discomfort and tightness, centering in that narrow corridor known as garganta — the throat. It's poetic irony at its finest. Our throats, these essential gateways for expression, close up under pressure. Immigration raids, Kafkaesque deportation threats — such events swiftly transform bold declarations into cautious whispers, making speaking out feel about as safe as texting your ex at midnight. And speaking of internal drama queens, let's not overlook our friend, the amygdala, forever vigilant. Spotting trouble, it immediately releases adrenaline and cortisol, leaving us with racing hearts, dilated pupils, and those embarrassingly incoherent noises reserved for awkward family gatherings. A biological masterpiece — though admittedly a disaster for articulate conversation.

When my daughter was younger, I jokingly called myself an alien, echoing my old "official" immigration status. Alien: extraterrestrial, foreign, E.T. desperately phoning home. Spanish thankfully avoids such melodrama: "extraterrestre" is reserved strictly for cosmic visitors, while "extranjero" politely designates foreigners. But English collapses it into "alien," like we're straight out of a low-budget sci-fi thriller, plotting sinister deeds. While we may get linguistically spicy using something close to the old French estrangier, English here erases nuances, transforming immigrant bodies into alien entities, unfamiliar and threatening.

Subscribe now

Adrift, But Not Lost

Strangely enough, when I searched for an image of Bruguera's performance to illustrate this piece, nothing turned up. In a deliberate and impactful choice during her performance, Bruguera avoided spending all her time anxiously repairing the boat. Instead, she often sat aboard the precarious vessel — embodying the quiet uncertainty. Behind this artistic choice lies a profound truth: that fragile structure holding her afloat isn't merely a prop; it's intimately tied to her very survival. That unseen yet constantly felt uncertainty is at the heart of the immigrant experience. Most like the performance's picture, this "Miedo" I speak of is invisible, something we immigrants carry quietly at the core of our existence, rarely seen but always present.

Here's a fun fact: since childhood, I've had this recurring nightmare where I'm adrift in the middle of a pitch-black ocean after my ship has sunk. Delightful, right? A highly intuitive soul once cheerfully explained that this dream signifies anxiety, stress, and a general lack of solid ground beneath me. Groundbreaking analysis, thanks. But honestly, as someone who comes from a place where speech was less chilled and more deep-frozen, plus an economy that went from terrible to apocalyptically worse, it checks out. People are still desperately trying to escape, and as for me? No safe harbor behind me, no clear destination ahead — just endless fighting to stay afloat, both literally and metaphorically.

Ultimately, the fear I discuss extends beyond singular instances — it becomes an existential reality. Still, as I said, in Spanish, you never become fear itself, but you can definitely be brave, happy, encabronada, or even alegre cuando te da la real gana. And that we are.

Share

When my Department Chair asked what we were reading during a meeting, I was among the few colleagues to answer the question literally: a queer speculative fiction novel, a debut nonetheless, by Korean American author Jinwoo Chong. Needless to say, this was not followed by any comment, and my chair found a way to boomerang the conversation back to the pedagogical books she intended to reference. Meanwhile, I was mentally adapting Flux into a course syllabus. Why? Because this novel offers a real, messy look at the complexities — and difficulties — of living between cultures, the media representation of minorities, and yes, the looming possibility of frequent blackouts even in so-called "developed" countries. Imagine that.

This was our last meeting before Winter break, which meant, for some of us, traveling to see family in other countries. That same Christmas, there was a massive blackout in Puerto Rico, leaving families to celebrate the last days of 2024 in the dark. But let's not act surprised — Puerto Rico has been living this plotline on repeat. If you somehow missed the memo, Bad Bunny broke it down for us in his 23-minute epic El Apagón — half music video, half slap-in-the-face reality check. It's a banger and a bulletin. He said it loud and clear: "Yo no me quiero ir de aquí" — and honestly, that line hits different when you're watching your Nochebuena candles do double duty as emergency lighting.

Fast forward to my own holiday trip: I just got back from Cuba, where yet another nationwide blackout left the island stumbling in the dark, both literally and metaphorically. The last time this happened was back in October 2024, and here we are again, five months later, like a bad sequel nobody asked for.

And it's not just Cuba and Puerto Rico. Blackouts spread across Latin America like a viral TikTok trend no one actually likes but can't escape. Why? And more importantly — are we all doomed to a future of flashlights and lukewarm drinks?

Subscribe now

Why Are There Blackouts for Days in Some Latin American Countries? Can This Be Solved?

Oh, where to begin? Picture an electrical grid held together by chewing gum, bureaucracy, and sheer optimism. Infrastructure in many Latin American countries is a relic from the days when disco was cool, and sadly, much like disco, it's not making a comeback. Decades of underfunding, corruption, and "we'll fix it mañana" attitudes have turned power grids into fragile, overworked messes.

And then there's climate change, because why not add another crisis to the mix? Droughts limit hydroelectric power, hurricanes batter the already shaky grid, and heatwaves push energy demand into the stratosphere. Top that off with economic mismanagement — energy subsidies that sound nice on paper but drain resources faster than a teenager using their parents' money on Roblox — and you've got a recipe for rolling blackouts.

Can this be fixed? Theoretically, yes. Countries like Chile and Uruguay have proven that investing in renewables, decentralizing grids, and actually maintaining infrastructure works wonders. But that requires political will, funding, and leaders who care more about long-term solutions than short-term PR stunts. So, you know, no guarantees.

Subscribe now

Why Is This Not Happening in Developed Countries?

If you're reading this from a country where a blackout means lighting some scented candles for the "vibes" rather than questioning your entire existence, congrats — you live somewhere that invests in its power grid.

Developed nations throw money at their infrastructure like it's building flashy bridges while the foundations may be crumbling — impressive from afar, but not precisely disaster-proof. Their grids are modern, diversified (nuclear, renewables, natural gas), and not run by people who treat maintenance like an optional hobby. Smart grids? They've got them. Automated rerouting? Yep. Quick repairs? Absolutely — because a prolonged blackout in a major U.S. city would cause more outrage than the disappointing season finale of a beloved TV show.

Of course, they still have their moments — looking at you, Texas 2021. But those failures are more of an exception than a rule, which is why you don't see New York or Berlin shutting down for days at a time.

Subscribe now

U.S. in the Dark? Flux and the Blackout Prophecies

Jinwoo Chong's novel Flux paints a near-future America where blackouts are popping up like surprise visits from your in-laws — occasional, inconvenient, and just frequent enough to keep you on edge, suggesting that rising energy consumption could make this our new normal. Science fiction? Sure. Completely impossible? Not so much.

The U.S. has an energy addiction. Between AI's insatiable appetite for data processing, cryptocurrency mining, ever-expanding data centers, and the rise of electric vehicles, power demand is skyrocketing like a billionaire's ego in a rocket. Now throw in climate change (heatwaves making ACs work overtime, winter storms freezing power lines, rising sea levels threatening coastal infrastructure), and suddenly Flux starts feeling less like dystopian fiction and more like a very unsubtle warning.

Oh, and let's not forget cyberattacks. The grid is going digital, which is great — until some hacker decides to treat it like a video game. Good luck explaining to Gen Z that TikTok is offline indefinitely if a cyberattack ever takes down a major power grid.

That said, the U.S. has the resources and tech to prevent this future — if the right investments are made. Grid modernization, renewable energy expansion, AI-driven energy management. It's all possible. But while the U.S. has the resources, whether it actually happens depends on the usual mix of politics, corporate greed, and whether public attention holds longer than a news cycle — unlike in Latin America, where the challenges are less about overconsumption and more about deep-rooted global inequalities that have long undermined the ability of so-called "developing" countries to truly develop, combined with economic instability and outdated, fragmented electrical grids that look nothing like the tightly regulated and redundantly backed systems of their wealthier counterparts.

Subscribe now

Last Light

Will blackouts be the new group chat ghoster, mostly absent, occasionally disruptive, and always popping up when you're least in the mood — but unfortunately, often enough to keep us nervous and nostalgic for working light switches? They're already here in Latin America, served with a side of government excuses. In the U.S., they remain a "what if?" — but one that's creeping closer. Flux may be fiction, but its blackout anxiety reads more like a spoiler alert than make-believe.

For now, Latin America will continue its ongoing relationship with unreliable electricity while the rest of the world watches and debates whether they're next. And in the meantime, we'll all be lighting candles over here on the island — not for romance, but to see if the food in the fridge has gone bad yet.

Subscribe now

For a while, Cuban digital media looked like it might pull off the impossible: existing. Not just as state propaganda, not just as the exiled opposition's megaphone, but as something in-between, something messy and complex. A space where people who lived on the island and outside of it — and didn't want to recite talking points from either end of the ideological spectrum — could write, think, and sometimes even get paid for it.

But reality, as always, has other plans.

The latest blow? The Trump administration — because of course — has decided that USAID funds supporting independent media across Latin America are woke nonsense and must be "reviewed" (translation: put on ice indefinitely). The Cuban government, never one to miss an opportunity for I told you so, is already celebrating: "Look! We said these media projects were U.S. puppets all along!" It's like watching a badly scripted telenovela where you know the twist before the second episode.

The irony is suffocating. For years, Cuban non-state media tried to prove its autonomy while juggling impossible contradictions: operating in a system where advertising doesn't exist, international donors are suspect, and domestic funding sources (businesses, private individuals) are terrified of government backlash. Now, after years of walking that tightrope, the whole ecosystem might collapse — not just because of Cuban government crackdowns, but because Trump (with the blessing of Marco Rubio, whom much of Florida's Cuban-American community expected to back the opposition) did the job for them. Structural fragility wins again: you don't have to kill something when you can just let it starve.

Subscribe now

A History of Writing Without Readers

Let's be honest: this crisis is not a surprise. Cuban journalism has been forced to reinvent itself so many times that survival feels like muscle memory.

First, the Revolution's early years (1959-1961) wiped out private press and replaced it with a monolithic state-controlled media machine. Writers no longer had to think about audiences, market demand, or competition — their sole readership was the state itself, whether through direct censorship or the soft approval of cultural institutions. Cuban literature and journalism became an exercise in writing at power, not for the people.

The Soviet-backed era (1960s-1980s) solidified this. Writers and journalists operated in a vacuum where readership was an afterthought; the function of literature was ideological reinforcement, not engagement. This created a culture of literary solipsism, where writers essentially wrote for each other, their peers, their institutions — never for a genuine, organic public.

The Special Period (1990s) cracked the illusion. The economic collapse triggered the first real fractures in media control, and tropical samizdat projects emerged. But the shift was incomplete. Many of the alternative journals and dissident publications that appeared still operated in a feedback loop of their own, addressing external arbiters of legitimacy rather than a real domestic readership.

The 2000s brought blogs, and the 2010s brought full-scale digital media projects, but the audience problem remained. Who were these journalists really writing for? While their work operated transnationally, the real audience was often foreign — NGOs, policymakers, international funders, and Cuban exiles eager for alternative narratives. The Cuban state press, still clinging to its monopoly, continued its disinterest in market-driven readership, while the independent outlets often found themselves writing to be seen by U.S.-based democracy advocates rather than by Cubans on the island.

The Two Mediaspheres: El Paquete vs. Digital Journalism

Meanwhile, something very different was happening inside Cuba.

The rise of El Paquete Sem

anal — the so-called Cuba's underground offline internet — introduced a form of actual market-driven media, one where magazines had to respond to real audience demand, not grants or ideological mandates. But there was an invisible divide:

• Publications inside El Paquete were popular, audience-driven, and sustained by advertising. They had to give Cubans content they actually wanted, whether music, sports, lifestyle, or entertainment.

• Digital media outlets reporting on Cuban politics and culture for an international audience had the luxury (or the constraint) of not needing to compete for attention in the same way. They were not accountable to an internal readership but rather to the external institutions that provided their funding.

And then, of course, there are the two untouchable topics in El Paquete: politics and pornography — the two prohibited P's that separate the media that actually circulates on the island from the one that only speaks about it.

The result? A fragmented mediasphere where Cuban journalists and writers have been trained — historically and structurally — to write for themselves, for each other, and for institutions abroad, but not for a genuine domestic audience. The only spaces where real audience engagement exists — like El Paquete — are also the most tightly restricted when it comes to politics.

And now, with the latest financial crackdown on independent media, that entire system is being shaken once again.

Subscribe now

The Real Question: Who Is Media Actually Speaking To?

So the real question isn't just how Cuban media will survive but who, if anyone, it will actually be speaking to in the process.

Will digital media outlets finally try to reach real Cuban audiences? Will they rethink their funding models to become more accountable to readers rather than external donors? Or will the ecosystem keep replicating the same feedback loop, writing for the same closed circuit of institutions and peers?

Meanwhile, El Paquete will continue its own brand of survivalism:" thriving under pressure — which recently came in the form of Decree 107 —, continue to reach actual Cubans, but staying obediently within the lines of the two forbidden P's.

Let’s Talk About Publishing Like It’s 2025, Not 1925

So, what does this mean for writers? For cultural production? For those of us whose work never fit neatly into either the state-approved literary sphere or the NGO-funded-hall-of-infinite-mirrors media machine?

I'm done waiting for an old-school publishing house to decide that my novel — a queer story set in Cuba with a lot of vulgaridad, full of the kind of people that never make it into canonical Cuban narratives — is worthy of its approval. The recent media crisis only reinforces what was already obvious: if we want to tell our stories, we need to control the means of production.

This is why I've been toying with the idea of a cooperative publishing model, something that moves beyond dependence on foreign grants, government subsidies, or one wealthy benefactor's good mood. Something built for people like me — people like us — who are tired of the same three options:

• Get published by a state-run press and toe the ideological line.

• Find a foreign publisher and become an exotic case study.

• Publish with a Cuban independent press — which boils down to self-publishing: pray someone finds you in the algorithmic abyss.

What if there was another way? Something built from the ground up, by us and for us?

I’m Not Announcing Anything —Yet

This isn't a manifesto (not today, at least). It's an open conversation. Because if journalism is having its funding pulled, literature has been in a financial coma for years. And if we don't start rethinking the structures that determine who gets heard, who gets published, and who gets paid, then we'll just be playing the same game under different names.

So let’s talk:

• What alternative funding models could actually work for Cuban and Latin American media?

• Could literature adopt similar survival tactics, or is the publishing world too entrenched in its own bullshit?

• What happens when “independent” becomes an impossible category? Where do we go from here?

Drop your thoughts. Argue with me. Tell me I’m wrong. Let’s not let this conversation get buried along with everything else.

But this isn’t just about one island — it’s about prying open the seams of national and academic silos and seeing what spills out, mutates, and reshapes the landscape. Like Desliz, the international experimental magazine I co-created in the early 2000s, this space doesn’t ask for permission. My work is transdisciplinary because categories put me to sleep. I move through literature, media, history, and social critique, all filtered through the complexities of my own existence — a queer person, a mother, an educator, and someone who has spent a lifetime slipping through institutional cracks, questioning every imposed identity, and hacking the systems meant to keep us in line. I’m here to build communities that challenge, sharpen, and unsettle — pushing past lazy labels, rewriting identities as we go, and ensuring no conversation gets too comfortable.

What You’ll Get Here

• Cultural criticism with teeth. No lukewarm takes — expect sharp, irreverent analysis of Latin American literature, Cuban media, transnational politics, and the messy ways language shapes power. And because boundaries are made to be crossed, expect detours into global intersections that refuse to sit still.

• Personal meets political. Because in a world like this, the two are never separate. Whether it’s reflections on identity, exile, queerness, or the strange mechanics of power, I’ll be writing from lived experience — mine and others’.

• Stories that don’t behave. Fiction, translation, and odd literary artifacts that refuse to fit neatly into any one form.

• Unfiltered conversations. Interviews, guest pieces, reflections on independent publishing, creative resistance, and whatever else are shaking up the cultural landscape. Paid subscribers get the deep cuts — the raw, behind-the-scenes takes you won’t find anywhere else.

  

  Subscribe now

  

How Often?

I’ll post at least once a week — sometimes more if the world is particularly chaotic (which, let’s be real, is often). Paying subscribers will get access to additional content, including deep-dive essays, insider insights, and the chance to suggest what I write about next. Think of it as a contemporary Tertulia without the inherited wealthy house and with far more urgent debates.

Why Subscribe?

Because independent voices can’t run on vibes alone, if you’re here for sharp, unfiltered, deeply-researched writing with a spine, subscribing is the best way to keep it going. Free subscribers get regular posts, but paid subscribers get the real backstage pass: exclusive interviews with writers, artists, and thinkers, behind-the-scenes perspectives from my creative and research process, live Q&As, and whatever else unfolds along the way.

• Subscribe for free to stay connected.

• Go paid to support independent writing and get more in-depth work.

• Share this with someone who needs a little more critical thinking in their life.

Let’s make this a space for thinking beyond binaries, questioning everything, and -most importantly- writing without permission.

Subscribe now

Launching soon! Subscribe now so you don’t miss the first post. (Because independent voices don’t run on vibes alone.)

Subscribe now