The first week of September 1989 was far from the image I had of what would be the college. The contrast could not be established at the Faculty of Journalism at the University of Havana where, in spite of the stately rooms and the marble staircase, the rooms were not very different from those of the pre. What was different and hopeless the fourteenth floor room of the dormitory where we placed Mario Escalona. Months earlier, after the admission process, my friend Frank and I had admired the buildings at Pier 12 street corner where we would play live part of the experience of Havana. From the outside we had similar amazing. The two towers that stood near the end of Vedado represented a radical change in aesthetics if we compared with IPVCE shelters.
But if the excitement and anticipation were remarkable in that August day, a month later turned into disappointment and uncertainty. The biggest surprise was not the room door to find no one assigned, but the beds without mattresses. I imagine that in 89 of the UH enrollment exceeded the limits of a residence as 12 and Pier and maybe that's why we lived in an area that never had bunk beds and lockers.
Colleagues called her "the highway" because all passed by. They arrived early and took over the little available. When we came the turn of Frank and me, only two tables were free of bagasse board. They slept that night because of tiredness having spent the earlier traveling the real highway, national, and morning and afternoon in the hustle own tuition.
barely remember the initial classes, luckily introductory or what is, irrelevant. Our first lesson we had been in Havana and perhaps unconsciously understood to be organized if in the end we wanted to conquer the city or at least become less bleak. Meanwhile ago needed a break and all the air blowing in the capital, whether down by 23 heading to the ramp or along the Malecon, was not sufficient.
Before spending the morning getting acquainted with the house of G, then we prefer to Terminal Railway and ensure the return ticket. I confess that at one time thought of abandoning everything. My beginning students have always been difficult and in those days preparatory in the ability to withstand tests its limits, the abandonment is a recurring theme. After a night without a mattress, with all the clothes in the suitcases, we had no where to put them, the prospect of spending a year in such conditions were not very flattering we say. More unfortunately
-yes, I think was the word some-afternoon when we returned to the room we discovered that we had won the stage. And so, adding fees to discouragement, Frank and I ended up scattered around Havana to the stark reality of having to sleep on the floor. He ended up in a family house in Marianao, I, in my aunt's house in Vedado, the apartment only a quarter that seemed huge in my childhood holidays, and at that 1989 would accommodate seven people.
colleagues do not remember if the 1st year of Journalism have similar experiences. Still in the early days of course presentations were not as spontaneous as to each other we will relate "intimate." However, it may not be just chance, but also the context that prevented closer. I assumed that those who articulated their coherent speeches about why they decided to be journalists slept in comfortable beds.
With the certainty that it was Thursday and Friday night would travel back home, the third day of that beginning was more bearable. A startup claims made us forget all scheduled classes and we showed up at the office of director Pier 12 and that you willing to find a solution to our plight and above all, to give us beds paths.
Perhaps the speed with which we changed the status of Palestinian residents of a fourth official should not surprise us. Until that time knew no other reality other than the Cuban and were used to their sometimes disappointing failures. So it was quite possible, as indeed happened, that while some rooms such as the aforementioned freeway were packed with students, others waited patiently for new tenants.
Thanks to the immediate management director Moving from the fourteenth floor of a building to nineteen other. The differences between the two were abysmal. The international experience it would provide three fellows from Republic of Congo who would share the new room. Compared to the previous stay, the 19 looked splendid, with more or less fresh traces of the true comfort that the building must exhibit in Havana 50.
However, sleeping in the new berths had to wait another week. Even without the anguish of having to seek shelter, we had decided to return to the province for perhaps a final protection and provisioning of cariño.La first stay in the capital was tiring, but at that September was difficult to predict the number of events that still occur in our little island and the world in 1989 would be added fatigue.
Difficulties abound in this course 89-90, with all the blows that the story gave him the so-called real socialism. Complexes also resulted in the following periods formed a more euphemistically called special. When I graduated in 94 my friend Frank was no longer possible to share the tribulations that we had reserved the working life, an absurd incident ended his life in early 1993 also terrible.
Much later, in conversation with a Colombian friend agree on what my countrymen often used the phrase "and not" easy "to refer to the thousand and one situations of everyday life on the island. We were again in the initial phase of a time, the twenty-first century and in Havana, life remained difficult for a large majority.
by chance my friend was staying in a newly restored building into a hotel for journalists a few steps from my old university faculty. For almost a decade that did not go so near the historic house and the memory of my first year there, my thoughts traveled all night. It was not easy to start here, I thought. Luckily the friends I made in those semesters addressed to make the stay less harsh and some the most endearing, became complicity in a simple, everyday act. That, among other things, life was 20 years ago.
