By Axel Saenz
HAVANA TIMES – For my age I have had a pretty substantial history with cat raising; this got me wondering about why I love cats so much? I haven’t found the answer yet, but if you find it when you see your furry friend let me know so I can get to know you.
I think I’ve liked cats ever since I used to watch the Tom and Jerry conflicts on Cuban television programming. I’m talking about the original 1950’s series, which had a pilot episode called Puss gets the boot, an episode I recently saw on the internet.
Back to the subject of the cats I have raised, my first cat was named Mican, I think his name came from a cartoon series, but I can’t remember the name of it. What I can remember is that it is was about anthropomorphic animals.
Mican was a black cat, part of the pet litter of a family friend who decided to give us one of the kittens. I have loved that cat ever since and I think it is thanks to Mican that I have so much love for all-black cats. I seem to remember that Mican had some white hairs in his armpits, but to me he was totally black.
It was very hard for me when I had to leave Cuba and leave my firstborn in the country. In the end we left him at the house of the person who gave us Mican. In 2012, I went to Cuba for a visit and I remember we went to visit him but Mican was no longer in that house.
In Nicaragua, in 2009 or 2010 I had two other cats, their names were Black and Gray, I think it is very obvious the inspiration for those names, although Black was not completely black, he had white on the lower part, from the chest to the stomach, with a pair of paws painted white.
Black was a gentle cat, very well behaved; while Grey, his brother, was calm, but liked to tease Black a lot.
After Black and Gray came Black the second. At that time I was not original with names at all.
It wasn’t until I got my fifth cat, that I started to focus more on parenting. My fifth cat was a female, I got her in February 2018. At that time, we were also adopting a dog around 5 or 6 months old that we named Kypros. That dog who for such a young age was already a giant who never grew in his mental age.
When I had Taiga she was the spoiled of the house, she was a very small kitten, the smallest I had had the opportunity to
