By Eduardo N. Cordovi Hernandez
HAVANA TIMES – As I have mentioned on a previous page of my Diary, like almost everyone, I am fortunate to have a selection of friends, childhood buddies who live in the closest geography of the neighborhood. We often gather regularly, just like going to church to receive “our daily bread.”
Yes, literally, going to the bakery to get the only bread roll received through a bureaucratic procedure, legally speaking and not pejoratively, because the matter is to leave a documentary record of the receipt to the consumer through the well-known Libreta de Abastecimientos (ration booklet) and of the sale, recorded in a control book known as “Torpedo,” a somewhat warlike name whose origin would be worth investigating philologically, linguistically, or anthropologically, because folkloric it does not seem.
The point is that we gather anywhere, like a traveling church, as if it were a nomadic Club. If two of us happen to meet during the “bread route,” as I said, we sit on the short steps of the pharmacy, and there the group forms. The term “steps” is a loving hyperbole because there are only three steps that bridge the height from the sidewalk to the portal that precedes the counter, a place where long ago – that time for me is at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, when I was leaving the innocence of childhood and preparing to become a teenager – they sold many things that were not medicines.
We bought them without prescriptions, without standing in line, and without being expensive: we bought fruit salts to make soft drinks, crystallized menthol to flavor cigarettes, inks of various colors to write with fountain pens. When I was in the sixth grade,