I open X (formerly Twitter) the way one steps into a Roman coliseum—looking for blood. It is the perfect arena in which to insult one’s neighbor, the one you will hate as much as yourself. X knows my obsessions: Real Madrid, Shih Tzus, and a good meal. It also knows—though I’ve never marked it as an interest—that I sometimes linger over posts about Cuba.
“Have dinner at a restaurant in your own neighborhood tonight. Order the sauce you’ve never tasted.
Have a cold beer at four in the afternoon in an empty bar.
Go somewhere you’ve never been.
Listen to a stranger who has nothing in common with you. Order a steak medium‑rare. Try an oyster (...)”
No matter how deep I drive the pick or how much earth I haul away, I will not unearth the remnants of an ancient civilization. This is Cuba—a place where ruins were buried alive and left to rot under the sun. What lies beneath are merely the remnants of Havana as it stood half a century ago. There is nothing noble to find.
Only a few weeks ago, the young actress Lili Reinhart—also an advocate for mental health—launched her own skincare line, Personal Day. The brand is specifically formulated for sensitive, acne‑prone skin. Her products are empathetic by design: vegan, cruelty‑free, and consciously gentle.
He likes what he sees. He thinks of the fabulous day ahead, but before stepping out he grows serious. At his level, you don’t have too many friends. Oliver is an Austrian jewelry designer—and that detail matters. When you step outside here, you tread on two millennia of cultural wealth. Under the Habsburgs, in the 18th century, this city counted citizens like Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven. In the 19th, Strauss II. In the 20th, Gustav Klimt. Enough to drive anyone mad. And for the mad: Sigmund Freud.
I don’t know what some creatives have rattling around in their heads. AGL—Attilio Giusti Leombrini—is an Italian luxury brand. They make shoes and handbags, all handcrafted. They’ve been doing it since 1958. They’re as old as the Cuban Revolution. Which also has a shoe stuck on its head. AGL blends old‑school leatherwork with contemporary design. The company is now run by three sisters. Third generation. Probably with an iron fist. Sara, Vera, and Marianna—the kind of women nobody dares to contradict, nobody dares to hold eye contact with
When I was a kid, I was dead sure that anything coming from the so‑called first world—cold fronts first and foremost—had to be good and pretty. Those Nácar soaps, which were anything but nacreous, were handed out along with sugar and oil without wrappers, just as the God of Central Planning had brought them into the world. That filthy little pleasure of tearing off a wrapper was denied to us until they started bringing them in from the Socialist Bloc—cold as well, but not first world.
There are advertisements seemingly conceived to strike at our deepest longings while at the same time mocking the sentinels of political correctness. Some are more daring than others, like this one, which promotes a steakhouse and cocktail bar. At first glance, it appears thoroughly elegant: against a black background advance a cocktail (a Love Potion 209, perhaps, or an Aviation), some frosted‑magenta blooms, and a rather brazen copy of the Venus de Milo. The composition invites the promise of refined sensory experiences.
In the early years of the eighties, while I was slogging through junior high, two ravishing Hungarians crossed my path. Katalina Soós shot past at such speed that I could only glimpse her contours through a pocket telescope. The other, Szonja Török, struck me with the same force with which the Tunguska meteorite flattened the remote Siberian taiga. Hungarians were something else entirely. You could tell by their avant‑garde hairstyles, by the freedom and self‑assurance with which they moved.
