Perhaps prompted by a timely confession—or by something closer to a revelation tinged with the paranormal—a journalist from El Español published today an article suggesting that sharing every moment is no longer the axis of the digital experience. It reads as if announcing a trend I cannot find anywhere. Perhaps it is simply that my generation, the people I follow and who follow me, are no longer inclined to chase trends.
American fashion designer Willy Chavarría, in collaboration with Adidas Originals, introduced the Oaxaca Slip-On, a black-molded, open-toe shoe whose aesthetic directly recalls the huaraches of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag, Oaxaca. The controversy erupted when it came to light that the shoe was being manufactured in China, and that the communities responsible for the craft had neither been consulted nor acknowledged in the creative process.
In the cloistered hush of an archive room, where light is meted out so as not to wound the paper, a witness from another world surfaces once more: a sheet written and signed by Hernán Cortés on February 20, 1527. Five centuries have passed since the ink was still wet; more than thirty years since it was wrenched from the collection safeguarded by Mexico’s National Archives and disappeared without a trace.
A staggering percentage of its so‑called informative content is either false or, at best, inaccurate. Today I stumble upon a post about the alleged auction—at Christie’s—of an AI‑generated work. I read and save. The note focuses more on the controversy it sparked than on the sale itself, perhaps because uproar, confrontation, and intellectual skirmishes attract far more attention than the artworks themselves.
As my enthusiasm for Artificial Intelligence grows, so does the range of readings I pursue on its likely paths and its influence on human reasoning. It is a dense undertaking: every day the media returns to the subject, and those articles, as they pile up, age with unsettling speed. AI keeps redefining itself. Yet to stop speaking about it is unthinkable.
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.
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.
