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.

A couple of days ago, while browsing the digital edition of the Financial Times, I read that on November 16th a dinosaur is going up for auction. The event will take place at the Château de Dampierre-en-Yvelines, in the Île‑de‑France region, between four and six in the afternoon—right in the middle of afternoon tea. Curiously, its value is estimated between four and six million dollars.

Each year, around October 12, debates resurface across Latin America over the day’s legitimacy. In Spain it is both National Day and Día de la Hispanidad; in countries such as Mexico and Argentina it is marked as Día de la Raza, often with a focus that rejects Spanish roots and exalts Indigenous heritage. In the United States it is Columbus Day. Criticism of the evangelization of the Americas grew after World War II, when newly independent former colonies began to rewrite their histories.