Another generation

Graffiti in central Havana

W is 16 and is always on G Street. I like talking to him because he floods me with a feeling of CHANGE that I don’t find in any other place in this territory. He doesn't make me remember when I was 16 like him, nor does he seem like any of my friends from that time, in him there is something we didn’t have: conscience.

I know the word sounds a little “Che-like,” but there isn’t another to define a boy so young who is already thinking about what he wants to do with his life, and fighting to achieve it. He doesn’t want to leave the country, and he fearlessly plays the songs of Los Aldeanos, Porno Para Ricardo and La Babosa Azul in little groups in the park. He has very interesting political ideas and says things that make me delirious when I think that I’m almost twice his age. W has come to three conclusions:

- He doesn’t want to leave the country: “Let them go, some old men,” he says not knowing that a few decades before almost the same words were said in an interview by Dulce María Loynaz: “Let them go, those who came later.”
- He reads everything they give you on G, pamphlets, discs, books. He says that that to be able to know what exists in the power you have to read everything. The other day he scolded me because I said I wouldn’t read Fidel’s “History will absolve me,” even if you paid me.
- He’s convinced, along with all of his friends, that this doesn’t have even one breath left, and that you “can push the wall.”