By Sara Más
Magdalena Benítez does not know when her marriage moved from sweet love to bitterness. It was "hell" in the last five years, she said. Benítez is a university graduate living in Havana. "It was really difficult for me to make the decision to divorce and start all over again", she added. "You get used to everything. One good day you realize that being shouted at or ignored means absolutely the same thing to you," she stressed. Hers is a common, apparently normal story. She fell passionately in love at 25, married at 28, and had her first son at 29 and the second one at 31. "I initially thought my mother-in-law was causing all our conflicts. She always wanted to give her opinion and decide on our lives. But we later moved out and began living alone (my husband, my children and me, and the situation did not get better, but worse", she told WNS. After her eight-hour shift at a shop, she got back home to bathe the children, help them do their homework, prepare dinner and snack and uniforms for the next day, arrange and clean the house, and wash the dishes before going to bed. "My husband always came back home very late at night because of his work. He gradually feigned ignorance of everything in the house, including myself, I believe. I realized we never talked to each other. I became invisible to him. That is the way I felt", she commented. "He never hit me or yelled at me. Disdain, silence and ignorance sometimes affect you more. We stopped speaking the same language", she recalled.

By Ilse Bulit
Following a tradition in the last 50 years, cold fronts threaten to hit Cuba in December, but they do not actually get here. Scientists had warned about climate change and old people in the island had anticipated such an event a long time ago. The first half of the 20th century had been marked by low temperatures in the winter, which made people use sweaters, coats and even newspapers to cover their backs if they were very poor, and give children cod-liver oil to prevent colds. As to drinks, some used to have steaming chocolate in porcelain cups, some others drank boiling linden or camomile tea in tin jugs, and most of them had hot coffee at night, although it shooed sleep away. Children went to school wearing newly bought uniforms or ragged clothes, but they all visited the seawall drive hoping to be bathed by the strong waves crashing against it.