Café Catedral is a cute place in my city. Quite expensive but nice and very well located. Nobody would expect that a science fiction author would write a short story about the end of the world in, and based on, Café Catedral. Right? Nope, wrong.
The story is called "74 Days". I was the author. It won an award. It named my second finished book. I wanted to write a story based in my city, with the kind of characters I see everyday; a very cuban tale that talk about my people and myself.
You see, there are a lot of Sci-Fi authors in Cuba, but the majority live in Havana, the capital city. So, for a lot of people, there is not Sci-Fi in Santiago. We're trying to change that perception.
Projects like Quinta Dimension, succesfull events like the VII Congreso de Ciencia Ficción y Literatura Fantástica del Caribe (an international space for caribbean Sci-Fi and fantastic literature) are great for us.
74 Days is about a random group of people facing apocalypse like a normal thing and having some coffee to deal with the crazyness of life. It happens in a very known place of Santiago, menctioning our streets and our institutions. And, of course, it talks about how we cubans only feel ready to face the hardest scenarios if we have a nice, very dark and concentrated cup of coffee. Or three.
Everyday I go to the Café Catedral and think about how the "end of the world" taste like coffee.
