Tales from the Maze of the Mind

This book of stories is the result of many yearsdecadesof experiences of a man not being brought into this world to become a leader or a follower, who hence decided to observe and transfer his views and feelings to whoever is interested in the maze of the human mind. This work does not attempt to comprise an entire life of collected information, just a few glimpses. A solitary boy from a Caribbean island, offspring of a third generation of western European immigrants, first saw the light in the city of Havana, Cuba, and grew up inside a turmoil of many social and political changes in the middle of the 1900s, about which, most likely, every reader has heard of or read. He went through life conceiving these tales and more to come. Some of the stories in this compilation take place around that mentioned era of ups and downs in that land andthough not politically orientedare immersed in the corresponding environment, while some others come about before and after. However, this series of tales is not limited to that place or subject. Many others may develop anywhere. Some have the harshness of an Horacio Quiroga or the mystery, anguish, and supernatural edge of an Edgar Allan Poe, combined with the wit, irony, and poetry of an Oscar Wilde and the absurd of a Franz Kafka; all this to say the least. They go from the distorted perceptions of an infant, through the mental troubles of a young adult or a parent, to the last days of the life of an elder; from the liberal thoughts of the streets to the dark philosophy of the enclosed man. The characters, manyt times simultaneously the narrators, may go from the mentally challenged, through the street-wise, to the insane intellectual. The book does not intend to cover the human spirit in its entiretytrying to do that would take a bit more than a book, but it is likely that the reader, would find a point of identification with a life gone through, or a fantasy taken place in the mind. Adventure, romance, action, and the paranormal combine in these pages, as so do happiness, sadness, and desperation.