Stories by Alina Garcia

A loud boom echoes behind you and you feel something sting you somewhere. You’re running, and with each step you take you begin to localize the pain to a specific point on your body — y ou’ve just been shot in the back. You feel the warm blood pooling on the front of your shirt. Suddenly, another searing hot pain engulfs the right side of your head. You touch it, and there’s more blood dripping from the wound. You hear a friend yell “They got his head!” and you realize that you’ve now been shot a second time. You turn around, and in one blink he drops dead right behind you. You run off pure adrenaline towards thick brush and launch yourself into it for cover. You close your eyes and wait for death, but it never comes. Instead, a vision of Nuestra Se ñ ora de la Caridad del Cobre (Our Lady of Charity) flashes through your scattered mind. This is how Antonio Garcia, member of the Cuban resistance against communism, recounts the events that landed him in jail. Opponents to Fulgencio Batis...

Ten years after Fidel Castro had been sworn in as Prime Minister of Cuba, Maria Zamora received her summons in the mail calling her to work on a Cuban farm or face arrest. Having just married her husband, the late Ramon Zamora, she began to devise a plan with him to not only escape manual labor, but also to flee the country. Ramon, a political dissenter, received an identical summons, but for a farm more than 2 hours away with no guaranteed form of transportation. The only way to get to their mandated labor farms was to hope for the goodwill of passerbys that had horses or cars, as Cuba had no centralized form of public transportation. The immense distance of Ramon’s farm meant that the couple would only see each other once every two weeks. Maria and Ramon considered themselves lucky, however, as they watched friends and family who opposed communism get arrested, jailed, and executed. It wasn’t unusual for Maria’s co-laborers to go missing from their positions during the day for her to...

Kearny ➡️ Jersey City         There’s nothing you can’t find in Jersey City. In terms of amenities it offers nail salons, hair salons, bodegas, delis, hospitals, doctors, shoe repair shops, tailors, botanicas , temples and churches for several religions, and more, all within a 10-minute walk of each other. There are financial offices, banking offices, industrial plants, power plants, car manufacturing plants, landfills, waste disposal plants, and more. The city is a well-woven tapestry of a variety of ethnic backgrounds, financial backgrounds, cultures, and customs. It also belongs to the New York Metropolitan area which puts it in the center of the action of one of the largest and densest cities in the world. Within the city are luxury apartment buildings as well as Section 8 housing and rooms for rent within larger units. People in Jersey City either live in abject poverty or in apartments equivalent to luxury units found in the tallest New York...

Is the Age of the Internet Pushing Us Toward an Orwellian Future? “ If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” reads the title of the National Security Agency’s website over a patriotic image of the waving American flag, reminiscent of the landmark phrase “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself” from George Orwell’s 1984 . The NSA’s seemingly reassuring phrase alludes to a much darker concept of an age where more bills are being approved that allow unrestricted surveillance of Americans, like the Patriot Act. The internet is one of the most widely used forms of social communication in the modern world, and society has reached a point where it cannot function without it. Because of its immense user base (3.2 billion people according to Wikipedia), it is also the easiest place to harvest people’s data and monitor their activity. 1984 by George Orwell is a roadmap to understanding the worst possible scenario that could happen to society if the i...

Deacon William “Bill” Benedetto, former Director of Religious Education at Queen of Peace, is a lifelong resident of North Arlington residing in the same home that his grandfather built here in 1925. Throughout his tenure with Queen of Peace, he has worked as a dedicated teacher of CCD (Religious Education Classes) and as a deacon. After attending Queen of Peace Grammar School, he went on to graduate from North Arlington High School where he met his wife, beloved Queen of Peace Grammar School teacher, Mrs. Lorraine Benedetto. His personal history gives hope to those wavering in their faith. As a matter of fact, his faith is what helped him cope with the passing of his daughter Annemarie, and what inspired his son Reverend William Benedetto to pursue his own vocation as a priest. Deacon Bill felt the call to the priesthood early on in his childhood, writing about his desire to be ordained in grammar school. Later in his life, he experienced a time where he felt alienated from the church...

Anyone that has used a restroom throughout the Rutgers University Newark campus has seen the collage of posters that hang within the stalls. A bathroom stall carries with it a connotation of undisturbable privacy, something that victims of abusive relationships often never have. The posters advocate for places where abused women, assaulted women, and harassed women can find resources to help them with what trauma they might have experienced prior to entering that sanctuary-like stall. People like Maribel Lorenzo never had access to those kinds of resources while they underwent their abuse. Their partners isolated them from friends, family and anyone that could threaten to undermine their power over their victim. There was no safe way to escape. “He was my high school sweetheart. I didn’t actually realize what was happening until much later,” says Maribel about her ex. Many people don’t realize that they’re in an abusive relationship to begin with. They often attribute their continued ...