Author: Alfredo Fernandez

Here in Cuba, the un-signed message is the surest way to report misappropriated resources, to identify beneficiaries or to blow the whistle on horrifying manipulations of financing.

An unprecedented event has taken place in Egypt. The dictator Hosni Mubarak has just been expelled from power by a people who in gaining their freedom used an unusual weapon: Twitter.

My father and a friend’s mother named Daysi, like many people in Cuba, have not had access to other non-state information sources for years. It is to the point that when they hear a rumor about some event outside or inside the country, if it isn’t confirmed to them by the government, they’ll never accept it as the truth.

I don’t know of another “animal exhibitor” in Cuba except for the man in the photo, the sole person who does this work listed by the Ministry of Labor as one of the 178 types of jobs for which self-employment is now permitted.

Ivette Cepeda’s voice returned us suddenly to some Havana night in the 1950s, when this was a city teeming with excellent singers and there were as many cabarets as in New York or Paris – without exaggerating.

Her house shoes are under the bed close by her feet, so if she has to go to the bathroom during the night she won’t have to step on the cold floor, since that’s bad for her health. The “bed,” though a bit hard, is at least a “bed.”

No, it’s not what all of you are thinking. What you’re reading above is the English translation of the title of an article by journalist Onnis Tur Pompa in the on-line bulletin of the Conference of Cuban Catholic Bishops.

The news about the laying of an underwater fiber optic cable that will reach our island from Venezuela should be a reason for joy, but seems to be irrelevant because everyone feels skeptical about the real possibility of eventually having open access to the Internet.

The forum consists of a roundtable with several guest specialists to discuss a theme that is determined at the beginning of the year. On this occasion the discussion was devoted to “school textbooks.”

Our national historiography has invariably hidden from us the possible sexual orientations of valiant revolutionaries. It’s as if they wanted to convince us with silence that being a homosexual during the Republic was something exclusive to “corrupt politicians.”