Author: Dariela Aquique

Many tribal religions celebrate a birth with mourning and death with song. They believe that human beings are born to struggle and find it sad. When they die, they believe that their souls rest and rise to another dimension, so they celebrate.

When I began writing my first post about the ways in which Cubans emigrate, I knew from the start that I was dealing with one of those issues that cannot be encompassed in a single commentary. This is why I planned a three-post piece on the subject. I am going to begin today by telling you a story about an incident I know about first-hand.

Women are taking a lead role in the Latin American political scene and they have come with proposals to reduce social inequality to a maximum and to bring about the political, economic and social integration of the L.A. region and the Caribbean.

In the post titled How Cubans Emigrate, I promised readers I would continue to discuss the migratory issue. Here, I will take an incident that made headlines around the world less than two months ago as my point of departure. I am referring to two accidents that caused many deaths near the Italian coastline.

The performance arts will always be a living reflection of the society that produces them at a given point in history. Their characters are an illustration of the way people are, think and behave. Contemporary comedy programs portray our society as it is today.

On the morning of Tuesday, October 16, 2012, Cuba’s radio and television news programs, printed and online newspapers and the regular edition of the Official Gazette of the Republic announced that the government had decreed the modification of the island’s migratory legislation.

It was the month of September of 1993. Cubans faced one of the darkest chapters of the country’s political, economic and social history. The Berlin Wall had fallen and Cuba’s economic crisis (the “Special Period”) was at its most severe: the US blockade was being intensified, the economy was being dollarized and people were leaving the country on rafts and en masse.

Faced with the more common or urgent questions of the population in Cuba, the authorities – or the officials responsible for this or that area – rely on a ready-made formula to answer. They say: “the problem is being studied” or “we’re looking into it.”

As in all totalitarian regimes, all political parties, groups of activists and any organization that gathered individuals with dissenting ideologies, philosophies or thoughts were abolished in Cuba shortly after the island’s current leadership took power.