I don’t think of myself as being one of those people who want to live detached from their feelings. Rather, I think that the passion for the game of baseball is encoded in human DNA and is a healthy self-cure for homesickness.
Every day I’m more and more surprised by the dilemma posed by the various approaches to product distribution in Cuba. The rationing book refuses to disappear since no alternative has yet been developed to protect those who are the most disadvantaged.
When the markets in my neighborhood are running short on calabazas (squash) — those long and heavy Cuban calabazas that are reddish-yellow on the inside — I can’t help but remember an old conga song (or was it rumba?) sung by the Afro-Havanans of the late nineteenth century.
In solidarity with the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement that tries to recover this international day of workers struggles for the United States, I declare myself on strike for May Day.
“Let’s screw, my love, let’s screw right now // because we were born to screw…” These are lines that appeared in the magazine Union, the journal of the Union of Artists and Writers of Cuba. These words are from the voice of the Pietro Aretino, a poet that date backs to the Italian Renaissance.
In his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, the famous Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker comes up with the somewhat curious conjecture that countries having McDonald’s fast-food restaurants have very little likelihood of going to war against each other.
One custom of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) organizations is to maintain neighborhood bulletin boards. Usually not a whole lot of attention is paid to these, though occasionally they’re used to communicate important messages.
It is symptomatic that reggaeton — the “babylonized” son of reggae — has displaced its paternal rhythm in the media. In addition, confusion has been created about the identity of those two different musical styles.
According to anthropologists, “rites of passage” are those special moments in the lives of human beings when a man or woman undergoes a change in their social status (religious, legal, institutional…).
These books constitute true and amicable contributions to thought in a country where it’s still taboo in certain places to talk about racial identity, inequality or question some intellectuals and leaders of the past and present.