Author: Dimitri Prieto-Samsonov

The non-government Cuban art project OMNI-Zona Franca has issued a call for solidary assistance. The group has circulated an email asking for participation, grass roots assistance, financial support and friendship for the holding of this year’s Festival Poesia Sin Fin (Endless poetry festival).

“USSR: four letters, four lies,” said Cornelius Castoriadis. This year Russia was deprived of a word that was also a part of its revolutionary heritage, and most certainly a lie. The Russian “Militia” was renamed in accordance to what it has been all along: “The police.”

A solution occurred to me concerning the abundance of a certain spirituality that’s dealt us in industrial quantities in the form of reggaeton.

With the new openness to the private businesses in Cuba, I have observed an economic phenomenon that I don’t understand. Theoretically, by increasing the supply of goods and services to a fixed demand, the prices should go down.

Some chemical-nanotechnology scientists succeeded in producing a molecule that “walks,” according to what I read recently in a BBC news report.

The Latin Recording Academy in the USA elected Shakira as the most significant figure in the music industry in 2011. I couldn’t help thinking back to the early songs of that daughter of a country at war.

He suggested making a critique of capitalism and modernity beyond the classical propositions of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. He included in his analysis a decided questioning of the so-called “real socialism,” bitterly re-interpreting the abbreviation “USSR” as “four letters, four lies.”

Cuban television has several talk shows, with these ranging in quality. One of them is “Dialogo Abierto” (Open Dialogue), which this week dealt with the evocative theme of “Abakua Ethics.”

Cubans are a very aesthetically oriented people. “Cute child”/“ugly child” is the basic dichotomy and the starting point for the “values” instilled in the majority of Cuban children. At least that’s the case in the urbanized western part of the island.

When people find out that I have a dual ethnic identity, that I share Russian and Cuban origins, and that I had a childhood and adolescence that were also shared between the two countries, they often ask, “What language do you think in?”