On occasion adherents of the Yoruba religion make offerings to the Orishas: deities of African origin. Each deity is related to some element or force of nature, which is why the Yoruba religion is often celebrated as a medium for communion with the environment, with those entities for which modernity, in its ascent, has lost respect.
Stalinist Cubans are the applied and persevering artisans of a possible capitalist transition within OUR country. Socialism doesn’t need smokescreens. The only way to confront precipices is to uncover them. To look into the abyss and see the abyss looking back, as Nietzsche once said. Only the brave – socialist or not – extend their eyes into the abyss.
Stalin is defended by loads of Cubans nostalgic for the Soviet era, and those who love the rattle of weapons. These are Cubans whose minds did not transcend the events of 1985-1991 in the USSR. They are people who have no compassion for the millions of dead, because for them political power is justified in itself by its own existence.
Cuban television has featured reports from Poland by journalist Julio Acanda in homage to the 70th anniversary of the fateful date of September 1, 1939 – which marked the German invasion of that country and the outbreak of World War II.
Desiderio Navarro is a legend. I’m not sure how many languages Desiderio speaks, but they’re quite a few. He’s translated Russian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, French…15 different languages in all-making him probably one of the most competent and industrious translators in Cuba.
The majority of us Cubans work for state-owned companies or institutions and, beginning in the 1960s, the workers have received net salaries. We never see the taxes deducted by the state and so technically, in the legal sense, we are not taxed.
The questions posed were these: Is the State the only entity in society that produces law? Or can there be others? Can there be several effective bodies of law in a society? And how do we know which law should be applied in each case?
As for Cuba, much was said about how the Municipal Assemblies depend upon their superior instances for the realization of local projects, since – despite new possibilities – municipalities in Cuba still don’t enjoy real autonomy.
It made me ask myself how is it that in one case we have a genuine movement towards the elimination of the massive use of plastic bags while in the other case the environmental issue only comes up as a comedic device.
Celia said she was a “Trotskera,” coming from “rockera“, meaning a female who is a rock-music fan, not a Trotskyist. In fact, I met her at the Havana Book Fair in one of those stalls of Trotskyist publishers that I wrote about in a previous Havana Times article.