Author: Erasmo Calzadilla

Clots of Pain for our Cuban New Year’s

In the vast majority of cases they’ve been raised in dirty, narrow pens with inappropriate feeding, suffering terrible temperatures and having been unable to play or socialize*, something they would really love.

Read More

How Many People in Cuba Are Behind Bars?

On December 19, the oficial Granma newspaper published an anonymously written article with the sensational title “Crime Increasing Among US Youth.” This article stated that a third of the young people in that country had been arrested at some time.

Read More

A Fugitive Film Festival

I became interested in this event when I started college, back in 1994. Before that I was only mildly interested because it wasn’t a major part of the cultural environment in the poorer outlying areas of town (like where I grew up).

Read More

Welcome to Cuba Reggaeton, but …

Reggaeton is not only a musical style but a whole way of life as well as a reflection of social changes occurring in this part of the world. When it made it to Cuba, I received it with open arms.

Read More

Cuba and Immoral/Unpatriotic Drugs (part II)

One of the most widely used devices for those who debate without solid arguments is lump all the varying cases into one category: those that excite as well as those that calm, the strong ones with the subtle, those that are dangerous to people’s health together with the relatively innocuous ones.

Read More

Granma and Deforestation

Every time I visit the mountains of Pinar del Rio, I run into “Mr. Deforestation.” Here I find increasingly younger trees being felled with chainsaws, along with large patches of protected-area land being ploughed under, and more and more pillagers having a field day without too many apparent difficulties.

Read More

Cuban Philosopher Alexis Against Communism

This is a continuation of an earlier post in which I criticized the response made by the philosopher Alexis Jardines to a question posed by a student at the University of Florida: “Is it true that there’s nothing salvageable from communism if we understand this word as the central idea of politics as far as life in communities…?”

Read More

You’re No Longer My Hero, Rene

That’s a joke of course; the Cuban Five were never my favorites. I felt bad to see them trapped in the teeth of that macabre machinery, as well as ad nauseam over the government’s constant public relations campaign around them.

Read More

Water and the Old Vets

The problems with drinking water in this city are nightmarish. The reservoirs are polluted, depressed, and the pipelines leak more than half of what they carry. In the neighborhood where I live, this vital resource is supplied for a only few hours every four days

Read More