Author: Erasmo Calzadilla

In 1959, the same year as the Cuban revolution, Soviet scientists began implementing a project to tame silver foxes on a farm in the ill-famed region of Siberia. From among the initial population they bred the meekest animals, repeating this procedure with each subsequent generation.

Military service in Cuba is mandatory – unless you’re gay, crazy or have enough money to pay off a corrupt official to get you out of it. I don’t know anybody who has ever voluntarily gone to sign up at the recruitment office.

I’ve expressed my doubts on other occasions about the legitimacy of the process that in 1976 led the people of Cuba to approve what is now our current constitution.

He is determined to “expose us,” attempting to make us out to be cyber-dissidents, anarcho-capitalists, cyber-mercenaries, friends or subordinates of the US Interests Office in Cuba, on the payroll of a foreign power, and/or collaborators with the “ideologists of subversion,” etc., etc.

I got myself into a big mess with the students at the faculty of Nuclear Sciences the day I explained to them that the paradoxes of reason were not resolved.

A few days ago I was surprised when hearing the demands of student leaders in Chile. One of them summarized their objective before the cameras saying, “We want the government to take over education.”

Who are the bad guys? In other words, who is it that is impeding democracy and workers empowerment for which the Cuban people struggled even prior to 1959? Who are the ones who implanted and sustain Stalinism?

A group of us have been going to state-run farmers’ markets in the relatively upscale Vedado neighborhood to buy cheaper food, since otherwise our money just doesn’t stretch.

From my point of view, the key word that identifies the left (at least one of them) is “participation,” not passive but active, in creating their own living conditions and we can break down participation into its economic and political components.

If they’re struggling for life then what makes rationale sense is that they take care of it. Other methods of struggle exist, such rash alliances with death are not indispensable.