Author: Erasmo Calzadilla

There are thousands of them disbursed throughout all the schools throughout the entire country. They don’t wear uniforms but they have uniform brains.

I believe the gist of the matter revolves around the capacity of such substances to alter one’s consciousness, and in this way too they can serve to change the social order and the structures of power.

We had spent a semester dreaming about the trip and squirreling away the all-important pesos. The plan was to climb one of the mountains in Guantanamo Province and to then go hiking along a river heading toward the country’s “first city.”

On the little screen today, they showed scenes of the Chilean student uprising at its height. Am I being the victim of another spell cast by the media? Possibly, but what I saw fascinated me.

The author of those provocative words against the educational dictatorship and elitism in sports was no other than Muammar al-Gaddafi, and those quotes were taken from his sacrosanct The Green Book.

Reading the “masterpiece” of someone very much talked about these days, I found some evocative passages on education and sports that I liked and wanted to share.

Yes. There’s racism in Cuba. Blacks and mestizos are the majority in the jails, but the minority in the country’s best schools. Much has changed since 1959, but the differences subsist – there’s no doubt.

It took Ted — a “yuma” (an American) — to tell me about a project that has been underway for more than a year at the University of Matanzas. Last night, when I had only two wake neurons left, with both nodding off, I opened an e-mail from some of the students in the “city of bridges” that shook me back awake for the short time that remained until dawn.

At the beginning of this decade, there appeared in my non-touristic neighborhood a couple of soiled, long-haired guys from Catalonia without a coin in their pockets but with a lot of glimmer in their eyes.

Why is it that the people of Cuba don’t generally fight for their rights? I’ve asked myself this question a million times and it looks like I’ll be asking it a million times more before anything changes.