Author: Erasmo Calzadilla

I was about 20 when I was called up for military service. Given my good health and a lot of naiveté, they had me serve my tour as a diver in the Navy.

Havana’s giant Copelia ice-cream parlor is like a Cuba in miniature. During the moments you spend eating ice cream there, you can find the same symptoms of deterioration in the services as those existing in any other corner of the country.

Do human beings have souls or are we made only of matter? This question has been posed for centuries, yet without finding a conclusive and definitive answer. I came up with the solution a while ago, so if you want to find out what it is, you have nothing more to do than follow the lines below.

The playful, the sexual, the emotional and the divine are dimensions forgotten by traditional pedagogy and which could be incorporated into a project an integral education.

In this city it’s not unusual to come upon empty bottles, especially those that once held alcohol. Recycling is worthwhile both for the country and the world and some change earned from collecting recyclables does no harm to my ordinarily empty pockets.

“Drugs are bad,” repeated Professor Garrison again and again, speaking mechanically to his students at school on an episode of South Park. Of course, not only did they not believe him, but they headed off as soon as they could to satisfy their curiosities, since they were sure the prof was lying.

La Mesa Redonda is a Cuba in miniature, full of superb specialists who arrange themselves carefully so as never to be off the mark; and where true discussion and plurality remain sequestrated. In short, it is a round fraud, so terribly bad that I thought I’d never run into anything similar.

Insults will rain down on me when I make public what I think about Mothers Day and everything that has to do with it.

On Election Day last Sunday, I was wrapped up in a family drama. As I didn’t sleep at home the night before, I called my mother early that morning to tell her I wasn’t going to vote. For years I had been mustering the courage to do something like this, but this was the first time I had reached the point of taking action.

Only three years prior, we were a capitalist colony when a popular revolution occurred that was nationalist and anti-imperialist – but non-socialist. We were not socialist because the US media was able to implant a horrendous image communism in our minds, but also because our way of life and work had little to do with socialism.