Author: Isbel Diaz

Strategies used to censor information at official Cuban government web-sites are not only varied, they are also employed at the complete discretion of their webmasters. In this post, I will focus on how user comments are censored on these webpages.

If your dad is a colonel in the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) of Cuba, no doubt your family had a great Father’s Day. I say this because the husband of a neighbor with this elevated title, around that date received some of the usual privileges they give the military elites on our island.

Cuban workers do not enjoy the right to strike. This right, which is elementary in any country which considers itself democratic, is nowhere mentioned in the current (and out-of-date) Constitution of the Republic of Cuba. The Constitution, however, doesn’t explicitly deny workers this right either.

Indalla is a shantytown located in the heart of the Cuban capital, whose existence even the president of the municipality where it is situated was unaware of. This marginal neighborhood was discovered a few months ago by the mayor of its own local government, while sanitation units were conducting a health inspection in the area.

I have just found out that Antonio Castro, one of the sons of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, was the winner of an event at this year’s Copa Montecristo golf tournament in Varadero. As you can well appreciate, the “socialist” golf played in Cuba is not too different from its capitalist brother.

On April 26, during an online debate held through the web-site of the Cuban Association of the United Nations (ACNU), I asked Reverend Oden Marichal, representative of Cuba’s Council of Churches, the following three questions related to the issue of human rights.

The “Proposals for Our Immediate Future” published by the CASA-CUBA Laboratory (Laboratorio CASA-CUBA,) have furnished us with a magnificent tool for collective action.

The US Interests Section in Havana just denied me a visa to travel to that country, where I was invited by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) to make a presentation at its upcoming congress in late May.

We’re so used to being the center of the universe here that I was surprised a few days ago when neither Cuba, nor the Cuban revolution, nor Fidel Castro were mentioned in a listing of Latin American leaders and revolutionary processes.

Regarding our confiscated magazines, through Resolution No. 92-2013, the Cuban customs office declared in its fifth “whereas” that “the penalty was correctly applied by the authority in charge in that it detected literature directed against the revolutionary process in Venezuela and its leader.”