Author: Isbel Diaz

Saving a life, be it a plant or an animal, is always one’s duty. That’s why when I discovered a gray chick, curled up between a sidewalk and a wall (both gray), coming to its assistance was like an order for me.

The sale of rice on the Cuban black market has reached more than three times the price of this product in agricultural markets. Several days ago, the lack of the grain provoked a popular protest in one neighborhood of the capital.

To conceal the economic, political and ethical contradictions of the cultivation of transgenic crops is unthinkable for any environmentalist. The public reality of genetically manipulated corn in our fields tells me that it’s urgent that we act.

Using the triumphalist formula of our press, they want to make us believe that transgenic produce is the solution to the country’s agricultural difficulties. A little dose of information, fragmented and manipulated, is all that’s provided to the Cuban pubic. Meanwhile, most of the debate occurs in online publications.

Recently I was invited to an event that promised to be productive. Young Cuban environmentalists and representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), met to try to coordinate actions in support of nature in our country.

It’s now certain: my Ceiba has died. The tree that they pruned almost four years ago in my neighborhood was not able to survive that act of aggression. San Agustin, suburb of Havana, has been left without one of its principal cultural symbols.