Author: Lynn Cruz

Not being able to safely cross large avenues is the main danger that pedestrians face today. The number of vehicles on our roads can’t continue to grow in Havana without first ensuring safety measures, such as the construction of pedestrian bridges and danger signs that remind us where people have died.

Amidst the socio-political crisis that is unfolding in Venezuela, after the masses took to the streets protesting for their freedom, a meteorological event (tornado) has laid waste to several Havana neighborhoods.

A few days after the Havana Film Festival came to an end, I began to reflect upon my encounters with friends, colleagues, acquaintances, who are becoming more and more distant as the years go by. It isn’t because they have changed, it’s quite the opposite in fact.

Sheyla Pool’s short movie “Fragil” is competing in the Havana Film Festival short films category. Its title and lead characters would make you think that it was a story about everyday life where old age is shown in its most delicate state.

The protest announced by the “San Isidro Collective”, (along with artists Iris Ruiz, Amaury Pacheco, Yanelys Nunez, Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, Michel Matos, among the most prominent) has unleashed paranoia and excessive surveillance of the Ministry of Culture’s (Mincult) surrounding areas.

Independent filmmakers have managed to continuously produce works, and even though they have to jump through bureaucratic hurdles, deal with censorship, Cuban film does exist and it does have international exposure, placed among the elite of global cinema, thanks to these productions that are made outside of Cuban state institutions.

When you face this bureaucratic apparatus, which Hannah Arendt would describe as being led by individuals who are unable to think, one realizes that in fact, it is a trivial and overly robot-like person that is unable to see that I am just another human.

Like the feeling you have when a baby you’ve been longing to have finally arrives, I was overcome by the same emotion after Patriotismo 36-77 made its debut. More than half a year went past until it could finally hit the stage.

Ariel Ruiz Urquiola, a scientist who was a professor at Havana University, which he was expelled from because of his ideas, came under the public eye after he held his first hunger strike, as a form of protest because medicines were missing which his sister Omara Ruiz Urquiola needed as part of her cancer treatment.