Author: Yenisel Rodriguez

I lived in Cuba until March 30, 2013. Today, I live with my father in the city of Miami. I have found compelling reasons to engage in political, grassroots activism in both Havana and Miami, though these cities are ninety miles apart.

“Para saber mañana” (To Know Tomorrow) is the leading program in the government media campaign seeking to indoctrinate the younger generation of Cubans with the time-worn and fraudulent ideology of the “Cuban Revolution.”

Today, as the outmoded bureaucracy opens the way to the most conventional forms of neo-liberalism, we’re seeing how the tiresome highly ideological speeches that date back decades are being tossed in the garbage. The government is reappearing with longings for pragmatism, with political questions becoming concise and sensationalist: work, consume and pay taxes.

The consolidation of capos in Cuban state administration favors the maintenance of authoritarian order in the country. They are representatives of those highly conflictive contexts of the underground economy that reaches the whole of Cuban society.

While eco tourism, family tourism and luxury tourism are gradually coming to occupy prominent places in the country’s tourism industry,.sex tourism in Cuba is being instituted as a legitimate economic institution.

Cuban amateur sports is no longer among the world’s elite. The growing interest that the emerging powers have shown in amateur sports, in addition to professional athletes competing in major amateur competitions, have elevated the quality of these events as never before.

Many European environmentalists come to in Cuba with the hope of finding a lifestyle representing an alternative to the chronic consumerism that has marred the natural environment in their countries.

Why limit the debate on the political situation in Cuba to the confrontation between the state and civil society. Any confrontation that goes beyond this is often interpreted simplistically.

The broadcasts of the London Olympics on Cuban national television were nuanced with biased opinions concerning sexual identity in sports.The most discriminatory opinions were reveled even in sports that excluded the participation of men.

El Caballero de Paris (the Gentleman from Paris) is back in Old Havana as a living statue. He has returned to alleviate the nostalgia for fabled characters that Havanans endure.