Alfredo Fernandez’s Diary

The Cuban Catholic Church should take advantage of the work being done to dress up those streets in Havana along which the Pope will travel by making a detour in the Holy Father’s the route.

As far as I know, the project for a new left, named “La Red Protagonica Observatorio Critico” (the Critical Observatory Leadership Network), which also operates on the margin of the Cuban government, is the major player that’s absent from the debate about Cuba on Web 2.0.

Jose Marti said that people can be divided into two camps “Those who love and construct, and those who hate and destroy.” Hanging onto prejudices — whatever they may be — automatically separates us from those who are loving and constructive.

For me the Cuban Revolution is a completely exhausted historical act, the result more of the inability of the then young leaders — today octogenarians — to fulfill their promises than due to the United States embargo.

Several days ago, another writer with Havana Times, Elio Delgado Legon, saw fit to comment on my article “Cuba’s Chemically Aged Kids.” I decided to use his argument as a springboard and write this response, which touches on only a few aspects of the extensive dossier on the Cuban government’s responsibility for the situation we Cubans are suffering today.

Recently I was talking to a friend about the situation that Cuba and its people are facing. Without letting me finish, she jumped up — almost hysterical — and said how pointless it was to talk about that issue. According to her, “What you can’t change, just don’t try to figure out.”

Cuba and its sister nation of North Korea are two countries with the tremendous fortune of having leaders who have saved their peoples from the slave-like conditions represented by the use of IT, a form of bondage that that has subjugated most of the planet’s inhabitants.

Those of us born in the 1970s makeup perhaps the generation that was most affected out of all those born since the Cuban Revolution. We were children in the ‘80s, a decade pregnant with slogans promising a “futuro luminoso” (bright future) that never came.

A few years ago, when a student asked the president of the island’s National Assembly when would Cubans have a real chance to travel, the nation’s highest legislator responded with a paroxysm: “If everyone in the world could do that, the skies would be filled with airplanes!”

Writing for a site that you can hardly access is something normal here in Cuba. Cyberspace is filled with Cuban blogs whose authors only rarely are able check their entries, much less interact with their readers.