I did a little search on the Internet before heading off to bed. It was then, suddenly, that I came across the discomforting news: Julio Garcia Luis, the dean of the College of Journalism, an honest Cuban Communist and a good person, had left us.
The Catholic Church, like the party, is an institution of people — though not necessarily humane — with pragmatic goals and where rhetoric and actions don’t always go hand in hand. Its history is full of dark chapters as well as contributions to the liberation struggles of our peoples.
I’ve been trying to end the year alternating between inevitable walks through the narrow streets of my city and reading a good book. In the latter case, the candidate I selected is From Germany to Germany, a book by Gunther Grass.
A few years ago, at the height of the political campaign known as the “Battle of Ideas,” Havana was paralyzed with unusually frequent mobilizations of hundreds of thousands of people — all of which paid for with public resources — in the well-known “Marches of the Combative People” and the “Open Forums.”
In my last post I dealt with art that’s critical yet committed to expressing the realities of today’s Cuba. At that time I discussed the hip hop duo Los Aldeanos, while this time we turn our gaze to the work of filmmaker Eduardo del Llano.
With increasing frequency and belligerence, the Cuban art world produces lucid voices that defend autonomy, social justice, national sovereignty and personal liberty as part of an emancipatory promise made to the island.
A few weeks ago I was able to return to Buenos Aires through an invitation to the event “Global Economic Governance: The Possible Roles of Latin America,” organized by the magazine Nueva Sociedad.
“The present government is continuing to commit the same errors that the governments of the past committed – but with a different style,” says Thais Maingon, who I spoke with at the Central University of Venezuela.
It has been said that up to now the complexity of the problem of the status of Puerto Rico had impeded trips by US presidents, little motivated by the potential for islander votes.
I received his first drawings at the beginning of 2007. This was precisely in the middle of the “e-mail war” that shook the conscious of a sector of Cuban academia and public opinion, though unfortunately for only a brief time. Lazaro Saavedra (born in Havana in 1964 and graduated from the Superior Institute of Art in 1988) is a faithful exponent of the generation of visual artists of the 1980s.