Dmitri Prieto’s Diary

The priority of those of us who organize these forums has always been to encourage contacts and cooperation between people who actively do things (and not simply think or write).

The first two sessions took place under the general slogan of the event — “@uto-organizing Ourselves?” — which made explicit the concern for technological connectivity (@) and leadership from below, from “ourselves.”

I don’t think of myself as being one of those people who want to live detached from their feelings. Rather, I think that the passion for the game of baseball is encoded in human DNA and is a healthy self-cure for homesickness.

Every day I’m more and more surprised by the dilemma posed by the various approaches to product distribution in Cuba. The rationing book refuses to disappear since no alternative has yet been developed to protect those who are the most disadvantaged.

When the markets in my neighborhood are running short on calabazas (squash) — those long and heavy Cuban calabazas that are reddish-yellow on the inside — I can’t help but remember an old conga song (or was it rumba?) sung by the Afro-Havanans of the late nineteenth century.

In solidarity with the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement that tries to recover this international day of workers struggles for the United States, I declare myself on strike for May Day.

“Let’s screw, my love, let’s screw right now // because we were born to screw…” These are lines that appeared in the magazine Union, the journal of the Union of Artists and Writers of Cuba. These words are from the voice of the Pietro Aretino, a poet that date backs to the Italian Renaissance.

In his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, the famous Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker comes up with the somewhat curious conjecture that countries having McDonald’s fast-food restaurants have very little likelihood of going to war against each other.

One custom of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) organizations is to maintain neighborhood bulletin boards. Usually not a whole lot of attention is paid to these, though occasionally they’re used to communicate important messages.

It is symptomatic that reggaeton — the “babylonized” son of reggae — has displaced its paternal rhythm in the media. In addition, confusion has been created about the identity of those two different musical styles.