Dmitri Prieto’s Diary

When they first showed Come and See in the cinemas here in Havana, people were impressed by a narrative that was so different from the classic Soviet style of making movies about the war.

I just visited Cuban musician Silvio Rodriguez’s blog. I learned about it through a news story that featured his statement: “Everything done to destroy the ultra-conservative bureaucracy will result in benefits for the country.”

Several days before May Day, I received a letter from the US Interest Section (the de facto American embassy here in Havana). I wasn’t the only one who received one; copies were also sent to a colleague of mine and to the members of the Critical Observatory network.

When my mother lived in this realm of the world, every Easter she would boil some eggs for us, along with slices of onions. The eggs were dyed a reddish color. That’s how she’d been taught in her native Russia.

When I was born and they told me about him, Yuri Gagarin was already both history and myth, because by then he had unfortunately died in a stupid flight training accident …

April 12 marks human kind’s first 50 years in space. This fact reminded me of a not very well known collection of details that I wanted to share.

March 18th marked the 140th anniversary of the proclamation of the Paris Commune, an attempt at socialism born of a popular revolution that overthrew French emperor Napoleon III during a war against Prussia.

Once upon a time back in the 19th century, there was a rebellious Italian named Orestes Ferrara. Some historians hold that in his youth he was an anarchist. Had that been true, he would have been one of the dozens of liberal socialists who came to the Caribbean to fight for “Cuba libre”.

I used to walk through that area with my parents in the distant decade of the 1970s, when my dad would tell my mom and me stories about the Cuban Revolution. I remember looking at the strange shield of the Republic mounted over the Palace and wondering how the “Yankees,”who were such bad guys, used the same native symbols of Cuba that the revolutionaries had used.

So, “it was decided” that Havana Province would be divided in two provinces, called “Artemisa” and “Mayabeque.” The first will have Artemisa as its capital city, and the second province’s capital will be…San Jose (they gave the second province an “indigenous” name so as not to reproduce that of a Catholic saint).