Dmitri Prieto’s Diary

My interest in neighboring Haiti is also inspired by the need to study the process by which emancipatory revolutions are hijacked by the political elite who then use them to erect new systems of domination.

It was a great honor for me to be on this panel dedicated to Russian and East European influences on Cuba. It is a highly debated topic since it is evident for many people that such influences exist, despite there having been little research on it.

Periodically in Cuba, national debates are held on important legal initiatives, such as the recent discussion of the new Social Security Act. In those instances, however, divergent perspectives are not presented in the press.

I began to give classes at the Community College in the town of Santa Cruz five years ago. Like many of my colleagues, I had to take some special classes to become an educator and be able to receive the supplementary income for that extra work.

Reggaeton has polarized Cuban society: on one side, the illustrious opinion of the defenders of tradition, public morals and good taste; on the other side, the persistent clueless -those who play it and listen to it, and who blast it from their cars and stores.

My friend, Cuban essayist and poet Victor Fowler, has discerned a dichotomy in Cuba between “the body of pleasure” and “the body of the Homeland.” I believe that explains why the bodies of the “Bratz” are popular among Cuban girls.

I heard a joke circulating among my Trotskyite friends. It goes, “What do two Trotskyites do on a deserted island? They found two Trotskyite parties!” I know that this thought tendency is not the one that prevails today among the global left.

In Cuba, officially a lay state since 1992, the theories of Darwin has been part of the obligatory basic education and of our boring conventional stereotypes since the Revolution. The interesting thing is that the Cuban reality as regards the theories of evolution is much more complex.

I’m not Jorge Luis Borges and I don’t have any complexes or phobias related to mirrors. But every time I go down Obispo St. and pass by that old heliport my sensation of strangeness before the old/new architectural work is even denser than when I went there to fulfill my rite of passage into the scientific elites.

The balustrades are part of the new constructions undertaken on their own initiative by many Cubans. The chief materials are cement and at times plaster, the form is kitsch, and the aim is to reclaim a concept of beauty, and at the same time serve as a status symbol.