Erasmo Calzadilla’s Diary

Reggaeton is not only a musical style but a whole way of life as well as a reflection of social changes occurring in this part of the world. When it made it to Cuba, I received it with open arms.

One of the most widely used devices for those who debate without solid arguments is lump all the varying cases into one category: those that excite as well as those that calm, the strong ones with the subtle, those that are dangerous to people’s health together with the relatively innocuous ones.

Every time I visit the mountains of Pinar del Rio, I run into “Mr. Deforestation.” Here I find increasingly younger trees being felled with chainsaws, along with large patches of protected-area land being ploughed under, and more and more pillagers having a field day without too many apparent difficulties.

This is a continuation of an earlier post in which I criticized the response made by the philosopher Alexis Jardines to a question posed by a student at the University of Florida: “Is it true that there’s nothing salvageable from communism if we understand this word as the central idea of politics as far as life in communities…?”

That’s a joke of course; the Cuban Five were never my favorites. I felt bad to see them trapped in the teeth of that macabre machinery, as well as ad nauseam over the government’s constant public relations campaign around them.

The problems with drinking water in this city are nightmarish. The reservoirs are polluted, depressed, and the pipelines leak more than half of what they carry. In the neighborhood where I live, this vital resource is supplied for a only few hours every four days

Do you remember the book The End of History? It was written by the neo-conservative Francis Fukuyama, the co-founder of the (imperialist) Project for the New American Century.

To prove that my effort was serious, one hot morning this summer I decided to do without my old friend, that jewel of socialist technology: my Orbita-model fan.

t’s not that I have blind admiration for Laura. I lost sympathy for her when on a broadcast of the program Razones de Cuba I heard her supporting the coup in Honduras, speaking directly with the leader of the coup.