Isbel Diaz

Luxurious apartments built on W. 25th Avenue in Havana for high-ranking officers of the Cuban Army and the Ministry of the Interior (State Security) contrast sharply with housing units constructed barely a few miles away in the capital’s community of San Agustin.

The government’s idea to sell building materials without a structural or a productive basis—isn’t working very well. In fact, I’ve always wondered: if they didn’t have materials yesterday, where do they hope to get them from today?

One of the things I have always praised Cuba for is its safety. Lately, however, looking closely at everyday life around me, I have found signs of violence – restrained, but ever present.

The father commented with pain to the public that “the initiative is in a difficult situation” because the center’s locale “is in total disrepair and for months they haven’t been able to do anything.”

Summer has begun, and —as is now the custom in Havana— artisans have taken over the Cuba Pavilion facility on busy 23rd St. What caught my attention this time were some colorful key rings that had inside… scorpions?!

If you want to offer your services, there’s nothing better than a Yutong bus. The backs of the seats of these Chinese buses, with their resistant acrylic, offer an effective surface.

Saving a life, be it a plant or an animal, is always one’s duty. That’s why when I discovered a gray chick, curled up between a sidewalk and a wall (both gray), coming to its assistance was like an order for me.

The sale of rice on the Cuban black market has reached more than three times the price of this product in agricultural markets. Several days ago, the lack of the grain provoked a popular protest in one neighborhood of the capital.

To conceal the economic, political and ethical contradictions of the cultivation of transgenic crops is unthinkable for any environmentalist. The public reality of genetically manipulated corn in our fields tells me that it’s urgent that we act.

Using the triumphalist formula of our press, they want to make us believe that transgenic produce is the solution to the country’s agricultural difficulties. A little dose of information, fragmented and manipulated, is all that’s provided to the Cuban pubic. Meanwhile, most of the debate occurs in online publications.