Osmel Ramirez

Transport carrying visitors constantly arrive in these parts. You regularly see license plates from other provinces here. Tourists and the devout come from all over the country to see this place, to see the Virgin or to fulfil a vow. The Virgin of Charity of El Cobre is the Patron Saint of Cuba in Catholicism and in the “syncretic” religion too. (12 photos)

On August 3rd, my youngest daughter, Alisay, turned 3 years old. I had thought about buying a cake and a tub of ice cream to sing “happy birthday” at home with the family, but something better popped up, a group day excursion to Santiago de Cuba. (12 photos)

Now we know the new Constitution’s content, which is currently being discussed to later be approved in a popular vote. This might seem like a democratic process on the surface, but there is no plurality in the people who drafted the reforms nor in the analyses being drawn.

I have lived in the same place ever since I was born, in the Guayabo neighborhood in the Mayari valley of Holguin province. Seeing the horizon lined by mountains is something I have engraved in my mind. That’s why, whenever I travel to the capital and I pass through Camaguey’s vast plainlands, I find the landscape monotonous and overwhelming.

As many of you know, I work the land. My official profession is “farmer”, although that’s not the profession I identify with. I feel like a communicator more than anything else. Although I must be honest, what I really like is politics, but I refuse to take part in this if there isn’t a democracy.

In Cuba, the word “counter-revolutionary” means the same thing as “heresy”. For nearly six decades now, people who haven’t supported or fought against the political system that the Fidelista revolution imposed have been labeled “counter-revolutionaries”. It means being a “worm”, “enemy of the people”, “mercenary serving Imperialism” or “stateless”.

At 3:30 in the afternoon of this Friday, June 22, I was released. I was imprisoned for three days in a cell at the Mayari police station. According to what they told me in front of my family and then alone, I would have no more peace. I will be detained every time I write an article.

It took them seven months to decide to intervene and it’s clear that they’ve only done this because other complaints have been made, demanding them to act; recently, there was a petition signed by many farmers who said their credits had been stolen.

In Cuba, the pre-established calendar year doesn’t coincide with the farming year. There are two well-defined planting seasons, which aren’t determined by human whim but by Nature itself: spring and the cold season.