Who doesn’t enjoy getting a gift? I don’t think that’s a difficult question. If that gift is something that changes your life, it is far more welcome. Things become complicated when one is responsible for distributing limited donations to a group of desperate people in need.
Read MoreOn Father’s Day – Sunday, June 15 – I decided to pay Cuba’s Cinematheque a visit. I hate Sundays, have many misgivings about the traditional family and its pathetic festivities, try to avoid public transportation on weekends and loathe the scorching sun of our summer afternoons more than a vampire would. (16 photos)
Read MoreMy mom had asked me to buy some tomatoes for lunch, but a big combat helicopter had just landed on the field of the baseball stadium behind our apartment building. It was a camouflaged Soviet chopper with insignias that aren’t used by the Cuban military.
Read MoreIf there is something we can reproach progress for is having weakened human beings in terms of self-control. The virtuosity of machines, our high-tech prodigies are useless if humanity does not come to terms with those things it cannot change: attachment, suffering, mortality.
Read MoreA Cuban friend who lives abroad and came to the island on vacation, eager to go out and enjoy Havana’s night scene, made me discover new places (discos, clubs, bars and cabarets) where people – particularly the young – enjoy themselves.
Read MoreThere’s nothing better for a romantic reconciliation than doing something that breaks with routine. An invitation from some friends who had rented out a beach house (at the extremely low price of 30 CUC for an entire weekend) came to us like a gift from heaven.
Read MoreI had never travelled so far from Havana – I had only gone as far east as Villa Clara, where I went two years ago. I had the opportunity to take a trip to Bayamo as part of an exhibition (titled El teatro en imagenes, “The Theater in Images”) I put together with a former classmate, Estela Ferrer.
Read MoreThe years go by but my neighborhood doesn’t change: the sidewalks are still in shambles, the streetlamp continues to cast a dim, ghastly light, the framboyan tree across the street has no new leaves or flowers, the peeling walls of the corner market (previously a ration store) are still stained with humidity, smelling of rust and old age.
Read MoreMuch of the data collected during Cuba’s last Population and Housing Census, conducted in 2012, has now been published. One of the questions in the census was the place of birth of those surveyed. There was a space on the questionnaire where the person’s country of origin could be registered.
Read MoreWhen the decades of the 70s and 80s in Cuba are termed the “innocent years”, I can’t help feeling a passing shadow, remembering the official “repudiation” of those who had the courage to confess that they didn’t feel satisfied with the shared poverty nor with the simulation of freedom.
Read More
