Looking up the meaning of the word “claustrophobia” in Google, I came across a web-site (www.claustrofobia.com) created by one of the most promising young writers in Cuba today: poet, storyteller, radio-play writer and current director of Santiago de Cuba’s Caseron publishing house Yunier Riquenes.
Read MoreLast Saturday, a group of activists and scholars from different nations who describe themselves as “friends of the Cuban revolution” issued an “Open Letter to the Cuban People” with warnings about the use of transgenic plant species in agriculture.
Read MoreIf your dad is a colonel in the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) of Cuba, no doubt your family had a great Father’s Day. I say this because the husband of a neighbor with this elevated title, around that date received some of the usual privileges they give the military elites on our island.
Read MoreThanks to movie pirating, the mockumentary Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden, which premiered at the end of 2012, has already hit the streets of Havana. “What a great movie,” the buddy who lent it to me said. “They’ll never be able to show it in theaters or the TV here.”
Read MoreNakamura would come see me at the bar once a week. He’s the kind of person that people can only describe as “normal” or “down-to-earth” when you ask about them. He’d put a lot of effort into becoming that kind of person.
Read MoreThis past Saturday, Estudiantes Sin Semilla (“Seedless Students”), a reggae band from Havana, threw a concert at the Parque Almendares amphitheater. Though I’d gotten the flyers announcing the concert only the night before, I was, luckily, able to attend.
Read MoreOn January 1, 1959, the situation changed radically, for the revolution set a government by the people and for the people. The workers became the owners of the means of production, and the aspirations of the revolutionary government coincided with that of the workers entirely.
Read MoreEvery time I see plane-lights trailing across the night’s sky, I imagine it is Antoine de Saint Exupery, the author of the “The Little Prince”, travelling on the back of a comet, looking down at this old world and reflecting on how little humanity has changed since his disappearance from the physical universe.
Read MoreEl Lagarto is a restaurant high in the forests of the Escambray Mountains that will put you in a food coma so deep that you will be glad it’s all downhill to get back to your casa particular in Trinidad. Like most superior restaurants in the country it is a private business. (15 photos)
Read MoreI’ve lost count of the number of my friends who have left Cuba and are now scattered across the world. The first of my friends to leave was Melina, a girl in my high school class back in the eleventh grade. She had told us she wouldn’t be in the school for long the moment she joined our class.
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