To be a photographer is the dream of thousands of people, a dream they don’t always choose to realize. Obstacles sometimes get in the way, be it the expensive nature of the art, or the person’s lack of real talent or their not having enough humility to learn from those who preceded them.
Read MoreThe bus stop in front of the Capitolio Building. Six o’clock in the late afternoon. A mob of people rush the door of a bus bound for Alamar. I think for a second. The day’s been bad and I don’t want to make it worse by ending up squished trying to get a ride home.
Read MoreThis past October I had to renew my driver’s license. Each town on the island has a designated place where that process is carried out, and I was assigned to take my written exam and then my actual driving test in Guanabacoa (an outlying town located just east of Havana).
Read MoreFrom a friend I received an e-mail from a friend with an interesting article titled “On the Press in Cuba” (Sobre la prensa en Cuba), by journalist Guillermo Rodriguez Rivera; it was taken from Espacio laical, a publication of the Archdiocese of Havana.
Read MorePopular revolutions, such as the one that occurred in Cuba in 1959, create deep marks on people’s daily culture, impressions of all kinds. Some foster future freedoms, others gestate oppressions to come.
Read MoreOn alternating days and for about six hours each day, water is supplied to homes in Havana’s Playa municipality. The low pressure under which the resource tends to flow from faucets has turned many residents of that municipality into veritable “hydraulic engineers.”
Read MoreThe falling of a 13-year-old girl from the fourth floor of her school building has shocked everyone who has heard the story (though I think relatively few people have).
Read MoreAlberto Garrandes is a Cuban writer who has earned prestige at the national level and even in other countries. I met him years ago just minutes before he left on a bus to attend a book fair in Holguin, where he had been invited as a guest.
Read MoreCubans are a very aesthetically oriented people. “Cute child”/“ugly child” is the basic dichotomy and the starting point for the “values” instilled in the majority of Cuban children. At least that’s the case in the urbanized western part of the island.
Read MoreThis past weekend, from in my stairwell I could hear the racket of the fumigation machines, which sounded close by. I had clothes hanging on the line and the lunch half done when an exterminator came to my door.
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