Diaries Archives - Page 503 of 647

Cuba Needs a Happy Medium

An entire movement of opinions around diversity has been stirred up as a result of the May celebration in Santiago de Cuba of national activities focused on the “Campaign against Homophobia.”

When Your Wages Can’t Stretch

Today was the happiest day in the whole month of work – but also the most frustrating. I waited in line, which tends to be long and slow, thrilled for my turn to get paid.

A Strange Job Change

The only thing that could have been held against him was from his previous job, when he cared for the rides at the Children’s Amusement Park there in Alamar, and what happened was pure childishness.

Summertime in Cuba, Thinking Haiti

The celestial and earthly powers that be have proclaimed that it is summer in Cuba. But when I travel home to the USA in a few days I won’t be missing the summer in Cuba. I’ll be missing the summer in Haiti.

End the Guantanamo Torture

We had spent a semester dreaming about the trip and squirreling away the all-important pesos. The plan was to climb one of the mountains in Guantanamo Province and to then go hiking along a river heading toward the country’s “first city.”

Remembering the Poet’s Wife

What disconcerted me greatly back then — in addition to learning about her suffering abundant menstrual flows — were my own monthly odysseys of finding sanitary pads in the 1990s.

The Sad Contradiction of Silvio Rodriguez

Bureaucracies usually don’t let themselves be “destroyed,” they defend themselves. Nor are they given to “evolving”; instead, that’s the very cause of the immobilism and statism that Amaury and Silvio criticized.

Cuba Without Kings or Magicians

My grandparents used to hear a certain legend when they were children. It was told to them by their parents, who lived in low-wage poverty back in the early years of US-controlled Cuba.

A View of Today’s Venezuela

“The present government is continuing to commit the same errors that the governments of the past committed – but with a different style,” says Thais Maingon, who I spoke with at the Central University of Venezuela.

Clean Water in Havana Bay?

According to fishermen who line up along the seawall, the contamination used to build up into a layer that was several inches thick – some even estimate that it was a yard or more deep.