Values are of course a magnificent tool for dominating from “within,” and thus exercising total power. After instilling them (that’s to say installing them), the manipulation of people is quite easy. It’s as if they were marionettes.
Read MoreCubans are always looking for reasons to celebrate. It doesn’t matter if it’s a birthday or a “non-birthday.” Common reasons for celebration include the victories of sports teams, the birthdays of saints, job promotions or getting together with friends you haven’t seen in a long time.
Read MoreI’m not exactly an environmentalist, but I believe that what environmentalists are doing is vitally important. Especially because they’re able —often better than other activists— to sensitize people with regard to controversial causes; because without sensibility, life becomes insipid and selfish, regardless of how good a social system.
Read MoreLess attention grabbing than a hunger strike is the matrix of people that is expanding —node by node— among people in this country who are interested in change. This is an effort that I would say is being directed toward true emancipation.
Read MoreI remember when I was about six I used to get all excited when my parents would take me roller skating on the weekend. We’d go to a rink a few blocks from our house where it cost only a peso to rent a pair of skates. They were metal but had four pretty yellow or orange wheels.
Read MoreIt caught my attention how —in a spirit of questioning certain stereotypes ingrained in people by the press, television and the simplistic rendering of history— one of the members of the panel called attention to the absence in our Cuban telenovelas of slaveholding blacks in the country’s colonial past.
Read MoreNo one thinks about what a psychiatric hospital must be like inside or how it functions. We don’t think about how people who are mentally ill are treated, or how they got to that point, or if it’s reversible, or if once they’ve entered they can ever leave their asylum. Madness —like jail and death— is terrifying.
Read MoreMany of us on the island have gotten used to seeing only the thorny side of our society: woefully inadequate pay, the critical situation of transportation, which puts all of us in a bad mood; the need to be a magician to keep food on the table, as well as other problems that exist in any society on the planet.
For one reason or another, things we don’t recognize are admired in a special way by many foreigners who visit us every year. They see beyond the difficult economic situation in which most of us Cubans live.
Read MoreLast night on the Latin American TeleSur network, I saw two undocumented immigrants in the US (one Mexican and the other Guatemalan) both protesting the privileges and protection the American government extends to Cuban emigrants in the US through the Cuban Adjustment Act.
Read MoreI’m thankful to those who comment on my writings in Havana Times; I’m eager to read all their remarks sooner or later. It’s very important to me to know what they’re thinking and saying. Plus, they give me company and help me feel I’m not talking to myself, like some lunatic.
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