The rooster is one of the most common creatures in Cuba. Within the world of the visual arts, this bird was the preferred theme of a 20th century Cuban painter: Mariano Rodriguez. In our national sport —baseball— the Sancti Spiritus team has the rooster as its mascot.
Read MoreThis pronouncement was not from the socialist voices of Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn, nor from those like Johns Rawls or Richard Rorty of the liberal stripe. It was US President Barack Obama.
Read MoreJoshua is my youngest and most recent friend. He’s 22 and has worked for eleven months at the same place I do, the Cuban Book Institute. It turns out he has an apartment in Old Havana, the oldest area of the city, one where many colonial structures still remain.
Read MoreI had already experienced 20 years of life when I entered the world of drugs for the first time. On days when there were parties among circles at the university, we all kicked in to buy chispaetrén (distilled home-brewed alcohol having the taste of kerosene).
Read MoreIt is a myth, a dream or a half truth. Movies, websites, books and all type debates have been generated concerning US government projects aimed at controlling people’s minds, to turn them into robots that obey the most senseless orders. Power is the obsession, the motivating force behind that idea.
Read MoreThis is an expression of solidarity with the drivers because people know that these workers —like themselves— certainly aren’t paid a wage that’s enough to live on.
Read MoreWhen I was just a boy, I had dreamed of being a college student. However, upon finishing high school, the stones of the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, impacting the center of life of those of us in Cuba.
Read MoreWhen I’m at the bus stop, I almost always see a number of buses fly by that don’t pick anyone up. These aren’t the vehicles that make up the public transit system, but ones that belong to certain State-run rental agencies.
Read MoreFew foreign cities have such a vital importance in the imagination of people in another country as the city of Miami has for Cubans. Always treated with hostility by the official State media, but often idealized by the average Cuban on the street, Miami today is for many Cubans on the island the closest thing to the “Cuban dream.”
Read MoreAs we entered the city of Matanzas, for me it was a completely new sensation and utterly different from what I’d imagined. I only knew that this province was a major producer of citrus fruit and henequen fiber, that it had a very intense cultural life, and that a large number of Cuban baseball stars had been born here…ah, and that it’s known as the “City of Bridges.”
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