Anyone strolling down a Cuban street around this time of year will see many homes and some businesses displaying Christmas trees. Since Cuba doesn’t have native firs, all of these evergreens are artificial.
Read MoreTo my surprise, I can now count on an enthusiastic gang of kids who hound me to take them to work on the “park.” Though these youngsters each measure less than four feet, they work hard for their age and without anyone forcing them. They cut the grass, water the plants and, in short, have appropriated this project without a great deal effort or any arm-twisting.
Read MoreOmar got a job at the French embassy, but since he didn’t have anywhere to live, he deprived himself of everything humanly possible to gradually build his own house. He accomplished this feat after six years.
Read MoreNot long ago on my job, we drew little pieces of paper with the names of people in our department. Each woman selected a man, and each man a woman, to be their “secret friend,” with the rule being that no one could tell who they selected.
Read MoreAt my job, they’ve created an activity by that name to encourage young people to interact. Its aim is to inculcate ethical and aesthetic values, and to create a closer relationship between the participants and the world of books. It also seeks to develop a sort of reconciliation between the managers -whose prestige is fairly deteriorated.
Read MoreI’m telling this story about our sound system not because it’s is so significant in itself, but because it fits like a ring in illustrating the problem of services in Cuba. This is one of the areas where citizens have to suffer the torments of slackness, indifference and inefficiency.
Read MoreI haven’t seen my twin nieces for eight years. Then too, it’s been seven years since I’ve seen their mother; that’s to say, my sister, who took them to live with her to France after she married a French guy.
Read MoreIf the official media doesn’t reflect the magnitude of the problem, how can little Julio who’s now 15 and for his whole life has watched his father yell and mistreat his mother, think of doing anything different? Who is there to tell him that this isn’t right? Who will explain to him that the law protects women?
Read MoreExcept for such tragicomic incidents, my young Cuban friend summarized the emotion of the encounter in a single phase. “They spoke about the divided family, the nostalgia… and I was happy to be able to rekindle that, to see new people and rediscover old faces… singing, shouting and standing up for a better future for our generation…”
Read MoreI just finished Leonardo Padura’s latest novel, “The Man Who Loved Dogs.” The work, says the Cuban writer in the book’s epilogue, investigates the “perversion of the great utopia of the 20th century”: socialism. He asserts that this utopia was wrecked by the same people who “invested their hopes” in it.
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