Yenisel Rodriguez’s Diary

After four days without electricity, hundreds of residents from the Santos Suarez neighborhood took to the street in protest on Thursday. Government representatives were unsuccessful in their attempts to silence the protest, giving excuses to over 500 people.

Look at the nutritional information on any Ciego Montero soft drink and look for the percentage that its sugar content represents in a 2000 calorie diet. I’ll give you a heads up: this information doesn’t exist.

One of the major contradictions caught sight of in Cuba’s self-employment and small business liberalization process is the marked absence of a wholesale market that can sustain the activities of these two sectors.

It looks as though definitive steps will finally be taken to make Internet services widely accessible in Cuba. Much pressure has built up around this issue, so we can imagine a heated dispute between different power groups on the island behind the scenes.

The efficient management of Cuba’s pedestrian boulevards is today an essential component of the government’s assessment of provincial governments, yet another in the long list of bureaucratic fetishes that aim to convey the sense of a thriving civil society in the country.

Cuba’s official media offered scant coverage of Argentina’s recent electoral process. In Machiavellian fashion, they postponed announcing the victory of the right (predicted since well before) until the very end, unwilling to share the news.

Many of the films screened at the recently concluded Havana Film Festival had subtitle issues. Situations like these heighten the sense we have had for years, that these venues of Cuba’s most important film festival, and society in general, are in frank decline.

The fact “Marxism-Leninism” continues to be included in the syllabi of Cuban universities reveals the divorce between the economic reforms impelled by the Castro government and the political discourse it holds up as banner.

Cuba’s National Sports, Physical Education and Recreation Institute (INDER) is slowly but systematically dismantling its role as a socializer of sports and focusing its energies on the restoration and strengthening of its commercial and industrial infrastructure.

I recall how, back in primary school, we used to shower white herons with rocks while heading back home from school. Poor things, they’ve never been anything but “worthless” to common people in Cuba.