Yenisel Rodriguez’s Diary

Some workers have had to go more than three months without receiving their wages at the Herminio Hernandez Agricultural Producers Cooperative in the Baguanos municipality of Holguin province.

“Ambientoso” (braggart) is a word used in Cuba to describe the social behavior of many people who live in highly marginalized and impoverished neighborhoods on the island.

La Bajada, a rural community in Pinar del Rio province, is a ghost town. It’s a series of vacant deteriorating buildings.

With this sarcastic phrase, the Guantanamo public taunted the baseball players on the team from the western Cuban province of Pinar del Rio; which had just suffered a crushing series defeat at the hands of “The Guaso Indians” – the team of the inflamed Guantanameros.

Mulutrella is a living statue who offers highly political art. He performs in the public setting of Plaza Vieja, which is administered by the Office of the City Historian.

The government’s intellectuals have begun to implicitly legitimate a capitalist future for Cuba. They are the same anti-capitalist intellectuals of the first 50 years of the so-called Revolution.

A friend admitted to me that his wages are now enough for him to buy things he hadn’t been able to before. It was a sincere confession, and though he really doesn’t earn that much, he could purchase things that someone who making a worker’s wage in Cuba isn’t used to having.

The hosts of the Cuban TV sports program Al duro y sin guante (Hard-hitting and Without Gloves), see the protective measures that currently exist in amateur boxing as being excessive.

CUPET garages are a miniature of the fractured society in which we live: on the one hand is the search for profitable services in hard currency and the “stability” of formal work; on the other is the culture of hustling, manipulation & shortages.

I’m not a mulatto, nor do I dance salsa well, smoke cigars or sell fruit. Nonetheless, it’s demanded that I too should somehow be “exotic,” that I should be a revolutionary and exotic blogger. This is the implicit demand I’ve received from some people commenting on my articles, particularly foreigners.