Features

While Canada will resume some of its services at the Embassy in Havana so as to facilitate immigration procedures for Cuban citizens, other countries such as Panama and the US, are adopting new measures to limit travel for Cubans.

An old man eats a typical Cuban meal in a workers’ canteen, in front of TV cameras. Viewers didn’t think too much of it: white rice, black bean stew, avocado salad and a juicy pork steak.

In the summer holidays, many Cuban families travel within the country. Family encounters are common right now. I went with my family to Holguin, to visit my wife’s family.

As a single mother, Marta literally carries Nina everywhere, and spends most of her time at home in the safe and stable environment she has created for her daughter. Sustaining both of them economically, in a life scenario where they only have each other most of the time, has been one of her biggest challenges.

The hotel charged by the hour, but the two young Cubans – dirty, hungry and dazed after being released from detention in the United States and pushed back into Mexico – had nowhere else to go.

You end up forming some kind of allergy, rash and swelling included, when you’re bombarded with the same pests, day after day. What’s the trending phrase at the moment in Cuban political discourse? The national economy’s “Productive chains”. The president says it, and then so does Tom, Dick and Harry, every booster and amplifier in turn.

Cuba is experiencing a climate of growing tension as August draws near. Nearly half a million employees are waiting (somewhere between excited and anxiously) for the day they receive their pay-checks for July. They are waiting for the first benefit of a spectacular pay-rise that the government announced last month for the public sector.