Features

A motion calling for an end to the United States embargo against Cuba accentuated the anti-imperialist tone taken on by the summit of Latin American and Caribbean leaders that ended Wednesday in Costa do Sauipe, Brazil. “It is a question of solidarity with the country that has shown the greatest solidarity with the people of the world,” argued Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president.

The state-run homes for the elderly can not unanimously be qualified as good or bad: they are simply a reflection of the country. They have had their bonanza and their crises. They have had self-sacrificing staff, people who have made the life of the residents more pleasant, but also inconsistent, corrupt and even sadistic people, who have used their meager positions to profit or to satisfy their desire for power.

Rosa Maria Leyva was one of the first people to reach Caletones after it was ravaged by Hurricane Ike. It took six hours to clear the road between the small fishing and resort village — just one of seven seaside neighborhoods in this area destroyed by the storm — and the northeastern Cuban port city of Gibara.

In May 2006 an Irish piano tuner, Ciaran Ryan, visited Cuba as part of an international piano tuner’s brigade organized by tuner Ben Treuhaft from New York. The trip proved to be the beginning of a new Irish-Cuba connection.

The years will pass in Gibara, Holguin and their children’s children will ask how much truth there was in their grandparents’ stories. The family who watched the water reach their second-floor apartment, the woman who dreamt the day before that she was swimming in her own house, or the story that along the coast, even the coral reefs shook will all seem like legends.

For eight years, Michel and Alexander Sanchez have been publishing Scriptorium, a fanzine (fan magazine) dedicated to rock music produced within Cuba and abroad, in a society that resists accepting this genre and its fans as part of the national culture.

If U.S. President-elect Barack Obama wants to begin dismantling Washington’s nearly 50-year-old trade embargo against Cuba, it appears he will have widespread support for doing so. Not only have some major foreign policy heavyweights recently called for ending the embargo if, for no other reason, than to create desperately needed goodwill elsewhere in the Americas and beyond.

“We had never lived in fear of the sea, but now things have changed. We have to go because what happened here could happen again,” said Ibrahím Rojas a two-time-Olympic medalist in canoeing who is from Santa Cruz del Sur, battered on Nov. 9 by hurricane Paloma.

“It all began with the cutting of the ceiba,” recalls Isbel Diaz, founder of the project “El Guardabosques” (The Forest Ranger), an environmental initiative that seeks to raise ecological awareness among residents of the Cuban capital and involve them in the protection of their natural surroundings, in particular the city’s trees.

Cuban television now regularly shows soap operas or educational messages that touch on thorny topics, but only superficially, without exploring the causes or consequences and, in many cases, legitimizing the patriarchal, sexist conduct they apparently seek to combat.