Fernando Ravsberg

Every 12 months for the past 26 years, I’ve had to renew my residency in Cuba, beginning with renewing my International Press Center credentials required to retain my residency and to obtain a new identification card and another year’s telephone line contract.

President Obama has put the question of history on Cuba’s agenda. Since his departure, those who want to forget the past, those who are willing to forgive but not forget and those who will neither forgive nor forget have been debating the issue.

Obama should be grateful for Cuba’s hospitality: no journalist asked him any difficult questions and no one engaged him on the subject of the embargo, the Guantanamo Naval Base, the prisoners kept there without trial, financing given the island’s opposition or the propaganda spread by Marti Radio and TV.

I’m desperate for the Rolling Stones concert in Cuba to begin and to end. I have nothing against rock’n’roll, quite the contrary, it is one of the few rhythms that I can dance with a minimum of expertise.

The US president didn’t arrive in Cuba with convincing arguments but to aim straight at the hearts of Cubans. Without a doubt, his aim was good. He was capable of earning widespread sympathy among the population, even before setting foot on the island.

In 1959, just months after the triumph of the Cuban revolution, Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo created Asterix, a comic-book saga telling the story of a small, Gaul village that Rome was never able to conquer, not even at a time when it had subjugated all of Europe and the Mediterranean.

The great Cuban novelist and journalist Lisandro Otero used to say that, while one can never be certain of what comes next under capitalism, one is oblivious as to what came before under socialism. It sounds like a joke, but, in Cuba, people know this is gospel truth.