Fernando Ravsberg

Not too long ago I went to look for a kitchen faucet at a hardware store that sells products in hard currency. The salesperson told me that they didn’t have any in stock, but she herself recommended that I talk to one of the vendors outside of the store, that “surely they can take care of it.”

Any clamp down on these “crimes” has been useless up to now. Security companies were created, with the net result being that the guards have been added to the chain of theft.

The good thing for the prisoners on both sides is that their governments have not ceased in their efforts to rescue them. For 10 years Havana has been orchestrating campaign after campaign, while in Washington people have remained quite concerned since Gross was captured last year.

Changes will continue slowly and cautiously – but they won’t stop. In the economic terrain they have already broken through the rigid limits imposed in 1968. The national debate will be on how to save socialism, and therefore there will be no political reforms.

In reality, the labor imbalance seems to have been introduced by official propaganda that overvalued the role of professionals in society. Finally, life has demonstrated that it is impossible to construct buildings relying only on architects.

When assuming the presidency, Raul Castro seemed to propose another concept of unity, one based on the diversity of opinions. He blasted “false unanimity” and opened up discussion by affirming that “from the deep exchange of divergent opinions come the best solutions.”

The announced release of Cuban political prisoners takes my mind back to the spring of 2003, when journalists crowded outside the courts to try and find out any bit of information about what was going on inside.

Despite the Soccer World Cup, news that the Cuban government will release 52 prisoners of conscious has traveled the world. Negotiations between President Raul Castro, Cardinal Jaime Ortega & Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos have panned out.

Guevara recognized that Cuba is experiencing “a crisis that is of a political and moral character (…) with the most terrible thing being its vacuity. The most terrible thing is to go walking down the street and not know if the people you pass by are the living dead or real people.”

Looking through Cuban periodicals on the Internet, I again ran into calls for conserving electric energy, something that is apparently so vital that a journalist launched the dramatic slogan “conservation or death,” through dropping the standard ending “venceremos” (we shall be victorious).