Haroldo Dilla

Those who applaud can argue that something is changing in Cuba, and they’re right. There are positive measures, but they continue being non-systemic steps aimed at survival, and therefore trivial before the tremendous crisis that faces society.

The statistics document an absolute reduction of the population, falling to about 11,242,638 residents in 2010. This meant that last year on the island there lived some 2,500 less Cubans than in 2005.

Unquestionably, those who refused to be expatriated are of a special mold that not all of us share, but the greatness of those who remained does not in the least diminish those who emigrated.

Since the time of the French Revolution, politics has usually been classified in terms of left and right. In the 1990s, when doomsayers began to predict the end of everything — history, borders, geography and politics — they also predicted the end of that political classification.

I always take the time to distinguish between those things that are true changes in Cuba and those other ones that are no more than camouflage. What’s new and what’s more of the same old thing.

Non-official bloggers in Cuba have to look for people who will allow them access to the Internet and/or they pay at hotels for an hour of frustratingly slow service, or they look for access from institutions and embassies that provide them the service for free.

The problem is that given the nature of the Cuban political system, we’ll never know exactly what was discussed or what was intended.

Now the extrajudicial execution of Osama bin Laden is asserted as an irreproachable legal and moral act – as if the status (well deserved) of Bin Laden as criminal vermin justifies his murder.

The government’s alliance with the church is, according to Raul Castro, a guarantee of “the unity of the nation” in the face of the “mercenaries” (those who subvert the law and are at the service of “a foreign power”).

We still don’t know what will be the multiple changes made to the “Guidelines” that served as the pre-convention discussion document for the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba. But we do know that of the 15 members of the new Politburo, eight are active officers in the military or come from its ranks.