Interviews Archives - Page 84 of 148

Cuban Author Amir Valle: I’ve Always Hated Anything Sectarian

He was born in a town near the Antonio Maceo sugar mill in Guantanamo in 1967. The mill was modern. His town, two km away, wasn’t. Everything was made of wood, everything was empty. In Amir Valle’s home, poor people eat. His best friends eat. A black family. Seven brothers, he tells me, who still used to live in barracks in the 1970s. “The baby that was born into a house was everyone’s baby and, a death in the family was a death that everyone would mourn,” he recalls.

A Not So Typical Cuban Street Vendor

Laura* (43 years old) is a sculptor and photographer and has exhibited her work at several galleries in Havana, but from Monday to Friday, she works at a company belonging to the Cerro municipality where she is a secretary and on the side she has another job that the majority of Cubans know: she’s a street seller.

In Cuba, the Majority of Independent Workers Aren’t Business Owners

In Cuba, women represent almost a third of the wage-earning population, in both the state and private sector. Before 2010, over 90% of women used to work in the state sector. Later, many also moved to the private sector out of their own choice and because the government suggested the need to reduce the state payroll.

Leinier Dominguez: I Try to Reach My Limits in Chess

When entering the home of Lenier Dominguez in Havana, a board with a game of chess with glass pieces receives you in the middle of a small table in the middle of this living room, and you already realize that you aren’t in anyone’s old home, but in a kind of temple where Caissa, the goddess of 64 squares, rules.

When a Remedy Is Worse than the Disease

The 2017-2018 academic year began on September 4th throughout the entire country, as it did at the Maximo Gomez Baez University (better known as UNICA), in Ciego de Avila. However, students in their 4th and 5th years of their English and French Language degree received a great surprise which has spread the island wide.

The Current Cuban Context Is One of Suspense

Latin America is green, tumultuous and varied. Within Latin America, is Cuba which is extremely different but also green, tumultuous and varied. When the region has suffered so much because of events that have been born from the Left, trusting its current ideologies can be hard for Latin American people today.

Interview with the Ecuador VP, Accused of Corruption, Claims Innocence

Ecuador’s vice president, Jorge Glas, involved in a legal process for alleged corruption linked to the Odebrecht case, said in an interview with dpa that there will be no evidence against him because he is innocent, and that the move by president Lenin Moreno obeys political reasons.

“The Canal Will Be the End of Daniel Ortega”

Bianca Jagger attributes Comandante Ortega’s insistence on the disastrous project of an inter-oceanic canal to a “delusion of grandeur” on the part of “a person who wants to remain in power for life.” This delusion won’t allow him to think logically.

A Cuban Lover of Time

Alberto Santiago has been a clock engineer ever since he was 8 years old; “I learned the profession alone. I like the mechanism in Soviet alarm clocks, in clock-towers, pendulum clocks and watches.” Now 61, he knows his profession extremely well. He lives in Rio Hondo in Cuba’s western Artemisa province.

“Nicaragua Betrayed the Migrants”

Father Alejandro Solalinde: Nicaragua was an ingrate! Cuba helped Nicaragua a lot, and Nicaragua forgot them, it didn’t pay them back in the same coin, instead it turned its back on them. They betrayed doubly their own brothers and sisters. That’s the Nicaraguan revolution? How terrible that is – a bad sign!