Count your money and set out to buy your groceries at a farm products market in Havana. A pound of pork costs as much as the average salary earned in a day by a health professional, even after the much-talked-about wage increase in this high-priority sector.
Read MoreIronically, State companies look a lot less “socialist” than cooperatives. The latter choose their leaders at worker assemblies, draw up their statutes collectively and distribute benefits more fairly. The process of approving co-ops, however, is very slow.
Read MoreThis geopolitical move by Moscow aims to deliver a message to the USA: that its current and future interventions in the Ukraine could meet with a response from a nearby territory (Cuba). It hints at an eventual restaging of the Cold War situation, with different tonalities.
Read MoreAre there alternatives to the State neoliberalism that is being installed as the socio-economic model in Cuba? Are there alternatives to becoming an accomplice of the anti-ecological and socially unjust global civilization model?
Read MoreCirculating from house to house on flash drives, La Partida (Antonio Hens), with crude scenes depicting male homosexual relationships, is not recommended for minors, if such antiquated cinematic rules have any meaning in today’s world. Here are my impressions of the film, which I recommend.
Read MoreCuban journalist Claudia Fonseca Sosa writes a contradictory article titled “Terrorism Has No Religion” in an attempt to reconcile a typical Muslim terrorist act with the party line “instruction” of not directly attacking our Islamic friends.
Read More“All Cuban women are whores,” a regular at a bar in Barcelona blurted out with a very sour look on his face when he heard that I lived in Cuba. The generalization struck me as awful, but I have to admit that it is a rather widespread opinion.
Read MoreThe problem with the notion of “development” in any of the disguises we’ve known so far (economic, human or sustainable development) is that it is an insatiable project, in which “the things we have at home” are never enough.
Read MoreIn Cuba, the deciding factor when it comes to capitalists seems to be whether they are Cuban or foreign. The new Foreign Investment Law authorizes private capital in the form of joint-venture or wholly foreign companies. That is to say, totally private companies will begin to exist in Cuba, but that doesn’t matter, because the owner and boss is a foreigner and the country needs their dollars to fill the State’s coffers.
Read More“I’m 68 years old and it’s all the same to me. Our people need respect,” these were the opening words of one of my neighbor’s complaints, voiced during the official accountability meeting with our local representative. It was an apt preamble for what came next.
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