My aim with this post is not to again criticize my friends the journalists. On the contrary, today I will write about a clever program aired every week during the Cuban television’s evening news. Cuba dice (“Cuba Says”) is the closest thing to the critical and timely investigative journalism we dearly need that we’ve ever had.
Read MoreSome days ago, I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in a very long time. From the clothes he was wearing and the accent he spoke with, I immediately realized he was now living abroad. We sat down together to catch up. We told stories, asked each other questions, laughed.
Read MoreBefore the Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), Cuba has once again called on nations to work towards general and complete disarmament, including the banning of nuclear arsenals. Though we must continue to ask for this at all international forums, this goal is, in my opinion, nothing short of an unattainable dream.
Read MoreGranma, the Cuban Communist Party’s official newspaper, has published a note attacking the island’s educators who offer private lessons on the sider to make ends meet, revealing “a lack of professional ethics.”
Read MoreLooked at both in a national as well as an international perspective, the duty of the left in Cuba is to preserve all the positive things that the Cuban socialist experiment has brought with it, as it struggles to move on towards a new model which – in the words of the currently fashionable jargon – is both prosperous and sustainable.
Read MoreWhenever I can, I spend part of my afternoon at El Toledo, a small bar and restaurant located at the intersection of Barcelona and Aguila streets, a stone’s throw from Old Havana’s Capitolio, the beautiful building where the phone company is currently located, the San Rafael boulevard and other emblematic places in Havana.
Read MoreA few days ago, Cuba’s Round Table TV program addressed the issue of what young people – and the Cuban people in general – wear these days. It’s true that the way some young people dress today is a bit curious, but this is not a question of right or wrong: it’s simply a way of dressing different from what was in style in earlier decades.
Read MoreThe children of émigrés spend their summer break in Cuba, Cuban-Spaniards travel back and forth between the island and Europe, flying next to people who sell cellular phones and computers, retired persons who “stretch” their pensions by living part of the time on the island.
Read MoreI am a pacifist to the last consequences. I believe killing is immoral, cruel, anachronistic and always counterproductive as a means of deterring crime. Massive wars are for me the most criminal actions imaginable. They are followed by torture and repression, and then by violent, individual murders in general. As I see it, no one has the right to kill anyone.
Read MoreWe could well say that we have no sexual education in Cuba, that the thinking surrounding this issue continues to be medieval, for it has yet to place itself in step with the times and, like all taboos, all we can continue to expect is for sex-related issues to be swept under the carpet.
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