I’ve lost count of the number of my friends who have left Cuba and are now scattered across the world. The first of my friends to leave was Melina, a girl in my high school class back in the eleventh grade. She had told us she wouldn’t be in the school for long the moment she joined our class.
Read MoreI have the fortune of living in a country (Cuba) where women can freely decide to end their pregnancy. I consider myself fortunate, and privileged, yes, when I see the state that the world is in and the vicissitudes of our civil rights. In 1965, in response to the growing number of female deaths caused by negligent abortion practices carried out without proper equipment, the country began to offer the procedure at hospitals. It was an official government decision implemented by the Ministry of Public Health.
Read MoreRecently, I met with the Cuban dissidents who have set up camp outside of Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, demanding the resumption of financial subsidies which, in their view, the Spanish government is duty-bound to pay them for an indefinite period of time. They’ve also received the cold shoulder from Miami.
Read MoreThere is at least one similarity between the way in which the fortresses of old organized their defensive structures and the manner in which some contemporary political regimes, like the one in Cuba, protect themselves.
Read MoreEvery time I run into Harry Half-Wit I have the urge to rush off somewhere. Do you know what he asked me the other day, out of the blue? “Hi Rogelio! How many political parties are there in Cuba?” I responded: My word, you’re dying to get me in trouble, aren’t you!
Read MoreWhen I write of the “weathered” streets of Pinar del Rio, I am thinking, not of the effects of climate, but about the onslaught of time itself, about the “implacable passage of time, the time that passed”, to quote songwriter Pablo Milanes.
Read MoreMarino Murillo, architect of the island’s recent economic reforms, has urged the country to aim for growth by eliminating “all of the obstacles that the current economic model places in the way of the development of the productive forces.” The problem is that the greatest obstacle could be the model itself, which is based on relations of production that hinder the country’s economic development, slow down changes, interfere with reforms and bring about discontent among the population.
Read MoreWherever I go, I like to browse in bookstores. Through what appears on the shelves, and what doesn’t, I try to piece together what people are thinking or, at least, what they are thinking about. So i was delighted when I found my first bookstore in Havana, on Obispo.
Read MoreThe way I see it, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which include the reduction of world hunger to half by 2015, continue to be too modest, for there is enough cultivable land in the world, and sufficient food is currently being grown, to be able to feed every human being on the planet.
Read MoreFor Cuba, this could mean a qualitative leap forward, not only economically, but politically as well. Such a commercial route could become an incentive for the gradual normalization of relations between Cuba and the United States.
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