Under the reforms being instituted in Cuba we are witnessing a broad flowering of private capitalism. This is taking place with the systematic increase in the exploitation of wage labor by business operations that are being protected by a law that allows for “self-employed contracted labor.”
Read More“I’m not very interested in numbers,” is an acceptable phrase from the mouth of a poet or a painter, but when spoken by an official linked to foreign trade in the middle of a press conference, the matter becomes worrisome. That conference was a real shame because there was a great deal of interesting information that could have been released on the sale of Cuban services on the five continents, which has now become the main source of income for the island.
Read MoreOne of the political facts that has surprised me most in the recent period is the number of people, networks and organizations on the left that have adopted critical positions towards Raul Castro’s “updating” of the Cuban economic model.
Read MoreThe use of so-called “green medicine” has always been important to my family, therefore every new property or application that was discovered and announced — either by the official Cuban media or word on the street — was immediately felt at home.
Read MoreIt’s impossible to know exactly when you break the umbilical cord with Cuba. When you’re saying goodbye from the door through which so many others have left, leaving many teary-eyed people on the other side, one finds that the laceration started many years earlier. (11 photos)
Read MoreThe revolutionary experience of the twentieth century showed, once again, the failure of trying to fit revolution or socialism into a narrow box, beyond the dialectical and classical generalizations of the socialization and democratization of economic and political power. Presently, given the political experience of the Cuban Revolution and the evolution that this process is now suffering, for a wide revolutionary sector in Cuba today, to be left entails supporting and fighting for…
Read MoreCuban gays have suffered greatly, particularly during the first thirty years of the revolutionary period. For reasons that will be elucidated later on, the Cuban government forced gays out of the closet and politicized their situation to significantly increase their oppression. Excerpt from the book “Cuba Since the 1959 Revolution.”
Read MoreWhile reading a scientific analysis of the institutions of political power in Cuba, I was reminded of a phrase by Tomas Gutierrez Alea, who — from his perspective as a filmmaker — defined socialism as a “good script with bad staging.”
Read MoreToday is my day to buy gas. We don’t have a gas line coming into the house from the street, so I have to buy a “balita,” as we call the bullet-shaped tanks of gas here. Every two weeks I go to the supplier with my ration card, my mother’s ID, the receipt and the empty tank.
Read MoreTo get some perspective on the issues of tourism and prostitution in the fifties we should consider that somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 tourists visited Cuba every year in the fifties, compared with well over two million for most of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
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