The 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.
Read MoreIt appears that a romance with no future has been struck in Cuba between the party bureaucracy and military technocrats, who apparently started their maiden voyage with the most recent party congress (April 2011).
Read MoreWhen I began to write for Havana Times two years ago, I thought I was running the risk of being expelled from the university or being looked at poorly in my neighborhood the day I was discovered.
Read MoreAt the meeting in Cuba on combating corruption, a specialist explained to me that five elements influence corruption: a monopoly over any activity, the rules and discretion of officials, public access to information, accountability of leaders and society’s control over the government.
Read More