If the Cuban State, with its latest plan to end subsidies to workplace cafeterias and other cost-cutting measures, is only seeking to improve its finances without advancing toward true socialization, it is taking another step toward reversing the Revolution.
The idea to start the site actually began years back at my former Havana translating job, where several of us felt the need to take some initiative to get out some better writing from Cuba in English. We believed this would give a broader look at the different realities and complexities of the country, hitting on both its accomplishments and challenges.
Antonio Guerrero, one of the Cuban Five, detained under unclear circumstances back in l998 and imprisoned ever since in the United States, had his sentence reduced Tuesday from life imprisonment to 22 years. Guerrero, 50, received a life sentence at the politically charged trial that took place in 2001 in hostile Miami. He was accused, as the others, of conspiring to commit espionage, among a host of offenses that were never proven.
With ousted President Manuel Zelaya installed at the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran military and its civilian supporters who seized power on June 28 continue to play big stakes poker. The coup leaders continue to snub the entire United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS), as well as stymie any attempts to mediate the crisis. Their latest move was to issue a decree “allowing them to suspend freedom of speech, ban protests and suspend media groups.” A radio and TV station were raided on Monday.
Knowing what the Chilean military did to thousands of prisoners at the Santiago stadium after the 9/11/73 coup against President Salvador Allende, a photo appearing today in BBC World is all the more horrifying. More than 600 Hondurans were detained in the last four days and the lives of those persons and others is seriously threatened. Brazil is seriously concerned that the Honduran military could decide to violate the embassy premises to try and arrest President Zelaya.
While the significance of the all-afternoon concert on Sunday in Cuba’s Revolution Square continues to generate commentary, Havana Times offers our readers a close look at some of the over a million Cubans and foreign visitors that made it to the plaza despite the burning sun.
What is clear is that while average people on this side of the Florida Strait-especially the youngest-welcomed Juanes with his magical golden flute, the Jurassic generation on the other side responded to him with the dark tones of a tuba. Isolation has many avenues, and opinions like these constitute only one part of the fat that separates them from the bone.
Three men accused of plotting to blow up several planes in the UK were sentenced to long prison terms on Monday. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Miami, two men who bragged about bombing a passenger plane that killed 72 persons are free to continue conspiring to commit more terrorist acts.
On the back cover of “To Change the World: My Years in Cuba” is a statement by Maria Lopez Vigil, author of “Cuba: Neither Heaven Nor Hell:” To know Cuba, neither analyses nor statistics nor official declarations nor diatribes by its adversaries are enough. One needs eyes infused with heart, passionate eyes, with which to look at the Cuban people in their daily life. In this book Margaret Randall looks at Cuba through such eyes.”
Some say in the US that the embargo or blockade is like a piñata hanging from the ceiling, one which doesn’t have to be pulled down in a single jerk, but just taken apart piece by piece – today an arm, tomorrow a leg, later the head – until it finally falls from its own weight.