No true revolutionary is willing to support the reverse of the Cuban Revolution or the restoration of private capitalism, be it from the forces of the right or from the bureaucracy. However, nor can we agree on repressing with violence those who simply express a different thought, or those who wish to peacefully express their points of views, even if we don’t agree with them.
Many people didn’t know who organized the march, but that was the least important. Sometime after five in the afternoon on Friday, November 6, around a hundred persons -mainly young artists- gathered in downtown Havana to begin walking in support of nonviolence, tolerance and love.
Changes for greater concentration and centralization of surpluses so that the bureaucratic apparatuses of the State have more means and resources, as well as more control over workers, production and their output? Changes for more statism or for more socialism? Changes to the right or to the left?
What is it that we blacks must infer from the comment of my former co-worker – that fighter against the Batista dictatorship, that eminent journalist, a member of the Communist Party of Cuba? That black people possess dignity thanks only to the victory of the Revolution? That whites were already people prior to the Revolution, contrary to blacks?
Not a single yawn was seen in the theater; the silence was like a knife cutting the air, evidence that the new productions have placed their fingers squarely on the wound. Don’t forget: Intelligence is everywhere in Cuba, even in the snout of the caiman, where Guantanamo is located.
Polemics is proud, slippery; its terms are not always transparent, its “cards” are face down or hidden, and they usually hide pitfalls and traps that are looked to for undermining, weakening and defeating the position of whomever confronted. Dialogue, on the other hand, is reasoning. It refers to a positive and open conversation, to a negotiation, with the alternation or exchange of words and opinions between people. In dialogue, one does not aim to defeat the other interlocutor, but to clarify, expand and modify the positions of the actors to achieve consensus.
Activists of the Communist Party, as well as those of political and mass organizations, were prompted to begin to discuss President Raul Castro’s latest speeches in which he said the people will decide the model of socialism to follow.
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.