Opinion

A Little History on Cuban Prisoners

The announced release of Cuban political prisoners takes my mind back to the spring of 2003, when journalists crowded outside the courts to try and find out any bit of information about what was going on inside.

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The Other Face of Power

Could it be that the old pornographer —accused of abusing prostitutes and of rape, but extolled by many as a symbol of freedom— acted to guide the young woman with the promises of her feminine power as an alternative that was better than the disgust of her husband, and along a long road of submission?

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Hong Kong Soldiers & Cuba circa 1980

Ideological diversionism could be in any place, in an object, in a meal and even in sweets. In the same way that the enemy had been able to condense the destructive power of a thousand conventional bombs into a medium-sized device, they had also done this with bourgeois ideology when compressing it into a simple piece of candy.

This candy that seemed so inoffensive to the rest of the humanity we referred to, in low voices, as chewing gum.

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Cuba-US Should Duplicate Spy Swap

In light of events over the last two days, a similar swap with Gross and the Cuban Five, allowing all to return to their countries and families, would be a historic sign of goodwill that could lead to the end of a half-century long adversarial relationship between the United States and Cuba.

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The Mark of the Eggs

In 1980, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser murdered his wife during an attack of schizophrenia. Also dying that year —though not at the hands of Althusser— were Sartre, Roland Barthes, and Bon Scott (the lead singer of AC/DC).

In Cuba, though, we remember that year because one could buy a dozen eggs for a peso [about five cents USD]; these had not yet been reduced to sales through the rationing system or on the black market.

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Cuba’s President, Cardinal Ortega & Spain’s FM

Despite the Soccer World Cup, news that the Cuban government will release 52 prisoners of conscious has traveled the world. Negotiations between President Raul Castro, Cardinal Jaime Ortega & Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos have panned out.

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Cuba’s Battle of Ideas

Guevara recognized that Cuba is experiencing “a crisis that is of a political and moral character (…) with the most terrible thing being its vacuity. The most terrible thing is to go walking down the street and not know if the people you pass by are the living dead or real people.”

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