The use and application of computers in the most varied spheres over the last twenty years —even in the most unimagined activities— has had a tremendous impact on the lives of people around the world. In Cuba, an underdeveloped socialist country, this process has had its own characteristics.
Silvio Rodriguez’s songs reflect, they question and enter into dialogue with the most immediate realities. They reach soaring poetic flight and are able to transmit feelings with a tremendous intensity.
People will point it out to me every now and then with a tone of concern, as if I had grown a tail without realizing it, or as if they were breaking the news of some terminal illness.
Nothing reminds me more of the army than Cuban schools. They are institutions for the perpetuation of the dominant ideology.
I sat there thinking to myself: Young people have always been the same, with their virtues and defects, with passion and the ideals necessary to make societies advance, with their malleability that makes them conducive to change, and their inexperience that allows them to make understandable mistakes.
“Two lovers in a pink convertible went to an abandoned drive-in theater. There, they got undressed; mutually surrendering their souls, in silence. The moon, observed them, serenely.”
“The first thing is to get settled and establish myself and to later look for some job. I’ll work for any place that pays me enough money to rent an apartment and buy things for myself – something I haven’t been able to do here.”
In the “before” times, in addition to having variety of alternatives and plenty of places for recreation, people had a different concept of amusement.
The changes in Cuba resulting from the Special Period crisis of the 90s, causing an opening to external influences, a gradual process of privatization of life began, if not at the institutional level (which has indeed begun to some degree) then at least in terms of family life. In this, Cojimar has been at the head.
Fidel Castro’s return to the Cuban television screen generated almost as much interest as the issue he was raising there: the imminence of war in Iran. The matter had to be very serious for him to interrupt his reclusive and prolonged retirement.