14ymedio, Jose Gabriel Barrenchea, Santa Clara, 24 August 2015 –One morning, I had just arrived at the Cabaña Fort during the days of the 2014 Havana International Book Fair, and on consulting the daily program discovered that at this very moment the Bolivian vice president Alvara Garcia Linera was offering a videoconference in the Lezama … Continue reading “Leftist Imperialism In Latin America / 14ymedio, Jose Gabriel Barrenchea”
Augusto César San Martín Born 20th of April 1967 in the City of Havana. He was attracted by the Ministry of the Interior and studied Criminal Sciences at the Herman Martinez Institute from which he graduated. Because of differences with the military, he requested permanent removal from that agency, which petition was denied him for … Continue reading “Augusto César San Martín”
14ymedio, Victor Ariel Gonzalez, Havana, 30 March 2015 — The Surprised Pupil is a program whose first mistake is the name. With quite mediocre staging, presentation and content, really this television program has nothing surprising to see. But to hear, maybe some viewer or another was hoping that its most recent on-air output would tackle … Continue reading “The Censors Talk about Censorship / 14ymedio, Victor Ariel Gonzalez”
Investment in Cuba? What for? ASCE XXIV / 2014 Annual Conference, Miami Hilton Downtown Hotel, Florida, USA Panel 12. Concerto Ballrom B – Friday, August 1st, 2:45-4:15pm 1. In Cuba during the 1970s, historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals challenged poet Jose Lezama Lima with his trendy scientific notions about the laws of objectivity and the transition … Continue reading “Investment in Cuba? What for? / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo”
The writer and Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, talks about Cuba in the first part of an interview with 14ymedio Yoani Sánchez, Madrid, 14 July 2014 — Mario Vargas Llosa, writer, politician, excellent analyst and even better conversationalist, received me at his home in Madrid for this interview. The minutes flew by … Continue reading ““The myth of Cuba has been cut to shreds for the most part” / 14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Mario Varga Llosa”
Interview with Carlos Alberto Montaner, writer, journalist and political REINALDO ESCOBAR, Havana, 24 June 2014 — Carlos Alberto Montaner has long been a kind of black beast in the official Cuban government propaganda. Accused of being a terrorist, a CIA agent, an eminence gris in the world counterrevolution, in real life he is an academic … Continue reading “I Am Nothing Else But Cuban / 14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Carlos Alberto Montaner”
Havana, Cuba, 19 August 2013, Augusto César San Martín Albistur/ www.cubanet.org.- On a phone call this morning, from the Combinado del Este prison, political prisoner Ramón Alejandro Muñoz González declared that as of August 26 he would restart his hunger strike. Ramón says that after writing letters to different government departments about his undefined legal … Continue reading “Sonia Garro’s Husband to Restart Hunger Strike / Augusto Cesar San Martin”
Translated by Karen González Nicolasa Guillén, Virgilia Piñera, Regina Pedroso, and Josefa Lezama Lima leave to go to paradise for a week. However, upon getting there they find out that, in fact, they have arrived at the steps of a ramshackle hotel for writers where they must imagine that they’ve arrived at paradise. In addition, … Continue reading “Four Cuban Writers Go To Paradise / Carlos Esquivel, in Sampsonia Way Magazine”
By Reinaldo Cosano. Havana, Cuba Posted in the blog of Wendy Iriepa and Ignacio Estrada The veil covering violent homophobic repression is slowly being drawn back, but the gulity aren’t asking for public pardon. It is hard to specify just how the virus of homophobic repression was incubated, sharp-eyed with the machismo of the days … Continue reading “Taken Out of the Closet, But No One Asks Forgiveness / Reinaldo Cosano”
He chaired the National Council of Culture in the ‘70s, which marginalized hundreds of intellectuals and artists. He reappeared on TV in 2007 and caused the “little war of emails.” —- The political commissar Luis Pavón Tamayo, one of the executors of censorship in the ‘70s, died Saturday in Havana, according to the writer Norberto … Continue reading “Luis Pavon Tamayo Dies, One of the Executors of Castro Censorship / Diario de Cuba”
The shortest monologue in the world has just been presented in a small room in Havana: “And where did Cuba end up?” (It is at the level of the short story “The Dinosaur” by the Guatemalan Augusto Monterroso.) Its name is Rhapsody for the Mule, and it is directed by Nelda Castillo for her theater … Continue reading “A DEER IN CHAINS / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo”
To get freedom we must escape from what oppresses us. To leave the ranks, dissent, desert what we haven’t even been consulted on. What we have been forced into by necessity. The first reaction is to accept, to resolve, to wait. Until one day you discover that no one is going to do it for … Continue reading “Pinch of Salt / Lilianne Ruiz”
It has always surprised me how Cuban intellectuals, particularly the generation that lived through the seventies, which later came to be called “the five gray years,” have this bad public memory, and in general, among people they trust, they express the pain they still feel for the abuses committed against them by the functionaries faithful … Continue reading “The Sad Centenary of Virgilio Pinera – Part I / Angel Santiesteban”
I am reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. The first time the book showed up (the expression seems fantastical, but in Cuba that is how one gets these books), I was washing diapers. I preferred to read it and laugh quietly in the early morning so as not to wake up my … Continue reading “The birthmark of the rabbit shows his life in the snow… JLL* / Lilianne Ruiz”
Interview of Salvador Bueno (fragment*) I met him in 1998. That year, on October 12, he received the “José Vasconcelos” prize in a ceremony at the National Hotel in Havana. The gold medal, conferred by the Hispanic Affirmation Front (HAF) to intellectuals of the Castillian language for lifetime achievement, had already gone to figures of … Continue reading “Salvador, a Seat Occupied in Cuban Literature / Francis Sánchez”
