English Translations of Cubans Writing From the Island
My neighborhood seems peaceful at night, but it operates in an irrational paradox, because in some streets the few lights that work are on in the day and at dusk they go off giving an atmosphere complicit with criminals and lovers. In the middle of the night we sometimes hear the exalted meows of some … Continue reading “Feline Needs / Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado”
In Cuba, there have been few priests who have bended their knees on the ground with the poor and persecuted, like Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the Salvadoran Archbishop assassinated in 1980. Or the Peruvian, Brazilian, Colombian and Spanish Jesuits who, in 1972, founded the Theology of Liberation. This defense of the most underprivileged and those repressed … Continue reading “Cuba, the Catholic Hierarchy and Power / Iván García”
For the ‘Palestinians’, as people from Havana call those born in the eastern provinces, to live in Havana is almost a mission impossible. By Decree 217, passed in 1997, the law sanctions and fines people born outside the capital who wish to settle there without official permission. It’s like a border without a border. There … Continue reading “Palestinians in Havana / Iván García”
He was working for a new kind of corporation, one of those occupying a luxurious mansion in the Miramar neighborhood and importing goods from abroad. To find such a job it was enough to appeal to the influence of his father, a lieutenant colonel, the pull of the family tree. He belongs to a new … Continue reading “Green Collar Crimes / Yoani Sánchez”
After half a century of diplomatic slip-ups, sophism, and trifles one reaches the point where they imagine that the Cuban government couldn’t possibly come up with yet another fallacy. But all it takes is to wake up in the morning and listen to the radio or read the newspaper, and then you will quickly see … Continue reading “A Double-Layered Denouncement / Luis Felipe Rojas”
Nestor Rodriguez Lobaina is a lifelong Cuban activist working for democracy and human rights in our country, founder the Alternative Studies Center of Cuban Youth for Democracy. In recognizing him as a Prisoner of Conscience in 1999, Amnesty International wrote: “Political activist, Nestor Rodriquez Lobaina, was arbitrarily arrested on 11 July 1999, for exercising his … Continue reading “Another Hunger Striker Nears Death in a Cuban Prison / Luis Felipe Rojas”
When the high creole hierarchy enjoyed the arrival of the 51st anniversary of the insurrection which elevated them to power on 1 January 1959, a violent cold front was ravaging the west of the country. In Mazorra, a psychiatric hospital located on the highway that leads to the principal airport, a major scandal was uncorking … Continue reading “In 2010, Bad News Abounded in Cuba / Iván García”
A couple of days ago I was walking with a friend to my daughter’s house and a cop car stopped us and asked for our IDs. Dog-faced like the usual Cuban police. They frisked us on the public street like common thieves. They wanted me to open an envelope with some magazines a Brazilian friend … Continue reading “I Don’t Even Have a Television and for the Police I am A Subject With A High Standard of Living / Iván García”