English Translations of Cubans Writing From the Island
This video shows the faces of the State Security Agents who blocked the door to the event. Dissidents Expelled from the Presentation of Criterios Magazine From Diario de Cuba Cuban State Security told Orlando Luis Pardo, Leonardo Calvo and Juan Antonio Madrazo that the activity was ’cultural’ and they did not belong ’to the world … Continue reading “Desiderio’s Employees* (Identifying them) / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo”
Havana, 20 December 2011 President Mariano Rajoy, I turn to you on the day my daughter celebrates her birthday. Just thinking of the Cuban young people, I decided to write you these humble and sincere words without standing on ceremony other than to offer you well-deserved congratulations, and to cry for the young of my … Continue reading “Open Letter from the Writer Ángel Santiesteban-Prats to the New President of Spain / Ángel Santiesteban”
The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers Foreign Policy presents a unique portrait of 2011’s global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who make them. DECEMBER 2011 When Yoani Sánchez launched her blog, Generation Y, in 2007, the Havana-born computer programmer turned journalist was a virtual unknown. Four years later, she’s a dissident voice of such … Continue reading “Yoani Sanchez Included in Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers / Translating Cuba”
Leonardo Padura just won the “Roger Caillois” Prize. We universal lovers of literature received the news with a mixture of satisfaction (almost personal) and unjustified astonishment: for a long time Leonardo Padura has exceeded the boundaries of what some call Cuban literature, and has become an indispensable narrator of today’s literary landscape. If prizes demonstrate … Continue reading ““My Characters Could Form a Collage of Disillusionment” / Ernesto Morales Licea”
I could barely sleep last night. A book left me tossing and turning, staring at the ceiling grid in my bedroom. “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” the novel by Leonardo Padura, shaken by his sincerity, by the corrosive acid he throws on the evasive Utopia they wanted to impose on us. No one can remain … Continue reading “Join, Silence, Kill / Yoani Sánchez”
“Buddy, is it true that the mother of Ruben Blades was Cuban?”, Arian, a 16-year-old student asks me, incredulous. “Cuban and from Havana”, I reply. On the island, young people know who Rubén Blades is, know his songs and dance to his music. But many are unaware that his mother, Anoland Bellido de Luna-Caramés y … Continue reading “The Cuban Blood of Rubén Blades / Iván García”
If someone were to ask me, what is the principal weakness, the most glaring problem suffered by Cuban journalism today, I believe I could summarize it without hesitation: It doesn’t resemble Cubans. It doesn’t resemble anyone. Neither the audience to whom it is addressed, which recognizes less and less these triumphalist news items they read … Continue reading “Orphaned From Journalism (Part 2, Almost Final) / Ernesto Morales Licea”
Haroldo Dilla, Cuban historian and sociologist. Photograph from the internet. A few days ago, a friend of mine gave me an interesting opinion piece by Haroldo Dilla Alfonso, entitled “From Loyalty to Complicity.” I can’t tell the readers where it was published, because I don’t know, though it is dated Tuesday, September 14th, 2010, but … Continue reading “Intellectuals: Between Loyalty and Complicit Silence / Miriam Celaya”
He received me on Monday in a quiet apartment in Mantilla from where he has written almost all his work. On a polished table he put cold water and strong coffee for both of us. He lit a cigarette whose smoke, luckily, chose as its victim the bust of Cervantes resting on a nearby sideboard. … Continue reading “The Novel of So Many Lives”
14ymedio, Havana, 22 January 2020 — Singer Silvio Rodríguez pointed to the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) as the creator of an independent “blacklist” of media aired a few days ago on Radio Progreso networks. “What Radio Progreso airs is what the ideological department of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC, “the leading political force of society and the State”) … Continue reading “Silvio Rodriguez ’Discovers’ That the Blacklist Comes from Cuban Communist Party”
EFE (from 14ymedio), Barcelona, 4 May 2016 — The Cuban writer Wendy Guerra, who has just published the novel Domingo de Revolution (Revolution Sunday), a sort of autofiction on her imagined Cuba, said with regards to the future of her country, “to be healed, the wounds must be named.” Guerra has revealed that she began writing the … Continue reading “Wendy Guerra: The Most Unbearable Thing in Cuba is Lack of a Free Press / EFE, 14ymedio”