English Translations of Cubans Writing From the Island
Five years ago expectations were high with regards to the selection of the new government elite. Many people speculated about who would be the next first vice president. Bets focused on two candidates: Carlos Lage Davila and Jose Ramon Ventura. Whoever was chosen, observers theorized, would suggest Raul Castro’s orientation over the next five years. … Continue reading “Where is Cuba Headed? / Antonio Rodiles”
With the arrival of the anniversary of the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, the Cuban martyr and human rights defender on the Cuban island, hundreds of arrests were carried out in order not to allow any festive and peaceful festive activity on the part of the opposition to the Castro regime. A party such as … Continue reading “State Security Imposes Itself / Anddy Sierra Alvarez”
By Pablo Pascual Méndez Piña HAVANA, Cuba, February 23, 2013 (Pablo Pascual Méndez / www.cubanet.org). Coinciding with the fourth anniversary of the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, the first meeting of Estado de Sats in 2013 was held on Saturday at its headquarters on 1st Street between 46 and 60, in the Havana neighborhood of … Continue reading “The United Nations Covenants Should Be Included in the Laws of the Nation / Estado de Sats, For Another Cuba”
Attention! Attention! Attention! Reporting is Jorge Luis Garcia Perez (Antunez) general coordinator of the Orlando Zapata Tamayo National Civic Resistance Front from the city of Placetas, Villa Clara province. Right now several regime opponents are being violently arrested in the city of Placetas as they are trying to go out into the streets to honor … Continue reading “Massive Wave of Arrests of Dissidents in Cuba Happening Right Now / Antunez – Jorge Luis Garcia Perez”
I want to talk about breathtaking scenery, as Cuba has a ton, of people in solidarity with the traveler, of which there are also thousands on the island, but it fell through. In those moments the journey beat me, short and dry, it’s about a scary place. I went once, only as far as the … Continue reading “The Inferno on the Other Corner / Henry Constantin”
In Cuba celebrating the birthday of someone as special as Laura Pollan has become a sin that the Castro brother’s regime won’t tolerate. Right now, at her home on Neptune Street in Central Havana there is a full manhunt. The women who managed to get there, some fifty, and those who for several days have … Continue reading “Today, February 13, is Laura Pollan’s 64th Birthday / Mario Lleonart”
Photos like these have been seen a thousand and one times, but these are “mine,” they are “my Ladies in White,” the ones my eyes saw. The coming days are going to be tough with a Cuba given to the coming vote, this electoral farce that happens with the world turning its back. Saturday the … Continue reading “Ladies in White… Ladies of Cuba / Luis Felipe Rojas”
From TranslatingCuba.com site manager: Add this blog — Pieces of the Island — to your reading list. As always “Pieces of the Island” brings up-to-the minute news directly from Cuba — and in particular from places other than Havana — from a broad range of activists who don’t all run their own blogs. Without this … Continue reading “Violence increases against dissidents in Cuba (Part 1) / Pieces of the Island #Cuba”
I turn on the TV and see a woman giving birth in front of the camera at some hospital in the interior of the country. The voice of a spokeswoman explains the birth figures for 2012, while I wonder if they asked the woman’s permission to film her during childbirth. The most probably answer is … Continue reading “The Patient / Yoani Sanchez #Cuba”
Trying to analyze the strategy of the Castro brothers is an exercise in pure abstraction. Their way of moving tokens on the political board tends to go against logic. The incarceration of 75 dissidents ordered by Fidel Castro in the spring of 2003 was a miscalculation.Foreign pressure led General Raul Castro to correct the error. … Continue reading “Cuba: The Time to Fill the Jails Came Again / Ivan Garcia #Cuba”
National baseball season in Cuba is about to begin. Once again, the bleachers of the entire nation will hear the free screams of those who bet for their local picks, and the island will have news of the fervor of its sons. The best known workers of the interior towns will organize trips to the … Continue reading “The Country Which Screams and the Country Which Waits / Luis Felipe Rojas”
Points of the declaration from Virginia. The signatories below, members of a countless number of organizations which make up the Central Opposition Coalition, an entity affiliated with the Orlando Zapata Tamayo National Front of Civic Resistance, have gathered this Wednesday, 3rd of October 2012, in the already historic and war-hardened neighborhood of Virginia, in Santa … Continue reading “A Declaration from Virginia / Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antunez”
Monday, September 17th marked the first week of a hunger strike carried out by the well-known economist and opposition figure Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello, 67 years old, “to demand the freedom of political prisoner Jorge Vázquez Chaviano and an attempt to force the government of Raúl Castro to comply with mediocre current legislation”, she tells … Continue reading “The Cuban Regime’s Destructive Acts Against the Dissidence Have Come to Seem Normal to the World / Ivan Garcia”
This past Sunday, July 22, Cubadebate, the Cuban Communist Party’s digital page Cubadebate published a police blotter style note in which was reported an auto accident in the eastern city of Bayama, which an individual of the name Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, “resident of Havana,” had lost his life. This was all the information Cubadebate offered … Continue reading “When an Opponent Dies / Rafael Rojas, Voices Magazine”
After a week on a hunger strike, several Cuban dissidents ended their fast this Tuesday afternoon. The number of opponents refusing to eat had reached 30 throughout the country, with their main demand the immediate release of the activist Jorge Vazquez Chaviano. Accused of the crime of “illicit economic activity,” he was sentenced to 18 … Continue reading “30 Cuban Hunger Strikers Win Release of an Opponent / Yoani Sanchez”
