CUBA CULTURE SECTION - Havana Journal > Cuban People
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By Alvaro Vargas Llosa | Deseret News
A few weeks ago, Hilda Molina, a delicate, soft-spoken neurosurgeon, obtained an improbable victory against Cuba’s regime when she left Havana and joined her son and grandchildren in Argentina. Listening to her story in a Buenos Aires restaurant, I could not keep from thinking that the real measure of the Caribbean tyranny is not how it treats its enemies but its friends.
Molina was her country’s first female neurosurgeon. In 1989, she founded the International Center for Neurological Restoration. It quickly gained attention; by the early 1990s, Molina’s prestige in the scientific community…
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By Walker Simon | Reuters
An untitled painting by Cuban born artist Wifredo Lam. AFP PHOTO
The Cuban art market is showing signs of vitality as the economic recession weakens demand for works from elsewhere in Latin America, collectors said.
A Cuban painting was the top seller in May’s Latin American art auctions in New York. American collectors of Asian art are now snapping up Cuban contemporary works and Cuban art galleries are also springing up.
For years late Cuban artists of the 20th century, like surrealist Wifredo Lam, have pierced the $1 million…
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Marina Sitrin | UpsideDownWorld.org
We are on a main city block early Saturday morning. People gathering are high spirited, almost giddy. As people begin to form a line I exhale deeply, imagining it is just one of many lines that are the Cuban reality. This line, however, is different. This line begins to shift, snake, jump and dance. This is a conga line. There are hundreds of us, perhaps even a thousand, and we are dancing in a conga line down one of the most central streets in Havana. And we are not just some random group of people, we…
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By JEANNIE NUSS | AP
Spanish authorities have arrested 29 people suspected of forging credit cards to finance an elaborate scheme to smuggle Cubans into the U.S. from Mexico.
The organization hacked credit card data to steal more than $530,000 from customers at restaurants and bars around Spain, a police statement said.
The network allegedly used the funds and help from a Spanish non-governmental organization to forge passports and travel documents and move Cubans along a convoluted route that included stops in Nicaragua, Spain and Mexico.
Spanish police said they did not immediately know how many Cubans actually made it…
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Reuters
Cuba rejected calls from Western countries on Monday to release jailed critics of its communist system and told the UN Human Rights Council such demands violated its sovereign rights.
The Cuban position was set out in a report on discussions last week in the Council’s Universal Periodic Review mechanism on the island’s human rights record, which was widely praised by developing countries.
During the review, the call for the release of those Western countries regard as political prisoners—and which Cuba denies it has—came from Austria, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands and Slovakia.
These recommendations, a…
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By William Booth | Washington Post Foreign Service (original title: In Cuba, Cellphone Calls Go Unanswered)
Tatiana González stood transfixed before the glass display case watching a single cellphone spin around and around on a carousel at the government-run store. It was a Nokia 1112, a simple, boxy gray workhorse of mobile telecommunications technology—and González was in love.
She coveted that phone. She confessed she had dreamed of that phone. But she would have to wait just a little longer before she could cradle it to her ear. How much longer? “I hope a year, no more,” said González, who…
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BY MIAMI HERALD STAFF
This capital city remained eerily dark and silent Wednesday night as the year ended and the day marking the 50th anniversary of the triumph of the revolution began.
There was no official explanation for the absence of celebrations, but persons who declined to be identified said that the government issued a last-minute ban on any public festivities. Celebrations will only be allowed to proceed after commemorations kick off Thursday afternoon in Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second largest city in eastern Cuba that is credited for unleashing and supporting the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to…
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Latin American Herald Tribune
Cuban bloggers began a workshop to exchange information despite warnings by the island’s authorities not to do so, according to a press release issued Saturday in Havana.
In the communique that was also published on the Generacion Y blog by the Cuban Yoani Sanchez, the cybernauts said that “faithful to their choice of dialogue and the search for viable alternatives, they have found other ways to start their journey without having to travel physically from one place to another.”
They said that exchanges have taken place on Friday and Saturday among “people who post blogs on…
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(original title: The End of the End of the Revolution)
By ROGER COHEN | New York Times
ON MY FIRST DAY IN HAVANA I wandered down to the Malecón, the world’s most haunting urban seafront promenade. A norte was blustering, sending breakers crashing over the stone dike built in 1901 under short-lived American rule. Bright explosions of spray unfurled onto the sidewalk.
I was almost alone on a Sunday morning in Cuba’s capital city of 2.2 million people. A couple of cars a minute passed, often finned ’50s beauties, Studebakers and Chevrolets, extravagant and battered. Here and…
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By Ray Sanchez | South Florida Sun-Sentinel
During every major story, there are things a reporter sees that don’t make it into the daily updates. Ray Sanchez, the Sun Sentinel’s Havana Bureau Chief, was among the first foreign journalists to reach the town where Hurricane Paloma made landfall.
These are some of those scenes from a hurricane in Cuba:
A day after Hurricane Paloma smashed into Santa Cruz del Sur with 145 mph winds, more than 800 people evacuated from the town gathered in the courtyard of the government shelter where they were being kept to hear when they could…
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