For many years, to accept tips was an act cataloged almost as counterrevolutionary. To receive a small economic stimulus from some client could be seen as a petty bourgeoisie tit-for-tat, an undignified gesture.
Yesterday, the student who never graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, died at age 56. He left us a bitten apple painted on a host of technological gadgets, and wondering how many more he could have created.
Those demonized by partisan publications are thus transformed into admired beings -- albeit in a whisper -- and even those fired from the government apparatus acquire a certain aura of appeal.
Our bureaucrats are bored and they relieve their tedium putting aces, hearts and diamonds in order. We don't know if they spend so much time on it because they have so little to do, or if, in reality, it is the low salaries that lead to this tremendous waste of time.
The state seems to have a free right-of-way -- literally -- to invade spaces, pushing pedestrians out into the streets, or constructing the greatest atrocities without any accountability to the people who live there.
To El Sexto, arbitrarily detained Havana graffiti artist The tires squeal, the car doors fly open, three men pour out, all produced by the same mold:...
Last week in Havana, the most playful of our artists was taken to prison.
Among the most notable signs of the Cuban government's pettiness is its failure to respect a political adversary, even when she is dying.
I was not a number in the last census taken in Cuba. I didn't appear in the figure of 11,177,143 people who -- by choice or by resignation -- inhabited the country at that moment.
I would have liked to see Muammar Gaddafi before a court, indicted for the crimes he committed against his country. I think the violent deaths of the satraps only gives them an aura of martyrdom they do not deserve.
I hope that today's vote in the UN is favorable toward those of us who wish such absurdity to end, especially we who consider the end of the embargo as a definitive blow to the authoritarianism under which we live.
Not only Libyans have watched, over and over, that short video of Gaddafi's last moments. In Havana's Plaza of the Revolution, for example, the fall of this important ally in North Africa has no doubt generated worry and uncertainty, but also great fear.
How many telephones do you think are listened into by the political police? I asked a man who once worked for state intelligence and who now is just one more private citizen.
Watching Cuba facing down an emerging power like Brazil, or a country as vast as Mexico, brings the same image to my mind over and over. In it, a frail and toothless gentleman is showing me his muscular arms a la Arnold Schwarzenegger.
