I vowed never to return to Cuba until the country of my birth was free -- an unlikely proposition given the strong grip of the Cuban government on virtually all aspects of life on the island. Ms. Sanchez has changed my view on the future of Cuba.

Not one to be left out of the discussion, Jay-Z just dropped a new track called "Open Letter" (produced by Timbaland and Swizz Beatz) in which he discusses his recent trip to Cuba. He raps: "I'm in Cuba, I love Cubans/ This talk about Communism is so confusing." I feel ya, Jay-Z.

If we could keep these resolutions, 2013 would be a banner year for U.S.-Latin American relations.

Year after year the issue of the U.S. embargo against Cuba is presented in the United Nations. Year after year, the majority of countries votes against this fossil of the Cold War.

The Cuban government is relaxing its grip on the island's socialist economy, allowing the legal creation of private enterprise for the first time sinc...

Havana still rejects the principle of far-reaching political change as a precondition for scrapping the embargo. There's no reason to expect a change of heart, particularly because other major economic powers' willingness to trade with and invest in Cuba has made the American boycott less painful.

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.

To say that one state controls US policy towards Cuba is in fact silly and insane. Its not one state, its worse.

Yoani Sánchez -- the world-renowned Cuban blogger and philologist -- will be honored here with the inaugural Freedom Award by CEPOS. But there's one oddity: Yoani is forbidden to leave her country to accept the award.

Mother's Day is a few weeks away and Havana is all geared up for the merchandizing aspect of the day. In the past, due to scarcities, the embargo and...

Why did the most mundane of tasks require going from place to place and person to person, and waiting in numerous lines?

The snack bar on 13th between F and G -- that afternoon on December -- is full of security agents and admirers. The first are the ones who follow this...

To go to work on December 25, to have school on New Year's Eve or to be called to "voluntary labor" as the year drew to a close -- all this was possible in an ideologically fervent Cuba.

What days those were -- when no one had to bring us, from a far off continent, what our own Cuban earth could produce.

Suffering, confrontation, revenge and a visceral hatred toward the Cuban people is the only legacy that our Cuban American Reps. Diaz-Balart, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Albio Sires, and Sen. Bob Menendez can be proud of.

Those who govern us have satellite antennas in their homes, broadband, open Internet, iPhones full of applications, while we -- the citizens -- trip over screens that say "this service is not available in your country."