Lacking any protection, Cubans enter the General Customs of the Republic where they pay the price of return. A chalk mark on the suitcase signals who must pass through the scaffold-of-valuation and the institutional assault-by-taxation on certain goods. Curiously, the airport employees have a keen nose for detecting returning nationals...

The new ration book surprised us at the end of December, just when speculation was growing about the demise of this booklet with its grid-paper pages. It arrived, like every year, surrounded by anxiety and annoyance, submerging us in that approach-avoidance conflict generated by the subsidized. In its little pages...

With the end of the year the price of pork soars, pickpockets ramp up their activities and inter-provincial transportation is a dirty word. We discovered that as December 31 nears, the lines to buy a ticket lengthen and on the highway it becomes...

My predisposition to respect differences has been put to the test with the "Letter in opposition to the current obstructions and prohibitions on social and cultural initiatives." [English translation available here.] Coming to me by way of email, the...

For a long time we had a New Year's ritual, we met with several friends at Camilla's house. Seated on the floor with everyone talking at once, we would put a slip of paper in a wicker basket with our name, a personal...

I offer, again today, a guest post. This open letter to Cuba's Vice Minister of Culture was written by blogger Claudia Cadelo, in response to a decision to ban the performance art group, OmniZonaFranca, from performing in public places. It needs no further introduction.

Open...

"The impasse is the dynamics of deterioration," my friend said, part philosophic part pessimistic after listening to Raul Castro's speech in the National Assembly yesterday. The rope of our prognostications had not stretched tight waiting for a possible announcement of changes, but we had some expectation around certain long-promised measures....

For Roberto San Martin

I've lived here and there. I've been a voice asking permission to leave my country and an exile waiting for permission to enter. The machine has crushed me between both sides of its serrated cogs: for...

I know them from forever, since I ventured beyond my neighborhood of dirty facades to a Havana that never ceases to surprise me. You could say they resemble almost all my friends: hairy, alternative and smiling. They are similar to those young people who crowded into our living room a...

The Big Bad Wolf or the Boogieman was called something else in my childhood: The Urban Reform. Raised in a house for which my parents had no papers, when there was a knock on the door it scared us to death because it...

Like the sneeze of a desired flu, the alternative Cuban blogosphere continues to propagate itself. It is no longer like the bleak wasteland that displayed -- if anything -- a few pseudonymous pages in April 2007, when I started Generation Y. I've lost count of how many we are now,...

On December 10 a mob assaulted women who had only gladioli in their hands. Fists raised -- urged on by plainclothes police -- they surrounded these mothers, wives and daughters of those imprisoned since the Black Spring of 2003. Several of the attackers learned the script on the run and...

With this guest column I would like to introduce a new blogger from Havana, Laritza Diversent. Laritza is an attorney. She graduated from the University of Havana in 2007, and the same year also took up the profession of independent journalist. Her Blog, The Laws of Laritza, is now...

My grandmother told me about it with the same rapture that, decades earlier, her parents had spoken of the old dream of El Dorado. She divulged that its mass was between yellow and orange, dry at first bite but pleasant and soft...

The store is located in the left atrium at the corner of Galiano and San Rafael streets, where there used to be a Ten Cent store, long since rotted from age and filth. It's like an alien spaceship that landed in a neighborhood that has seen many of its businesses...

December has always been a month to spend little time at home. Outside it is not as hot as usual, and the New Latin American Film Festival offers a full program to tempt us to leave the house. It's time to get out the sweaters and not worry too much...

A friend swore to me ten years ago that he would not go to the beach again until he could buy -- near the sand -- a beer in national currency. His pasty white legs confirm that he hasn't been to the sea for a decade, while waiting to pay...

Adolfo Fernandez Sainz lives among stories like this one; he turned 61 on November 30, six of them locked in Canaleta prison since the Black Spring of 2003.

That afternoon the last of his canine teeth would be extracted. He had spent...

Someone shoved a piece of paper under my door. A sheet cut in half with instructions about how to evacuate in the case of a hurricane or an invasion. One phrase struck me like the refrain of a bad song: "Sew a tag to the clothes of minor children with...

It delights us to cure ourselves of that stage of life we call adolescence and, in particular, to become independent. Finding an answer to that question we have asked ourselves so often: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Able to leave home without explaining ourselves, being...