Cuba Blog
Cuba Blog is an outlet for independent Cuban journalists to post their work. The articles are available in English and/or Spanish and have been sent to us directly by the authors.
/ Miguel Iturria Savón
The Cow
I did not know it was sacred until the accident happened. I was on my way from Guantánamo to Havana, travelling by a Yutong 1244. It was last Thursday very early in the morning on the main road between Las Tunas and Camagüey, somewhere close to Sibanicú. The impact woke up all the passengers.
By the time I got off, the drivers had already informed local police and the most curious of the passengers had all gathered around the corpse. The nose of the bus was dented, and one of the drivers was quarrelling with the youngest policeman with whom he later left for the police station in order to enter the victim in the register of deaths. He came back at six in the morning, accompanied by another officer and the vet from a nearby farm.
We went on our way with a 3-hour delay, people murmuring and telling stories.
“Only here and in India is this animal held in reverence,” said someone scornfully. “But there it is at least justified by religion and their tradition, but here it is a problem of shortages, law and butchers,” added an old lady who claimed not to remember the taste of a steak.
“If things returned to be like before, a pound of beef could be bought at the butcher` s for a few cents and my son would not be serving eight years in prison because he had slaughtered one piece of cattle,” murmured an old man on my side.
This is how the journey passed. The passengers became possessed by the ghost of the cow. The scarcity of meat and the penal provisions regulating slaughter, sell or receipt without a previous permission by the Government seemed to have blurred their simple mind dulled by fantasies.
I remained silent, but Matilda came to my mind - the lovely cow from television which re-emerges as the Phoenix bird on the bottles of milk that can be bought in shops for Cuban pesos. I also remembered the White Udder, the champion of a dairy cow whom the Commander in Chief had embalmed for having him gratified with her two hundred litres per day. And suddenly I was overcome by nostalgia as I remembered what the Maximum Leader once pledged. We have been promised to see the bay of Havana filled with the foamy liquid produced at the milk farms of Bayamo and Camagüey.
Could the cow that bumped into our bus possibly be a granddaughter of those ruminants that discredited our illustrious Messiah?
As I was on my way in the bus, many things about that noble animal came to my mind, but I could imagine neither the taste of its milk nor the taste of its meat. Perhaps the sacred and the forbidden serve as a good advice for us to avoid temptation and years of prison. May God save us from sin!
2010-09-08 / Will Weissert - AP
Report: Castro blasts Ahmadinejad as anti-Semitic
HAVANA — Fidel Castro criticized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for what he called his anti-Semitic attitudes and questioned his own actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 during interviews with an American journalist he summoned to Havana to discuss fears of global nuclear war.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, blogged on the magazine's website Tuesday that he was on vacation last month when the head of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington — which Cuba maintains there instead of an embassy — called to say Castro had read his recent article about Israel and Iran and wanted him to come to Cuba.
Goldberg asked Julia Sweig, a Cuba-U.S. policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, to accompany him, and the pair spent portions of three days talking with Castro.
Cuba's state-controlled media reported Aug. 31 that Goldberg and Sweig met with Castro and attended the dolphin show at Havana's aquarium, but the blog was the first to reveal details of what they discussed. ...more
2010-09-08 / Expatica News Service
Two more Cuban political prisoners arrive in Spain
Two more Cuban political prisoners arrived in Madrid Tuesday, bringing to 30 the number of dissidents who have reached Spain following their release under a deal between Havana and the Catholic Church.
The two men, Victor Arroyo and Claro Sanchez, traveled to the Spanish capital on two separate commercial flights accompanied by 16 close family members, a foreign ministry spokesman said.
Arroyo was serving a 26-year prison term while Sanchez had been jailed for 15 years for dissident activities.
Cuba agreed on July 7 to release the remaining 52 of 75 dissidents who were arrested in a March 2003 crackdown who are still behind bars in a landmark deal that was brokered by Madrid.
The deal came after dissident hunger striker Guillermo Farinas nearly starved to death.
If all 52 dissidents are freed, it will be the largest release of Cuban prisoners since 1998 when 300 dissidents were spared jail time following a visit by then pope John Paul II.
2010-09-08 / Badge Greenslade (Guardian UK)
Cuban blogger is press freedom hero
Cuban blogger Yoani Maria Sánchez Cordero has been named by the International Press Institute as its 60th World Press Freedom Hero.
Sánchez's blog, Generation Y, is an acerbic critique of life in Cuba, and a telling reminder to the world of the restraints on free speech and expression on the island.
Launched in 2007, the site was rendered unavailable in April 2008 by the Cuban authorities. Since then, Sánchez has managed to keep the blog alive through a series of ingenious measures and is thought to have a regular readership of more than one million.
She has been refused permission to travel outside of Cuba at least six times in the past two years. In 2008, Time magazine named her one of the world's 100 most influential people, noting that "under the nose of a regime that has never tolerated dissent, Sánchez has practised what paper-bound journalists in her country cannot: freedom of speech." ...more
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