Cuba // Current TV

Assata Shakur, former Black Panther, speaks from exile in Cuba

Twenty-eight years ago, in a highly disputed trial, an all-White jury convicted former... more

worrg
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21 days ago
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October 24, 1962 - War Of Nerves.

Another nail-biting day in history.

Gordonskene
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4 months ago
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A Revolutionary Project: Explorations of Cuba from Walker Evans to Now

“A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now” is a photographic exhibition that looks at three critical periods in Cuba’s history as witnessed by photographers before, during and after the country’s 1959 Revolution. The exhibition juxtaposes Walker Evans’s 1933 images from the end of the Machado dictatorship, with views by contemporary foreign photographers Virginia Beahan, Alex Harris and Alexey Titarenko, who have explored Cuba since the withdrawal of Soviet support in the 1990s. Walker Evans's distinctive photographic style was nurtured by New York in the late 1920s, but it became more fully formed by his 1933 experiences in Cuba.

Virginia Beahan, Alex Harris and Alexey Titarenko look at Cuba in very different ways. In 2001, Virginia Beahan began a multiyear project on Cuba; Beahan’s Cuba is a land of contradictions, full of disappointments and hope, decay and rejuvenating beauty, simultaneously anchored to the past while looking beyond the present.

Through distinct vantage points, Alex Harris probed the country’s propensity for ingenuity as it underwent great transition. His 1998-2003 photographs focus on three icons of the island, the American car, the beautiful woman and the revolutionary hero, as metaphors to explore the distortions with which Cubans and Americans see one another.

Alexey Titarenko’s 2003 photographs of life in Cuba depict people persevering amid varying states of ruin: collecting food rations, fixing long-outmoded cars or playing baseball. Titarenko was drawn to Cuba following years spent photographing his home town of Saint Petersburg, a once-grand city transformed by revolution and slow decay under Communist rule. Titarenko deliberately photographed Havana in much the same way he’d photographed his native St. Petersburg, as a city that has suffered very much from communist policies and communist rule. And so his black-and-white and very dusty gray imagery removes any spark, any color from Havana, which is in fact very colorful.

This piece includes a number of black-and-white and color photographs, a photo-gallery and three documentary short films.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/a-revolutionary-project-explorations-of-cuba-from-walker-evans-to-now/“A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now” is a photographic... more

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4 months ago
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Castro calls Obama stupid, slams Cuba policy

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro lashed out at U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday... more

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4 months ago
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Bachmann CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS!

ThinkProgress: " Michele Bachmann has her eye on a new front in the War on... more

KB723
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5 months ago
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104 comments

CUBA. Una Storia anche Italiana - Museo di Roma in Trastevere

La mostra celebra un particolare “matrimonio esotico” tra culture, quella... more

Findart
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5 months ago
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Cuba gay man and transgender woman marry

A Cuban man and transgender woman have married in what is being seen as the... more

cabinettags
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6 months ago
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cuba struggle

linx my artist a cuba per raccontare l'ingiusto meccanismo politico alla fine del... more

LINXMYARTIST
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8 months ago
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US Targeting Cuba’s Health-Care System !

When your wrong, your just plain wrong! The U.S. government’s half-century... more

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8 months ago
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American Scholar and Blogger Ted Henken is Interrogated by Cuban State Police

The American Scholar and blogger Ted Henken, who was visiting cuba researching the... more

Zurama
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9 months ago
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Cuban Dissident Murdered by Cuban Police!

Martha Roque, a prominent member of the Cuban oppossition reports the sad news that... more

Zurama
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9 months ago
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Black in Latin America: Cuba's Next Revolution [PBS]

Blacks in Cuba: A look at being black in Cuba and issues of race, racism, and their... more

UrbanGypsy
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9 months ago
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The Mansion, The Country: A Story of Cuba

She has a five-bedroom house that is falling to pieces. She got it in the seventies when the family for whom she worked as a maid went into exile. At first she went through all the rooms each day, the interior patio, caressed the marble banister of the stairs to the second floor, played at filling the basins of the three bathrooms just to be reminded that this neoclassical mansion was now hers. The joy lasted for a while, until the first bulbs burned out, the paint started to peel, and weeds grew in the garden. She got a job cleaning a school, but not even six salaries for such a job would have been enough to maintain the ancient splendor of this house that seemed increasingly larger and more inhospitable.

Thousands of times, the woman in this story thought of selling the house inherited from her former employers, but she would not do anything outside the law. For decades in Cuba a market in housing was prohibited and it was only possible to exchange properties through a concept popularly known as a “swap.” Dozens of decrees, restrictions and limitations also arose, to regulate and control this activity, making moving an ordeal. An all-powerful Housing Institute oversaw the completion of a string of absurd conditions. With so many requirements, the procedures were strung out over more than a year, such that before families could go live in their new homes they were exhausted from filling out forms, hiring lawyers and bribing inspectors.

Such anxieties raised hopes that the Sixth Communist Party Congress would raise the flag for real estate. When, in the final report, it said that the purchase and sale of homes would be accepted and all that remained was to legally implement it, hundreds of thousands of Cubans breathed a sigh of relief. The lady with the mansion, at the moment it was announced, was sitting in front of her television avoiding a drip falling from the ceiling right in the middle of the living room. She looked around at the columns with decorated capitals, the huge mahogany doors, and the marble staircase from which the banister had been torn out and sold. Finally she could hang a sign on the fence, “For Sale: Five-bedroom house in urgent need of repairs. Wish to buy a one-bedroom apartment in some other neighborhood.”She has a five-bedroom house that is falling to pieces. She got it in the seventies... more

UrbanGypsy
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9 months ago
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WikiLeaks reveals details about Guantanamo detainees

Nearly 800 classified U.S. military documents obtained by WikiLeaks reveal... more

remyric
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10 months ago
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Cuba Enforces Private Property - The Free Market is Killing Us

Cuba says it will allow people to buy and sell their homes for the first time since... more

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10 months ago
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Cuba: Viva the capitalist revolution?

The footage looked like a high definition version of a Cold War pep rally: Military... more

ptr23
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10 months ago
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1 comment

History is Written by the Victors: Anniversary of Bay of Pigs

HAVANA, Cuba, April 18: By Miguel Iturria Savón - Two extraordinary and conflicting events pepper the history of Cuba in the second half of the twentieth century. The first occurred between 17 and 19 April 1961 in the Bay of Pigs, in the south of the island. The second, from April 22 to the 16th of September between the northern port of Mariel and Florida. They were both led by Cubans, but both the 1961 invasion brigade and the mass exodus of 1980, dot the island's bilateral relations with the United States - the refuge used by many in Cuban history as a supply center for our independence of the nineteenth century, and by opponents of the dictatorships of Geraldo Machado, Fulgencio Batista and Castro in the twentieth.

Much has been written about these events to the north and south of Florida. Hundreds of articles, interviews, testimonies, books, documentaries and other media support the communist government's version, the victors of the battle at Playa Giron over the brigade of compatriot exiles trained abroad. The version of the vanquished was, of course, suffocated by the revolutionary fetishism, and is hardly known.

Official propaganda reiterates that Giron (as it is known in Cuba), "was the first defeat of imperialism in Latin America ", which is a distortion, because although the Cuban expedition had the support of the United States government, no American troops took part in the naval operation. The fighters of Brigade 2506, like the guerrillas they were trying to link up with in the Escambray mountains, were fighting against the dictatorship that had taken control of the island after the revolutionary chaos.

The Cubans were less free after the Bay of Pigs. A day earlier, on April 16, 1961 - Fidel Castro declared the socialist character of the revolution. The island was subsequently occupied by thousands of Russian soldiers whose bases were maintained until the mid-eighties. The rest of the story goes through half a century of dictatorship, populist clamor, corruption and the legacy of silence.

The flip side to this was the mass exodus from Mariel and Florida, a popular referendum against authoritarianism. Twenty years of repression, rhetorical contortions, shortages filled with boredom and disappointment to thousands of youths who dreamed of living without instructions.

After the bus that forced the gates of the Embassy of Peru in La Habana, into the embassy entered the flood of the unhappy. To withdraw security to the embassy, the government created the chaos and encouraged the arrival of American vessels to pick up relatives and other "scum." In less than five months left 125,000 people fled to the United States.

Faced with this surge, the leader ordered rallies of repudiation, the throwing of eggs and stones against dissidents, and the introduction of more than three thousand madmen and criminals into the boats of hope in an attempt to destroy the reputation of those who left. Three decades later, the horror and defamation against those who choose another destination remains an official practice.

Accustomed to reliving the past - evoking attacks, revolutionary symbols and involving third parties in the national struggle, the Cuban regime celebrated its victory with another celebration of the Bay of Pigs and the socialist character of the revolution, while its strategists shuffle policies to prevent another mass exodus like the one that created the sea-bridge between Mariel and Florida in the spring of 1980; where bridging the gap between Mariel and Florida represented a leap to freedom.HAVANA, Cuba, April 18: By Miguel Iturria Savón - Two extraordinary and... more

UrbanGypsy
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10 months ago
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Aging Cuban revolutionary praises Raul Castro’s speech proposing economic major changes and term limits for leaders

Fidel Castro has applauded brother Raul’s speech proposing major economic... more

joeeddy
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10 months ago
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