Cuba // Current TV

Former State Department official sentenced to life for spying for Cuba - CNN.com

Washington (CNN) -- A former State Department analyst was sentenced to life in prison... more

irishlonewolf
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1 year ago
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Fidel Castro appears again, warns of war | Reuters

(Reuters) - Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro took his warning of impending... more

irishlonewolf
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Alex Cuba Leaves His Heart in New York

New York City holds a lot of warm memories for Canada-based Cuban musician Cuba.... more

CafeMedia
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Olga Guillot, Cuba's "Queen of the Bolero," Has Died

Cuban 'Queen of the Bolero' dies at 87 By the CNN Wire Staff July 12, 2010... more

EthicalVegan
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New Photos Show Smiling, Healthy Castro

New pictures of Fidel Castro show the stooped but smiling former leader venturing out... more

itdango
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Cuba Vows to Release 52 Political Prisoners

MEXICO CITY — The Cuban government on Wednesday agreed to release 52 political... more

UrbanGypsy
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Traveling throughout Cuba in a Wheelchair

3 friends discover Cuba, Cuban Style

Intermodemedia
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1 year ago
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Federal Authorities Paid Journalists To Sabotage Trial | This Can't Be Happening

Is it coincidence or conspiracy? Supporters of five Cuban intelligence agents now... more

toyotabedzrock
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Ten Years Later, Elian Gonzalez Says He's Happy to Be in Cuba

10 years later, Elian Gonzalez says he's happy to be in Cuba By David Ariosto,... more

EthicalVegan
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Reflections by comrade Fidel. KNOWING THE TRUTH TIMELY.

I received an e-mail from an office in Cuba asking me to view this letter by Fidel... more

Monkey_Films
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Life After Oil: Cuba Can Teach Us How to Live Without Our Dirty Fossil Fuel Addiction

http://www/alternet.org/story/147256/life_after_oil%3A_cuba_can_teach_us_how_to_live_without_our_dirty_fossil_fuel_addiction?page=1

The crisis in the Gulf is only the most recent reminder that we have to begin imagining a post-carbon future.

As oil pours into the Gulf of Mexico, providing a painful reminder of the cost society pays beyond the gas station pump for fossil fuel energy, it's hard to even begin to imagine what a post-carbon future would look like. If you can't picture it, try looking about 90 miles south of Florida.

Cuba, which enjoyed plentiful oil during much of the latter half of the 20th century, entered a crisis when the Soviet Union and the Socialist Bloc disintegrated. In late 1989, Cuba saw its access to oil, food imports and chemicals used in industrial agriculture whisked away practically overnight. A few years later, in 1992, scarcity increased further when the U.S. tightened its blockade of Cuba. After 20 years of painful transition, Cuba is now a living example of how a society can flourish while treating oil like the scarce, filthy and increasingly risky-to-procure energy source it is.

The United States can learn two lessons from Cuba: first, what might happen if we do not transition to clean, renewable forms of energy before our oil runs out; and second, how we might successfully thrive in an era when oil is no longer a cheap form of energy we take for granted. Where Cuba's model can offer the most to the U.S. is in lessons learned about agriculture. Few Americans may be aware of how fossil fuel-dependent our food system really is. Oil powers tractors and fuels food processing plants, refrigerators and freezers that store our food. Oil powers the trucks and trains that ship our food to us and we also use oil to make pesticides. As for fertilizer? That comes from natural gas.

Cuba is living proof that an abrupt shift is painful. No Cuban who was alive at the time can forget the first years of the so-called "Special Period." Sara Daisy, who lives in Havana, describes waiting upwards of five hours for a bus to take her to work. Fernando, a middle-aged Cuban with a bit of a belly, says he lost 25 pounds in those first years, sucking in his tummy to show how he used to look. The societal upheaval caused by the lack of oil permeated every aspect of Cuban life. When Cubans were able to find transportation to their jobs, often they would arrive to find the power was out and they could not work anyway. The commute home was no easier, with another long wait for the bus.

Cuba, a nation with nearly 100 percent literacy and a highly educated population, simply didn't have enough oil to transport students to and from the island's major universities. And, perhaps most fundamentally, Cubans had simultaneously lost food and the inputs needed to grow their own food using industrialized agriculture. With only an average of 60 percent of their caloric needs met, Cubans began to starve.

The country needed to restructure in order to survive. Some of its adaptations are ones we in America might consider sub-optimal (like the widespread and encouraged use of hitchhiking as a means of transportation). But, keeping in mind that we can and should be selective in what we replicate, Cuba does provide a model for running a modern society on little oil. Nowhere is this truer than in agriculture. Cuba is perhaps the only country on earth with a national policy promoting food sovereignty via agroecology (that is, being able to feed their own population by growing food organically and ecologically).http://www/alternet.org/story/147256/life_after_oil%3A_cuba_can_teach_us_how_to_live_wi... more

JanforGore
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Cuba's Orwellian Paradise

[Translated from Spanish from the Blog Generacion Y by Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez]

They are there to watch and record us. Dozens, hundreds of cameras scattered throughout the city, as if it were not enough that there are vans filled with police, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) on every block, and the security forces in their checked shirts. They have been installed with an efficiency rarely seen in the execution of any project of public benefit. Their sophisticated structure is the same on streets where half the houses are on the verge of falling down, as in the modern tourist enclaves and on the sumptuous Fifth Avenue. They capture those who traffic in beef, sell drugs, or steal a gold chain; but they also monitor those who don’t keep guns under their beds, but rather opinions in their heads.

When these “fish eyes” began to be installed everywhere, they generated a sense of paralysis among Havanans. I remember looking for blind spots where the crystal globes couldn’t see me. Then I relaxed a little and learned to live with them, though I still felt the itch on the back of my neck of a person who knows they are being observed. Among the speculations about these filming devices is one that they have face-detection programs – including a data base – that read anthropometric measurements. But comments of this kind may well belong to the fantasy catalog generated by everything new.

These public cameras – the embodiment of the Orwellian “telescreen” – have ushered in a new cinematography. Although they basically operate automatically, some hands have leaked their contents to the alternative information networks. Dozens of images are emerging from the police archives and circulating right now, by flash memory. Videos where we see ourselves committing crimes, surviving, stealing and rebelling. Minutes of police beatings, car crashes and images of prostitution between young boys and tourists twice their age. One is a complete and shocking snuff movie, which for weeks jumped from one screen to another, from cell phones to DVD players.

Without intending it, the police have given us the crudest testimony they could about our present reality. A succession of scenes that, no doubt, will be stored in the visual memory of this country.[Translated from Spanish from the Blog Generacion Y by Cuban dissident blogger Yoani... more