Red Havana and Cuba

Skinny, the best friend of Conde who was incapacitated in the war in Angola and reason why he never leaves home. What is it about the war in Angola that Skinny talks so much about during the novel? The next video is historical review of what happened in the called "Operacion Carlota." English subtitles available.

The regime of Hugo Chavez that held power in Venezuela for 15 years brought some interesting people to work with the country. The Venezuelan government had links with other left-wing countries such as Russia, China, and yes the beautiful Cuba. Cuba, as well as the other countries, has been under a dictatorship for at least 50 years. Fidel Castro was the president at the time when he and Hugo Chavez decided to send Cuban "doctors" to Venezuela, so they could be part of "Barrio Adentro" one of the social helps that the government gave to people in exchange for petroleum.  Barrio Adentro or inside the hood was a mission that sent Cuban doctor to the poorest communities, where very often they were murdered or robbed by the criminals of these communities. As result of these crimes against them, the doctors started to desert and leave to Colombia.    "No Venezuela neither Cuba huh? I always had that question in my mind, what is wrong with Cuba? the government ...

Source: Jason Raish / www.jasonraish.com        Something that I have found interesting while looking into Cuba is how the tourist industry catered to foreigners. Foreigners from all over flocked to Cuban beaches and desirable places for the beautiful landscape and water. To isolate these tourists from the rest of Cuba and their citizens, they often did not allow Cubans to come near the hotels and resorts and did not allow tourists to wander too far from these places. Before 1997, If a policeman found a Cuban citizen who was not working in the tourism industry talking with a tourist they would regard the Cuban as a thieve and throw him in jail, even if it was the tourist who initiated the conversation. Even the workers who were employed by the government were not allowed to mingle and conversate with the guests, for fear their capitalist ideologies would cause government dissidence in the Cuban population.       But it is hard to see how these pe...

       When the Soviet Union fully collapsed in the 1991, the Cuban economy was dealt a devastating blow. Because the Soviets were the main source of their exports and imports, they no longer had a means of making profits, and food and medicine (among other things) became very scarce. It's GDP collapsed to 34% of its former self, and exports and imports were cut by 80%. Source: The Havana Project      Before the collapse of the USSR, the Russians exported large amounts of pertroleum to the Cubans in exchange for sugar. Fidel sold any surplus petroleum to other countries( which made petroleum the second largest export product before the 1990's) when the Russian Federation took power in Russia, they no longer supplied Cuba with one of its main exporting products and cut exportation of oil to Cuba by 10% of what the USSR had supplied. In retaliation, Fidel cut of all imports of oil from the Russian Federation, causing a massive need to drastically...

Leonardo Padura is the most-read contemporary Cuban writer in the world the last decade. He is the winner of the 2015 Princess of Asturias award which he won in Spain receiving it with a baseball in hand, being baseball his biggest passion. The novel The man who loved the dogs in which Padura reconstruct the life of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his assassination in Mexico gave Padura most of his recognition, precisely because in a Cuba that the writer was not only prohibited by the regime but simply in -existence, the author of Red Havana was erased from history.  With time also in  Cuba, despite his criticism of the Castro regime and the as he describes,  "raw and tragic, " reality of cuba , he received the National Literature Prize in 2012. He was born in 1955 in Mantilla, a small neighborhood of Cuba. Same neighborhood in which his great-grandfather, grandfather and father were born and raised. Padora still living in this place in which he has cre...

Discrimination against homosexuality in Western culture in general, which includes republican Cuba, is a widely discussed topic. In Cuba, these acts were sanctioned by the master narrative of a perpetual revolutionary crisis and by the project of creating an ideal figure of socialism, in a context in which to express itself against such official opinions would characterize one of counterrevolutionary or agent of the Imperialism, and justifying any action taken against one. Within the revolutionary codes, homosexuality constituted an ideological difference, one of the "negative cultural influences" denounced by the First National Congress of Education and Culture of 1971 - "one of the most nefarious moments in Cuban cultural politics", according to Padura Fuentes  from which emerged the initiative for the parametrization of artists like Marques in Havana Red. The connection of the intelligentsia with homosexuality was evident in the recognition by Congress of t...