Julio Antonio Fernández Estrada

An interview with Yunior Garcia a Cuban actor, playwright & activist

Nonardo Perea is an artist, writer, and audiovisual creator who has made his life experience and queer identity the core of his work—deeply self-referential and dissident. This is his way of thinking about Cuba.

Cuban journalist Abraham Jimenez Enoa has felt in his own flesh the contradictions of his country and of exile. His career has been marked by the honesty with which he chronicles everyday Cuban life, but also by the persecution that led him to abandon Cuba in 2022.

The Cuban people are on alert, because their university students have spoken. We are all with those who protest, demand and clamor for their rights. We’re with the students who have opted to act civically, at a time when this may seem too sluggish. We’re with the teachers, who won’t allow those students to be repressed.

I’m afraid of Trump. Of Trump and his measures. Not his shoulder-to-shoulder measure, nor the circumference of his neck, but of everything that might occur to him while sleeping, if indeed he does sleep.

I wish that in 2025 there will only be floods of joy, blushes igniting cheeks, collapses of ill intentions, and penetrations that aren’t from the sea or pirates. Let marital beds shake and let family cupboards overflow.

The Cuban state left the country. I don’t know if it took the opportunity to stay with some sports delegation at a competition somewhere or if it dared to endure the odyssey of volcanoes and jungles, or if it abandoned a medical mission in Africa or South America. However, I know it didn’t leave on a raft because it hasn’t been sent back. It left, and it didn’t say goodbye.

On July 11, 2021, Cuba changed. It changed its history; the conceptions about the character of Cubans; the domestic and international understanding of our people’s “immobility”; the way the State, the Government, and specifically, its repressive forces related to the citizenry.

The Cuban Government should surrender to its people. Drop their authoritarian weapons and surrender unconditionally.

Bureaucrats still do not understand that betraying the people is a crime of lèse-majesté. They have confused gratitude, believe they owe their power to their supporters and obstinately forget the citizenry.

The simple glance of a man who has been and still is a witness to the life of Cuban women. I’ve seen them, listened to them, read them.

Cuba floats on a pond. We are not adrift. In fact, aboard our raft of caña brava we crash against the walls of the basin of stagnant water in which the government has put us.

"Mabel Cuesta is a prestigious academic at the University of Houston. She is a poet, essayist, professor and activist for the salvation of the homeland, which she prefers to feel and understand as matria". An interview by Julio Antonio Fernández Estrada.

Jovann Silva treats his students like a Cuban teacher, with the self-assurance of Cuba. He is one of hundreds of thousands of Cubans who have had to make sharp turns in life to reinvent themselves in the new land of emigration.

There are many reasons why people leave Cuba. Also important among them is the political expression, launched in a resounding plebiscite, about the impossibility of trusting the political and economic institutions of the state.