Evocation of one of the most important Cuban artists of the 20th century, a solitary man who in barely five years of feverish creation left a group of exceptional paintings and drawings, in addition to a handful of narrations.
Walking along a Havana street during the summer afternoon can be a refined way of torturing yourself. I walk along Trocadero and I decide to seek some shade and a bit of silence in the Museum of Fine Arts.
Financial restrictions and fuel import problems have greatly slowed down the economy more than expected. The memory of darker periods returns.
Storm clouds are again piling up over Cuba’s economy. The government is taking urgent measures, some linked to power cuts, which accentuate the memory of the dramatic times of the so-called Special Period. The affinity of some causes in time going into trances among each other does the rest. But President Raúl Castro does not admit comparisons with the crisis of those years. And present official policies are certainly different from those in the 1990s.
“Reflections” on someone who made us laugh but also think.
Faced by the recent physical disappearance of writer and journalist Héctor Zumbado, it’s not worth resorting to the common “he left a great void” because it already existed for more than two decades. Since then, the conditions in which his life passed were a mystery and his creative cycle had come to an end but now, with his definitive departure, people will look back and make assessments of his work which situates with greater precision his place in Cuban literature and journalism.
First the drought and later untimely rains reduced by a fifth the production of the 2015-2016 sugar harvest.
Adverse weather conditions, combined with industrial faults imposed a strong low in the 2015-2016 sugar harvest. Recent reports by the Azcuba Business Group indicate that it had barely reached 80 per cent of what it had planned. The emergency measures taken during the final stretch of the harvest and the government statement that it would not accept less tons than the previewed were of little use.
