She tried it during the Cold War and she succeeded in the post-Cold War: she swam across the Straits of Florida to join two shores that are still distant and tense due to the waves of politics.

A cute Havana hotel joins the 16th Biennial with works that range from subtle obviousness to intricate allegories inlaid with semi-precious stones.

The country’s highest immigration authority offers statements to OnCuba regarding controversial issues of the draft law that will soon be submitted to the National Assembly.

Pierre Jean González and Cedric Leiba Jr. got Broadway eating out of their hands because they have plenty of inventiveness to confront the stratification of U.S. capitalism when it comes to gays, Latinos, blacks and the poor.

Two documentaries reposition the subject of the embargo from the northern shore of the historical dispute that, with its own genetics, precedes and survives the Cold War.

Jorge Perugorría intends to turn Isla de la Juventud into his best work outside the sets: an ecological laboratory in the insular Caribbean.

A gallery of national artists and press reports make up an intergenerational visuality about the most recurring and spectacular natural cataclysm that hits the island.

Will one of Cuba’s most splendid dancers end his stage career sitting behind a desk? Apparently neither one nor the other will happen.

Although his name does not appear in culture headlines, Cuba owes him some front-page events. Resurrecting Chano Pozo in one of his Havana ecosystems is the most recent of such episodes.

In an epiphany in installments, Hanny Valenciaga discovers that her fondness for dolls pays off with a childhood short on toys.

Long before and after the embargo, in the 1960s, Cuba has not stopped exporting two very valuable assets to the United States: baseball players and jazz musicians.

Nicolás Guillén Landrián, the “enfant terrible” of Cuban documentary filmmaking, will have a second resurrection with a retrospective of his work, debates that smack of controversy, and audiovisual material from one of his rescuers.

A former minister of economy who speaks of an excess of control over management; a professor who describes the almost broken down state socialist enterprise that works based on a financial lie; a journalist who disagrees with such absolutisms; a self-employed person who complains about limitations; an official who defends central planning without crushing the market; and an economist who asks for courage and humility to accept that the model has had defects from the start. The most recent Último jueves of the year of the magazine Temas was great. Under the Jules Verne title of “Voyage to the center of the model,” the current Cuban economic system underwent a dissection, finding many pathologies: structural paradoxes, old mentality, over-bureaucracy, disarticulation of productive actors, countersteps, uncertain perspectives of the course, exacerbated regulations, institutional inconsistencies and handbook dogmas. And if that were not enough, all this syndrome is aggravated by external diseases. A scattered, wounded and harassed regional left and a Washington trying to implode the walls of the Cuban system with the pistons of the machinery of the full-scale blockade, have managed to further unbalance the model and disrupt its desired lines of coherence and action. Already in September of this...

It is necessary to agree with Federico García Lorca. “There is no map or exercise to search for magic.” Described in Andalusia as a mysterious and ineffable charm, the magic ran away to America more than five centuries ago in Columbus’ expeditions and right now we detect it, very much alive, in the musicians and dancers that liven up the evenings and nights in El Mesón de la Flota. Do they fan the guitar? / Yes. / And they play the string guitar? / Also, and without capo. / And do they sing without music? / Well, sometimes. / And the cante jondo? / That’s always present. Soleares, seguiriyas or tonás, whatever you want. / With jaleo or without jaleo? / With a lot of jaleo. / And the dancers? / The magic is always with them. That could well be the imaginary dialogue between a connoisseur of flamenco music and the group performing a season at El Mesón de la Flota flamenco bar. Located at 257 Mercaderes Street, on the first floor of the small hostel (bearing the same name) with five spacious rooms, the Mesón evokes the traditional Spanish inn that proliferated in the accesses to the port...

In Chechnya there is no homophobia. Rule out a miracle. The thing is that there are no homosexuals, the authorities allege, making them invisible with one rhetoric swipe in that Russian republic of the Muslim Caucasus. In Cuba there is homophobia, because of different reason, and certain art areas are helping to combat the phenomenon, delegitimizing it and placing it at the level of the social view, making it visible. “The spaces and manifestations where a different sexuality can be expressed are scarce and have their very defined borders,” complains Yanahara Mauri Villarreal (La Salud, 1984), in the middle of a vertigo of mass photos from her homoerotic phantasies and taken with “a semi-pro Nikon D3100 and some Russian flashes” in an exercise of scenic minimalism set up at home. “There are photos I have shot in the street, using a wall as a background.” “With these images I try to erase those borders, to free the individual of the weight of a tradition plagued by heterosexist formulas of seeing pleasure, the erotic and interpersonal relations,” says Mauri, a queer art activist, in an exclusive for OnCuba. It’s Los hijos Onán, a fleeting 10-day personal exhibit in the discreet studio...