...lives in the Vatican. Calle 13.   That’s right: the Pope is Latin American, but he is a Pope. That is, we can’t make a party of it. It does not matter if he is Argentine, Lebanese, or Italian. He represents the Catholic Church, its statutes, its preachments, its actual placing in contemporary politics. We can’t ask him for anything else. In fact, any symbolically unusual attribute or to the left of Jorge Bergoglio is simply a stroke of cunning. He has been chosen to change an image, to wash the stains of a threatened institution. Bergoglio is not only Argentinean, or the first Latin American pope. He is also a Jesuit. Being Jesuit does not mean that he supports the Theology of Liberation. B eing Argentine does not mean that he is going to help our mainland or that he belongs to the Third World. That is still a fundamental error. Believing that a particular man assumes beforehand the characteristics of the circles which he belongs to, it is like believing that all millionaires are bad, that all poor people are good, and that all poets are sensitive. A worker- Lukacs brings that idea to Marxism-is not a revolutionary...

Interview with Rey Ordonez, during his visit to Havana

I have a bad habit. I remember important dates with days and sometimes weeks in advance, but a few hours before I completely forget them, as if I turn off the alarm in my head. This brings, of course, serious implications: you ignore your mother's birthday, or your grandmother's birthday. There is no greater example of filial ingratitude or indifference. The family has the strange habit of requiring them to show reciprocity and love in a way, in my opinion, misleading and too banal to take it seriously. Any wayward, only with a good memory, can pretend to be the exemplary son. If you want to lead a life without unnecessary ties, then you have two options. Either you leave the house. Or educate your parents. I mean, either deny, or start a revolution. In journalism is more of the same. One goes through life remembering secret dates that advertising kinds of put aside till the ripe moment to use the excuse of the anniversary. That's one of the cartoons of the trade that excites me so much. Stalking the specific day, in the best case, get what you want to say about it, or simply to write a text...

Carlos Acosta has debuted as a fiction writer with Pig’s Foot, a novel that charts, they say, the history of Cuba from the nineteenth century to today, and has been included on the Waterstones 11 annual list of the books most promising debut novels in the United Kingdom.

-Tell us a little about what happened in New York? -A strategy problem. When they changed me to Chicago I had eight wins and three losses, I was almost going to the All-Star game. Maybe they were expecting more from me, but I was much better in Chicago. I was with Ozzie (Guillen). I think Joe Torres has been one of the best managers I've had, but I prefer Ozzie’s spark. Also, I do not speak English. I do not speak English now, after ten years, and Ozzie speaks Spanish. We understood each other well.

Photos: Gabriel Dávalos

Someday Victor Mesa and Ariel Pestano will make it up. Or not. For now, they’ve been able to put in the same bag what Cuban writer Mañach defined as the three cyclic forms of nationality: the ball, the rumor and the lottery. Team Cuba is like the lottery: be part of it can become as eventful and gratifying as drawing the winning number, and such a reality brings its respective share of amplified rumor.

The issue of reggaeton has caused a wave of rumours, inquisitive or not, during the last weeks. People are talking about prohibition, regulation and foreign agencies reproduce comments and forecast Cuba entering a musical Inquisition, but, it seems that nothing is going to happen.

The decline of Santiago de Cuba is the greatest wrong in Cuban baseball. Not the changing structures, not the low roof -very low-of the National series, not the inaccurate numbers, not the lousy arbitration, but the aimlessly drifting of a indomitable and historical team.

The most complex times are about to arrive. Thus, using a farsighted tone, marino Murillo, Vice-President of the Council of Ministers, defined the coming changes that the Cuban government will make to update its economic model, a much-needed action that has become essential for the future of the country.

There are not such irreconcilable months like December and January, perhaps because Christmas is the only opium authorized, scheduled and established by the terms of Western culture. The twenty early days of December are something else, maybe until Christmas Eve, although I believe that even before you start to notice the mood changes and everything becomes somewhat artificial or noisy.

Photos: Reno Massola The fact that Descemer Bueno is an essential artist in the current Cuban music scene, it is proved, in the first instance, by the restless flock of people on Tuesday December 26, long before eight thirty at night, that were lurking outside the Mella Theater ready for anything.

On the other side of the phone , hardly knowing how everything had happened, Israel Rojas talked incessantly, he treated me with absolute undeserved deference, about my views on chronicles non worth quoting here. I began blushing, with nothing to say, speechless, but stayed there until Israel also said he had read Banda sonora (Soundtrack), that text with a deadly line: "At fourteen I adored Buena Fe , but at fifteen I acquired critic conscience ".

The best films I've seen in my personal movie theater of my laptop, alone, presumably at night, but not too late, but at the gates of the night, say around nine or ten, as an appetizer of wakefulness, as food for the vigil and hallucination. Do not watch a movie before going to bed because the film is still, sequence, trick, the very same powerful attributes of sleep, and that would be an unfair competition.

My dear Eric: I didn’t see you in Wednesday´s concert. There were so many people that I don’t know if it was bad luck or you just couldn’t enter. I looked for you among the bundles. I looked for you at the exit. I tried, among thousands of people, to sharpen my ears and to distinguish a filament of your voice, a brief wrong sign that pointed at me your exact location in the bubbling the Karl Marx theater was. It was not possible, naturally, only in moments of desperation or of great anxiety people come with completely crazy things like that.

Fito Paez has a long love relationship with Havana. A relation of comings and goings, somewhat heartbreaking, like any relationship worthy of an artist with a city that seems made or drawn or just for art shows.

Los Van Van will open the film festival in Havana and nobody finds it weird. In fact, it is not. But, twenty-five years ago that wouldnt have happened, they wouldnt have opened such a cultural event. Popular music, or to be more accurate, the music that people dance to, is not designed for that.

During the last Havana International Trade Fair, an interesting piece of news came out, but the Cuban media hasn’t covered it sufficiently. Maybe it is to deemphasize it. Maybe they think is wise not to give too much credit to such a step, but the opening of the sugar industry to foreign capital is decisive proof that the Cuban government has set on a path to deconsecrate the canons of the Cuban socialism pantheon.

For Lauren Cleto and Yuris Nórido, friends and teachers My trips to the ballet are counted. Let’s not go any further because there is no further. During the last Ballet Festival of Havana - at the height of the assistance-I went to see Coppelia, Swan Lake and took a look at the dramatic presentation of José Manuel Carreño and some figures of U.S. ballet companies.

Breezes you have the secret of the two swells, The chill of the dew on the skin... and the detachment of the body of another nailed body. Lezama Lima.   If there is a change with equal impact both in the real and the symbolic world, that is the immigration reform that from next January will be in force in the country.  

Photos: Alain L. Gutiérrez The striking thing about the concert by Habana Abierta was that slight shade of unreality. Practically no one could believe it.

In the documentary Buscando a Chano Pozo (Seeking Chano Pozo), the myth is presented in all its glory. Isolina Carrillo, for example, believes that he was not a brave man. Or maybe, she seems to say later, he was a brave man, but because he was fighting for his own. Once, she says, he got angry and demanded a larger sum for his copyright and next month they shot at him and missed at the gate of a building.

After much struggle it seems that finally, on October 5, at the Salon Rosado de la Tropical, Cubans of my generation can go to a concert of Habana Abierta. A spectacular band that has grown on the myth of the distance and those eerie gatherings at 13 and 8 streets in the Havana city’s neighbourhood of Vedado, albeit with bitter pride, just some nostalgic people can recall.

Photos: Michel Aguilar and Alain L Gutiérrez A long time ago, more than sixty years, the illustrious and somewhat forgotten chronicler Eladio Secades pondered this: "Among us, an honourable secret? Is Havana truly joyful?"