Another year is about to end and Cuba is still in uncertainty. “One little step forward and one little step backwards”, as people say showing their ancient wisdom. Despair hounds us. Suspicion about the process of gradual changes grows. The true structural changes are more and more urgent and cannot be put off any longer. An immense majority of us are experiencing it. All Bishops in Cuba acknowledge it. Even the government knows it but it doesn’t...

  This is not a moment for complaints. This is a moment for proposals. Cuba needs urgent economic, social, political and cultural projects to respond to tomorrow’s challenges.   Cuba also needs its citizens to be able to choose and develop their own life projects here and now. Citizens without life projects are not persons but mass. Citizens without life projects are a nation without a soul. And it doesn’t exist.   The ones who think...

On the 29th of January, 1993 the Civic and Religious Education Center (CFCR) belonging to the Catholic Diocese in Pinar del Río was being created. Its two purposes were:   1.The ethical and civic education based on the values of Christianity for all the citizens who wished to receive it regardless of creed, philosophy or political choice. 2.The reconstruction of the civil society fabric in Cuba.   On the 3rd of January, 1994 the Socio Cultural magazine...

Cuba won’t be able to change without a deep change regarding the exercise of everyone’s right to all kinds of property over the tangible and non-tangible material goods; the sense of belonging, the economic development and the degree of democratic participation depend mostly on this point.   The relationship between property and progress is the same relationship that exists between freedom and human-social development. It’s also the same relation...

Cuba, Cubans, women and men need for the democratic present and future, to acknowledge and trust the civic value of representativeness.   In the middle of the 21st century, we don’t live in Pericles’ Athens where all of the citizens used to go to the Areopagus to exercise primitive democracy personally and shouting. Not all of the ones who lived in Athens were free and thus citizens and not all of them went to the theatre to discuss the matters of...

“There will be no isolated human intellect, even if it is vigorous and prolific, that would alter the slow and progressive course of the natural elements of life which improve and transform themselves in an uplifting way through man’s education and freedom; and the fair rights that are intelligently requested must surely win with no violence required; and the only efficient way of improving the existing social evils, using natural and effective means,...

“To live is to love. To love is to resurrect”. These mystical verses by Dulce María LOynaz can summarize the life and the work of the emeritus archbishop from Santiago de Cuba, Pedro Claro Meurice Estiú who was rightly called “the Lion of the East”. The end of his pilgrimage took him by surprise in another shore of Cuba which is only one; it happened maybe as a visible sign of his passion to unify the Nation-in-Diaspora. And now that it happened there...

There have been already many and varied pronouncements about this topic of the exercise of citizen sovereignty and the election and the duration of public servers. One of the most interesting proposals has been the one made by the Editorial of the fraternal magazine “Espacio Laical” in which they propose, among other aspects, direct, secret and free elections of the president of the Nation and the participation of persons who are not members of the...

“Friendship is the greatest of the civic goods because if there is friendship the civil confrontations will be reduced to the minimum” (Aristotle: “The Nicomacheme Ethics”. Book IX, 1170)   “Convivencia” magazine is going to be four years old. Its name (living together) is a need and a proposal. But we don’t want to speak about us. We want to continue thinking and suggesting things for the present and for the future of Cuba always with our feet...

“You are and should be the protagonists of your own personal and national history” (John Paul II, Cuba 1998)            The two visits by the Supreme Pontiffs of the Catholic Church are landmarks that show a step forward taken by Cuba civil society. Cuba has changed and not only and not always for the worse.  Our opinion is that between both apostolic visits there is a process that goes forward: the process of the...