One of my friends from Havana gave me the CD: “Fénix de Cristal” as a present and I have been listening it a lot in the last few days… Here is the video for one of the songs:

This summer has brought a lot of rain to Cuba. The first few days Cubans were praising the stormy weather and the cooler breeze, there was also a heavy drought so nature started to be kind to the island. After a week of showers, mostly in the afternoons and around the time people are finishing […]

Some things are consistent in Havana and those are usually the negative ones. Every pavement has a hole, every building has a public hall with a missing lightbulb, every block has at least one informer. As crazy as it may sound this time I noticed the consistency of the lack of street signs. Every traffic […]

The “frazada de piso” (cloth that is used to clean the tile floors in Cuba) disappeared from Havana stores for over a month. Rumours has it that the factory was closed, nothing was of course said on the national television, regarding that common matter. I was visiting Havana for a month and the floor cloth […]

About a month ago La Chucheria bar opened in Vedado (1rst St. btw C and D). This place is a great example of a private business, one of the many flourishing in Havana at the moment. Two apartments on the street level were purchased to build a restaurant on one side and a 3D cinema […]

One positive thing I noticed since I am in Havana this June is that summer fruits are all over the place and luckily the production is high or at least higher than previous years. Huge mangoes and incredibly sweet mameyes are being sold at the market. Beautiful pineapples and papayas decorate the trucks of private […]

Thanks to my friends, my mother’s friends, who are mine as well and the friends of friends I can receive emails from my mom everyday. The simple action of starting your computer, write an email and click the send button does not exist in Cuba for most of people. For the last couple of years […]

  Today I remembered Bavaria – Dragones Restaurant in China Town, Havana.  When I started dating my husband we gathered with a couple of friends to go eat at this popular restaurant that at that time was famous for its well loaded pizzas. Living in Cuba your brain will normally skip the analysis of “going […]

I am happy to celebrate my grandparents’ 54th wedding anniversary. Many things need to work together to achieve this number. My grandfather sent me an email and he assured me that love, respect and being there equally in the good ones and bad ones is indispensable. When I think about their lives together there has […]

En mi lenta misión de actualizarme con los filmes cubanos he encontrado esta película de Chijona en Youtube. El elenco es brillante, de lo mejor del cine cubano, así que vale la pena echarle un vistazo sólo por eso. Hasta Yotuel, el integrante del grupo Orishas, tuvo su rol en esta comedia. El guión no […]

Most of barbacoas (barbecues) in Cuba are indoors and do not involve meat or sausages at all. This is already hard to explain to a Spanish speaker who is also not familiar with this second use of the word, but as I commonly say, Cuba is on one extreme and the rest of the world […]

Summer is coming and some friends, specially students, want to visit their families in Cuba for a month. Purchasing an airplane ticket from Canada could be tricky if you want a direct flight to Havana. For Cubans living in Toronto the options are few: Air Canada and Cubana Airlines. Until 2005, Taca used to fly […]