The image of a single, homogeneous Cuba is increasingly the stuff of dreams. The single-party, command-economy socialist island of the Caribbean with a monolithic society and politics is giving way to a Cuba of social diversity moving towards a plurality that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago, writes Leonardo Padura, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a dozen languages.
In this article, Padura writes that since the 1990s and the profound economic crisis that the Cuban government dubbed the "special period in times of peace", the protectionist ceiling that the state tried to extend over every inhabitant of the island shattered, and there was an emergence of a variety of ways of seeing reality, interpreting it, and living it.
Since that period Cuba has turned into a country of many looks and many faces: in addition to the official Cuba of the television and press, there is an underground Cuba, beset by marginalisation of both areas and people; and then there is the mirage of tourism, exclusive beach resorts and clubs only for foreigners, among other Cubas.
//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, NEW ZEALAND, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM//
Global Issues