The sight of Cubans traveling to Cuba, lugging duffel bags crammed with soap, toys and other consumer goods to give to their relatives, and bringing 40-inch television sets, bicycles, video-game consoles, even car tires, bothers me. My annoyance revolves around two points: 1) Those travelers are aiding Castro’s Cuba. Showering their relatives with those items […]
S. CHRIS SHIRLEY It is my pleasure to introduce S. Chris Shirley, award-winning author and director, whose first novel, Playing by the Book, was recently published by Magnus Books. Chris, before we start, I want to tell you how much I loved your book. Every time I put it down, I felt like I had […]
First, it’s a dream. Then, it’s hard work that stretches over months and years, peppered with sheer frustration. Doubts creep into your sleepless nights. Who will want to read this? Who cares? You don’t think you can do it. Somehow you go on. You’re too far into it to give up. The day comes when […]
According to a song in the musical A Chorus Line, all is beautiful at the ballet. But is it? At the National Ballet of Cuba, which has been hailed as one of the leading ballet companies in the world and the best in Latin America, dancers receive modest salaries of $10 to $30 a month […]
To some, she was Rosaura, Nena, or Nenita. To me, she was my mother, my world. She was my first piano teacher, instilling in me a life-long passion for music. She was Mother Courage, defying Castro’s regime and committing the ultimate sacrifice: sending her children away so they would be safe from communism. She was […]
On April 17, 2014, Nobel laureate, Gabriel Garcia Marquez died at his home in Mexico City. He was 87 years old. Born in Colombia and known to millions simply as “Gabo”, Garcia Marquez was regarded as the most popular Spanish writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century. His works outsold everything published in […]
Today I have the pleasure of presenting Arturo Bueno and his wife, Estela, two amazing people I met through the Pedro Pans of California Group. Both participated in the exodus of Cuban children that came to this country between 1960 and 1962. Arturo, tell me where you lived in Cuba and how old you were when you came to the U.S. […]
When and how did you decide to write a cozy versus another type of mystery? I decided to try my hand at writing a cozy mystery after I read a couple of cozy series by M. C. Beaton. Everything about the cozy I liked, the amateur sleuth, the calm, small town setting that hid wickedly, […]
It is time to give thanks, and I want to offer my gratitude to a program that took care of more than 14,000 Cuban children between the years 1960 and 1962: Operación Pedro Pan. Without this program, we—I was among those children—would not have received the love we experienced when we arrived on American shores, […]
The Federal Shutdown When I came to this country, escaping Fidel’s communism, America was the epitome of democracy where political parties with opposite ideologies could coexist and work together toward a common goal. I didn’t know then that one day I’d see American democracy at its most dysfunctional. I’m talking about the federal government shutdown, […]
LORENZO PABLO MARTINEZ 