NEWS

Message from Cardinal Juan de la Caridad García Rodríguez, Archbishop of Havana, with indications for the archdiocese, after the passage of this territory, on Friday, July 3rd, to the first phase of the post-pandemic recovery phase.

From Palabra Nueva we share the New Entry Call for academic year 2020-2021 of the Institute of Ecclesiastical Studies Father Felix Varela.

Last Monday, June 22, he began his online broadcasts RCJ Radio “The Sound of Hope”. With the emergence of this first Cuban Catholic broadcaster, the Church on the island manages to broadcast radio content continuously from a digital platform. What was long a dream cherished, a group of young people has made it a concrete proposal that bets on evangelization through the media.

“Movies don’t make the days but they can certainly make them better. Sundays, at least in Cuba, depend on the films one decides to see,” says film critic Daniel Céspedes. Sure that no Cuban television space can compete with the expansion of audiovisuals and other offers that promotes and distributes the package, Céspedes stops at the program Arte siete, a space whose reach and fidelity show the number of viewers who enjoy it as a family.

In Cuba, only #LaHabana does not enter the recovery stage. The capital continues to report cases and does not yet meet the five indicators established by the Ministry of Public Health to move on to another phase. Haste can’t be a risk factor for tomorrow. If we come to this day with the situation we have in the capital, the sensible thing to do is to rectify coordinates and do things correctly. Otherwise, any result will be forced and we will never remove the nasobuco from the face.

For a few weeks, men and women of cuban letters offered Word New their perceptions of the current pandemic. On a global scale, many are the workers of thought who, in the face of the reality of the world, take the floor. One of them, the prominent Cuban thinker residing in Germany, Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, does so from a philosophical critical stance that insists on “slowing to think”, as a first duty of his trade. For him, “thinking, especially in a time of crisis like the current one, requires the willingness to open our eyes and hearts to let ourselves be affected by what is happening alarmingly around us and ourselves as individuals and ‘intellectuals’.”

In these days of tribulation, Christians pray the #Padrenuestro to plead with #Dios to eradicate the disease and guide our steps in a scenario that has become surprisingly dangerous. Daily life has shown that we suffer from a chronic shortage of basic products and services even without #coronavirus and that we face a war against low birth rate, double currency, fragmentary government control, high prices set in the state and private sectors, as well as poor quality of the products offered. For this chronicler, “televised masses have come to soften the tensions now aggravated by the closure, and should be added to the preces of the ceremony, the permanence of such Sunday broadcasts when the isolation is over. It would greatly benefit the elderly, the disabled, hospitalized and also the prisoners, who need the Eucharistic message so much.”

The Marist brother of Spanish origin, Jesús Bayo Mayor, after thirteen years of stay in Cuba, returned to Chile, where he had first arrived in 1979. The first days in southern land were admiring to see economic progress and improvements in the urban infrastructure of its large capital. Soon that impression changed. Today he tells us that during the eight months he has been in that country, he has had the experience of seeing that he is afflicted by some social and economic viruses that are aggravating with the Coronavirus pandemic. Therefore, in addition to telling how Covid-19 affects Chile, it gives us a previous presentation of social movements.

Three months after the first cases of #Covid19 confirmed, #Cuba will begin to open the society to enter the so-called ‘new normal’. How we’re going to deal with that reality from now on, we don’t know. Because the queues are going to continue, our needs continue to grow, and the margins and gaps where the disorder operates are open.
With reduced collective transport and a declining supply of goods, goods and services, the new normal does not provide a very encouraging picture.