NEWS

Centro Habana, if not the standard-bearer of social indiscipline in the Cuban capital, is in the avant-garde platoon. What causes affect this? The following text tells us about the complex structure and social formation of this slum and insists on those potentials that are addressed with the help of the social sciences, become strengths in any difficult situation such as #Covid19.

With the lyrics of a song, the sister of the Congregation of God’s Love, Antonia Valverde, Toñi, as she is known, expresses her gratitude for the welcome received from God and others during this obligatory isolation.

Word New reproduces Catechesis number six, dedicated to the theme of prayer. It was released at the General Audience on Wednesday, June 10, 2020. We invite you to share it from our domestic Church.

Cuban narrator, essayist and critic Margarita Mateo finds the idea of returning to what many already call new normalcy unpleasant. He fears that this new normality will be very similar to the previous one and reproduce the same patterns. For the university professor, this would lead us to “continue to live in a world where values continue to prevail that far from contributing to the improvement of the human species, tend to promote the worst of it, including epidemic idiocy and attachment to the banal”.

For Neife Maria Rigau Chiong, a young Habanera Catholic, these months of confinement have known her for retirement. Although initially, they were initially painted lost, he could later see them as an opportunity. “As at all times,” he says, “in this period I have also been comforted to know myself accompanied by God; it is one of the certainties that we must always keep within us, because it gives us the strength we need to act or the patience we need to wait. That certainty is Christian hope.”

As a pressing measure of mental health before #Covid 19, the psychologist, critic and journalist, Jesús Dueñas Becerra, advises avoiding, at all costs, the place in our psychs of fear, anxiety, anguish and stress. “The word of order,” he says, “is not fear, let alone panic, but the responsibility to take care of ourselves and each other.”

This June 5, 2020, the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity celebrates the 60th anniversary of its founding. On the same date, but from 1960, the day of Pentecost, the then Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity was created by St. John XXIII with the “Motu proprio Superno dei Nutu”.

For Sister Nadieska Almeida, Daughter of Charity, this has been a time of deep encounter with herself and with God, in a different way. Communities that have older members have been one of their great concerns, for if there is one thing she has learned in her life as Daughter of Charity, it is respect for them. “Today it is our turn to step up and protect them as much as we can and with the resources we have.”

Iván Alejando Batista, designer of Palabra Nueva, offers details about the project “Film Posters in Covid’s Time”. The proposal, which can be seen on digital platforms, rescues the best of Cuban signage of all time to convey a message of public good and prevent the spread of the Covid-19.

Visual artist, curator, art critic and cultural promoter, Sandra Ceballos Obaya, believes it is healthy to take advantage of isolation to live together for a while in and learn to eliminate that pathological anxiety of interacting and competing with society. “When we learn this, he says, there will be a terrible obsession with fighting to be superior to the Other.”