News stories by Leonardo Padura

HAVANA, Aug 05 (IPS) - For Cubans, baseball is not a sport, much less a game: it is almost a religion, and taken very seriously.

HAVANA, Mar 28 (IPS) - The reform process launched in Cuba by the government of President Raúl Castro has made several changes to the country's rigid social and economic structure, with the ultimate aim of bringing this island nation out of its economic lethargy and making production, which is sinking under the weight of restrictions, controls and contradictions, more efficient.

HAVANA, Feb 27 (IPS) - The Cuban National Assembly, the parliament, has just passed a historic milestone: the visible turning point when one momentous and complex phase in the life of the country begins to come to a close, and a door opens on a future that, however hard to predict, will in many ways be different.

HAVANA, Feb 13 (IPS) - Early this month, Cubans went to the polls to elect delegates nominated by municipal and provincial assemblies to the island's parliament, the highest government body where citizens' votes carry decisive weight. The turnout, as usual, was over 90 percent, and all the municipal candidates, as usual, were voted in.

Law 288 recently passed by the Cuban government finally made it legal to buy and sell private real estate on the island, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages.

The plans and agreements approved at the recently-concluded Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party has left people with a wide range of reactions, from hope, to scepticism, to fear, satisfaction, the sense that old ideological principles have been renounced or that such certainties are no more than window dressing. But the Congress left no one with a feeling of indifference. Cuba's magnetism -sometimes morbid, sometimes admiring- prevents that from happening, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages.

Havana is being reborn. I can't be sure whether this is taking the best form possible. The first elements of the "updating of the Cuban economic model" have been made official and the effects have begun to be felt in an accelerated fashion on the face of a city that for the last fifty years seems to have been stuck in time, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs.

For years the Cuban population has been undergoing a decline that is now, according to specialists, "evident and pronounced", and it will continue to decrease unless there is a shift in the three crucial areas that affect demographic growth: mortality, emigration, and birth rate, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a dozen languages.

The training in living "the historic" that we Cubans have received has aroused in us the feeling that this punishing phase of history may be nearing its end, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a dozen languages.

For a number of years, and with increasing frequency, the historic leaders of the Cuban revolution (first Fidel Castro and now his brother Raul, currently president) have expressed concern that the major danger facing the country's political system and the revolutionary process that they began half a century ago is disintegration from within, writes Leonardo Padura, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a dozen languages.