All posts by: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo was born in Havana and graduated from the University of Havana with a degree biochemistry. Around 2000 he began work as a free-lance writer, photographer and dissident blogger.

Article 1: CENSORSHIP WITHOUT CENSORING

2003 was a deadly year for Cuba. In March, the government declared an open war on the citizens. In less than a few hours, the Police arrested over a hundred peaceful dissidents and independent journalists from all across the island. Although the international press nicknamed the most notable of the arrested men and women as […] Read more

Fear, Lies, and Videotapes

The period of fear in Cuba seems to be over. Or is it just an impression? The “culture of fear”, as Oswaldo Paya Sardinas (1952-2012), founder of the Christian Liberation Movement and a martyr of the regime, described the situation in Cuba, may be, at last, fading away in every corner of the island, hand […] Read more

My United States of America

Back in the 1970’s, the years of my Cuban childhood, there were terrible shortages, the country had closed itself off to the world and the United States was seen as a mythical land – a land of the unknown, the beyond, the different, the free, the illusionary; a mirage of hope for people living in […] Read more

On Losing My Passport

The media circus (or more specifically, all the nonsensical messages sent to my mobile phone by excited, cheerful reporters from abroad, which almost ruined my battery) is simply depressing. Everybody seems to believe that the reforms initiated by Raúl have been reaching deeper and deeper layers of the system (rather resembling metastasis of Marxist materialism) […] Read more

Payá: with P for a President

It’s Monday, July 23. Oswaldo Paya Sardinas has been dead since yesterday. Agents of the government had promised that this would happen and had even carried out several attacks against him, which he survived without actually noticing. By and large, it seems that there won’t be a Nobel Peace Prize winner in Cuba unless Fidel […] Read more