Artist Sandra Ceballos reflects on her independent practice, performance art, gender discrimination, and decades of censorship and exclusion in Cuba. Founded in her home in 1994, Espacio Aglutinador became an independent exhibition space and, in her view, an artwork in its own right, offering artists room to create outside official cultural controls. Ceballos says the project’s demands gradually displaced attention from her own work and privacy, prompting her to focus again on her art while continuing independent initiatives. She describes art as a channel for expressing distress and protesting injustice, rather than a means of curing or resolving it, and argues that artistic freedom requires refusing political, social, moral, or commercial concessions.

Australian traveler Djanaya Hampton says two men approached her near the Eiffel Tower, photographed her without consent, and later followed her through the Paris metro with others. She escaped after contacting a friend by video call and receiving help from a passenger who identified himself as a security guard. Hampton sought assistance at the Australian Embassy in Paris and cut her trip short out of concern for her safety. The account has raised concerns about harassment and risks faced by women traveling alone, but there is no public confirmation that the incident involved human trafficking.

The Observatorio de Género de Alas Tensas reports 52 femicides in Cuba between January and September 2026, based on an independent monitoring network, community sources, media reports and women’s advocacy platforms. The register identifies victims, dates, locations and alleged perpetrators, with intimate partners or former partners responsible in many cases and several children and elderly women among the victims. OGAT argues that official prevention policies remain ineffective and that activism is criminalized, while calling attention to disappearances, unresolved cases and the need for institutional accountability.

Camila González Arias, a 17-year-old student, was allegedly beaten to death in Havana on June 21, 2026, by her 29-year-old partner, Carlos René Alfonso Gorejuria, who was detained after the attack. The case highlights the normalization of relationships between adolescent girls and adult men, gaps in Cuba’s legal protections for minors, and the lack of effective institutional support for Camila’s ill mother, grandmother and 12-year-old sister. Alas Tensas’s gender observatory counts 51 femicides in Cuba in 2026, including five victims who were minors, while arguing that independent monitoring is more timely and transparent than the state’s court-based aggregate statistics. The article concludes that Cuba’s institutions failed before, during and after the crime, while continuing to devote resources to political surveillance and repression.

A BBC investigation found that a network of roughly 1,700 Telegram channels used photographs of Ukrainian women alongside fabricated stories of kidnapping and rape to draw users toward pro-Russian channels. More than 6,500 advertisements amassed over 65 million views; many were removed, but new posts continued to appear. Women whose images were used said they struggled to get Telegram to respond, while researcher Valentyna Shapovalova said the tactic monetizes sexualized violence and can reinforce wartime propaganda. The report distinguishes these false online claims from documented conflict-related sexual violence: the UN human rights monitoring mission recorded at least 701 people subjected to sexual violence by Russian authorities since the full-scale invasion began.

Cuban violinist, singer and composer Martha Duarte Mustelier has died in Lugano, Switzerland, where she lived in her later years. Remembered by musicographer Rosa Marquetti as a pioneering woman violinist and the first woman to graduate from Cuba’s Instituto Superior de Arte in violin, Duarte worked with ballet, opera, folkloric, theatrical and cinematic productions. She later led groups including Vidrio y Corte and Martha Duarte y Sarabanda, developing an experimental fusion of Cuban rhythms, contemporary music and jazz. Her work included the 2001 album “Mulata de espalda,” film composition, transcription of Pablo Milanés’s repertoire, and collaborations with prominent Cuban musicians. Her daughter Afrika paid tribute to her as a beloved mother, grandmother and exceptional violinist.

Daína Chaviano discusses how her La Habana Oculta series combines historical research, personal memory, imagination and spirituality to reconstruct Havana and explore Cuba’s complex national identity. She explains that Havana functions as both a real city and a symbolic synthesis of the island, while exile deepened her understanding of its history and transformed writing into a means of preserving and rebuilding memory. Chaviano describes her approach to historical fiction, balancing documentary precision with plausible imaginative hypotheses where the historical record contains gaps. The interview also examines Indigenous, African, Spanish, Chinese and spiritual traditions, challenging narrow notions of Cuban identity and the idea that the supernatural or “magical realism” is uniquely Latin American. The series is presented as a possible space for reconnecting a fragmented Cuban nation, including the experiences of exiles and previously excluded voices.

María Matienzo reviews Alberto Abreu Arcia’s novel La noche es testigo as a work that brings Afro-Cuban spirituality, oral traditions, ancestral memory, and Black queer experience into the center of Cuban literature. The novel challenges Western and white intellectual frameworks that have marginalized Black writers and religious knowledge, while linking the historical experience of Juan Francisco Manzano with contemporary transgender and sexually dissident nightlife. Abreu Arcia argues that decolonizing Cuban narrative requires validating non-Western epistemologies rather than folklorizing them, and criticizes Cuban LGBTQ+ discourse for privileging white, educated gay identities while excluding Black people, lesbians, and trans people.

Health authorities in Holguín, Cuba, warn about adolescents consuming Shaka energy drinks, including Shaka Mixer Energy-Vodka, a 250-milliliter product containing 18% alcohol as well as caffeine, taurine and sugar. Officials highlight risks such as increased heart rate, anxiety, insomnia and the early normalization of alcohol use. Research cited in the report links regular alcohol consumption in Cuba to higher mortality, cirrhosis, cancer and vascular disease, while a 2025 study found risky drinking among 15.11% of surveyed Cuban university students. The product’s sale and promotion through private businesses and social media raise concerns about labeling, oversight and access by minors.

Cuban poet Milena Ferrer Saavedra has published El nombre de una Isla with Madrid-based Editorial Betania. The collection explores love, heartbreak, family ties, writing, migration, memory and Cuban identity through free verse, sonnets and brief compositions. Its two sections move from romantic desire and rupture to family relationships, aging, poverty, solitude and death, while recurring island, sea and lunar imagery links personal loss with exile and belonging. The book includes references to Galicia, Ronda, the Camino de Santiago, Jorge Luis Borges and Rainer Maria Rilke, and features cover and interior artwork by Carlos Alberto Masvidal Saavedra.