Volume III, Issue 2

The Surly Bartender is on a short leave of absence from La Cuadra. In place of his usual column, one of America’s greatest voices has agreed to pinch-hit. Joe Bageant suffers no fools and coddles no arrogance. In the course of a story he sits you down, buys you a beer, makes you feel comfortable… full story HERE »

In Doniel Espinoza’s series, Escaleras al Sueño the artist combines great technical skill with a perfect measure of surrealist absurdity to visually tell his audience small, but beautiful, magical realist stories.

The objects in Espinoza’s paintings are, in a sense, overly familiar. We live with them daily, we interact with them casually, but those things -… full story HERE »

When I was a kid my family didn’t take many vacations. We never did the Disney thing. We never made it to the Grand Canyon. Unlike Carol and Mike Brady (or Fred and Wilma Flintstone for that matter) my folks didn’t see much value in schlepping off to Hawaii in the middle of the winter…. full story HERE »

The following story explores some recent developments in the central tragedy of modern Guatemalan history – the genocide which took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Maya during this country’s long civil war.  In an email conversation with La Cuadra Dr. Barbara Rose Johnston shared additional information about the international financing of the Chixoy… full story HERE »

One of the goals of La Cuadra is to bring our readers some geopolitical perspective on events in Latin America and beyond. Truth be told, there are not a lot of accessible reports on regional events that are worth reading in any language, and certainly not in English. Though we have some very good friends… full story HERE »

It was typical. I sat down to put on my shoes before heading out to the bank to deposit some rare and desperately-needed checks, when outside my window I heard the rain begin to come down hard.

I can’t tell you how often this has happened.

So I sat there a few minutes, waiting patiently. Rain falling… full story HERE »

A few months ago we ran a joke about a talking dog. People loved it. It was cute, had a funny lead-in, a bunch of cursing in the body paragraphs, booze references were sprinkled liberally throughout the page and it finished with an unexpected, roundhouse-to-the-balls, punch-line. Since then we’ve been getting requests to again run… full story HERE »

One of my favorite slogans of the 1960s Yippies is, “We are not Marxists. We’re Groucho Marxists.”

Groucho Marxists used comedy and outlandishness as a political tool. They believed revolution should be a party, a circus, a festival of irony and absurdity that raised political awareness and paved the way for real… full story HERE »

Unhappy Meal: In December of 2008, McDonalds Corporation unintentionally stepped into the middle of an international border conflict when its Moroccan franchises included, as a Happy Meal prize, a map of North Western Africa which indicated a national border separating Morocco and the disputed territory of Western Sahara. The Moroccan government claims sovereignty over Western… full story HERE »

Being self-fashioned iconoclasts, it is rare that we find ourselves engrossed by . . . well, icons, but the image of Muntadar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi reporter who launched a couple of size 10′s at President Bush’s yawping maw has done it for us. Apparently the little fella pictured above has been smitten by Mr. al-Zeidi,… full story HERE »