Calle 13 and their Havana Megaconcert

The megaconcert started at 5 p.m. sharp. The one in charge of warming up the 100,000 people crowding into the “Anti-Imperialist Rostrum,” popularly known as the “Protestodrome,” was Cuban singer Kelvis Ochoa.

For nearly an hour, in warm spring sun and a gentle breeze, Ochoa went through his repertoire from top to bottom. He heated the place up. A poor audio that could barely be heard more than 350 meters from the stage did not prevent people from enjoying themselves, jumping and dancing, as only those born in this corner of the world can.

With their bottles of sugar-cane rum, or cans of Cristal beer, the mass of youth made it a date, enjoying the concert. After 6 in the evening the music of the Boricuan* band Calle 13 broke out.

The Puerto Rican musicians, who boast several Grammy awards, have many followers on the island. And from the first hit, the Protestódrome exploded. Despite a heavy police presence, thousands of tourists had joined the wild dancing and the hip hop tropical holiday.

The good feeling continued even after Calle 13 played their final note after two hours of contagious rhythm and fiery lyrics. Thousands of people, eager to prolong the event, gathered in the parks of Vedado to pass around brandy and, accompanied by an Mp3 or an old broken-down guitar, to sing until they were hoarse, throughout the night.

Others stood in long lines at the Coppelia ice cream parlor, to ease the heat with an ice cream of modest quality available for purchase with national currency. There were only a couple of flavors, and they didn’t include strawberry or chocolate.

Opposite the capital-city ice creamery, there were long lines to buy hot dogs for ten pesos. The places that accept only convertible currency were also packed.

It turns out that in Havana the people are thirsty for good concerts and high-quality cultural activities. And when there are some, like the concert by Juanes and Miguel Bosé, September 20, 2009 at Revolution Plaza, or this one by Calle 13 at the edge of the Malecon, people will turn out however they can.

They forget about poor transportation and bad food. They even set baseball aside, although the national title is being decided, and Industriales, the local team, is in contention.

“Baseball can wait, but shows like Calle 13 only happen once in a while,” says Yuri, a 23-year-old black young man, outlandishly dressed and wearing heavy 14 karat gold chains . Nonetheless, Yuri and his friends are constantly keeping an eye on their watches; they don’t wait for the end of the show and rush to catch a packed bus to their homes.

They wanted to arrive in time to watch the final match on tv between Industriales and Villa Clara for the championship. If they succeeded, they could kill two birds with one stone. They enjoyed good music and they could see on tv the conclusion of a sizzling tournament.

And in an expensive Havana, with few recreational options, to be able to enjoy two high-level events on one day is a luxury. And for free.

Iván García

*Puerto Ricans refer to themselves using the Taino word “boricua”

Translated by: Tomás A.

Transport in the Capital: An Unresolved Issue

Public transport has always been an unresolved issue for Fidel Castro’s government.  In Havana, in particular, where after the trams were taken out in the early 1950s, the bus service was among the best of all the most important cities in the world.

In the 1980s, when the county had a direct pipeline to the resources of the Kremlin, Hungary and other countries of the old socialist block, in the village of Guanajay, 60 kilometers from the capital, they set up a factory to assemble Ikarus buses. This did not prevent movement from one part of the city to another being a disaster.

At the time of the greatest material abundance of the olive-green Revolution, when you could buy yogurt and milk without a ration card, 2,500 buses and about 5,000 taxis circulated in the capital. But even still the deficit in public transport was not eased.

With the arrival of the silent war called “the special period,” after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, traveling around the city was a feat worthy of an Indiana Jones adventure. There were times when some bus routes operated only twice a day. Then they made their appearance with the famous “camels,” trucks towing large trailers that could fit up to 300 people, squished in like sardines. Real saunas, and places for pickpockets and sexual perverts.

People walked up to 20 kilometers a day to conduct their business, visit a friend or family member. The main streets were deserted and dark as the power was cut off up to 16 hours a day. On that chaos, the heavy Chinese bicycles were introduced, which caused fatal traffic accidents to skyrocket.

Not to mention the escalating violence. The streets of Havana were competing with those of Medellin or Rio de Janeiro. In order to steal your bicycle, the thieves were just as likely to chop you with a machete or slit your throat, as they caught you by stretching a rope across the dark street, when you passed on your bike.

With the passing of time, to the buses and “camels” they added “Haley’s comet.” Castro 1, preoccupied with his delusions of helping Third World countries, and squandering the meager public funds in economic nonsense and meaningless plans, landed to reality in 2004. And looking stupid in the Assemblies of People’s Power, he asked what the Minister in charge was doing to resolve the transport crisis.

As always, el comandante blamed the failure on others. But he realized that if he wanted the economy to grow, he would have to take some money from the bank to buy buses, trucks and locomotives. From China and Russia they bought about 5,000 buses and an equal number of trucks.

Urban transport, starved, saw the manna when they started to roll out 460 Yutong, Liaz and Maz buses throughout the city. The bus company began to operate 17 routes designated with the letter P, that today run on Havana’s main arterials.

In peak hours, the P routes run every 5 to 10 minutes. They are always full to bursting and hot as an oven. But for want of bread, cassava. The much vaunted improvement that the city’s leaders boast about is pure mirage.

Today, one-third as many buses are operating in the city as in 1988.  It makes sense that a city of more than two million people, like Havana, if you want it to function even minimally, must have bus service capable of carrying a million people who move around the city every day.

Lacking a subway or suburban train, and where taxi service in national currency has disappeared, the only viable option for the citizenry is to take the congested P routes. Still, moving from the main central avenues to a marginal neighborhood on outskirts is a complicated story.

The bus service in the major neighborhoods and peripheral areas is a calamity. With the downturn in the economy due to the two crises, the world financial crisis and the one we have suffered for 21 years as a result of the Special Period, the plans to expand public transport have been shelved.

With the cutting of the frequency of trips, heading out with the family on the weekend is quite inconvenient. The buses known as the P routes are packed and run up to 30 minutes late on Saturdays and Sundays.

To make matters worse, among the staff of the bus company it is rumored that the due to the usual default on part of the Cuban government, the providers will not guarantee to supply parts for the years to come.

To go from one zone to another in the city could become an inferno. And the hard years of the 1990s, when a bus was as rare as a spaceship, could return. Although never, to be perfectly honest, has a bus ride in Havana been easy or pleasant.

Iván García

Photo: DCvision2006, Flickr. One line of trams in Havana in the 40s.

The Two Faces of the Internet in Cuba

For Rolando, a 56-year-old worker, the internet is science fiction. Fernandez, who has never navigated the information highway, thinks it is pure fantasy that someone sitting in their home can read a newspaper or magazine, watch television shows or listen to the radio.

Laureano, a 61-year-old retired cigar-roller, looks at me with amazement like he doesn’t believe what I am telling him: that you can reserve airline tickets or buy tickets to the World Cup in South Africa, all on the Internet.

Many Cubans have only seen the Internet in films that come on Cuban television on Saturday nights. Magic and immediacy. A fabulous way to get whatever inquiry you want from the keyboard of your personal computer.

Internet is seen as an impossible art. When someone wants to share reliable information, the say “I read it on the internet.” On the island, it has become customary to disseminate texts on the subject of Cuba downloaded from newspapers, blogs or digital pages.

As less than 0.8 % of the Cuban population have a home  connection to the World Wide Web, people try to manage as best as they can. In the offices of the Telecommunication company (Etecsa), hotels, hospitals, airports, government ministries and offices of the main national media, the employees can access the Internet.

But people who are lucky enough to get on the Internet, are always in the eye of the hurricane.  It works for many things.  To be able to have an e-mail address through Yahoo or Gmail and be connected with family and friends outside the country. Or to read secretly the last post of Yoani Sánchez or articles in El Nuevo Herald, El Mundo or El Pais, Cuban’s preferred news sources.

Also the Internet is used to spread gossip about those who are famous, to try to make foreign friends and why not, if the your boss isn’t too controlling, then like a business tool.

Those that have Internet at their jobs can make some money off of it too.  Not much, but enough to be used for the daily needs.  Luisa, 29, works at a hotel and every morning she comes in with a flash drive full of messages her neighbors have given her to send to their families, girlfriends or friends whom live outside the country.

“I charge 10 pesos (50 cents in dollars) for sending an e-mail.  If the connection is possible, I copy movies or soap operas which later I burn to a DVD and rent it out for 5 pesos (25 cents in dollars).  It’s not much, but it gives me enough so I can have lunch and take private taxis daily.”

Others like Mariano, 43, with a vast knowledge of the Internet, can make an appreciable amount of money. He designs web pages for people who rent rooms to tourists, or for prostitutes which advertise themselves on the net.  And also copies films or TV programs broadcast from Miami, especially about when people close to Castro leave the country, or other critical reports on Cuba.

“I sell films, soap operas and reports to people dedicated to renting movies.  For designing a web page I charge 50 pesos (40 US Dollars).  In the case of those who rent rooms, I charge a 5 peso (4 US dollar) commission per tourist who rents their house.  On a good day I can earn from 60 to 100 pesos (50 to 80 US Dollars).”

Knowing that people are making money with the Internet connections at their jobs, the Castro government has tried to close the web, and watches it with a magnifying glass.

At her workplace, Nora, 43, was obliged to sign a code of ethics, whereby she pledges not to access counter-revolutionary, politically biased or defamatory web-pages. At the same time, it is forbidden to possess an email account.

The least expensive Internet connection costs 5 CUCs (cuban convertible pesos) or 125 pesos in local currency, equivalent to half of the minimum monthly wages in Cuba. Beside being expensive, the connections are extremely slow. The fastest ones do not go above 50 Kbs and are only available in luxury hotels like the Melia Cohiba or the Saratoga.

Uploading photos or videos is almost impossible.  To think you can have Internet at home is a fantasy.  On the black market they sell Internet passwords for the most secure and fast Internet connections in a range of prices from 50 pesos to even 120 (from 40 to 100 US dollars).

If they catch you, the fines are scandalous.  From 20,000 pesos (4,000 US dollars).  If you are a resident you can even go to jail.  A lot of Cuban workers like Rolando or the retired Laureano can’t believe that one day they will be able to sit in front a desk and find that the Internet is not magic nor a fable.

Until such time comes, Cubans will have to be satisfied to learn about the Internet from their children and  grandchildren. Or from the Saturday night movies on TV

Photo: bibicall, Flickr. Tourist connecting to the Internet from a cybercafé in Santa Clara, a city in the center of the Island

Translated by:  Betsy

Surviving in Socialist Cuba

Life for Juan Domeq, who is 79-years-old, is a vicious cycle. Every day, he gets up at 5:30 a.m. and with his gait slow and hesitant, he arrives at his newspaper corner. He buys 50 copies of the Granma newspaper and the same number of the Juventud Rebelde. Domeq invests 20 pesos (less than one dollar) in the 100 copies. If he manages to sell them, at one peso for each one, he gets 80 pesos in profit. But he cannot sell that quantity of newspapers every day.

“People in the streets are not interested in what the Cuban press says. Besides, the employee at the street corner cannot always sell me 100 newspapers, usually, he sells me 40 to 50 of them. Afterward, if I have a good day, I buy food, milk or yogurt for my wife who has been bedridden for the past four years with paralysis. The small amount of money that I get selling newspapers is spent on meals. In addition, I have to keep my eyes open all the time, because the police has already given me a fine of 40 pesos because I have sold the newspapers without a licence,” Juan Domeq says, a sad old man overburdened with problems who lives in a filthy bunkhouse in the Havana neighbourhood of Lawton.

At the same time that Domeq gets up to buy the newspapers, Antonio Villa 68-years-old, with a physical impediment, wakes up. Then, after a cup of hot coffee, in his wheelchair, he goes towards the bakery of his area, where he sells bags of nylon for one peso each (.05 cents).

According to Antonio, someone he knew sold him a hundred bags of nylon for 35 pesos. ” Selling bags takes between 10 and 12 hours daily. Sometimes, I have a good day and I manage to sell 200 baskets, but most of the time, I only sell 80 or 90. With what I get, 65-120 pesos, (3-5 dollars) I buy a meal and I keep some change to pay a lady who washes my clothes. Several times the police have taken me down to the station. Besides fining me, they confiscated my bags. But as much as I want to be free, I return to doing what I know how to do so I can earn an honest living”, relates Antonio, a black man who lost a leg during the war with Angola and lives in a wooden hut with a roof of aluminum.

Also, without much luck, Clara Rivas tries looking for a handful of pesos. She is 71-years-old and is a resident of a decrepit old people’s home in the La Vibora neighbourhood. Clara, dirty and in old clothes, sells cigarettes as a retailer. “In the home, we are given lunch and a meal, but it is so bad that many old people who live there prefer to look for our own money and to eat in the street.”

After spending 14 hours selling cigarettes, money earned can buy a portion of rice, stewed peas and a tasteless bony fish, in a hovel belonging to the state where prices are low. With a full stomach, she returns to the home to sleep.

Juan, Antonio and Clara are three old people full of complaints, already with signs of senile dementia, and without a family who cares for them. They must perform miracles so as to survive under the hard conditions of Cuban socialism. And they are not the only ones.

Iván García

Photo: Martin Baran, Flickr

Translated by : George L

House Arrest


The morning of Monday March 1st in Havana was like any other.  After spending the night with my girlfriend I returned to my house at around 6:30 AM.  There was no sign of abnormality.

The only warning sign emanated from a small portable radio next to the bus driver.  It was a song by Silvio Rodriguez.  Upon getting off of the bus, a line from the song reached my ears:  “Freedom was born with wings/ And who am I to cut each of its dreams…”  At that moment I was not aware that it was a warning.

For the most part the city was awakening to its habitual routine.  A group of bored women were waiting in line in front of the State Agro-Store.  They were waiting for the doors to open so they could buy their rationed quota of sweet potatoes.  In order to soften the long wait, they commented about the latest happenings in the Colombian soap opera, “Coffee with the Smell of a Woman”, which keeps Cubans in suspense and has more power than any revolutionary act.

Along the path of two blocks to my house I noticed the fast past of those who were arriving at their jobs.  Right on the corner of Carmen and 10th of October a group of secondary students chatted about baseball and their new idol, the baseball player Michel Enriquez.  I said hi to them, they were well-known throughout the neighborhood.  I was about to join their conversation when a tall well-built mulatto called out to me.

He introduced himself as Misael, from Counter-Intelligence. He asked me if I knew the whereabouts of my mother, Tania Quintero, also a journalist for Cuba Press.  I told him I was ignoring him.  After that, he suggested that I walk towards my house because he had orders that I should remain in my house until further instructions.

I refused.  Another official, who apparently was heading the operation (and introduced himself as Roldan), then began to speak to me for more than an hour.  We initiated an extensive conversation.  We touched upon various subjects:  the politics of the government, the embargo, the exile community in Miami, the dissidence, the free press, the gag law (promulgated in February of 1999), and the future of the country.

I manifested my disapproval of terms such as “annexationist” and “traitors of the country” which the regime frequently uses in reference to independent journalists.  Because no one in their right mind, I told him, wishes to lose our sovereignty.  With frankness I told him that “country” was not synonymous with “Fidel” and “revolution” and that I consider myself as not having betrayed anyone and I defended the idea of remaining on good terms with myself.

In silence, he accepted my criticisms.  The future of the country concerns all Cubans.  I reminded him that, precisely, Vladimiro Roca, Martha Beatriz Roque, Rene Gomez Manzano, and Felix Bonne Carcasses were all imprisoned just for wanting to open up a space.  They owe most of their prestige to the government because in its pathological fear and jailing of those who have different ideas, they have elevated their status to that of giants.

I shut up.  He then told me that he was there to carry out an order:  I could not move from my house.  If I violated that order, I’d be detained.

Upon arriving at my residence I felt satisfied.  I had expressed my points of view.  With my phone lines cut, I began to follow the news by radio.  Thanks to BBC and Radio Marti I was informed that the foreign press had not been granted access to the trial and that the police operation had been disproportionate.

I also found out that the presence of regular citizens was not permitted within 150 meters around the court.  Due to the strong military operation it felt like we were in Rome awaiting the trial for the head of the Sicilian mafia, not of four peaceful dissidents, all of them older than 50 years old.

The international press echoed the repressive situation.  From the balcony of my house, where I spent most of my temporary prison sentence, I watched the coming and going of people, with their indifferent faces, clueless as to what was going on in their city and in their country.

The State press did not publish a single word.  As if in Marianao there wasn’t a trial of such complexity taking place.  Officially, the four dissidents were ghosts.  In my neighborhood people continued their daily struggle to survive.  With a mix of curiosity and fear, some neighbors stared, out of the corner of their eyes, at the odd mission taking place at the bottom of my building.

The momentary restlessness did not stop them from continuing their customs: buying bread daily on the ration, taking their kids to school, cleaning their deteriorated homes, or trying to communicate with their family in Miami.

It was almost 8 PM when my captors allowed me to make a few phone calls to a friend from the public phone in the corner.  It was then that I found out that my mother was not home because she was detained at the police station at 7th and 62nd in Miramar.  A pair of “escorts” had followed all of my steps.

An hour later, Ariel Tapia, a colleague of Cuba Press, arrived at my house with a bottle of fourth category rum, that which is sold to the population for 20 pesos.  There was nothing to celebrate.  On the contrary.  But drinking rum is a national pretext to consume the boredom and to “unload” about the future, that bad word which Cubans only feel courageous enough to mention after drinking a bottle of alcohol.  Cubans spiritually undress themselves after consuming such intoxicating drinks.

Neither Ariel nor I escaped the ritual.  Like that, between drink and drink, we dress our desperation in dreams and reaffirmed our purpose of working for an open, plural, and democratic society.

That’s what we were doing when, at 10:30 PM, my guards informed me that I could now return to being a normal citizen.  They told me not to worry about my mother, that she would be back the next day.  At that moment I once again became Ivan Garcia Quintero.

Ariel and I left the house and walked with that exclusive joy that is attached to the freedom of movement.  We wandered about the streets of La Vibora, our small country, until the early morning hours.  We ended up stopping at the staircase of the Pre, which is how the former Institute of La Vibora is now called.  At around 4 a strange sensation invaded me before going to bed.  It was the joy of knowing that it is worth it to have opinions in life and being able to express them.

If from this fateful March 1st I extracted some sort of benefit from my house arrest, it was the conviction that I was not going to give up on the determination of contributing to idea that the country truly belongs to everyone.

Ivan Garcia

Photo: El Pre, formerly Instituto de la Víbora.

Published in Cubafreepress on March 5th 1999.

Translated by Raul G.

Surviving Under Cuban Socialism

Life is a vicious circle for 79-year-old Juan Domeq.  Everyday he gets up at 5:30 in the morning, and with his slow and hesitant walk he arrives at a newspaper kiosk and purchases 50 copies of Granma (the official state paper) and also 50 copies of Juventud Rebelde (‘Rebel Youth’- another state paper).  Domeq invests 20 pesos (less  than a dollar) on the 100 copies.  If he manages to sell them at a peso each he will profit by making 80 pesos.  But he can’t sell that amount of copies every day.

“People on the street care very little for what the Cuban press has to say.  Besides, the guy who works at the kiosk can’t always sell me 100 newspapers, usually he sells me 40 or 50.  Later, if I have a good day, I buy food, milk, or yogurt for my wife, who for 4 years now is in bed due a paralysis.  The little money that I make selling papers I spend on food.  And I have to constantly keep my eyes open, for the police have already fined me  40 pesos multiple times for selling newspapers without a license”, points out Juan Domeq, a sad old man, heaped with problems, who lives in an unclean bunkhouse in the Havana neighborhood of Lawton.

At the same time Domeq gets up to buy his papers, Antonio Villa, 68 years old and physically disabled, also wakes up.  After drinking a cup of hot coffee for breakfast, he gets in his wheelchair to travel all the way to the neighborhood bakery where he sells nylon bags at the door for a peso (.05 cents of a dollar) each.

According to Antonio, an acquaintance sells him one-hundred nylon bags for 35 pesos.  “I sell bags for about 10 to 12 hours daily.  Sometimes I have a good day and I manage to sell 200 bags, but most of the time I can only sell 80 or 90.  With what I make, from about 65 to 120 pesos (3 to 5 dollars), I buy food and I put change aside to pay a lady who cleans my clothes.  On multiple occasions the police have taken me to the station.  Besides fining me, they confiscate my bags.  But as soon as they let me go, I go back to the only thing I know how to do to make money in a decent way,”  says Antonio, a black man who lost his leg during the war in Angola and lives in a wooden hut with an aluminum roof.

Also without much luck, Clara Rivas, 71-years-old and residing in a decadent asylum for the elderly in the neighborhood of La Vibora, tries to make some money.  Clara, dirty and badly dressed, sells cigarettes at retail.  “In the home (asylum) they give us lunch and dinner, but it is not appetizing, so much so that most of us old people prefer to make some money by our own accounts to eat out in the streets.”

After selling cigarettes for 14 hours, the money she has earned is sufficient to buy one ration of rice, stew, and an unidentified fish, full of spines, from a state store where the prices are low.  With her stomach full, she returns to her nursing home to sleep.

Juan, Antonio, and Clara are three elderly people burdened with problems, already showing signs of being mentally senile, and without families to take care of them.  They have to make miracles in order to survive under the rough conditions of Cuban socialism.  And they are not the only ones.

Ivan Garcia

Photo: Martin Baran, Flickr

Translated by Raul G.

Where there’s smoke…

Let us leave aside the journalistic theory that an unconfirmed rumor is not newsworthy. At least not in Cuba. On the island, idle gossip acquires the character of news. It even happens that at times the rumor is more accurate than the miserly news the regime deigns to publish.

It so happens that the government controls every aspect of society. It masterfully manages the flow of information. Although it cannot prevent infiltrations from happening in the form of gossip and whispers.

In any society where freedom of the press is a part of the laws embedded in the Constitution, a journalist only has to pick up the phone and call a government source to confirm a point.

Or demand information in the name of a set of rights that prevent a government from denying or manipulating. This does not happen in Cuba. Here, when rumor is repeated with insistence, it is because something is happening.

I will give you examples. The government reported as accurate that 26 demented people died Havana in the Psychiatric Hospital of Mazorra in January. Independent journalist and other sources raised the figure to more than 60, including those who died in several Havana Nursing Homes during the cold wave the country endured at the beginning of the year.

In addition, the government hides information about the economic collapse. According to rumors, there is a video only shown to the members of the Communist Party, about the difficult crisis of resources.

And these days, it is vox populi, that there is a supposed corruption scandal involving the highest figures of the government. The rumors mention the names of the Minister of the Interior, Abelardo Colomé Ibarra, and one from the Armed Forces, Julio Casas Regueiro. Without much fanfare, the minister of Aeronautics, Rogelio Acevedo was taken out circulation. And in previous days a strong man from the Castro’s elite, the Chilean Max Marambio, aka El Guatón, was as well.

The official press keeps the usual silence. The Cuban media has to wait for executive orders to divulge the news, to the rest of the island, the hoaxes and speculations are known as Radio Bemba, the gossip network, literally “Lip Radio.”

In the absence of credible information, Radio Bemba is spread at supersonic speed.  Whispers involve everything, from Fidel Castro and his brother Raul’s health, to new state prohibitions or laws that will be proclaimed. The ratio of correct guesses is about 60%.

As a result, people believe the rumors to be more truthful than the insipid state information, which paints a perfect world for us, one where everything increases, from the meat production to the construction of homes. The National Television News, whose acronym is NTV, is called No Te Veo — I don’t watch you — by the man on the street.

But if someone’s credibility is in the basement, it is that of the news media. Cubans consider that the disinformation is three times greater than the information.

Whether it is by emails, Twitter or SMS, it is common to learn certain news before the State Press releases it. Now, in this spring doomed to be hot, when Cubans do not expect anything good from the meager economy, and where the whispers of scandals involving big personalities grow like a snowball, it remains to be seen whether the wave of whispers is true or false.

But where there’s smoke…

Ivan García

Photo: Janex & Alba, Flickr. River in Baracoa, in the extreme east of Cuba.
Translator’s note on the photo: The Spanish expression for, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is (loosely translated) “When the river sounds, it is because it carrying water.”

Translated by: Mari Mesa Contreras

The Ladies In White Are Not The Real Enemy

I have good friends who completely support Castro’s revolution. I respect their opinions, as they respect mine. And there’s no problem. We have shared interests. We like soccer and baseball, white rum, and we love our children. We were born in Havana, which we love.  And each of us, from where we stand,  want the best for our country.

What separates us are the political opinions. I am convinced that of course individual rights are shamelessly violated in Cuba.  The government acts chaotically when the island is put on public trial.  But it isn’t a CIA campaign, or that the large media corporations have been cruelly baited with regard to the shortsighted policies of the Castro brothers.

No. It’s simply the actions of the system which provokes worldwide condemnation and the newspaper headlines. Following the death of the opponent Orlando Zapata Tamayo, the media, democratic governments, and social networks have aimed their cannons at the aged olive green government.

This death, the result of a hunger strike of one person, who the friends of the revolutions want to see as delinquent, who was at that moment serving a prison term for his politics, whose demands were purely political, was something that could have been avoided.

The system is very sensitive to internal or external criticism. It always sees an imperialist conspiracy. These are blows to the chest, and for them, no country has the moral right to criticize Cuba when it comes to human rights

And so it defends itself by going on attack. Personal rights are violated in almost the entire world, and this is   denounced by civil society groups. The same thing happens on the island. But it is the Cuban government that represses those who think differently.

It has not gotten to the point of extrajudicial deaths. Nor is there any need for that. They control the three basic powers of society, and if you go to a hearing on an alleged political crime, you are condemned in advance.

Not recognizing the opposition is the root cause of all the problems. All of my friends who support Castro in one way or another, live in societies where it is not a crime to be an opponent. It is not believable that an entire population supports a regime. Nor is it true that all who oppose it are a band of mercenaries at the service of the United States.

In Cuba there are many things that do not work. The Castros do not want nor do they permit other people to form a different political party with their own opinions. And then unfortunate events occur, like that of March 17 with the Ladies in White.

You can have whatever opinion you want about this group of women. But there is a truth which is like a fist: if their husbands, sons or other family members were not in jail, the Ladies in White would not exist.

Just as, if thousands of Argentinian children had not disappeared, during the military dictatorship of the 70’s, there would have been no reason for the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.  The Castro government is anti-democratic, and repressive at the time when it should accept different political opinions.

But it takes advantage of the freedoms of the democratic societies. For the crime of espionage, five agents are jailed in the United States and they spend the people’s money, which is very scarce, on travel around the world for their family members to defend the cause.

In the ‘monstrous’ country that is the United States, friends of the revolution have paid 50 thousand dollars so that a “poisoned” media would publish propaganda in favor of freedom for the spies. The Castro politicians, on their world travel, unite with opponents of governments elected by their people, and with revolutionary groups.

And nothing happens. I haven’t read any articles about Frei Beto or Lucius Walker, fervent Castro admirers, delineating how they have been whipped by the intelligence services of their countries. Maybe they are more subtle than the Cubans. Or it might be, as I believe, that these things are entirely permitted in free countries.

In the events of March 17, in the poor neighborhood of Parraga, in Arroyo Naranjo, the poorest part of the city, which has the greatest number of prisoners per capita in the entire country, there was physical violence and manipulation.

I don’t offer any categorical opinion despite what I have read or heard about the Ladies in White. I saw photos and videos in which you can see them badly treated by the soldiers, who arrested and almost strangled one of the women in the group.

As an independent journalist, I have been present at a few public demonstrations, including these Ladies in White, and not only have verbal lynchings occurred, but punches, kicks, karate blows.

Furthermore, simply trying to impede a demonstration is counter to the freedom of self-expression. And it is a lie, that the government amplifies, that the “people spontaneously” insult and slander the demonstrators.

Those who have lived in Cuba know this is not true. Since 1980 when these “acts of repudiation” appeared, against people who decided to leave their country, where they were beaten and insulted, it has become an habitual practice and strategy of the political police.

The authorities summoned these people in advance to denigrate the marchers as “mercenaries.” In Havana it is known that more than a few times in the work centers, in order to give the appearance of the “revolutionary masses,” workers were given a day off, so they could go and shout insults at the Ladies in White or others in opposition who decided to demonstrate in the streets.

In Cuba, on their own, nobody would bother another person for peacefully demonstrating. Even less for this spent revolution, where the support for the Castro project diminishes every day.

The government, with these events, is creating a thick smoke screen. There are strong rumors, with much credibility, that people at the highest levels are involved in scandals, bribery, corruption, and this is a giant headache for the government of the brothers from Biran.

It is not the opponents, the independent journalists, the bloggers or the Ladies in White who are creating the final political crisis of this regime. It is and will be the generals who have now become businessmen, who have grabbed the greenbacks with such pleasure.

The dissidents demand change, but in a peaceful way. You can insult them or beat them, but it is the participants in the “dance of the millions,”* living well and sawing out the ground from beneath the government, that really threatens the people at the top.

The real enemy who could overthrow everything are rubbing shoulders with power.   These are the dangerous ones. The others are just dust and straw.

Ivan Garcia

*Translator’s note: “The dance of the millions” refers to the period in Cuban history when immense wealth was created in the sometimes speculative development of the sugar industry.

Translated by ricote

How I Survived The Black Spring

The evening of March 17 my mind was elsewhere.  I didn’t have a cent in my pocket and I had to buy a vitamin-filled milk complex, which at the time cost 4 dollars, for my daughter Melany, who was barely a month and a half old.  The baby’s voracious appetite forced the pediatrician to order the vitamin-filled complex to complement the mother’s milk.

Back then I was an independent journalist working for the agency Cuba Press, which was presided over by the poet and journalist Raul Rivero.  I wrote for the web site of the Inter-American Press Society, plus chronicles and stories for Encuentro en la Red [Encounter on the Web], a web site created by Cuban immigrants in Spain, which was the best, journalistically speaking, that was being promoted outside of Cuba.

Payment for the articles arrived every two or three months.  The day before the government launched a raid against 75 opponents and independent reporters, I was barely treading water. It was a hot month of March.  The Iraqi invasion by the U.S. troops was imminent.  The previous night I had spoken with my wife regarding the possibility of selling some of my clothes and a watch so we could buy the food for the baby.

That evening I spent the night at the baby’s house to help the mother, who was very tired by little Melany’s habit of waking up in the middle of the night and then sleeping until dawn.

Around midnight, on Tuesday, March 18, I returned to my house, in the district of La Vibora, where I lived with my mother, my sister and a niece.  I felt the exhaustion of centuries and the bags under my eyes reached the floor.

I saw, on the balcony, my mother Tania Quintero, who was an independent reporter as well, signaling incomprehensibly to me. When I arrived she informed me that they had detained several reporters and dissidents.

My exhaustion was gone immediately.  The bad news did not stop there.  There were massive detentions going on all over the island.  The next day we found out that almost a hundred people had been detained and their homes had been carefully searched.

My mother and I were waiting for our arrest at any moment.  We were walking around with a toothbrush and a spoon.  I spoke with my wife and sadly told her that they could come for me at any time.

We held our hearts in our fists.  Those days were full of fear.  I did not understand the government’s reasons for jailing a group of people whose opposition was peaceful or who wrote without mandate.

Reporter friends like Raul Rivero, Ricardo Gonzalez, Jorge Olivera and Pablo Pacheco, by State decree, slept in cells sealed by the political police.  I listened to short-wave radio and the world-wide denunciation was spectacular.  Castro, in his calculated strategy, thought the Iraq war would divert the world’s attention from the matter.  But it did not happen that way.

As the days passed, a powerful wave of attacks was let loose by the Cuban Media against the opposition.  The circus began.  Trials without rights and where the people who had infiltrated the dissidence came out to the light.  I remember with horror that there were 7 prosecutor requests for the death sentence.

The crime was to dissent and to write articles that were not favorable to the government.  As “definitive proofs” the office of the public prosecutor presented typewriters, portable radios, books, blank sheets of paper and money.  They didn’t trouble themselves to show a single firearm nor any explosive materials.

“Castro has gone crazy” I thought.  The more that I analyzed different fact, the less logic that the conclusions made. What was certain: the government had prepared meticulously for the hit.

The Varela Project, of the dissident Oswaldo Paya Sardinas, had Fidel Castro by the balls.  Any democratic leader who traveled to Cuba asked him to fulfill the laws of his own Constitution, which authorized the reform of laws when 1000 signatures have been collected.

And that is what Paya’s movement had done.  In fact, the former US President, Jimmy Carter, in a speech given at the University of Havana in front of Castro himself, had demanded that the legal requirements be met.

This ended up exasperating Castro. Since 1998 five spies, from a ring of twelve, had been jailed in the United Stated, and no leagl maneuvering had succeeded in overturning the penality.  So he decided to play hardball.

He reformed to the Constitution to perpetuate his political system.  He created the scary Law 88, known as the gag law, which could send you to prison for over 20 years, simply for dissent or writings, under the accusation of working for a foreign power.

The conditions had been created to unleash the raid against the opposition.  The Iraq war was the smoke screen that Castro used to obscure the news.

No dissident of journalist was sure of his situation during the following months.  My mother and my family were forced into exile.  I preferred to watch my daughter grow up.  I felt I had every right in the world to be at her side and watch her say her first words in the country where she was born and where her parents and grandparents were born.  Fidel Castro was not going to stop me.  Even at the risk of going to prison.

Seven years after the fateful Black Spring, little has changed in Cuba.  Fidel Castro awaits his death in bed, writing his memoirs and a litany of personal reflections about anything going on the planet.

His brother Raul, without any big changes, has continued the same repressive politics against whomever opposes them.  He continues to disqualify and spurn them.  The intimidating Law 88 is still floating in the air of the Republic.  Whenever the government decides, they can jail the dissidents without any thought.

At this stage of the revolution and the logical erosion of power, the Castros are determined to remain power until death. Nobody is going to change their minds.  Not the international pressures, nor the honest talk of other countries’ leaders who wish for Cuba to join the group of democratic nations.

Seven years have gone by since the incarceration of dissidents.  Life here is still the same.  Nothing has changed.

Ivan Garcia.

Photo: La Víbora, a neighborhood of the municipality, 10 de Octubre, the most densely populated in Havana

Translated by Marfa Otano

Canaleta, Year Seven

I present to you Canaleta.  Not the famous fountain in Barcelona, where the fans gather to celebrate the victories of their soccer team.  No.  This is the Cuban prison, located in the province of Ciego de Avila, some 280 miles east of Havana.

Inside the Cuban Canaleta, in a narrow cell, dirty and poorly ventilated, in triple bunks, they have crowded 20 common prisoners and one prisoner of conscience: Pablo Pacheco Avila, independent journalist, sentenced to 20 years imprisonment during the crackdown of March 2003. His crime? Writing without government authorization.

A pen without mandate. A free electron. A humble man of the 9th of April neighborhood, Ciego de Avila, a degree in physical culture, who wrote sports commentaries and notes about the daily life in his city. A typical Cuban, a sip of coffee in the morning and a little tobacco to round it off.

Pablo Pacheco expiates the unjust sentence in that cell block, number 43, Canaleta prison. Next April 4 he will be 40. Far from his wife, Dr. Oleidys Garcia, a doctor by profession, and his son Jimmy, 11, who enters adolescence without the advice of his father.

In cell block 43, at eleven in the morning they lunch on a repugnant menu: rice not even cleaned, with a hint of fish stretched with soy made for animals. At four in the afternoon, the same disgusting thing for dinner. Pablo eats what his stomach and eyes permit. Or if he has it, the food his wife brings when she visits, every three months.

Pablo prefers to concentrate on writing. And taking advantage of the telephone minutes the regime allow to read his chronicles, news, and complaints to blogger colleagues or alternative journalists, who record the texts written in his cell.

In August 2009, Pablo Pacheco opened a blog, Voice Behind The Bars. A great chronicle of the hard conditions in Cuban prisons. In his articles he details the life of his unfortunate comrades. The bad treatment of the guards. And the rampant corruption of the militants in charge of the Canaleta prison.

Everything is there, in his blog. He tells us that in four years, 18 common inmates have committed suicide, desperate from the extreme conditions in the Ciego de Avila prison. And how dozens of the inmates mutilate themselves and make attempts on their lives, finding themselves in a dead-end street.

Pablo Pacheco has made journalism a priesthood. When friends read or hear his stories, sometimes they can’t help crying. And no wonder. The boy who slept under his bunk, unbalanced, suffering from Schizophrenia, he cut off his ears. He was taken to a punishment cell. Pacheco things that many of the convicts of Canaleta should be patients in a psychiatric hospital.

In cell block 43, a motley crew of convicts enjoys talking about baseball, politics and women. All have sinned, in some cases forced by necessity. Others knew what they were doing. His cellmates are a human trafficker, a pair of murderers and petty thieves who, in the dark of night, knife in hand, slaughtered cattle to sell its meat.

In the prison in Canaleta, in other cellblocks, also filthy and stifling, suffer four other prisoners from the Black Spring. They are Antonio Díaz Sánchez, Félix Navarro Rodríguez, Pedro Argüelles Morán and Adolfo Fernández Saínz. Recently, they have started to write and send their tapes also to Voices Behind the Bars, now a collective blog.

The poet and journalist Raúl Rivero Castañeda spent more than a year in these cell blocks; now thanks to pressure from the civilized world he lived in exile and Spain and writes for the daily paper El Mundo.

A few days ago, from cell block 43, Pacheco called me and told me that March 15 to 21, the prisoners of conscience of Canaleta will unite in a fast to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Black Spring and the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo. They, and the common prisoners, are following the hunger strike of Guillermo Fariñas, now in the intensive care ward in a hospital in Santa Clara.

The prisoners in Canaleta prison know that, in the face of any abuse or maltreatment, there are 5 political prisoners who will fearlessly disseminate their cases. The prison directors know that there are five pairs of watchful eyes to report any signs of corruption among the prison guards.

Pablo Pacheco and the rest of the prisoners in the cause of the Group of 75, not only call for their unconditional release, but also demand respect for the integrity of the common prisoners. Although from chilly Europe no advocate for human rights is allowed to visit the prisons on the island, the political prisoners are doing everything possible to overcome the abuse and excesses in Cuban penitentiaries.

Prisoners like the deceased Orlando Zapata frequently passed up the chance to talk to their families and instead they used their telephone minutes to call an independent journalist and report abuses, committed against them and the other prisoners. Pacheco and the other political prisoners of Canaleta have done the same.

If you would like more information about how life is lived in a Cuban prison, please click on Voices Behind The Bars.

Iván García

Being a Journalist in Cuba

To engage in the profession of journalism in Cuba, outside the control of the state, has its dangers.  Not to the extreme of having a hitman show up at your door on a motorcycle and fire a full magazine at you point blank from a .45 caliber pistol, as happens in Mexico or Colombia.

They also don’t put a black hood over you and later dump your mutilated body in a dumpster, as occurred during the 80’s in Honduras, El Salvador, or Guatemala.  No.  For being an independent journalist or a critic of the Castro administration what could happen to you is that you can be thrown behind bars for up to 20 years if the government decides to do so.

The Castros promise many years of jail for those of us who report on our own account.  But to date, there has not been a documented State-sponsored assassination of a reporter, either official or independent.

For being a free lance journalist on the island, authorities can orchestrate an “act of repudiation”, a verbal lynching in which members of the public, instigated by the political police, insult and scream at you with the veins extended on their necks about to explode.

It’s also possible that some unknown person, a supposed “delinquent”, will ambush you and beat you up in the darkness of the night.  Or that the phone in your house will ring incessantly at 3 A.M. and when you answer it, a disguised voice shouts an earful of insults at you. By the way

When you decide to write without official sanction you lose your job, and State Security has the right to threaten you and summon and question you whenever they feel like it, under the guise of having a “friendly chat.”

The phenomenon of Cuban independent journalism was born in the 90’s.  Among its founders are Rolando Cartaya, Indamiro Restano, Rafael Solano, José Rivero, Julio San Francisco, Raúl Rivero, Iria González Rodiles, Ana Luisa López Baeza, Juan Antonio Sánchez, Germán Castro, Tania Quintero, Bernardo Arévalo Padrón, Jorge Olivera, Olance Nogueras, Joaquin Torres, Héctor Peraza, Manuel Vázquez Portal.

On 18 March 2003, Fidel Castro was determined to strike a blow against journalism outside the State. During the early morning hours that day, the political police forces arrested 75 dissidents and journalists. In the black spring, 25 communicators ended up in jail; their only crime was reporting without government permission.

Correspondents such as Raúl Rivero, one of the heavyweights of Cuban journalism and director of the independent agency Cuba Press, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Thanks to the intervention of the Spanish government, today he is a free man who writes two columns a week for the Spanish edition of the daily newspaper El Mundo.

Right now, 27 journalists languish in the hellish Cuban prisons. One of them is Ricardo González Alfonso, correspondent for Reporters Without Borders, who has not stopped writing in prison. In Spain he has published two books: Bleeding History, a collection of poems, and Men Without Faces, a narrative. Another is Pablo Pacheco, whose written and oral testimony from Canaleta Prison can be read on the blog Voices Behind Bars.

But since 1999, law number 88, or the gag law, has been floating menacingly in the air of the Republic, giving the regime a free hand in deciding when to send someone to the penitentiary. Not a single text by a free Cuban journalist has been written without a measure of fear and paranoia. It’s normal. Because you never know if tonight you will sleep in your own bed or in the bunk of a jail cell of the police or State Security.

At times I have a nightmare. In the solitude of my room, I dream that there is a loud pounding on the door of the house. And some tough, dog-faced guys dressed in olive green take me out of the room without my feet touching the floor, throw me by force into a Russian-made car with military license plates, and take me as a prisoner to an unknown destination.

Not all are hallucinations. Sometimes I dream that the little hands of my seven-year-old daughter, together with her mother, wake me with the good news that the government of General Raúl Castro abolished the absurd laws — Cubans no longer need permission to leave the island, the exiles who wish may return to their homeland, and never again will it be a crime to write a chronicle or opinion piece telling the truth about Cuba and Cubans.

Whenever this happens, I wonder which of these dreams will become a reality first.

Iván García

Photo: AP. (Right) Ricardo González Alfonso in 2002, some months before being detained and sentenced to 20 years in prison. (Left) Luis Cino, also an independent journalist.

Translated by Raul G. and Tomás A.

Chávez, the Substitute for the Russians?

The government of the Castro brothers has staked everything on one card. That of Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, the strong man of Venezuela, a walking-talking comic strip, bursting out with some bizarre nonsense every minute. Chávez defies every canon of a balanced, sober and coherent statesman.

It could be a bible passage, or he might sing you folk song, or declaim one of his usual Maisanta poems, this Venezuelan fighter against the Spanish Colonialism of the 19th century. A deep and serious student, of course, of Simón Bolívar the Liberator.

And he has launched the strange theory that Bolívar died as the result of a complex Yankee plot. If he were a clown, comedian or a simple citizen of the state of Barinas, he would pass unnoticed. But he is the president of one of the major oil-producing countries of the world.

He has the hard currency to splurge on his extravagant projects, and considers himself a new Bolívar for the 21st century. He is committed to a different and humane socialism, but applies the same coercive measures his predecessors used to build communism.

Chávez is a confused ideological amalgam. He believes in God and Marx.  He is anti-Yankee, and since he came to power in 1999, he has radicalized his rhetoric, not only against the United States, but against all the countries of the first world.

His goal is to develop an entente among poor nations, who trade among themselves, use a common currency and who don’t rely for anything on the predatory trade with rich countries. He follows the usual custom of statesmen of “socialist societies,” who have the rare mania for perpetuating their own power, and who crush the opposition and the media.

Chávez is the classic bad boy of any meeting, debate, or world symposium where he makes an appearance.  He has no sense of moderation or respect. His brain is connected directly to his mouth. Any idea, no matter how absurd, spews forth without any processing by his mind. He has no clutch. Just an accelerator and a brake.

Let us add that the Red Commander runs his cabinet like a military barracks and distributes perks and positions among this friends and family, like every previous depraved Venezuelan president whom Chávez so frequently criticizes.

He came to power through the back door, thanks to a society paralyzed by the skyrocketing poverty and corruption in Venezuela. When democracies fail, they provide breeding grounds for these type of bullying strongmen.

From the Caribbean, Fidel Castro took note.  After the USSR said “see you later” to the bizarre communist ideology, Cuba found itself heading back to the stone age. Long blackouts, little food, a wartime economy and a large segment of the population angry and hopeless, whose only goal was to cross the Straits of Florida on a rustic raft or to marry some boring and lonely middle-aged Spaniard.

Castro had to make concessions.  Allow self-employment and small pockets of a mixed, market economy, but it wasn’t enough to move forward, though combined with the billion dollars being sent by families in Miami, it supplied him oxygen and precious time to keep his revolution from blowing away with the wind.

But the Castros worried greatly about a section of the population gaining independence. Money begets power, and makes people question the status quo. And so, the peripatetic Hugo Chávez seemed like a gift of the gods.

He had oil and money. He was a confessed admirer of Castro and had a handful of incendiary ideas that if used wisely could create a minefield for the gringos in Latin America.

Of course these were different times. Fidel Castro is a skilled political strategist, but to install a clone of the Cuban revolution in Caracas he would have to demolish the structures of civil society and free press. And obviously a segment of his dark-haired friends would not stand idly by and just watch their country go down the drain.

It is logical, than, that by February 2010 Chávez was having a terrible time. Closing a cable television station brought street demonstrations and violence. In eleven years under the commander in the red beret, the numbers tell us that there has been no reduction in poverty, corruption or violence.  Quite the contrary.

What has increased is the Cuban presence, in the form of doctors, trainers and military advisers. The Castros, worried about the situation of their ally, have sent their sinister minister of communications, Ramiro Valdés, former head of the Cuban political police and former Minister of the Interior, to see what actions can be taken to stem the disconnect among a wide sector of Venezuelans.

The official Cuban press hasn’t published one line about the latest events in Caracas, nothing about the daily four-hour blackouts, and almost nothing about the presence of Valdés. According to official media in the South American country, Valdés went to develop a plan for the power industry. Hard pill to swallow. Ramiro Valdés, fervent admirer of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first boss of the Russian Cheka, is a neophyte in this area. But if there is something he knows by heart, it is how to repress people.

If Chávez were to lose power, the Cuban economy, under siege, could not withstand the terrible blow of losing oil supplies. It is likely that among the counsels of Valdés are some messages from Fidel Castro, calling for restraint from the restless and unruly Bolivarian commander.

The Castros have bet everything on the Hugo Chávez card. From creating a trade organization, ALBA, or a common currency, the sucre, to depending on South American oil to keep the lights on in Cuba. For them, there is no way they can allow the rash Chávez to throw it all into the abyss. They are going to try everything. The fate of Venezuela is, in a very real sense, the fate of Cuba. And the Cuban government will do whatever it takes to keep the Venezuelan Santa Claus on the throne.

They bet on the wrong horse. But at this point, for the Castros, there is no turning back.

Iván García

Photo: Reuters. Hugo Chávez and Ramiro Valdés, Minister of Communications and Technology, during a recent visit to Venezuela.

A Minister in the Public Pillory

The street corners of Havana are hot. Glowing. Like a match on sandpaper that will burst into flame at the slightest touch. Baseball is to blame. This spring it is being played coast-to-coast on the island, celebrating the playoffs of the national sport, and Los Industriales, the team representing the capital, is hitting hot. The fans are going wild.

If baseball or “the ball,” as it is called in Cuba, serves as relaxation for most men, for women the sedative is found in soap operas, the electronic opium that makes them forget for 45 minutes that their refrigerators are empty.

But the ordinary Cuban also gives at least a passing glance to local events. And sees bad signs. Circulating clandestinely throughout the country are more than 300 photos of 26 deaths (rumored to be almost 60) from hunger, cold, and ill-treatment this past January, at the Psychiatric Hospital of Havana, known as Mazorra.

If you have the courage to look at the entire dark collection you have a strong stomach. The photos, taken by police experts, somehow escaped the iron state censorship imposed by the authorities over the Mazorra case. And many people carry them on their USB or flash memory, and late at night, when the children are asleep, like a scary movie, they watch the horrors on their computers.

The black and white images of the dead are comparable to those from any Nazi concentration camp. Men without teeth, with fresh marks from beatings, emaciated bodies, concrete testimony of the hunger they suffered. They were so thin that three bodies fit on one stretcher.

Confronted with such horror, ordinary people have been shaken. Roberto Osorio, 34, an engineer, trembled with fear at the photos. And he wondered how these things could happen in this country, which, according to its leaders, has a public health system comparable with the best in the world.

In a survey of 30 people, between 19 and 74 years old, of both sexes, they unanimously demanded not only a thorough investigation, but also asked for the resignation of Public Health Minister José Ramón Balaguer Cabrera.

Balaguer (born in Santiago de Cuba, 1932), a doctor by profession and one of the guerrilla commanders who participated in the revolution, is a member of the State Council and the Politburo of the Communist Party. He was appointed Minister of Public Health by Fidel Castro himself, when on July 31, 2006, he announced that for health reasons he was transferring power to his brother Raul.

One of those surveyed, Dahlia Fuentes, 56, an architect, doesn’t believe it’s possible that the minister wasn’t aware of what was happening in the country’s main mental hospital. “In every workplace in Cuba, there is a core of the Party and the Communist Youth, and they have to report what goes on. Furthermore, I assume that the Ministry of Health makes periodic inspections of its hospitals. If, in spite of all that, Balaguer’s story is that he was not informed of what was going on there, then he should resign because of incompetence” the architect says angrily.

Sara Villar, 21, a medical student, goes further. “Events like these are a clear sign that the country needs radical changes. It is not enough just to ask for the resignations and prosecutions of those responsible, it is the system that doesn’t work,” says the future doctor.

What happened in Mazorra in January 2010, has placed the performance of public officials, administrators and ministers in the public pillory. Also the political opposition, alternative journalists and the blogosphere are demanding the termination of Balaguer. The blogger Yoani Sanchez opened the tag #despidanaabalaguer# on Twitter, with hundreds of thousands of followers so far.

Amid the passionate discussions around the series of local baseball playoffs, and the next episode of the snoozer soap operas, the  opinion on the street prevails: people want the head of the Minister of Public Health to roll.

The government has gone totally mute. Its response is silence. Even in these days, Jose Ramon Balaguer is appearing more than ever on TV. And people are wondering if that is the method adopted by the mandarins of court to confirm him in office.

It would be swimming against the current. But if there is one thing the Castro brothers know how to do well, it is swim upstream.

Iván García

Photo: José Ramón Balaguer during the presentation of the book, “Battles for Life,” in February 2009.

Translated by: Tomás A.

Good Worms and Bad Worms

It was Fidel Castro who, in one of his his typical vitriolic outbursts, during a speech on January 2, 1961 (in what was then the Civic Plaza, today Revolution Plaza), applied the epithet “worms” to those Cubans who dared to criticize his olive green revolution or who decided to leave their homeland. That day he also first used the term “gusanera” [roughly equivalent to what today might be called “the wormosphere”(!)] as synonymous with counterrevolution.

Since 1959, more than two million Cubans have emigrated from their country. Let’s speak frankly. Certainly in the first waves of migration, early in the revolution, the vast majority of those who fled the island were individuals who openly hated Castro.

Many had lost their properties, nationalized in one stroke by the bearded ones who came down from the Sierra Maestra. Others, members of the lower-middle class, packed up and flew to Miami, thinking that the Comandante’s revolutionary wave was only a passing fad.

In the early years, more than three thousand professionals, excellent doctors, engineers, architects, academics, intellectuals, almost all representatives of the enlightened Cuban intelligentsia, took to their heels. To denigrate their newly exiled countrymen, official propagandists labeled them as Batista-ites, bourgeois, landowners, exploiters … And to complete the string of insults, the usual cliche of “worms.”

Then things changed. In 1980, during the Mariel boatlift, most of the 120,000 people who left their native country were simple, humble people who had never had a cent, nor run a business. People who had been educated in schools where every morning, after a patriotic speech, they had to salute, shouting “Pioneers for communism, we will be like Che.”

Since ordinary Cubans can’t freely leave their country, those who desert are the ones who are able to travel: doctors, politicians, generals, artists, ballplayers and athletes in general. All are citizens who, while living in Cuba, stand out as “revolutionary,” all the while living a double-standard with masks on. Silently attending boring meetings of the CDR, and voting early in this parody of democracy that are the Cuban elections. With a bottle of rum and to the beat of the conga, they attend military marches and demonstrations in Revolution Plaza. In this way they meet the standard of what is “politically correct.” So they don’t draw attention to themselves, and so the Party and the Ministry of Interior continue to have confidence in them.

In the depths of their souls, they wait for an opportunity. And at the first chance they leave behind tropical socialism, absurd rhetoric and material burdens. The Castro government rationalizes all these Cubans voting with their feet (or at least the majority) by saying that they left in search of economic betterment. They try put their deserters on a par with Mexicans or Haitians who in desperation flee their countries. If we agree with the official line, then we must acknowledge that from the economic standpoint, the Cuban revolution failed.

Still, when you leave Cuba for a better life, and you can read and write, as every Cuban who goes into exile can, if you are not cynical, or a liar, you should let your government know that they are the main cause of your hardship, driving you to jump into the sea on a raft, or into a loveless marriage with a Spaniard or an Italian old enough to be your grandfather.

You must not have a short memory. I still remember — how could I forget — how as a teenager of 15, watching impassively the acts of repudiation and physical attacks on those who decided to leave the island. Then the wind went out of the sail of several socialist projects. The Berlin Wall came down, and overnight, this State of workers and peasants that was the USSR disappeared with amazing speed. The map of Europe changed color.

But Fidel Castro’s revolution, which certainly was not established by Moscow, clung like one posessed to the flag of resistance, nationalism and the threat of Yankee treachery. Then a “miracle” happened. The eternal “worms” turned into butterflies. To the chagrin of Castro, those scum, those worthless Cubans who failed to recognize the greatness of his revolution, thrived, and with the greenbacks of his hated enemy began to support about 60 percent of the Cuban population, according to unofficial figures.

And now in the 21st century, without U.S. dollars, euros, or other foreign exchange sent as family remittances, nobody on the island can make plans to fix their aging house, acquire a television, buy shoes for their children, or eat two hot meals a day.

For the regime, there are “good” worms and “bad” worms. The good ones are those who traveled to Havana on January 27th and 28th, 2010, to meet with government officials “in defense of national sovereignty, the struggle against the blockade, and the release of the five heroes unjustly imprisoned in the empire.”

The meeting was held in the Convention Center, west of the city, under the long title: “Meeting of Cuban Residents Abroad, Against the Blockade and in Defense of National Sovereignty.” According to Granma newspaper, it was attended by 300 delegates from 44 nations, of which 144 came from the United States.

Never mind that these “good” worms have achieved little or nothing. It is still necessary to ask the state permission to travel abroad or visit your own country. If you leave permanently, you lose your house and other properties. And Cubans who think differently than the official line, namely the “bad” worms, are ejected from any discussion as if they had bubonic plague.

I am in favor of any dialogue. But open to all. Not just for those who applaud so long that their hands turn red, for the way the Castro brothers rule the destinies of Cuba.

I want to see the liberal politician Carlos Alberto Montaner, who lives in Madrid, walking the halls of the Convention Center, chatting animatedly with Haroldo Dilla, a Marxist economist who decided to live in Santo Domingo.

How I would like to witness the rough humanity of the poet Raul Rivero, nibbling ham and cheese canapés at Bucan Restaurant with writer Miguel Barnet, while another bard, Roberto Fernandez Retamar approaches him and invites him to his home that evening to talk about poetry.

Or that my mother, Tania Quintero, who was once the friend and journalist partner of Rosa Miriam Elizarde, could ask her about her family and her work. Nor would it be bad if the prestigious journalist Max Lesnik, with whom I share a two-man blog called Ninety Miles in the newspaper El Mundo / America, called me and we stayed to grab a coffee at the Parque Central, and there disagree civilly.

For now none of this is possible. The “good” worms should push the government to take the path of tolerance and respect for differences. Then, these meetings of immigrants would have a reason to occur.

Max, in any case, if you visit Havana, come and see me.

Iván García

Photo: Max Lesnik with Fidel Castro, in the documentary “The Man of Two Havanas,” directed in 2007 by Vivien Lesnik Weisman.

Translated by Tomás A.

Armani, Take Note

He doesn’t look quite the same as English footballer David Beckham, or the Spanish actor Antonio Banderas. He’s Cuban, his name is Carlos and he was born 24 years ago in a village in the middle of the Venezulea sugar-growing region, in the province of Ciego de Avila, about 375 miles from Havana.

He likes to wear tight-fitting Guess jeans, with a wide belt buckle decorated with an imperial eagle, and a Dolce & Garbana pullover sweater, tight, to show off his biceps, patiently sculpted in a gym. More than just his body, what he likes to show off is his penis.

To complete the picture of this neighborhood pretty boy: one gold tooth; two chains and a finger-thick bracelet, all 18 carats; black hair, shiny with too much gel; and he never loses the smile of success.

And what does success mean to the golden boy? He has lived in Havana for five years. In the early days, he rented a room with a friend for 40 convertible pesos a month in a sordid, filthy slum in the suburb of San Leopoldo. Not now.

“I have a Cuban girlfriend who is a model in Italy and is married to a man with a large belly and a larger bank account. She lives for me. Every month she sends me between 800 and 1000 euros and when she comes on vacation we have an amazing time in luxury hotels and trendy discos. She bought a house for my parents in Ciego de Avila and recently one for me in Nuevo Vedado. Also a car and the latest-generation computer. I have no complaints about her.”

Carlos doesn’t consider himself a typical “pinguero” as Cubans call the boys who sell their penis to men or women. From the beginning, when he was a newly-arrived hick in the capital, he found that he attracted men and women equally.

“I made love with a few disgusting old women for 30 cuc, and there were many nights that some European geezer would suck my cock for only ten dollars on the steps of the University of Havana.”

But after years of underpaid sex, life got better. Several Spanish and Canadian homosexuals returned home praising the qualities of this Caribbean gigolo, telling their friends that on their next vacation they should take a short hop to Havana to meet this great looking guy. As good-looking as Antonio Banderas. And hung like a porn star.

And of course, he also toured Nuevo Vedado — girls from Madrid or Milan, plump older women from London or Geneva. One infatuated German woman posted a page that advertised his “qualities.”

“I consider myself a professional. Now I don’t charge less than 120 euros a night, I even have hourly rates, like the best gigolos.”

Carlos’s dream is to leave for Madrid or Berlin, to open a male strip club.

“Here in Cuba you run many risks. Because it’s an illegal occupation, if I get caught I could be put behind bars for 5 years. And in prison, if I wasn’t brave, I would be the ‘girl’ of whichever bugger it pleased.

So he says his hours on the island are numbered.

“I once read that in the 50’s they had a club in Havana’s Chinatown, where a black man was very famous for a show in which he displayed his twelve-inch penis. I measured and I’m close to that. When I relocate to Europe I will do a remake of that show.”

Now he imagines earning euros and winning applause after a performance in nightclubs. Interviews in celebrity magazines and a row of fans making proposals to the boy from central Venezuela who looks like Antonio Banderas. “But better equipped than the actor from Malaga,” he says smiling.

And probably also than David Beckham, whose genitals the Italian reporter Elena di Cioccio dared to touch. The new image of Emporio Armani men’s underwear is the Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo. Prettier and more muscular, but not very “gifted” as these photos show:

So, Armani, take note. This Cuban is not as famous, but with him you won’t lose any time doing photoshop.

Iván García

Translated by: Tomás A.