Author: Lynn Cruz

I recently discovered that a Cuban professor had been expelled from the documentary school where he had taught for 12 years, who hasn’t gone public with the news, because he is still waiting for a response from Fernando Rojas, the Vice-Minister of Culture.

Rojas and Susana Molina, the current director of EICTV, decided to expel him because they believed him to be: “politically incorrect”.

Of course, this would never have happened when the school was a Non-governmental organization. In the hands of political commissars now, unprincipled subjects with a green light to crush anyone who threatens their weak official discourse, there isn’t any kind of will to maintain the school’s prestige.

On Monday March 19^th, an actress friend of mine told me that the casting for Angeleri’s workshop would take place on Wednesday the 21st. The news took me by surprise as I had been working on some exercises the week before for the theses of direction students on the regular course. I was sure they would call me for Angeleri’s workshop, but it seems I’ve also been put in the category: “politically incorrect”, but because I’m just an actress, they didn’t even spare themselves the effort of telling me, as they believed that everything would have been assumed.

I immediately called up producer Rafael Acosta, who I have known ever since I first started working at the school, and after insisting more than once, he finally answered. I really needed Arley Perera’s phone number, who is responsible for calling the actors, but Acosta told me he didn’t have his number, and when I asked him about the casting, he replied that I was indeed not on the list.

Then, I decided to speak to Angeleri myself so as to clear up any doubts, as she had written an email to me saying: See you soon, dear! When I contacted her, she couldn’t hide her surprise and said that she had asked Perera if I was going to the casting and that he had awkwardly replied: I don’t know, I’ll tell you later. It was after 7 PM when we spoke, Perera had already gone home and Angeleri suggested I call Orietta Roque, coordinator of Higher Education, which is where the workshop was taking place, to make sure that it wasn’t a misunderstanding.

Roque told me that there wasn’t a problem with me personally, that it was the producers’ decision and that she couldn’t do anything to change it. We had a confrontation on the phone, and she finally said that I wouldn’t be able to go to the casting.

Nothing that Roque had said was true, first of all, her husband Gerardo Chijona, who also teaches a workshop on the same program, doesn’t allow producers to organize his casting and he, like the majority of teachers, take their own cast.

On the other hand, the injustice is even greater if you take into account the fact that Angeleri teaches a casting workshop with complex scenes from an acting perspective, with real film rigor, as her students are film professionals, which means to say that even if I went to the casting, that doesn’t mean I’m going to get a place on the workshop as it’s highly competitive.

I have also got several job offers from abroad thanks to this workshop’s intensity.

In the end, and in the face of the blatant situation, I just had to apologize to Angeleri for the shame she would experience for seeing what it means to live in a country where the slightest bit of respect for professional competence doesn’t exist as it isn’t my ability and discipline as an actress that is being decided behind my back, but what my point of view on the country’s current situation is, which is being subjected to a new terror policy.

They didn’t show Angeleri any respect as they lied to her face. The schools’ producers, alongside Roque, have censored me giving vague excuses which only prove the lack of personal conviction those at the head of arbitrary measures have who are only trying to cut me from my profession.

Note: Translation from English version of Havana Times

According to Winfrey, anyone can go as far as she has. She could criticize Trump but not the system that fabricates the fantasy of wanting a life that doesn’t necessarily keep in line with an individual’s real possibilities. In other words, Winfrey defends the “American dream” which is also the “Latin American nightmare,” not just for immigrants but also for the realities of Latin American people.

The heart of Winfrey’s speech addresses the fact that every success or failure is an individual’s sole responsibility. It omits the existence of political, economic or social situations and that’s why Aschoff calls her way of thinking “neoliberal.”

Because ideas also fall into abstract terms, Cubans were also given a dream, the dream of social justice; it doesn’t matter that it might be unsustainable given the fact that the conditions to move towards this “Communist paradise” were never created. Karl Marx didn’t say that a Revolution could bring about a communist system.

It isn’t easy to analyze a system which has been adopting and adjusting certain positions, based on the philosophy of the “temporary.” This has been the trap that the government has fallen into in the long run, a prisoner of its own inclinations, it wants to survive although it has to deny itself, its own rhetoric in order to do so and the most important thing in the name of the majority is to demand that: “We need to improve” in order to disguise this transition towards state capitalism.

Even when it keeps its so-called “achievements” going: “Free healthcare and education.”  As part of a globalized world, Cuba also runs the risk of not being exempt from this neoliberal political and economic movement, in its different forms of manifesting and defining itself.

Reality on the island, the product of the historic exhaustion of four generations which have walked along a cobbled path, in the name of anti-imperialist resistance, is that of apathy and discredit towards politicians.

Cuban society is moving more and more towards individualism, saving oneself at any cost, in the face of the chaos and social disorder that have taken over the country. In the long-term, years of sacrifice have only proved that Cuba is nothing but a poor country, trapped in a geopolitical conflict, which dates back to the Cold War.

This wouldn’t be dangerous if the economy had been strengthened during the nearly 60 years of this same system, with a real rule of law and civil society. In Cuba, poor governance also prevails today with a president and a small anonymous group that control and exercise power from the shadows, who are only worried about their opposition, in any way they take form, whether that’s in art or politics.

A while ago, during a movie shoot for Cuban TV, I was at the Vistar magazine office, a gossip magazine which has popped up within this low budget capitalism that is becoming more and more visible and tangible here. At the office entrance, there was a slogan: “Consuming what we produce is a way of being patriotic.”

Preparing yourself for Cuba’s future will mean doing business but without questioning the Communist Party and its so-called “achievements.” That is to say, the current Cuban government’s ideology is focusing on the business world. Those who were born in the ‘90s, for example, didn’t live during the time of the Russians and so they became conscious within a dollarized society. For them, the Revolution is just a brand up for sale in Old Havana, where Cuba spreads its legs like a prostitute. And the new Cuban Parliament will establish itself there too, in the Republican Capitolio.

What happened to the idea of Cuba’s “New Man,” forged from the steel of an anti-imperialist Revolution?

In his book Sabbat Gigante, Nestor Diaz de Villegas, the writer who stirs things up among the Cuban exile community, says that the “worm” has been Castrismo’s greatest creation. He was a political prisoner when he was just 18 years old because of a poem he wrote to Carlos III Street, which later became Salvador Allende Avenue after the Revolution triumphed. A teenage prisoner of conscience.

Drawing conclusions from his analysis, you could deduce that Miami became the city of worms. Something that Fidel Castro created together with the US government. This is how Castro purged the island to prevent any kind of political competition. The first “worms” to leave would be the middle class, small business owners, professionals and intellectuals.

An organized repudiation of those leaving the country at Mariel in 1980.
However, 54 years after the first mass exodus in 1964, Cuba is a doomed land today. Opposition on the island is also slandered off as “mercenary” for receiving funds that come from these same Cuban-American “worms” that probably left during the Camarioca boatlift.

A new kind of “worm” left during the following exoduses, the working class who don’t live off of funds from the White House once they are there, nor are they Cubans with renowned surnames. When the time came, they were also labeled “traitors”.

However, in his Sabatt Gigante, Diaz de Villegas says: “There is a kind of late vindication in the fact that the monstrous worm returns to Cuba, transformed into a butterfly.”

They sustain the country with their remittances. However, the Cuban government made sure of adding a 10% tax to the dollar with regard to the Convertible Cuban Peso (CUC). I’m using its English abbreviation so as to not confuse it with the other PCC (Cuban Communist Party), one of destiny’s ironies.

Thus, every time a Cuban begins criticizing the government in a direct way, and shows them that they aren’t afraid, they run the risk of being converted into a “worm”. You have no other choice but ostracism or exile.

Meanwhile, a new kind of industry created by Castrismo has also been extended to the so-called “missions” that doctors, athletes, artists and teachers go on. They are the ones who really pay for the so-called “achievements of the Revolution” which are of course riddled with corruption.

Cubans rest at the immigration office in Penas Blancas, Costa Rica, on the border with Nicaragua on November 16, 2015. Photo: Ezequiel Becera /AFP
You can’t deny Fidel Castro’s intelligence; he collected all the glory for himself, at the expense of dividing, oppressing and crushing the Cuban people.

On the other hand, Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, who represents the ugly American, has stood out for his hostility towards immigrants from “shithole” countries. He has reinforced tensions with the Cuban government, condemning both nations to live in uncertainty and fear. However, it led to the Cuban government establishing the new category of “repatriate worm” after it was supposedly going to “reconcile with its exile community”.

Even though Cubans have a US passport, they still need a Cuban passport to travel to Cuba. Could Cuban and US immigration services please explain, what the status of a repatriate is?