Author: Miguel Iturria

Spies have always existed; what would secret services be without agents within the mafias? The terrorist gangs? The narco-guerrillas? The bank robbers and other groups who violate social norms and impose their interests on people and institutions? Don’t they watch governments and their ministers and generals? Doesn’t espionage exist between political parties? Does anyone believe that governments don’t “leak” and “process” — for their interests — the growing virtual media network used by millions of citizens every day?

The issue has come to the fore in the international press following the revelations of U.S. analyst Edward Snowden, who escaped with thousands of secret documents from New York to Shanghai and then to Russia, from where he tried to get political asylum in Ecuador, Venezuela or any other Latin American country where the transparency of information he requires is a chimera in the face of state authoritarianism and the fragility of the democratic system.

To escape and become a become a media star, the new “avenging hero” chose to create an image crisis for the United States and President Barack Obama. Snowden had a better civic alternative: giving up his job with the cyberpolice and denouncing, to the courts, how an agency of the federal government violates the information privacy of its citizens.

Maybe it’s too much to ask of a 29-year-old boy fascinated by the growing popular revolts shaking the institutional order from North Africa to Brazil. It may be attractive to dynamite the government apparatus instead of fighting to improve it. Are we looking at a civic hero or a traitor in service to countries like Russia, China, Iran or Venezuela? We still don’t know, but however imperfect but American democracy is much more transparent than that trumpeted by those seeking to benefit from computers and briefcases carried by Edward Snowden.

In times of social demands, discredited politicians and ministers, technological advances that position the citizen against the power of the state, the young American becomes the friendly face of challenge. What will happen? Will his revelations benefit the citizens or just pit the United States against the champions of oppression in Russia, China, Cuba or Venezuela?

For now, Edward Snowden, like Sergeant Bradley Manning — who leaked thousands of secret documents to Julian Assange, the Wikileaks leader now finding refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London — is revered as a hero by Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, John Cusak and other Hollywood stars who alternate between artistic creation and defending caudillos such as F. Castro, the late Hugo Chavez and many snipers who despise democracy and deny their people freedom of speech, press and association.

5 July 2013

“You barely talk about your country,” A friend of my wife tells me at a gathering in Valencia. I smile, because this traveling satirical traveler, not mythic even in his native Santander, where he sometimes goes to visit his mother and sister. Before leaving us he gave me the Dirty Trilogy and the King of Havana, by Pedro Juan Gutierrez, whose pages had such a negative impact that he postponed his visit to the island for almost a decade. And he admits his “sorrow and frustration after trekking through this tragicomic and bittersweet Cuba with the exception of Trinidad, Varadero and Viñales.

Yes, I do not usually talk about Cuba, about which I have published some books and hundreds of articles in the digital press. I’m not lazy but in the face of such discursive, traitorous and demigod banality, I limit myself to answering specific questions about my country and its challenges. In addition, the island is not the center of America nor the world and we run the risk of being mono-thematic and boring to our friendly hosts, immersed in the problems of their family, environment and country.

I don’t think, as my friend Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo does, that “There is no country with virtue. Every country is a virtual shaving”; although in the case of Cuba, the word has lost its drawing power. Not even the “patriotic” and corrupt gurus of the only Party still believe the tiresome rhetoric about sovereignty, nation, homeland and freedom. After decades of tyranny and slogans the concept is devalued and neither emotion, nor a million employees and soldiers who are paid to sustain the regime.

I guess that thousands of exiles and hundreds of peaceful opponents on the island are in harmony about the significance of the word nation, as well as the mythification from exile during the 19th century of Padre Félix Varela and the poets José M. Heredia and José Martí, icons of the fledgling nation and creators of literature.

They have pronounced, from the podium, so many beautiful and moving phrases about the Homeland and the Nation that I’ve learned to be cautious with these “useful” and fickle voices. In short, the Homeland is usually “the land of my fathers,” “the soil where I was born,” the garden we build, the family that embraces us, the wall that we try to cross, the country where someone waits for us, or the “promised land” of the marginalized who flee misery, wars, and the lack of opportunities on their “native soil.”

30 June 2013

Tall like a pine and genuine in his desire to express himself through art that is ephemeral and challenging, describes the young Cuban graffiti artist, Danilo Maldonado Machado — alias El Sexto (The Sixth) — who does not smile at the spring greenery nor the excess of tropical light, despite a love for the colorful trees and ocean breezes that cool the bustling night on the streets of Havana, the city whose walls are the objects his paints, as explicit and allegorical as the reality that he tries to capture with spray paint.

It’s not that El Sexto wants to beautify this bittersweet city that defies moisture and time and official apathy. More than embellish, his nocturnal murals call the attention of the bored capital pedestrians, accustomed to looking without seeing or listening without hearing in the midst of violence and the helplessness generated by the servility and cowardice induced by the despotism of the State.

And so he has problems with the political police and the other police, who control the order and carry out the order to arrest him on the public street for having a spray can in one of his pockets and later they made a search of his house and seized his works and painting supplies as well as fining him a thousand pesos without specifying the crime he committed.

In a short video shot by photographer Claudio Fuentes, El Sexto refuses to pay the fine because “I would demonstrate that I’m doing something wrong, that being an artist is a criminal act.” And he says: “I prefer to force the courts to make a judgment for me to demonstrate how and why I’m doing harm.”

We hope that Danilo Maldonado Machado, whose pseudonym satirizes the demented political campaign of the Castro regime to free to Five Spies convicted in the United States, comes out well in this new police hunt, one among so many detentions and searches to dissuade him from his “disturbing” street art.

For those who wish to know the urban odyssey of this Havana artists who exercises freedom of expression without permission, I suggest you go to his blog, located in the Vocescubanas.com portal, where there is the video made by Claudio Fuentes. You can also read the enlightening article from the writer Ernesto Santana Zaldivar, who recreated the last fight of Sexto against the police and legal harassment on this island of automatons dressed as functionaries and of intellectuals vaccinated against common sense.

In my case, I can attest to the personal, artist, and solidarity value of this tall boy who draws, with banned spray cans, stars and satiric cocks and naive and frightened faces. I met him several times at the house of Yoani Sanchez — famous author of the blog Generation Y — and at the residence of the physicist Antonio Rodiles, leader of the virtual program Estado de Sats; in addition to attending and commenting on for Cubanet the Exhibition put on by El Sexto in the apartment of the singer Gorki Aguila, on October 29, 2011. I brought to Spain the sheet that Danilo Maldonado Machado painted on my floor in Central Havana, days before we caught the plane to freedom. El Sexto converted this sheet into a protest my being held in police custody that is a testimony to denouncing and friendship.

21 June 2013

Yesterday the Cuban poet Rafael Alcides Perez turned 80; he remains in Havana as a poor, strong and gentle grandfather; lucid amid the social madness and literary closure, oblivious to personal egos and tribal tantrums. He knew fame and tasted applause from his younger years, when he joined in the swarm of those poets of the intimate and innovative generation of the ’50s, who transitioned from the estrangement and apathy during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista to the euphoria by the Revolution led by Fidel Castro, which shook the foundations of the nation and imposed exile and silence.

Rafael Alcides leaves a lasting impression on those who know him personally. Admiration grows if you read his poems before hearing his voice booming with rhythm. The poet seduces his listeners with the cascading flow of his images and metaphors, resonant and profound like the simplicity that animates his actions.

He, who for decades has declined to publish in Cuba, knows that his name carries weight in the memory of his book and some magazines that collect his most transcendent verses. The author of Thanked Like a Dog was excommunicated from the official poetry sanctuary and sanctified by writers and poetry lovers. His name barely circulates on the island, where his books are a rarity in antiquarian portals, personal libraries and catalogs of the National Library.

From Spain I join the tribute paid by the intimates of the octogenarian writer, still engaged in the creative task. Within a few years, when some publisher takes on the rescue of his poetry and novels, new readers will have in their hands, “Mountain Smoke,” “Gypsy,” “Travel Notebook,” “The Wooden Leg,” “Memories of the Future,” “Night in Memory,” “And they die, and they return, and they die,” as well as “Nobody” — his penultimate poem collection — and the controversial stories, “Contracastro,” and “The Return of the Dead.”

10 June 2013

From May 29th until today I could not open VocesCubanas.com, the alternative platform that contains my blog Island Anchor. As I thought the “closure” could be only be in the Spanish Levante — I live in the province of Castellón, in the community of Valencia — I called  followers of my posts living in Zaragoza, Madrid, Canary Islands, but none could access “Cuban Voices” nor enter my blog, not even from Google by searching on the titles of the last texts.

Coincidentally, Wednesday May 29 was the last day of Yoani Sanchez’s stay in Madrid, where she delivered a speech at the ceremony for the Ortega and Gasett awards, given by the newspaper El Pais; the next day she was received in Havana by family and friends while the Spanish newspaper reproduced her words and pictures with former President Felipe González and other figures of the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE) and the media.

No one should be ready to think that the closure of the Voces Cubanas portal in Spain was a way to lessen the impact of her words and to annul any commentary on her extensive tour of Americanand European countries. But who benefits from the silence of censorship? Who gave the order to disconnect? Where and by whom was it executed? The answer points to the officials who monitor the news in the Cuba Embassy in Madrid and to the Island regime’s network of consulates in the Iberian Peninsula.

It is not the classical theory of conspiracy; the Castro regime tactic is very old and the order stands, the diplomats-cum-State-Security-Agents executed it based on a Guide to events that demystifies the Havana government’s propaganda. They simply overload the networks, hack pages, multiply the trash emails against some, and “take the offensive” against others, even in media such as El Pais. The rest is up to time and the naive who are silent before the long arm of censorship.

4 June 2013

If in every dream the dreamer is the author of the fable that he lives while he sleeps, in every journey the traveller interacts with his own emotions, the landscape, some passengers and with cities that evoke events and personalities of the past that enrich his memory and the pleasure of travelling.

In my case, traveling through Spain, land of my father, grandparents, siblings, and wife; it is more than just a way of doing provincial tourism, I’m entering an amphitheater of dreams with geography as auditorium, the train or bus as a form of set design, and the people traveling or transiting are the authors.

The name Sagunto takes us back to Hannibal’s audacity, the Cartaginian General that turned the ancient Iberia in an operations base to dominate the Mediterranean and left Sagunto to occupy Rome, whose inhabitants persecuted the Carthaginians and settled in the Iberian peninsula.

Turned into a Roman province like the neighboring Tarragona, Sagunto was more important than Valencia, the current provincial and autonomous capital of which it was subject. Besides the huge Roman castle by the railroad tracks, other monuments recall events and legends that inscribe Sagunto into Spanish history, among this the military uprising of General Arsenio Martinez Campos, considered “the restorer of Spanish monarchy” and “Cuba’s pacifier,” in 1875 and 1878 respectively.

As Sagunto to Zaragoza is almost 180 miles, the traveler crosses the villages that look like picture postcards and is engrossed in orange groves, vineyards, olive trees, pines, poplars, leafless phantasmagoric trees, windmills in the mountains and tunnels that link fields, farmhouses and industrial silos that precede cities with stops. Segorbe, Jérica, Barracas, Sarrión, the celebrated Teruel — Mozarabic modernist capital of ham — Monreal del Campo, Caminreal, Calamocha, Cariñena and others that weave a map of movement adorned at times with snow.

Zaragoza, the fifth largest city in Spain after Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Sevilla, impresses the newcomer with its gigantic modern railway and bus station. Upon leaving we expect the magical encounter with the banks of the Ebro, fertilized in January by the abundance of rain that threatens to overwhelm the bridges.

The Ebro valley with its desert landscape and cold winds in the urban layout of the ancient kingdom of Aragon, natural scenario of Iberian people, Celts, Romans, Goths and Arabs. Around the current Zaragoza — urban and administrative center of the autonomous community of Aragon — are circled dozens of villages in two provincial capitals: Teruel and Huesca. A short distance away are Navarre and France in the Pyrenees and the cities of Castilla la Mancha, Catalonia and Castellon.

When touring Zaragoza we are amazed by the beauty of the Plaza and the Basilica of Pilar, La Seo Cathedral, the Roman stone bridge, the iron bridge of the nineteenth century, the Aljafería — the Moorish palace of joy — as well as the Plaza of the Bulls, the Imprente Blasca and statues of transcendent characters like General Parafox, the heroine Agustina de Aragon, the painter Goya, the writer Baltasar Gracian, Dr. Ramon y Cajal,the filmmaker Luis Buñuel and the Cuban intellectual and patriot José Martí, who lived and studied in the city of Zaragoza.

31 January 2013

With the onset of spring the name and the paintings of Salvador Dalí once again resonated in Spain, as the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid located has mounted a retrospective of 200 of his paintings and drawings, visited in less than a month by more than 50,000 people and reviewed by dozens of experts in various communication media in Madrid, Barcelona, Paris and other cities.

The show comes from the Parisian Pompidou Art Museum and had the cooperation of the Dalí Foundation, one of the most profitable in Europe. The “prophet of modernity” includes 104 pieces from the thirties confirming the precocious genius of the enigmatic and provocative “King of Surrealism”, who also dabbled in film, especially with his compatriot Luis Buñuel, with the Walt Disney studios and with Alfred Hitchcock.

According to the media, the “eccentric and immeasurable” character that Dalí built (Figueres, 1904-1989), is knocked out by his creative work. Alongside Picasso and Miró, Dalí made up the luxury triad of visual arts of Spain and is one of the icons of the universal art of the twentieth century.

15 May 2013

To celebrate World Book Day — and the Castilian language — on 23 April, the online edition of the daily El Pais has presented to readers in Latin America with Voces para un Cervantes (Voices for a Cervantes) to download on computers and ebook tablets. The collection “brings together interviews that this newspaper has undertaken with the 37 Spanish-speaking writers who have obtained the highest award in Spanish letters since 1976,” when the Spanish poet Jorge Guillén first received the award.

In each of the interviews we hear the voice of the winners, transformed into contemporary classics of literary creation, although “Some are hurried interviews, made the same day of the Cervantes award where the winners express their joy and surprise. Others, more thoroughly, occurred before or after the award ceremony on April 23.”

All of the award-winning writers are in Voices for a Cervantes, from representatives of the legendary Spanish Generation of 27 — Jorge Guillen, Damaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego and Rafael Alberti — to José Manuel Caballero Bonald, who received it days earlier, through the memorable Jorge Luis Borges and other travelers in Latin letters such as Alejo Carpentier, Octavio Paz, Ernesto Sábato, Augusto Roa Bastos, Carlos Fuentes, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Dulce María Loynaz, Juan Gelman, Mario Vargas Llosa, José E. Pacheco, Gonzalo Rojas, Álvaro Mutis, Sergio Pitol, Nicanor Parra, Jorge and Jorge Edwards.

In the El Pais interviews these masterful voices of the New World alternate with the grand Hispanic artists such as María Zambrano, Luís Rosales, José Hierro, Antonio Buero Vallejo, Antonio Gamoneda, Francisco Umbral, Miguel Delibes, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Ana María Matute, Camilo José Cela, José García Nieto, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Francisco Ayala, José Jiménez Lozano, Juan Marsé y el citado José Manuel Caballero Bonald.

As clarifies in El Pais, the prize for Literature in the Spanish Language of Miguel de Cervantes was convened by the Ministry of Information and Tourism on September 15, 1975. Since then it has been awarded in the last quarter of each year to one of the six writers nominated by the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language of Spain and Latin America, who receive it the following year on April 23 at the University of Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, which coincides with the book fair in commemoration of the death of the author of Don Quixote de La Mancha.

21 April 2013

These days, the name of Cuba has echoed in the Spanish press, but not for the arbitrary arrests and hunger strikes of dozens of imprisoned opponents, but for the statement of actor Willy Toledo — exceptional in his role as a fucker caught in the act in The Perfect Crime — who after embracing Hugo Chavez’s successor in Caracas announced in May that he will go live in Cuba; his calling the regime there marvelous has unleashed satirical comments in El Pais and other Spanish media.

From the largest of the Antilles the names of two characters who passed from this life also echo: Alfredo Guevara, founder and former president of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, and the composer César Portillo de la Luz, author of With You in the Distance, You My Delirium, Reality and Fantasy and other songs that brought him fame and money, as well as recognition of the cultural institutions of the dictatorship, which he was identified without actually writing laudatory hymns in the style A. Guevara, Filmmaker-in-Chief, and the troubadour and ex-deputy Silvio Rodríguez, an icon of the “committed song.”

I didn’t comment on the Spanish actor’s decision in this blog, because the Iberian cybernauts already did; though perhaps it’s a publicity tactic to get attention and a contract in Havana. It remains to be seen whether the Ministry of the Interior will grant him a Resident Card in Cuba, where they have interests and offer benefits to be well-received.

With regards to the late Alfredo Guevara, I suggest to those who think of him as a “great intellectual, filmmaker and Cuban diplomat,” go to the blog of the writer Zoe Valdes and read her post of April 19; she portrays him in body and soul as she worked with him at the Cuban Embassy and in UNESCO and was formerly editor of the journal Cine Cubano, attached to the film fiefdom of Mr. Guevara.

It seems good to review the life and work of personalities from Cuban culture, but it is unfortunate that the press in Spain and other European countries disseminate the background noise and vagueness about what is Cuban, while they are silent on the tragedy suffered by as island decimated and exhausted by the communist monarchy that still demands an extra effort to survive.

7 May 2013

In Spain there are those who believe that we foreigners should shut up until we know how the country works, which takes time and learning. Other people usually ask us about current national hot topics and explore what we think about some minister or opposition leader. As I’m more passionate about culture than politics, sometimes I answer with some silliness, because I sense that my interlocutors are coming from their own circumstances and their ideological perception.

The most recent question they asked me Friday from Cuba about the corruption in Spain and how it compares with that on the island. To be brief, I’ll start with the press in both countries. As for Cuba, I find two articles published today on Cubanet handy; one my Miriam Celaya, “To be corrupt or to not be corrupt, that is the question”; and “Corruption in Uniform” by Marta B. Perez Roque. I suggest reading them, because they both agree that the problem is widespread: “… For the powerful it’s a way to get rich,” and for “ordinary Cubans it’s a way to survive.”

With regards to Spain, I suggest reading Joseph I. Torreblanca’s article that appeared on April 24 in the blog Cafe Steiner, on the Civic Circle of Opinion about corruption, made in Madrid with the participation of four professors who exposed an ethical, legal, economic and political problem. In summarizing the meeting Torreblanca said:

“Like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the four horsemen of corruption are immoral individuals, public cheaters, for-profit businessmen and opaque political parties. Hence, to leave behind the corruption we need a great individual self-discipline, an effective state, entrepreneurs who want to compete and open political parties… “

Not to delve into cases of either country and to avoid generalizations, I prefer to remember that corruption is a universal problem with deep historical and cultural roots inherent greed and temptations.

30 April 2013

In Cuba, May is a month that evokes history and celebration for the advent of the  Republic on May 20, 1902, the celebration of International Workers Day, which had become of spectacle of the “chorus syndrome” for half a century. In Spain, May Day is a National Holiday for Labor Day, and the following day in Madrid marks the 1808 popular uprising against the French forces, whose troops had already been kidnapped by Carlos IV and his dynastic successor (Fernando), repressing the Aranjuez Mutiny and implementing terror in other places on the Peninsula, to impost Joseph Bonaparte, brother of the French emperor, on the throne.

The uprising in Madrid and the wave of executions was the prelude to the War of Independence against foreign troops; its huge internal and external consequences for the dramatic situation of Spain was taken advantage of by its colonies in America to throw off the colonial yoke.

Historians, artists and writers have testified about the odyssey of the Spanish people against their occupiers. The brilliant artist Francisco Goya memorialized on two canvases the shootings of May 2 and 3 in Madrid, while the writer Benito Pérez Galdós wrote novels about the events, and the sculptors such as Antonio Sala, author of the Daoíz and Velarde Monument, located in May 2 Square, and Aniceto Marinas, creator of the Monument to the Heroes of May 2, around which the first centenary was celebrated in (1908) in the Puerta del Sol.

3 May 2013

On April 21, as a prelude to the celebration of World Book Day in Madrid and other cities in Spain, the daily El Pais published a review by Antón Jacinto of The Dark Charisma of Hitler, by the British historian Laurence Rees, who analyzes the personality of the great German dictator and the capacity of hatred as an element of popular leadership. I attach  major pieces of that article because it made me think of F. Castro and other “charismatic tyrants” in Latin America who combine hatred with the terror and mass manipulation.

“We know almost everything about Adolf Hitler, but irreducible secrets of his personality and leadership remain. For the famous British historian and documentarian Laurence Rees (Ayr, Scotland, 1957), none are greater than how he managed to drag along with him, in the terrible cycle of war and genocide, millions of Germans. To try to clarify that and to explain the keys to the fatal attraction of the Nazi leader, the author of Auschwitz, Horror in the East, Their Darkest Hour, and Behind Closed Doors, has dedicated his new book, The Dark Charisma of Hitler. Rees highlights the features of Hitler “his unlimited capacity for hatred.” He warns: “The power of hate is undervalued. It is easier to unite people around hatred around than any positive belief.”

As a person, says Rees, Hitler was quite unfortunate. “Badly damaged” psychically, incapable of true friendships and affections, bathed in hatred and prejudice. “Lonesome and with a vision of life as a struggle and human beings like animals.” But he had charisma. “We tend to think that charisma is a positive value, but despicable people may have it,” he muses.

Rees says, “The most important thing to understand that Hitler’s charisma depended on people. Charisma does not exist offline. You cannot be charismatic on a desert island. Much of what makes it is the other… Yes, the idea is that when we feel a special connection with someone we believe that depends on this person but actually it depends partly on us. Hitler’s charisma came from both the people who followed him as well as himself… “

Rees explains how among the Germans themselves the influence of Hitler’s charisma resulted in changes. “People who saw him as a ridiculous or disturbed in 1928 came to consider him as a savior in 1933.” There were always, however, people immune to his charisma. Philipp Von Boeselager, who conspired to kill him, found him outrageous and said it was disgusting to watch him eat: a boor. “Well, but you have to remember that … unconventional times require unconventional leaders.”

People had to be predisposed to follow Hitler, says Rees, although he, the leader, brought his intransigence, his absolute sureness of his role as a providential figure, his ability to connect with the hopes and desires of millions of Germans, their uncontrolled emotions and, above all, his contagious hatred. “One of the hardest things in the world is accepting the blame and responsibility for yourself, we are all predisposed to project our frustrations on the other, in the form of hatred.”

Did Hilter’s success depend on his charisma? “Yes, this aspect was vital. If someone says he will do something extraordinary and he does, the next time it is easier for you to have faith. Hitler played strong, all or nothing, and every victory strengthened his charisma. Many military, for example, who looked at him with suspicion, surrendered to his genius, his intuition, the famous Fingerspitzengefühl, after a long series of victories that seemed inexplicable…”

So, how did his charisma survive the failure at Stalingrad? “Unlike Mussolini, Hitler dismantled the structures of the State, so it was more difficult separate him from power, in addition, he had instilled fear of the Red Army in the Germans and their revenge, which would happen at the defeat and although Hitler would be gone, and of course Hitler increased the terror of his repressive apparatus in direct proportion to the loss of his charismatic leadership.”

Hitler cultivated his charisma … “including in many small ways. He wore glasses, but never let himself be seen or photographed in them. He carried a magnifying glass. They even fabricated a special typewriter with large characters to write the texts he had to read … He also studied his image in the mirror and practiced his famous glare.”

Rees points out the differences between Hitler and Stalin in terms of charisma. “Stalin practiced negative charisma, the entire image of Hitler seemed hollow. Under Stalin there were no rules to avoid being killed. No one was sure. In Nazi Germany it was clear who would be persecuted by the regime, in the Stalinist USSR, no. Stalin used fear like Hitler used hatred.”

25 April 2013

The newspapers and TV news in Spain barely report on news from Cuba, where not everything happens between the orders and the execution of the orders, nor does the reality coincide with the political propaganda designed by the Powers-That-Be, as is clearly demonstrated in these days of the travels through America and Europe of the Island blogger Yoani Sanchez, who sat on the El Pais jury that awarded the Ortega y Gasset prize and responded to questions from the readers of that newspaper, for whom she is the representative on the Caribbean island.

Yoani, that chronicler of reality unaligned with the classic political definitions, has responded with wit, honesty and ingenuity to questions that they are just formulating in Spain, a nation plunged into economic crisis, unemployment and budget cuts in health and other social services, generating protests, uncertainties and challenges from citizens that echo in the media.

I am not going to summarize the questions and answers of the famous creator of Generation Y and  the Bloggers Academy of Cuba; those interested can read it in the online edition of El Pais from Friday April 19; but I do want to note Yoani behaves as a genuine citizen ambassador, beyond her divergent views she offers a look from those millions of voiceless Cubans who reject the endless discourse of Communist rule and who do not see their country in the inexplicable limbo of a  utopia conceived in the former Soviet Union and spread to Europe by the leftist parties complicit in the grotesque Cuban dictatorship.

For the situation in Spain is understood the tone of certain questions, in which also gravitate the effects of Castro’s propaganda and the pursuit of social chimera elsewhere. Maybe that’s why Yoani says that “in Cuba we live under state capitalism, a family clan deeply neoliberal”; she warns that “how to be free is learned by being free” and that for her “life is not elsewhere, but in another Cuba” where “to exercise independent journalism does cost one’s freedom or a media lynching.”

23 April 2013