Author: Yoani Sánchez

Last week a friend asked me if the coming of democratic changes to Cuba would result in independent journalism. I stopped to meditate, because there are answers that shouldn’t be thrown out there without carefully weighing them. In the seconds I remained silent passing through my head were all the images and moments of those reporters of risks and words that have influenced my life. I thought about Raúl Rivero, who left journalism and the official institutions to take a dangerous leap toward freedom for his pen.  I remember the typewriter permanently on the table in his apartment on Peñalver Street, the smell of his cigar, his arms reaching out to receive everyone who came. Undoubtedly a man who loved his profession which put him at the center of so much repression and damage.

I kept going over the names. Reinaldo Escobar who permanently infected me with the virus of journalism, my colleagues of Primavera de Cuba, the many friends who have fed the pages of Cubanet, Diario de Cuba, Café Fuerte, HablemosPress, Misceláneas de Cuba, Voces Cubanas, Penúltimos Días and of so many other sites, blogs, press agencies and simple bulletins with just a single sheet folded in half. Spaces in which they have narrated this country concealed by the official media and the triumphalism of political slogans. People who choose the most difficult path, instead of remaining silent, faking it, staying out of trouble like the vast majority. Thanks to them we have heard innumerable news stories silenced in the national newspapers, television and radio, the private and hegemonic property of the Communist Party.

So, when my friend sprung that question on me, I concluded that in a democratic nation journalism has no need of surnames. It is not “official” or “independent.” And so, as a small tribute to all those reporters of yesterday and today, I have written the prologue to the anthology, “Con voz abierta/With Open Voices,” which presents a selection of news and opinion written from within Cuba and in the most precarious of conditions from the legal and material point of view. It is a book of journalists… simply journalists, without qualifiers that determine their affiliation to any ideology. A compilation that will bring about this future in which we will not need to make distinctions between professionals of the press.

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10 October 2013

When I was in high school two of the many words used as insults shocked me. One of them was “self-sufficient.” Its stigma came from the mea culpa processes to join the Young Communists Union, where the candidates criticized themselves for not behaving — always — as part of a collective. Another pejorative terms was “conscious” or “aware,” which in that context referred to someone too intellectual, too devoted to books, too engaged in learning. The good students were labeled “super-conscious” and the natural leaders who emerged in each group also felt the taint of self-sufficiency. Better not to excel, not to overexert yourself… these disqualifiers seemed to warn us.

Worshiping individual mediocrity generates mediocre societies. Vilifying the talented and entrepreneurial hinders the development of a nation. Professional capital is not constructed only with titles, degrees and post-graduate degrees, but with the need that arises from a population that reveres knowledge. It is also imperative that intelligence is not something to be hidden, almost with embarrassment or shame. We are all potential scientists and discoverers, in need of an environment where our capabilities find respect. A country of scientists should be able to show off its laboratories and vaccines; but also ensure that ordinary people can patent their achievements and be rewarded — materially and spiritually — for their ingenuity.

There may be many university graduates in Cuba, but as long as these people do not find true social and legal recognition and salaries commensurate with their work, we can hardly call ourselves a nation of science. It’s sad that more statues are raised and more plazas dedicated to people who have wielded machetes or weapons, than to those who have saved lives with their microscopes and syringes. The prodigious milligram* of knowledge needs an environment where it can multiply. That fertile soil that carries the seed of education, the irrigation to imagine a better life through scientific discovery and the essential fertilizer of freedom.

* “An ant censured for the subtlety of its loads and its frequent distractions, found one morning, on straying once again from the road, a prodigious milligram. Without stopping to think about the consequences of the discovery, it took the milligram and put it on its back. Happily it discovered that it was the perfect load just for her. The ideal weight of that object gave her body a strange energy: like the weight of their wings on the bodies of birds.” (Taken from “The Prodigious Milligram,” Juan José Arreola, Complete Works, Mexico, Alfaguara, 1997)

** Thanks to Universal Thinking Forum for provoking this reflection … and much more.

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6 October 2013

He has sewn a double lining into the bottom of his pants. Big enough to hold the milk powder he sneaks out of the factory. So far he’s never had any problems, but every now and then they bring in a new guard and he avoids taking anything home for a few days. His work at the Dairy Complex has never been professionally interesting to him, but he wouldn’t exchange it for any other. To his place as a packer he owes his daughter’s quinceañero celebration, the new roof on his house, the motorbike he rides around the city. He has a job envied by many. An occupation someone with just a sixth grade education can do, but one coveted by academics, experts and even scientists. It’s a workplace where you can steal something.

Ingenuity and illegality are combined when it comes time to make a living. Hoses rolled up under a shirt carry alcohol out of the distilleries. Cigar rollers calculate when the security camera looks away to slip a cigar under the desk. Bakers add extra yeast to make the dough rise disproportionately so they can resell the flour. Taxi drivers are experts in fiddling with the meter; clerks steal a little bit from each tube of liquid detergent; farmers add a few small stones to each bag of beans… so they weigh more. Creativity in the quest of embezzling the State and the customer stretches across the island.

However, of all the elaborate and clever ways to “struggle” that I have known, there is one that stands out as remarkable. I heard it from a friend who gave birth to an underweight baby at the Havana maternity hospital. Both the child and the mother had to stay in the medical center until the baby gained almost a pound. The process was slow and the new mother was desperate to go home. The bathroom had no water, the food was terrible, and every day her family had to make great sacrifices to bring her meals and clean clothes. To top it off, my friend looked at the other low birthweight babies and they were putting on ounces rapidly. She expressed her desperation to another patient who responded, laughing, “Boy, are you stupid! You don’t know that the nurse sells the ounces?” That lady in the white coat who walked the halls every morning charged for entering a higher weight into the medical record. She was selling non-existent baby ounces. What a business!

After hearing that story, nothing surprises me any more, I am never shocked by the many ways in which Cubans “struggle” for survival.

4 October 2013

If reality could personify itself, climb into a body, have physical contours. If a society could be represented by a living being, ours would be a growing adolescent. Someone who will stretch out his arms and legs and throw off paternalism to become an adult. But that beardless boy is wearing clothes so tight they hardly let him breathe. Our daily life has been compressed by the corset of a legality with excessive prohibitions and by an ideology as outdated as it is dysfunctional.  This is how I would draw the Cuba of today, this pubescent but repressed form would represent the context I live in.

The governmental trend is not moving to recognize our needs for economic and political expansion. Rather it is trying try to squeeze us into absurd molds. This is the case with the limited occupations allowed to self-employed workers, the sector that in any other country would be classified as “private.” Instead of expanding the number of licenses to included many other productive activities and services, the authorities are trying to cut reality to fit within the accepted list. The law doesn’t work to encourage creativity and talent, but rather to constrain the limits of entrepreneurship.

The latest example of this contradiction is seen in the operations against those who sell imported clothes, primarily from Ecuador and Panama. According to the official media, many of these merchants are licensed as “Tailors,” which allows them to market articles coming from their own sewing machines; and instead they offer industrially manufactured blouses, pants and bags. Violators are punished by confiscation of their merchandise plus heavy fines. The inspectors attempt, in this way, to force our reality into the straitjacket regulated by the Official Gazette.

Why, instead of so much persecution, don’t they authorize the work of “merchant.” Buying, transporting and reselling articles in high-demand should not be a crime, but rather a regulated activity that also contributes to the treasury through taxes. To deny this key piece in the machinery of any society is to misunderstand how to structure its economic fabric. The legal framework of a nation shouldn’t condemn it to the infancy of timbiriches — tiny Mom-and-Pop stands — and to the manufacture and sale of churros, but rather it should help us expand professionally and materially. As long as the Cuban government doesn’t accept the ABCs of development, our reality must grow and stretch its arms towards illegalities and the underground market.

22 September 2013

Good evening:

More than a decade ago Vaclav Havel’s book “The Power of the Powerless” fell into my hands for the first time. It came wrapped in a page of my country’s official newspaper, the Cuban Communist Party’s daily. Covering books was one of the many ways of hiding inconvenient texts forbidden by the government from the eyes of informants and the political police. In this way we had been reading, clandestinely, stories of what happened with the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of the Soviet Union, the Czech transformation, and all the other events in Eastern Europe. We knew about all these transitions, some more traumatic, others more successful and many of us dreamed that the transformation would soon come to our Island in the Caribbean, subjected to more than five decades of totalitarianism. But the transition most yearned for remains to be built. The processes of change don’t come alone, citizens have to spark them.

Today I am here, in the very city where Vaclav Havel was born, this man who summed up as few others have the spirit of the transition. I am also facing many people who have encouraged, pushed and personified the desire for change in their respective societies. Because the search for horizons of greater freedom is an essential part of human nature. Thus, it is twisted and unnatural for regimes to try to perpetuate themselves over the people, to immobilize them, to take from them the desire to dream that the future will be better.

In Vaclav Havel’s era, for Lech Walesa, and for so many other dissidents of the communist regimes, methods of peaceful struggle were effective: labor unions, even artistic creation was put to use for change. Now technology has also come to our aid. Every time I use a cellphone to denounce an arrest or write in my blog about the difficult situation of so many Cuban families, I think about how these gadgets with keyboards and screens would have helped the activists of previous decades. How far they could have cast their voices and projects had they had the social networks and all of cyberspace that opens today before our eyes. The Web 2.0 has been, without a doubt, a boost for the spirit of transition that dwells within us all.

Today, for the first time in Forum 2000, there is a small representation of Cuban activists. After decades of island confinement in which our country’s regime blocked many dissidents, independent journalists and alternative bloggers from traveling abroad, we have achieved the small victory of their opening to us the national frontiers. It is a limited victory, incomplete, because many others are still missing. Freedom of expression, respect for free opinion, the ability to choose for ourselves who represents us, the end of those acts of hate called “repudiation rallies” that still persist on the streets of Cuba against those who think differently from the ideology in power. However, many of us feel that Cuba is in transition. A transition that is happening in a more irreversible and instructive manner: from within the individual, in the conscience of a people.

In this transition we see the influence of many of you. Many of you who have arrived first to freedom and who have found that it is not the end of the road, rather freedom brings new problems, new responsibilities, new challenges. You who, in your respective countries, kept alive the breath of change, even risking your names and your lives.

Like the spirit of transition contained in that book by Vaclav Havel, wrapped — to disguise it — with the pages of the most stagnant and reactionary official newspaper you can possibly imagine. Like that book, the transition can be prohibited, censored, decreed to be almost a dirty word, postponed and demonized… but it will always arrive.

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16 September 2013

Subtitles read:
Free access to information for me to have my own opinion.
I want to elect the president by direct vote, not by other means.
Neither militants nor dissidents, all Cubans with the same rights.
End the blockade… and the INTERNAL BLOCKADE.

The filters were useless. The many eyes watching the monitors of the “master switch,” with itchy fingers ready to cut the signal, turn off the audio, kill a camera and switch to another focused on the crowd… or even on the heavens…

The professionals were useless, even though they had been carefully trained in TV censorship to cut to a test pattern or superimpose a musical curtain, should any “spontaneous” thing be said that should not be broadcast live.

It was all useless because the man in front of the microphone made the decision of his life: he resolved to put honesty above his own artistic career.

Robertico Carcásses was at the right time and the right place. He couldn’t let the chance go by and so he let loose, on the main stage of the Cuban regime, what so many of us are thinking.

Thank you, Bobby, for your bravery, your originality and for seizing this great opportunity with your voice and your art. Thank you!

*Translator’s note: Carcásses was singing at a concert staged for the release of the “Cuban Five” (Cuban spies imprisoned in the United States) at the Anti-Imperialist Bandstand in Havana, Cuba.

15 September 2013

Beto was one of those who handed out beatings in August of 1994. With his helmet, his mortar-splattered pants and an iron bar in his hand, he lashed out at some of the protestors during the Maleconazo. At that time he was working on a construction team and felt like part of an elite. He had milk at breakfast, a room he shared with other colleagues, and a salary higher than any doctor’s. He spent the years of his youth building hotels, but a decade ago, when his brigade was demobilized, he became unemployed. He didn’t want to return to the village of Banes where he was born, not him, nor many others of that troop ready to build a wall or break heads.

Several of these construction workers were allowed to settle in a makeshift neighborhood in the Havana suburbs. The received the benefit of permission to build a “llega y pon*” — a shantytown — near Calle 100 and Avenida Rancho Boyeros. A crumb, after so much ideological loyalty. Without the perks and high wages, many of these bricklayers had to survive on what they could find. Beto set up a workshop for fabricating “creole bricks.” Other neighbors in his makeshift neighborhood also dedicate themselves to building materials: sand, stone powder… bricks. With the new relaxations giving permission for the repair and building by one’s own efforts, the business of “aggregates” prospers, involving more people every day. The producers, transporters, brigade leaders, and finally the men who load the sacks on the trucks. A chain of work — parallel to the State’s — more efficient, but also at higher prices.

Beto doesn’t like talking about the past. In his shirt full of holes he walks between the stacks of Creole blocks coming out of his little factory. When he sees one that has cracked or that has a broken corner, he shouts at one of his employees who mixes the mortar for casting the molds. He carries an iron rod in his hand, as he did on 5 August 1994, but this time it’s for knocking against the blocks, checking the strength of his product. He frequently glances over to the little house he is building at the end of this unpaved street with no drains. For the first time he has something of his own, something no one has given him. He is a man with neither privilege nor obedience.

*Translator’s note: “llega y pon” is literally “arrive and put.”

The sign says: Don’t Pass. Danger

3 September 2013

The composition is almost circular, compact. The eyes follow a spiral line that starts on the shoe of the man seated in the foreground and ends at the rooster held by another. There is peace, vestiges of good conversation, and in the background a village of wood and palm leaf huts. Six Cuban peasants have been represented in this painting by Abela, as well known as it is plagiarized. Their faces are tanned by the sun and vaguely indigenous. They are magnetic, irresistible. Our gaze takes us to the details of their clothing. “Dressed to the nines,” impeccable sombreros, long sleeves, perhaps with the fabric starched for the occasion.

Infected by the familiarity of the painting, I go to the countryside, put myself in the furrows where so many times I have picked tobacco, beans, garlic… I go in search of the primordial unity of Cubanness that is rural man However, under the scorching sun of August, instead of “Abela’s guajiros,” I find people dressed in military garb. Olive-green pants, shirts that lost their epaulettes long ago, old berets from some battle that never happened. They don the uniforms of the Armed Forces or the Ministry of the Interior to face the rigors of the fields. They don’t have many choices.

In the informal market it’s easier to buy an official jacket than a shirt for farm work. A police cap costs less than a straw sombrero. Belts made out of cowhide are also a thing of the past; today it’s easier and cheaper to find those used in the army. The situation is the same for shoes. Rubber boots are scarce and instead the men and women of the land wear shoes designed for the trenches and combat. In a militarized country, even in the smallest details the military prevails over tradition.

State centralization was drying up the autonomous production of clothes designed for farming. Not even the recent relaxations for self-employment have encouraged this production. It is not just an issue of economics or supply, this situation also affects questions of our national idiosyncrasies and popular customs. A current version of Abela’s painting would leave us with the impression of a looking at a militia group in tattered clothing posing for the painter in the middle of an encampment… about to sound the reveille.

23 August 2013

My grandmother made a living washing and ironing for others. When she died, in her mid-eighties, she only knew how to write the three letters of her name: Ana. For her whole life, she worked as a maid for a family, even after 1959 when official propaganda boasted of having emancipated all servants. Instead, many women like her continued to work in domestic service but without any legal security. For my sister and me, Ana spent part of her days in “the house on Ayestarán Street,” and we never said out loud that she was paid to clean the floors, wash the dishes and prepare the food there. I never saw her complain, nor did I hear of her being mistreated.

A couple of days ago I heard a conversation that contrasted with the story of my grandmother. A plump lady dressed in expensive clothes was telling her friend — between glasses of white wine — how she behaved with her young domestic. I transcribe here — without adding even a word — a dialog that left me feeling a mixture of revulsion and sadness:

– From what you tell me, you’re lucky.
– Yes, I really can’t complain. Suzy started with us when she was 17 and she just turned 21.
– Now we’ll see if she gets pregnant and you have to throw her out.
– No, she’s very clear on that. I told her that if she gets pregnant she’ll lose her job.
– Yes, but you know, “the fox always returns to its den.” So maybe she’ll run after some man from the village where she was born.
– No way! She won’t even go to that “den” on vacation. Imagine you didn’t have any electricity, the floor of her parents’ house is dirt, and the latrine is shared by four families. – – It’s like the heavens opened up for her since she’s been with us. All she has to do is what I tell her, that’s all I ask.
– That’s how they start, but later they start thinking things and ask for more.
– So far we’re doing fine. She has Sunday afternoons off to do what she wants, but she has to come home by midnight. Most of the time she doesn’t even go out because she doesn’t know anyone in Havana. It’s better that way, because I don’t like the bad influences.
– Yes, it’s really bad out there. These country girls do better not to even go out because if they do they learn a few things.
– They learn more than a few things. Because of that I even monitor her phone calls. I don’t want her to learn what she doesn’t need to know.
– And that boyfriend you told me she had?
– No, that didn’t continue. We made it clear that we didn’t want men visiting our house. And she, really, has no time to be falling in love, my children take a lot of time. Taking them to the park, their homework after school, they like to paint before going to bed, she has to read them a story, they don’t like to watch movies alone. Poor thing, when it’s time to fall into bed she must be dead on her feet.
– Woooow… you’re sitting in the catbird seat. I haven’t had any luck. Every time I hire one, they don’t last even a month.
– If you like I can introduce you to Susy’s younger sister, she seems very serious.
– How old is she?
– Fifteen, so you can train her like you want.
– Yes, give her my phone number and have her call me. Oh, and make it clear, I’ll buy everything: clothes, shoes. But if she leaves one day, she’s not taking even a pin from my house. Make that clear! Because they get a big head and it’s hard as hell to deflate it!

The two women continue talking as the wine bottle passes the half-way mark. I overhear a rant about her husband’s more than 60 pairs of shoes. They laugh and I feel my stomach knotting up in a familiar way, with the accumulated anger abusers provoke in me. I go outside for a little air and see the “matron’s” car. It has green Army-issue license plates that stands out against the shiny metallic gray body. It’s the new aristocracy class, the olive-green royalty, lacking scruples and modesty. I spit on the windshield, for Susy, for Ana, for me.

They don’t have their own places, but they flourish everywhere. They lend money at interest, facilitate loans, and charge the same in cash as in goods and services. They are the new moneylenders. After being stigmatized for decades, these banned bankers have returned without licenses or pity. They offer everything from small amounts to thousands of convertible pesos, although the latter is only for very reliable clients. They operate in areas they know well; they know how much their neighbors make in wages, whether they receive remittances from overseas, or if they have some other source of income. Starting with this information, they distinguish between those who will be “good for it” and those who won’t. Although there can always be surprises. The great nightmare of these “usury experts” lies in the customers’ intentions to board a boat and be smuggled out of the country, without returning to them what is theirs.

Other situations can be resolved with pressure and threats. When a debtor is overdue in his payments, the lender feels that the time has come to teach him a lesson.

Edward was watching television last Saturday when they knocked on his door. Two burly men pushed past him into the house and one of them hit him in the face with his fists. They took the stereo and left, but not before warning him, “You have 72 hours to pay back El Primo… if you don’t, we’ll be back and we won’t behave so nicely.” The victim could not go to the police, because, from the beginning, he preferred illicit credit, without possible complications. He spent the next three days selling some of his home appliances and going into debt to friends so that he could repay the loan. He also prayed a little that El Primo and his henchmen might be raided for the great number of crimes they commit.

María, however, obtained a loan of 10 thousand pesos from the Metropolitan Bank. She needed to fill out endless forms and present written evidence of her employment. She planned to use the money for construction materials to remodel her old house. She felt satisfied to have gotten the sum legally, although now any paperwork she fills out includes the information that she is in debt to the State. Others, who could not meet the requirements, had to accept the conditions and interest rates of their neighborhood moneylender. More than one client has had to pay with favors from her own body when the repayment date has come and gone; more than one family has had to deliver a refrigerator or a car, because an irresponsible member thought to ask for money they could never repay.

As necessary as he is slandered, the moneylender is just one link in the illegal financial chain of our reality. Cautious when giving, implacable when collecting.

15 August 2013

I scan the shelves, dusting off my memory for books over these last decades, in search of the titles that I must keep, at all costs, from the fire of oblivion. It’s not an easy task. Every author, every text chosen… is an act of betrayal toward the rest. Making a list of the essential becomes something as personal as choosing your child’s name or selecting who is with us in the most private moments. Because the good works, end up being — once read — like beings we want to share the rest of our lives with. We have given them a prominent place in our recollections, because they carry a part of ourselves, our doubts, passions, disappointments and hopes. If we try  to assemble a decalogue of the best books of the last few decades, we’ll more likely come up with a inventory of those that affected us and those that took our breath away. An enumeration of those that changed us, profoundly and irreversibly.

Here are mine:

The Savage Detectives (1998) by Roberto Bolaño

In the footsteps of the writer Cesárea Tinajero, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano follow an inquiry that will last twenty years. Superimposed on these investigations that center on the search for a poet who is an exponent of visceral realism, but that goes far beyond that to probe the limits of literature, politics and ideals. Redefining and mocking art itself, The Savage Detectives does not come off as a rehash of the noir that runs through Bolaño’s work, but also takes hold of certain structures of the historic novel and, with a good dose of tragedy — in more of the classical style —   leads its characters to a fatalism that the reader can predict from the first pages. Dissatisfaction, lies, ideals that blow up, weave a tough story, sacrilegious and irreverent. A mockery, like a sneer; a smile like a scream.

The Man Who Loved Dogs (2009) by Leonardo Padura

In its pages is laid out a complete historical investigation of the last years of the life of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Trotsky. Jumping back and forth from the present to various points in the past, the test also describes the decline of of two revolutions, the Russian and Cuban. The axis is the story of Ramón Mercader, who assassinated Trotsky in Mexico and later found refuge in the Havana of Fidel Castro. Leonardo Padura places part of the narrative in the voice of Iván Cárdenas, a Cuban sunk in the hardships of the Special Period with its housing crisis, food shortages and lack of expectations. It is this man who hears from the mouth of Mercader himself — masked behind a false identity — the details of the homicide and the context in which it occurred. A devastating book, sweeping through all these story so exalted by an officialdom as full of pathological lies as it was dangerous, erected in the USSR and able to make Cuban officialdom disciples of its vices and habits.

Soldiers of Salamina (2001) by Javier Cercas

The testimony of Antonio Miralles finishes this novel by Javier Cercas on the turbulent and contradictory era of Spanish Civil War. Just as national troops are advancing towards Catalonia, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, writer and ideologue of the Spanish Falange, manages to escape from a collective execution. A Republican soldier gives him up, but ends up forgiving him and letting him flee with his life. Heroism like betrayal, or a deep attachment the pull of compassion disrupted in the act that opens the path to barbarism. The hero cannot be considered one, as he acts from almost irrational outbursts and against every rule. The anonymous man who lets his inner voice prevail and whom the war placed in situations where kindness and commiseration won out.

The Feast of the Goat (2000) by Mario Vargas Llosa

Published in 2000, this novel proved prescient for the later history of Latin America. In what most literary critics now consider the ultimate in the literature on the dictatorship, Mario Llosa Vargas returns to the figure of the Dominican satrap, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Shortly after the new authoritarianism installed on our continent, we would reflect whether The Feast of the Goat was a novel of past events or current realities. With an enviable dramatic tension, the book reconstructs a man enjoying an almost absolute power and expressing it in eccentricity, droit de seigneur, whims, a taste for humiliating those around him … a condensation of the worst satraps that have plagued our lands. The plot has three story lines which come together and precipitate the end. On one side, the return of Urania Cabral to the Dominican Republic after years of exile, on another the story of the men who planned the assassination of Trujillo, and finally the man himself on the last day of his life. With masterly writing Mario Vargas Llosa is enshrined as a versatile novelist, sharp and diligent in his research, and he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010.

Gomorrah (2008) by Roberto Saviano

A combination of the genres halfway between investigative journalism and literature. A true story, raw, into the depths of the Neapolitan Camorra criminal enterprise. The consumption and the merchandise marking the tempo of the plot. Things like motives of pleasure and suffering. The most elaborate luxury supported in the mud of crime and illegality. Saviano also manages to follow the path to toxic waste, much of which ends up in the Italian countryside dirtying the environment even of those trafficking in the waste. An extremely well documented and disturbing book that changed its author’s life and placed him in the sights of one of the most dangerous criminal organizations in the world.

Day of the Oprichnik: A Novel (2006) by Vladimir Sorokin

Imaginary Russia in 2027 is the setting in which this futuristic novel unfolds. But its true roots are in the past, in the era of Ivan the Terrible when he created the Oprichnik, his personal guard. The protagonist is called Andréy Komyaga and the reader will follow on his heels for one day of his fierce life. A scathing and intelligent critique of authoritarian societies, particularly a Russia that cannot shake its Tsarist past, which returns again and again in the figure of a Stalin or a Putin. A novel of brutality, of the blood during the slaughter, the description of which horrifies the reader. With Orwellian tones where the individual becomes simply a piece which power handles at will. The extermination of the opposition, including the looting of their riches and the violation of their widows, complete the analogy of what has been the attitude toward political opponents for much of Russian history from the past and present. A novel that takes hold of the future, simply as a trick to tranquilize us with the present.

Soul Mountain (1990) Gao Xingjiang

A trip through rural China in search of the legendary mountain Lingshan, leads the author of this book through the threads that weave the identity of this vast country. After being misdiagnosed with lung cancer, Xingjiang travels his homeland and on the way compiles legends, stories, testimonies, poems of the people he bumps into along the way, creating the amazing kaleidoscope of life, hope and pain he presents the reader in this book. A polyphonic work, blending elements of an epic novel, but also lyricism and intimacy. Its author, with a vast reference and culture, lets his consciousness flow freely in the more than 700 pages of text. The critiques of the Chinese system and its cultural policy are scathing and devastating. Xingjian himself experienced firsthand the pressure of censorship and publishing ostracism. Hence, Soul Mountain transcends history to also become a memorial to a contradictory and huge nation. In 2000 Gao Xingjiang won the Nobel Prize for Literature, receiving the news in a modest suburb of Paris where he has lived in exile since 1987.

Blindness (1995) by Jorge Saramago

Sitting at a traffic light, a man starts to lose his sight and from him a rare epidemic of blindness spreads across the entire country. The first measure is to quarantine the affected but the number grows and there are ever fewer people who can see. The lowest passions erupt, the most primitive instincts, and the fight for survival is out of control. A direct metaphor for the alienation and ruthless attitudes generated by modern societies. However, some characters retain the ability to see and at that point we are urged to think about the responsibility of having your eyes open when so many others have theirs closed. A novel that calls on us to regain lucidity and awareness. The author does nothing to make it easy to read, ignoring the names of the characters, structuring very long sentences with little punctuation. “Blindness” is upsetting from the first page, thus fulfilling the objective of shaking us up and disturbing us. No wonder that three years after the publication of this book, Saramago would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii (1947, reissued in 2001) by Victor Klemperer

Although first published more than half a century ago, this book has had a second birth in the eyes of thousands of readers. Klemperer proposes a thorough guide on how not only Nazism expressed itself verbally, but also the school of oratory and semantics it left for later totalitarianisms. The constant adulteration of terms and the ability to distort concepts, were some of the methods of subjugation employed by the Third Reich. The appropriation of ideas like heroism, falsified and adjusted to its convenience, helped Nazi propaganda become ordinary to millions of Germans. A verbal scaffolding constantly falling on the ears and permeating every area of social, academic, artistic, entrepreneurial and informative life. It was not necessary to create new formulas or concepts, simply to appropriate them and to empty them of all their previous significance. The excessiveness of this kind of discourse and its constant boastfulness permeated that of many other leaders who subsequently tried to subject, from the platform, their own people. After reading The Language of the Third Reich and can not again hear the chatter of a leader or the excesses of official propaganda, without calling forth the specter of fascism.

Persepolis (2000) by Marjane Satrapi

A graphic novel, lately these books with “little figures” seem simple amusements. However, Persepolis makes us drop this predisposition from the first page. It compels us to share the anguish of a young girl, becoming a teenager and young woman under the Islamic fundamentalist regime. The story begins in 1979 when Iran is the scene of a profound political change that puts an end to half a century of control by the Shah of Persia and begins the so-called Islamic republic. From the eyes of this little girl educated in a progressive family, the reader watches the transmutation of a social ideal into authoritarian fundamentalism. The road ahead is exile, which Marjane Satrapi leaves for, convinced that she no longer fits into a society with its overly excessive bans and punishments. Expressed through writing and cartoons, her biography sheds light on the situation faced by millions of people in Iran. A book full of tenderness, narrated by a child’s voice who also talks to God, who created a prophet able to follow the path of Mohammed or Jesus, but she discovers that on earth, unlike in those celestial paradises, pain and fear abound.

So much for my exercise of treason. No one will forgive me, neither the books included nor those discarded. Compose a list of these essential texts from recent decades, leaves a worst taste in my mouth than when I started.

9 August 2013

She gets up and has a little coffee. The concrete of the counter is still fresh. Magaly, her two sons and her husband live in a house under construction. They’ve spent seven years like this. Little by little raising the walls and installing some pipes. Every day that goes by they get closer to the end of the job, but they also live through another day of anxiety and risks to get the materials. Today they need stone dust and washed sand. They get their money together before heading out to the state supply center, inviting me to accompany them. We arrive at the central warehouse, but at the door an employee delivers the bad news. They haven’t stocked up, we’ll have to wait until next week.

We then dive into the world of resellers of cement fillers. Finding them is easy; haggling, impossible. The area around the Cristina railway workshop is the best supplied hardware black market in the whole country. You just have to walk through the doorways and gates for voices to call out asking, “What are you looking for?” We’re cautious, it’s not recommended to go with the first offer. Swindles are everywhere. One man, with a little table where he’s fixing lighters, looks at us and whispers, “I have everything for construction.” In a conjurer’s gesture he passes us a much-handled sheet that contains a list of prices: gravel and sand, 1.50 convertible pesos (CUC)* per sack; Jaimanita exterior stone, 7.00 CUC per square meter; and granite tiles, 10.00 CUC, also per square meter. “If you buy a large quantity transport is included,” he points out, while dismantling a lighter with an Italian flag drawn on the plastic.

My friends do the accounting. Acquiring surfacing for the entire floor would cost their combined wages for 20 months. The costs of the bathroom fixtures are enough to elicit a little scream from Magaly, but it’s barely audible, covered by the noise of the road. They decide to prioritize. Today they’ll take only some blocks, several sacks of sand, and two wooden doors. The vendor adds it up and rounds it off to everything Magaly and her husband earn for half a year’s work. “It will always be a cheaper option than the legal stores,” she says out loud to console herself.

Night falls and everyone’s fingers are covered with a gray layer of cement and dust. The children go to bed in the only room that has a roof. The counter has hardened and the dirty dishes are left on its rough surface because there are still no pipes to deliver the water to wash them. Tomorrow they’ll have to go out and get steel and some electrical switches. One construction day less. Twenty-four hours closer to having their house finished.

*Translator’s note: One Cuban convertible peso (known as a CUC and convertible only in Cuba), is worth roughly one US dollar (before exchange fees). The average monthly wage in Cuba is less than $20 US, and is generally paid in Cuban pesos (CUP); 24 CUP = 1 CUC. Many everyday items, and most “specialty” items are only sold for CUCs, including in State stores.

9 August 2013

Recently I have been reading an excellent book by Carlos Salas, currently the director of the site lainformacion.com. One of those texts essential for any newsroom and for the library of every reporter. With the title, “Manual para escribir como un periodista” (Manual on How to Write Like a Journalist), in its pages he dissects the art of writing headlines, the skills of a good interviewer and the need for research as a prelude at any article. This professional who has devoted decades to narrating reality gives us an agile volume where he shares the knowledge others keep only for themselves.

Wearing my “Salas glasses,” I began a meticulous analysis of the accuracy with which the official media reports the news. I did not have long to wait for the first inconsistency and deficiencies to spring into view.

Throughout the week, the news media reported on the unfortunate story of a group of people poisoned by methyl alcohol. A party in a proletarian neighborhood in Havana that ended in tragedy. Eleven dead and dozens of people affected by ingesting this dangerous substance, it was a sad sequence of lack of control, contraband, the black market, economic precariousness and irresponsibility.

Drama is an inseparable companion of journalism, as those of us who exercise this profession know well. But in the midst of tragedy, we must maintain the ability to discern why the national media treats certain events as so significant, while other news is simply completely silenced.

Almost on a par with the drama of those poisoned by methyl alcohol, was an accident during a Children’s Carnival in Guantanamo. The bleachers gave way and several children were injured, one of them with head trauma. The confusion, chaos and terror that must have resulted from the collapse of this structure in the middle of a celebration are obvious. Why wasn’t such an incident reported both on television and in newspapers across the country? Because in the case of a product stolen from a warehouse and consumed in secret it was citizens who acted illegally? Who bears the responsibility for a badly constructed grandstand at a public event? The State, that omni-proprietor, that judge of everyone… judged by few.

The news of those who died from methyl alcohol is meant to hold the victims up as examples of people who had fallen into such circumstances by violating established norms or because they suffered from an uncontrollable addiction. They always try to put responsibility on the people. The fact that, in a country with a tradition of producing rum, many prefer to buy their beverages on the black market, says more about our national penury than it does about vice. Nevertheless, the official moral was summed up as: This is what happens to the unscrupulous and to drinkers. The victims are doubly victimized.

But in the incident of the bleachers collapse, where children and adults were injured, the official journalists could not assign guilt to the injured. Inevitably, they would have to relate the shoddy work of the state enterprise that built the structure, without any consideration for safety. Or instead, confess that a good part of the materials for the job were embezzled, which presumably caused its weakening and subsequent collapse.

Both episodes, unfortunate and avoidable, point to a widespread and chronic problem in our reality: the need to steal and divert resources to survive. Thus, poverty wages and economic insecurity are the direct cause of these two tragedies. The culprits are not only sellers of illegal alcohol and the workers who take home some screws or pieces of wood, but also the order of things that turns us into criminals to survive.

7 August 2013