Three Parameters, One House / Yoani Sanchez

For Sale or Trade. From martinoticias.com
For Sale or Trade. From martinoticias.com

Placing zeros to the right seems to be the preferred sport of those who put a price on the homes they sell in Cuba today. A captive market at the end of the day, the buyer could find a lot of surprises in the wide range of classified ads. From owners who ask astronomical sums for their houses, sums that have nothing to do with the reality of demand, to real bargains that make you feel sorry for the naiveté of the negotiator. Many are pressured to sell, some by those with the smarts to realize that this is the time to buy a house on the Island. It is a bet on the future, if it goes wrong they lose almost everything, but if it goes well they position themselves — in advance — for tomorrow. The slow hurry up and the fast run at the speed of light. These are times to make haste, the end of an era could be close… say the smartest.

It’s surprising to see, with barely any notion of real estate, how Cubans launch themselves into the marketing of square meters. They talk about their space, usually with an over abundance of adjectives that make you laugh or scare you. So when you read “one bedroom apartment in central Havana with mezzanine bedroom,” you should understand “room in a Central Havana apartment with wooden platform.” If they talk about a garden, it’s best to imagine a bed with soil and plants at the entrance; and even five-bedroom residences, after a visit, are reduced to two bedrooms partitioned with cardboard. The same mistrust with which people view the photos on the social networks where young people look for partners, should be applied to housing ads here. However, you can also find real pearls in the midst of the exaggeration.

Right now there are at least three parameters that determine the final cost of a home: location, physical state of construction, and pedigree. The neighborhood has a great influence on the final value of the property. In Havana, the most prized areas are Vedado, Miramar, Central Havana, Víbora and Cerro, for their central character. The least wanted are Alamar, Reparto Eléctrico, San Miguel del Padrón and La Lisa. The poor state of public transport significantly influences people’s preference for houses that are near major commercial centers with abundant spaces for entertainment. If there is a farmers market in the vicinity, the asking price goes up; if it is near the Malecon it also goes up. People shy away from the periphery, although among the “new rich,” those who have accumulated a little more capital whether by legal or illegal means, the trend of looking for homes in the outskirts has begun. It is still too early, however, to speak about a trend to locate in greener and less polluted areas. For now, the main premise can be summarized as the more central the better.

The physical state is one of the other elements that defines what a home will cost. If the ceiling is beam and slab, the numbers fall; meanwhile constructions from the 1940s and ‘50s enjoy a very good reputation and appeal. The lowest values are for the so-called “microbrigade works” with their ugly concrete buildings and their little Eastern European style apartments. If the roofing is light — tiles, zinc, wood, ceiling paper — the seller will get less. The state of the bathroom and kitchen are another point that directly influences the marketability of the property. The quality of the floors, if the windows are barred and the door is new — of glass and metal — these are points in its favor. If there are no neighbors overhead, then the seller can rest easy. Also very valuable are houses with two entrances, designed for a large family seeking to split up and live independently. Everything counts, anything goes.

So far it resembles a real estate market like any other anywhere in the world. However, there is a situation that defines, in a very particular way, the value of homes for sale. This is their pedigree. This refers to whether the house has belonged to the family for forever, or if it was confiscated in one of the waves of expropriations in Cuba. If the previous owner left during the Rafter Crisis of 1994 and the State handed the property over to someone new, the price is lower. The same thing happens if it was taken during the Mariel Boatlift in 1980, a time when property was awarded to others after the emigration of those who had lived there up until that time. But where the prices hit rock bottom is with those homes confiscated between 1959 and 1963, when great numbers left for exile. Few want to take on the problem of acquiring a site that later may go into litigation. Although there are some who are taking advantage of this situation to buy real mansions in the most central neighborhoods at bargain prices.

In order to check the location, the state of construction, as well as the legal past of the house, potential buyers are aided by their own experience, a good architect and even a lawyer to dig through the details of the property. Each element adds or removes a cipher, one zero or one hundred to the total price people are willing to pay. In a captive market anything is possible; it’s as if knowledge of real estate has only been sleeping, lethargic, and now returns with amazing force.

18 May 2013

From the Washtub to the Washing Machine / Yoani Sanchez

From a distance you feel the strokes… bam, bam, bam. The arm raises the thick fat stick and then lets it falls hard on the twisted sheet. The spray of lather explodes with every stroke and white water seeping from dirty fabric mixes with the river. It is very early, the sun barely up, and already the clotheslines are waiting for with damp clothes that must dry in the morning. The woman is exhausted. From the time she was a teenager she has washed her and her family’s clothing in this way. What other choice did she have? In that little village lost in the eastern mountains all her neighbors did the same. At times as she slept her body would move restlessly in the bed and repeat the hint of a movement: up… down… bam… bam… bam.

Lately the discussion of women’s emancipation in Cuba has been focused on persuading us of its extent, showing the numbers of women in parliament. There is also talk — in the official mass media — of how many have managed to climb into administrative positions, or to lead an institution, a scientific center or a business. However, very little is said about the sacrifice involved for them in managing in these positions with their busy domestic schedules and material shortages. You only have to look at the faces of those over forty to note the tense frown common in so many Cuban woman. It is the mark left by a daily life where a good part of the time must be dedicated to burdensome and repetitive tasks. One of these is the laundry, which many of our countrywomen do, at least a couple of times a week, by hand and in very tough conditions. Some do not even have running water in their homes.

In a country where a washing machine costs an entire year’s salary, we can’t talk about women’s emancipation. Facing the washtub and the brush, or the boiler filled with baby diapers bubbling on the firewood, thousands of women pass many hours of their lives. The situation becomes more difficult if we move away from the capital and look at the hands of the women who clean, with the strength of their fingers, the shirts, pants and even the military uniforms of their families. Their hands are knotted, stained white by the soap or detergent in which they’re immersed for hours. Hands belie statistics about emancipation and the fabricated gender quotas, with which they try to convince us otherwise.

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1980s Aurika washing machine imported from the USSR to Cuba and still used by many Cuban families ... in the absence of another.Photo from museodelanostalgia.blogspot.ch

Other texts with this theme: With Clitoris and With Rights; Violence Against Woman.

15 May 2013

From the Jewish Museum to the Stasi Museum / Yoani Sanchez

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The Jewish Museum in Berlin

The building is shaped like a dislocated Star of David. Gray, with a zinc-clad facade and little openings that provoke a strong sense of claustrophobia. The museum is not only the objects on its walls and in its display cases, the museum is all of it, each space one can move through and even the voids — with no human presence — that can be glimpsed through certain gaps. There are family photos, books with their gold-embossed covers, medical instruments, and images of young people in their bathing suits. It is life, the life of German Jews before the Holocaust. One might expect to see only the testimonies of the horrors, but most dramatic is finding yourself facing the testimony of everyday life. Laughter captured — years before the tragedy — is as painful to look at as are the emaciated corpses and piled up cadavers. The proof of those moments of happiness make the tears and pain that follow more terrifying.

After a time between the narrow corridors of the place and amid its bewildering architecture, I go outside and breathe. I see spring greenery in Berlin and think: we can’t allow this past to ever return.

A tiny window, the only source of light in a German Stasi cell.
A tiny window, the only source of light in a German Stasi cell.

And not very far from there, stands the Stasi Museum. I enter their cells, the interrogation rooms. I come from the perspective of a Cuban who was detained in the same place, where a window looking outward becomes an unattainable dream. One cell was lined with rubber, the scratch marks of the prisoners can still be seen on its walls. But more sinister seeming to me are the offices where they ripped — or fabricated — a confession from the detainees. I know them, I’ve seen them. They are a copy of their counterpart in Cuba, copied to a T by the diligent students from the Island’s Ministry of the Interior who were taught by GDR State Security. Impersonal, with a chair the prisoner can’t move because it is anchored to the floor and some supposed curtain behind which the microphone or video camera are hidden. And the constant metallic noises from the rattling of the locks and bars, to remind the prisoners where they are, how much they are at the mercy of their jailer.

After this I again need air, to get out from within those walls. I turn away from that place with the conviction that what, for them, is a museum of the past, is what we are still living in the present. A “now” that we cannot allow to prolong itself into tomorrow.

10 May 2013

My Father and Berlin / Yoani Sanchez

The Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall

The rumble of a train comes through the window. In Berlin there is always the sound of a train somewhere. I look out and see a very different reality from what my father saw in 1984 when he first came to this city. A train engineer, he had won — based on volunteer hours and a great deal of work — a trip to the future. Yes, because in that era the GDR was the horizon many Cubans aspired to visit someday. So, this man of locomotives and greasy hands was also given a bonus to buy some clothes before he left for Europe. He chose a jacket and pants combo, along with an immense suitcase in which my sister and I played at hiding ourselves. He arrived in East Germany in the middle of winter and stayed only two weeks on a guided tour, whose main purpose was to demonstrate to the lucky travelers the advantages of that model. And my father came back convinced.

At the airport on his return he arrived smiling from ear to ear and with a bag in hand. Inside was a pair of shoes for each of his daughters, which turned out to be the greatest achievement of the trip. That and the memories. For decades he has been telling us about his stay in the GDR. Adding details each time, until it has become almost a family legend that we listen to when we gather for any commemoration. In the light of today the wonder of that engineer is captured in the fact that in Berlin he was able to sit in a café and ask for something to drink without having to stand in a long line, that he had bought some small gifts for his kids without showing a ration book, and that he had taken a shower in hot water at the hotel where he stayed. I was surprised at every little thing.

Now I am the one in Berlin. Thinking that my father would not recognize this city, that he would not be able to reconcile it with that other one that he visited in a year as Orwellian as its date indicated. Of the wall that divided it in two all that is left is a museum piece painted by various artists; the hotel where he stayed was probably demolished, and the name of the woman who translated for him, and watched him — so that he wouldn’t escape to the West — is not in the phone book. The suitcase also no longer exists, the shoes lasted us just a single school year and the reddish tinted photos that he took in Alexanderplatz have been handled so much you can’t see them. However, I’m sure that when I return my father will try to explain Berlin to me, to tell me how he entered a bakery and was able to eat a turnover without presenting a ration card. I will laugh and tell him he’s right, there are dreams that after so much time are not worth ruining.

8 May 2013

Señor Capitol / Yoani Sanchez

Photo: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Photo: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The Capitol building in Havana is beginning to emerge from its long punishment. Like a penitent child, it has waited 54 years to return to its status as the site of the Cuban parliament. Visited by everyone, it was a natural sciences museum with stuffed animals — plagued with moths — and in one of its hallways the first public internet site in the Cuban capital opened. While the tourists photographed the enormous statue of the Republic, thousands of bats hung from its highest decorated ceilings. They slept upside down during the day, but at night they swooped around leaving their feces on the walls and cornices. It accumulated there for decades, amid the indifference of the employees and the giggles of teenagers who pointed at the waste saying, “Look, shit, shit.” This is the building I have known since my childhood, fallen into disgrace but still impressive.

Visitors are always captivated by the history of the diamond that marks the starting point of the Central Highway, with its share of cursing and greed. And on observing this neoclassical colossus, these same travelers confirm — what we all know but no one says out loud — “It looks a lot like the Capitol in Washington.”  In this similarity lies part of the reason of the political exile suffered by our flagship building. It is too reminiscent of that other one; an obvious first cousin of what has come to pass for the image of the enemy. But since, by decree, no architectural symbols are erected in any city, its dome continues to define the face of Havana, along with the Malecón and el Morro which stand at the entrance to the Bay. For those arriving from the provinces, the photo in front of the wide staircase of this grand palace is obligatory. Its dome is also the most common reference point in paintings, photos, crafts, and whatever trinket someone wants to take back home to say: I was in Havana. While they insisted on downplaying its importance, it only became more prominent. The greater the stigma attached to it, the more enthralling its mixture of beauty and decay. Among other reasons because in the decades after its construction — right up to today — no other construction on the Island has managed to surpass it in splendor.

Now, the National Assembly of People’s Power will begin to sit exactly where the Congress of the Republic of Cuba once met, a congress the official history books speak so badly of. I imagine our parliamentarians meeting in the chamber of upholstered seats, surrounded by the large windows with their regal bearing, under the finely decorated ceilings. I see them, as well, raising every hand to unanimously — or by huge majorities — approve every law. Silent, tame, uniform in their political ideas, eager not to offend the real power. And I don’t know what to think; whether, in reality, this is a new humiliation — a more elaborate punishment — in store for the Havana Capitol; or if, on the contrary, it is a victory, the triumphant caress it has been waiting for for more than half a century.

30 April 2013

Ian Vasquez Interviews Yoani Sanchez at Cato Institute / Yoani Sanchez

Ian Vasquez interviews Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez on the future of Cuba. The interview occurred on 20 March 2013.

A video of the session with Ian Cato and Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, with Ted Henken translating, from that day is available here.

Published by the Cato Insitute on Apr 25, 2013

Lima and Dust / Yoani Sanchez

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Lima’s Sky “The Color of a Donkey’s Belly”

To every city we attach a face, to every place a personality. Camagüey strikes me as a sober lady with a long ancestry, Frankfurt is punk hair and skinny ties, Prague is the blue eyes and crooked smile of that young man who — just for a second — crossed my path. For its part, Lima’s face is indescribable but covered in dust. The dust of Lima swirls and settles everywhere. It flies over the cliffs that drop abruptly into a sea which, for Caribbeans, feels too cold, too choppy. Tiny particles of earth and sand that stick to your body, to food, to life. Dust on the native fruits, on the recently served ceviche. Dust in your “pisco sour” cocktail that leaves your tongue wanting more and not wanting any. A layer of gold, unreal, that coats the windshields and the newspaper sellers who defy the red lights to unload their merchandise before dark. The dust which we all become after the final day, but which in Lima carries us forward in life.

Lima seemed to me a girl with copper skin. Reserved, with something of that mysterious silence of those who come from the mountains. And with healing hands. Because in Lima I recovered my voice, and that is not a metaphor. I arrived after more than fifty days of intense travel, hoarse and feverish. I left recovered, coddled by my friends, with my energy restored having witnessed a city that has outgrown itself. I submerged my feet in the Pacific for the first time, I climbed the hills of the village of El Salvador to see people gaining ground against the aridity of the soil and poverty. I saw the historic center with its churches, its tourist attractions, its religious processions. Because Lima is a host of cities, some whimsically superimposed on others. It’s like a young woman whose body has outgrown her clothes and they no longer fit. Thus, the traffic bottlenecks and the many cranes raising buildings on all sides. This city has a face put together in a hurry, an eye here, a mouth there, a forehead taken from everywhere; it is mestiza, chola, German, Swiss, Chilean, Spanish… and very much Lima.

18 April 2013

Mario Vargas Llosa: A Nobel Long Overdue / Yoani Sanchez

mariovargasllosa

The literature of Mario Vargas Llosa has prompted several key turning points in my life. The first was 17 years ago, in a summer of blackouts and economic crisis. Under the pretext of borrowing “The War of the End of the World,” I approached a journalist expelled from his profession for ideological problems, with whom I still share my days. I keep that copy with its yellowed cover and detached pages, because through it dozens of readers have discovered this Peruvian author censored in the official bookstores.

Then came university, and while preparing my thesis on the literature of the dictatorship in Latin America his novel “The Feast of the Goat” appeared. The inclusion in my analysis of that text about Trujillo did not sit well with the panel evaluating me. Nor did they like that among the characteristics of American caudillos, I highlighted exactly those also flaunted by “our” Maximum Leader. Thus, for the second time, a book by the now Nobel Prize winner in Literature marked my existence because it made me realize the frustration of being a philologist in Cuba. Why do I need a title, I told myself, that announces I am a specialist in language and words, when I can’t even freely unite phrases.

So Vargas Llosa and his literature are responsible, in a direct and “premeditated” way, for much of what I am today: from my matrimonial happiness and my aversion to totalitarianism, to my having reneged on philology and turned to journalism.

I am prepared now, because I fear the next time one of his books falls into my hands its effect will last another 17 years, or once again slam the door on a profession.

BHIiY7_CYAAEXbF6 April 2013

Cubans, period

Freedom Tower, Miami

Freedom Tower, Miami

Years ago, when I left Cuba for the first time, I was in a train leaving from the city of Berlin heading north. A Berlin already reunified but preserving fragments of the ugly scar, that wall that had divided a nation. In the compartment of that train, while thinking about my father and grandfather – both engineers – who would have given anything to ride on this marvel of cars and a locomotive, I struck up a conversation with the young man sitting directly across from me.

After the first exchange of greetings, of mistreating the German language with “Guten Tag” and clarifying that “Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch,” the man immediately asked me where I came from. So I replied with “Ich komme aus Kuba.”

As always happens after the phrase saying you come from the largest of the Antilles, the interlocutor tries to show how much he knows about our country. “Ah…. Cuba, yes, Varadero, rum, salsa music.” I even ran into a couple of cases where the only reference they seemed to have for our nation was the album “BuenaVista Social Club,” which in those years was rising in popularity on the charts.

But that young man on the Berlin train surprised me. Unlike others, he didn’t answer me with a tourist or music stereotype, he went much further. His question was, “You’re from Cuba? From the Cuba of Fidel or from the Cuba of Miami?”

My face turned red, I forgot all of the little German I knew, and I answered him in my best Central Havana Spanish. “Chico, I’m from the Cuba of José Martí.” That ended our brief conversation. But for the rest of the trip, and the rest of my life, that conversation stayed in my mind. I’ve asked myself many times what led that Berliner and so many other people in the world to see Cubans inside and outside the Island as two separate worlds, two irreconcilable worlds.

The answer to that question also runs through part of the work of my blog, Generation Y. How was it that they divided our nation? How was it that a government, a party, a man in power, claimed the right to decide who should claim our nationality and who should not?

The answers to these questions you know much better than I. You who have lived the pain of exile. You who, more often than not, left with only what you were wearing. You who said goodbye to families, many of whom you never saw again. You who have tried to preserve Cuba, one Cuba, indivisible, complete, in your minds and in your hearts.

But I’m still wondering, what happened? How did it happen that being defined as Cuban came to be something only granted based on ideology? Believe me, when you are born and raised with only one version of history, a mutilated and convenient version of history, you cannot answer that question.

Luckily, it’s possible to wake up from the indoctrination. It’s enough that one question every day, like corrosive acid, gets inside our heads. It’s enough to not settle for what they told us. Indoctrination is incompatible with doubt, brainwashing ends at the exact point when our brain starts to question the phrases it has heard. The process of awakening is slow, like an estrangement, as if suddenly the seams of reality begin to show.

That’s how everything started in my case. I was a run-of-the-mill Little Pioneer, you all know about that. Every day at my elementary school morning assembly I repeated that slogan, “Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che.” Innumerable times I ran to a shelter with a gas mask under my arm, while my teachers assured me we were about to be attacked. I believed it. A child always believes what adults say.

But there were some things that didn’t fit. Every process of looking for the truth has its trigger, a single moment when a piece doesn’t fit, when something is not logical. And this absence of logic was outside of school, in my neighborhood and in my home. I couldn’t understand why, if those who left in the Mariel Boatlift were “enemies of the State,” my friends were so happy when one of those exiled relatives sent them food or clothing.

Why were those neighbors, who had been seen off by an act of repudiation in the Cayo Hueso tenement where I was born, the ones who supported the elderly mother who had been left behind? The elderly mother who gave a part of those packages to the same people who had thrown eggs and insults at her children. I didn’t understand it. And from this incomprehension, as painful as every birth, was born the person I am today.

So when that Berliner who had never been to Cuba tried to divide my nation, I jumped like a cat and stood up to him. And because of that, here I am today standing before you trying to make sure that no one, ever again, can divide us between one type of Cuban or another. We are going to need each other for a future Cuba and we need each other in the present Cuba. Without you our country would be incomplete, as if someone had amputated its limbs. We cannot allow them to continue to divide us.

Just like we are fighting to live in a country where we have the rights of free expression, free association, and so many others that have taken from us; we have to do everything – the possible and the impossible – so that you can recover the rights they have also taken from you. There is no you and us… there is only “us.” We will not allow them to continue separating us.

I am here because I don’t believe the history they told me. With so many other Cubans who grew up under a single official “truth,” we have woken up. We need to rebuild our nation. We can’t do it alone. Those present here – as you know well – have helped so many families on the Island put food on the table for their children. You have made your way in societies where you had to start from nothing. You have carried Cuba with you and you have cared for her. Help us to unify her, to tear down this wall that, unlike the one in Berlin, is not made of concrete or bricks, but of lies, silence, bad intentions.

In this Cuban so many of us dream of there will be no need to clarify what kind of Cuban we are. We will be just plain Cubans. Cubans, period. Cubans.

[Text read in an event at the Freedom Tower, Miami, Florida, 1 April 2013]

Coconut Flan / Yoani Sanchez

I’ve found a Cuba outside of Cuba, I told a friend a few days ago. He laughed at my play on words, thinking I was trying to create literature. But no. In Brazil a septuagenarian excitedly gave me a medal of the Virgin of Charity of Cobre. “I have not been back since I left in 1964,” she confirmed as she handed me this little gem that had belonged to her mother. During my stay in Prague, a group of compatriots living there seemed to be more aware of what was happening in our country than many who vegetate, inside it, in apathy. Amid the tall buildings of New York a family invited me to their house and their grandmother made a “coconut flan” in the style of our traditional cuisine, so damaged on the island by the shortages and scarcities.

Our diaspora, our exile, is conserving Cuba outside of Cuba. Along with their suitcases and the pain of distance, they have preserved pieces of our national history that were deleted from the textbooks with which several generations have been educated or rather, raised to be mediocre. I’m rediscovering my own country in each of these Cubans dispersed around the world. When I confirm what they have really accomplished, the contrast with what official propaganda tells me about them leaves me with an enormous sadness for my country. For all this human wealth that we have lost, for all this talent that has had to wash up outside our borders and for all the seeds that have germinated in other lands. How did we allow one ideology, one party, one man, to have felt the “divine” power to decide who could or could not carry the adjective “Cuban.”

Now I have proof that they lied to me, they lied to us. Nobody has had to tell me, I can grasp it for myself on seeing all this Cuba that is outside of Cuba, an immense country that they have been safeguarding for us.

30 March 2013

Spicy, Spicy / Yoani Sanchez

la-fotoMexico does not allow for half measures, does not admit that we remain unscathed. It’s like spice on the tongue, tequila in the throat and the sun in our eyes. Five days in the land of the feathered serpent and it was hard for me to board the plane because intense desires spoke to me about staying to explore a captivating and complex reality. I’ve seen modern buildings a few yards from the ruins of the Great Temple; incredible traffic jams on the streets, while on the sidewalks people walk with the calm of those who are in no hurry to arrive. I have also seen the smiling La Calavera Catrina, alternating seamlessly with the the vibrantly colorful of the people in La Ciudadela shopping center. With her sarcastic laugh, feathered hat and exposed ribcage she challenges me. Someone gave me a taste of a dessert, it was intensely sweet, sprinkled with sugar; but then I bit into a tamale and the kick of chili on my tongue made me cry. Mexico doesn’t allow for lukewarm feelings, you love it or you love it.

So my Aztec journey began surrounded by contrasts. From Puebla to Mexico City, meeting friends and visiting several newspaper offices, radio stations and, above all, speaking with many many journalist colleagues. I wanted to know first hand the rewards and risks of practicing the reporter’s profession in this society and I have met a great number of concerned, but working, professionals. People who risk their lives, especially in the north, to report; people who think like I do about the need for a free press, responsible, and tied to reality. I have learned from them. I have also gotten lost in the network of tiny shops and kiosks in the city center, and have felt the pulse of life there. A life I had perceived from the air before we landed, when at dawn on Saturday I saw the great anthill that is Mexico City, the many cities it contains, burning with life, despite the early hour.

For a moment, I had the impression of living in a fragment of the novel Los detectives Salvajes by Roberto Bolaño. But I wasn’t seeking, like the protagonists in this book, a cult poetess, lost in oblivion. In reality I was trying to look at and find my own country through the eyes of the Mexicans. And I found it. An Island reinterpreted and multiple, but close; one that raises passions in everyone and leaves no one unscathed. A friend asked me before I left, “What does Mexico make you feel?” I didn’t think too long: “Spicy,” I replied, like a spice that provokes an electric shock, and brings tears of pleasure and torment. “And Cuba,” he insisted, “What does it make you feel?”… Cuba, Cuba is bittersweet…

Surprising Sentence for Angel Carromero for the Deaths of Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero in a Car Crash / Yoani Sanchez

From Uncommon Sense

Angel Carromero has been sentenced to four years in prison for the traffic accident that killed two opponents of the regime, Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero. The Granma Provincial Court issued the sentence Monday, October 15, after the public trial which took place on October 5. According to the official website Cubadebate, the leader of New Generations of Spain’s ruling Popular Party is considered “guilty of the crime of murder while driving a vehicle on the public right-of-way.”

This case which has kept Cuban and Spanish public opinion guessing, now enters the appeal phase after the court ruling. Both the defense and the prosecutor can challenge the decision before the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court. It is expected that once confirmed or reduced, the Havana government will proceed to apply the treaty on serving of sentences signed by both countries. In which case, Angel Carromero could serve his sentence in some Spanish prison.

This young man of 27 has been judged according to article 177 of the existing Criminal Code, in which it is established that “the driver of a vehicle who, violating traffic laws or regulations, causes the death of a person, incurs the sentence of privation of liberty of from one to ten years.” Initially the prosecutor demanded a sentence of seven years, which has been reduced by three in the sentence dictated by the court. However, the family of the Oswaldo Paya, the leader of the Christian Liberation Movement, demanded an independent investigation of the facts of that Sunday in July near the city of Bayamo.

Of the four involved in that unfortunate event two died and the Swede Jens Aron Modig returned to his country without any charges being presented against him. Angel Carromero was involved in a police investigation that has had wide repercussions, including in the official Cuban press. Many denounced that the case has been used by the Island’s government against the internal opposition, and has even served as a mechanism to pressure Spain’s Popular Party administration. As of today, a new scenario opens for all parties.

According to the official version of events, Carromero was driving at an excessive speed and lost control of the car on a road under repair. With improper use of the brakes, the car left the highway and crashed into a tree. The official note released this Monday asserted that the trial had analyzed “wide material evidence” and had complied with “the established legal safeguards, in accordance with the seriousness of the facts.” However, at that trial held over a week ago, Oswaldo Paya’s children along with dozens of activists who tried to reach the court, were not allowed access. Arrests, home detentions and threats marked the day during which the trial was held, which Granma newspaper itself had previously announced would be “oral and public.”
The Spanish government, for its part, on hearing the sentence, has reaffirmed that its main motivation continues to be that Angel Carromero “return as soon as possible” to his homeland. “Right now there is a process of analysis and study (of the sentence), with the objective that he will return here as soon as possible,” a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs affirmed to the AFP press agency. For its part, the Cuban Consulate welcomed “with relative satisfaction” the “sensible reduction” of the sentence the prosecutor had asked for against the young man. The Consul General on the Island, Tomas Rodriguez-Pantoja, explained that by not exceeding five years the sentence left a “range of options” to implement the bilateral convention on the serving of sentences.

However, for both the defense and for many Cuban dissidents, the sentence is excessive. Elizardo Sanchez, president of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, expressed himself opposed. “I expected absolution due to the extenuating circumstances that were present in this case. Among them the bad conditions of the highway and the worse road signage,” the activist said. For their part, many official voices — many of which are anonymous or using pseudonyms — commented on Cubadebate and other websites that the sentence seemed “too short.”

Along with the extenuating circumstances raised by Human Rights activists on the Island, is added that fact that the families of those killed in the accident did not themselves file charges against Angel Carromero. An element which has led many to believe that the sentence imposed on Angel Carromero would be minimal and symbolic. Thus, the announcement this Monday has unpleasantly surprised those who supported the idea of a possible acquittal.

Once the sentence was announced, Ofelia Acevedo, Oswaldo Paya’s widow, confirmed her opinion that Carromero “should have been at home a long time ago. Perhaps he will not have to serve the sentence in Cuba and will be expelled from the country.”

16 October 2012

My Dirty Piece of the Sea / Yoani Sánchez

Uprising called the
Uprising called the “maleconazo” /5 August 1994 / Photo by Karel Poort

In 1994 I spent many hours sitting on the wall of the Malecon. I preferred the area between the Gervasio and Escobar streets, which I called “my dirty piece of sea.” That was a border between the abyss and the abyss. On one side the rocks and the waves, on the other a sequence of ruined houses and starving figures looking out over their balconies. Still, this place allows me to escape the day-to-day strangulation of the Special Period. If my stomach burned from emptiness, there was still the hope of finding someone hawking — in a whisper — pizzas or paper cones of peanuts. When the power cuts made it impossible to be in my hot room, I also went looking for the sea breeze as a relief. On that concrete I loved, cried, stared at the horizon wanting to run away, and even passed a few nights.

But on the morning of August 5 of that year, the Malecón became a battlefield. Around the ferry dock to Regla people were gathering, encouraged by the hijackings of several boats throughout the summer. An extended sensation of the end, of chaos, of “zero hour” was palpable in the atmosphere. Those waiting to take “the next boat to Florida” were the poorest, those with the least to lose, those ready for anything. Their disappointment was great when they learned there would be no chance of getting on any of these boats. Undoubtedly, that was the spark of the popular revolt that broke out immediately afterwards; but the fuel of the protest was hunger, scarcities and desperation.

A contingent of construction workers, disguised as “enraged people,” lashed out against the unarmed crowd with stick and iron bars. The order from on high was clear: crush the rebellion, but don’t leave behind any imaged of anti-riot troops repressing the people. The epithets launched against the outraged of that day were “lumpen, vermin, criminals and counterrevolutionaries.” The majority of them would emigrate in the coming weeks, on homemade rafts, or simple truck cabs mounted on inner tubes. Others were sent to prison for facing the shock troops. Fidel Castro showed up in the middle of it all — only once the situation was under control — and the official media displayed his presence there as the confirmation of a great victory. But the truth is that after a few weeks the government had to permit farmers markets to relieve the misery. Without the pressure exercised that August 5, we would have ended up like a “Democratic Kampuchea” in the middle of the Caribbean, like the experiment of a stubborn tropical Pol Pot.

I no longer like sitting in front of my dirty piece of the sea. Some of the horror of that August 5 is still there, sandwiched between the cracks in the wall.

Photo by Karel Poort taken from http://desarraigos.blogspot.com/2009/08/el-maleconazo-fotos-ineditas-del-5-de.html
Photo by Karel Poort taken from http://desarraigos.blogspot.com/2009/08/el-maleconazo-fotos-ineditas-del-5-de.html

6 August 2012

Rosa’s Little Shoes

It is rare to find a Cuban who doesn’t know some poem by José Martí, at least some snippet of those simple verses we learn by heart in elementary school. From the time we’re little, in the morning assemblies at school, in Spanish classes, at all the political rallies we attend, we hear over and over the lyrical verses of our national hero. The over exposure to him leads to the point where many associate him with the current state of things, and in the very poor areas, where the electricity often fails and food is in short supply, they have even vandalized his busts.

But back to the Apostle’s poetry, especially the most famous of them, with its childlike tone, full of ribbons, flowers and images, which has the title “Rose’s little shoes.” Any child under ten could rattle off its sweetened octosyllables and narrate the story told in its verses. But could also recite some of the many parodies that have been written, especially those of a political nature that make a mockery of the system. Marti is the most parodied of our authors, which is not a mark against him, but rather proof of the familiarity people feel with his work.

Among the many jokes we draw from the work of this universal Havanan, is one taken from “Rose’s little shoes,” where the protagonist — named Pilar — meets a poor little sick girl at the seashore. Without consulting her mother, the rich girl takes off her shoes and gives them to the little needy one. She completes her generous gesture with a phrase, “Here, take mine, I have more at home.”

That brief line, written almost 150 years ago, is now an infinite source of jokes, wisecracks and imitations. It is used to indicate the social differences that are becoming more obvious and traumatic in a society where the official discourse continues to talk about equality. The most profound of the jokes among the students, obliged to wear school uniforms, has do to with their ability to rate the buying power of each person by looking at their feet. Although one of the slogans most repeated by the Cuban government is that there are no children walking barefoot through the streets of this Island, the big question is where do parents get the money so that their children aren’t walking with their heels on the asphalt. It’s enough to walk past store windows and look at the high prices of leather, to realize that a salary alone — the fruit from working for the State — won’t be enough.

The drama of shoes for children becomes more poignant when school is about to start and the markets are crowded. It is not unusual then to hear the parody of Jose Marti’s poem everywhere, especially when the first day of class hundreds of eyes will look over what is shown below the pants and skirts. The cost of a pair of shoes, the cheapest, is equivalent to the average monthly wage of any worker.

We must choose between surviving for thirty days or providing our children a pair of sneakers, sandals or boots. Luckily people are not satisfied and almost everyone does something illegal to send their children to school smug and comfortable. There are also generous family or friends who donate clothing and shoes, already used, to others who need them most. Those who have no clandestine business, “divert resources from the state” or appeal to the family that lives across the Straits of Florida. Ironically, it is the exiles who end up making the official propaganda come true. The high-sounding phrases of the political billboards are based on the thousands of dollars each year that enter the country through remittances.

But the parody of Marti’s poem does not attack those who have better shoes thanks to inventiveness or a relative, but others, those who have gotten them through privilege. “Take them, take mine, I have more at home,” comes the sarcastic whisper of the son of a colonel or of a trusted diplomat posted abroad. And so the caricature of Pilar and her generosity is evoked again and again when someone brags about owning something that ordinary Cubans can barely dream of.

For example, the teenage grandson of some general, driving his own car, will hear the cute verse tossed at him when he boasts of his four wheels and their gleaming tires. It is also a way of saying: we are watching, we know that everything you are flaunting came to you by way of ideological loyalty. Sometimes it’s enough to say, “Yes, I know, you have more at home,” for the braggart to feel unmasked and the conceited to comprehend the ephemeral nature of the crumbs that come from power. Because history has these ironies, this way of making fun of everything and everyone. The nineteenth century lyricism — by the grace of necessity and humor — converts verbal material into scorn, sweet revenge on those who have less. And at some point far away, Marti’s taciturn face, believing that his Pilar with her straw hat and ribbons will be remembered as an example of kindness, not used as a spear against the false discourse of egalitarianism.

31 May 2012

From Cuba Libre in El Pais