Category: Agustin Valentin Lopez Canino

Dekaisone, Agustin Lopez, Havana, 8 June 2015 – It is 8:30 in the morning on Sunday, 7 June. I am at my sister’s house and go down to the street with the intention of buying bread for breakfast. A People’s Revolutionary Police (PNR) patrol car with two uniformed police officers and a henchman from Castro’s Gestapo, are waiting for me a few yards from the exit and don’t allow me to realize the action. During the previous days I had been warned to stop attending Sundays at Gandhi Park.

I engage in a conversation with the dictatorship’s assassin, who after using various dirty and perverse methods of persuasion to keep me from attending Mass at Santa Rita Church, including subtle threats, orders me to accompany him. I am put into the patrol car under the express orders of senior commanders and after riding around various places on the outskirts of Havana I am abandoned on a central highway some 12 miles from the city with threats not to go to Santa Rita next Sunday. continue reading

Don’t talk about politics because they’ll hang you, but I hung myself first and talked about politics afterwards.

In front of me there are four panelists, I imagine that they’re people who are knowledgeable about the matter, prominent scholars on the subject of Cuba and its miseries, but full of demagoguery and revolutionary utopias, they were born, grew up, and came of age within the political fanaticism of socialism, submissive and obedient to the directives of the Party and the whims and the ego of the Maximum Leader, so they substituted their needs and looked for sustenance, listening to and making what was bad, and they didn’t deal with looking for what was good.  I’m not judging, I am trying to be just and find reason.

The debate presented today is: Bread winning: incomes and standards of living.
Maria del Carmen psychologist and scholar on the subject, presents the moderator.  Jose Luis Rodriguez prestigious professor.  Betty Anaya Cruz also an expert on the subject and the pompous reporter Yasley Carrero Chavez.

Between them they make a detailed presentation of income, salaries and standards of living.  At no time do they explain how to obtain a salary that covers the necessities, incomes that raise us to a dignified standard of living and earn us our bread in an honest, honored form.  Of course, the means don’t exist in a socialist system and even less in this mutation implanted in Cuba.  They concur that salaries only cover 50% of the necessities and the other 50% comes from other sources of income.  They don’t dare say that it comes from corruption or from selling or exchanging dignity and decorum for leftovers from the State.  If they make direct political critiques they’ll hang.

A leading official representing the State in matters of commerce states that: “Not even if they raise the salary several times will it cover basic necessities and resolve the problem.”  Fuck, I say to myself, why is this mediocre person here if he already committed suicide, he is more dead than socialism, I hope he goes home and runs his errands to the corner store, and to think that he represents society and has a prominent post.

The panelist Jose Luis Rodriguez uses data to show that people’s savings in banks have grown.  Wow! Damn! Now I believe that shame has a price in the stock market.
So I wrote my first question on a scrap of paper that was on the seats.

If the system implanted in Cuba is socialist, based in Marxism and Leninism, and I read in one of Lenin’s books that the salary earned by the worker in a socialist system serves to satisfy his basic material and spiritual needs within the society and still have a little left over for other enjoyment:  What has happened that this hasn’t come true, does the system work?  Could we reverse the situation without political changes?

I didn’t believe they would give me the floor for my question but they gave me three minutes in front of the microphone and so I repeated what I had written and I added these words about the increase in savings: Was it the honest and honored worked who had saved his salary?  The worker can’t save anything.  Therefore it’s not saving but robbing, embezzlement, corruption and other undignified forms of raising income.  

I understood that all this problem of salary and everything else has been engendered by a socialist system and we are going to solve it with more socialism; that’s like a doctor faced with a bacterial infection wanting to heal it with more bacteria.  Thank you I’m done.  

They finished by giving a social and economic tint to the debate, supporting the new reformist model, as always avoiding the subject of necessary political change.  Terror and demagoguery.  If they directly confront politics they hang.

19 July 2013

Once again it is the first of May, once again the Plaza is filled, slogans that will never be accomplished, unattainable challenges, huge flags carried as if over coffins, people raising their fists and shouting against the ghosts of fear, and above, on the tribunal the tribunes, the Caligulas of this empire waving their arms like Caesars, hands up, hands down. Like petrified mummies. Perversity in those above and perversity in those below, and over the city the black wings of opprobrium.

Many eyes reflect indifference, others fright and confusion. There are those threatened at their workplaces with the loss of their little bag of goodies handed out at the end of each month with some toiletries, or with the loss of a few dollars added to their salary as a prize for fulfilling their monthly slavery, as well as those looking for the opportunity to leave on international missions where they could earn in a few years what would take their entire working life on the island, those who attend universities and others who have started working for themselves and who prosper thanks to corruption, also the heads of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution who, on every block, applaud the Revolution. All threatened with the loss of something they need. They have never thought that this lie of their existence denies their identity and blocks their salvation making them live in the most absurd and miserable way.

It hurts to see a nation whose modesty is accumulated in landfills and whose honor is in the sewers. Tomorrow they will return all to the same things, stealing, lying, cheating, corrupted to the core, humiliating themselves to beg for a modicum of freedom and a crumb of rights.

If the José Martí of the Plaza, in front of whom they parade, weren’t made out of stone he would have fled the city in terror of a Cuba so shameless and vile. I hope there aren’t many of these May Days left in storage for the future.

3 May 2013

Between hugs, handshakes and some tears we said goodbye at the Havana aiport last night, Sunday, 10 March, to the leader of the Ladies in White, Berta Soler.

She was accompanied more than fifty of these brave women and about thirty friends and admirers (including the political police brigade that never misses these events) but not along the the usual route of the Ladies in White through the streets of Cuba to demand freedom for political prisoners. Rather she is taking advantage of a part of Law No. 13, embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, violated for 53 years by the authorities of the Cuban government led by Fidel Castro Ruz, before, and now by his brother Raul Castro the leader of the Communist party, the only party allowed to exist under the constitution created by them and approved by fear. A violation that had motivated thousands of Cubans to make an out-of-control exodus in which many lost their lives trying to escape the dictatorship. For 53 years Cubans could only leave the island to work in international missions (serving as doctors and other positions), in sports delegations, or on cultural tours, all well-controlled by government authorities, but still many members risked desertion under the strict eyes of State Security. Thus numerous talents in all branches of learning and doing fled the island.

A few minutes before leaving this reporter asked Berta Soler two questions:

What will make you return to Cuba?

Berta: My commitment to my people, to political prisoners who remain in prison, to freedom. To demand the rights that are still violated by the dictatorship. I go out into the world only to bear witness to the truth of Cuba and to fight for our rights. We are not mercenaries as we are painted by the dictatorship but patriots, people of any social class who lose the fear of repression and hold to citizenship in search of democracy.

Are you afraid to return home?

Berta: No, not at all. Fear of the tyrant has plunged this country into misery, has made this people mediocre and isolated from the rest of the world, not knowing how to relate to their own brothers. Even the government itself has confessed that it has failed to create a generation within the Party capable of replacing the old and worn out satraps who govern. God willing, I will return to new streets, that do not belong to the Party, to a government or to a dynasty, but to all Cubans, those here and our brothers who have been banished into exile, because for me we have all been banished, expelled from out country, the land that by right belongs to us.

Now on the point of crossing over the high wall of the Revolution, her husband, Angel Moya Acosto, a political prisoner from the Black Spring Group of 75, hugs her and says, “Do the right thing, not one step back. Our best weapon is the truth. Give the world this message. We are here, waiting for you.”
Laughter, applause, excitement, and the cameras clicking, until the Afro-Cubana leader is lost behind the curtains of customs.

11 March 2013