April 2013 marks a decade since once of the most depressing moments of post-revolutionary history: the so-called Black Spring. It was a time when Fidel Castro, excited about what he assumed was a revolutionary wave in Latin America and the arrival of the first subsidies from Venezuelans, decided to eradicate every sign of discontent and opposition that had accumulated along the road of defeat-after-defeat-until-the-final-victory that he had laid out. The pretext was, as it had been since 1959, shutting the door to the imperialist threat.

Although the Black Spring is remembered above all for the imprisonment of 75 opposition activists without due process, I focus my attention on another event: the shooting of three black youths for the failed hijacking of a passenger ferry that crossed Havana Bay.

As is well-known, a group of eleven young people participated in this criminal act on April 2, 2003, intending to reach the coast of Florida. This involved taking thirty passengers hostage, including two foreign girls who converted to kidnappers and who became, for the police, key pieces in the negotiations. Finally the boat ran out of gas, prompting the hijackers to accept a settlement that only their naivete could support: be towed to the dock at Mariel where they would be refueled so they could resume their journey north. Continue reading →

Raúl Castro during the 26th of July commemoration

At last week’s celebration of the 26th of July something happened I didn’t quite understand. The program stated that Machado Ventura was going to speak, but then the General/President also spoke. It seems someone asked him to and people went along with it. After a speech by Machado Ventura — his oratory is unmistakeable, saying what everyone expects and in the most boring possible way — anything is welcome. And Raúl, when he improvises, has the virtue of using Cuban slang and relating trifling events, which is relaxing. And after a tirade from Machado one needs to relax.

Raúl dropped some interesting tidbits. One of them referred to the issue of wages. Given a population that spends the month — as my friend Henry says — “smoking under water” (that is making silk purses out of sows’ ears), the General/President declared that there will be no increases in salaries until there is an increase in production, especially in food. Which is very confusing in so many ways, but particularly in the fact that the reforms come to a halt right at the heart of things: the immense and dilapidated State economy. And in the lack of effective policies to jump start the agricultural economy.

And the responsibility for all this is primarily the orator’s, who has spent his six years in power playing around the edges, rummaging through other people’s pockets, with an economy that grows only in the government statistics. That is, inevitably, the General/President has to say as Sor Juana Inés said to the men of her day: you pay for the sins you condemn.

He then noted that doctors earn very little, but so, he said “do we all.” Another vulgarity because as it happens, and the whole world knows it, everyone, as he said everyone, obviously, does not have to count pennies. The overwhelming majority do, yes, but not all. And what puts some on one side of the line where very little is earned, and others on the side where a great deal is earned, is not a gamble or bad luck, but the result of the very politics and practices that animate the system commanded by the General.

And this is interesting for the following reason. The functionaries, intellectuals and academics faithful to the system, including the half-asleep journalists and badly-paid official bloggers frequently mention “the losers,” that is the people who will inevitably lose with an economic adjustment, needed, they say, for the economy to take off. There are a lot of dark corners here, because they are the same people who have been the preferred victims of belt-tightening: teachers, State employees, retirees, slum dwellers, women, young people entering the labor market, etc. etc.

Only our economists — who celebrate the Chinese model while condemning the Chilean — never clarify that these people are sacrificed, helpless to defend themselves or negotiate, because in an authoritarian regime like Cuba’s — as happened in Chile and is happening in China — there are no independent labor unions or social associations who represent the interest of the helpless “losers.”

But nobody — certainly not the anguished General/President — speaks about the winners. That is the tiny minority of people who better their economic and social situations and eventually become the dominant class in the emerging capitalism. This elite is already visible, and there are places in the principal Cuban cites, and especially in Havana, that serve as the seat for a kind of consumption and behavior that has nothing to do with the discourse of Machado Ventura. But everything to do with the descendants of people like Machado Ventura.

So while it is true that in this group of elite consumers there are many people who have arrived through a combination of talent and market opportunities — artists, writers, small entrepreneurs — these reasons have very little to do with the recruitment of the other chosen ones of the new Cuban capitalism. The most important group of the new elite are made up of those who appropriated the best houses in the best places to rent rooms (or even to run small hotels with very sophisticated services) or to open restaurants; or those who have the best higher-up contacts for joint-ventures, or those who run the best businesses to partner with foreign capital.

In short, those who had relations, political protections, information, and the cunning and astuteness to slide through the intricacies of an infernally corrupt system, all the while swearing allegiance to socialism.

These people, needless to say, do not have the low incomes that, according the General/President, are suffered by all Cubans. They are the winners of a divvying up of the spoils from the work of others, the frustrated expectations, and the dangerous resentments of millions of people of several generations.

People whom our economists call — simply — the losers.

From Cubaencuentro

30 July 2012

Eliécer Ávila and Yoani Sánchez at the CLICK Festival

I’ve been reading the whole imbroglio generated by Cuban State security agent Percy Alvarado with his article about Obama’s imperialist interference in Cuba. First he accuses everyone in sight of being pro-Yankee puppets, and later apologizes for having shoveling shit with such energy over those he wasn’t authorized to.

None of which is new to Percy, whose favorite hobby has been shoveling mud, as well as being mistaken in his unwholesome profession, because not too long ago the same thing happened with some Venezuelan Chavez supporters, to whom he gifted some shovels of shit and then later swore he didn’t mean to. It’s that there are people who, no matter the context they find themselves in, keep doing the same thing.

And now, reading about Percy Alvarado’s immature entanglements, I thought back to find the boy I met nearly forty years ago at Lenin High School. My first workplace.

At that time Percy Alvarado (PA) was a Guatemalan boy who taught high school literature classes and fantasized about his epic/guerrilla past and his decision to reunite the disbanded movements of Turcios Lima and Yon Sosa to march on Guatemala City. It was a little heavy but we all — students and professors — put up with it because, as our friend Pepín would say — without these fabrications Percy wouldn’t have existed. And perhaps because we sensed that that being who wandered the cold halls of “La Lenin” and discharged his frustrations on tolerant parishioners, was the best personal version you could get of this existence condemned to moral misery.

What followed has been terrible. Not because he was a spy — this is a profession like any other everywhere, and there have always been professional and honorable ones — but because he was determined to leave us his written memoirs. And to enter into the ideological game with some McCarthyism articles, like this now, the incoherence and humorous features of which did not omit their dangerousness as accusatory pamphlets in a country where there are no individual guarantees, nor independent judicial processes.

And it’s that PA’s article is not simply what it seems — a ridiculous burlesque — but a serious unfounded accusation that continues what the badly-paid-bloggers and Cubadebate were already cooking up when the CLICK Festival was held. Their intention is to create a state of opinion favorable to a crackdown on autonomous critical projects and the opposition, through their presentation of them as creatures of the American interference in internal Cuban matters, as anti-national boils that need to be lanced for the common good.

As an article, this poorly written pamphlet follows the rules of psychological warfare: a stunning collection of unconnected data, mentions of names with details of alleged activities (about 40 people were named/snitched on), a self-assured speech by the police in control, and the use of aggressive phrases that say nothing but imply a great deal. And above all, frighten.

It speaks, for example, of “known” things, about which “there is strong evidence,” accusations about about which “there isn’t a shadow of a doubt”; allusions to “secret meetings” with declared enemies and the promise that much more is known, but is being saved as ammunition for a future crackdown in which a guy like PA must feel like a pig in shit.

A favorite victim on this occasion is Eliécer Ávila — the young man who managed to draw out from Alarcón all the nonsense he harbored — who is called “the new favored son of the mercenaries.” He is accused of “harboring stupid ideas,” of wanting an “impossible Arab Spring,” and of using “fantasy concepts.” But despite everything he is warned that they are watching him very closely and will block the development of his “stupid-fantasy-impossible” plans with all “the resources and elements required.” All of which again demonstrates that Eliécer would be an excellent psychotherapist in charge of emptying decrepit minds, and that in this practice of saying nonsense there are no known limits: evidently Percy has surpassed Alarcón and his unforgettable metaphor of the skies filled with airplanes.

But Eliécer was not the only one. Antonio Rodiles comes in for his share, along with another four dozen people who are mentioned by name and supposed functions, with the same delight as a neighborhood snitch might find in it. This includes recognized critical figures and opponents of several new cultural projects and pluralist projects from the left like the Havana Times. And he adds, in a very odd manner, the prestigious Citizens Committee for Racial Integration which, he states, offends patriotic values with its recognition of the Independent Party of Color and Evaristo Estenoz. Who, according to Percy, were active in the nineteenth (sic) century.

And here comes the slip that accentuates the ridiculous appearance of this badly contrived — and worse written — plot. In his wild unbridling of repressive virtue, Percy touched on the edges of sin when he included in his list of “mercenaries” five intellectuals who not only have nothing to do with the opposition, but who in some cases have carried out glamorous pro-government acts of faith. And who, therefore, are officially recognized as intellectuals.

The Ministry of Culture (MINCULT), which had published PA’s article in one of its newsletters, was forced to apologize for it (the only moderately positive thing in this muddy mess), alleging that the libel is not consistent with their editorial line because of the attack on the five intellectuals. And consequently (and here they return to the swamp), accepting by default the rest of the repressive arguments, personal attacks, simplistic view of the world, and to putting dozens of people and institutions in danger by the accusations of a scribe in service to the worst snobs of the Cuban political class. And this is awful for MINCULT and, I believe, lost in opportunity to show the world that there is still some decency and good sense in the high political spheres of the Island.

In the end I am always assaulted by doubts about to what extent this was an initiative of Percy Alvarado, or the fulfillment of a suggestion from some higher up, with the intention not only of terrorizing Cuban intellectual sectors, but also conditioning the members of the political class themselves who already understand that it’s not possible to continue to govern a nation as if it were a herd of cows. In any case, I believe that the result will be inverse of that expected by the perpetrators. There are situations and processes in contemporary Cuba that are irreversible, and among them is the emergence of an independent public, pluralistic and diffuse space that could not be decimated with another Black Spring.

Percy Alvarado brought all his existential failures, twisted arguments and shovels of shit and threw them on Obama.

And the young people of the Critical Observatory told him something as brief as it is substantial: “Enough already!”

23 July 2012

A former privately-owned store in Havana now under State ownership and management. The sign over the clothing racks states that the clothes are: “Recycled but of Quality”

On March 13, 1968, Fidel Castro, in one of his miles-long speeches, announced to the Cuban people what he called “the Revolutionary Offensive*.” In reality, it had nothing revolutionary about it, on the contrary, it was an essentially counterrevolutionary measure intended to eliminate the urban petty bourgeoisie. And with it to eliminate one of the few areas of social autonomy remaining in the country after the brutal nationalization of everything that moved. After this step, the only thing left outside the State sector was a limited area of small farm cooperatives of differing forms, that owned 30 percent of the land and supplied something like 70 percent of the agricultural food to the Cuban population.

The Revolutionary Offensive was one more step in the sociopolitical control of the population and in the construction of a Thermidorian regime with totalitarian aspirations that finally consolidated itself on the base of Soviet subsidies. It was also another step in the repression of everyone who seemed estranged from a new morality more similar to the plebeian asceticism of the medieval peasant movements than the Marxist proposal.

And it was a particularly damaging outburst of the anti-urban sentiment, in the same way that cities were considered as nurseries of amoral manifestations and the rural world as an idyllic place to cultivate the new revolutionary virtues. If anyone doubts this, read this short paragraph from a speech as homophobic as it is anti-urban, uttered by FC in March of 1963:

“Many of those bums… have taken the extreme liberty of attempting to go to some of the places of public attendance to organize their faggoty shows… our society cannot make room for these degenerates. The socialist society cannot permit that kind of degeneration. There are many theories, I am not a scientist, I am not an expert in this matter, but I have always observed one thing: the countryside does not yield this inferior product. I have always observed this, and I always bear it very much in mind.”

And from here, obviously, they derived practices such as the agricultural mobilizations that battered us for decades, the schools in the countryside, and in the countryside they terrorized the families until very recently, and the fatal UMAP** (Military Units in Aid of Production) that destroyed the lives and dreams of thousands of Cubans. All in an attempt to subjugate a Caribbean population to a stoical and monastic lifestyle that, logically, the new political class escaped by reserving for themselves intimate recreational sites within and outside the country.

Recently I returned to the speech announcing the Revolutionary Offensive. I hadn’t gone back to it since that day I heard it, when I was a teenager, stuck in the crowd filling San Lázaro Street. And reading it served to reaffirm my conviction in the value of democracy, of public debate, and of the independent press. Because the report presented by Fidel Castro (FC) against small urban businesses — in the midst of a several hour tirade that included observations about the drought, the fight against imperialism and the victory of the 10 million ton sugar harvest — constituted a gross manipulation of public opinions that could only be carried out from uncontested power.

FC’s report was based on a study applied to 6,452 private businesses — including snack stands — and 955 bars, never making it clear if they were included in the previous figure or were an additional number. It was undertaken by Communist Party militants from each municipality with the support of the surveillance entities, the CDRs — Committees for the Defense of the Revolution — which obviously were determined to construct the results to agree with the conclusions they wanted to reach, to legitimize the operation. And in particular, those conclusions fed into the political passions of the moment.

So the study presents frankly childish data such as specifying that 66 percent of the clients of the bars and 72 percent of the proprietors were “anti-social and amoral” deviants from the revolutionary purposes. Claims difficult to prove, but sufficient to identify the happy drinkers as zigzagging enemies of the Revolution.

On the other hand, in his speech FC grossly distorted the statistics. Let’s say, for example, that when only 28 percent of the businesses were not legally registered, this was presented as “almost a third”; or when he had to explain that 51 percent of the business had good hygiene conditions, 40 percent had average conditions, and 9 percent bad, he presented this data as almost half “did not have good” hygiene conditions. And so on, making the reading an invitation to laughter if it weren’t that through it he was hiding a wave of expropriations against workers, against the “people” whom FC himself defined in his legal plea of 1953***, and against the few remaining spaces of social autonomy.

I say expressly workers, because there is something that neither the endeavors of the investigators, nor the manipulation of the orator can hide: of these 6,542 small businesses analyzed in Havana, 72 percent were registered and paid their taxes on time, 88 percent of the owners worked in their businesses and relied on family labor, and only 31 percent of them had other employees. And 73 percent of the owner families had no other income, with the overwhelming majority having daily gross revenues of less than one hundred pesos.

Curiously, only 6 percent of the business owners had requested to leave the country.

In a country where at that time the only way to express discontent was with your feet.

Translator’s notes:
*The 1968 Revolutionary Offensive, according to Granma, the Communist Party newspaper, was intended to fight selfishness and individualism and eradicate parasitism. The government confiscated 55,636 small, private businesses.
**UMAP — Concentration camps for religious believers, homosexuals and other “counterrevolutionaries.”
***Subsequently edited and published as “History will absolve me,” this refers to his statement at his trial for the attack on the Moncada Barracks on 26 July 1953, generally taken as the start date of the Revolution.

From Cubaencuentro

9 July 2012