Category: Ivan Garcia

Yunia explains that in hard currency stores, beauty products are expensive and their sale is irregular. “Sometimes a certain product disappears for months. The best Havanan hairdressers buy their products abroad, either because people have the ability to travel or because their relatives send them. They are also acquired through ’mules’ dedicated to the sale of clothing, cleaning and cosmetics.”

She puts her newborn in her crib and continues explaining: “Hair treatments, extensions and dyes, when using premium products are expensive. In a month, a young woman who carries extensions can spend 30 or 40 CUC in her city. But in Havana there are customers who can pay those prices. For hairdressers there are a variety of options, to try to please all pockets. If now, the State begins to inspect and control the inputs or insists that they be bought in Cuba, the prices will rise, since it will be much more expensive to obtain suitable cosmetics. The worst thing is not the state interference, but that the private workers are legally defenseless. They impose new measures and there is no legal venue where one can take a complaint. It’s a lion-to-monkey fight, with the monkey tied up. ”

Since last week, Martí Noticias and the Reuters news agency revealed details about a restrictive package of measures for private work, the social networks lit up, and inside the old taxis, which have become forums for debate, discontent has been increasing.

The new twist is being openly criticized by ordinary Cubans. “They did it with the roving cart vendors and the private produce markets, and now you walk through the state produce markets and they’re empty,” says Roberto, retired, pointing with his hand to the dirty and empty shelves.

“What will be the solution, that the State takes control of everything again? That has not worked in sixty years. Sometimes I think there are government officials who are from the CIA. They are idiots. If you forbid what works more or less well, to implement what has never worked, chaos returns. The issue is not that individuals charge high prices. The problem is that the State does not pay the wages that are needed. Of course, the easiest thing is to take on the weakest party and put a lot of limitations and kill your business or make you work yourself to death to earn a few pesos,” says Gladys, a state cafeteria worker.

When you talk to any taxi driver in the capital you will notice the displeasure clear as day. “It’s a giant fucking over from this Party of shitheads. Basically what they want is to suffocate private work with the story that we are getting rich. Rich from what?” Asks Eduardo and he answers:

“We have to work twelve, thirteen and even fourteen hours to clear 400 or 500 Cuban pesos. Half the money goes on food and things for the house. The other, saving, to fix the car when it breaks down. For months now, the government has had the idea of putting private taxi drivers into cooperatives and exploiting them as slaves, just as they do with cooperative taxis. Most of us are against it and we will not give in. In good faith I knew that those who keep driving freelance, they will get rid of them with inspections, fines and severe inspections of the car. It is well known that half of these junkers should not be on the street. In the end what they want is to fuck us over.”

René, owner of a fleet of five cars and three jeeps that he rents as taxis, says that through people he knows in the ONAT he learned that “as of April the government will go after us with every thing they’ve got. There is talk that each taxi driver has to own his car. I do not know how this mess will end, but we will look for a shortcut to follow the new rules. It is the State, which is not capable of satisfying the demands of the people, which forces us to cheat to live as God intended. The only ones who are getting rich in Cuba are those who govern.”

The information in the foreign press, not being denied by the regime, has given rise to a wave of rumors and speculation.

“It’s a witch hunt that does not surprise me. History repeats itself. The government has always watched the progress of the private sector and then it takes the repressive scissors and cuts off their wings. That fatso Marino Murillo said that we, the individuals, have caused more harm than benefits. We pay our employees up to ten times more than state salaries and provide better services despite high taxes, and they do not allow us to import food or have a wholesale market, says the owner of a paladar, a private restaurant.

Daniel, an economist, believes that future restrictions on private work is “a terrible strategy. This has already been said repeatedly by other colleagues. What must be fought is poverty, not those who generate wealth. If they want to eliminate illegalities in private work, the State must provide the options so that this does not happen. It is the government that has failed to enable them by not allowing a wholesale market, not allowing them to associate with foreign companies or import directly from abroad. In this war the people lose. The only sector that grows in Cuba is the private sector. They employ half a million people, who by having better salaries, can increase domestic consumption. That is, more oil, clothing and appliances are bought in hard currency stores and one million people are tourists in hotels.

On the street, people ask why the military autocracy (which is guided by the ’scientific theories of communism’), dislikes that a segment of Cubans can prosper by their own efforts.

The answer seems elementary. It will always be easier to govern a herd that depends on an authoritarian state than on loose cattle in open, well-groomed paddocks.

“In addition to finishing my daughter’s room and giving the house a touchup, I want to continue in my job as a warehouse manager in the bakery, what I’m looking for there is to be able to support my family. And, of course, to have four pesos in my wallet and have a few drinks with my friends and to have a look at a young girl from time to time.”

The current electoral process in Cuba and the predictions about who will be the next president are issues that Eduardo does not care about. “Buddy, I don’t give a rat’s ass. What’s the next one going to solve? What have the neighborhood delegates to the Assembly of People’s Power resolved? The ’Five Heros’ (also called The Spies) were knocked up in prisons in the US for several years. For the Cuban system, that should be enough. But for me, the truth is, they mean nothing to me: whatever position they hold, it’s not going to solve people’s problems.”

Although academics, specialists and Cuban expatriates abroad along with the Florida media follow with a magnifying glass the official protocols of the hermetic olive-green autocracy –those who will elect the new president of the Republic of Cuba — the expectations of ordinary Cubans are extraordinarily low.

I am afraid to disappoint my editor and readers. But in the circle of people where I move, family, friends and neighbors, there is not a hint of optimism about it. Quite the opposite. Astonishing indifference and full-bodied pessimism.

Marta, an  engineer, jokingly says that these issues raise her blood pressure. “Thinking about politics here is just picking a fight for fun. When I go online, I see in the Miami press the coverage they’re giving to the next president. They do analyses, make lists of possible presidential candidates, and wrack their brains about what might happen in the future. Do you want my opinion? Nothing is going to happen. They [the regime] have had all the time in the world to square the circle and they haven’t done it. And nothing has happened, because the people are still forced to ’invent’, trying to survive, and they don’t rebel and won’t rebel, because they designed a government tailored to their interests. It doesn’t matter if they put Mariela Castro in there, Gerardo Hernandez, one of the five spies, or Miguel Díaz-Canel [the current vice president]. They will all seek to perpetuate the Revolution.”

In 2002, in response to the collection of signatures for the Varela Project, an initiative carried out by dissident Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, Fidel Castro held his own ’referendum’ and decreed the “irreversibility of socialism in Cuba,” which was reflected in the Constitution.

The disgust and zombie spirit of a large segment of citizens, is not an impediment for Cubans because they don’t have their own dreams and want to live in a modern nation where the people are soveriegn.

For Germán, a retiree who survives by collecting money for the illegal bolita (lottery), “talking about elections is a joke in bad taste, because most of the population can’t directly elect the president of the country. He is elected by 600 deputies, all members of the Communist Party, the only one there is. ”

On March 11, the citizenry will simply ratify the 605 candidates (one candidate per position) for deputy to the 9th Legislature of the National Assembly of People’s Power, people’s whose names have already been posted. Then, those deputies will elect a new president.

The 605 deputies were proposed in the Municipal Assemblies of People’s Power held on January 21. In the ’general elections’ that will take place on Sunday, March 11, around 8 million Cubans must ratify them. And on Thursday, April 19, when the National Assembly is constituted, the 605 deputies will be in charge of electing the head of the Council of State and other senior officials.

As has been published, 40.6 percent of the 605 deputies are blacks or mixed race; more than 86 percent have completed higher education; 53.22 percent are women; 13.2 percent are between 18 and 35 years old and the average age of the deputies is 49. But adding more ’dark’ faces, summoning a greater number of women and showing a youthful retouch does not democratize the Island’s legislature.

Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz, presumably, will maintain his position as first secretary of the Communist Party and although he said that state positions could be held only until the age of 75 (Castro II turns 87 on June 3), a group of elders called the “historical leaders” remain on the list of candidates for deputies, such as José Ramón Fernández, born in 1923, Faure Chomón (1929), Antonio Lussón (1930), Ramiro Valdés (1932), José Ramón Balaguer (1932), Joaquín Quintas Solá (1938), Ramón Espinosa (1939) and Leopoldo Cintra Frías (1941), among others.

“On the island, people do not trust their parliament. Since the first National Assembly was constituted in 1976 (the 1st Legislature, 1976-1981, had Blas Roca as president, Raúl Roa as vice president and José Arañaburu as secretary), all the votes have been unanimous. The parliamentarians do not speak frankly about the real problems or the aspirations of the people. They are buffoons,” says Luis, a private taxi driver.

The Cuban electoral soap opera is designed for the outside world. A wave of analysis, opinions and forecasts generates press coverage and expectations in the United States and the European Union, geographical areas where, in the not too distant future, the regime aspires to maintain or create fundamental alliances.

The intention is to sell hypothetical economic reforms, without giving in to the political principles of an autocratic government. The main strategy of the presidential relay is to try to make the Castro surname invisible and negotiate the dismantling of the embargo with the US Congress, offering possibilities for investment and trade.

We observe that Colonel Alejandro Castro Espín, the typical bad cop, is not among the candidates for deputies. They chose to elect his sister Mariela, a kind of liberal face of the Cuban revolution.

“The game is to keep a Castro holding the strings, but inside the sewers of power.  Outside, the pools are varied. But those who know the Cuban reality well, know that if anything has characterized Castroism, it never improvises and never leaves the ends untied,” affirms a former university professor of political science.

Until proven otherwise, everything indicates that Miguel Diaz-Canel will be the next president, handpicked by Raul Castro and the military leadership. The interesting thing will be to know how far his autonomy will reach.

It could be a copy of Dmitri Medvedev in Russia. Or Osvaldo Dorticos, who after the resignation of Manuel Urrutia, served as President of Cuba from July 17, 1959 to December 2, 1976. A leader who was nothing more than a chair warmer.

In a ramshackle barbershop, the suicide of Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart was the perfect pretext for a discussion.

“They say in Granma that he was killed because he suffered from a depressive crisis. Just imagine it, if a guy who did not lack beef, dollars and gasoline for his car car is given a slap, what can you expect from people who every day have to jump through hoops just to put food on the table,” said a young man waiting his turn for a haircut.

The barber did not hold back, saying: “Gentlemen, happiness does not come from money or power. Maybe the man was miserable. They say that Fidel brought him to live with him as a child and separated him by force from his mother. Or maybe he killed himself because he missed his father. Who knows.”

Habaneros on the street were making up conjectures or were simply not interested in the tragedy. Rodolfo, a guy who’s nearly six feet tall, did not care about the reason “Fidelito had to leave this world. When I die, none of them will cry for me.” He ended with a blunt phrase: “Everyone who commits suicide is a fool.”

In the national medical literature, suicide, a taboo subject on the island, is called ‘Intentionally Self-Inflicted Assault’. An article published in Cubanet in July 2016, reported data from the National Directorate of Statistical Medical Registers of Health in Cuba: “In 2015 in Cuba there were 1,492 such deaths, with a rate of 13.3 [per 100,000], a slight increase compared to 2014, when there were 1,454 suicides, for a rate of 13.0.” According to statistics, Cuba has one of the highest suicide rates in the Americas and since 1969 suicide has been one of the ten leading causes of death in the country.

Perhaps people are not as happy as the regime’s propaganda suggests. Although from the beginning of the nation, Cubans have committed suicide. “Whether for religious or patriotic reasons, there have always been those who have preferred to leave the environment rather than face reality. There is also a tendency to pyromania. On a night in January 1868, the Bayamese preferred set fire to their city rather than let it fall into the hands of the Spaniards. They did the same in Guáimaro in 1869 and in Las Tunas in 1876. Some women, faced with a disappointment in love, often choose to do away with themselves. Others decide to kill their husband for his constant abuses or infidelities. Men prefer to hang themselves or throw themselves into the sea,” says Luis, an ethnologist.

For the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the death of Martí in an absurd skirmish in Dos Ríos, on May 19, 1895, was a political suicide. In his opinion, the man Cubans call the ’Apostle’ was misunderstood by several Mambises chiefs. One of the most famous suicides in the Republican era was that of Eduardo Chibás, leader of the Orthodox Party, who on August 5, 1951, shot himself after he finished a speech on a weekly radio program. He died eleven days later, he was only 44 years old.

The Fidelista revolution increased the numbers of suicides for ideological reasons. The list of ’olive-green’ suicide victimes includes, among others, the commander Félix Pena (1959), Nilsa Espín, sister of Raul Castro’s wife Vilma Espín, and her husband Rafael Rivero (1965); Onelio Pino, captain of the yacht Granma (1969), Javier de Varona, close associate of Fidel Castro (1970), Eddy Suñol, vice minister of the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) (1971), Alberto Mora, Minister of Foreign Trade (1972), Rafael del Pino, member of the 26th of July Movement (1977), Haydée Santamaría, Casa de las Américas Director (1980), Osvaldo Dorticós, former President of Cuba (1983), Rafael Álvarez, Finance Director of Minint (1989), Enrique Sicard, Department Head in MININT (1989), Rodrigo García, finance minister (1994) and Carlos Figueredo, colonel del MININT (2009).

That they are known, there were two failed attempts of self-elimination, that of Augusto Martínez Sánchez, Minister of Labor, in 1964, and in 1994 that of Jorge Enrique Mendoza, director of the newspaper Granma. Others died in strange circumstances, such as José Abrantes, former interior minister (1991), Manuel ’Barbarroja’ Piñeiro (1998), brothers Celia María and Abel Enrique Hart Santamaría (2008) and division general Pedro Mendiondo and his in-laws ( 2013).

The case of Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart is a psychological study. “He never led a normal existence. He lived until he was ten years old with his mother. And then Fidel ignored parental authority, which in normal conditions favors the raising of children by the mother.

“In an interview with a former bodyguard, I read that Fidel barely paid attention to his first son. I am sure that Fidelito saw him as a god. And he imitated it in his gestures and letting his beard grow. But in his childhood and youth he did not have his father’s attention, he grew up in his uncle Raúl’s house, under the pseudonym of José Raúl.

“It is true that he could travel to Spain to see his mother, Mirta Díaz-Balart, but that dramatic existence could take its toll. A depressive state can develop at any time. Fidel Castro may have the historical merits that they want to point out, but I don’t believe he was a good father,” a Havana psychiatrist pointed out.

People who knew the eldest son of Castro I, agree in describing him as a distant human being, but educated and affable. Manuel, an engineer who worked with Fidelito in the ’80s in Juraguá, says that “because of his character, he did not look like a Cuban, he did not like bachata [music] and fucking or sitting down to drink beer with friends or colleagues. He gave the impression of being shy, always seemed distracted. He knew who he was, he did not forget the weight of his surnames and I think he liked to exploit the mysticism that surrounded him. But professionally he was very well educated.”

The failure of the Cienfuegos Atomic Energy project in 1992 provoked the wrath of Fidel Castro, who ousted him from office. The Juraguá Center, with Soviet technology, was considered the signature work of 20th Century Cuba. The regime buried more than a billion dollars in its construction. That year, after the disappearance of the USSR, Castro stopped the project. Twenty-six years later, the ruins of the nuclear reactor remain standing, like a phantasmagorical relic of the Cold War.

The plague of excrement and putrefying animals is hardly mitigated by the smell of the sea that breaks over the nearby coast. The Nuclear City, the name of the town where supposedly Soviet engineers and Cuban workers would reside, is a conglomeration of crappy buildings with construction defects. People live from what falls off the back of a truck. Selling queso blanco, shrimp stolen the night before from a state company or placidly drinking homemade rum.

Richard, a welding technician, worked at the Juraguá Center and recalled that “the man (Fidelito) visited the works every day. It was even rumored that he had a house in Cienfuegos. The failure of the work was not just his fault. They were stealing hand over fist there. And there was no experience in such a complex specific construction, that’s why the pace of constructive was super slow. Luckily, they closed Juraguá. If it were working it would have been a time bomb.”

With Raúl Castro’s rising to the presidency, his nephew regained prominence, being appointed scientific adviser to the Council of State. But his political career continued in the background. Perhaps one day they will know the causes that led him to commit suicide, apparently throwing himself off a high floor of the Personal Security Clinic, located in the Kohly District, in the former Alturas de Almendares residential area.

The truth is that Fidel Castro’s eldest son grew up in a complicated environment. With a textbook narcissist for a father, more determined to go down in history than in raising his children. And with a mother living at a distance in Madrid. And maternal cousins who from Miami openly declared themselves enemies of their father and his revolution.

Despite his academic career, people only approached him for a selfie because of his resemblance to Fidel. It was never him. He was a mannequin. He was predestined to sit on a psychiatrist’s couch.

Note: The remains of the nuclear physicist Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, 68, the eldest son of Fidel Castro, known as Fidelito, who committed suicide on Thursday, February 1, rest in the pantheon of the Cuban Academy of Sciences in the Cemetery of Columbus, in Havana. On the discreet black marble pantheon, on Monday, February 5, several wreaths were seen, mostly white roses, from his children and grandchildren, from his mother, Mirta Díaz-Balart and his sisters and nephews through his mother’s line. The wake was held at the headquarters of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, of which he was vice president at the time of his death, according to several of the attendees who reported it on social networks.

The Cuban media, all state, did not publish anything about the wake and burial, organized privately by the family, as had been announced in the official news about the death. The only public expression from his paternal relatives came on Friday, February 2, from his cousin Mariela Castro Espín, daughter of Raúl Castro, Fidelito’s uncle. In her Twitter and Facebook accounts she thanked those who expressed sympathy.

Castro Díaz-Balart, the only son of Fidel Castro’s marriage with Mirta Díaz-Balart, also served as scientific advisor to the Council of State, Cuba’s highest governing body. (Information taken from Martí Noticias.)

Yosbel, in the tenth grade, says “Martí is the most important Cuban hero. He was the one who taught us to think, the intellectual author of the assault on the Moncada barracks and the precursor of the Cuban revolution.”

Joshua, in the eleventh grade, confirms what Yosbel expresses and adds: “If Fidel had been born at that stage, he would have been like Martí and the rest of the Mambises chiefs. If Martí had been born now, he would be like Fidel and Raúl. ” He says it as if he were reciting a poem.

Do you admire José Martí? Have you read Martí’s works? I ask them and I ask them to speak frankly, not as if they were at a school assembly. They smile, they look at each other, and confess that they have hardly read him.

“What I remember,” says Yosbel, “I read Rosa’s Little Shoes and some stories from the book The Golden Age. But I’m not a fan of Martí. They tell you so much about him on the news and the newspapers, then they repeat the same jabbering at school, that you learn it by heart, but you do not enjoy it. It seems that Martí was not a human being, but an extraterrestrial.”

If you speak in confidence with young people and even with adults who, during their student years met a marble Martí, distant and perfect, the figure of the National Hero does not move them.

Maybe he’s repeating rumors he heard or it’s what he thinks, but Diego, a teller in a bank, says that “Martí was a spider captain. He talked and wrote a lot, but when it came time to use his gun, he was a failure. If the press presented him to me as a guy who had his faults, perhaps I would appreciate him more. But they want to sell you to a person who in 42 years of life did more things than an old man of one hundred years.”

When doctrinal propaganda is abused in the eagerness to build a myth, there is a risk of rejection in a population already stunned by the excess of pamphleteering propaganda.

Carlos, a sociologist, believes that “the sanctification of José Martí began after his death. In all cultures, it is typical to sketch a portrait of your heroes distant from their real lives. About Martí there is a suspicion that he had extramarital relations and according to recent studies he had a daughter with Carmen Mantilla. He was not a skilled warrior in the use of the machete and the rifle. Nor was he a military strategist.

“But, until proven otherwise, he is the Cuban with the greatest set of skills we have had. A humanist and an intellectual of the highest level. His untimely death generated a kind of feeling of guilt among the Mambises leaders, who, whether by dissension, envy or ambition for power, rejected Marti for not being a seasoned fighter like them.

“But it is the revolution of Fidel Castro that has fiercely manipulated his figure, in an attempt to weave a false theory of revolutionary unity. With regards to Martí, not only has the government turned him into a hostage, but the dissidence and the anti-Castro exile have done the same. He is the hero of both sides. The question we must ask ourselves is whether we venerate the Apostle in an authentic way. Or does he only serve as a stepping stone for our political campaigns.”

Luisa, a university student, says that “like every year, to remember the birth of Marti, we will march from the Staircase of the University to the Fragua Martiana (located at Hospital and Vapor in Centro Habana, now a museum). We do not go spontaneously, it is rather a commitment to the FEU (University Student Federation) and the UJC (Young Communist League). We have a good time and some leave the march and go home.”

In Cuba, prudery reaches the level of a work of art. Although intellectuals, like the filmmaker Fernando Pérez, in his film El ojo del canario (The Eye of the Canary) (ICAIC, 2010) tried to de-sanctify José Martí, the official narrative continues to use the hero in a simplistic and dogmatic way.

Martí was never a Marxist. In his work he left evidence of the opposite. Knowing the authentic Martí, like Cuban traditions, we have a love of country, the national culture and the idiosyncrasy of its people, which should be something spontaneous and long-winded. Without guidelines or political scripts, Cubans should feel motivated to read about the lives of our heroes and to cultivate respect for our traditions in a natural way.

Those born on the Island who reside in other lands and care about their country, always go to sleep “with Cuba under their pillow.” And from afar they have learned to appreciate the colossal dimensions of José Martí.

On the 165th anniversary of the birth of the man Cubans call ’The Apostle’, I remember that warm afternoon in November 2016, when I visited Ybor City in the city of Tampa with a group of friends. We laid a wreath at the foot of the statue located in Friends of José Martí Park, inaugurated in February 1960, a short distance from the old tobacco factory, where Martí harangued his countrymen and collected money for the necessary war of independence. Later, as we walked through the cobbled streets, we met an 85-year-old man who travels from California to Tampa each January, to honor the Master.

That is the Martí that should prevail among Cubans. The one that nobody has imposed to us. One that rises freely.

“Cuba has all the conditions necessary to stop using fossil fuels in a decade or less. Based on the sun, the winds and the waters of the Atlantic Ocean or the Caribbean Sea — because the rivers are not very large — the Island would have clean and sustainable energy that would contribute to its development. To this we could add the use of hybrid transport, running on electricity or cane alcohol,” said Ana optimistically.

But when I asked her, “if the laws changed would you return to rebuild the country?” she emphatically shook her head, No. “It would have to be with certain requirements, among them a public apology from the regime for its deplorable attitude towards the Cubans who one day decided to emigrate and live in a democracy. It is the first thing I would demand to return and work for my country. ”

Given the current dilemma of Cuba, trapped in a stagnant economic crisis, chronically unproductive, with brakes on private work and the creation of small- and medium-sized businesses, with social tension due to the poor administration of resources, along with a housing deficit exceeding one million homes, a low birth rate, an accelerated aging of the population, miserable salaries and a qualitative decline of education and public health, an honorable exit would be forge an agreement with the diaspora and, using the skills and talents of everyone, begin to rebuild the foundations of the national economy.

Exiles like Ana Gálvez or the famous musician and composer Jorge Luis Piloto, who, in order to emigrate from Cuba, had to accept the regime’s degrading treatment, deserve an apology. And there are others whom Fidel Castro expelled from their homeland for thinking differently and opposing the state of affairs.

Miami, Autumn 2014. While Jorge Luis Piloto in his Mercedes Benz was traveling with me to the new Marlins baseball stadium through the tunnel built after the expansion of the port, I asked him, too, if certain conditions were met would he return to reform his country. The answer was not immediate. He kept driving, concentrating on the traffic.

In the 70s, Piloto lived with his mother in a small room with a makeshift platform “mezzanine,” a bathroom and collective kitchen in a building in danger of collapse in the Pilar neighborhood, in Havaa’s Cerro municipality. The authorities did not consider him a “reliable” guy: he wore his hair long, he always carried a guitar in his hand and was a lover of the Beatles.

He had arrived in the capital at age 15 from Cárdenas, Matanzas. And although in Havana one of his own song’s won an award in the Adolfo Guzmán Competition, in 1980 he decided to leave with the Mariel Boatlift.

Fidel Castro, offensively, called the more than 125,000 Cubans who emigrated through the Port of Mariel that year “scum.” Earlier, he had called those who left “worms.” In 1980, that terrible year, the neo-fascist acts of repudiation emerged. Popular mobs harassed you, shouting all kinds of offenses and slander, they threw eggs at you and more than one person beat you.

Piloto experienced it first hand. After pondering his response to my question he told me that he had no plans to return, but if one day Cuba bet on democracy, he would help in any way he could. Recently, in a card for the new year, Jorge Luis wrote: “In 2018 may we can travel to Cuba without asking for permission and with a process on the way to democratization, but with social justice for all. The Cuba that [José] Martí dreamed of.”

Every time I’ve been in Miami, I’ve chatted with numerous compatriots. Most have good jobs and have built successful careers. I ask them all the same question: would you return to rebuild Cuba?

Ninety-five percent, after explaining their reasons, answer No. Journalists like Osmín Martínez and Iliana Lavastida, who have managed to turn a boring conservative newspaper like Diario Las América into an attractive medium, do not have plans to return to Cuba either.

Only those politically committed confessed that they would leave everything behind and return to rebuild the land where they, their parents and grandparents were born. This is the case for the poet and journalist Raúl Rivero.

Almost all of the Cubans who have triumphed in Miami would help from a distance. A praiseworthy thing, but in a de-capitalized nation like Cuba today, it feels like very little. Because the country will need more than professional and financial help and powerful infrastructure investments. It will also need labor. People with experience in sectors such as construction and architecture: with few exceptions, everything built in Cuba over the last sixty years has been built badly.

It will also require people with knowledge in public administration, democratic political institutions, specialists in education, agriculture, telecommunications and other technical and scientific branches.

It is probably the best option — perhaps the only one — to involve the olive-green dictatorship. Negotiate with the emigration, especially the one with the most economic power. Open, without conditions, the doors back to their homeland. Stop treating emigrated Cubans as just a source of remittances and encourage them to participate in the national reconstruction.

Despite the triumphalist discourse of the regime, the ship is taking on water. It would be a crime to let it end up sinking without trying to find solutions.

Nobody is more interested in the fate of Cuba than Cubans. Although those who left do not want to return to stay.

On the morning of Friday the 15th, after a hearty breakfast of melon juice, bread with pork steak and cold salad of macaroni with ham, pineapple and mayonnaise, the couple, dressed in sackcloth and dragging a medium-sized stone they began their journey to Rincón, a small town south of the capital, where at the stroke of twelve o’clock on Saturday, December 16, in the sanctuary adjoining a leprosarium, the saint of beggars and the poor is venerated.

Erasmus wants to arrive at the town of El Rincon in the afternoon and buy candles, flowers and prayers. Also food and a bottle of rum to alleviate the cold that usually attends this time of year. “We thought to sleep outside in the sanctuary and after the mass, give our offering to old Lazarus. He deserves it.”

Because the procession coincides with the weekend, the “congregation of devotees, which is always impressive, this year is expected to be more numerous,” says a priest of a church in the neighborhood of La Víbora, who adds:

“There is a lot of frustration in the country. The wet foot/dry foot policy was eliminated, with the arrival of Trump to the White House and relations between Cuba and the United States have worsened. And after the supposed acoustic attacks, obtaining family reunification visas has become very complicated, because people have to travel to Colombia with all the expenses that represents. In addition, the government has slowed down its economic reforms.

“For more than three months now, it has not been issuing licenses to the most prosperous private businesses and the economy continues to deteriorate. All this is being suffered by the Cuban family, with salaries that do not solve much, a lack of housing, expensive food and an indecipherable future. As if that were not enough, it is unknown what will be the course of Cuba within three or four months, when it is assumed that Raúl Castro will leave power.”

Not only is Catholicism favored in times of economic crisis and people’s distrust of the poor management of the regime. Evangelists, Protestants and Jehovah’s Witnesses, among others, have increased their numbers of faithful. As have, of course, the Afro-Cuban religions, both Santería and Palo. Due to religious syncretism on the Island, Saint Lazarus is also known as Babalú Ayé and is venerated without distinction of creed.

Three years ago Yanira joined Santería — Yemayá, clarifies — and now goes dressed in white to El Rincón. “Every December 16, on the eve of Saint Lazarus, I’m walking down Rancho Boyeros Avenue to Rincón. The last section, from the village to the sanctuary, I crawled down the street. I have a lot of faith in old Lazarus. Thanks to him I have been successful in life.”

According to Ana Luisa, a resident in the town of Rincón and owner of a small business selling entrepanes (sandwiches) and flowers, “there are believers who spend up to one hundred convertible pesos in offerings to Saint Lazarus. When this time of year arrives, almost everyone in the village starts to sell something: food, flowers, candles, statuettes … Whatever it is, to take advantage of the influx of thousands of devotees, who usually pay a lot of money.”

Shortly before December 17, El Rincón is decorated with large floral decorations and dozens of images of San Lazaro, some of large size, which are placed in glass urns or in the portals of the houses.

On the main street, several private coffee shops offer Creole food, fruit smoothies, ham and cheese sandwiches or bread with roasted suckling pig. They also sell coffee, beer, rum, brandy and red wine, which helps to bear the coldness and damp that at night is felt in El Rincón, which belongs to Santiago de las Vegas, a town where temperatures usually drop quite a bit in December.

Although the official press hardly reports on the pilgrimage, spontaneously thousands of Cubans come to venerate Saint Lazarus. “It’s a village show. Even in the hard years, when the regime banned religious demonstrations, people flocked to the Rincón. That voluntary participation in Cuba only occurs in baseball games or mega concerts, like the Rolling Stones,” says Carlos, sociologist.

In spite of the silence, the authorities allow a flotilla of state buses to transport thousands of people to the sanctuary. During the journey on foot, hundreds of policemen, black berets and agents of the State Security dressed in civilian clothes, without much discretion, watch the pilgrims.

The plastic artists Luis Manuel Otero and José Ernesto Alonso, began a walk in support of freedom and democracy in Cuba, but they could not even leave Centro Habana: at the intersection of Belascoaín and Carlos III, they were detained by the political police. Alonso has already been released, but Otero’s whereabouts are unknown.

And by tradition, Saint Lazarus receives various prayers and petitions. Erasmo and his wife, from the Ocapuna neighborhood in the eastern province of Holguín, thank the “old man” for healing breast cancer and having escaped from prison.

Other faithful, like Ernesto, come from Miami to pray for reunification as soon as possible with his daughter who lives in Havana. And Otero and Alonso, with all their rights, they demand freedom and democracy.

Saint Lazarus, somewhere, hears them all.

On the street, the tirades against Raúl Castro are often bitter and even offensive. His brother, the late populist caudillo, continues to arouse some respect among Cubans, be they apolitical or detractors of the Castro regime.

But Raul, handpicked by Fidel after he stepped aside on 31 July 2006 due to health problems, does not inspire the same consideration among ordinary people. Without restrictions, not a few Habaneros, mostly marginal, call him ‘Raula’ — the feminine version of his name — question his manhood and tell jokes about his sexuality.

There is a popular perception that Raúl is more repressive than his brother. “If he has to bring the tanks out on the street so that this shit does not fall, he’ll do it without thinking twice about it,” says a newspaper salesman.

Those who ever had dealings with Raúl Castro, such as the writer Juan Juan Almeida and the former state television journalist Lissette Bustamante, had a chance to experience little-known facets of the current president: that of a father and a grandfather who worships his children and grandchildren, an organized man who knows how to listen.

Nikolai Leonov, an old fox of the KGB who met the General in the ’50s when he was a simple Socialist Youth activist, in a report to the Soviet intelligence portrayed him full-length: an eternal conspirator.

With discretion, Raul Castro, has participated all the witch hunts and purges that have occurred in these 59 years of revolution. From the execution of the pilots of the Batista air force and the microfaction process to the Ochoa case and the dismissal of Carlos Lage and Felipe Pérez Roque.

“Raúl is more communist than his brother. Fidel only believed in him. If he wants, Raul can be cruel, but he has his feet on the ground,” says a person who knew him when he was a minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR).

Despite his repulsive reputation and without much political talent, in his eleven years at the helm of Cuba’s destiny, he authorized broader economic reforms than in the Castro I phase and repealed absurd regulations that made Cubans third-rate citizens in their own country, such as the legalization of the purchase and sale of cars and houses, travel abroad and being about to stay in exclusive hotels formerly open only to foreign tourists.

Although he has maintained the repression against the dissidence on the island and Cuban interference in Venezuela, Castro II negotiated Cuba’s financial debt with various countries on favorable terms and managed to reestablish diplomatic relations with the United States without giving an inch in his obsolete political principles.

According to credible sources, Raúl Castro’s decision to withdraw from power is unappealable. But as long as he lives, he will remain the first secretary of the Communist Party and, from the shadows, will play an important role in the sewers of power. “That’s what he likes. Manipulating the strings of power, from behind the power, ” says a former official.

The postponement of his retirement does not seem to be a delaying move. Some analysts believe that the current state of affairs, crisis in Venezuela, setbacks in relations with the United States and an economy on the razor’s edge, could have influenced Raúl to reconsider his decision to retire in February 2018.

The former official believes that “there has been more noise outside than inside. I think that this postponement is due to the fact that the elections of the municipal candidates were delayed due to Hurricane Irma. The deadlines that remain until February are very narrow to be able to elect the new deputies. I do not think it’s Raúl’s move to stay as president for two more months.”

Daniel, a barber, does not care when Raúl is going to retire or who will replace him. “We will keep the same style of government that has never worked. The Cubans will continue going through hell to get food. What interests me, and I suppose the people also, is that there are changes that really improve our lives, not the happy talk story they’ve been feeding us for 59 years. ”

What should be of interest to scholars of Cuba is the lack of charisma and meager qualities of the new batch of politicians in the country. Almost everyone feels uncomfortable before the cameras. Their speeches are mechanistic and trite. They make up for their poor creativity by cutting and pasting phrases from speeches delivered by Fidel Castro.

They never smile in their appearances. They are always serious, as if in a bad mood and their pathetic expression screams for an image consultant. But what most concerns citizens is that they have no idea how a nation is managed efficiently.

The great problem of Cuba is not Raúl Castro. It is what comes after.