Chronicle about a chronicle


To be a reporter in Cuba is something like trying to be a tightrope artist balancing on a loose rope in an old traveling circus. To begin with, when one is an independent reporter, in addition to the string of insults that—generously and without rationing—are hurled at us by those in the government and State media, add the precarious conditions under which we undertake our work.

The first and greatest difficulty is that since independent journalism is prohibited by the Castro brothers, we have no access to reliable statistics and numbers. Frequently, by not having truthful data, I have to abandon some article or report that I am writing because I lack information.

One major obstacle, when I want to make a note or get a story, is that the people I consult, because of that irrational fear that has paralyzed Cuban society for 50 years, beg me not to identify them or their occupation.

It is nerve wracking. In that world that borders on the surreal, independent Cuban journalists undertake their work in the 21st century. Living for half a century in a closed society, where criticism and discrepancies are synonymous with personal enmity, has without a doubt tainted human relationships.

The misunderstandings come from all sides. Some proud intellectuals, who hold their heads high, distance themselves from the State information apparatus; they comment quietly among their friends that the lack of professionalism of some independent journalists can be seen in the stories they write and in their lack of objectivity by not including in their writing the opinions of independent thinkers. They are in the habit of judging harshly the role of the opposition and the blogging movement on the island. OK.

Recently, I wrote, for the digital page “El Mundo/America,” a chronicle titled “The ‘Other’ Yoanis” about four women I know who blog, because one way or another, most Cuban bloggers who began to write after 2007, whether they are official or not, look sideways at Generation Y, Yoani Sanchez’s blog. Either to attack or praise it.

Without a doubt, if we don’t believe all that string of nonsense that government propaganda wants us to buy, we have to admit that Sanchez is the anchor and star of the Cuban blogosphere. One hundred million hits per year provoke admiration in some and jealousy and envy in others.

Writing on the island is a highly risky job, even if on any given night they don’t riddle you with bullets as you enter your house, as happens in Colombia or Mexico. And for that same reason, because there is no bloodshed, some intellectuals and leftist politicos think that the Castros are not so bad. There is no blood, that is true. But the regime promises us many years of prison for writing our own thoughts.

In Cuba not only the government is intolerant. So are the opposition, independent journalists and bloggers. Some are as intransigent as the State officials.

So, to the point. I was telling you that recently I wrote a story about four women who blog: Claudia Cadelo, Laritza Diversent, Lia Villares, and Miriam Celaya. After a few days I find out that two of them, Miriam Celaya and Lia Villares, alarmed by my bad handling of information, issued separate denials. A good signal.

I recognize that Celaya has reasons. I made mistakes on dates and conferred a political position—to be in favor of the market economy—that she personally hadn’t told me. I apologized to her.

Villares, the other blogger, is in disagreement over a nuance. I wrote that her father is an alcoholic, a conclusion I came to from the 4-page profile she composed on her blog, where a couple of times she lets us know that her father has lost control by drinking more than he should. She was upset with my appraisal.

The point is not that she may have upset me. A journalist is not an amanuensis, and I don’t write to please anybody. What really worries me is how sensitive we are at times when we offer our opinions. Even when these are favorable.

We honest journalists commit mistakes. A lot. But I am not married to any party, ideology, or movement. I have a free hand to write what I think about any person, be his name Fidel Castro or a known dissident.

If my pen does not shake when I pass judgment on a government that considers it a crime to disagree with the Party line, I am not about to give in to persons with whom I agree, even if at times they show an intolerant face.

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. After all is said and done, I am a journalist, not a mouthpiece.

Dawn* or Darkness?

Even though Hugo Chavez, its creator, and the Castro brothers are beaming with pride about ALBA*, the free-trade agreement with Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, the agreement has insignificant benefits for the people of Cuba.

The most notable benefit is that, thanks to the flow of oil that the folkloric President Chavez generously provides us with, in the last three years we have not had prolonged blackouts in Havana, which at their height would last up to 8 hours daily.

Five years after implementing the treaty with Caracas, the bright side is that we have some petroleum. Not too much, though, since in the second trimester of 2009, the Cuban government ordered a new notch on an already over-tightened belt, and asked for even more economy with the black gold.

The other advantages we would supposedly have do not exist.  In 2004, the Sole Comandante, delirious as only he can get, squinted his eyes—it’s almost as if I could see him now—telling us how Cuban stores would be filled with lots of merchandise and all kinds of food. And children would have no reason to whine because their parents would be able to buy them bonbons and other goodies. In a definitive manner, ALBA would make us economically independent. Of course, the common man on the streets was not fooled. He knows by heart all the Maximum Leader’s ravings.

Many foreigners now laugh and think one exaggerates when we enumerate the long list of promises and the bright future Castro I has been promising for half a century.

Let us review the list. Tubers and vegetables would be abundant. Let’s not even talk about how much milk there would be. We would no longer have to go to the dairy for it. Upon waking up in the morning, one would find on the patio or balcony of the house an exquisite midget cow waiting for us to milk her. Everyone would have pure and fresh milk to drink to his heart’s content.

There would be bananas for exporting. Coffee would be available in industrial-size quantities. Pork would be practically free. Cuba would be the closest thing to paradise. In San Julian, a community in Pinar del Rio, one could experience what it was to live in a communist society.  Not even Lenin attempted it.

All our dreams began to crumble, but not because the Comandante lacked good will. No. He had more than enough passion, but he lacked rationality. As always. No tubers, and no midget cows. Even that which we had produced for centuries, like sugar, we now have to import from the Dominican Republic.

The common Cubans on the street long ago stopped believing in the utopias and pleasant dreams of Fidel Castro. Now they are more cautious, if not skeptical. For now, no one in their right mind believes in the benefits of ALBA. It is understood that as a member of the trade agreement, one of the island’s contributions is providing health care.

Therefore, thousands of South Americans travel to Cuba for cataract surgery. Even the natives can now have their eye surgery in the morning and be home by the afternoon. Just like what happens in New York, Barcelona, or Zurich. Castro, of course, brags about this service.  But these types of surgical procedures are not news anymore anywhere in the civilized world because for a long time they have been successfully available.

What Cubans want is to see food in their pantries. They want to be able to have cafe con leche and buttered bread for breakfast. And for their children to have clothing and shoes. But that, they observe, has not been made possible by the much-praised trade agreement. Less rhetoric then, and more reality.

At this point, after 50 years of nonsense and waste, chimerical undertakings, and absurd plans, simple people do not bring up in serious conversation the supposed goodness of an alliance that has yet to show palpable results.

No one believed the lovely story of the Comandante in Olive Green, when one night in 2004, in a state of euphoria, he glimpsed a plethoric future for his subjects. Not even the children, to whom it never even occurred to ask their parents for bonbons.

*Translator’s note

The title—Alba o oscuridad, in Spanish—is a play on words. “Alba” is the Spanish word for dawn. The organization ALBA is the Bolivian Alternative for the Americas.

Photo: Claudio Vaccaro, Flickr

Trotski’s assassin, by Leonardo Padura


In his last novel, The Man Who Loved Dogs, the Cuban writer and journalist Leonardo Padura Fuentes tells the story of Ramón Mercader, the man who, with a pickaxe on August 20, 1940, fatally struck the head of Leon Trotski, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s fiercest opponent, and a discreet and cultivated man with a passion for dogs.

Padura read fragments from his new book in a discussion held Tuesday, November 23, in the Blue Heron room of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). Considered one of the most talented writers on the Island in our time, the novelist was born in 1955 in the marginal neighborhood Mantilla, in the municipality of Arroya Naranjo, the poorest in Havana and the one with the highest crime rate in the country.

Without a doubt, Leonardo Padura is one of the good ones. And brave. Apart from his agile and sober prose, his novels show a sharp critique of the social situation. Since his first novel, Horse Fever, through his excellent biography of José María Heredia, and his documentary, The Faces of Salsa, made with Rigoberto Lopea, where they interviewed the mythic Celia Cruz, banned by Castro’s government even after her death, the writer of Mantilla has confirmed that he is a heavyweight in the literary world of the Caribbean.

Now he comes to us with a story that tries to get at the foundation of the life of the professional assassin and Soviet spy, Ramón Mercader, who was born to a Cuban mother and, as the author tells us in his book, died on the island at the end of the 1970s.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, the 23rd, there was a party. The small room was packed and afterwards the writer read three passages from his novel and invited the public to ask questions. A pleasant and substantive dialogue was struck up, where Padura, with his narrator’s gift, shared unpublished anecdotes.

Among these was how he came to be interested in the figure of Mercader. He confessed that when he was a student on the Isle of Youth, the son of Trotsky’s murderer was studying at the same school. Years later, in 1989, he had the opportunity to visit Culiacán, México, the house where the murder was committed. “There was a depressing, prison-like and Danteesque atmosphere.” He added that some months after his visit to the crime scene, the Berlin wall fell. And it was then that the doors opened to the beginning of an exhaustive investigation of Ramón Mercader.

But he found barely any facts. Then he had to let his imagination and logic take flight. According to the writer, Stalin, a textbook paranoid, ordered the burning of all the documentation regarding the preparations for the attack on his fiercest rival, Leon Trotski.

Despite the scarcity of information, the author of The Fog of Yesterday, obtained evidence that Mercader studied to be an assassin in the schools of the NKVD, the predecessor of the feared KGB, on the outskirts of Moscow and that after the crime, both Mercader and the official who directed him received the highest decoration of the Soviet State.

Without beating around the bush, during the whole colloquy, Padura made it clear that the perversions and horrors were not only Stalin’s but the Soviet system’s. A young writer who preferred to remain anonymous asked, at the end of the literary conversation, if Leonardo Padura, who in his work often makes none-too-subtle digs at the crisis of values in Cuban society, is paving the way to write his masterpiece on the figures and events of the Cuban Revolution.

Looking at his round, mixed-race face, adorned with a well-trimmed incipient beard, and with a voice tailor-made for storytelling, it seemed that his most important book is about to be written. We hope to hear good things from Leonardo Padura Fuentes.

The Marginalized from the Slums

Night is his best ally. Pedro, an unemployed 21 year old knows how to take advantage of it like no one can. He lives in a hut made of aluminum and grimy boards, along with his four brothers and his mother, who likes to drink herself into unconsciousness with filtered alcohol made from molasses.

Pedro’s entire family escaped from a hamlet in a municipality of Guantanamo, a province 1,000 km east of Havana. His entire life, he recalls, they have eaten very little and inadequately, and have drunk rum excessively. And money? Forget it.

“Those little papers with people painted on them, we have always lacked them in our pockets,” he confesses.

They arrived in Havana a couple of years ago and built their dwelling in the outskirts of the city, bordering the national highway. Typical local slums with hovels called “Ready Mades,” populated by squalid persons, generally black and mestizo, without future. Like Pedro’s family, they raise a roof in a jiffy in order to have a place to sleep.

In the capital, Pedro’s family manages however they can. Pedro’s mother, Emelina, armed with her plastic bottle filled with homemade rum, sells plastic bags for one peso as well as butter or cream cheese made in the country side, discreetly peddled near a bakery.

“At the end of the day, I earn 30 to 40 pesos only,” says Emelina, who has a large double chin and, although she says she is 48 years old, looks more like she is almost 70.

The rest of her children, a girl and three boys, barely completed high school. Martiza, 17 years old, a prostitute, usually stands with her hand out attracting clients traveling in cars moving at more than 100 kph on the national highway. If anyone, attracted by her slender body and provocative tits, slows down, she negotiates. Forty pesos for a blow-job and 80 to be penetrated.

She dreams of another life. Eat a hot meal every day, a good, decent husband who will provide a good life. While she waits for her break, she goes out every night to “make do.”

“I am a whore so I don’t starve to death,” she says in a soft voice; meanwhile, distracted, she gazes at her long finger nails, decorated with the American flag.

The two other brothers are somewhat withdrawn, but they are hard workers. They climb as high as 20 meters to lop off the fronds of the royal palm—these are highly prized in the farmhouses of Havana’s suburbs.

“Sometimes he earns up to 500 pesos (20 dollars),” fusses his mother.

This is a lot of money for them. Pedro is the thief. He takes advantage of the dark of night to steal from a State refrigerator with some friends. They enter through the roof of the establishment to steal boxes of frozen chicken or boxes of potatoes.

With the proceeds of his thievery, Pedro buys designer clothes and Nikes. His mother is unaware of his misdeeds.

“I would like to get out of poverty and have a cement-block house that stays dry inside when it rains. Be able to go to clubs and drink good beer.”

That is why, on a moonless night near the national highway, Pedro knows the darkness will help in his attempts to change his destiny. He has yet to land in jail, but this is in the cards.

Ciro’s Swans

The Cuban musician Ciro Diaz, from the group Porno para Ricardo (Porn for Ricardo) made a rock version of Swan Lake, written by the Russian composer, Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). For the title he put “I Hate Swans.” It was recorded on La Paja Records,* an underground music studio in Havana. The drawings are by Charlie Bravo, who was inspired for the story by the supposed clash between swans and crocodiles for the control of a lagoon on the island.

Translator’s Note:

*”Paja” means masturbation, and “Paja Records” is a play-on-words of pajarraco, an expletive for a bird, as in “damned bird.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

Chronicle with a First Quarter Moon

Perhaps I’m not the right person to write this chronicle. Or perhaps I am. I know of colleagues who personally knew Silvio Rodriguez in that first stage of the revolution, ingenuous and difficult, crude and contradictory, where children, as if by magic, were converted into men.

Again I am going to talk about the spell that Silvio cast on my generation, considered by many to be “lost.” All of us under 50 years of age found a rare similarity in the way we agreed with his lyrics.

Perhaps in school, in the theme song for a child’s television show or in the voice of a friend, I don’t remember exactly now, but when I discovered Silvio he was composing songs for a little while, and he had been one of the founders of the Sound Experimentation Group of ICAIC (the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematography), together with the indispensable Pablo Milanés, Noel Nicola and Vicente Feliú, among others, all directed by Leo Brouwer, who already was a maestro.

One year later, in 1973, the New Trova Movement, of which Silvio was a major part, had been created. The Beatles, already a myth around the world, had disintegrated in 1970, and it was no secret to anyone that the geniuses of Liverpool, with their rock-ballads, had left an irremediable vacuum after their break-up, in spite of the psychosis that they gave to the Cuban cultural and political authorities.

Then, I think the experts on culture strategy saw a gold mine, and thus they supported that unkempt group that sang about strange things but in the end were “revolutionary.”

A truce was declared. The media spread Trova, little by little. They were at the service of Silvio and the New Trova. With his reserve, of course. At the beginning, to the disgust of the Trova singers, they were heard only during political events, patriotic commemorations or days of national mourning.

The official propaganda up to then emphasized the known themes of Silvio Rodriguez, like The Era is Giving Birth to a Heart, Gun Against Gun, Song for the Elected and the Mambi Chief, songs that with their metaphoric and poetic language demonstrated support for the revolution. Silvio also sang about the every-day and lost love but, for the moment, until his complete loyalty was not shown, those lyrics sailed away into semi-secrecy.

The singer-songwriter from San Antonio de los Baños was a kind of diminishing quarter-moon. We could aprpeciate only one part of his face. Thus, in that way, he came to our generation.

We hummed the lyrics on patriotic anniversaries or when remembering the martyrs. Silvo was growing up with us. When the 80s arrived, the proven Cuban composer was not censored. It had been a sad and traumatic birth, but here was this Rodriguez, in his proper place. One of the best Cuban composers of the 20th century.

The lyrics of The News Summary and I Hope So stopped raising suspicions. On the contrary, he was a prophet in his own land and also in Latin America and Spain. Many, the same as I, pursued and annoyed him, from concert to concert. We knew almost his whole repertoire by heart.

Human beings need myths, leaders, chosen people….and for us, Silvio was it. Or, at least he marked a precious percent of Cuban youth, although some of them later were converted into critics of his work and his ideological position. Others say that he was blocked, he adapted and was intimidated.

My current political position differs a good bit from that of Silvio Rodriguez during these days of November when I turned 63. But I’m not going to stop admiring his songs for that reason. It would mean negating and betraying an important part of my life.

Now, Silvo, we see you clearly, bereft of the halos whose lights deceived us. And we are grateful to you, we have been enriched spiritually and separated from superfluous and useless music. Millions of those from my generation are far away in other lands, under the sea or have split forever. I don’t know about others, but I want to thank you for having proposed something to us, not imposed. For having freely transmitted to us good values. That is more important than any militancy.

Iván García

Photo: Interiano Vinicio, Flickr

Translated by Regina Anavy

Silvito the Free and I

Before Sept. 20, when Juanes * at the end of his concert made public thanks to Los Aldeanos (The Villagers) and Silvito El Libre (Silvito the Free), the rapper son of Silvio Rodriguez was already known on the internet. “Who said that the Cuban revolution is in the final stage, that there is no renewal or new blood? Here we have Silvito el Libre … We still do not know if he uses the words sunset, hummingbird and soothsayer in his rhymes, but surely he will be a big summer blockbuster. “Don’t lose sight of him,” they wrote August 25 on the Chilean Web site The Clinic. Among his topics that you can hear on You Tube are the Hero, Now We Will See The Faces, Kill Yourself, Mamá and Rap, I’m Still Here, Nothing and The Etik, among others. More about his life, published in the cyber-magazine on the blog Rapdiacion Local.

* Colombian pop singer.

Translated by Regina Anavy

The Cristal River

Río Cristal, a tourist center inaugurated in 1960, is located on Avenida Rancho Boyeros, close to one of the airports in the capital, after passing the Aqueduct of Wind. It’s on the site where, in the 18th century, a slave barracks existed, and, later, a convent for nuns. Remodeled on different occasions, it still enjoys being the choice for the people of Havana, above all those who can pay with CUCs to stay there.

The entrance is still the same, wide and shady.

The swimming pool is in great demand all year.

…surrounded by a tranquility and a vegetation that is absent in the best hotels of the city.

And, for the kids, the park.

…in particular the little castle, in good-enough shape.

Inside the same installation, not only are there unattended areas, there is also the river. According to data published on Cubanet on September 22, between 2008 and 2009, five young people drowned in the Cristal River, which borders the recreation center of the same name.

Because of the deaths and accidents. the police have put up a sign prohibiting swimming in the river, but the young continue to do it. They say it’s because they don’t have other places where they can go to have fun.

Alexander, a lifeguard at the Rio Cristal swimming pool, said that on many occasions he has had to help kids who were on the point of drowning, but he did not always arrive on time.

Ana Lidia, the mother of a child who lives in the area, asserted that the river water is very contaminated. “The time my son escaped from me and went into that filth, he contracted a staph infection.”

Iván García, with text and photos by Robin Thom, of Flickr.

Translated by Regina Anavy

An alcoholic with a name

Rufino Delagado, 38 years old, in his occasional lucid moments, admits that his life has already hit rock bottom. And he looks up to the sky, impotent, as if looking for an answer to his problem with alcohol. He has not always been a dirty and rude guy. Six years ago, he used to work in the warehouse of a tobacco business, and with what he used to steal from the State and the salary he received, he could afford to keep his wife and daughters with some ease.

“I used to offer a box of tobacco for 20 CUC. There were days in which seven or eight were sold. As my wife received remittances, the money left over was used to buy me drinks.”

He started as a social drinker. And ended as a common drunk, one who sells the little that is left in order to get a drink. At the beginning he used to drink quality rum and beer. Now, Rufino drinks the alcohol of the miserable, filtered with molasses, in improvised barrels, where a liter costs 10 Cuban pesos. He cannot live without drinking. His family put him under medical treatment. But it didn’t work. Rufino always would come back to the alcohol.

When he was drunk he was a monster. He used to hit his wife and daughters. His wife got rid of him, as you throw away an old sofa, when one night in 2006 she arrived at their poor apartment and found him naked among vomit, food and cockroaches that were enjoying themselves in the mess as if they were at a party.

He never again had news about either his daughters or his wife. He lost his job. Now he roams in the surroundings of La Vibora. He eats, when he eats, from the little that people throw away in the bins. He has no friends. Only sad guys like him, that every day get together on the corner of Calle Carmen and 10th of October, opposite Plaza Roja, to drink the drink of the forgotten.

They always finish in the same way. Fighting among themselves. In the squabble they hit each other and cause a huge disturbance. Even the police are not interested. If by chance they are detained for a couple of days, they bathe and kill the hunger of their days with prison food.

In his occasional periods of lucidity, Rufino remembers that he was a guy who used to love his daughter, and he used to dress tastefully. He took baths with hot water and ate home-made food. After, he used to sit with his wife to watch the soap-opera of the moment on the telly. He never thought that his life would become hell.

When he is not drunk, the memories take him back to alcohol. Among tears and curses, with the 10 Cuban pesos that he gets selling some old item or money given as payment for a favour, he goes to the same place, to buy distilled alcohol. His existence is a vicious circle. And what is left is for going to church and imploring the Virgin to let death take him away, soon. With just one wish to be granted, that, before dying, he will be allowed to see his wife and two daughters.

Iván Garcia

Translated by: Tanya May and Regina Anavy

If the comandante danced to rock…

If the Cuban generals had liked rock, things in Cuba might have been different. Perhaps the soldiers would not have gone out in their vulgar Russian jeeps, scissors in hand, cutting the hair of those devoted to this type of music. And they would not have had to arrest thousands of young people whose only crime was to be a fan of the songs of the Beatles, the mythical quartet from Liverpool, and send them to those concentration camps that were called the Military Units of Support for Production, more commonly known by their acronym, UMAP.

If Fidel Castro and his military court had frequently hummed “Yesterday,” or some other ballad by Led Zeppelin, and at their ranches, between beers and select rums, while they filled their mouths with shrimp and masses of fried pork, the weekends had been spent with the Rolling Stones or some other rock band of the epoch, perhaps Cuba would not have known the Gray Period in the ’70s.

Later, everything was pure cynicism. The Cuban leaders always hated rock, Western influence, books of foreign authors and the consumer market. They thought that the flock of sheep that is the Cuban people ought to be immunized against the “brutal and decadent capitalist society.”

Therefore, zero short-wave broadcasts, music, styles and foreign pleasures. They wanted those long-hair types and druggies who composed strange songs to remain very far away from the proletarian and internationalist archipelago.

When the air from the East began to blow, indicators that the “brothers in the socialist camp” were tired of collective societies, repression and unanimous thought, then the comandante and his generals decided to paint over some things.

They named a minister of culture with long hair, who perhaps in his youth had listened to prohibited music. But as soon as he entered into the martial discipline of the Communist Party, he had to trade his tastes and sing loud and clear the marches and hymns that Fidel Castro liked.

The summit of impudence was to erect a statue to John Lennon in a park in Vedado, in Havana.

lenon.jpg

And very serious and with remorseful faces, celebrate in Havana the 8th of December, the day Lennon was assassinated in New York. One of so many ways to insult peoples’ intelligence. Because when the ex-Beatle was alive, in order to listen to him, you had to be a prisoner in Cuba.

Also, they are now paying homage to the playwright Virgilio Piñera and the writer José Lezama Lima. If the comandantes and generals have demonstrated something on the island, it’s that they know how to take advantage of the figures of culture, above all after they’re dead. Although I do have one doubt.

If in the hypothetical case that the Castro dynasty lasts 100 years. would they raise statues to the poet Raúl Rivero, the blogger Yoani Sánchez or the opposition figure Oscar Elías Biscet? From a regime as surrealistic as this one, anything can be expected.

Perhaps, if the commandante and his generals had danced to rock, none of this would have happened. And our country would be enjoying democracy. It’s symptomatic, in societies that are not closed, that the leaders enjoy rock music. In Cuba it could not be different.

Iván Garcia

Translated by Regina

Carrots and Sticks

I would like to understand certain radical leaders of our America.  I share many of the social political views of the left and I have my doubts about a liberal economy.  Above all, when it is poorly applied by the leaders of the continent.

For almost two centuries there have been enough Latin American presidents who mostly ran their countries like they were their own country estates. Many see the government as a way to write their own ticket and loot the public treasury.

It’s the same from the left and the right.  Look at Carlos Menem or Hugo Chávez.  Without considering their inveterate habit of becoming plotters and dictators. We blame our ills on the United States. It is the easiest. True, the colossus of the north, which emerged as a nation around 1775-76, more than a few times has referred to the region as its natural backyard.

We don’t have U.S. type leaders for the simple reason that Latin American governments tend to nepotism and warlordism. The Yankees, with their gift for business, realized they could impose their views on the continent throughout the centuries with a couple of dollars and a few threats.

In the deal between two people or countries one invariably tries to set itself above the other. It is the animal tendency of the human being. This has happened because the brilliant military leaders such as Bolívar, Sucre, Paez, and San Martín who brought about independence were not succeeded by statesmen of their stature.

In the United States, no.  The leaders of their revolution were equal to or less than their counterparts on the continent. It is at the time of governance that the country of the stars and bars surpasses the countries of the region.  In Latin America there has not been a Washington, Lincoln or a Roosevelt.  The majority of our statesman are more worried about leaving rich from their time in office, and in creating an opaque framework, than in governing well.

Sad to say, but that’s the case.  Now in the 21st century, we look with favorable eyes on presidents like the Chilean Michelle Bachelet, or the Brazilian Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, two who are philosophically socialist but realistic about the world around them.

And in 2009 a guy like Barack Obama came to the United States, a black man who exceeds the leaders of the continent in clear ideas, empathy, and good sense.  I watch with concern as radical statesmen like Evo Morales or Hugo Chávez who, at the first sign of change, add to the hackneyed speeches accusing him of “Yankee Imperialism.”

If they were to govern democratically, respecting differences without polarizing the logical contradictions of opinion that usually exist in any nation and do not always look askance at what the U.S. president does and says, this would be the first big step forward for the region.

In the Summit of UNASUR (Union of South American Nations), held in late August in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina, leftist radicals engaged in a bitter debate over the establishment seven U.S. military bases in Colombia.

They may be right. I do not think it’s time for military bases. But I’ve never heard of Morales, Correa and company criticizing the joint military exercises conducted this year by Venezuela and Russia. Nor did they criticize Chavez’s huge purchases of Russian weapons, nor do they criticize their complicity with autocratic governments like Iran.

I believe in social ideas. I consider myself a kind of leftist. I’m tired of seeing populist rulers, made hoarse by protesting U.S. policies and yet being silent when it applies to measures affecting the people or the sovereignty of other nations under a leftist president or a dictator like Fidel Castro.

I’ve never heard Chavez or Morales demand that the Castro brothers allow other political parties, free press or elections. Nor do they recall that in the Fall of 1962, Cuba had nuclear missiles and Russian military bases.

It’s true. It is pragmatic and convenient to portray the USA as allied with the worst guys on our continent. But the blame for most Latino leaders has been scant, we can not always say everything is the fault of the gringos. Yes, it is also true: at times they use the carrot and stick approach.

But we must recognize that during its more than two centuries of existence, the U.S. government has enabled its people to live better. Latin American radicals make splendid speeches, talking about bright futures and social theories. But in practice it has not worked. If you doubt this, look to Cuba.

Iván García

Translated by Karen

A Drama in Two Acts

teatro1.jpg

The First Act: The Executioner’s Weeping (1999)

For a long time, Jorge Gonzalez, 47, suffered the same nightmares. A discharge from a rifleman on a misty and starless night. Then, he senses the sound of a shot dealt to a condemned man who is he himself.

He always wakes up the same: bathed in sweat and crying. Another night robbed of rest. When he has that nightmare, Jorge can’t get back to sleep and stays awake until dawn. It happens to him almost daily since he retired from his thankless profession as an executioner. Killing one’s fellowman–guilty or not–has its consequences.

Now, the profession is costing him. One rarely talk about this occupation. One thinks of big guys, unfriendly and with a brain the size of a garbanzo bean, divest of feelings.

In men that have been called by the government for the insensitive task of administering the death penalty, they arrive humming a commonplace tune, then roll up their sleeves, and put on a black hat to hide their faces. Afterwards, they go on the same path to their homes, far away from the mundane noise, without a family and accompanied by their dog, waiting for the next execution. Nothing farther from reality. In the absence of testimonies about the life of executioners, people have invented legends.

Jorge Gonzalez is the antithesis of the classic executioner who appears in books and films. Of small stature, a bit bald, thin, and with a fixed fear before any significant event. Jorge, who confesses that his pulse doesn’t tremble at having taken the lives of more than 20 people, gets scared in the presence of a cockroach and panics at the sight of small lizards.

He’s cultured, likes Ricky Martin and his happy music. He reads Goethe and Stendhal. When one speaks with him they discover that he’s not stupid, but a rather intelligent man. But the 10 years that he spent on the firing squad have changed him.

in 1982, after fulfilling three and a half years of military service in Ethiopia, as part of the communist help to Mengistu Haile Marian’s pro-Maoist regime, Jorge graduated from college without being completely sure of what his future would be. The same thing happened to him as to other men of war: skillful in the handling of a rifle, but unable to function as civilians.

Jorge had been a sniper in a battalion under the control of General Arnaldo Ochoa, who years later was executed by Castro’s government, accused of treason and drug trafficking. Under Ochoa’s orders, Jorge participated in the famous Battle of Ogaden where the Cuban general was exalted for his new method of devising military strategy.

“I always admired General Ochoa, who in Ogaden displayed his skills. No wonder the battle is the subject of study in Western military academies.”

In 1989, Gonzalez could have been one of the men that, in Baracoa, a coastal town on the outskirts of Havana, formed part of the task force ordered to executed General Ochoa.

“I couldn’t be untrue to myself. I had killed murderers, rapists, and terrorists, but I couldn’t pull the trigger on my old boss. I made up a phony mental illness and they relieved me for six months.”

Upon returning to his speciality of killing, the executioner found out in detail about the final seconds of the hero of Ogaden.

“It’s not a fairy tale, that’s for sure. Ochoa drew close to the firing squad, saluted each one of firing squad’s members and said to them: ‘Don’t fret, men, carry out the order.’ He refused to cover his face. He died a valiant man.”

He says it, his voice faltering and his gaze lost out the window to where the sea becomes discernible.

“In that moment I thought it was a harsh course of action, but a just one. Now, I think it was excessive.”

In 1992 Jorge gave up this macabre task. His nerves weren’t letting him live and he decided to discharge himself from the army. He travelled to various psychiatric hospitals and resorted to electric shock therapy. But he couldn’t keep his mind clear.

Every night when a discharge from a rifleman wakes him in a sweat and crying, his wife tries to calm him. To no avail, though. Unable to sleep, he sits in the balcony of his house and stares at the sea. With the departure of the sun, weariness sets in and with it, the sensation that he is the most miserable man in the world. And perhaps he isn’t.

Second Act: The Last Execution (2009)

It was like any afternoon in the month of July. Jorge Gonzalez, 57, prepared rather slowly and fearfully the details of his death. It was the last day of his dangerous and uncommon life. He bought a few pounds of chicken from the black market and, with 3 CUC (Cuban convertible pesos), a package of Cubitas Coffee at the store.

At noon he put on his Sunday best: a red and violet checked shirt, a gift from his only wife, and pair of cotton pants, old and used, that 23 years ago he had bought in a little market in Addis Ababa while he was completing his military service in Ethiopia as a sniper in a group of elite troops.

He had eaten like never before; rice with chicken and all the fixings, and even allowed himself two glasses of Fortin Wine. He looked at himself in the mirror and entrusted himself to the Lord. He tied a thick rope to the iron chandelier in the living room and put it around his neck.

Four days later, the police opened the door with an axe. The body was already showing signs of decomposition.

Jorge Gonzalez had been an executioner. One of those entrusted with administering the death penalties decreed by the State.

He graduated from the armed forces and was admitted to psychiatric hospitals. His wife left him, tired of this short bald guy who spent the mornings reading like one possessed and at night awoke drenched in sweat and screaming.

When this happened he would sit in an armchair for more than two hours, without saying a single word. With his gaze fixed on the deep blue sea visible from his balcony. Probably the last image he caught before he died was the quiet summer waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

I knew Jorge Gonzalez. Ten years ago I devoted a story to him, The Cry of the Executioner. I found out about his suicide, in 2009, a month and a half later. The delirium had disturbed him. It was his last execution.

Iván García

Bad Luck

If bad luck had a name it would be Antonio Fonseca.  An enormous black man of almost 400 pounds, with a wide nose, sharp cheekbones and lips two fingers thick, who was born one cold, wet night in January 1981.

His mother, stark raving mad, set her husband and son on fire, when the latter was three years old. The father died. Fonseca still has visible marks on his entire body. And he still wonders what his mother’s motive was for her macabre pyromania.

Not having any family to take care of the little boy, from the age of three he lived in a state orphanage to the south of Havana, very close to the José Martí International Airport.

“In my childhood I had very few happy moments. One of them was when I was 10 and a group of us escaped from school to go watch the big planes take off and land.”

Antonio, wearing dirty, discolored, denim shorts, was seated on a wooden bench, in the shack where he lives, in the heart of Havana. On his nude torso you can see large bruises, produced by the burns of his disturbed mother.

“I don’t know the name of the woman who gave birth to me. I have never wanted to know about her; I only know that she spent many years in prison,” recounted Fonseca, while he took a drag on his cigarette.

He finished the 5th grade with great difficulty. And since he was 12 years old, the only thing he knows how to do is to commit small crimes and smoke marijuana. In spite of looking like a basketball player, he is not a violent guy. No. The three times he went to prison were for possession of drugs for his own consumption, It’s been a year since he was referred to a drug addiction clinic. But nothing helped him get better.

“I feel better when I’m high, only then can I sleep and hope for another day.”

And his eyes shine brightly. He works as a construction worker and does any work in the neighborhood, from finishing a patio and clearing debris, to filling buckets with water. Then, with the money, he buys a couple of joints at 25 pesos each. And on dark nights he feels like he’s in the clouds when he walks through Brotherhood Park, in the direction of Monte and Cienfuegos, in search of a cheap whore to calm his sexual appetites.

His minor crimes, to get some money, usually consist of stealing lightbulbs or chairs from some house. The money, of course, is destined to buy marijuana. This was Antonio Fonseca’s vicious circle. A big baby who could barely read and write. A prisoner of drugs. A sick guy whom luck avoided.

But the culmination, just a few days ago, was that in the tenement where he lives there was an over-the-top police operation. As usual, Antonio was high. And with his red, bleary eyes, he found himself accused of a violent robbery. A witness recognized him as the man who savagely beat a young person in order to steal his gold chain.

He swore to the authorities, on the mother he never new, that he was innocent. But confronted with a guy from a dissipated life with prior crimes, the police had already closed the file on the case. He remained in jail, hoping they would take him to preventive detention, where he would wait for his trial.

The prosecutor is requesting a penalty of 25 years. Without family, children or friends, Antonio Fonseca knows what fate awaits him. “No one can do anything without luck,” he used to say. He was right. Luck was never his ally.

Iván García

Translated by Regina Anavy

H1N1 Attacks

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The new influenza is gaining ground in Cuba. With the change in the weather, according to epidemiologists, it’s expected that the H1N1 virus will reap its harvest among the population of the island. As of October 1, the Ministry of Public Health reported the detection of 457 cases.

Now the Hubert de Blanck High School, in the municipal district Plaza of the Revolution, in the capital, has been forced to close. On Wednesday, September 30, the principal of the school reported that a sanitary commission, headed by the provincial director of epidemiology, had carried out a detailed inspection at the school.

A couple of days before, the principal had sent out an SOS because of the high number of students with respiratory problems. Due to bad hygienic and building conditions at the school, an old mansion poorly adapted to serve as a school, at first it was thought that this could be the cause of the high fevers and respiratory problems that many were suffering.

After numerous check-ups the doctors found 121 cases with respiratory problems of various degrees. As a preventive measure, the sanitary authorities decided to close the school. The tests done in the labs of the Institute of Tropical Medicine confirmed that five students were infected with the H1N1 virus.

In another two high schools in the same area, José Larruñada and José Luis Pérez, the alarm has gone out. Ana Rosa, a civil engineer who is 34, admits that because of the parents’ fear that their children might get infected, school absences have been noted. As an example, she says that on Friday, October 2, 70 students at José Luis Pérez High School did not attend classes.

Despite the fact that the virus threatens to become a pandemic, the government has taken it calmly. Maybe to avoid spreading the panic, the press has not mentioned what occurred at Hubert de Blanck and prefers to mention “stimulating” cases, like that of a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy, who, thanks to medical attention, survived the type-A flu at the National Hospital.

On television, a timid propaganda reminds us that hands should be washed frequently and cleanliness should be maintained at home. In taxis paid in foreign currency and in city buses, posters have been placed in favor of better hygiene. But the new flu is not explicitly mentioned.

Low-income families in Nuevo Vedado, where the word on the street is that H1N1 is almost a plague, want to know if it had crossed the minds of the Castro brothers’ government to make an urgent and substantial discount on products like soap and detergent, which can be bought only in Cuban convertible pesos, at prices that are impossible for most ordinary Cubans. It would be the logical thing to do. But so far, the rulers of the destiny of Cuba have shown no concern about this sector of the population.

Alarmed, I phoned the provincial office of the Ministry of Public Health. I asked if sanitary authorities were ready to confront a possible pandemic. The person who answered did not want to identify himself, but he assured me that they had sufficient anti-virals and medicines to treat H1N1.

Many parents interviewed believe that the mega-concert given by Colombian singer Juanes, on Sunday, September 20, was the explosive device for the uncontainable advance of the virus. More than one million people gathered in tight quarters, and this could have been the “soup” that made it easy for the virus to grow.

If that is the case, Juanes’ good intention of singing for peace in Havana could have become the ideal place for H1N1 to form a massive attack on the citizens of Havana. As a coincidence, the most-affected schools are within a few kilometers of the Plaza of the Revolution.

Now the problem is whether the Cuban authorities have resources and effective measures to stop the spreading of the disease. I hope they do.

Iván García

P.S. On Friday, October 9, a television program was announced to report on the situation in Cuba with the H1N1 flu, respiratory illnesses and dengue.

Translated by Anonimatus Generacion Y