English Translations of Cubans Writing From the Island
The programme ” The Night” on NTN24, exclusively revealed a letter [which can be read here, in English] from the dissident writer Ángel Santiesteban, who is currently serving a five-year prison sentence in Cuba.
The writer alleged that he had received “constant death threats” since he was incarcerated. Equally, the dissident defended his innocence through his writing and questioned the justice of the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raúl, on the island.
Translated by Shane J. Cassidy
10 October 2013
“The Night”, on top of doing an excellent job denouncing the dictatorship of the Castro family, the repressive situation which has existed in Cuba and the violation of human rights on the island, has dedicated a privileged space in its programme for Ángel Santiesteban-Prats, who will soon have completed eight months incarcerated after a judicial farce with invented charges by the political police, using the mother of his son to place false accusations against him with the only objective to silence his critical voice against the regime, and therefore they intend to keep him imprisoned for five years.
But so clumsy and so thinly disguised are the crimes that it wasn’t sufficient for them to jail him for being innocent but to jail him for political crimes according to them, they offered him his freedom in exchange for renouncing his political position, becoming the first ordinary criminal to whom they offered the freedom in order for giving up his political activism. A strange way of understanding freedom which the dictator Castro Ruz has.
All our gratitude to Claudia Gurisatti, Jeferson Beltrán, Jason Calderón and the Cuban Lilo Vilaplana, tireless figther for the freedom of Cuba for the rights of their brothers and Friend (with capital letters),
in the name of Ángel Santiesteban-Prats,
The Editor
Translated by Shane J. Cassidy
11 October 2013
Hello to the viewers, the team who works for “The Night Moves”, in particular to their presenter, greetings to the persistence of friends like the director and the writer Lilo Vilaplana and to Antonio Rodiles, who directs the cultural space and social project State of SATS.
Dear friends, this month marks eight months that I have been imprisoned, and my departure on this primetime programme with a continental reach.
I am not lying to you if I admit to you that I never could have believed that the dictatorship would be able to imprison me knowing that I’m innocent, not because there remains an ounce of sanity of justice in them but because they provoked a wave of protests, so that to expose the evidence of the prosecution and that of the defence, the political game behind the circus mounted against me is clear.
Of course, as a totalitarian regime they have made a show of force, they have once more shown what they are capable of doing to voices which oppose the dictatorship, especially if they are within the Cuban archipelago. I know that my life has been thrown into danger, the mysterious deaths of the opposition leaders exposes their crimes. I have received constant death threats since my arrival in prison, where they have assured me that I will not leave with my life. What also makes it difficult is that there are many eyes of solidarity watching me on an international level. They have also offered to give me liberty if I desist from my opposition ways, or if I change them they proposed my definite departure from the country. In both cases, I refused flatly.
At any rate, the worst will come if needs be, it was a path I took with full conscience and for the necessity of my soul, I took it knowing the risks, because even before opening the blog, I, an intellectual and exemplary citizen to society thus far, many family and friends predicted jail or death for me.
Of course, I don’t want to be a martyr, my dream is to continue being a writer and be able to tell what is happening in my country the hopes and disappointments of my contemporaries. They know that if this doesn’t come to pass, I prefer it, since what I could not tolerate is to continue living in my country under the slavery of one of the most intelligent and ferocious dictatorships which has existed on the face of the earth.
When all will be revealed, many will be ashamed of having supported it, justifying that they did not know.
To you all, my eternal gratitude, long live Cuba and may it be free!
Ángel Santiesteban-Prats
Lawton prison settlement. October 2013
Translated by Shane J. Cassidy
10 October 2013
The letter by friends from Spain is a cruel reminder that when it comes to confronting the government, repression can happen anywhere. One of their sons was detained at a demonstration of the CNT and accused of assaulting a police officer. Although in this time of smart phones there exists documented proof that it was the police who assaulted the young man while he hoisted a banner, he has to confront a trial where he could be sentenced to up to seven years in jail. The illegality is so flagrant that Amnesty International has taken an interest in the case. I am no philosopher or political scientist, my knowledge of economics is precarious, in times past I thought that culture could save us, but also that is an illusion. It is justice, with eyes blindfolded and a true balance, that they should erect over governments and ideologies to protect any citizen.
Translated by mlk
11 October 2013
SANTA CLARA, Cuba, October 9, 2013, Yoel Espinosa Medrano / www.cubanet.org.- Blackouts of up to ten hours a day have been seriously affecting residents in the province of Villa Clara for several weeks now. Electricity is the main choice for cooking.
Last week in Santa Clara about 200 people in the Condado neighborhood went out into the street at night in front of their homes and launched a spontaneous “pot banging protest.” Fifteen minutes later electricity was restored.
“I do not know what is happening at the Electric Company, the blackouts are more prolonged and continuous, they have three different circuits and they aren’t making repairs on any of them or maintaining the power lines, but there’s no power between 8:00 in the morning and 6:00 in the evening,” said Guillermo del Sol Perez, a resident of 3rd Street and Circunvalación in the Brisas del Oeste neighborhood in Santa Clara.
Utility officials announce the daily blackouts on the local radio, saying that the service is down for maintenance. They also interrupt the service intermittently for periods of 30-60 minutes in the morning or evening hours.
In the offices of the Commercial Department of the Electric Company, the damage to domestic equipment reportedly exceeds two thousand, because of service irregularities, according to a worker who requested anonymity.
“This is the worst, they turn off the power in the early morning and don’t turn it on again until dusk; the most affected are those of us with children crying from hunger and we have no way to heat even a glass of milk,” said Dania Conception mother of two children living on 1st Street in the La Vigia neighborhood, also in the provincial capital.
In most nuclear families, accounting for the number of members, they are given an emergency fuel reserve. Those who receive liquid gas are allowed 20 kg per 12 months, and for the rest they receive five liters of alcohol and some 15 liters of kerosene for the same period, through the ration book.
The blackouts paralyze work, state and private, as well as the preparation of snacks, lunch and dinner for thousands of students in regular schools and boarding schools.
Yoel Espinosa Medrano
From Cubanet, 9 October 2013
SANTA CLARA, Cuba, October 9, 2013, Yoel Espinosa Medrano / www.cubanet.org.- María de la Cruz Martín Concepción is a lady of 65. She lives in the central province of Villa Clara, one of the territories with the highest rates of an aging population in Cuba. Relatives and neighbors are keeping and eye on her. She is determined to take her life if the situation in which she lives isn’t addressed.
She says she has lost the joy of living. Death has played with her on several occasions. She has had three heart attacks. She also suffers from Ischemic Heart Disease, Diabetic Neuropathy, Hypertension, among other conditions common to her age, exacerbated by poor diet.
Martin Concepcion is experiencing a crisis of diabetes and high blood pressure . She hasn’t bought the medicines to control her conditions for three months. Her drugs — Glibenclamide, Cartopril, Nitropental, Dipyridamole and others — cost about 100 Cuban pesos a month.
Fatally, General Raul Castro took 198 pesos (some 7 dollars) from the pension she receives from social assistance. To control her illnesses she drinks infusions made from medicinal plants, and also subsists on the charity of others who give her the occasional pill.
Her husband, Joseph Felinciano Fernandez, 72-years-old, nearly died of a bowel obstruction complicated by peritonitis recently. He earns a monthly pension of just over 200 Cuban pesos (about $7) .
Three years ago, a man driving a Russian brand Ural motorcycle with a sidecar hit the horse-drawn wagon Felinciano was driving and caused a skull fracture that affected his hearing. He also has an abdominal hernia.
The motorcycle driver was under the influence of alcohol and fled the scene. Eventually the police found him. The old man was in serious condition for several days in a hospital.
The trial for the accident was prearranged. The accused, the person who hit the back of the cart, had “patrons” and money. He got of scot-free and the old man was sentenced to pay a fine.
The couple’s home, located on Callejón del Salado S/N and Circunvalación, in the Brisas del Oeste neighborhood of Santa Clara, in Villa Clara province, is in deplorable condition.
An official of the Municipal Housing Authority, named Minerva, classified it as in a state of total collapse.
María and her husband now spend the night at the home of a daughter who has one room, a kitchen and bathroom. Also living there are her son-in-law, grandson and wife.
Raúl Fernández is a paramilitary who holds the position of Coordinator of the Area , a notorious organizer of mobs and a member of the so-called Rapid Response Brigades who generally take actions against human rights activists. He visited the shack and told the elderly couple they would get together the money for lumber for repairs.
María sent letters to the various levels of government and the Party in Villa Clara.
A gentleman who identified himself as delegate of the People’s Power in the area analyzed the housing situation and said they could not spend another minute in it because the roof might fall in at any moment. He also said they did not have ownership of the house, so they were classified as illegals, despite having lived there for over 20 years.
The official said that without title to the property they could not subsidize their housing repairs.
Meanwhile, María waited for a formal response. She herself won’t see the end to their odyssey because with poor nutrition and no medications, her heart can’t withstand another attack.
From Cubanet, 10 October 2013
Raimundo arrived early to an offsite clinic affiliated with General Calixto García Hospital that was located in the basements of two old satellite buildings. The waiting room was full and the rumble of voices prevented him from concentrating on the book he had brought along to make the obligatory wait more tolerable. Suddenly an older woman entered the waiting room. She was a newspaper vendor hawking Workers and inviting everyone there to buy a copy to pass the time while waiting their turns. She went on and on, telling everyone she had to do this in order to eat, that she had been a worker at the hospital for many years and that, if she did not do this, she would die of hunger because her pension was so meager, though even when she was working, she still barely made a living.
It was then that an eighty-year-old man, who was waiting to be seen, spoke up and said, “Señora, this is fascism and all our rights are being taken away. This hospital is disgusting. It looks like it hasn’t been cleaned for months. We’re in a dark, humid basement and no one has even put a fan down here to get a little air circulation. If the doctors can’t take it, then what about the patients?”
“Tell it like it is, old man,” someone there said.
The murmur of voices rose in crescendo. Everyone began commenting on the filth, the shortages, the lack of sanitary conditions, the hassles they had to endure to get there by bus because not everybody had ten pesos for a tarecón (a taxi from the 1950s).
Suddenly, a male nurse looked down the wide stairway leading to the basement and called out to the patients in the waiting room, “This man has had surgery. Can someone give me a hand getting him and his wheelchair down the stairs?” The clinic’s door opened and a doctor, fanning himself with a piece of cardboard, said in a loud voice, “Next”
The same old man takes the floor again and raising his voice, so that everyone can hear, says, “Gentlemen, this is our hospital!”
9 October 2013
Last week a friend asked me if the coming of democratic changes to Cuba would result in independent journalism. I stopped to meditate, because there are answers that shouldn’t be thrown out there without carefully weighing them. In the seconds I remained silent passing through my head were all the images and moments of those reporters of risks and words that have influenced my life. I thought about Raúl Rivero, who left journalism and the official institutions to take a dangerous leap toward freedom for his pen. I remember the typewriter permanently on the table in his apartment on Peñalver Street, the smell of his cigar, his arms reaching out to receive everyone who came. Undoubtedly a man who loved his profession which put him at the center of so much repression and damage.
I kept going over the names. Reinaldo Escobar who permanently infected me with the virus of journalism, my colleagues of Primavera de Cuba, the many friends who have fed the pages of Cubanet, Diario de Cuba, Café Fuerte, HablemosPress, Misceláneas de Cuba, Voces Cubanas, Penúltimos Días and of so many other sites, blogs, press agencies and simple bulletins with just a single sheet folded in half. Spaces in which they have narrated this country concealed by the official media and the triumphalism of political slogans. People who choose the most difficult path, instead of remaining silent, faking it, staying out of trouble like the vast majority. Thanks to them we have heard innumerable news stories silenced in the national newspapers, television and radio, the private and hegemonic property of the Communist Party.
So, when my friend sprung that question on me, I concluded that in a democratic nation journalism has no need of surnames. It is not “official” or “independent.” And so, as a small tribute to all those reporters of yesterday and today, I have written the prologue to the anthology, “Con voz abierta/With Open Voices,” which presents a selection of news and opinion written from within Cuba and in the most precarious of conditions from the legal and material point of view. It is a book of journalists… simply journalists, without qualifiers that determine their affiliation to any ideology. A compilation that will bring about this future in which we will not need to make distinctions between professionals of the press.
The post Periodistas independientes: periodistas appeared first on Generación Y by Yoani Sánchez.
10 October 2013
We met at the Cinematheque. We had taken the same bus and watched the city though the small window without trying to talk. In truth, I watched her when she wasn’t looking. At the theatre I noticed her in line behind me. There was a smile, and another ten minutes of waiting to buy a ticket. I realized when it came time to pay that I only had four coins worth 20 cents and a peso in my pockets. I had forgotten my wallet at home.
I looked through my pockets again: Keys, a peso, coins, and the bus fare bulletin. Nothing else. The ticket clerk was impatient with my delay. As the line grew longer he got angry.
I cursed.
—Two, please —she said to the ticket clerk and looked back at me. –Today is my turn to pay. Did you forget?
She gave me a wink. I wanted to go along with her game, but I couldn’t find the words.
She smiled.
I thanked her.
The employee muttered again.
We walked into the movie.
From my seat, I saw her choose her own seat a few rows away. She put on her headphones. She was listening to her Walkman until the lights went down. No one sat next to her.
I left for the lobby before the final credits, feeling ridiculous. The entire way to our seats and I had only said a stupid “thank you.” I needed to see her, apologize, make up some story in the hope that I could appear less stupid to her. I was so worried I could barely pay attention to the movie.
I didn’t have time to invent some excuse. She came out to the lobby right away. I walked toward her. –Excuse me, I don’t even know your name, and I’m in debt to you.
I suggested we met up some other time. She smiled. She said that it’d be pointless to meet up again if I forgot my wallet.
—Putting it in my pocket wouldn’t help me much. Do you have a pen?
Then I wrote my number on the back of the bulletin that I always carried in my pocket.
She looked into her purse, ripped a page from her agenda, and wrote something.
—When you call, say that it’s for me and leave a message. I don’t like to bother my neighbor.
READ THE REST OF THE STORY IN SAMPSONIA WAY MAGAZINE, HERE.
The publication of this story is part of Sampsonia Way Magazine’s “CUBAN NEWRRATIVE: e-MERGING LITERATURE FROM GENERATION ZERO” project, in collaboration with Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and a collection of authors writing from Cuba. You can read this story in Spanish here, and other stories from the project, here.
I now see how an asthmatic who was too sick to travel became someone who could kill and command his own army of troops. But twenty years would have to pass before I would be able to write such a simple statement. When you are six Februaries old and they force you to bring your hand up to your forehead in a salute and say that you want to be like the Argentinian Rambo… (the good guy), who killed Batista’s henchmen (the bad guys) and wanted all the countries of the third world (?????!!) to be free, then you think, he is not only Rambo, he is Elpidio Valdés.*
The Che I learned about in school made his way through the intricate byways of the Sierra Maestra, teaching his men how to read and use rifles while “slapping around” the knuckle-heads and brown-nosers among his troops. According to textbooks he was the one who captured Santa Clara and organized the army of bearded men who entered Havana in 1959. But then came the other Che, the one introduced to me through books wrapped in newspapers by dissidents in the 1990s. In pamphlets and newspaper articles the other Che (no longer a guerrilla hero) arranged executions at La Cabaña, screwed over Virgilio Piñera and called forth a river a blood in an attempt to overturn capitalism.
Five years ago I saw a photo of a bearded man dirtied from months spent in the jungle. I was with Javier Palacios, the Peruvian nephew of a former guerrilla army leader. The Peruvian man and his family want nothing to do with the icon immortalized by Alberto Korda and his camera. The stories they have heard about him are horrifying. They have buried once and for all the idyll of internationalism manufactured in the offices of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party.
A guy who bullies, curses, walks around all day in a bad mood and years later seizes on several Cuban families (almost all of them peasants) with the story of doing away with imperialism…cannot be a nice guy. A guy who did not sing, did not laugh and did not play a musical instrument cannot be a nice guy. About five years ago a Spanish newspaper published a photo of his corpse lying in a laundry in La Higuera, Bolivia, all the veils fell away. The songs of adulation which had been sung for decades, the sea of ink and even the famous letter of farewell no longer mattered, even if you find out at the end of the story that it was read ahead of time as an order to kill. To Cuban ears it sounds like a settling of scores, like high-spirited taunting. Like saying, “You can go straight to hell.” As the saying goes, “He who lives by the sword…”
*Translator’s note: The hero of an animated television cartoon for children from the 1970s and 1980s who fights in Cuba’s 19th century armed struggles for liberation.
8 October 2013
Photo Rebeca
Self-employment, in the face of capricious decisions by the authorities in charge, continues to lurch along, and its progress and solidification as a lawful way of life for thousands of people becomes more complicated by the day. Although it has been officially declared that the policy continues the same as when it was first authorized, and the only thing intended by the new regulations is to set up greater order, in practice it is not so.
Apart from the widespread confusion between what is authorized and what is unauthorized, caused primarily by the generic, ambiguous, extremist, and bureaucratic regulations of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, the Ministry of Finance and Prices, the Councils of Administration of the People’s Power, and others involved, plus the arbitrariness of inspectors and others in control, requiring compliance with nonexistent provisions, and imposing excessive fines according to their personal interpretations, the chaos created makes the practice of self-employment a living hell.
Day by day, because of all this institutional disorganization, it survives by the tenacity of those who practice it, risking resources and efforts on activities that not even its proponents have been able to define within serious legal boundaries, leaving everything to future studies, adjustments, and details, as the authorities are wont to respond to those who ask, demonstrating their professional precariousness for holding the positions they occupy. While the unconditionally incompetent constitute a majority in the different levels of state administration, the solutions shine by their absence, the rope continues to tighten to the breaking point, with the implications that entails, and the problems pile up.
It seems that self-employment, which emerged as a necessity to resolve the employment that the state is unable to assure to its citizens, continues to terrorize those who were forced to authorize it, those who, without the help of their many advisors, find ways to control it without completely strangling it and, what concerns them more, without losing any of the perks of power accumulated over so many years. But it turns out that the citizens of today do not look anything like those of yesterday: they are now tired of fables and impositions and are willing to defend their rights of survival.
9 October 2013
HAVANA, Cuba, October 8, 2013, Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello / www.cubanet.org.- On Thursday September 26, Barbara Fernandez Barrera was the victim of an act of repudiation in her home, located at Avenida 47, #7403, between 74th and 76th, in the municipality of San Antonio de los Baños, Artemisa province. The attack was ordered by Ernesto Perez, head of State Security for the municipality.
Supposedly, officers arrived with a warrant, but they didn’t show it to Barbara, saying it was from the Municipal Prosecutor, named Damaris Jata Seco. The aim was to remove a sign that was on the wall of the balcony of his house, that said: A long injustice, 3 years without water.
About twelve men went to the house by order of the Prosecutor. The painted the front green and white, in an illegal act of vandalism, according to Barbara, because this officer decided to do so.
While they were carrying out the painting, they were also threatening the woman, telling her she could fall from the balcony.
Also present was a State Security official known as Osmani. According to Barbara, she has put up with this situation since February 6, 2009, caused by the downstairs neighbors who cut off the water supply from the street.
She went out to demonstrate publicly on May 27, accompanied by some dissidents, with signs to protest this untenable situation and a deputy prosecutor named Marlen appeared outside the Municipal Prosecutor’s office and told her it would be resolved; she had been totally deceived, as is usual with the regime when they want to get out of difficult situations.
Now, Barbara has an Independent Library named after Václav Havel. According to her account, those who were in her house painting, shouted that they were going to burn her books. They offended the former Czech president, saying he was a “criminal” who fancied himself a defender of Human Rights.
It should be made clear that all these people were officially representing the Cuban regime, which has diplomatic relations with the Czech Republic .
As in most cases of social problems, the government does not solve this problem to make this family’s life a little easier, but removes a poster that does not look good from the political standpoint. As always: It’s politics before social justice.
Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello
From Cubanet, 9 October 2013
HAVANA, Cuba, October www.cubanet.org — It is called the Bad Neighborhood of the Bright Light, a hamlet situated to the west of Santa Fe in Havana province. Its residents, almost all black and mixed (emigrants from areas to the east), say that in the beginning, more than twenty years ago, the houses on the edge of the sea were huts, lifted on a base of old posts and materials found in the trash, and that very few of its residents are registered in the Identity Card offices, nor are their houses, now in better repair, legalized by the Housing Authority.
A few days ago Claribel returned to this neighborhood; she is a Cuban who escaped on a raft to the United States five years ago. Such was my curiosity, that I asked a neighbor, a friend of her family, to take me to meet her.
We took a bicitaxi and with great fear braved the convoluted, dangerous and muddy streets to the little house where Claribel’s family lived, a few yards from the sea. The sight was depressing. She is a twenty-something girl, tousled hair, with the face of a black doll and a contagious smile. But in the hut, still made of broken boards and a cement-fiber roof, lived her parents, brother and grandparents in deep poverty, or as they themselves told me, barely surviving.
“I’m not surprised. It’s all I knew,” Claribel told me. “They can’t even drink a glass of milk a day. The monthly wages of my brother don’t last half a month, they still haven’t fixed the streets, there’s no piped drinking water, no toilets with plumbing, no bus that comes here, and what’s worse, the money they have isn’t enough for proper nutrition for the eldery, because the products in the “shopping” are very expensive. In a word: My family lives as badly as when they came to the Bad Neighborhood of the Bright Light some ten years ago. It was called that from the beginning because everyone lacked gas for cooking. Today many of them still use the old dangerous burners.”
I didn’t want to say goodbye without asking them why they’d left the eastern provinces, and the grandfather answered:
“There, in Santa Cruz del Sur, our social life regressed because everything was deteriorating little by little. The hopes that the Revolution gave us evaporated like will-o-wisps. The Haiti sugar mill shut down. The young people gave themselves over to drinking. Nothing functioned, not the bakery, the mail service, the little restaurant. The village became a ghost town, while Fidel kept giving the same speeches, talking about the crises in other countries, without saying that Cuba was more than dead. Me, I was proud of my native home, when we left, everything was destroyed, just like so many forgotten villages in Cuba.”
Before we left, we asked if there was a paved road out of there, so we could avoid the bicitaxi. There wasn’t any. Back in Santa Fe, despite its broken streets and its sidewalks overgrown with grass, we thought we’d come to Paradise.
Tania Díaz Castro
9 October 2013, From Cubanet
HAVANA, Cuba, October, www.cubanet.org – Of the 6.5 million hectares of agricultural land is in Cuba, only 32 percent was cultivated in February 2008, when General Raul Castro assumed the presidency. There were 2 million acres covered with the invasive marabou weed or other weeds, and badly cared for. In other words, one third of the arable land was idle.
Twenty years after their creation, the Basic Unit Production Cooperatives (UBPCs), with the 1.77 million hectares of land they own, only managed to cultivate 219,100 hectares in 2012. With the exception of land used for growing sugar cane, coffee, cocoa and cattle breeding, these cooperatives reported 23% of their land to be idle, covered with marabou and other weeds.
To help turn around this deplorable situation, the government enacted Decree-Law 259, in July 2008, which authorized the distribution of land, in a form of leasing known as usufruct, up to a limit of 13 hectares per person, for a period of 10 years, with possibility of extensions. In the last five years, 1.7 million hectares has been distributed to 174,000 lessees. Of this figure, 53% is destined for livestock, 23% to vegetable crops, 7% to livestock breeding, with small areas under cultivation in tobacco, coffee and sugarcane.
But right now the process of distribution of land in usufruct is hampered and limited by of bureaucratic delays in the approval of applications. This is compounded by the slowness and delay in beginning to work the land, sometimes caused by the lessees’ inexperience of the farm work. Also due to the fact that they face a shortage of the means of labor , their high prices and poor quality.
However, the major obstacles confronting the delivery of lands in usufruct come from the State farms, which hinder and are reluctant to declare vacant the 500,000 hectares of land that remain unproductive.
Of the total land owned by agricultural enterprises, cooperatives, farmers and the lessees, only 1,353,519 hectares were cultivated in 2012.
The poor results in agricultural production require the government to spend 1.5 billion dollars in food imports, most of which could be produced in Cuba.
The situation is such that between January and March of this year there was a drop of 7.8 % in agricultural production, reporting a significant reduction in the production of beans, potatoes, citrus fruits, eggs and milk.
Osmar Laffita Rojas, From Cubanet
8 October 2013
P. Toscano
The magazine Palabra Nueva (New Word), of the Archdiocese of Havana, in the section dedicated to sports, apart from analyzing the current situation of the different disciplines in the country, is doing important work in rescuing figures forgotten or disqualified by the official press, due to what they practiced before January 1, 1959 (the day of discovery, because the 2nd was they day Christopher Columbus arrived, as a poet friend likes to say), or continued to practice after they were out of Cuba, without links established with the new authorities.
It also informs us about the current Cuban athletes, not belonging to the “government stable,” who triumph in the different countries in world sports, in baseball, as well as football, boxing, swimming, volleyball, basketball, wrestling, athletics, etc., who, despite the narrow political opinions of the authorities to marginalize them, and even the absolute silence around them, declaring them non-persons, are as Cuban as those living on the island, and are also a source of national pride.
No country in the world rejects their children, living wherever they live and succeeding wherever they succeed, because they are an indissoluble part of them, independent of their political opinions and their acquiring, or not, another nationality in a given moment. Luckily history, despite the opportunism and cowardice of some of those who write, always places everyone in their rightful place. It’s all a question of time!
Thus, in a not too distant future, our sports stars will be together with athletes from before and today, from inside and outside, receiving the same respect as citizens. For now, we are grateful to Palabra Nueva for what it does, showing that in sports, too, we are one people dispersed across many shores, all of us valued and honored.
6 October 2013
