Category: Rafael Alcides

The government doesn’t see it this way, and it continues to make plans with the optimism of someone who is sure of its people’s unconditional approval. It insists on governing under the rallying cry of “Socialism or Death” for all time.

Nor does a certain segment of the dissidence see it this way. This is the part that has seen Obama give everything in return for nothing; that fears that the measures to soften the economic embargo, which have already begun to be seen, will regenerate a regime which (notwithstanding what should, by natural law, have already occurred in Venezuela, but has not) would otherwise be a memory today.

The other segment, the optimistic one, already sees itself raising a glass on that great day marking the start of the future, as they come and go amongst government authorities who, in Panama, fearing contamination, refused to stay under the same roof and breathe the same air as their opponents. Because of course, those people (the ones in Panama, at least) could not but be there that day, when their foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez, sat down with his counterpart, John Kerry.

It is not to be believed that the US Embassy will also then allow itself to be restricted by the condition that for several years now has been governing festivities sponsored by accredited diplomats in Cuba. It is an unusual constraint that prevents ambassadors from simultaneously receiving on their premises both government dignitaries and dissidents. Or to put it another way, it obliges them to have the government people enter through the front door, and the dissidents through the back.

The US would never accept such a thing. In that case, the optimistic dissidence maintains, the other embassies would find themselves dispensed from continuing to carry such an onerous burden. Thus, another significant breach between the two sides of the opposition.

Of course, “Who Knows Who” does not live far from there. But in any case – as an estimable dissident told me who practically applauded the skin off his hands on December 17 and who today avidly awaits August 14 – “that embassy” is over there, too, to provide its occupants the pleasure of looking over their celebratory glasses towards those captious attendees of the Panama summit, as if to say, “Never say never.”

“That embassy over there,” he continued, will be an important and none-too-silent witness of what is happening with human rights in Cuba. For the moment, the government will continue to arrest and abuse, but it will have to do so with much caution, given that it is being observed in situ; and given that neither the tourist, nor the investor, nor any of the characters who will play a role in the future that has just started, would much like the spectacle of police massacring the citizenry who, in exercising a universal right such as that of dissent, has gone out on the street to demonstrate. Besides, what’s coming now in the bilateral relations is “I’ll give this much if you give that much.” And Time, for Its part, continues to march over the administration of little old men who have run out of time.

All this would seem to confirm what the journalist Regina Coyula was saying in a tweet launched into the ether at 12 midnight on July 20 that, while seeming to have given all in exchange for nothing, the astute Obama had reopened the US embassy in Havana in a “subtle stratagem that one day will be dubbed a novel version of the Trojan Horse.”

About the Author

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

A thirty-something jabao [light-skinned mixed-race man] with a gold tooth, and sporting a linen guayabera even when going down to the river to bathe, Belarmino was the proprietor of the town funeral home. The term “funeral home” here is generous, because in that little shack, nobody ever lay in state. People would come and buy the coffin—built by Belarmino himself—to take away by horse or wagon.

In the town where Belarmino was previously established, and from where he had to flee under protection from the rural police, he “damaged” fourteen teenage girls, and took to his bed everyone and their mothers for he had some magic powders that made him irresistible. In the brief time in which he resided in the captain’s town, he had no chance to use them because very soon the girls were being hidden by their parents or sent to relatives up in the hills; and a lovestricken quinceañera [a girl celebrating her 15^th birthday], resisting being sent away, hanged herself. Belarmino became invisible. He was never heard from again.

Perhaps, the captain did not deny, there are in politics powders that have equal powers of seduction to those used by that Belarmino of his childhood. Why did the captain say this? He began to list the reasons:

Upon nationalization [taking possession of foreign-owned properties, businesses and industries in the Revolution’s early years], Fidel and Raúl left the Americans living in Cuba—and the priests, and most Spanish merchants, as well—without even the laces to tie their shoes. They took down God from His altar, implanted a political system that is the negation of everything that had been known in these parts, agitated the political henhouse of the region (because this America of today is not the same as in the 1950s), and now—as if none of this had taken place—suddenly, almost 60 years on, the United States gives in, the EU gives in, the Pope smiles, and Raúl continues to make demands. Besides removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, and reestablishing diplomatic relations, the USA now has to return the naval base in Guantánamo and lift the embargo—and maybe even indemnify it. Could this be understood?

As psychiatrists do, I responded with another question. “Where are you going with this?” And he, in psychiatric fashion, asked me if I believed in the power of Belarmino’s magic powders. He was laughing at me. In any case, for him, the situation was very clear: Whereas the super-powerful United States could impose on Cuba the “skeleton deal”—as in his straightforward way of speaking privately Raúl Roa characterized this relationship—Cuba couldn’t do the same with the US, nor with the EU. And so given that Raúl doesn’t possess anything similar to Belarmino’s magic powder, nobody here should lose hope yet. Nobody, affirmed the captain resolutely. Another thing: Hadn’t Fidel kept until the right time the secret that the Revolution was Communist?

At the farmers market there was nothing green to be found—except for some mangoes going for five pesos per pound, which were already under the effect of some evil liquid that in two hours makes them look ripe on the outside, but on the inside they are acidic and greenish, and ready for pitching into the trash 48 hours later, covered by then with a white mold resembling a sinister cobweb. The captain mourned them, recalling the mangoes of his childhood, when the best of them—the fragrant mango bizcochuelo—cost two cents, and others—including the Toledo mango—could be purchased by the bag, filled to the top, for a nickel. But he did not ask for my view on his theory regarding the Raúl-Obama-EU-Pope Francis issue. Having undergone his catharsis, what could my opinion matter to him?

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

About the Author

 Rafael Alcides: A short biography is here.

To console him, and because I don’t believe that, for now, the government intends to abolish the ration book—a costly burden, yes, but an even greater psychological benefit—I advised him to relax. “Don’t believe in rumors,” I told him.

“This was the only life I had,” he replied.

I let him vent.

Have you considered leaving the country?” I asked him.

He sighed heavily.

“If I had someone to sponsor me*…”

I purchased my three little rolls of 20-something grams each, and perhaps because an evil shared among many is easier to bear, I returned home feeling better. On the way back I compared the disenchantment of this teacher—a fragile but dynamic man who used to dress in his militia uniform festooned with all his decorations—with the latest hobby of a certain neighbor. This is a widowed doctor who grew old dreaming of leaving the country, and who, now that he could do so without major paperwork and without losing the house he inherited from his elders, refuses to go. Neither his children nor his nieces and nephews (all of whom are abroad) are able to persuade him otherwise. Of these, one who was visiting in January, told me, grinning, “Imagine, with the remittances we send him, he’s living like a king, with a maid, lots of Viagra, and three, 20-something doctor-girlfriends to keep him busy.”

They seemed to be saying—that disenchanted teacher who wouldn’t know how to live without the ration book, and that doctor who has discovered that, with money, even being widowed and very elderly one can be happy—that the Cuban exodus would not have been so massive had the socialist government been able to provide a privation-free life for the citizen. However, the end of Pinochet, even though he left Chile off the charts in terms of a First-World standard of living, or of Franco, despite the vertiginous development achieved by Spain during the Generalísimo‘s last two decades, demonstrate that the issue is not just an economic one. As I read somewhere once, without freedom there is no lasting splendor. Nor is there ground that can withstand the cathedral placed upon it.

It has always been thus. Rome, once the ruler of the world, that mighty Rome of patricians and slaves where, moreover, the Christian was persecuted, eventually disappeared. A comparable lack of freedom ended Spanish colonial domination of lands in Our America, as well as the English, Portuguese and French. Vanished from that former America were Juan Manuel de Rosas, and Gaspar Rodríguez Francia, and Rufino Barrios and Porfirio Díaz and Gerardo Machado. In the America of my time, that America from when I was young, we saw the last of Trujillo with his braided uniform, and Somoza, and Stroessner, and Pérez Jiménez, and the Brazilian Joao Goulart, and Cuba’s Batista…

In recent times, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world has continued lightening up. No longer are there even Hussein, Milosevic, Gaddafi, nor now, finally, that odious fellow in Yemen. With efficiency, in each of these cases, the lack of liberty—that secret gift of the oppressed—has done its fatal deed.

I do not surrender, and therefore do not give up the dream that today or tomorrow—that is, sooner or later (and these things almost always happen when one least expects them)—I and others like me, who number 11 million, including the glum teacher from this morning, will see solutions to our problems putting food on the table—as well as the slum housing, our city falling apart, and everything else that we know too well.

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

Translator’s Notes:
* To obtain a visa to immigrate to the U.S., a Cuban national must have a sponsor. This page from the U.S. Interests Section in Havana explains.
** Cuba has two currencies: Cuban pesos, also called moneda nacional (national money), abbreviated CUP; and Cuban convertible pesos, abbreviated CUC. In theory CUCs are a hard currency, but in fact, it is illegal to take them out of Cuba and they are not exchangeable in other countries. Cubans receive their wages and pensions primarily in CUPs, with wages roughly the equivalent of about $20 US per month, and pensions considerably less. The CUC is pegged 1-to-1 to the American dollar, but exchange fees make it more expensive. The CUP trades to the CUC at about 24-to-1. See here a concise description of Cuba’s dual-currency system and an announced plan to unify it.
*** The average Cuban citizen relies on “remittances”—material help—from relatives abroad. A Cuban blogger explains it here.

About the Author

Rafael Alcides was born in Barrancas, municipal district of Bayamo (Cuba) in 1933. A poet and storyteller, he was a master baker in his teen years. He has worked as a farmhand, cane cutter, logger, wrecking crew cook, and manager of a sundries store in a cane-cutters’ outpost. In Havana in the 1950s he worked variously as a mason, broad-brush painter, exterminator, insurance agent, and door-to-door salesman. In 1959 he was the chief information officer for the Department of Latin American Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Relations, and spokesman of this agency in a daily television program in which he hosted and interviewed foreign political personalities. He was chief press officer and director of Cultural Affairs in the Revolutionary Delegation of the National Capitol.

Among his most recently-published titles are the poetry collections, GMT(2009), For an Easter Bush (2011), Travel Log (2011), Anthologies, in Collaboration with Jaime Londoño (2013), Conversations with God(2014), the journalistic Memories of the Future (2011), the multi-part novel, Ciro’s Ring (2011), and the story collection, A Fairy Tale That Ends Badly (2014).

As of 1993, he had been employed by the Cuban Institute of Radio & Television for more than 30 years as a scriptwriter, announcer, director and literary commentator when, at that time, he ceased all publishing and literary work in collaboration with the regime in Cuba. As a participant in numerous international literary events, Rafael Alcides has given conferences and lectures in countries in Central and South America, Europe, and the Middle East. His texts have been translated into many languages. He was honored with two Premios de la Crítica, and a third for a novel co-written with another author. In 2011 he received the Café Bretón & Bodegas Olarra de Prosa Española prize.