Category: Translating Cuba

He always dreamed that his bones would one day, when the time came, fertilize the land that witnessed his birth. With the passing and the weight of years, he silently, sadly observed the march into exile of his friends and family. Little by little he was left all alone.

Now Fermín, his eighty years generously arrayed across his meager body, has left our planet, heading to Mexico with a small suitcase, and a heart full of expectations: finally he will be reunited with his entire family.

He made it Mexico City where a good friend was waiting for him, with precise instructions to deliver him to the U.S. border safe and sound. But Fermín, a little giddy about the trip, on arriving to Guanajuato, left the hotel, took a little stroll around the block, and exclaimed: “Coño, and I thought Miami was great!” His friend quickly extracted him from his mistake. Eleven hours of traveling was still ahead of him to get to the place indicated and, of course, once there he immediately invoked the Cuban Adjustment Act, to ask for asylum.

Full of the excitement natural to him, he boarded a bus for Orlando, but when he’d been traveling for a couple of hours he realized he’d forgotten his suitcase, with all his documents, at the border crossing. Without thinking twice, he took another bus back to Texas, recovered his suitcase, and started his journey once again. This time he would go direct to Miami.

Finally, after traveling 140 hours (from the time he left our planet), he managed to meet up with his anxious family. They interrogated him about the inexplicable delay, and Fermín — with a huge smile — replied,”Caramba, I was enjoying the scenery!”

After so many years and so many adventures, Fermín will spend this Christmas with his family.

December 12, 2010

During a break yesterday, December 10, my son’s friend approached a group of people where he was and said:

“Caballero, you have to go sign up, there’s a list over there, to go mix it up with the Ladies in White. Let’s go, we have to go home and change clothes, we gather here at three and they’ll release us at seven.”

It wasn’t my child’s classroom, the classroom selected was the tenth grade, and it so happens it was the classroom of Teo Escobar Sanchez — common names in the Cuban blogosphere.

Those in the group heard the announcement with the annoyance to be expected toward an activity imposed at the last minute; one of the girls commented by way of a goodbye, “What a drag, but if you don’t go they’ll put it in your file and you already know…”

And they went to the Director to sign the commitment form.

I don’t know what they told those kids, how they spoke to them about the Ladies in White, if they mentioned some action they had planned in Villalon Park. Teenagers barely fifteen, the majority with no particular ideas about Human Rights, much less about who these brave women are.

They left school with the Director, the Party secretary and two men who weren’t from the school. Some of them got caught up in the excitement of the crowd.

Maybe I’m deluded, but I see only weakness in what looks like arrogance.

But it is also an act of desperation.

December 11, 2010

In my country, the use of Spanish language words is subordinated to the political interests of the moment. So, at the beginning of the sixties when the dangers of communism were pointed out, they talked of humanism. Later, when the lack of democracy was pointed out, they spoke, officially, of proletarian democracy. When confronted with the issue of human rights, they talk about the rights to defend ourselves. And so it goes.

1. Now they’ve turned to other words. The crisis that threatens the country is not that, but simply problems and difficulties. The massive layoffs of workers, is a process of making people available. Those who are laid off, and so become unemployed, are not that at all, they are “available.” And so to the point of exhaustion.
2. This game with words and with the different internationally accepted categories, has brought consequences in regards to statistical information about Cuba, which are ignored by any serious world organization, as they lack absolute reliability. The statistic that there are 3.6% unemployed, reported for several years now, is example enough, when in reality there is underemployment, using three or more workers where one would be enough.
3. The result was catastrophic: low productivity, no profits for businesses, poor quality products and services, and labor, financing and corruption problems, diversion of resources, miserable wages, etc. Precisely what they are not trying to fix.
4. What would make sense is not to repeat the mistakes made. However, that’s not the situation. They continue down the same road, trying to continue to politically manipulate words, believing that using some instead of others will change reality.

December 11, 2010

1. I remember the Isle of Pines, for years now renamed the Isle of Youth, as an exotic place that lived up to its name, in addition to cattle, citrus, huge melons, Japanese and American families and thousands of parrots. Also there was the Las Casas river, the ferry dock, Nueva Gerona and its free zone, La Fe, the black sand beach, the Lanier Swamp, Siguanea, El Abra, where Martí lived, the Model Prison and the Colony Hotel.
2. These days, reading the newspaper Granma, I find two interesting facts. The first has to do with the considerable deterioration of livestock. Of more than 300 dairies now largely abandoned, the industry faces today trying to bring back 25 of these facilities of which, they’ve managed to finish only 15. This has resulted in a deficit of more than 100,000 liters of milk (I don’t know the time frame). Due to the lack of raw materials, Milk Products Company is working at only 20% of its industrial capacity. The second fact is that 80% of remaining forest estate lands are invaded by the marabou weed. The pine forest industry, already depressed by decades of neglect, also faces two fundamental problems, shortage of raw materials and the deterioration of the machinery, leaving the industry virtually paralyzed by the lack of flat files and the critical situation with regard to the allocation of fuel.
3. The journalist, critical in his two articles about the existing reality, write nothing about responsibilities. Presumably if it is due to decades of neglect, as is well described, those responsible will not be one, two or three temporary staff. The bar, as in the sport of high jumping, should be raised much higher. It is not my goal to play the role of inquisitor.
4. These are simple examples (there are hundreds of them), that the economic model has never worked, does not work, will still not work with updates, adjustments and substitutions of additions. We must go deeper, if we do not want these situations to continue on a repeating cycle.
5. That implemented and proposed so far does not meet expectations. It is simple economic theory, taken from old manuals of political economy, and a compendium of good intentions for a better future. That’s fine for ideological training courses, but has nothing to do with real solutions to the problems of the nation.

December 9, 2010

While Hugo Chavez reported to the Venezuelan Parliament his intention to establish an armed forces of the extreme left, that would make government decisions and prevent the triumph of right in the elections of 2012, his Cuban mentors promoted some liberal measures to survive without the support that put him over the top when he assumed absolute power decades ago.

Chavez neither learns from the mistakes of his ideological patriarchs, nor loosens Castro’s hand on critical issues. The South American sorcerer’s apprentice is not subtle, he enters the ring with the sword of Bolivar as a mask and the precepts of socialism to expropriate and to exclude his opponents and then indoctrinate the masses through education and media.

We Cubans know the rest of the movie, but do not know how to shake off the nightmare, whose last chapter has as its script the “discussion” of The Social and Economic Guidelines of the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party to be held in April 2011; nothing new, for certain, from the zigzagging discussions preceding these congresses from the distant year of 1975.

The congresses serves to keep power in the same hands, the “popular discussions” to legitimize the Party and its chosen ones. The novelty of the next conclave is that the captains need to shake off the ballast that risks unbalancing the ship and its arrival at the port of socialism, far into the mists of the future.

While Chavez seeks the freeway to socialism on the far left, his counterpart of the Caribbean opened some valves to get credit, reduce international pressure, prevent the growth of internal opposition and solve minor problems, such as inertia, the “improper gratuities,” fictitious employees, inefficiency of production, labor and social indiscipline, widespread theft and the “chick syndrome,” which points to the decentralization and corporate and individual autonomy, tempered by absolutism and bureaucratic regulations.

Accustomed to “discuss” from within the socialist model, Cubans talk about the Guidelines in their workplaces, they know that it is “more of the same” because once approved it will justify the mass dismissal letters and the end of the termination subsidies. The document ignores the role played by private property, whose reform is essential; there is no signal toward a concession regarding rights and freedoms abolished in the sixties, from free speech, assembly and association to the right to own property and independent unions.

The attempt to preserve an exhausted model makes a mockery of the Cuban nation. Half a century of socialism shows that planning and state ownership does not solve the country’s problems. It is not about updating the disaster, we need new players and an end to recycling the same people in power to finish off the face of intimidation. If Chavez repeats that the staging is his problem, ours is to leave the theater.

December 9 2010

One full page in the newspaper Granma of December 9: a transcript of the speech of Bruno Rodriguez on climate change and, on the front page, Raul Castro with the president of South Africa and Machado Ventura in Pinar del Río. Obviously, not a single word on the eve of Human Rights Day.

A law student friend sent me this text message this morning: “I am on the steps with some students who are waiting for the Ladies in White. Do you know something? What can we do? The first lift a hand to them is going to feel my fist.” Too cynical, I would say, to choose law students from the University of Havana to participate in a repudiation rally on December 10. Are these the lawyers who are going to defend us tomorrow? Those who today spend the afternoon vilifying women whose families were and are imprisoned for crimes of opinion?

Cuba is a signatory to the the U.N. covenants on Human Rights. How far does the hypocrisy of the Cuban government go that not even today can they stop themselves from repressing those who think differently? Meanwhile, in Geneva, the foreign minister is performing semantic cartwheels to justify the totalitarian system he represents, and in the streets of Cuba the political police are demonstrating that our human rights — with or without U.N. Covenants — continue to go begging.

December 10, 2010

The night of December 3 was full of light and friendship. Yoani Sanchez invited a group of friends of Ernesto Santana to her house to grab from his hands a copy of his novel The Carnival and the Dead, the most recent winner of the Premio de Novelas de Gaveta “Franz Kafka”.

It’s an award for perseverance, an award against censorship, and authors who for various reasons do not receive Cuban’s permission to publish in the land of their birth, have the opportunity each year to send their works to this type of act of generosity and solidarity and see their works published with the highest quality, as you can see from the pictures that accompany this post.

Of course, I have not read the novel and I can not talk about its literary quality, I spent only a couple of hours without being able to put it down and that is already something. Marginality, the impossibility of personal fulfillment, including lack of interest in what many try to call happiness are, in this short novel, the keys to this very long story. Ernesto Santana’s characters are ghosts beaten by the war in Angola and the disruption of national life, so it will be a few hours of distress-pleasure well worth retracing in the dark.

I met Ernesto at a book fair in Pinar del Rio, back in 2005 and some months later he gave me a bunch of poems for the first issue of magazine Bifronte. Thus, we published for the first time in that magazine poetry of a narrator, a kind of Violon d’Ingres, or pastime.

For me, who has been away from the country’s official literary life for years, it was a gratifying moment to know that there is a group of men and women who think of the country, who are rebuilding it piece by piece and putting it in a safe place through their novels and poems. Five years later I run into Ernesto Santana, and, for the first time, others: Amel Hechavarría, Daniel Díaz Mantilla, Ernesto Morales, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo and several others, a sign that Cuba pulsates in its writers, and how.

December 10 2010

Article 9.

• No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 12.

• No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 13.

• (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
• (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 17.

• (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
• (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Article 19.

• Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 21.

• (1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
• (2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
• (3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article 23.

• (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
• (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
• (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
• (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

December 10, 2010

Several weeks ago, in one of those tedious reflections they read on every newscast, I heard about Wikileaks. I know it seems incredible that a blogger, someone who uses the web as a means of expression, would not already know about this site with all the disclosures. But nothing is strange on this “island of the disconnected,” not even that we learn years later about things that have been the subject of intense discussion in the rest of the world. I remember the first mention of Julian Assange’s site in our official media was accompanied by a certain complicity on the part of the article writers, a hint of laughter anticipating the damage that the publication of these classified documents could cause the U.S. Government. But when the name of Cuba began to appear along with reports about the interference of Venezuela and the testimonies of coercion against their own medical personnel, the enthusiasm of the newspaper Granma turned to annoyance and the initial applause gave way to silence. Not even the Maximum Leader referred to Wikileaks again.

What happened in recent days will significantly change how governments manage information and also the ways through which we citizens get a hold of it. But also — let’s not fool ourselves — those regimes that are based on silence and the lack of transparency, will reinforce the protection of their secrets, or avoid putting them in writing. Meanwhile, the exposure of the cables, memorandums and correspondence between diplomats and departments of state is being noted by authoritarians everywhere, and they are learning not to leave written evidence of their orders to silence, suppress or kill. This lesson has already been practiced for decades, if not, when the day comes that those Cuban archives will be declassified, I will be searching them to see if they record the name of the person who decided to execute the three men who hijacked a ferry in 2003 to emigrate. Where is the paper that confirms the psychological pressure put on the poet Heberto Padilla to push him to a mea culpa that still weighs on the conscience of some? In which drawer, shelf or file do they keep the signature of the person who ordered the sinking of the tugboat 13 de Marzo, that killed the women and children who were washed overboard by the Coast Guard’s water cannon?

There are so many who don’t keep records, who have an unwritten culture of repression and who have paper incinerators that smolder all day; bosses who only need to raise an eyebrow, crook an index finger, whisper into an ear a death sentence, or a battle on an African plain, or a call to insult and assault a group of women dressed in white. If some of them would emerge in a local Wikileaks, they would get the maximum penalties, be made examples of with the strongest punishments, without worrying about whether to fabricate a charge of “rape” or “bovine slaughter.” They know that “seeing is believing” and therefore take care that there is no material containing surprising revelations, that the real framework of absolute power will never be visible.

December 10, 2010

3 minutes ago
They are calling all the high school and medical students in Havana to go to Villalon Park.
13 minutes ago
They said in my son’s school that anyone who doesn’t go to the repudiation rally in Villalon Park better have a very good excuse.
16 minutes ago
Do the international organizations know that in Cuba they use minors for ideological confrontations.
19 minutes ago
UNICEF should speak out about using minors as “Brown Shirts” against the dissidence.
20 minutes ago
Why don’t they send their own children to these displays of anger? Why use ours to confront all Cubans?
21 minutes ago
No one is going to use the offspring from my womb as cannon fodder for their shock troops. Teo is staying home!
23 minutes ago
In Jose Miguel Perez High School they are calling on all the students to go to Villalon park for a repudiation rally.
24 minutes ago
The Ladies in White are marching right now, the miracle of possible plurality. The gladioli can do more than the beards.
32 minutes ago
Darsi Ferrer and his wife were going to Villalon Park for a Human Rights march when they were intercepted.

A ringing youth protest took place in Villa Clara, about 180 miles from Havana. Around a thousand young men paid three pesos in national money to see the match between Barça and Real Madrid, in a movie theater beneath the Hotel Santa Clara.

Instead of the transmission of the classic Spanish league, they showed a Cuban documentary. Meanwhile, in a neighboring locale, that could enjoy the match for 5.50 convertible pesos (about $7 U.S.). They started stomping, yelling and booing.

Tempers were getting hot. And in addition to anti-government slogans, there were acts of vandalism, breaking chairs and decoration. Within minutes, scores of cars and dozens of cops arrived. Some 70 arrests were reported, including the manager of the movie theater.

Almost all were high school and college students, perhaps fans of the Real Madrid, who meet in the Parque Vidal, facing the scene of these events. Villa Clara is the most soccer-mad province in Cuba, in particular Zulueta, one of its municipalities.

That happened Monday, November 29. Two days later and about 280 miles away from Santa Clara, in Bayamo, another provincial capital, this time Granma province, the opponent Yoandri Montoya reported the stoppage of the horse-drawn carriages, one of the most popular means of transport in the city.

The drivers holding licenses agreed to stop in protest of the raise in the monthly tax, from 120 pesos (5 dollars) to 571 pesos (24 dollars). When they increased the fares to the passengers by one or two pesos, they refused to pay double.

Despite pressure on the part of the Party authorities, the police and security, the drivers stood firm in their demand. Certainly, one of Cuba’s most popular songs is called To Bayamo by Carriage.

In Puerto Padre, in Holguin, another eastern province on the island, the protests came from pedicab drivers, who are prohibited from parking in and visiting the sites where the tourists usually are.

According to a source who didn’t want to be identified, in a Santa Maria del Mar nightclub, in a beach area outside of Havana, a discussion about entering the place ended up in a brawl, where there was no shortage of shouts against the government.

Recently, the national television news broadcast a story in which farmers were openly critical because the loss of products due to lack of transport. The situation promises to go further, with rising unrest and discontent among workers and the population in general. But also because of the alarming waste and disorder among leaders and officials.

This is the case with more than 300 temporary homes built on a coastal strip of Corralillo, Villa Clara. They were built using State resources of dubious origin. It was not reported by a foreign correspondent or an independent journalist. No. The one who reported it was the newspaper Granma.

Photos: In the first, from the magazine Ideal, young people at the entrance to the movie theater in Santa Clara where shortly afterward the protest occurred. In the second, taken by Yoandri Montoya, we see the line of carriages stopped in the street in the city of Bayamo, Granma province.

December 6 2010

For the third time in a row a writer from our island is honored with the Premio Novelas de Gaveta “Franz Kafka,” awarded by its Czech sponsors to the Carnival and the Dead, by Ernesto Santana, who introduced it in a brief evening ceremony on Friday, December 13, at the apartment of Yoani Sánchez and Reinaldo Escobar, creators of the Cuban Alternative Blogosphere Academy, a civic non-profit entity that disseminates new technologies and citizen journalism.

The words of praise were delivered by the writer Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, winner of the 2009 Kafka prize for his story collection Boring Home. A critical appraisal of Pardo Lazo on the literary works of Ernesto Santana will be published in the next issue of the Voices digital magazine and commented on in this Cubanet blog, Island Anchor on the Voces Cubanas portal.

In 2008 the Premio Novelas de Gaveta “Franz Kafka” was awarded to the Habanero Orlando Freyre Santana, author of Blood and Freedom, which addresses, in fiction, the struggles against the Cuban military dictatorship.

The essay competition, sponsored initially by the Independent Library Movement and the Czech Republic NGO People in Need, is an option for authors who live on the island and have no chance of publication, such that their texts are sleeping in drawers and computers. It requires of the participants an unpublished and exclusive text.

Ernesto Santana (Puerto Padre, 1958) is an agile prose narrator, whose works oscillate between realism and the poetry of memory. In 2002 he received the National “Alejo Carpentier” Award.

As it is not possible to read and review a 174-page novel in a single weekend, I offer the reader a summary of the review written by Carlos A. Aguilera on The Carnival and the Dead, by Ernesto Santana.

“More than desire, disease, or Africa, the new novel by Ernesto Santana is about the dead. The dead that a determined ideology have produced. His characters, shadow plays acting up against a vacuum, are turned into characters almost in contradiction to themselves. They are skinny, alcoholics, hard; sons of quarrelsome mothers and sleepwalkers of war. The come and go from nowhere, as if life (that place where everything is defeated) had taught them to swim precisely so they would drown. And from this suffocation, which in turn is pure pleasure and extreme ordinariness, The Carnival and the Dead draws its story. The rest we could talk about is their different voices, their geographic countries, their veracity. But none of this is as important as knowing that The Carnival and the Dead is a “dance macabre,” a dance where we find nothing more alive than the dead.”

December 9 2010

There is no doubt the dissidence on the island is looking for a space. The document: A Future for Cuba. Issued on December 2, it is counter-proposals to the government’s measures — a balanced document that fits this time in Cuba — from a group of ten people, among them the economist Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello and Arnaldo Ramos Lauzurique.

They have put their feet on the ground, their proposals in writing. At times, the Cuban opposition,weighed down by mediocrity, internal squabbles and divided by personal egos and despotic behavior among its leaders, was shipwrecked on the rocks of its own disarray. There was no valid reference, no starting point. Add to that the penetration by the moles of the special services, it is a cause that has become fragmented.

As unfinished business, they still have to try to reach large portions of the population. But they do try. In this December 2010, conditions are ripe for the dissidence to take a 180 degree turn in their political work.

They can count on new tools. Almost all opposition groups have websites where they release their platforms and proposals for the future that is upon us. Important figures and veterans like Oswaldo Paya Sardinas, Elizardo Sanchez and Martha Beatriz, among others, have personal blogs.

There are other elements that promote a greater field of competition. The release of prisoners from the Black Spring of 2003 — although 12 remain behind bars– seems to send the message that the government of the Castro brothers will not go back to filling the jails with prisoners of conscience. At least for now.

Also the dialogue initiated by General Raul Castro with the hierarchy of the Cuban church and the government of Spain after the death of Orlando Zapata and following the government mob violence toward the Ladies in White (which continues against Reina Luisa Tamayo), is a sign that the regime needs political oxygen. And a truce to try to apply their timid economic reforms.

Throughout its history, the Cuban opposition has had brilliant moments. The Varela Project of Payá Sardiñas in 1998, despite some errors of law, was a well-intentioned proposal to try to democratic change.

Previously, the Working Group of the Internal Dissidence issued sensible documents like The Nation Belongs to Everyone, signed by Vladimiro Roca, Martha Beatriz, René Gómez Manzano and Félix Bonne Carcasses in 1997. Also Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet has undertaken specific activities for social justice and human rights.

Then in March 2003, came the hard blow, with the arrests of 75 valuable opponents. To this was added the unveiling of undercover informants in different groups outside government control.

After seven years extolled in sectarian and exclusive position, now the dissent attempts to take the path of concord. They do not ask to be a homogeneous movement. Only that their members agree on the main arguments and points of agreement achieved, to articulate a calm discourse and bring along the citizenry.

These points of agreement exist. It is calculated that 70% of the people on the island are very disgusted with the current economic and political situation. Examples include outbreaks of civil disobedience and public protests of citizens outside the dissent.

Most of the internal opposition has always been in favor of dialogue between all parties. The Castro government is the one who refuses and does not consider them as an important actor. But the current situations, and those that can be foreseen, could rearrange the cards on the table.

Maybe this is the time for the dissidence. In their hands are concrete workable proposals. Martha Beatriz already launched a good signal. They need a final push. To continue fighting in opposition.

December 9, 2010

39 STEPS TO NOWHERELANDIA…!, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

Poster by Rolando Pulido, the wizard of the New Oz…

Translator’s note: HAPPY BIRTHDAY ORLANDO!!!!!!!!!

December 10, 2010