Category: Translating Cuba

I am not going to tell anyone the news about Wikileaks, I’m sure my readers know a lot more about it than we do in Cuba; I do want to comment on the repercussions of the Wikileaks revelations in my media. They have even dedicated a Roundtable TV show to it. And it could be that there are still those shocked by what is at stake in the world today and the moral implications of all that’s been uncovered, but save for some angry gestures here and there, this how the world’s intelligence and diplomacy community functions.

I watched the Roundtable go on about what would results from a massive leak of information in Cuba, and what the “disqualifications” would be for a Caribbean version of the wiki portal. The truth is that in the midst of so many documents, it was rather expected that the Cuban government would “get its hands dirty.” The neighbor should not have too much fun with the hailstorm if their own roof is made of glass.

December 8, 2010

He studied medicine, put on the white coat, entered a hospital to work in a specialty, and blindly believed in the maxims of Hippocrates. At first, imbued with a fascination for cells, muscles and tendons, he barely noticed that his colleagues walked in mended shoes, and that he himself did not earn enough to feed his family. He saw too much in the Artemis hospital: the professional greatness of some and the material disaster of all. One day it was announced with great fanfare that they were going to raise the salaries of all heath care workers. But barely 48 Cuban pesos, the equivalent of 2.00 convertible pesos — or about $1.60 U.S. — were added to his meager monthly salary.

So he and a friend wrote a letter to the minister of his profession, communicating the discontent among physicians at such a ridiculous increase. They managed to collect 300 signatures and delivered it to the Minister of Health, as well as to the Council of State, the seat of power on this Island. The answer came a few weeks later in the form of his expulsion from his specialty. Five months later both letter writers were fired and their university degrees stripped away. Five years have passed since those events, but neither of the two has been able to get work in a clinic as a doctor.

Last week, Jeovany Jiménez Vega — the protagonist and victim of this story — decided to go on a hunger strike in Marti Park in Guanajay, to demand from the Office of the Minister of Public Health, that he and his colleague Dr. Rodolfo Martinez Vigoa, be restored to the practice of medicine. In the same days when the Cuban news featured the air traffic controllers’ strike in Spain and the worker protests in Greece, two men languished very near to us and we heard nothing. Yesterday, fortunately, they resumed eating, because Jeovany has decided to open a blog to tell the world; to opt not for starvation but information. He believes that the letter that was signed by only a few could collect thousands of signatures, if it is made public and presented to all the trained doctors in this country stripped of their rights.

Click here to read the declaration, “Interrupting the Strike.” Here is a brief statement by Jeovany Jiménez Vega. [Both are also appended below.]

The new blog will be ready on Monday and will be announced via Twitter.

December 9, 2010

Statement from Jeovany Jimenez Vega

My name is Jeovany Jiménez Vega, friends call me El Chino. For the last four years I’ve lived in Artemisa, a town some 30 miles to the west of Havana, Cuba. I was born on October 10, 1970 in Guanajay, our town nearest to Havana. I went to high school at the José Martí IPUEC of Artemis between 1985 and 1988. That same year I began to study medicine at “Victoria de Girón” Institute of Basic and Preclinical Sciences in Havana and did my clinical course (the third to fifth years), at “Calixto Garcia” Hospital in the Plaza municipality. I graduated in 1994 when the Special Period was at its height, and started work in Guanajay, along with some of my former classmates. I worked in Guanajay for 12 years.

In 2005 the Public Health sector in my country issued a “wage increase” which, like the majority of my colleagues, I thought showed a lack of respect. Together with a friend I sent a letter to the then Minister of Health, Dr. José Ramón Balaguer Cabrera, signed by 300 workers (coincidentally the same number as the courageous, although dying, Spartans who fought at Thermopylae) which set out the common approach.

The story of the brutality that followed you can read in the documents on my site, which tell you what you need to know about the seriousness of the matter and show you how things are in our beautiful Cuba. For the moment, I believe this presentation is sufficient.

But it is also important that you know that I like people plain and sincere, modest but with a lively spirit, amusing and friendly, who smile a lot. I admire people who do not dwell on the size or the nature of the dangers when they embrace a just cause. I am taken by intelligent, creative and sensible people and by the same token detest the cowardly and lazy. If you are of the former stripe, here is my open hand, I am your friend forever.

Declaration of Interruption of the Hunger Strike

Dr. Jeovany Jiménez Vega and I have decided to stop the hunger strike began last Friday, in Marti Park in Guanajay, Havana Province, to demand that the Office of the Ministry of Public Health reinstate into the practice of medicine Dr. Jimenez and his colleague Dr. Rodolfo Martinez Vigoa, disqualified for four years now. On Monday afternoon, a messenger from a high authority who preferred to remain anonymous, and who deserves our credit and respect, asked us to interrupt our endeavor because a new door is opening to our demand. Now we will take the path agreed to with the authorities with the aim of being reinstated to our profession.

Artemis, December 8, 2010

Alfredo Felipe Valdés, spokesman and striker

Jeovany Jiménez Vega

On September 6th when their children start the school year, many Cuban parents won’t have to get up early to go to work. In the summer of 2010, they joined the contingent of the unemployed.

This is the case for José Benítez, 48-years-old, an electrician who is scratching his head thinking how he can look for a fistful of pesos to maintain his wife and three children. They don’t have relatives overseas, they don’t receive dollars nor euros. Neither do they have the money to start up a private business.

“My future is uncertain. To get cash, I’ll probably do private wiring jobs. My wife, who was a housewife, got a temporary contract cleaning in a hospital. I don’t want to think about tomorrow. While the more I analyze, the less solutions I find for our economic and material problems. God squeezes, but doesn’t kill”, says Benítez, while he watches a Brazilian soap opera.

Many families like that of the electrician José know that they have to warm their chairs more than they should in front of the television. In an attempt to recover the paltry economy, the Cuban leaders have foreseen sending a million people to the street.

This time, the State will only pay 60% of their salary. To find a fix to the difficult labor situation, it is expected that the government will free up even a little more on private work.

One can already sell mangos, avocados, and plantains if you have a plantation on your patio. By whatever means, people are already doing it. René Fiallo, 60-years-old, lives in an old residence in the Sevillano neighborhood. Although the authorities would prohibit him from selling so many mangos and avocados from his trees, René pokes fun at the means.

“Fruit sales constitutes a fundamental source of money in our family. Now I’ll do it legally”, assures Fiallo, who from now on must pay a 5% share of his income in tax.

It is far from being the solution to the traumatic food situation in Cuba. A little patch. In the case of the leasing of lands,  expectations are more reserved. The independent economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe thinks that the regime should open its hand without fear.

For Chepe, leasing the land for 10 years isn’t a good solution. “If they want people to work those lands at full steam, they should grant a lease of no less than 50 years. Like in China. If you know that you will occupy a piece of land for only 10 years, you won’t be motivated to continue investing in it when you make certain profits”, affirms the economist.

The end of this summer’s vacations marks the start of a stage of uncertainty for many families. And despite the increase in private work, the majority don’t have a nickel to invest in a small enterprise.

On top of that, every day the people have to put up with a ferocious media blast about the critical work situation in the United States and the European Union. The capitalist countries aren’t doing well. That’s certain.

But the Cubans wish that their leaders wouldn’t bury their heads in the ground before their problems. That is what’s happening. Fidel Castro has eyes for nothing other than to read news about a supposed nuclear war. And predict catastrophes.

As if it weren’t enough with those who in their homes have so many unemployed Cubans.

September 7, 2010

“It is always good to be, even in serious cases, as least hypocritical as possible.”

April started off with good news for Havana’s lovers of the seventh art. I refer to the exhibit in the Charles Chaplin cinema of Martí: the Eye of the Canary, a fictionalized feature-length film, passionate and emotional, that successfully explores the inner world and character building that shaped the historical significance of José Martí; a purpose that evokes the theory of the father of Cuban pedagogy, José de la Luz y Caballero, who asserted that the processes that found a people are require as a premise for their accomplishment the preparation of historical subjects and the basic moral foundation, a mission that Luz devoted his life to. He accumulated all that is valuable of the most celebrated men of his time, which he enriched with his wisdom and handed to his students, among them Rafael María de Mendive, the maestro of our José Martí.

The tape — divided into four interconnected sections which are condensed decisive events in the childhood and adolescence of the young Martí: bees, arias, birthdays and bars — is the first of a series that will feature films from Uruguay, Mexico and other countries in the region. It was produced by a professional group at the highest level, led by Fernando Perez as director and screenwriter, with photography by Raul Perez Ureta (National Film Award 2010), art direction and scenery by Erick Grass; the soundtrack by Edesio Alejandro, Rafael Rey on production and the interpretation of the main roles by professionals Broselianda Hernández (Leonor Perez), Rolando Brito (Mariano Martí), Manuel Porto (Don Salustiano) and Julio César Ramírez (Mendive), together with the successful performance of Damian Rodriguez and Daniel Romero (Martí children and youth, respectively), and Eugenio Torroella and Fernando López (Fermín Valdés Domínguez young child).

The critics are dealing with and will have to deal with this film for a long time, for that reason, and because I am not a specialist in the field, I will make just three points that I consider of great interest: the characteristics of its director, the figure Marti and the message it contains.

The Director

Fernando Pérez Valdés, the Cuban filmmaker most emblematic of the decade of the nineties of last century and winner of the 2007 National Film Award 2007, is considered among the best directors in Latin America. Celluloid caught Perez in the networks of images and sounds from the impression received as a child by one of those timeless films, I refer to The Bridge over the River Kwai (1957), directed by David Lean film, which chronicled the construction of a railway bridge by prisoners of war, in which there were cultural differences and similarities of feelings between captives and captors. Driven by this perception, the author of Martí: the Eye of the Canary, entered the ICAIC in 1962, an institution that played a large role in his education: production assistant and management (1971-1976), Noticiero ICAIC (1979-1981 ); and in parallel he studied Hispanic Art and Literature at the University of Havana (1965-1972).

The influence of prominent Cuban and foreign filmmakers in his development cannot be ignored. Among the former, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, who brought rigor in his relentless pursuit; Santiago Alvarez, founding figure of documentary filmmaking was his cinemagraphic “father”; Manuel Octavio Gómez, director of the first educational documentary of ICAIC; Manuel Herrera, co-founder of the Experimental Motion Picture Association of Santa Clara (1959); Sergio Giral, director of the feature film The other Francisco (1975), a film that explores the true face of slavery; and José Massip, director of the documentary History of a Ballet (Yoruba Suite) (1962), First Gold Dove Award at the Short Film Festival Leipzig. Among the latter, it suffices to mention the Polish director Andrzej Wajda, director of classics such as Ashes and Diamonds (1958) and Landscape after Battle (1970), reflecting the passions, tensions and hopes of the generation of Poles who emerged from the ruins of World War II, films that enter into the moral problems that triggered the conflict between individual choice and political action; the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, author of Before the Revolution (1964) and The Conformist (1970), who was notable in the film adaptation of classic literature, concerned with the political and sexual themes and the characters’ inner world; the British-American Alfred Hitchcock, master of suspense, author of The Pleasure Garden (1925), also made several series of short stories with television hits such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1959-1962) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1963-1965), highlighted by the use of psychological elements and visual impact to bring spectators to the climax.

With this knowledge, Fernando began a rich production of documentaries that range from Chronicle of a Victory (1975), co-directed with the late Jesus Diaz, to the best of them, Omara (1983), from where he jumped to what most appealed to him, fictional film — or more specifically realistic fiction — with his finest work, the feature-length Clandestines (1987, a story of love set in the battle in the cities during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista; Hello Hemingway (1990), small personal short stories; the medium length Madagascar (1994), a film that explores the human condition, expressed in symbolic language able to communicate a state of subjectivity for which the words become insufficient and that masterfully closed Cuban cinema of the last century; Life’s Whistle (1998), where, from an imagined future, he tells a history that coincides with our present, to address the pursuit of happiness through inner freedom, truth and social communication; Suite Havana (2003), reflecting the dreams and aspirations that strengthen the will and make you see the future more clearly by turning out contradictory reality into an inexhaustible source of inspiration from love and from inner freedom: a love of one’s neighbor and of a city that despite its state of abandonment and destruction is full of beauty and possibilities; and Madrigal (2006), a mixture of artifice and reality, a philosophical reflection about time that lies in the future, with a script that is a kind theater play within the theater, an action that begins in Havana to end in a city of the future. All of these are vital parts of the Cuban cinema, and winners of many prizes inside and outside our borders.

Fernando was also influenced by Georges Melies — a cinema pioneer, who, after attending an exhibition in 1895 of Antoine Lumière, immediately perceived the possibilities of the new technique and conceived of film to produce illusions — whose concern about political reality led him, in his first feature, The Dreyfus Affair (1899), into the magical world from fantasy to history, to discover that film is a new way of seeing, interpreting and shaping the reality according to the will of the artist. Fernando, for his part, has highlighted the potential of film to promote critical thinking among Cubans, a practical demonstration of complex social problems that concern everyone, especially the intellectuals, and aesthetes of change, critical of our shortcomings and sources of connection between our traditions and universal knowledge.

According to the filmmaker himself, in an interview TV interview on Friday December 9, 2005, he is a filmmaker, but above all a moviegoer who relies more on questions than known answers, who prefers the image to the word to express concepts resulting from his investigations. Filled with love, respect and concern for others, Fernando is living expression of the human, a Habanero for whom the most important are his children, film and Cuba. His creativity emanates from these qualities, experiences, desires, frustrations and dreams, a combination of architecture and poetry that is expressed in a symbolic language through the construction of images and sounds. From these traits, the choice of childhood and adolescence of Martí at the heart of his latest work, does not seem casual. The son of a low-income postman and a homemaker, Fernando received at home what he calls the upbringing of respect, which enriched his concerns and his relationship with the world of cinema, an ethics expressed in the pursuit of one’s own happiness together with that of others, beginning with the family and extended to teachers and students, bosses and subordinates, friends and acquaintances.

The Figure of Martí

José Julián Martí Pérez, the son of a soldier and a housewife, both of limited education, became a prominent politician, historian, writer, speaker, teacher and journalist. A transformation originating from his intelligence, the love of his mother, his father and righteousness of his relationship with the director of the Boys’ School in Havana, Don Rafael Maria de Mendive, who put him in touch with the most valuable of the torrent of political and cultural ideas that had formed inside and outside the colony.

The great work of Martí begins after his political imprisonment for the critical apprehension of the preceding thought, including the mistakes made by the Cubans in the Ten Years’ War, to form a modern republic, based on the full dignity of man; a goal yet to be realized. His thinking, synthesis of love, virtue and civility, is not outdated. Marti established a genetic relationship between party and logic, war, independence and republic. Guided by the maxim that in the hour of victory only the seeds sown in time of war bear fruit, and delineated the functions of the latter so that in it were the seeds of true independence and a republic conceived as equal rights for everyone born in Cuba and free space for the expression of thought, so that each Cuban would be entirely free politically. Definitions topped with that ideal still as distant as it was then: I want the law of our republic to be the granting to Cubans of the full dignity of man.

The dignity of the human being, one of his greatest, if not the greatest, concerns, expressed itself in practical action. He made every effort to achieve a change in the mindset of the military leaders. For this reason he broke from the Gómez-Maceo Plan and wrote the Generalissimo in 1884: “What a shame to have to say these things to a man whom I believe to be sincere and good, and in whom there are the outstanding qualities to become truly great. But one thing is beyond any personal sympathy that you can inspire in me, and even all reason of apparent opportunity: and it is my determination not to contribute in the least, from blind love to an idea that I am living my life to bring to my country a regime of personal despotism that would be more shameful and unfortunate than the political despotism which is now supported, and is more serious and difficult to eradicate, because it would be excused by certain virtues and embellished with the idea embodied in it, and legitimized by the triumph.”

In Maestros Ambulantes he condensed his aspirations into the following words: “Men have to live in the quiet enjoyment, natural and inevitable, of freedom, like they must live in the enjoyment of air and light.” Fernando presents this Martí during his formative time. One who, as recounted in the film, published his first political article in el Diablo Cojuelo, a newspaper edited by his friend Fermín Valdés Domínguez, who, the day after the Havana Volunteers attacked the Theatre Villanueva, wrote the dramatic poem Abdala which, at such a young age, gives a beautiful definition of homeland: he who, when the teacher Mendive was arrested and imprisoned, he frequently visited him in prison; he who, together with Fermín Valdés Domínguez, wrote the letter to his classmate Carlos de Castro y de Castro on October 4, 1869, where he said: “Have you ever dreamed with the glory of apostates? Do you know how in ancient times apostasy was punished? We hope that a disciple of Sr. Rafael María de Mendive will not leave this letter unanswered.” In the judicial process when he was asked, “Was it you or Fermín?” the answer was firm and manly: “I was the one who wrote it!” For which he was sentenced to six years imprisonment with hard labor.

The Message

The efforts in the search of economic efficiency, in addition to the obligatory taking into account of the interests of the producers, will fail it they do not simultaneously proceed to perform an ethical reset of relationships from the family to the public. in this sense, it imposes a joint labor,m where art is called upon to play an important role, a role that begins with the rescue of human dignity, the value inside, vital and irreplaceable possessed by each human being, and which constitutes an indispensable tool to accept ideals, reject or form new ones, a force that allows people to feel free, even in conditions of oppression, as demonstrated by the Apostle in his youth. And Marti, The Eye of the Canary, is a hymn to the dignity, that is, from my point of view, the main message of the film: an appeal to the rescue of dignity, from the emotional as a way to reflect and change. The agreement between the Cuban present and the contents of the tape, seems to respond to the Marti thesis to do at every moment, what is needed in that moment. Thank you, Fernando!

Originally published in Issue 15 (May-June 2010) of the online magazine Convivencia. “Marti, The Eye of the Canary”, by Fernando Perez, will be competing in the Feature Films category in the 32nd New Latin American Film Festival. It was recently awarded the Colón de Plata award for Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography at the Latin American Film Festival XXXVI. A good opportunity for blog readers who have not seen it.

December 1. 2010

News Update: Top (most recent) to bottom (oldest)

• This Friday, December 10, Yamil will have a consular visit.
• Yesterday we visited Yamil. We hope that this week JUSTICE will prevail over the INJUSTICE committed against Yamil for 3 years.
• The prosecutor still hasn’t finished his conclusions, Yamil remains in the Military Hospital anxiously awaiting the final results.

December 8, 2010

WE ALL LIVE IN A LENNON SUBMARINE, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

tersitesexcathedra.blogspot.com/2010/12/la-muerte-de-john…

December 8, 2010

December 8, 2010

I saw him. I’m sure it was him. He didn’t recognize me, absorbed in himself as he was, sitting in a bar on Belascoaín Street, listening to Olga Guillot on a decrepit RCA Victrola.

It was four in the afternoon on September 8th. A desert sun seemed like it was going to melt the Havana asphalt. Not a drop of breeze was flowing. Nearby, in a dirty cafe, some people were trying to refresh themselves with an insipid orange juice.

It was the Day of the Virgin of Charity. Many people walked hastily — almost all of them dressed in yellow, the color of Ochun, her equivalent in the Yoruba religion. They were headed toward the church that bears her name, at the corner of Salud and Manrique, Havana Center. They were going to participate in the procession and Mass in honor of Cachita, as the Cubans call their patron saint.

To pass the time, I sat in a bar with a bar made from blackened mahogany, and when I turned my head, there he was, with two friends. The victrola, rescued from some warehouse, was playing, one after the other, some boleros by Olga Guillot, Blanca Rosa Gil, La Lupe and Freddy, the fat one who gave me goose pimples.

The friends were drinking from a Caney rum bottle lazily, in their crystal glasses. He, with his eyes closed, was enjoying the music, while a cigarette threatened to burn his fingers.

I didn’t want to call out his name, so as not to break the spell. But I swear, he who I saw sitting with his friends was the poet who lived on the third floor in a building on Peñalaver Street, in the Victoria neighborhood. He had come incognito to this Havana that has less brilliance and enchantment each time.

That afternoon I saw Raúl Rivero, one of my journalistic icons, who, from the end of 1995 until March 2003, was my boss at the Cuba Press Agency. Then I was a rookie with ambitions of setting the world on fire. I have recorded in my head the journalistic advice he’d given me. Thirty minutes of talking with Rivero was for me like three years of university classes.

In that fateful spring, the Poet of Victoria was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment by an arrogant and closed government which did not want — nor does not want — ideas to flow freely.

One winter afternoon in 2004 he left the Canaleta prison, in Ciego de Ávila, the land that had seen him born in 1945. A few months later, he went into exile, with his vices and manias in tow.

In splendid Madrid, he misses his friends. Because of that, on Charity Day he dropped in on Havana. I saw him. Listening to boleros in a bar on Belascoaín Street. It must have been a miracle of the Virgin.

Translated by: JT

September 9, 2010

You can’t imagine the quantity of pacts, commercial treaties and political deals that are planned over mojitos, cubalibres, and daiquiris. Perhaps you don’t know a part of those who risk investing in the island took their first step when their heart was trapped by a mulatto woman with an insatiable sexual appetite.

Robert, an Italian impresario with slicked down hair and the life of a playboy, wasn’t convinced by the Castros’ ideology, nor the precarious guarantees made by laws about investments to open his wallet and take on a deal in Cuba. No. It was his people. Above all, his women.

“In the mornings, while I’d drink coffee, I would talk with people. A good deal, honor, and material poverty convinced me to start a business. I’ve contracted some Cuban friends of mine under the table. It’s the best way to help them”, comments the Italian.

Helping person to person works better than many think. Entrepeneurs are few on the island. Almost all are married to Cubans, or have a side thing going with a stunning black woman. Local bedrooms have a certain share of responsibility for signing commercial deals with the government.

The special services know it. And one of their strategies with businesspeople, politicians, and foreign journalists is to wrap them up in the arms of a good looking young man or an irresistible woman. Testimony to that peculiar form of doing business is the National Hotel. And not just now, rather from its foundation, 80 years ago.

This mass of facades and windows was inaugrated in 1930. Situated on Taganana Hill, across from Havana’s Malecon, it has hosted hundreds of famous people: Ava Gardner, Marlon Brando, Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Maria Felix, Libertad Lamarque, Agustin Lara, Ernest Hemingway, Romulo Gallegos, Jean Paul Sartre, Pierre Cardin, Naomi Campbell, Steven Spielberg, Kevin Costner, Pedro Almodovar and Juanes, among others. And also gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano.

Captivated by the magnificent sea view have been personalities of the stature of Winston Churchill, Nelson Rockefeller, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, or Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin.

On its colonial style patio, where in the 18th Century the Spanish situated the Santa Clara Battery, which formed part of the defensive system of the city, you could see politicians and empresarios walking around Havana, in informal chats with consultants and assistants to the creole leaders.

Between glasses of beer, mojitos, and rum Collins, real politics cooks; after which the governors or ministers will probably give their approval.

On occasions, bed will convince those doubtful businesspeople. Politicians escape by the skins of their teeth. They come for a few days and are used to being in the public eye. “Even still, some fall to the temptations of big butts or brown dicks”, says an employee.

The National Hotel was declared a National Monument in 1998. A simple room costs 150 dollars a night. The suites, 510 dollars a day. Modest or luxurious, its rooms guard many secrets.

In Cuba, some drinks or a bedroom sometimes has more power than official speeches. Believe it or not.

September 12, 2010