Category: Yoani Sanchez

Accustomed to legislating with a marked numerical superiority, the ruling party found their disadvantage a bitter pill to swallow and stomped out of the room. For them, the coming months will be a martyrdom because they will hear a flood on contrary opinions, they will be held accountable for their decisions, and they will see laws approved that will affect their own bloc.

In the Castro regime’s manual, one can read in great big red letters the maxim to avoid at all costs allowing political opponents to take the microphones. One lesson that the Plaza of the Revolution taught Chavez, but that his clumsy disciple Nicolas Maduro did not assimilate well. Maduro’s arrogance made him believe that he would win the elections of last December 6, and today he is looking hard for ways to tie the hands of the National Assembly.

While the Venezuelan Supreme Court was hearing the ruling party’s challenges to three deputies-elect from the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), Cuban parliamentarians were meeting at the Palace of Conventions. In Caracas, everything was speculation and political tension, but in Havana the script was already well known: vote unanimously and, at best, listen to long hours of speeches about the supply of yogurt, the poor quality of the induction cookers recently hawked to the population, or the complications involved in obtaining a birth certificate.

Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power, led by Esteban Lazo, was once again the image of docility, but its Venezuelan counterpart was transformed, this Tuesday, into pure effervescence. The South American nation has become, as of this moment, a country difficult to govern. But what democracy is easy?

Now there is only one parliament in this hemisphere that functions as a ventriloquist for power. One country where the legislators applaud a ruler who attends the National Assembly dressed in an army uniform, and spits at the minister of the economy to stop blushing about the failure of his programs. In this nation, where for nearly six decades we have not heard a real debate among legislators, this Tuesday we were proud and envious of Venezuela.

Television, radio and newspapers are maintained under strict monopoly of the Communist Party, and not only because they are ideologically subordinated, but also because they are financed from the state coffers – money that belongs to all Cubans – money that they use to sustain a biased editorial line that does not reflect the national complexity.

The topics covered by the journalists of this partisan press represent the interests of an ideology and a group in power, not of the entire country. They never dare, for example, in their reporting, to question the authorities, nor the current political system, nor the organs of State Security nor the activities of the police, among other taboo subjects.

However, where the official press most betrays the precepts of balance and impartial information is in the testimonies they broadcast, in the voices they give space to and the opinions they express. By the grace of journalistic censorship, access to the microphone is granted only to those who agree with the government and applaud the actions of its leaders.

They never interview someone with a difference of opinion, or someone who believes the country should take other political or economic paths. Unanimity continues to fill the front pages and the news broadcasts, although for a long time now loud dissent has been heard on buses, in stores, in the hallways of institutions and even in classrooms.

At the beginning of this year an avalanche of reports filled the television broadcasts. The protagonists were young people who claimed to live “in the best of all possible worlds,” smiling with confidence in their future and not even dreaming of emigration. Not included among the opinions were those from anyone in the process of leaving Cuba, or feeling frustrated by their professional prospects, or submerging themselves in illegalities to survive.

In the almost 70,000 hours of annual television broadcasts not a single self-employed person complains about their high taxes. Parents who fear the growing violence in Cuban streets are never encountered in the Cuban media, and women beaten by their husbands don’t appear demanding legal measures to protect them from the abuse.

The teachers whose pay doesn’t allow them to live a decent life find no echo of their demands in the media, nor do dissidents appear to demand respect for their opinions. An inmate denouncing bad prison conditions has no chance to appear before the cameras, nor do the patients who have been victims of medical ethics violations or bad treatment in the Public Health System.

This entire area of Cuba, the widest area, remains outside the authorized media. Because the official Cuban press doesn’t exercise journalism, rather it proselytizes. Although it is made up of many professionals with university and post-graduate degrees, they do not have the freedom to engage in the work of reporting. Instead of looking for the truth, they try to impose an opinion. What they do cannot even call itself “the press.”

However, the return of “farmers markets” has not been free of attacks and government animosity. The official press blames private producers for the high prices of many foods, and the figure of the intermediary has been demonized in the extreme. In the last 2015 session of the National Assembly, the idea was floated of imposing price regulation on certain food products, to force merchants to reduce the amounts.

At first glance, this would appear to favor consumers. Who wouldn’t consider it good news that a pound of pork without bones would not exceed 30 Cuban pesos, or never reach the astronomical 50 peso asking price in Havana’s Egido market at the end of 2015. The initial reaction of customers would be to welcome it, because a single lemon would no longer cost one Cuban peso, nor would papaya sell for 5 Cuban pesos a pound. However, behind the regulated prices come greater evils.

What could happen is that the products subjected to price controls would disappear from the agricultural markets and once again go into hiding. We would not be able to go to the corner to buy a pound of onions, like we have done over the last two decades, but would return to the times when we’d end up at the side of some road or in the middle of nowhere illegally dealing directly with the producers or the persecuted intermediaries.

Consumers would end up paying the piper for a measure that does not solve the problem of the lack of productivity on our farms or of the extremely low wages.

An economy is not planned on a whim, nor is it managed by force of restrictions, rather it is a fragile framework where lack of confidence and excessive state control are like a deadly embrace, leaving us without the ability to breathe on our own. In this grip, controlled prices come to be feared as the kiss of death that strangles commerce and leaves it lifeless.

Hopes that overlooked José Martí’s accurate maxim, “A nation is not founded like a military camp is commanded.” The behavior of a soldier in the trenches can never be equated with a farmer’s day, and an officer’s command to bend one’s back over the earth has nothing in common with the efforts of a peasant to hire someone to bring in his harvest.

The harangues against the invasive marabou weed, launched by Raul Castro in his first years as president, fueled expectations, as did his call to put a glass of milk on every Cuban’s breakfast table. The Raulistas discerned in those statements the soaring of food production and the bringing down to earth of prices, to be consistent with wages. But neither occurred.

Instead, in recent months consumers have suffered a significant increase in the cost of agricultural products. If the year started with a pound of black beans costing between 12 and 15 Cuban pesos, at the close of December the price varied between 15 and 20 pesos – the wages of an entire working day – reaching the staggering price of 30 pesos in the case of garbanzo beans.

Meanwhile, the average monthly wages in the country only grew from 581 to 640 Cuban pesos (roughly $25 US), a symbolic increase which, expressed in a worker’s purchasing power, equals about three more pounds of beans a month. The results Raul Castro has achieved with his much-vaunted methods are not far removed from the little his brother Fidel Castro achieved with his grandiose agricultural and livestock projects.

The usufruct leasing of land to farmers ran up against the bureaucracy, excessive controls and the poor state of the leased land. El Trigal, the experimental wholesale market, is a sequence of empty stalls, petulant bananas and high prices. In reality, it is easier to find an apple brought from thousands of miles away than an orange or chiromoya planted in our own fields. For the coming year, the country will spend 1.94 billion dollars on food imports, and nobody even talks about the battle against the invasive marabou weed any more.

“I have to earn my beans,” says a teacher, as he justifies dedicating his workday to cooking pork, along with a portion of“Moors and Christians”– as we call black beans and rice – that he sells illegally to the workers at a hospital. Because yes, our lives revolve, rise and fall around those delicious little bits that we long to put on our plates. Expensive and tasty, they are the best indicator of the General’s failure.

In response to the measures taken by Barack Obama’s administration, the Plaza of the Revolution has not taken the necessary steps so that they might affect the daily lives of the island’s people. Instead, the official Castro discourse has played at maintaining a verbal confrontation with our neighbor to the north, and continues to use the argument of the “blockade” to justify its own failures.

Shortages have gotten worse in Cuba’s retail markets and it is now more difficult to buy the foods that were available last December. Corn from California is not filling store shelves, nor have McDonald hamburgers displaced the local version we call “fritas,” as those against globalization predicted. Putting food on the table has become an even more difficult, agonizing and expensive task.

Visitors looking for “beautiful ruins” and antique cars to photograph will not be disappointed, the theme park of the past is still intact. Modernity and development have hit the wall of reluctance in the face of the new. Cuban leaders have managed to convey and maintain their ailing old age over the entire country. No Apple store has opened in the heart of Havana, nor has public transport gotten any better.

No ferry has docked at Cuban ports since the date we enshrined in the shorthand of “17D.” Nobody has managed to connect from the island with roaming on their US phone cards, nor has any visitor managed to get money with their Visa or Mastercard at an ATM anywhere in our insular geography.

The international press has been filled with speculation about US airlines’ return to Cuba, but only charter flights land at our national airports. Relaxations allowing local entrepreneurs to be supplied from goods purchased in the US have failed to overcome the iron customs controls that block commercial imports to private hands. All the improvements decided in Washington have been held up in the thicket of prohibitions and controls that this system imposes on its own people. The internal blockade has closed ranks, before the fear of losing the justification provided by the external embargo.

Telecommunications, the cornerstone of US policy towards the island, has hardly benefited from the announcements launched from the White House. In a race to keep customers captive to the country’s only telephone company, the government has opened several dozen outdoor wifi zones for web browsing, at exorbitant prices, with service as unreliable as it is controlled. A year after 17D, this continues to be the country with the least extensive information technology in the entire hemisphere.

Freedom… well thanks. Raul Castro has been legitimized and recognized by most governments in the world and starred in a Summit of the Americas in Panama, between the flashing cameras and his meeting with Barack Obama. As for opening doors inside the country, he has refused to allow even the slightest belligerence from his critics, against whom he has maintained arrests, acts of repudiation and the painful execution of reputations. The latter is launched from the impunity of a power that can turn a dissident into a criminal in the eyes of public opinion.

However, that popular wisdom that scans the horizon and knows when changes are serious and when they are pure masquerade has emerged with force this year. The instinct for self-preservation, that ancestral pull that keeps us safe, has decisively given the lie to predictions made twelve months ago. Pushed by this conditioned reflex to avoid the danger of an existence without hope, thousands of Cubans have taken the route of emigration, in many cases risking their own lives.

Now it is left to us to again reset the clock. Both governments will call for calm, and to not despair. The occupant of the White House will say goodbye in 2016, perhaps after visiting our island, and Raul Castro has announced he will retire in 2018. This desperate time of history and politics passes step by step, without leaps, barely perceptible. Meanwhile, the hours of the lives of millions of Cubans inexorably drain away. 17D has become a date in the past.

Since then his career as a director has led him to address ordinary or extraordinary situations within the documentary genre. “My first documentaries are more casual,” he explains. “Later, through school, watching movies and growing experience, my documentaries became more formal and correct. Each one has a different challenge but they’re not free of errors.” His challenge for the future is to make “documentaries that serve people, not only the director; where the aesthetic is not as important.”

Yoani Sanchez. Among the many interesting issues of the day, why choose for your next film the Rafter Crisis, which occurred more than two decades ago?

Armando Capó. I grew up without the Internet, the only possible source of information were the history books and the media, like the news. In my history book in high school, the Russians had fraternally protected Poland and the Baltic countries during World War II. It may have been true, I did not live it (and we all know what really happened with the pact between Hitler and Stalin). Instead, the Special Period and the rafters is what I experienced. But the media and books didn’t talk about hunger, pain, separation… It was converted into the glorious resistance of the Cuban people to preserve the achievements of our Revolution: The Special Period. When words are used to hide facts.

I cannot understand how there can be induced amnesia in a nation, and I don’t think this helps to heal.

Then there’s the personal: this marked not only the country, but it occurred at the time when I had to move to the city, when I fell in love, and when I had to stop being a child.

Sanchez. How do you think you can cinematically reconstruct an event that has so many verbal references and yet so few published images?

Capó. We have worked hard on finding those images, but more as a reference to build situations. For example, at the end of the film, Carlos accompanies a group of rafters who are preparing their raft just beyond Caletones beach. Hence the images of rafters in the dog’s teeth of Cojimar or in other parts of Havana that serve as well. There are many good photos of the rafts, of how they were made, how they were launched on the sea, etc. But the best are the recordings made by foreign broadcasters, some press agencies, or by some correspondents or individuals. These are very useful for the emotional climate, where you can see the relationships between individuals, the pain, the sounds, and even the prayers.

Sanchez. Why choose the method of crowdfunding to help finance August ?

Capó. Because it is not only a way to get money to make the movie: everything we are doing now to publicize our crowdfunding is also a way of promoting this film on the social networks and in the press.

Our idea is to build a community, to create an audience and the need to see the movie. In Cuba there is no way to distribute it, no one goes to the movie theaters, nor do the theaters generate any return on what is spent on them. In addition, the distribution is very poor quality, which makes the audience not want to go back. How do you reach an audience like this, in a poor country and on top of that one scattered throughout the world. The networks were created for this. The idea is to be able to reach everyone, any possible viewer wherever they are in the world, make the rounds of the festivals and a find a possible opening for streaming.

Now, if it is hard to access the community of Cubans outside Cuba, it seems to us that it is because there isn’t much of a custom among this community of participating in these kinds of campaigns, and it takes time and media support to reach them, because it is a divided community all over the world, with different realities and priorities. We know it is hard, but we also know that it is possible. Right now, if 80 people donate an average of 25 euros, we will make it.

Sanchez. How did you choose the actress Laura de la Uz for one of the protagonists of the film?

Capó. There was no casting process. Laura is a great actress and I needed good actors. I had given some thought to her during the writing process, but nothing definitive. Then I consulted with the producers Marcela Olivera and Claudia Esquivel, and they loved the idea.

I have to confess that I was a little afraid to approach her. But it is because I respect her work so much and then one begins to create a distance that is not real. So much so that I asked Fernando Perez to set up a meeting, like when a school friend sets you up with a cute girl you’re afraid to approach.

Now I think that the first time I tried to get it on with a girlfriend was as clumsy as my first meeting with Laura.

Sanchez. Is the current migration crisis with Cubans stranded in Central America a repeat of the nightmare of the rafters?

Capó. We did not expect this to happen, but in a certain sense it was coming. The number of people who are attempting this route has grown to approach or exceed the dramatic figures of the rafters in 1994, but until now it was in dribs and drabs so it didn’t have the visibility of 20 years ago. It may serve to comfort to all the countries Cubans are passing through in their journey that it is Costa Rica that is best able to address this crisis.

My question is: Will crossing the border of Nicaragua eliminate the problem? How can their route to the US be protected? Can they pass? There are many testimonies of kidnapped migrants, of families that need to be ransomed, or threats that they will receive pieces of their families until they get the money. I think this is the beginning of a possible tragedy whose consequences we can’t foresee.

Sanchez. In the last few months the need for a Film Law has been strongly debated in Cuba, what do you think?

Capó. The country has changed and is becoming more pragmatic on the one hand and more blind on the other. Symptomatic of this is the announcement that cultural production has dropped to 0.5% of gross domestic product. The austerity policy that is applied to culture is reaping its rewards and they are not good. It is like the recipe the International Monetary Fund applies to member countries to reduce their fiscal deficit.

I would like to see Cuba as a place that has enormous potential thanks to its culture, a virgin territory. But if we are not capable of protecting that culture against the coming changes, this cultural patrimony that generates industry, then we are not thinking about the future, much less the present. It is irresponsible to maintain that attitude.

Besides, there is a real need to regulate current film production, to democratize access to financing, to create laws to protect those who make movies, not only among ourselves but also with regard to those who use our country as a stage. The ICAIC (Cuban Film Institute) as an institution is rooted in a way of thinking and making movies that is, at the least, archaic, and that is not capable of taking on the role as the representative of Cuban cinema.

For me, a Film Law goes far beyond the necessary restructuring of the audiovisual industry. I would like to see in it a a premonition of the kind of relationship we should have in Cuba, of civic responsibility to participate in proposals and solutions. That is why this proposal is so subversive, because it creates a precedent for what an opinion group and a guild can create. The proposal for horizontal citizen participation, which for so long has not happened in our country.

Headquartered in Palo Alto, the startup responsible for this tool for text chats, voice and video, was founded by one of the first ten Google employees, who says that he likes working “on challenging projects.” A maxim that has been extensively tested in Cuba, where despite the technological obstacles the app has spread virally through smartphones and tablets.

Anyone who says that technology distances us and locks us in solitude, can wander through the wifi zone on Havana’s La Rampa and see the tears and smiles this utility gives rise to when Cubans connect between here and there. The emotions are very much as if they were face to face. There is no coldness on the screen, nothing dehumanizing on the keyboard, when they are the only chance of encountering the people we love.

The corner of Infanta and 23^rd, any Saturday. A lady enjoys the son she hasn’t seen for two decades, checks out his latest hair dye, while the emigrant’s sister has brought the dog who also participates in the moment. At their side, a young man no more than 20 insistently repeats, while holding the phone in front of his face, “Don’t delay, get me out of here.” Through IMO we have tackled, in recent months, our hopes and our despair.

Even prostitution with foreigners has become more technological through the new utility. Now “the merchandise” is evaluated before the customer arrives in the country. The other day a young girl swept a tablet with a camera over her whole body while, on the other side, someone with a German accent asked if it was true that she was over 18.

However, IMO deserves the title of Person of the Year above all because of the key role it has played in the migratory crisis facing close to 4,000 Cubans on the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. While the official media remained silent about these rafters-on-foot, this tool has kept their families on the island informed about the fates of their loved ones trapped in Central America.

Suffice it to mention the thousands of Cubans who escape to other nations where there is no “wet foot, dry foot” law, to realize that the responsibility for the exodus that we have been experiencing for more than half a century rests on a system that has not been able to offer its citizens material prosperity, personal fulfillment or freedom… Much less a future.

Why, if they can get $15,000, do they prefer to invest it in a dangerous escape with no certainty of getting to the other side, instead of creating a business or prospering in their own country? The answer is painful and compelling: because there are no guarantees, no hope

Mr. Zamora apparently ignores that the amount of money mentioned, equivalent to more than 60 years of the salary of a professional earning 500 Cuban pesos a month, comes from a desperate action, or from help sent from abroad. The majority of those who are currently in Central American shelters have sold all their belongings to undertake such a dangerous route, or depended on relatives who have emigrated to finance the payment to the human traffickers.

The question would be why, if they can get $15,000, do they prefer to invest it in a dangerous escape with no certainty of getting to the other side, instead of creating a business or prospering in their own country. The answer is painful and compelling: because there are no guarantees, no hope and because the timeframe of their lives cannot wait for the promises of improvements on the horizon: promises that every time we come close to touching them become more distant.

The problem unleashed is growing, because Nicaragua’s closing of the border to Cubans is not deterring those left on the island from trying to leave. The flights to Ecuador continue to carry Cubans who, instead of feeling discouraged by the increasing difficulties, believe that the visibility of their cause might protect them and create pressure for a corridor that guarantees passage to the north.

It seems to be a repeat of the effect that moved 10,000 people to occupy the Peruvian embassy in Havana in 1980, and shortly after led more than 100,000 to leave from the Port of Mariel, the same migratory fever that led 35,000 Cubans to figure in the Rafter Crisis in 1994. A nation in flight, one whose children cyclically find a route to leave behind the land where they were born.

It is noteworthy that this situation is happening when Raul Castro’s reforms seem to have peaked and proved their ineffectiveness in bringing about results that can be seen in daily life

It is noteworthy that this situation is happening when Raul Castro’s reforms seem to have peaked and proved their ineffectiveness in bringing about results that can be seen in daily life. Not even the reestablishment of relations between Cuba and the United States has managed to appease the widespread disappointment and despair among Cuba’s youngest.

The undeclared but latent threat, that the Cuban Adjustment Act will be repealed, has only hastened each individual’s decision to abandon their country, but this is neither the trigger nor the cause for deciding to risk one’s own life and those of small children on a journey filled with danger.

A brief statement by Raul Castro in front of the cameras on national television, where he would say what millions of Cubans have waited decades to hear, would be enough to stop the flow of migrants and even to start to reverse it. Not offering this final speech, of the autocracy that will give way to another government, makes him guilty of everything that is happening.

The most expansive authoritarian regimes in history have been characterized by a strict control of the media and a high disregard for freedom of information. For these systems, a journalist is an uncomfortable individual who must be tamed, silenced, or eliminated. These are societies where a journalist is recognized only when she repeats the official government rhetoric, applauds the authorities, and sings praises to the system.

I have lived forty years under a government that considers that information is treason. At first, when I learned to read and began to pay attention to the national media, with its optimistic headlines and data on the country’s economic over-achievement, I blindly believed what those newspapers were saying. That country that only existed in the ink of the Cuban Communist Party’s national newspaper was similar to the one my teachers taught me about in school, similar to the one from the Marxist manuals and the speeches of the Maximum Leader. But it did not resemble the reality.

From the frustration between my desires to know and the wall of silence that the official Cuban press imposes on so many issues, the person I am now was born.

My first reaction in the face of so much manipulation and censorship – like that of so many of my fellow citizens – was simply to stop reading that press which served those in power, that propaganda disguised as journalism. Like millions of Cubans, I sought information that was hidden, censored news articles, and I learned to hear the radio transmissions coming from outside even with the interference that the government would impose on them.

I felt like I would drown if I wasn’t informed. But, then another moment came. A moment when I switched to “action.” It wasn’t enough to know everything that was being hidden from me and to decipher the truth behind so many false statistics and such editorial grandiloquence. I wanted to be part of those who narrated the Cuban reality. Thus, I began my blog Generation Y in April of 2007, and with it I took the path of no return as a reporter and a journalist. A path filled with danger, gratification, and great responsibility.

During the past eight years, I have lived all of the extremes of the journalistic profession: the honors and the pains; the frustration of not being allowed to enter an official press conferences and the marvel of finding an ordinary Cuban who gives me the most valuable of testimonies. I have had moments where I have exalted this profession and moments in which I wished I had never written that first word. There is no journalist who does not carry the burden of her own demons.

Now, I lead a media outlet, 14ymedio, the first independent news platform inside of Cuba. I am no longer the teenager who turned her eyes away from the official press, looked for other alternative news sources, and later began her own blog as if she were someone opening a window into the entrails of a country. I now have new responsibilities. I lead a group of journalists, who every day must cross the lines of illegality to perform their jobs.

I am responsible for each and every one of the journalists who are a part of the newsroom of our news platform. The worst moments are when one of them takes longer than expected to return from covering a story and we have to call their family to say that they have been arrested or are being interrogated. Those are the days that I wish that I had not written that first word…or that I had not written that first word the moment I did, but much earlier.

I feel that if we had moved towards action, and if we had exercised our right to inform much earlier, Cuba would now be a country where a journalist would not be synonymous with a tamed professional or a furtive criminal. But at least we have begun to do it. We have moved from information into action, to help change a nation through news, reporting, and journalism. It is Action with a capital “A,” like the one my grandmother wrote on those papers though she never really understood what they were saying.

Note: Speech delivered by Yoani Sanchez on 10 November in New York, at the ceremony for the 2015 Knight International Journalism Awards. The director of 14ymedio was given the award last May by the International Center for Journalists for her “uncommon resolve in the fight against censorship.”

The allusion in the column was published some months ago when Antonio Castro, one of the sons of the former Cuban president, was discovered by a hidden camera while on vacation in Bodrum, Turkey. A place he arrived at from the Greek island of Mykonos on board a 150-foot yacht, and where he stayed with his companions in luxury suites.

It is hard not to relate the opulent life of Fidel Castro’s son and the calls for savings being launched today by his uncle from the dais, with the ironic phrase of the journalist: “Once he gets home he says nothing, He deceives his countrymen with stories about shipwrecks.” The similarities between the symbolic history and the real-life story have made the article go viral, and it is spreading via email within Cuba.

The coincidences grow when A. Ricardo writes, “he returned to weigh anchor, this time for the north, where the cold climate distanced him long ago,” which coincides with the onward journey of the ex-president’s son to New York, where he was also photographed, sheathed in sportswear and with a teddy bear in his hands.

“Thanks to his father Gulliver Junior travels quite often,” reads the text appearing in the newspaper of the Cuban capital. That is, because of the precarious economic situation imposed on millions of Cubans by his progenitor, now he can give himself luxuries that exceed what could be paid for with the retired father’s pension. But the Lilliputians are also getting tired. Could this journalist’s article be a sign of that indignation not at all diminutive?

*Translator’s note: A newspaper published by the Provincial Committee of the Cuban Communist Party

But the years passed and on this long and narrow island there has never been detected even a single piece of that twin-engine Cessna. New technologies burst into everyone’s lives, satellites search every inch of the planet, and mythical cities, submerged or buried, are found all over the globe. But of Camilo, not a single clue.

The illusion that he would return to unite “the highest leadership of the country” was giving way to another desire. In the mid-eighties I heard talk of Camilo Cienfuegos as the hope for change. “If he were here, none of this would have happened,” the elderly intoned. “He wasn’t a communist,” my grandfather said.

Once again we want to find alive the hero of Yaguajay, but this time to lead our dissatisfaction and to help us overcome our fear.

In the Special Period the urge to discover at least a vestige of that tailor-turned-guerrilla forcefully resurfaced. We speculated that if the circumstances of his death were unraveled, Fidel Castro’s government would fall like a house of cards. The best-kept secret of the Revolutionary era would also be its end. But even in those years the mystery was not solved.

A few days ago a little girl reminded her mother she needed to take a bouquet of flowers to school to throw into the sea on the day this Havanan not yet turned 30 disappeared. A second later the girl asked, “But is he dead, or is he not dead?” Her mother explained the official version in a bored voice, ending with a categorical, “Yes, he’s dead… he is not breathing.”

The mystery has collapsed. Not because we found answers, but because we got tired of waiting for them. Right now, nothing would change because we know that Camilo Cienfuegos is alive somewhere – with his graying beard – unless it is scientifically proven that the official version is true. Nor would there be a great commotion on finding out his death was an assassination order by his own compañeros from the Sierra Maestra.

Time, implacable, has ended up burying Camilo.