Category: Yoani Sanchez

Our apologies, we do not have subtitles for this video. Article 53 of the Cuban Constitution (referenced in the video) reads:

ARTICLE 53. Citizens have freedom of speech and of the press in keeping with the objectives of socialist society. Material conditions for the exercise of that right are provided by the fact that the press, radio, television, cinema, and other mass media are state or social property and can never be private property. This assures their use at exclusive service of the working people and in the interests of society.

Reinaldo speaks little of his time as an official journalist. When he does, it is with a mixture of frustration and relief. The first from his responsibility for the fabrication of so many stereotypes, and the second because by expelling him from the newspaper Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth) they turned him into a free man. Cuba International Magazine holds a prominent place in his memories, as he worked there for almost fifteen years.

In our house we have created an entire category of news with the name of this publication. When a provincial correspondent speaks on TV of the marvels of a battery factory — without mentioning how many are actually being produced — we watch, laugh, and say to ourselves: “This is in the worst style of Cuba Magazine.” If there is an article in the press presenting the life of a small provincial town through rose-colored glasses, we connect this, as well, with the editorial approach that has done and is doing so much damage.

Mayerín, unlike Reinaldo, just graduated from the Faculty of Social Communication. Sometimes he calls from a public pay phone to tell me about his latest article on a digital site he collaborates on. “Did you see,” he asks me, “what I managed to slip in in the third line of the second paragraph?” So I go check my reporter friend’s daring and find that instead of writing “our beloved and invincible Commander-in-Chief,” he has simply put “Fidel Castro.” Keep up your daring work!

Several generations of information professionals have had to approach their work through censorship, ideological propaganda and the applause of power. Sugarcoating reality, using national media as a showcase for false achievements and filling newspapers with a doctored and distorted Cuba, these are some of the evils of our national press. If these deformations leave a sour taste the mouths of readers and television viewers, the effect is even worse on the journalists themselves.

The informants end up prostituting their words to stay out of trouble or to earn certain privileges, and the social prestige of the reporter plummets and the press becomes an instrument of political domination. For this informant, who as a child dreamed of uncovering some scandal or investigating an event to its ultimate consequences, all he is left with is folding or breaking down the door, continuing to put make-up on reality, or being declared a “non-journalist” by the government.

6 February 2014

Infanta and Vapor Streets, eight at night. The scaffolding creaks under the weight of its occupants. The area is dark, but there are still two painters passing their brushes over the dirty balconies, the facades, the tall columns facing the avenue. Time is short, the 2nd Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) will start in just a few hours and everything should be ready for the guests. The streets where the presidential caravans will pass will be touched up, the asphalt addressed, the potholes and poverty hidden.  The real Havana is disguised under another stage-set city, as if the dirt — accumulated for decades — was covered by a colorful and ephemeral tapestry.

Then came the “human cleansing.” The first signs of one more stage set being erected comes via our cellphones. Calls are lost into nothingness, text messages don’t reach their destinations, nervous busy signals respond to attempts to communicate with an activist. Then comes the second phase, the physical. The corners of certain streets teem with supposed couples who don’t talk, men in checked shirts nervously touching their concealed earphones, neighbors set to guard the doors of those from whom, yesterday, they asked to borrow a little salt. The whole society is full of whispers, watchful and fear-filled eyes, a huge dose of fear. The city is tense, trembling, on alert: the CELAC Summit has started.

The last phase brings detentions, threats and home arrests. Meanwhile, on TV the official announcers smile, comment on the press conferences and carry their cameras to the stairs of dozens of airplanes. There are red carpets, polished floors, tree ferns in the Palace of the Revolution, toasts, family photos, traffic diversions, police every ten yards, bodyguards, accredited press, talk of openings, people threatened, dungeons filled, friends whose whereabouts are unknown. Not even the Ñico López refinery is allowed to let its dirty smoke leave the chimney. The retouched postcard is ready… but it lacks life.

Then, then everything happens. Every president and every foreign minister returns to their country. The humidity and grime push through the fine layer of paint on the facades. The neighbors who participated in the operation return to their boredom, and the officials of #OperaciónLimpieza — Operation Cleansing — are rewarded with all-inclusive hotels. The plants installed for the openings dry up for lack of water. Everything returns to normal or to the absolute lack of normality that characterizes Cuban life.

The fake moment has ended. Goodby to the Second CELAC Summit.

28 January 2014

A crowd was waiting outside the mansion in Vedado with a statue of Abraham Lincoln in the garden. The language school opened its doors to new registrations and in the days that followed tested the attitudes of those interested. Everyone waited nervously, thinking that they would be evaluated on a pronunciation here… a mastery of vocabulary there. To our surprise, the main questions weren’t about language, but rather alluded to politics. By mid-morning a young woman who had been rejected warned us, “They’re asking the name of the first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in Havana.” We stood there mouths agape, who would know that?

A few decades ago the leaders of the so-called “political and mass organizations” were figures known throughout the country. Whether through their excessive presence in the official media, long tenure in their jobs, or simply because of personality, their faces were easily identifiable, even to kids in elementary school. We relentlessly heard talk of the secretary of the Young Communist Union, saw on every newscast who was leading the PCC in a province, or overdosed on declarations from some president of the Federation of University Students. There they were, clearly recognizable. Some even came to have nicknames, along with numerous jokes about their quirks and inefficiencies.

This morning on national television they mentioned Carlos Rafael Miranda, national coordinator for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). And it started me thinking about how blurred these positions have come to be, posts that before seemed to have so much power to decide the fate of so many. People now unknown leading institutions that every day fall deeper into indifference, are more forgotten. Leaders whose led can no longer remember their exact names and surnames. Figures who came too late to stand in the flashes of the camera, to be included in the analyses of the Cubanologists, or — at least — to be the targets of some joke. Mere shadows of a system where charisma is increasingly scarce.

25 January 2014

That house had a protective fence bristling with iron spikes, and the one next door had a huge gate and double locks. On the doors of certain offices signs warn, “Authorized Personnel Only,” and around the Council of State the armed guards are stationed every ten yards. Protecting themselves from others, avoiding contact, keeping strangers out, are the objectives of these physical and legal parapets. They are just like what the masterful Ryszard Kapuscinski described in his article, “Chairman Mao’s One Hundred Flowers,” during his trip to China.

In this vivid and sharp text, the Polish journalist brings us the human mania to construct obstacles to separate us from the different. The perfect example is that serpent of bricks, stones and various materials that snakes across the geography of the great Asian giant. All to defend itself — or isolate itself — from those who were left on the other side of the wall. In the Cuban case, it has been simpler, because the sea distances us from the rest of the planet. A strip of salt water that has marvelously served the political discourse of a “people under siege” and “the enemy” on the other shore. All out of fear, out of pure fear of diversity.

Kapuscinski reflected on the human and material costs of the construction–real or discursive–of walls. An exercise we could try in our own country. How much has isolation cost us? How many resources have been spent on trenches, tunnels for war, aggressive diplomatic campaigns, indoctrination in schools to foment the idea of a foreign enemy? How many lives have been destroyed, diminished or terminated because of these walls erected for the benefit of a few? “The wall serves not only to defend oneself… it allows one to control what happens within it,” reads Travels with Herodotus, and it’s painful that sixty years later it continues to be a reality in so many places.

24 January 2014

A friend called me yesterday. He was nervous. All around his house the police were engaged in an intense “cleansing.” The reason for such concern was that this retiree with no pension has an illegal satellite antenna with which he provides TV service to several families. So, when the forces of order get strict, my friend has to cut the cables, hide the dish and give up the service fees he earns for several days. A real economic disaster for him. Whenever he hears about an international summit, a meeting with invited foreigners, or some dignitary visiting from another country, he starts to fear for his business. He knows that each of these events corresponds to a police raid carried out with zeal and intransigence.

When Pope Benedict XVI visited the Island, hundreds of beggars, prostitutes and dissidents were “taken out of circulation.” The phone company, Cubacel, also did its part, cutting service to 500 users across the country. Now, the second Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) is coming our way, to be held in January in Havana. Already truckloads of flowerpots have appeared, with plants that will be watered only for the two weeks they are located along the main avenues. In some central streets scaffolding is rising, with housepainters who are coloring over the cracked and blackened walls. They are also retouching the traffic signals along the route where the guests will pass, and even the old chipped billboards are being replaced by others.

The clandestine and officially “unpresentable” Havana has been warned that it must be quiet, very quiet. The beggars are being held until the Summit is over, the pimps warned to maintain control over their girls and boys, while members of the political police visit the homes of the opposition. The illegal market is also being held in check. “Calm down, let’s have a little calm,” the police repeat in a threatening tone, without ever leaving written notification. So my friend started this morning. He is disconnecting his equipment and called me again to assure me that on the 28th and 29th he won’t even think of putting a foot in the street. “Not at all! I have no desire to sleep in a dungeon,” he told me, before hanging up the phone and locking away his antenna.

23 January 2014

This time she couldn’t enter the terminal to watch him leave. A sign warns that the interior of José Martí International Airport can only be accessed by travelers, not their companions. So she said goodbye at the door. He is the second son who has left since Immigration and Travel Reform was implemented a year ago. For her, like so many Cubans, it’s been a year of goodbyes.

In the first ten months of 2013 some 184,787 people traveled outside the Island. Many of them for the first time. Although the official statements try to deny that people flee the country, more than half of all travelers hadn’t returned as of the end of November. Nor do we need the numbers. It’s enough for each of us to just look around to quantify the absences.

From the personal and family point of view each trip can transform a life. Whether escaping for good from a country where you don’t want to live, learning what exists on the other side, rediscovering relatives or simply some time away from the daily routine. The question is whether the sum of all these individual metamorphoses serves to change a nation. The answer — as with so many things in the world — can be a “yes” and a “no.” continue reading

There’s a green robot with antennae everywhere you look. In the mobile phone repairers’ ads, on certain nice T-shirts, and even staring at us from the windshields of some cars.

Not only does the Android app show up in many places in Cuba, the Google operating system has also grown in popularity over the last year. The creature based on Linux lives in a good share of the smartphones entering the country, legally or illegally.

If we take a look at what’s inside these Smartphones, we note the prevalence of applications that work off-line. Local users prefer those that work without access to the Internet, to ease the limitations of living on the “Island of the disconnected.”

There is a great demand for maps throughout the country, encyclopedias with images, translators into various languages, role-play games and tools for everyday life.

After inquiring among several users and cellphone repairers, I can offer a list of the ten most popular Android applications in Cuba.

WikiDroyd: A version of the well-known interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia, which includes not only the texts but the images. It works without an Internet connection, although it must be downloaded to the phone’s database. If you just ask the technician, it will include the version most used in Spanish with almost two gigabytes of data. continue reading