Category: Yoani Sanchez

My grandmother made a living washing and ironing for others. When she died, in her mid-eighties, she only knew how to write the three letters of her name: Ana. For her whole life, she worked as a maid for a family, even after 1959 when official propaganda boasted of having emancipated all servants. Instead, many women like her continued to work in domestic service but without any legal security. For my sister and me, Ana spent part of her days in “the house on Ayestarán Street,” and we never said out loud that she was paid to clean the floors, wash the dishes and prepare the food there. I never saw her complain, nor did I hear of her being mistreated.

A couple of days ago I heard a conversation that contrasted with the story of my grandmother. A plump lady dressed in expensive clothes was telling her friend — between glasses of white wine — how she behaved with her young domestic. I transcribe here — without adding even a word — a dialog that left me feeling a mixture of revulsion and sadness:

– From what you tell me, you’re lucky.
– Yes, I really can’t complain. Suzy started with us when she was 17 and she just turned 21.
– Now we’ll see if she gets pregnant and you have to throw her out.
– No, she’s very clear on that. I told her that if she gets pregnant she’ll lose her job.
– Yes, but you know, “the fox always returns to its den.” So maybe she’ll run after some man from the village where she was born.
– No way! She won’t even go to that “den” on vacation. Imagine you didn’t have any electricity, the floor of her parents’ house is dirt, and the latrine is shared by four families. – – It’s like the heavens opened up for her since she’s been with us. All she has to do is what I tell her, that’s all I ask.
– That’s how they start, but later they start thinking things and ask for more.
– So far we’re doing fine. She has Sunday afternoons off to do what she wants, but she has to come home by midnight. Most of the time she doesn’t even go out because she doesn’t know anyone in Havana. It’s better that way, because I don’t like the bad influences.
– Yes, it’s really bad out there. These country girls do better not to even go out because if they do they learn a few things.
– They learn more than a few things. Because of that I even monitor her phone calls. I don’t want her to learn what she doesn’t need to know.
– And that boyfriend you told me she had?
– No, that didn’t continue. We made it clear that we didn’t want men visiting our house. And she, really, has no time to be falling in love, my children take a lot of time. Taking them to the park, their homework after school, they like to paint before going to bed, she has to read them a story, they don’t like to watch movies alone. Poor thing, when it’s time to fall into bed she must be dead on her feet.
– Woooow… you’re sitting in the catbird seat. I haven’t had any luck. Every time I hire one, they don’t last even a month.
– If you like I can introduce you to Susy’s younger sister, she seems very serious.
– How old is she?
– Fifteen, so you can train her like you want.
– Yes, give her my phone number and have her call me. Oh, and make it clear, I’ll buy everything: clothes, shoes. But if she leaves one day, she’s not taking even a pin from my house. Make that clear! Because they get a big head and it’s hard as hell to deflate it!

The two women continue talking as the wine bottle passes the half-way mark. I overhear a rant about her husband’s more than 60 pairs of shoes. They laugh and I feel my stomach knotting up in a familiar way, with the accumulated anger abusers provoke in me. I go outside for a little air and see the “matron’s” car. It has green Army-issue license plates that stands out against the shiny metallic gray body. It’s the new aristocracy class, the olive-green royalty, lacking scruples and modesty. I spit on the windshield, for Susy, for Ana, for me.

They don’t have their own places, but they flourish everywhere. They lend money at interest, facilitate loans, and charge the same in cash as in goods and services. They are the new moneylenders. After being stigmatized for decades, these banned bankers have returned without licenses or pity. They offer everything from small amounts to thousands of convertible pesos, although the latter is only for very reliable clients. They operate in areas they know well; they know how much their neighbors make in wages, whether they receive remittances from overseas, or if they have some other source of income. Starting with this information, they distinguish between those who will be “good for it” and those who won’t. Although there can always be surprises. The great nightmare of these “usury experts” lies in the customers’ intentions to board a boat and be smuggled out of the country, without returning to them what is theirs.

Other situations can be resolved with pressure and threats. When a debtor is overdue in his payments, the lender feels that the time has come to teach him a lesson.

Edward was watching television last Saturday when they knocked on his door. Two burly men pushed past him into the house and one of them hit him in the face with his fists. They took the stereo and left, but not before warning him, “You have 72 hours to pay back El Primo… if you don’t, we’ll be back and we won’t behave so nicely.” The victim could not go to the police, because, from the beginning, he preferred illicit credit, without possible complications. He spent the next three days selling some of his home appliances and going into debt to friends so that he could repay the loan. He also prayed a little that El Primo and his henchmen might be raided for the great number of crimes they commit.

María, however, obtained a loan of 10 thousand pesos from the Metropolitan Bank. She needed to fill out endless forms and present written evidence of her employment. She planned to use the money for construction materials to remodel her old house. She felt satisfied to have gotten the sum legally, although now any paperwork she fills out includes the information that she is in debt to the State. Others, who could not meet the requirements, had to accept the conditions and interest rates of their neighborhood moneylender. More than one client has had to pay with favors from her own body when the repayment date has come and gone; more than one family has had to deliver a refrigerator or a car, because an irresponsible member thought to ask for money they could never repay.

As necessary as he is slandered, the moneylender is just one link in the illegal financial chain of our reality. Cautious when giving, implacable when collecting.

15 August 2013

I scan the shelves, dusting off my memory for books over these last decades, in search of the titles that I must keep, at all costs, from the fire of oblivion. It’s not an easy task. Every author, every text chosen… is an act of betrayal toward the rest. Making a list of the essential becomes something as personal as choosing your child’s name or selecting who is with us in the most private moments. Because the good works, end up being — once read — like beings we want to share the rest of our lives with. We have given them a prominent place in our recollections, because they carry a part of ourselves, our doubts, passions, disappointments and hopes. If we try  to assemble a decalogue of the best books of the last few decades, we’ll more likely come up with a inventory of those that affected us and those that took our breath away. An enumeration of those that changed us, profoundly and irreversibly.

Here are mine:

The Savage Detectives (1998) by Roberto Bolaño

In the footsteps of the writer Cesárea Tinajero, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano follow an inquiry that will last twenty years. Superimposed on these investigations that center on the search for a poet who is an exponent of visceral realism, but that goes far beyond that to probe the limits of literature, politics and ideals. Redefining and mocking art itself, The Savage Detectives does not come off as a rehash of the noir that runs through Bolaño’s work, but also takes hold of certain structures of the historic novel and, with a good dose of tragedy — in more of the classical style —   leads its characters to a fatalism that the reader can predict from the first pages. Dissatisfaction, lies, ideals that blow up, weave a tough story, sacrilegious and irreverent. A mockery, like a sneer; a smile like a scream.

The Man Who Loved Dogs (2009) by Leonardo Padura

In its pages is laid out a complete historical investigation of the last years of the life of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Trotsky. Jumping back and forth from the present to various points in the past, the test also describes the decline of of two revolutions, the Russian and Cuban. The axis is the story of Ramón Mercader, who assassinated Trotsky in Mexico and later found refuge in the Havana of Fidel Castro. Leonardo Padura places part of the narrative in the voice of Iván Cárdenas, a Cuban sunk in the hardships of the Special Period with its housing crisis, food shortages and lack of expectations. It is this man who hears from the mouth of Mercader himself — masked behind a false identity — the details of the homicide and the context in which it occurred. A devastating book, sweeping through all these story so exalted by an officialdom as full of pathological lies as it was dangerous, erected in the USSR and able to make Cuban officialdom disciples of its vices and habits.

Soldiers of Salamina (2001) by Javier Cercas

The testimony of Antonio Miralles finishes this novel by Javier Cercas on the turbulent and contradictory era of Spanish Civil War. Just as national troops are advancing towards Catalonia, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, writer and ideologue of the Spanish Falange, manages to escape from a collective execution. A Republican soldier gives him up, but ends up forgiving him and letting him flee with his life. Heroism like betrayal, or a deep attachment the pull of compassion disrupted in the act that opens the path to barbarism. The hero cannot be considered one, as he acts from almost irrational outbursts and against every rule. The anonymous man who lets his inner voice prevail and whom the war placed in situations where kindness and commiseration won out.

The Feast of the Goat (2000) by Mario Vargas Llosa

Published in 2000, this novel proved prescient for the later history of Latin America. In what most literary critics now consider the ultimate in the literature on the dictatorship, Mario Llosa Vargas returns to the figure of the Dominican satrap, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Shortly after the new authoritarianism installed on our continent, we would reflect whether The Feast of the Goat was a novel of past events or current realities. With an enviable dramatic tension, the book reconstructs a man enjoying an almost absolute power and expressing it in eccentricity, droit de seigneur, whims, a taste for humiliating those around him … a condensation of the worst satraps that have plagued our lands. The plot has three story lines which come together and precipitate the end. On one side, the return of Urania Cabral to the Dominican Republic after years of exile, on another the story of the men who planned the assassination of Trujillo, and finally the man himself on the last day of his life. With masterly writing Mario Vargas Llosa is enshrined as a versatile novelist, sharp and diligent in his research, and he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010.

Gomorrah (2008) by Roberto Saviano

A combination of the genres halfway between investigative journalism and literature. A true story, raw, into the depths of the Neapolitan Camorra criminal enterprise. The consumption and the merchandise marking the tempo of the plot. Things like motives of pleasure and suffering. The most elaborate luxury supported in the mud of crime and illegality. Saviano also manages to follow the path to toxic waste, much of which ends up in the Italian countryside dirtying the environment even of those trafficking in the waste. An extremely well documented and disturbing book that changed its author’s life and placed him in the sights of one of the most dangerous criminal organizations in the world.

Day of the Oprichnik: A Novel (2006) by Vladimir Sorokin

Imaginary Russia in 2027 is the setting in which this futuristic novel unfolds. But its true roots are in the past, in the era of Ivan the Terrible when he created the Oprichnik, his personal guard. The protagonist is called Andréy Komyaga and the reader will follow on his heels for one day of his fierce life. A scathing and intelligent critique of authoritarian societies, particularly a Russia that cannot shake its Tsarist past, which returns again and again in the figure of a Stalin or a Putin. A novel of brutality, of the blood during the slaughter, the description of which horrifies the reader. With Orwellian tones where the individual becomes simply a piece which power handles at will. The extermination of the opposition, including the looting of their riches and the violation of their widows, complete the analogy of what has been the attitude toward political opponents for much of Russian history from the past and present. A novel that takes hold of the future, simply as a trick to tranquilize us with the present.

Soul Mountain (1990) Gao Xingjiang

A trip through rural China in search of the legendary mountain Lingshan, leads the author of this book through the threads that weave the identity of this vast country. After being misdiagnosed with lung cancer, Xingjiang travels his homeland and on the way compiles legends, stories, testimonies, poems of the people he bumps into along the way, creating the amazing kaleidoscope of life, hope and pain he presents the reader in this book. A polyphonic work, blending elements of an epic novel, but also lyricism and intimacy. Its author, with a vast reference and culture, lets his consciousness flow freely in the more than 700 pages of text. The critiques of the Chinese system and its cultural policy are scathing and devastating. Xingjian himself experienced firsthand the pressure of censorship and publishing ostracism. Hence, Soul Mountain transcends history to also become a memorial to a contradictory and huge nation. In 2000 Gao Xingjiang won the Nobel Prize for Literature, receiving the news in a modest suburb of Paris where he has lived in exile since 1987.

Blindness (1995) by Jorge Saramago

Sitting at a traffic light, a man starts to lose his sight and from him a rare epidemic of blindness spreads across the entire country. The first measure is to quarantine the affected but the number grows and there are ever fewer people who can see. The lowest passions erupt, the most primitive instincts, and the fight for survival is out of control. A direct metaphor for the alienation and ruthless attitudes generated by modern societies. However, some characters retain the ability to see and at that point we are urged to think about the responsibility of having your eyes open when so many others have theirs closed. A novel that calls on us to regain lucidity and awareness. The author does nothing to make it easy to read, ignoring the names of the characters, structuring very long sentences with little punctuation. “Blindness” is upsetting from the first page, thus fulfilling the objective of shaking us up and disturbing us. No wonder that three years after the publication of this book, Saramago would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii (1947, reissued in 2001) by Victor Klemperer

Although first published more than half a century ago, this book has had a second birth in the eyes of thousands of readers. Klemperer proposes a thorough guide on how not only Nazism expressed itself verbally, but also the school of oratory and semantics it left for later totalitarianisms. The constant adulteration of terms and the ability to distort concepts, were some of the methods of subjugation employed by the Third Reich. The appropriation of ideas like heroism, falsified and adjusted to its convenience, helped Nazi propaganda become ordinary to millions of Germans. A verbal scaffolding constantly falling on the ears and permeating every area of social, academic, artistic, entrepreneurial and informative life. It was not necessary to create new formulas or concepts, simply to appropriate them and to empty them of all their previous significance. The excessiveness of this kind of discourse and its constant boastfulness permeated that of many other leaders who subsequently tried to subject, from the platform, their own people. After reading The Language of the Third Reich and can not again hear the chatter of a leader or the excesses of official propaganda, without calling forth the specter of fascism.

Persepolis (2000) by Marjane Satrapi

A graphic novel, lately these books with “little figures” seem simple amusements. However, Persepolis makes us drop this predisposition from the first page. It compels us to share the anguish of a young girl, becoming a teenager and young woman under the Islamic fundamentalist regime. The story begins in 1979 when Iran is the scene of a profound political change that puts an end to half a century of control by the Shah of Persia and begins the so-called Islamic republic. From the eyes of this little girl educated in a progressive family, the reader watches the transmutation of a social ideal into authoritarian fundamentalism. The road ahead is exile, which Marjane Satrapi leaves for, convinced that she no longer fits into a society with its overly excessive bans and punishments. Expressed through writing and cartoons, her biography sheds light on the situation faced by millions of people in Iran. A book full of tenderness, narrated by a child’s voice who also talks to God, who created a prophet able to follow the path of Mohammed or Jesus, but she discovers that on earth, unlike in those celestial paradises, pain and fear abound.

So much for my exercise of treason. No one will forgive me, neither the books included nor those discarded. Compose a list of these essential texts from recent decades, leaves a worst taste in my mouth than when I started.

9 August 2013

She gets up and has a little coffee. The concrete of the counter is still fresh. Magaly, her two sons and her husband live in a house under construction. They’ve spent seven years like this. Little by little raising the walls and installing some pipes. Every day that goes by they get closer to the end of the job, but they also live through another day of anxiety and risks to get the materials. Today they need stone dust and washed sand. They get their money together before heading out to the state supply center, inviting me to accompany them. We arrive at the central warehouse, but at the door an employee delivers the bad news. They haven’t stocked up, we’ll have to wait until next week.

We then dive into the world of resellers of cement fillers. Finding them is easy; haggling, impossible. The area around the Cristina railway workshop is the best supplied hardware black market in the whole country. You just have to walk through the doorways and gates for voices to call out asking, “What are you looking for?” We’re cautious, it’s not recommended to go with the first offer. Swindles are everywhere. One man, with a little table where he’s fixing lighters, looks at us and whispers, “I have everything for construction.” In a conjurer’s gesture he passes us a much-handled sheet that contains a list of prices: gravel and sand, 1.50 convertible pesos (CUC)* per sack; Jaimanita exterior stone, 7.00 CUC per square meter; and granite tiles, 10.00 CUC, also per square meter. “If you buy a large quantity transport is included,” he points out, while dismantling a lighter with an Italian flag drawn on the plastic.

My friends do the accounting. Acquiring surfacing for the entire floor would cost their combined wages for 20 months. The costs of the bathroom fixtures are enough to elicit a little scream from Magaly, but it’s barely audible, covered by the noise of the road. They decide to prioritize. Today they’ll take only some blocks, several sacks of sand, and two wooden doors. The vendor adds it up and rounds it off to everything Magaly and her husband earn for half a year’s work. “It will always be a cheaper option than the legal stores,” she says out loud to console herself.

Night falls and everyone’s fingers are covered with a gray layer of cement and dust. The children go to bed in the only room that has a roof. The counter has hardened and the dirty dishes are left on its rough surface because there are still no pipes to deliver the water to wash them. Tomorrow they’ll have to go out and get steel and some electrical switches. One construction day less. Twenty-four hours closer to having their house finished.

*Translator’s note: One Cuban convertible peso (known as a CUC and convertible only in Cuba), is worth roughly one US dollar (before exchange fees). The average monthly wage in Cuba is less than $20 US, and is generally paid in Cuban pesos (CUP); 24 CUP = 1 CUC. Many everyday items, and most “specialty” items are only sold for CUCs, including in State stores.

9 August 2013

Recently I have been reading an excellent book by Carlos Salas, currently the director of the site lainformacion.com. One of those texts essential for any newsroom and for the library of every reporter. With the title, “Manual para escribir como un periodista” (Manual on How to Write Like a Journalist), in its pages he dissects the art of writing headlines, the skills of a good interviewer and the need for research as a prelude at any article. This professional who has devoted decades to narrating reality gives us an agile volume where he shares the knowledge others keep only for themselves.

Wearing my “Salas glasses,” I began a meticulous analysis of the accuracy with which the official media reports the news. I did not have long to wait for the first inconsistency and deficiencies to spring into view.

Throughout the week, the news media reported on the unfortunate story of a group of people poisoned by methyl alcohol. A party in a proletarian neighborhood in Havana that ended in tragedy. Eleven dead and dozens of people affected by ingesting this dangerous substance, it was a sad sequence of lack of control, contraband, the black market, economic precariousness and irresponsibility.

Drama is an inseparable companion of journalism, as those of us who exercise this profession know well. But in the midst of tragedy, we must maintain the ability to discern why the national media treats certain events as so significant, while other news is simply completely silenced.

Almost on a par with the drama of those poisoned by methyl alcohol, was an accident during a Children’s Carnival in Guantanamo. The bleachers gave way and several children were injured, one of them with head trauma. The confusion, chaos and terror that must have resulted from the collapse of this structure in the middle of a celebration are obvious. Why wasn’t such an incident reported both on television and in newspapers across the country? Because in the case of a product stolen from a warehouse and consumed in secret it was citizens who acted illegally? Who bears the responsibility for a badly constructed grandstand at a public event? The State, that omni-proprietor, that judge of everyone… judged by few.

The news of those who died from methyl alcohol is meant to hold the victims up as examples of people who had fallen into such circumstances by violating established norms or because they suffered from an uncontrollable addiction. They always try to put responsibility on the people. The fact that, in a country with a tradition of producing rum, many prefer to buy their beverages on the black market, says more about our national penury than it does about vice. Nevertheless, the official moral was summed up as: This is what happens to the unscrupulous and to drinkers. The victims are doubly victimized.

But in the incident of the bleachers collapse, where children and adults were injured, the official journalists could not assign guilt to the injured. Inevitably, they would have to relate the shoddy work of the state enterprise that built the structure, without any consideration for safety. Or instead, confess that a good part of the materials for the job were embezzled, which presumably caused its weakening and subsequent collapse.

Both episodes, unfortunate and avoidable, point to a widespread and chronic problem in our reality: the need to steal and divert resources to survive. Thus, poverty wages and economic insecurity are the direct cause of these two tragedies. The culprits are not only sellers of illegal alcohol and the workers who take home some screws or pieces of wood, but also the order of things that turns us into criminals to survive.

7 August 2013

People laugh in the darkened room, the seats creak, and from the bathroom a reek invades everything. It’s nighttime at a Havana movie theater and the audience is enjoying the most recent Cuban comedy. Titled For Sale, it was directed by the well-known actor Jorge Perugorría and has already been shown in an extended series of openings. A controversial film that provokes laughter on the one hand, and fierce criticism on the other, it has its favor that it doesn’t leave its viewers indifferent. Either they laugh with pleasure, or get up in the middle of the screening and leave. Such reactions are also symptomatic of how we Cubans respond to certain issues, work and people. We tend to love or repudiate; to applaud or reject, with no intermediate points.

This is a humorously macabre story, with dead people who must be disinterred at the cemetery in the middle of the night. The script takes us by the hand through the absurdity of a reality where the sale of a tomb and the bones sheltered within it is the only path to financial relief for a young professional. For Sale unwinds in an also cadaverous Havana, a city of faded houses with balconies on the point of collapse. It presents us with a society where scruples and urges give way before the imperatives of survival. A wake-up call about the ferocious pragmatism that invades us, leaving nothing safe. A metaphor, perhaps, of a time in which the past is viewed with irreverence and a desire to liquidate it, by we who live in the present.

In its favor, the movie also makes several references to the classics of Cuban filmography. The well-known game of mirrors — the film within the film — amplified and referenced. An explicit tribute to Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Titón) and Juan Carlos Tabío. The Death of a Bureacrat, For Trade, Strawberry and Chocolate, are some of the films referred to throughout the movie. However, some of these references pass unnoticed by a large audience, one that younger or less versed in national cinema doesn’t know its antecedents. Rather than a difficulty, this lack of reference points allows another way to understand the story being told. If the script wanted to turn these hints into evocations, they’re left for many as events at the same level as others. The trick of the lens looking into the lens needs an aware viewer, otherwise it’s seen as one more point in the story.

And then came the actor…

The figure of the director also cast as one of the protagonists is something new in the cinematography of the island.

Few native directors have alternated between both sides of the camera. In For Sale, the union of these roles doesn’t occur in the cautious manner of Alfred Hitchcock, where we see, for a few seconds and in the shadows, his chubby profile. In this case the spectator senses that the character of Noel recalls, too much, the actor who plays him, perhaps because his designer and interpreter are the same person. It is clear, however, that the entire filming must have been like a huge party for all the participants. To the point that at the end of the filmstrip it rushes to conclude in a great celebration where it seems to offer a solution to all the problems. An abrupt and often repeate, closing in Cuban comedies, that bore more than entertain.

Although with Nácar, the female protagonist, the script reaches for it, it misses an intimacy leaving only a timidity that is not credible. Lacking the weight of interior emotion that has nothing to do with the easy laugh, something we have become accustomed to in movies made in Cuba. The excessive sex scenes and erotic allusions, designed to fill theater seats, in hopes of seeing a nipple here, a thigh there… a couple kissing in the shower. “Wankers” all over the country are pleased with a script that offers them many minutes of bedrooms, beds, cunnilingus and even lesbian moments. Another contribution to the hackneyed stereotype of a hyper-eroticized national identity obsessed with the pleasures of the body. The ideological clichés are harmful, but the carnal also echos banal and enduring perceptions.

If you have to sacrifice the dead to feed the living…

Beyond the pitfalls and limitations of For Sale, its main achievement is to convey a message of particular importance for Cubans today. Filled with laughter, the myths of the past are picked apart, yesterday’s buried bodies are liquidated. The dead stay dead and serve only in regards to the imperatives of the living, every minute of the film seems to tell us. The corpse of the protagonist’s father, an ideologically inflexible man, at the end of the reel is a mere mannequin in an exposition. Played by the actor Mario Balmaseda in the manner of a rigid Lenin, index finger raised, this character embodies the political leaders whose old-fashioned speech provokes laughter more than sympathy. Leaders and ideas in liquidation once their time is passed; the stark conclusion of this filmstrip.

I am among those who stayed until the final minute of Jorge Perugorría’s film. I laughed through several of its scenes and reflected during others. Despite my own objections and criticisms, I preferred to find its nuances and intermediate points. I gave it a chance and I think it was worth it. Because through its 95 minutes, the script reaffirmed an idea I have pondered for years: no one can bear so much past, carrying on their back the weight of all the deceased. A nation is not a cemetery where the living must comply with the designs of those who are gone. The same thing ends up happening to political last wills and testaments as happens to the bones in the film For Sale: they are auctioned off for the imperatives and pragmatism of now.

From El Pais: Cuba Libre

5 August 2013

The National Tax Administration (ONAT) office is open and dozens of people have been waiting from very early. An employee shouts directions for what line to get into for each procedure, although a few minutes later confusion will reign once again. At a desk without a computer another official writes the details of each case attended to, by hand. The wall behind her back is damp with humidity, the heat is unbearable and people constantly interrupt to ask for forms. An institution that takes in millions of pesos in taxes every year carries on with feet of clay, suffering from material precariousness and poor organization. Congested offices, interminable paperwork and lack of information are only some of the problems that hinder its management.

However, the setbacks don’t stop there. The lack of stable wholesale markets with diversified products also slow down the private sector. The inspectors fall on the cafes, restaurants and other autonomous businesses. Strikes or any public demonstrations to reduce taxes are strictly forbidden. It is expected that the self-employed will contribute to the national budget, but not that we will behave like citizens willing to make demands. The only union permitted, the Central Workers Union of Cuba (CTC), tries to absorb us in their straitjacketed structures. Paying monthly dues, participating in congresses where little is accomplished, and parading in support of the same government that lays off thousands of workers: it is to this that they want to reduce our collective action. Why not create and legalize our own organization, one not managed by the government? An entity that is not a transmission line from the powers-that-be to the workers, but the reverse?

Unfortunately, most of the self-employed don’t consider that salary independence and productivity must be tied to union sovereignty. Many fear that at the slightest hint of a demand their licenses will be cancelled and other measures taken against them. So they remain silent and accept the inefficiencies of ONAT, the inability to import raw materials from abroad, the excesses of the inspectors and other obstacles. Nor have emerging civil society organizations managed to capitalize on the needs of this sector to help them achieve representation. The necessary alliance between social groups that share nonconformity and demands doesn’t materialize. So our labor demands continue to be postponed, caught between the fear of some and the lack of attention from others.

4 August 2013

Noel repairs the blades of the fan. He has a little workshop in a doorway in Cerro neighborhood. He repairs electric irons, blenders, every kind of obsolete motor, and does good things with rice cookers and water heaters. It’s not a job that generates a lot of dividends. Some of the customers ask for his reliable services and then he doesn’t see them again; others want to pay in installments and end up not paying it off. However, in addition to diminished returns, this labor offers Noel a unique experience. Every day, he is in contact with people, many people. Speaking, opining, telling him what came over the illegal satellite dish and especially listening, opening his ears to what they have to say. So he has become, in his little cubicle full of grease and cables, an actor of opinion, a born leader appreciated for his abilities and respected for his words.

Cuba is full of people like Noel, anonymous, simple, who know reality at a level no minister can reach, even with the most competent advisors. People who don’t show up on TV screens, who aren’t at the front of any parade, but who have natural charisma and contact with the people to lead changes. For now, we only know those with whom we’ve managed to interact or meet personally, but there are thousands. They will never draft a political platform, but they know by heart the most acute problems that afflict our society. They would not sign an action demanding improvements in human rights, nor will they open a blog, practice independent journalism, or autonomous law. The word “activist” scares them and to call them opponents would put an end to the life they have now. They are — without saying so — all that and much more. They are citizens of conscience, to those who damage the situation in our country.

The future of our nation will be influenced by Cubans like this. So many who, today, are behind a desk in some office, at the front of a classroom, filling out forms in some State agency, we will see reach the public sphere. As they feel there’s a mark of respect in stating their opinions publicly, they will emerge from all sides. It’s important that at the point when they decide to take that step we do not react with our suspicions nor with confrontation, but with our embrace. Because while Noel fixes a broken fan blade, I feel that one day he will also have the ability to join together the broken and separated pieces of our reality. The same care with which he glues plastic and fixes the motor, he will put into the social leadership he will show tomorrow.

28 July 2013

The language of diplomacy, although distant and calculated, gives us a glimpse of changing times. I remember that for years I could predict every word foreign presidents would utter once they arrived in Cuba. Never lacking, in the script of their speeches, was the phrase “the unbreakable friendship between our peoples…”. Nor was a commitment to total harmony between the political projects of the visiting leader and his counterpart on the Island. There was one path and fellow travelers could not deviate an inch from it, and so they made it clear in their statements. Those were times, seemingly, of complete agreement, no nuances, no differences.

In recent years, however, the expressions of the official guests who arrive have been transformed. We hear them say, “although there are points that divide us, it’s best to look for those that unite us.” The new expressions also include the declaration that “we represent a diversity,” and that “we come together in working together, maintaining our plurality.” Clearly, bilateral relations in the 21st century are no longer conceived with a monochromatic and unanimous discourse. They exhibit the variety that has become fashionable, although in practice there is a strategy of exclusion and denial of diversity.

José Mujica, president of Uruguay, has added a new twist to the discourse of presidents received at the Palace of the Revolution. He stressed that “before, we had to recite the same catechism to come together, and now despite our differences, we manage to be united.” Incredulous spectators on national television, we immediately asked ourselves if the doctrine to which the Uruguayan dignitary referred to was Marxism or Communism. According to today’s evidence, two presidents can shake hands, cooperate, pose together for a smiling photo, even though they have dissimilar or opposing ideologies. A lesson in maturity, no doubt. The problem — the serious problem — is that these words are said and published in a nation where we, the citizens, can have no other “catechism” than that of the party in power. A country that systematically divides its population between the “revolutionaries” and the “unpatriotic,” based purely on ideological considerations. An Island whose leaders stoke political hatreds among people without taking responsibility for these seeds of intolerance they consciously sow, water and fertilize.

This is Cuban diplomacy. Accept hearing from a foreign visitor what you would never allow someone born on this island to say.

The unforeseen, situations that nobody predicted, are for politics like pepper on food. When it appears that all the possible variables of a scenario are on the table, an event sneaks in among them that changes everything. Such is the case with the diplomatic crisis generated by the arms transported from Cuba in a North Korean ship, discovered in the Panama Canal.

After years of trying to clean up its act before international bodies, this incident sets Raul Castro’s government back decades, returning it to the era of the Cold War. There is no time left for the octogenarian politician to reverse the effect of such a a misguided operation. Between now and his announced retirement in 2018, there are not enough days to make people forget the bungling of those missiles hidden under a cargo of sugar. Someone else, in his position, would renounce or remove the Minister of the Armed Forces, but a play like that has no precedent in the Castro regime.

On hearing about the trafficking in this arsenal of war, the question that immediately jumps to mind is how many times have operations like this been carried out without being discovered. The testimony and speculations about Cuba’s sending troops and arms to countries in conflict abound.   It is symptomatic that on this occasion the contraband has been intercepted mid-journey, which raises a new question. Why in this case has it come to light? Clumsiness or intention? Bungling or being out of touch with the workings of the real world? The questions will be asked, but the answers are known only to a few.

The truth is that these events confirm the denunciations of those who, for years, have documented the support of the Plaza of the Revolution for guerrillas, insurgents, destabilization groups, and governments sanctioned by international organizations. Wrapped in the halo of “proletarian internationalism,” the help offered in most cases was hidden with subterfuges, such as merchant ships transporting soldiers or military equipment on the sly. It was the era when the sharp eyes of the satellites didn’t track the planet with such precision, and the Soviet bear was there to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for its outstanding disciple in the Caribbean. A bygone and remote era.

If Cuban political leaders believed they could still hide planes and missiles on a ship, send it through the Panama Canal and successfully arrive at a North Korean port, it is proof of their great disconnect from the reality of the world they live in. The statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is also a part of this anachronism, attempting to explain the cargo as a shipment of “obsolete” military equipment off to be repaired in the country of the Kim dynasty.

The justifications or falsehoods that were once effective, fall on the ears of the citizens of this third millennium like bedtime stories for unsuspecting children. Their naiveté was left behind in the 20th Century and it’s a good thing, because the leaders can’t fool us as easily as before. In fact, the performance of the Cuban authorities has displayed such stupidity that it suggests it was an operation prepared by the Castro regime itself, in order to be caught red-handed.

Every time that relations between Havana and Washington seem headed for a rapprochement, some event generates an abyss between the two governments. The most famous example was the shooting down of the Brothers to the Rescue planes in February 1996.

Could it be, on this occasion, that the orthodox within the power structure are dynamiting what they perceive to be Raul Castro’s weakness in trying to talk to the neighbor from the north? Or is it the General-President himself who has built this scandal to try to avoid getting to the negotiating table? The “conspiranoia” is infinite.

However, there could be a simpler answer behind all this, as incredible as it seems: the Cuban leadership really believed that it could still continue playing with toy soldiers and ignoring the provisions of the United Nations, without being discovered. Holding power for too long makes those who exercise it into a species of autistics, disconnected from reality. So this could be one of the most chronic cases of political autism we now have in our global village.

In the midst of the complex situation in Cuba, why would the government dare to undertake such a ridiculous operation? After so many efforts to appear before the international community as a country transitioning through a process of openings, where does this “sugar missile” piece fit? Well, it doesn’t fit!

Evidently the relations between old ideological allies are still placed above pragmatic diplomatic strategies.  Old comrades are still prioritized, although to the eyes of the world they are seen as a family dynasty, a recalcitrant violator of the human rights of their citizens, constantly threatening the rest of the planet with nuclear conflict. The fellow travelers support each other, so they have to violate the same UN resolutions to achieve it.

Now that the boxes of missiles are discovered — the MIG-21 airplanes and the rocket batteries — it remains to be known how Raul Castro will get out of such a delicate situation. An apology would not be enough, because the government would still have to comply with some diplomatic sanction resulting from its actions. Acting the fool and reaffirming their “sovereign right” to send arms to be “repaired” in North Korea, will further isolate the island’s authorities at a time when economic support from abroad is urgently needed.

The insolence will also conspire against a possible loosening of the European Common Position, and against the easing of the American embargo. To reply with a barrage of government attacks against the president of Panama won’t accomplish much, because this problem involves other nations who don’t appear willing to forget so easily.

So, then, how does the Castro regime turn the page, minimize what happened, and present the world with a real posture of mea culpa and peaceful engagement? The only solution that remains is to announce political change, the opening so often demanded by its citizens and by international  agencies and governments.

The only thing they can do to overcome this huge mistake is to focus all attention on the total decriminalization of dissent in Cuba, the legalization of other political forces and the final dismantling of totalitarianism.

From “Cuba Libre” in El Pais.

23 July 2013

 The Congress of the Journalists Union of Cuba (UPEC) has just been contradicted. Barely a few days after that meeting of official reporters, reality has put them to the test … and they failed. Yesterday, the news that a freighter flying under the North Korean flag, coming from Havana and found with missiles and other military equipment in its hold, jumped to the first page of much of the world’s press. In Panama, where the arms were detected, the president of the country himself sent out a report via Twitter about what happened. Knowing that in this day and age it’s almost impossible to censor — from the national public — an event of such scope, we awoke this morning to a brief note from the Ministry of Foreign Relations. In an authoritarian tone it explained that the “obsolete” — but functional — armaments were being sent to the Korean peninsula for repairs. It did not clarify, however, why it was necessary to hide them in a cargo of sugar.

At a time when newspapers are offering lessons that governments can’t get away with secrecy, the conformist role of the official Cuban press is, at the very least, painful. Meanwhile, in Spain several newspapers have challenged the governing party by publishing the declarations of its former treasurer; in the United States the Snowden case fills the headlines which demand explanations from the White House about the invasion of privacy of so many citizens. It is inconceivable that, this morning, Cuba’s Ministry of the Armed Forces and its colleagues in Foreign Relations are not being questioned by reporters calling them to account. Where are the journalists? Where are these professionals of the news and of words who should force governments to declare themselves, force politicians not to deceive us, force the military not to behave toward citizens as if we were children who can be constantly lied to?

Where are the resolutions of the UPEC Congress, with their calls to remove obstacles, abolish silence, and engage in an informative labor more tied to reality? A brief note, clearly plagued with falsehoods, is not sufficient to explain the act of sending — secretly — arms to a country that the United Nations itself has warned others not to support with the technology of war. They will not convince us of their innocence by appealing to the antiquity of the armaments; things that produce horror never entirely expire. But, as journalists, the most important lesson to come out of this “crisis of the sugar missiles” is that we cannot settle for institutions that explain themselves in brief press releases, that cannot be questioned. They have to speak, they have to explain… a lot.

17 July 2013

She has broken a nail in her agitation. Tomorrow she will have to go back to the manicurist to restore the nail polish and the miniature English flag painted there. His shirt is falling apart in the effort and his whole body is covered in sweat as if someone had thrown a bucket of water over him. No, it’s not an erotic scene, it’s not love, but lawlessness. A couple under the June sun carrying sand to finish remodeling their kitchen. They’ve stolen it from a theater that is being remodeled. Lurking until the custodian fell asleep after lunch. Then they filled two bags, which are enough to build a little counter. The little house has been built this way, taking a bit from here and there, hoping for someone to look the other way to carry off some bricks or floor tiles. Their little home has been the result of depredation, of this rapacity that so many Cubans assume towards the resources of the State. Take everything you can, grab anything from this powerful owner… and get it done.

Among the reasons some buildings take so long to build or repair are not only apathy and lack of efficiency. The theft of cement, steel and other construction materials also slows down many public works. Some are already memorable, where the amount of resources stolen increases the initial costs of the building or restoration by a factor of three. The sinks disappear even before they come off the truck, the paint cans are filled with water to resell the paint on the black market, and there is even a hotel where 36 air conditioners were stolen a few days before its opening. Faced with so many thefts, each object and resource must be closely watched and the watchers watched in turn.

Many eyes are waiting for a slip-up. In one uncontrolled early morning a mound of gravel was reduced by a third. On some summer vacations, a school without a custodian could lose several windows and the occasional toilet. The light fixtures disappear, the electrical switches are ripped out and the looting extends also to the door handles, the stair railings, and even the ceiling tiles. With no pangs of conscience or guilt complexes on the part of the perpetrators. It’s more like the exploited poor taking a piece of the boss’s delicious snack when he’s distracted looking out the window. It is symptomatic that almost all those who take building materials from State construction projects feel no remorse for doing so. They call it “recovering,” “inventing,” “struggling,” “surviving,” When standing in a shower built with stolen tiles, under the running water they think, “you take what they give you and what they don’t give you… too.”

25 June 2013