Plummeting

The ideas and projects of the eternal rulers of the Cuban government seem to float, trapped in the void of unworkability, and wear us down with their monotony, at the same time they have been falling on their faces for a long time, due to inflexibility, inefficiency and lack of productivity. The tacit failure of the political model, the traps and pretexts of the “highest leaders” to remain in power at all costs, as well as their perseverance in mistakes, injustices and lack of respect to the rights of all their citizens for decades are preventing, in their fall, their parachutes from opening up.

Translated by T

February 10 2011

We Now Have a Logo!

These days I am madly happy for the logo that the young Spanish friends Rafa (El Pecas) and El Goyo sent me; they tell me they are graphic designers and own an advertising agency devoted to that creative universe. Thanks to the courtesy of these Iberian collaborators, we now have a logo for “La rosa descalza.” Zankz, chavalez! The displays of affection we often receive are good to us, but some initiatives stimulate us even more because they are evidence of the reach and outcome of our work. I congratulate us all for such ingenious and kind collaborators who are willing to cede the fruit of their imaginative mind with no other gratification than the disinterested help to one of the blogs of the growing independent Cuban blogosphere. God bless you!

Translated by T

February 10 2011

More of the Same / Regina Coyula

Each one of us out there will draw their own conclusions on the video posted on the net by Coral Negro. It is my personal opinion that the video is authentic and that it was not leaked by MININT — the Ministry of the Interior — like some choose to imagine. Let alone that it was I who leaked it, like someone with excess imagination has suggested. The man who speaks on the video is an operative official of cyberconfrontation, that new modality so in tune with our times. Those who are listening to him in the conference seem to be hearing about this topic for the first time.

Where does this information—revealed by the speaker, through which he establishes the psychology of the enemy—stem from? From a public site on the Internet. After that, the conference turns into something quite didactic. Through it I have learned of high-speed Wi-Fi satellite units as part of a module that includes blackberries and notebooks intended for bloggers (the mercenaries, as he calls them) and traditional counterrevolutionaries.

I learn that, through that service, any person could suddenly get the “You are connected” message on their PC; he recognizes the dangers of people’s freedom of Internet access, and admits that nobody who benefits from this will either complain or inquire about where the connection came from.

So much technology overwhelmed me, but I still feel envious when it comes to those “chosen ones.” Cuba is the atypical case where a Blackberry can make a suspect out of you; it is the country where you cannot have access to paid satellite-based TV from abroad. Both examples point out to precisely what the speaker at the conference is so worried about: this kind of access escapes their control.

On a last note, the statement made that the subsidies for subversion now come in the form of awards, caught my attention. Anytime now, they will come up with proof that Her Majesty Beatrice of Holland laundered the check—endorsed by USAID—for the Prince Claus Award, granted to Yoani Sánchez this year and to Desiderio Navarro last year.

The coda is the blank facial expression of those in the audience, and the badly-disguised yawn from a lieutenant.

Translated by T

February 9 2011

If It’s Wires We’re Talking About… / Rebeca Monzo

Wires have been omnipresent elements of our culture, especially during the past few decades.

There are those fine, multicolored wires, those you find scattered on the streets after telephone lines have been repaired. These, up until a few years ago, were sought for and collected by empirical artisans who, given the scarcity of paste jewelry in stores, improvised necklaces and earrings, much sought after by our women to dress up their poor outfits.

There was also another type of wire, a bit thicker, whose bits were kept as treasures—in improvised storage bins—for those moments when bracing the leg of a piece of furniture or tying up springs in an old sofa was needed.

Now it is the fiber optics cable that has become fashionable. That wire that will supposedly give us better and wider Internet service, here in a country where internet connectivity has become a fantasy for the majority of the population. Official figures insist that a little over a million Cubans have access to a limited Internet service. In good creole Spanish, this really means Intranet service. In other words, those who have the equipment required, plus the privilege of E-Mail access, can navigate through the internal network of the country, but none at all to have access to the World Wide Web, and few to any kind of chat services.

The authorities in our planet have made it quite clear to all that this is not about extending web access, but about allowing present users (mostly from the State) a higher connection speed. Despite this, those of us who insist in believing in progress welcome it, because, in the long-run, one way or another, many more of us will also benefit. So then we arrive at the last wire we wish to talk about, the one that is precisely the best-known among us, due to its sustained and continuous use: The line* that most of us who survive here have been eating for over half-century.

*In this context, “comerse un cable” does not translate literally into “to eat a wire”; it is an idiomatic expression (in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and other Spanish-speaking countries) that refers to boredom / idleness / lack of money—depending on the country—and always related to lack of work or activity. A literal translation, then, is not possible without an explanatory foot-note.

Translated by T

February 9 2011

May We Never Forget / Ernesto Morales Licea

The video posted with this blog never should have been seen, I think. Moreover, it never should have existed, it never should have been shot. Because once it was, once it grows in the uncontainable technological universe, it becomes impossible to keep it in the shade, to not let it be.

Let’s be honest: sometimes, ignorance protects. Yes. I say it with all its letters: I would have slept in better peace, my expression would have been less gloomy, if I had not devoted 5 minutes and 28 seconds to watching it. Because, once it is watched, if we carry inside us what is known as decorum, or what we call the soul, we can never be the same afterwards.

His name is Juan Zamora González. We don’t know his age, but I assume he is older than 70. This we know: he presently lives in Villa Clara, and, years ago—when his arms could firmly carry a rifle—he risked his blood, his being. He placed his life in the hands of a beautiful chimera, the revolutionary triumph of an entire nation looking for a promising future. He did it, like many others, in the hope of his humility. Full of faith.

And I, the eternal “talker”, am speechless this time. I don’t know if I should apologize for that too. The testimony of a crushed man, a man bitten by disgrace, has stolen my impulse and my sleep.

Because, as of today, I only have one credo, one strict dogma that rules my existence: humanism. Like that. Pure and simple. I love humankind. I love my race. I, like renaissance people four hundred years ago, also believe in humankind and admire its divine existence.

And for this reason, for, as a basic principle, loving humankind, I despise those who sully others, who frustrate others, who rob others of their existence. Be it an assassin with demoniac hands, or a system with its all-exclusive gears.

And because of that I also ask myself, feeling my own rage winning over my body, growing inside me with subtle ferocity:

What deplorable race do we Cubans turn ourselves into when we cease to love our own kind, the neighbor who suffers and stays silent, when we devote our hours and lives to intolerance and repression? What dark essence is inside those who can devote their time to learning how to censor blogs, how to block free discourse, how to attack ladies dressed in white, when a man such as this is starving to death in front of their unperturbed noses?

No. It cannot be true, dear readers. It cannot be, Cubans everywhere, inside and abroad: look at the face of Juan Zamora González. Feel his pain. Cry when this man smiles in shame while he tells of how he has sold the tiles of his roof so he can eat, while he tells of how if he still lives is because the knife he used to try to end his agony was not even sharp enough.

And now I don’t apologize for posting the video, for interrupting the peace of those who watch it: now I say let us all watch it. Especially those who go on shouting their “Vivas!”, those who do not spare any praises in favor of an accomplished Revolution—for the humble and by the humble—and those who have lost their memory under an amnesia of corruption and power.

Let us look at the face of this poor soul, and let us know that each minute of silence, apathy and hatred, each minute we choose to forget that the least fortunate drown in their sorrows while local papers—like Colombus—speak of the most beautiful land on Earth, each minute we refuse to fight for the joy of a nation that is still midway between boredom and unhappiness, condemns us all a little.

Translated by T

February 8 2011

To the Almendares River / Rebeca Monzo

This last Sunday, as I was coming back home from visiting a friend, I crossed the bridge over the Almendares River. And looking at this river, I remembered that beautiful poem the famous poet, Dulce María Loynáz (1902-1997) wrote, inspired by it.

I met this great lady late in her life, when she was already retired and in her voluntary incile* at home, where she had let time and memories peacefully flow. It was her birthday that day, and a good friend of mine had asked me to accompany her in her visit to greet her. I was excited by the idea, because I would have the opportunity to be face to face with one of the most important figures of Hispanic literature. As I did not have anything to give her as a present—it was a last-minute invitation—I decided to give her a beautiful conch shell with a maidenhair fern planted in it. She was a great lover of nature and simple things.

I was very impressed by her beautiful house at El Vedado, even when it was run-down by her evident lack of resources. You could still see some fine furniture and porcelains around, mute witnesses of her former social status. The ceilings had patches of missing plaster, the rugs were worn-out by time, and the lack of paintings on the wall surrounded the house’s owner in an aura of mystery. She received us with a wide smile and a steaming cup of coffee, served by a niece who took care of her. This wonderful lady, already forgotten, became news once again in our planet when she received, a few years later, the important and well-deserved Cervantes Award.

This is how her poem to the river starts:

This river with a musical name
Reaches my heart through a road
Of warm arteries and a tremor of diastoles

This is its last stanza:

I will not say what hand tears it away from me,
Nor inside of what stone of my breast does it find its source:
I will not say it is the most beautiful
But it is my river, my country, my blood!

*The opposite of exile

Translated by T

February 7 2011

Free Fall / Iván García

"Welcome to Our Green Caiman"

The only thing need to fall is to be above. And although Renato knows this, he is still not used to the sacrifices of the real Cuba’s tough life. He was a heavyweight in an imports firm. A jet-set of the elite.

He wore the red insignia of the Communist Party and had a promising future ahead of him. On many an evening, he would be enjoying seafood, salad dressed with olive oil and fruits at some luxurious restaurant of Havana. And a good Spanish wine on the side, of course.

On his return back to his splendid house at Miramar, he would smoke a Cohíba cigar and have a cup of strong Brazilian black coffee. He would then go to bed, unstressed and relaxed, to have sex with his wife, an exuberant light-brown-skinned young woman of thirty-two.

As it happens in any marriage, they had plans. And Renato aimed high. He envisioned himself at 47 as director of a ministry and climbing up the ladder within the party hierarchy. His life was beautiful. He spoke several languages and traveled the world. He always had euros, dollars or Swiss francs in his wallet. He was not an extremist in his dealings with his workmates, nor did he judge severely the ideological weaknesses of his friends.

He never climbed higher by trampling over anybody else. He followed a very specific ethical system: to give priority to talent. Loyalty was essential, but it could always be second. He was not a shameless corrupt, either.

Yes: like any Cuban official, he knew some tricks and accepted bribes from capitalist impresarios under the table. But he always negotiated in ways that were favorable for the nation.

He was a professional and a Sybarite. He did not have lovers. He never participated in scandalous orgies. He did not even drink rum in excess. Like any other person with political ambitions, he had his aspirations. He dreamed with one day of becoming president.

He had logical and measured projects, in tune with the system in which he lived. He would even say to his closest friends that a socialism with a human face—one that was efficient and that did not support political repression—was indeed possible.

Renato did not see it coming. The day he was summoned to his supervisor’s office he never imagined that he would be subjected to a prickly telling-off and a litany of accusations due to political immaturity and lack of faith on the historic leaders of the Revolution.

A few weeks later he was thrown out of the party and his official car was taken from him. He no longer had a position of trust. No trips abroad, no business with refined capitalists.

He was stunned. He asked around, he begged, he made appointments with the high powers. He felt they were doing him injustice. His only crime was to believe in the reforms that General Raúl Castro was proposing. And to wish these were even deeper.

Months before this, Renato had participated in a meeting with the high cadres of the party. Everyone in the room was asked to, openly and with no regard to censure, say what their opinion was regarding the supposed economic changes that could be tried in the island in a near future.

He thought this was his chance. He had already undertaken meticulous research on a plethora of options to forward the economy. He expressed that the State needed to get rid of inefficient enterprises. He applauded the measure that resulted in the loss of a million jobs, and he thought the number should be higher, as to lessen the burden of the State. And he provided a series of counsels on how to engage the issue of the self-employment.

Our blunt official was betting, and so he said, on large reforms, market economy, small and medium-sized enterprises funded by Cuban-American capital, on the removal of the tax on the US dollar and on the gradual abolishment of the rationing system.

In his thesis, he did not mention anything about political changes, nor did he judge the work undertaken so far by the revolutionary leaders. After he finished his contribution to the meeting, he did not notice any sign of alarm at the big wigs’ table.

Some bureaucrats with power even came over to congratulate him. Twenty days later, when he was summoned to the supervisor’s office, he understood that his pragmatic project had become the cause of his disgrace.

The blow still hurts. Good-bye to those trips to Europe, to those shrimp dinners in the twilight. Only his wife and family are left. And the certainty that a better Socialism is still possible. Now he suspects that it won’t be feasible within the government of the Castro brothers.

The only thing needed to fall is to be above. When you touch ground, you learn a lesson. In the power structures of Cuba there are two capital sins: the ambition of power and thinking big. Renato had wished for both. And now he is paying for it.

Translated by T

February 4 2011

Brief History of Maternal Wisdom / Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado

I still remember how, as a teenager during the ’70s, my mother would give me sex education lessons: “Open your eyes wide and keep your legs shut tight,” was the verdict. A male-chauvinist invitation to my development, burdened by the prejudices of ancient moral concepts and different inheritances from other cultures and from our own Hispanic roots.

Back then, as had been the case since remote times, men—who, as opposed to women, could choose their partners—were entitled to a prize when they married. There were times when they would even receive gifts if they married a damsel, which more than discrimination was an affront. Incredibly so, in the Cuba of the ’70s, the idea that men needed to be awarded their partner’s virginity through marriage or nuptials still existed. Women must remain virgins until marriage, adults and believers would say back in the day.

Supposedly the woman would acquire her name and her representation in society through the husband, and he, in turn, would acquire her hymen and the innocence of a consort, not to mention the multiple and different functions the lady of the house would eventually undertake, (and without the actual help of the husband, due to the scourge of male-chauvinism), so we can reaffirm—something that is evident and many have pointed out already—that the male gender, through marriage, always gained much more than just a life partner.

During my early childhood I heard expressions such as “they married behind the Church” in clear allusion to people who had sex outside of marriage. “Bought on credit” would imply the same. In other words, such people had “played around” or “done little things” regarding their mutual commitment before actually “signing the papers.”

Other warnings would include “after what’s been taken, nothing is left of what was promised,” to warn of men “who promised villas and castles” with the sole purpose of “cleaning their gun“… So I would worriedly wonder what size was that gun, and, for a long time, I would go into utter hiding if someone took an interest on me; that is, until biology and physiology imposed themselves…

In 1989 my husband and I joined the ranks of opposition, and by then, the maternal litany was “open your eyes wide and keep your mouth shut tight,” because, if Rafa and I were imprisoned, what would happen to our children? It was a recurrent expression up until last year, when she traveled to the United States and was able to stay.

Even so, from La Yuma, she still calls and insists I too should leave, repeating her ancient script of the neglected housewife, neglected by the male-chauvinism that defined the society of her time, and which she reformulates, adjusts and reapplies according to the circumstances. All my life I have been chased by a set of words that constitute a set-phrase: “Keep your legs wide open and keep your eyes shut tight,” Or was it the mouth? Or was it keep your mouth shut and open your eyes wide? Who cares! In any case, I am a grown woman now, and I refuse to renounce what has defined my passage through this world: to do what my civic conscience dictates me.

That mother of mine just never got it that I decided to skip the Anglo salutation (Hi) and go straight to the motions, disregarding any moral etiquette that, even if in an ever-decreasing fashion, still permeated my youth. She never understood—and it seems she never will—that I am a transgressor when it comes to anything I deem unfair, and she has still not come to terms with accepting who I am.

The prejudices I have mentioned here fortunately have disappeared from society, and my poor mother reached her old age riveted by the discrimination and humiliation of centuries, and remains lodged at the edge of fear. These days I don’t refute her opinions, I don’t fight her; I limit myself to replying, half-caustic and half-joking, in allusion to her old litany: Let’s shut the doors tight to any expression of intolerance and open our eyes wide to the world, Mommy! (because it’s never too late….).

Translated by T

January 31 2011

Chronos at the Service of Politics / Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado

All of our mass media have already announced, with a great fanfare, the VI Cuban Communist Party Congress—which will take place in April, 2011,—and the “Project of Economic and Social Policy Guidelines” which is already in debate within the party’s base and which will be analyzed during said congress. As we read this announcement, we were slapped by the irony of the propaganda and the call being made by those eternally in power.

Debate what? They have already drafted the 291 articles of the program! The rest is just pure formalism to do what they have always done, for over half a century: to give a party or governmental task to their members, so they, in turn, can go back to the people for more shallow and monotonous meetings and discussions, so the people are made to believe in their usual fictitious staged offering of theatrical and participative banquets, when, in fact, all they are giving people is mimicked insinuations of buffoonery.

Then the other part will come, the implementation, which can last… who knows how long! because they never set real deadlines, making use of their usual trick of delaying projects to use the opportunity at hand to make people happy and content. The hope of the citizenry placed on the roulette of their chronopolitics. Always playing in the same key: to gain time.

The appetite for openness of our society is getting bigger and bigger, and more visible, which is why a conceptual change on the part of the highest leaders in our nation is crucial; but they have always demonstrated, and still do, that they are far too conservative and inflexible when it comes to facing such a challenge. Thus, they are leaving us with just one imaginative equation: If the old powers cannot properly drive the government car nor deal with those urgent transformations our country has needed for decades—not only economic and social ones, but also political ones,— then what is left for us, and what is left for them to do anymore, those stubborn and static leaders of the Cuban government?

Translated by T

Spanish post
January 31 2011

31 AND POSTEANTE / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

31 and Keeping on keeping on…!

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

I remember the conspiratorial slogan. The eighties were coming to an end. The twentieth-century of Revolutionary Cuba was coming to its end. It was December. Another December. It was Robaina and his Ujaycee, spelled like that—UJC, Young Communist League—with the seven colors of the rainbow on all the rundown façades of this city. It was 1989. Another date that ended in a 9, the preferred number for any respected Revolution (reread history to corroborate it.) I had just enrolled at University of Havana to do a BA in biochemistry, free of cost, right by 25th Street at El Vedado, one of the quiet little streets that are, secretly, the most beautiful in the world. A landscape with trees and shade and small, slow-paced businesses whose shop assistants never got old, with love dripping freely from each gaze at the edge of the large avenues and institutions of the capital city.

The Berlin Wall was going down, Gorbachov was God-bachov, our god forbidden after the bullet that stoned Ochoa and half of the Ministry of the Interior (there were hundreds of detentions and sackings: soldiers have always been the first victims of that political power they perpetuate, even if unwillingly).

I was I. My name was already Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo. I was not even 20, for god’s sake. I was eternal. Skinny. Fearful. Distrustful, distant. I had not yet made love. Or hardly. Helpless and intelligent. Prone to getting sick, and healthy afterwards. Sagittariatic. I was not sure if I would have the strength to make it to 2000: so far away, so futuristic, such a lie in the official discourse of magazines shutting down in their wholesale bankruptcy during the general crisis of Socialism (that CGS — General Crisis in Socialism — no Marxism professor ever instilled in us). I was not sure I would ever be able to taste a half-syllable of truth. Pardon me. I remained silent for twenty years because of you and because of me. I was ugly. I was bad. I was another, others.

But now I turn 31. December goes by like a charitable nightmare. There isn’t a worse Cuba than that made from the same wood. Of such a little slogan on consignment, “31 and Forward,” not even forgetfulness remains. Its author was defenestrated when Fidel was still alive, like all other Cuban officials, respected or not. Faith passed away. We were left alone, faithless. It’s nice.

With all the oil of America and those enormous air-conditioned Chinese buses, but alone. It’s beautiful. Raúl as residue, as inertia, as the rhetoric of the red tape to nowhere. The Castro of catharsis. We are still so young, going on 40 and still so young. That is, if we have lived at all. They kidnapped our time. We were exiled. They tattooed our genes with “outside” kills, and “inside” redeems, and we wanted to kill ourselves. Anything to not participate in that false feast in which this country didn’t sur-vive but sur-died, funereally. We left. We rented ourselves for just a while, no more. We would come back eventually, when death had taken care of cleaning up a bit those high positions of our imaginary nation. And we also stayed behind, some of us.

We humiliated ourselves for a while, another while, no more. We would eventually talk to one another, when fear had left our bones, tomorrow or in the following millennium. Or, for example, now, when December 2010 is ending and we are sad but free, and that desperation makes us unique and beautiful like a cosmic race, somewhat comical, and each one extends blank hands to the brother who loves us from so far away, and we tell each other the exceptional experience of the horror of a history without end. 31 and going.. and going good!

2011 is the year of the newest Cuba. That Cuba where we will need to wrap ourselves in a lot of courage so we can avoid killing one another like dogs at the Tienanmenville Square Motherland. Where we’ll need to come out of the closet we all let ourselves be boxed into by too much State or Exile. Neither the totalitarian State nor the totalitarian Exile exist. It’s I, you, we, all of you who exist. Nastiness among Cubans is done with. 2011 is now or never. If we don’t deserve our motherland, our patria, then many blogs will need to be deleted and we need to turn our attention to talking about some other topic.

The twenty first-century cannot go by with us still going on with our little freedom histrionics. We are not eternal. Soon we are going to die, perhaps before those in high positions (death is petty). 2011 is to be lived from this same line in atrocious freedom. Being I, being you, being all of you, being us. Please. What mediocre vice minister can stop such a march? What tinpot premier can scold when all the words in Cuba rebel and reveal themselves like new, shiny, exquisite, sonorous light? Even pain itself will be a virgin and thrilling pasture. Long live life, Cuba! Even a life without the burden of so very many decrepit Cubas! But may I, and you, and all of you and we live forever! There is a Cuba after Cuba. There are Cubans before Cuba, and Cubans after Cuba.

Translated by T

31 December 2010

Chronos at the Service of Politics

All of our mass media have already announced, with a great fanfare, the VI Cuban Communist Party Congress—which will take place in April, 2011,—and the “Project of Economic and Social Policy Guidelines” which is already in debate within the party’s base and which will be analyzed during said congress. As we read this announcement, we were slapped by the irony of the propaganda and the call being made by those eternally in power.

Debate what? They have already drafted the 291 articles of the program! The rest is just pure formalism to do what they have always done, for over half a century: to give a party or governmental task to their members, so they, in turn, can go back to the people for more shallow and monotonous meetings and discussions, so the people are made to believe in their usual fictitious staged offering of theatrical and participative banquets, when, in fact, all they are giving people is mimicked insinuations of buffoonery.

Then the other part will come, the implementation, which can last… who knows how long! because they never set real deadlines, making use of their usual trick of delaying projects to use the opportunity at hand to make people happy and content. The hope of the citizenry placed on the roulette of their chronopolitics. Always playing in the same key: to gain time.

The appetite for openness of our society is getting bigger and bigger, and more visible, which is why a conceptual change on the part of the highest leaders in our nation is crucial; but they have always demonstrated, and still do, that they are far too conservative and inflexible when it comes to facing such a challenge. Thus, they are leaving us with just one imaginative equation: If the old powers cannot properly drive the government car nor deal with those urgent transformations our country has needed for decades—not only economic and social ones, but also political ones,— then what is left for us, and what is left for them to do anymore, those stubborn and static leaders of the Cuban government?

Translated by T

Spanish post
January 31 2011

Brief History of Maternal Wisdom

 

I still remember how, as a teenager during the ’70s, my mother would give me sex education lessons: “Open your eyes wide and keep your legs shut tight,” was the verdict. A male-chauvinist invitation to my development, burdened by the prejudices of ancient moral concepts and different inheritances from other cultures and from our own Hispanic roots.

Back then, as had been the case since remote times, men—who, as opposed to women, could choose their partners—were entitled to a prize when they married. There were times when they would even receive gifts if they married a damsel, which more than discrimination was an affront. Incredibly so, in the Cuba of the ’70s, the idea that men needed to be awarded their partner’s virginity through marriage or nuptials still existed. Women must remain virgins until marriage, adults and believers would say back in the day.

Supposedly the woman would acquire her name and her representation in society through the husband, and he, in turn, would acquire her hymen and the innocence of a consort, not to mention the multiple and different functions the lady of the house would eventually undertake, (and without the actual help of the husband, due to the scourge of male-chauvinism), so we can reaffirm—something that is evident and many have pointed out already—that the male gender, through marriage, always gained much more than just a life partner.

During my early childhood I heard expressions such as “they married behind the Church” in clear allusion to people who had sex outside of marriage. “Bought on credit” would imply the same. In other words, such people had “played around” or “done little things” regarding their mutual commitment before actually “signing the papers.”

Other warnings would include “after what’s been taken, nothing is left of what was promised,” to warn of men “who promised villas and castles” with the sole purpose of “cleaning their gun“… So I would worriedly wonder what size was that gun, and, for a long time, I would go into utter hiding if someone took an interest on me; that is, until biology and physiology imposed themselves…

In 1989 my husband and I joined the ranks of opposition, and by then, the maternal litany was “open your eyes wide and keep your mouth shut tight,” because, if Rafa and I were imprisoned, what would happen to our children? It was a recurrent expression up until last year, when she traveled to the United States and was able to stay.

Even so, from La Yuma, she still calls and insists I too should leave, repeating her ancient script of the neglected housewife, neglected by the male-chauvinism that defined the society of her time, and which she reformulates, adjusts and reapplies according to the circumstances. All my life I have been chased by a set of words that constitute a set-phrase: “Keep your legs wide open and keep your eyes shut tight,” Or was it the mouth? Or was it keep your mouth shut and open your eyes wide? Who cares! In any case, I am a grown woman now, and I refuse to renounce what has defined my passage through this world: to do what my civic conscience dictates me.

That mother of mine just never got it that I decided to skip the Anglo salutation (Hi) and go straight to the motions, disregarding any moral etiquette that, even if in an ever-decreasing fashion, still permeated my youth. She never understood—and it seems she never will—that I am a transgressor when it comes to anything I deem unfair, and she has still not come to terms with accepting who I am.

The prejudices I have mentioned here fortunately have disappeared from society, and my poor mother reached her old age riveted by the discrimination and humiliation of centuries, and remains lodged at the edge of fear. These days I don’t refute her opinions, I don’t fight her; I limit myself to replying, half-caustic and half-joking, in allusion to her old litany: Let’s shut the doors tight to any expression of intolerance and open our eyes wide to the world, Mommy! (because it’s never too late….).

Translated by T

January 31 2011

This is Not the Novel of the Revolution (6) / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

(…CHAPTER 6…)

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

A Cuban woman kills herself. She leaps like a disoriented bird from her apartment at FOCSA, that dwarf skyscraper inherited from an equally dwarfed Capitalism. Alienating. The empty swimming pool gets some moistness once again after decades and decades of collective neglect.

A merchant from Nuevo Vedado adds some red hair dye to the tomato-less tomato purée that he will later sell at a State agro-market where soldiers’ wives will go with their children. The police arrest him on a Sunday. The merchant claims that there are no toxic substances, only toxic ways to employ them. He claims his innocence in regard to his dying of tomato-less tomato.

A beggar asks me for a peso. I give it to him. Every day I hand out dozens of pesos among the local destitute community.

Ipatria punches me with a closed fist. I do the same to her. I hug her. I spit blood and ask her to forgive me. I don’t really know exactly why, but I ask her to forgive me. Nothing of this should have been real.

Alive. I am alive. Like the off-key roosters in Lawton’s backyards.

To sing to him in the morning. What an image. How many octosyllables must have been rhymed in Cuba following such hoaxes? The morning announces itself with a trill. With the rooster’s song. Quiquriquí. Cock-doodle-doo. Arroz con país. Rice and country.

Everything rhymes. Everything fits inside décimas and seguidillas and slogans and headlines. Everything is ritual, rhetoric of the Revolution.

A million bees buzz in my ears. An army of scorpions in my temple. Crustaceans under my cheekbones and acid reptiles in my sternum. A zoo of tiny lies, so as not to name the truth.

I die. I am dying. Like pigs unsuccessfully challenging the neighborhood knives.

My telephone has an international outlet. 119, world. 34, Spain. I dial JAAD’s cell number.

It rings. I hang up. To hell with the Stepmotherland.

A morning smoke fills the corridor of my wooden house. Steam, dew. The beauty of these cyclical lines builds up pressure. Truth resounds in my veins. Daybreak, agony. Knock-knock, who was it?

Orlando lays down.

It’s nice to imagine him in vertigo from the male-female roofbeams, lying on the bedspread in shadows, a body so immaculate and horizontal.

A phosphorescent Orlando. The hair mat like seaweed. Medusa about to be reborn a corpse. Orlando, aphasic.

It is unimaginable to imagine him at this hourless hour, five-something in the Cuban dawn.

Orlando turns face-down. He curls up. A fetus with no consonants. Oao. And interjection with no vowels. Rlnd.

Reiterative until exhaustion. Unrecognizable.

His man buttocks, human, devouring the rest of his nudity. The remains of his muteness.

Orlando has no hands. His arms are buried under his rickety body, under his ideal-athlete biology, under his perfect skin full of irregularities. Patches, spots, crevices, pimples, scars, biopsies.

Orlando dances.

His back arches itself. His spine swells, his legs stretch until tendons burst from desire.

Orlando moans. He collapses. He makes a nest out of sperm and bed sheets. A bundle of scents accumulated under the coldness of the false winter coming in in strips through the louvers.

He lays exhausted.

It is natural to assume he is not asleep. That death is as deceitful as dreams. That Orlando has given out a slight, imperceptible whinny of pain and has magisterially stopped breathing.

Translated by T

February 6 2011

The World is a Mess / Rebeca Monzo

That’s what people in my planet usually say when someone, timidly, dares to voice any sort of criticism in the public media regarding anything that affects us all.

But the truth is that the world is, indeed, a mess. Only a few weeks ago, Tunisian protests began due to the high costs of food and gas. Very soon these protests made clear the long and excessive rule of the Tunisian political leader. And very soon, neighboring countries followed; presently, mass protests have been ongoing in Egypt, where the demonstrations are increasingly heating up.

It was Mubarak’s opponents who first took to the streets: men, women and even children peacefully demanding the resignation of their president. There, the origins of the protests were similar to the Tunisian ones. Yet the stubbornness of a ruler who has been in power for over three decades has come to the forefront, and what initially was taking place peacefully and in an orderly fashion has become unstable: now the supporters of the regime have begun to counterattack and, for the first time, we are witnessing abuses, violence, Molotov cocktails, showers of stones from rooftops, aggression to foreign journalists, deaths and hundreds of injuries. The civilized world asks for a peaceful transition and the creating of a new government. It wasn’t long before Mubarak’s counterpart in Yemen got the message and, sensibly, he has already declared he will not run for reelection and that he will not nominate his son as his successor.

In the meantime, here in our continent, the leader of our neighboring Bolivarian brother, proclaimed that not only he will celebrate his twelve years in power, but that he also plans to celebrate another twelve, and then another twelve, and more and more after that, boasting about his illustrious intelligence.

And meanwhile, I, unwillingly, have caught myself remembering that old saying from my grandma: “When you see your neighbor’s turban burn, soak your beret.”

My friends, the world is, indeed, a mess.

Translated by T

February 4 2011