I put up this post this past Friday, but the WordPress goblins made it disappear. With my scarce connection time and my barely adequate technical knowledge, I wasted a copious amount of time looking for responses in a forum, and along the way, restoring this post. Management having failed, I’ll do this the old way: by repeating it.

The Revoliquera* Experience

If I ask a youth with occasional internet access which page referring to Cuba he visits, almost certainly he’ll respond with Facebook. It doesn’t matter that it’s not Cuban. The social network par excellence keeps him up to date with his artists and favorite athletes and let’s him meet up with his school friends, who today can be the same in Miami as in Madrid or Moscow.

But if I consult a young fan of technology or video games, or who is just growing out of his first childhood, the more sure is that he’ll answer that his favorite page is Revolico, the site of national sales & buying, born from the lack of a physical space inside Cuba to accommodate a classified ad.

It’s impossible to walk down the street and not see bills posted on phone poles announcing electronic musical concerts or house parties. On bus walls appear printed announcements of exchanges, nor does a car attract any attention with a cardboard box behind the windshield with hurried letters that read: “FOR SALE”. The yellow pages of the telephone book increasingly recognize the emerging private services sector, but even there the space is insufficient to insert a perishable or offensive ad. Here is where the online note triumphs.

No matter the real estate market, where the false image of an enormous (and overpriced) residential listing is for sale, poking around on revolico.com reveals that Cubans aren’t too interested in whether or not the government is going to build socialism; but meanwhile, each provides their own management style, and for some it doesn’t seem to be going badly. The productive forces of this country are in the starting blocks waiting for the starter’s gun to go off, and Revolico is becoming pre-competition training.

And if you don’t have access to the internet, that is no longer a problem. Inside a weekly or monthly 500 GB pack you can find an offline version of the popular site that now permits even the opening of links to photos; “It’s exactly the same as seeing it on the Internet,” a neighbor told me who copied her own version from me last week. As it is often forbidden to access Revolico from work and school, or the page won’t open and is redirected to the searcher, disturbed souls have posted alternative addresses and proxies that lead to the revoliquera (messy) experience.

Office services, translations, language classes, wedding dress rental, jobs, loans with interest, clowns, quotes … that amalgam makes up the pages of Revolico, a much better known site within Cuba than Generation Y, and more visited than CubaDebate.

Translator’s note: “Revoliquera” is an adjective roughly meaning “messy” created from the word “revolico” which in Cuban slang means “a mess”; it is the name of the Cuban site that is the equivalent of “Craigslist.”

Translated by: JT

13 May 2013

El Sexto is raided at his home this afternoon at 1:15 pm, according to Alexandra his wife and owner of the apartment, who learned of it through an email from her dad who lives downstairs and saw men and women in uniform and in plainclothes, accompanied by 2 neighbors from the CDR [Committee for the Defense of the Revolution], and a major from MININT [Ministry of the Interior], in all about 5 people, they showed him a search warrent and confiscated his laptop, spray paints and all the works they found and took him away in a patrol car. As of now with destination unknown.

Translator’s note: This post and the following ones (now with earlier time stamps) together form a report on El Sexto’s (“the Sixth” — Danilo Maldonado) arrest, the search of his home and the confiscation of his belongings.

18 May 2013

El Sexto – Danilo Maldonado

– 8 mini cards in the name of Danilo Maldonado – 1 Canon camera – 1 Thinkpad laptop – 15 virgin discs – 76 yellow cards with the writing “I determine” 4 signed by El Sexto – 4 recorded discs – 2 recorded discs with photos and video. [Identifies Danilo as "unemployed"]

37 spray paints, multiple colors and brands – 4 templates to paint – A dossier of the Salbutomal (asthma medicine) project – 1 book of curriculum vitae – 3 DVDs – 3 canvases (of paintings)

1 Samsung cellphone – 14 cards with paintings and sketches – 15 canvases with paintings, 2 Voices Magazines, 4 photos with counterrevolutionary elements

[same as above]

20 May 2013

Undesirable

Fear is a role. You play it how you want. [After el Sexto's t-shirt with Laura Pollan was ripped off him by State Security, he had her face tattooed on his skin, followed by those of other recently deceased heroes of the freedom and democracy movement.]

Faces of the new Cuba. Benedict XVI was in Cuba this week. There, where change is beaten among the Castro reforms and the demands of the famous dissidents, there are also more anonymous people who from their commercial undertakings, their rap music, or their graffiti, modify the face of the island. This is a tour of this new Havana labyrinth.

20 May 2013

Tomas Estrada Palma

With my little note I just want to remember those who wrote history bequeathing the Cuban nation a date that today unites Cubans inside and outside the island.

Independence Day is one of the many festivals they have tried to rip from the memory of our nation. Like they have also ripped from one of our capital’s main arteries the name of the person who was the first president of that fledgling republic, leaving only his shoes and an empty pedestal never occupied by any Cuban.

Palma’s empty pedestal, only his shoes remain. Photo: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Don Tomas Estrada Palma is a man worth remembering like those who drew their machetes for a May 20 that was entered into history as a day of glory. I know this date has been erased by those who have tried to show a history not told by our ancestors. The nascent Republic of 1902 is still worthy of being celebrated and is one of the indelible marks of our identity.

Blessed be they day of May 20, the birth date of our Republic of Cuba, island nation that jealously guards the key to the Gulf.

Today we have a Republic, today we have a Nation, today we have independence but our nation weeps to see the Cuban family disintegrate and see it abandoned to the whims of a few in olive-green who have been able to put themselves above all the interests of a group, that only cares for the throne and the perpetuation of its name.

20 May 2013

Angel Santiesteban

On September 2, 2011 I published the “SOS for Angel Santiesteban” in Cubanet, when despite his having been awarded multiple prizes by the regime itself, the Cuban government’s own political police were harassing the writer. In late 2012 Angel was sentenced to five years imprisonment after a show trial in which his ex-wife was used as a spearhead against him. I will not refer to details of the case because they are still circulating in various writings and in Santiesteban’s blog, but I will offer my personal impressions of this word artist.

Before personally coming to know the author of “Dreams of a Summer Day,” “The Children Nobody Wanted,” “Blessed are Those Who Mourn,” and “South: Latitude 13,” I read his books and listened to several anecdotes that reflected his temperament and satirizes the political situation in Cuba. It’s hard to forget some of the characters of his stories about prison and Cuba’s intervention in the wars of Africa. Perhaps the masterful design of these alienated beings who gallop through the pages of his works are the real cause of humiliating trial that attempted to annul his rebellion and the voice of this audacious man without masks.

As my son was Angel Santiesteban’s lawyer, I had the privilege of welcoming him to my home in Havana and chatting with him over a glass of water — Angel does not drink rum or coffee. We talked about literature and his family experience. Only once, when asked by one of his characters, did he reveal the traumatic imprint of his brief stay in prison before the age of 20, after being arrested on the northern coast while saying goodbye to a relative who tried to leave the island on a raft.

I met Santiesteban several times at the house of the blogger Yoani Sánchez and at cultural gatherings organized at the residence of the physicist Antonio Rodiles, leader of the Estado de Sats program. I remember that Angel barely took part in those debates and almost always sat at the end of the hall, far from poses and prominence poses but friendly with anyone who approached him. In the end he left in his car with 4 or 5 people whom he drove to, or closer to, their homes.

The last time we met was in front of the police station at Infanta and Manglar,  next to the “Fame and Applause” building, where fifty opponents demanded the release of Antonio Rodiles, arrested after the funeral of Oswaldo Paya Sardinas, who died in suspicious accident. We chatted there while Wilfredo Vallin and Reinaldo Escobar tried to negotiate with the Head of the Station, also surrounded by a gang of criminals who awaited orders from State Security officials to kick and drag opponents.

The judicial farce against Ángel Santiesteban reminds me of the famous narrator Reinaldo Arenas and the poets Heberto Padilla — imprisoned in 1971 — and Raul Rivero, sentenced in 2003, victims of a dictatorship that punishes free expression and promotes quietism and the complicit silence of the intellectuals.

19 May 2013

Photo Peter Deel

In the Republican Cuba each province had a governor and each municipality a mayor, who governed, in the case of the province with a Council of municipal mayors, and in the municipalities with a city council with councilors. The municipality was the local society organized politically to an extent determined by the necessary relations of vicinity, on a basis of financial capacity to meet the expenses of the government. It had autonomy, with powers to meet the peculiar collective needs of local society. The province was composed of the municipalities within its territory. So it was established in the Constitution of 1940.

From the year 1959, instead of perfecting what already existed, these structures were modified and, in the case of the municipality, which is what interests me, the mayor was replaced by a triumvirate of three commissioners, something also provided in the aforementioned Constitution, but with the number of commissioners in correspondence with the number of inhabitants in each municipality, rather than a fixed number for all.

As the experiment failed, due to the multiplicity of leaders, it was changed to just one, though with limited executive and financial power, and with the measures to be applied having to be approved or ordered by the central government.

In practice, the old town hall of municipal government became a mere administration. Then they experimented with the same dismal results, with the so-called JUCEI (Coordination, Operations and Inspection Boards, which were the municipal and provincial governing bodies). With the emergence of the People’s Power they thought that the problem would be resolved, looking to the experiences gained within the Republic and later, but these lessons were discarded, maintaining the inefficiency, now increased with the increase in bureaucracy.

The truly great problem is that, sitting on top of the existing bodies of government, both national as well as provincial and municipal, is the Party. It is no coincidence that every time there is a meeting of any of them, either the National Assembly or the provincial or municipal ones, the Party Plenary is held first and it establishes the scope and limits of what will be discussed and approve by the assemblies.

In this scheme, in reality the Party has the power, and of course it the Party that governs and the government (the People’s Power), are simply administrators. Herein lies its inability to solve problems, national as well as provincial and municipal. It is a duality similar to the two existing currencies where one, though it do not do so consciously, conspires against each other, because they occupy and act in the same small space.

In the capital this is the big problem, aggravated by the presence of the central government and its agencies and institutions, who influence and pressure the administration, which becomes an executor of the tasks of others, leaving its own tasks uncompleted.

The result is on view for all: broken streets and sidewalks without maintenance,  abandoned landscaping, chaotic garbage collection, terrible services of all kinds, buildings deteriorating and collapsing daily, poor health and other evils that affect citizens.

As long as our provincial and municipal governments do not have real, strong and resourceful leaders, who perform their duties as such, all this will be insoluble.

18 May 2013

Today is 118 years since the greatest and most timeless of all Cubans fell in combat: José Martí, “the Apostle of Independence.”

The system prevailing in our country for 54 years has been rebaptized him as the National Hero but I, like many, never liked that description, considering it inadequate for such a universal figure, and so we continue to call him what our parents and teachers taught us, when Cuba was a Republic.

The use and abuse of Martí’s thoughts and expressions, taken out of context and applied “conveniently” to reinforce concepts that have nothing to do with his ideology, have only provoked an almost involuntary rejection on the part of many of the citizens in our country, especially among the younger segments of the population, towards the figure of the Apostle, who sometimes even joke about him disrespectfully.

A man of letters, of peace and love, he became involved with weapons, possibly pressured by his own companions, falling mortally wounded, on his first day out on the battlefield without barely having had the opportunity to fight; and this was a man who was capable of uniting all Cubans under the same idea, man who was so desperately needed alive.

So many years after that event that is so sad for most Cubans, his ideas are still the compass that governs the desires of our politicians. Keeping alive our chimera of achieving, sooner rather than later, the chance to see our nation free and sovereign “with all and for the good of all” as Martí dreamed.

19 May 2013

To my readers:

And Telesur Says So

At first glance, it would seem that the Telesur TV channel — now live in Cuba — is the same as any other news program on national television. On Telesur, as in the regular channels in Cuba, the U.S. government is the great villain, enemy of peace and prosperity of the people, and equally villain are its allies, the government of Israel and the ever-evil “western powers.”

On Telesur, broadcast reports also indicate that the good-natured and just FARC vigilantes have the government of Juan Manuel Santos up against the ropes. He has been forced to sit at the negotiating table, while Bashar Al Assad is the paradigm of kindness for the Syrian people and the hope of Arab countries against Western domination.

Telesur shows how the hairy ear of the interventionist US imperialism hides behind all the conflicts of the world, with provocations against North Korea –- which for that reason has been forced to use the threat of nuclear war — or with its peculiar way of recruiting mercenaries to overthrow democratically elected governments around the world, mainly in Latin America.

Thus, for example, it could almost be said that there is no opposition in Venezuela, though in the recent elections it won almost half the electorate votes, but a fascist clique spurred from Washington, some of them Venezuelan congressional representatives, who had the audacity to “incite violence” when they were deprived of their right to speak and protest against it, the result of which was a brawl in which — curiously — those same “traitors” were the ones seriously injured by the violence of the ruling bloc.

All very simple, as in the old Western B-movies, the world is divided into good-just-because and bad-to-the-end.

This last weekend Telesur broadcast a report from China, where its correspondent in that country presented as a true gender advance that now Chinese women with larger incomes can have two children instead of the only child that the strict birth control stipulates. That is, couples with lower incomes than that officially established will not benefit from this change. Without a doubt, establishing social differences according to income is something that has become common in systems called “socialist.”

But Telesur is not exactly like Cuban TV, as some claim, because since, at the end of the day, it is a channel that broadcasts to the entire region, where the press is not the exclusive monopoly of governments, it is required to transmit images and events that occur daily in the world, and we know that images speak louder than words.

It doesn’t matter if figures and information are manipulated, the fact is that, for the first time, Cubans have seen and heard Barack Obama’s complete swearing-in speech of the oath of office, and we have also taken part onscreen in free and direct elections held legitimately in “sister countries,” such as Ecuador, Paraguay and even in Venezuela itself, complete with electoral campaigns, opposition, international observers, returns, complaints and all the ingredients of a democratic recipe that we have been denied for generations in our country.

In some twisted way, Telesur is a small chink in the boarded window of Castro’s totalitarianism. When there are contrasts, some light is cast. That is why so many Cubans watch some Telesur areas incredulous and in awe, such as a show called “Atomun” which, by detailing the latest technological advances that occur in the world, has the rare virtue of placing the natives of this island face to face with our enormous lack of computer technology and our appalling isolation compared to other XXI century societies which, paradoxically, have not had the advantages of half a century of “revolution.”

Whether they like it or not, Telesur reports to us from disinformation. And it appears that no one can say they are trying to deceive us. Their intentions to confuse are openly declared, even from their own presentation slogan: “Telesur, our North is the South.” And I say let whoever wants to be confused be confused.

Translated by Norma Whiting

10 May 2013

Photo from infolatam.com

For several days the inspectors of the Ministry of Labor and National Tax Administration Office (ONAT) in the Havana municipality of Cerro have been telling the self-employed workers who sell in the doorways of their homes in the area that they must dismantle their shelves and stands. The only way they can continue doing this work is if they move it inside their homes. And this option is open only to a few, mainly the owners of such dwellings. The rest, who have rented these doorway spaces for their work, will have no option other than to turn in their licenses as self-employed.

But those who can continue to offer their merchandise will not find their future path free of obstacles either. According to what some of these vendors of household items who work on Ayestaran Avenue in Cerro said, the inspectors told them they could not sell foreign clothing nor any article that had been acquired by the self-employed in the State retail market. The only things they will be allowed to sell are items the artisans have made themselves, as self-employed, such as tea towels, tablecloths, handkerchiefs and the like.

That provision makes it clear that the reason for the raid was not only about the public image; that is, to rid the streets and avenues of people crowding around the small traders, a kind of informal economy that proliferates in the cities of almost all of Latin America, and that the Castro regime has tried so hard to avoid.

The other target of this attack — and for some the main one — has been what the authorities classify as “resale.” In other words, the fact that these self-employed offered, at prices higher than the official ones, the same articles that would sell in the State stores, and which in many cases were in short supply in these establishments.

Of course, the higher prices were not due to the greed of the self-employed, but rather because of their not having a wholesale market where they can acquire their goods, so for them the retail price was their costs, and then they had to add a margin for profit to come to their selling price. Ah, but this was never understood by the hard-line Castroites, who wrote many letters to the newspaper Granma asking that these self-employed workers be done away with, calling them “unscrupulous elements who exploit the working people.”

And those who thought this action was confined to Cerro, learned of their error this past Wednesday, May 15. That day, starting early in the morning, a large group of inspectors, accompanied by a police brigade, blocked the doorways on Carlos III Avenue, in the municipality of Central Havana, where there was commercial activity.

A tour we made along that central avenue, in the section between Infanta and Belascoain streets, allowed us to see the magnitude of the repression: Empty stands, racks and shelves; doorways where yesterday life hummed, today mired in the peace of the grave.

This blow against the self-employed operates like a domino effect, not only because many sellers lose their licenses, but also because homeowners lose the rent they charged for the doorways. Thus, a significant group of people who had found a way to sustain themselves, are very likely to become homeless. One lady, who had to close her business, where her two sons sold things in a doorway on Ayestaran Avenue, said, “It seems that the authorities want the young people to have to steal to eat, and then they have a justification to put them in prison.”

And a friend, an economist by profession, who has been well aware of the changes implemented by President Raul Castro, was adamant about the indication of recurrence said, “With these people nothing is certain. It’s one step forward and two steps back.”

Orlando Freire Santana, the author, was born 1959 in Matanzas, Cuba; he has a degree in economics, is an award-winning author of essays and novels, and is an independent journalist reporting from Havana.

Translated from Diario de Cuba

17 May 2013

Miriam Celaya, Yoani Sanchez, Laritza Diversent in Stockholm today, 20 May 2013