Translating Cuba

We know that the trial of Angel Carromero — the Spaniard who was driving the car in when Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero were killed — will be held in Bayamo, 450 miles east of Havana. But we still don’t know when it will begin. Although Friday, August 31, was mentioned, the fact is that there has been no official notification. Diplomatic sources expect that the trial “will be held soon, but for now, there’s no date.”

The leader of the youth wing of the Spanish People’s Party (PP) is charged with reckless homicide and the prosecutor has asked for a prison sentence of seven years. According the official Cuban media version, Carromero was responsible for the accident that killed the two Cuban dissidents on July 22. The island press release stressed that Carromero was supposedly speeding on a road under repair and that this was the principle cause of his losing control of the car and hitting a tree.

Thus, he will be judged based on Article 177 of the current Penal Code, where it establishes that “the driver of a vehicle who, while breaking the laws and regulations governing transportation causes the death of a person, incurs the penalty of privation of liberty of from one to ten years.”

Nevertheless, the family of the leader of the Christian Liberation Movement does not accept the official explanation of the facts and has asked for an independent investigation.

Since the prosecution’s sentencing request was announced a few weeks ago, Carromero’s case has entered a stage of maximum discretion on the parts of both the Cubans and the Spanish, who have maintained silence with regards to the press. Various diplomatic sources consulted preferred to continue that reserve and remain “silent until the trial.”

The Spanish government is hoping that once the trial is concluded, Havana will expel the young politican or follow the treaty between the two governments regarding the serving of sentences. In that case, Carromero could serve his time in Spanish territory. However, we are far from knowing the final outcome.

It is likely that the ruling will not be disseminated immediately after the trial, but be delayed until after sentencing, which would mean waiting several days before knowing the outcome. Already, he has been in custody 40 days since the incident occurred.

Amid such secrecy, it is very difficult to confirm when the trial at the Granma Provincial Court will begin. I traveled there this Thursday and can confirm that, as August 31 dawned over Bayamo, the city appeared quiet. The early hours of the day began, in the heat of August, with the preparations for the start of the school year.

Numerous news agencies have traveled to Bayamo, intending to attend the trial, but it’s likely it will be held behind closed doors. Several passersby interviewed were unaware the trial was going to be held at the court there. However, they seemed to be aware of the events of July 22 which took the lives of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize winner, Oswaldo Paya, and his colleague in the struggle Harold Cepero.

Given the political background of the Carromero case, there is a visible anticipation in the international community and among island’s dissident activists as to what may happen in this case — quite complex and surrounded by questions.

31 August 2012

People tend to repeat actions and strategies that were successful, be it as individuals or as groups. Even governments, such as Cuba’s, sometimes show little creativity and don’t escape this facile practice of repeating and “taking hold” of well-used — and sometimes abused — tactics.

Thus, through the years, we have witnessed how from campaign to campaign — one of the synonyms of this vocabulary is “mission,” which the Chavez government in Venezuela uses — they steal time and resources from the country and the whole people. With their known skills and control for “spreading rumors” in society, they made us, and still make us, believe what is most convenient to their interests.

So, they divided families, and as if that rupture weren’t sufficient, they verbally abused and even humiliated those who wanted to leave Cuba. I remember many of the promises we were made as children, of the triumphalist utopias that never came true, of those “Three Kings” of social justice who never arrived. They atrophied our ability the right to oppose, to choose among several parties –or none — and they blockaded freedoms.

The conceived of the “Havana cordon” as a coffee plantation lost by whim and improvisation. They conceived the 10 Million Ton Sugar Harvest to improve the financial situation in Cuba and turned the entire nation to this effort. Then, more and more projects failed, campaigns failed — like a strong election campaign, but with only one candidate. From the perpetual deepening 53-year crisis — euphemistically called “the Special Period” — they created the “rectification of errors and negative tendencies” program to give hope to people of good will.

As time went on the dictatorial government had their cadres and society immersed in this new program. Then came the “perfection of business,” another gap of several years without questions because they are working to improve everything; and the result is more of the same: another period of mythological manipulation, propaganda and super-politicization of 360 degrees, which led us nowhere. And what happened to the Energy Revolution? Why is our electric service still cut off?

The saddest thing is that all these deceptive tasks and plans that they offer society have no deadlines. Unlike any serious proposal, they do not set dates or stages to achieve certain project milestones. And time passes and no one asks — much less publicly — about the results of the program.

With time the rhythm of these crippled plans is lost; among the corruption and inefficiency everything slows down and they come up with a new plan to reestablish the initial enthusiasm, a process like a video game, with bonds of permanence.

It seems there is no schedule or timer to the nonsense cooked up by the Cuban historical leadership, despite their many failures and setbacks. It seems that these repetitive manipulative schemes are sociological probes that continue to drain their failures, the wheel with which they draw water allowing them to stay afloat.

When his health stopped the “eternal guide” from continuing to lead the country and he ceded the post to his brothers, rumors of Raul reforms created expectations in society. But in the last two years the hereditary president has only proposed the Guidelines of the Economic and Social Policy of the Party and the Revolution. He repeats the old procedure of introducing the demagogic catheter to ensure his continuity at the head of Cuba and welfare and positioning of his family members.

In February Raul Castro will complete his first five official years of leading the government and the national media has already announced elections in October. Who will be elected? As dictatorships always propose their continuation, before the event everyone is already sure of the results: there won’t be any surprises.

August 30 2012

It’s sad to see the “deputies” applauding every stupidity that originates in the puppet theater, and how many respectable, and some admired figures — very few are left — are unaware that history will remember them as accomplices to the Totalitarian Government.

Not to be forgotten is the consistent attitude maintained by the painter Pedro Pablo Oliva, who was expelled because of his personal opinions from the “Assembly,” where the people had put him, where one is supposed to repeat the institutional unlikely tongue twister they present as “democratic socialism.” In reprisal they seized and closed his Home Workshop, a response of the dictatorship so that those “parliamentarians” won’t forget that here there is no democracy, only absolute obedience to the whims of the Castro brothers.

The truth is that at the last meeting of the “delegated representatives of the people”, the artist Kcho, (or perhaps his intentions were to venture into the humor and therefore I didn’t understood what he said), asked something stupid that I won’t venture to repeat again, and until that time he had been acceptable, because everyone’s opinion has worth, that is the teaching that they themselves have not learned.

The sad, dramatic, the unacceptable, is what the other “lawmakers” will give a standing ovation to, rising to their feet, as a way of shouting to the world “we are stupid and all of us are incapable of having individual opinions,” because you can’t conceive that there are so many cowards together, that no one has the courage to confront the slanders they perpetrate there behind the backs and against the people, forgetting that their names will be part of the disrepute and history will not forgive them.

The meetings of the “National Assembly of Cuba”, have become a place of sleep and overall apathy. We can see this simply observing what happens when the television cameras pan over those stale faces, struggling not to make their lethargy obvious, faces awakened only by the applause of some “parliamentary pilots” whose job is to warn them when they should be clapping or raising their hands in the unanimous vote that so shames us, and which is the living proof of the lack of individual thought in those instances.

Apparently we will have to continue to live with such “councilors”, only Fidel, Raul Castro and God, know why and what they are there for, but what most Cubans do know is that they are never going to benefit the people they claim to represent.

August 30 2012

She is a woman alone, devout Catholic from a famous neighborhood on the outskirts, and lays to rest all her dead in a family pantheon. The Columbus Cemetery, sooner rather than later, will reunite her with them and with God. Holy word. The sadness of life is not eternal.

Alas, now the meeting will have to wait until the resurrection programmed win the final trailer of the Bible. Apocubalypse. Because a few weeks ago she discovered that the remains of her eight beloved corpses had disappeared. Necrophagia, period. Not a molar not a hair nor a belt buckle nor the sole of a shoe to comfort her. They stole from her the imagined dead of her memory. Her biography is worth nothing. Dead woman walking, from one office to another of the Cuban necropolis, where they all take her for stark raving mad, despite (or precisely because of) her brandishing the stamped papers of eight interments, exhumations signed by the then administrator (today buried or exiled, it’s all the same), annual receipts of punctual payment, among other out-of-date formalities.

To make matters worse, the solitary lady is terrified and incapable of telling of her horror in public (the terror is simply this muteness, this impossibility of speaking: it happened to me). The victim does not want to politicize this vandalism. She prefers, instead, to place total confidence in the Cuban burial system. She appeals to the relevant officials (the same ones who robbed her). And she has even written to Caridad Diego and Eusebio Leal, a fine pair of confe$$or$ for her unspeakable, almost indecent, pain.

When I begin to tell this horrifying story, to stoke the indignation and chaos in Havanada, it turns out I’m a jerk. The families of many of my friends cheerfully share similar stories. It’s not the end of the world by any means. The provincial cemeteries are a haven for thieves. Almost everyone, at some point, has been robbed of one or two little corpses buried in the holy earth of the Revolution (owned, incidentally, by the Office of the Historian, who is owned in turn the State Council: perhaps our lady was right to choose them as her addressees and to reject me).

It is a thing of witches with the complicity of corrupt officials and undertakers (those who dropped the coffin of Oswaldo Paya Sardinas, with new uniforms and professionally trained muscles, there aren’t any starving employees at the cemetery, rather a much more interior ministry: in fact they are still guarding his grave who knows if it’s to profit from his democratizing spoils).

There are a thousand and one tragedies cooked with the seasoning of the dead (the children would be the most coveted, along with the Chinese, that delicacy). But not a single on of these recipes is to stir the Good: we Cubans wear ourselves out only to further destroy our existence, never to free ourselves or cure ourselves of Evil. With this rotted cuttings of flesh and bone fearful spells are created to kill other Cubans in turn, in a revolting spiral that ethnological beauticians of Catauro magazine would call, “the crucible of Cubanness.”

For the moment, especially if you don’t live on the Island because they banished you or you fled years ago, I challenge you to look in your family vault. At best you’re missing an aunt of your soul, poor thing, who you helped with vitamins and minerals until the end of her slow and irreversible final illness. At worst you no longer have parents or are an orphan of the third generation because: 1) they really died, 2) they were fucking stolen, 3) you don’t know it when you humble yourself to ask for an Entry Permit to put a flower on no one.

Perhaps because of this even the beggars are asking to be cremated in Cuba. Renouncing God’s wrapping so as not to end up poisoning some neighbor in a devil’s whorehouse among drums and alcohol. But not event that. The dust always works. And is affordable.

Compatriot of open-air corpses, forgive my insistence with a morbid little classic horror film, but, have you checked your dead?

From Penultimos Dias

August 30 2012

An article about so-called “subsidies”—recently approved to help families who have housing problems, lack financial resources and are willing to rebuild or make repairs themselves —raises some questions. The article deals only with Pinar del Río, one of the provinces most affected in recent years by hurricanes that have passed through the nation’s frontiers.

It is reported that 12 million pesos have been budgeted, from which 357 families have benefitted so far, 133 repair or constructions projects have begun, and 231 people have acquired building materials at the point of sale. Of 952 subsidy applications, 357 have been approved (as previously mentioned) and 328 are being processed. This suggests that the remaining 252 have been denied, or are not being processed. So far, everything seems clear.

The first question arises over the report that more than 22,000 homes have been affected by hurricanes over the last decade. Assuming that 952 applications are approved (something very difficult to accomplish), that would leave 21,048 affected homes without coverage. In black and white terms this would mean that, if 952 cases were resolved this year, it would take an additional 21 years to resolve the rest. This assumes that there is no additional damage from future hurricanes.

Since this is an “orderly process” (which to me means lengthy and slow) and there is “rigorous control from the point of sale to completion,” according to the official interviewed, this suggests that the subsidy recipient must not only do the actual work, he must also accept the fact that bureaucrats from the various organizations involved in the process will control his every move. As if this were not enough, it is reported that “money from the subsidy may not be used to cover the costs of transporting building materials.” This raises another question. Is he supposed to carry the cement, concrete, iron rebar, etc. on his back and those of his friends and family?

When those who draft regulations know absolutely nothing about what they are regulating, these sorts of inconsistencies occur. Wouldn’t it be easier, after analyzing and approving each application, to hand the subsidy over to the beneficiary and let him—the person most concerned with solving his housing problem—use it as he sees fit without pointless interference? Would it cost so much to stop wanting to control everything?

Someone might point out that this is not the only way to solve the housing problem, that there are also bank loans. That is true, but just try to apply for one and you will see the vía crucis that awaits you, assuming you can even get it. I think the decision to grant subsidies is a just one, but if the bureaucratic impediments that currently accompany them are not removed, it is a program that will fail without accomplishing its objectives.

August 27 2012

The kitchen no longer smells of kerosene, nor are the walls black with soot, nor is alcohol needed to “warm up” the stove. The tenement no longer wakes up with the noise of the air valve stoking the fire, and the lady’s allergies are not set off by the stench of burning. The little window no longer vents a gray smoke, and the food doesn’t have that faint taste of fuel. She no longer fears falling asleep and having the flames crawl through the wooden door. Now, no…

Now the problem is the electricity bill. The rice cooker that they gave out five years ago and that has had to be repaired dozens of time. The stove that was handed out in those days of the so-called Energy Revolution which seems to voraciously swallow kilowatts. The Chinese refrigerator — a replacement given out for the old Frigidaires — which spends more hours thawing than freezing. In short, now her great concern arises from the excessive bill with the blue numbers that they slip under her door.

If, before, she spent her day in search of fuel, now her pension goes to the high costs of electricity. Using the stove and water heater at least three times a week, means she now has to allocate 80% of her retirement to pay for energy. It’s gone from one distressing difficulty to another desperate one. She exchanges a ceiling covered in soot for several days a month with no electricity because she can’t pay for it. Before she could complain, swear, scream at the stove, howl to the four winds because the damn burner wears her out. Now, no. Because it’s all been “the Comandante’s idea,” the “Comandante’s program.”

29 August 2012

The last conga just went by. The street is half-lit, dirty, with remnants of viewing platforms and dismantled stalls, all now barely but a memory. The 2012 carnival has come to an end.

Nothing about the city’s atmosphere gives any indication of what has just transpired. Only those living close to Havana’s Malecón have been witness to these impoverished evening festivities, with their large amounts of beer and rum, empty plates of rice with beans and slices of pork or chicken, and most notably widespread promiscuity. All this in an ever more restricted space of not much more than a few blocks.

How different from the carnivals of Havana’s distant past, which rivaled the most important in the world—Carnaval in Río de Janeiro, Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the very glamorous Carnival of Venice, to name a few—all of which took place in February and March before Lent.

In the case of ours there was a carnival atmosphere for months before the festivity itself. There were the competitions to choose the best poster, which would later provide that year’s theme, the sewing, the almost secret preparations of the floats that would represent the different groups sponsoring them, each with its own queen, and the rehearsals of various neighborhood carnival organizations. The entire city prepared and decorated for the much anticipated event. The selection of the Queen and her Maids of Honor—renamed Estrella and Luceros, or Star and Shining Stars, after 1959—was the climax of these preparations. Large photo portraits of them adorned the display windows of the main retail stores.

As a child I very much enjoyed these celebrations, always spent with my family and usually in a box near the Capitolio. Once the parade had ended and the last float and its crew had turned the corner at the Fountain of the Indian to return to the starting point near the Hotel Riviera, we children ran into the street to gather up the streamers and make big balls out of them, all under the watchful eyes of our parents. In general, though, it was all very safe. No one got drunk.

After the 1960s these celebrations gradually lost their splendor. There were no more sponsorships. The state had taken over everything. I remember one day at my workplace the union representative came by to announce that Estrella would be chosen at a general meeting that afternoon to represent us and the sugar cane harvesters at carnival. They told all of the girls who worked there to fix ourselves up a bit before going to the meeting. To my astonishment I was chosen to represent the company. Afterwards I had to compete with ladies from the ministry’s other businesses, later with those from the trade unions, and finally at the sports stadium, where in the end I won. It all happened very quickly, as though it were a dream.

I can assure you, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was the quite possibly the last year in which there were luxurious floats. The theme of ours was the bottom of the sea. Now, looking back on it after all these years, it strikes me that it was like a portent of what awaited us—to touch bottom, as we are doing now.

August 29 2012

When in Cuba we say “the system” we are referring to a circumstance which, even though we recognize it as abnormal, arbitrary and unnatural — the condition of being on an Island and being subjected to a “political-ideological education” experiment, as well as the terror — can be, for many, unbearable.

There are many families of university professionals who retire to their home life. They manage — God only knows how — to maintain a standard of living that they find acceptable and good. They don’t recognize the abnormal situation other than when they think they should earn more money and have more comforts, increasingly retired and amoral. Because in Cuba it seems that the native character lacks some essential, something they had in Tunisia, thanks to solidarity with the tragedy of another people came out and protested and demanded real change. Change of government and of political orientation, a change toward democracy.

We all have our limits. The limits of fear and the instinct of preservation.

What is more disheartening is to see some who can contrast the “system,” leaving frequently for abroad, or having more information, and all they care about is earning more money and maintaining their comfortable lifestyle. They’re indifferent to the rest of the issue.

A friend of K, who lives a few blocks from the house where Laura Pollan lived, has a son she doesn’t allow outside — naturally — during the acts of repudiation against the Ladies in White. She’s doing the right thing because the people who gather to scream under direction can reach dangerous extremes, but the important thing is that she also, from an instinct of preservation, stays behind the door, recognizing what’s wrong when she says to K, “I have to see what they do to the Ladies in White,” and this scandalizes her although later she bites her tongue.

The workers of the repressive organs take as a given the current government and that things won’t change in Cuba. Such that the government counts on the complicity of everyone, including — as much as I hate it — my own complicity!

Within the Cuban jails, throughout these 53 years, there have been acts of sadism — physical and psychological torture — executions by the regime’s gunmen, State Security agents, workers in the Ministry of the Interior; all of them “good revolutionaries.” Of the same school as the “heroes” of those melodramas in the style of “The Silence That Had to Be,” those with which “the people” have identified.

One of the things that characterizes opponents in a totalitarian system is the need to act as visibly as possible. So the purpose of these tortures doesn’t seem to have been to find out hidden things. The sense of torture in Cuba is to demoralize the opponents of the regime, make them doubt their sense of strength and force them to withdraw.

The ways in which they exercise cruelty against another human being, legitimated by a government that persecutes the political opposition, can’t comfort us in its differences: what happened in Chile under the Pinochet regime, which the Cuban people were so sensitive to, never should have happened, and what happened and is happening in Cuba under the current regime — to which they have given the name revolution, and that confuses many — should not be happening.

There are many witnesses. Those whom they’ve taken prisoner and the resisters in prison who describe it as a martyrdom of every single day, to destroy you as a person, demoralize you, a living death, violate all your rights with frightening arbitrariness, as well as extreme situations which I’ve heard from Hugo Damián Prieto Blanco who continues fighting; from Ányer Antonio Blanco Rodríguez, so young and yet so old like the Iron Marti; the doctor Oscar Elias Biscet who despite all he suffered in prison for defending the human rights of this people, violated every day in its 30 articles, gave me a lesson in forgiveness and Christian love to its ultimate consequences that destroyed my sleep.

The dilemma of every Cuban could be to obey, making ourselves immoral, or to resist, recovering something more than our voice. The State represses because it doesn’t look kindly on the resisters, the dissidents, in a “world” (system) of great ideas that claim to have been constructed “by and for the good of humanity and the disadvantaged.” It would be a good title for a book of testimonies: How ‘the good’ have executed and inflicted pain.

Armando Valladares told in his eyewitness book of political imprisonment in Cuba, which he called “Against All Hope,” that after being beaten and seeing how some of his companions were bayoneted to death, he came to find that they had poured buckets of excrement and urine on them.

The world was scandalized by the revelations of torture from the Abu Graib prison, but the world has had the testimony of Valladares for years and there hasn’t been sufficient international denunciation to liberate Cuba.

Do they believe that these guys who govern Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Syria, wouldn’t give society something in exchange, while to stay in power they commit crimes against humanity?

The native citizen, or of any place in the world, that lets their conscience be bribed with a school or a free hospital is no more worthy than those who sell their silence for a sum of money.

The excuse that the prison is closed and the bosses pretend to be decent people and they say it’s a lie that Cuba violated human rights, is another way of bribing the conscience with being too lazy to find the truth.

This morning (assuming I can post this soon) we learned that on the eve of the first anniversary of the “Patriotic Union of Cuba” (UNPACU), Jose Daniel Ferrer’s house is being assaulted by the political police. Jose Daniel Ferrer is the leader of this organization that undertakes peaceful protests, in the streets of Santiago de Cuba, against the government and for the Release of the political prisoners. As the telephone company is state-owned, the  telephone lines of UNPACU members have been disabled. So there is no communication.

I am not satisfied with sitting here, writing the same thing one more time that almost the whole world already knows and when I finish this oration I’m going to season the beans, I being no less indolent that those people who hear news about repression in Ciba and don’t do anything and “season the beans” as if nothing was happening.

We Cubans need to become moral subjects, whose consciences hurt when we see any kind of abuse and who set aside fear of death or believing in God, it hurts us when it happens to others as if it were happening to us. It is in our “Cuban” egotism — resident on the Island or in exile — where the dictatorship nests.

Are the zombies within the walls worse than the mere spectator zombies who live all over the world and know a closer approximation of what it is to live in Freedom?

August 28 2012