From Tatlin’s Whisper to Tatlin’s Cry / Yoani Sanchez

Images from the first Havana edition of "Tatlin's Whisper"
Images from the first Havana edition of “Tatlin’s Whisper”

Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 31 December 2014 – Those of us who participated in that first edition of Tatlin’s Whisper in Havana will never forget that minute of freedom in front of the microphone that would cost us years of official insults. The project to reenact the performance, but this time in the Plaza of the Revolution, invariably brought back to us memories of that night in the Wilfredo Lam center and the hope that this time the microphones would be open to a larger number of Cubans. I confess that I came to reflect on where it would be best to raise the podium, to place the actors dressed in olive-green who would regulate the time of each person’s speech, and how the white dove would look, fluttering over the shoulder of each orator.

On the eve of December 30 I talked with Tania Bruguera who, hoarse and exhausted, already felt the cage closing around her. All the signs pointed to their not allowing her to even reach the Plaza and the political police unleashing a wave of repression against those who wanted to accompany her. I ventured to describe three possible scenarios she might face: that they would not let her leave her home, or would arrest her; that they would let her get to the plaza which would be taken over by a last-minute popular festival with cheap beer, parades and loud music; that they would let her stage Tatlin’s Whisper, but fill the time at the microphone with voices shouting official slogans. There was no way to add to these variables one that would conclude with a chorus of plurality and tolerance making itself heard in front of the statue of José Martí.

In that conversation I told her that “The performance is already done; the artistic action achieved,” because with her project Bruguera had unveiled the framework of censorship, cultural cowardice and repression that immobilizes Cuban life. Many of her artist friends had declined to accompany her, some acquaintances had called on her to concede and move Tatlin’s Whisper to the interior some institution and others, more committed, had warned her that there was a plan to “abduct her from the Plaza.” From the early hours of the morning the macabre dance of arrests and intimidation began.

Ladies in White, activists, journalists and dissidents were jailed or blocked from leaving their homes. Many communicators had their cellphones cut off, text messaging cancelled and access to the government-operated Nauta email system restricted. In a whisper, information about what was happening began to surface. The 14ymedio team suffered a hard blow, with two reporters and a contributing writer arrested and our press office under a police operation for hours. The list of the jailed was growing and as communications began to work again we started calling each other to keep ourselves up-to-date.

But the whisper turned into Tatlin’s cry. One that is now heard through the phone lines, on Twitter, outside the police stations, where family members demand to spend the last day of the year with their loved ones. There is no microphone, no white dove, no one minute of freedom, but rather long hours of suffering and uncertainty.

Tania, among all the scenarios we projected, we missed this one. You in jail and from there, dressed in the gray uniform of an inmate, you performed the most devastating and unforgettable of all your artistic actions. The Plaza is today in each one of us.

Declaration of “Convivencia” Magazine on the Restoration of Diplomatic Relations Between Cuba and the U.S.

Convivencia (Coeixistence) magazine salutes the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the Republic of Cuba and the United States of America.

We hope that this climate of dialogue and negotiation is also established between the Government of the Republic of Cuba and independent Cuban civil society, with a respect for unity in diversity, the right to self-determination and the exercise of citizen sovereignty.

Convivencia magazine is glad for the release of political prisoners, and believes that all political prisoners must be released, including those who are on parole in Cuba.

In the same way, all repression for political reasons must cease. The Cuban Government should ratify the United Nations Human Rights Covenants and the conventions of the International Labor Organization, as they claim the four points of consensus identified by a growing and significant group of Cuban civil society. continue reading

Convivencia magazine is grateful for the mediation by his Holiness Pope Francis in the restoration of diplomatic relations between the Republic of Cuba and the United States of America.

Likewise, we hope that the Church can continue to offer its service of mediation in an achievable and necessary dialogue between the Cuban Government and independent civil society in Cuba, with the consequent recognition of the latter as valid interlocutor.

Convivencia magazine believes that the restoration of diplomatic relations between the Republic of Cuba and the United States of America removes a serious obstacle so that the fundamental dispute can be clearly seen as being between the Cuban Government and its citizens, not between Cuba and the United States. Thus can it be understood that the most important thing for our people is inclusion, civil and political, economic, social and cultural freedoms and the exercise of an ever more participatory democracy in Cuba.

Convivencia magazine hopes that this historic event and the lifting of all blockades, especially the one that the Cuban government uses against the initiative and entrepreneurial nature of its citizens, will create the necessary conditions so that the Cuban people are the principal actors of their own history, and so lead the nation — including all our compatriots on the Island and in the Diaspora — towards a future of peace, freedom, progress and social justice.

The Editorial Board

Translated by: Hombre de Paz, with some assistance from Alicia Barraqué Ellison

18 December 2014

Tania Bruguera Under Arrest at Acosta Police Station in Diez de Octubre, Havana / 14ymedio

Tania Bruguera (photo from her blog)
Tania Bruguera (photo from her blog)

14ymedio, Havana, 30 december 2014 — Contacted by phone at her home, the director of 14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, said that Tania Bruguera was under arrest at the Acosta Police Station in the Diez de Octubre municipality in Havana.

Reinaldo Escobar was released from the same station Tuesday night at 10:00 pm. Escobar affirmed that he saw Tania “wearing the gray uniform of a convict,” It is still unknown when Bruguera will be released.

The two police cars surrounding Yoani Sanchez’s building have been removed and the director of this digital daily is no longer under house arrest.

The 14ymedio reporter Victor Ariel Gonzalez is still being detained, in Guanabacoa. Still unknown are the whereabouts of the activists Antonio Rodiles, Ailer Gonzalez and Eliecer Avila, along with the photographer Claudio Fuentes and his partner, Eva Baquero.

Developing news.

UPDATE: Ailer Gonzalez has been released.

Several activists and Reinaldo Escobar, editor-in-chief of ’14ymedio’, arrested / 14ymedio

The police car in front of the apartment of Reinaldo Escobar and Yoani Sanchez. (14ymedio)
The police car in front of the apartment of Reinaldo Escobar and Yoani Sanchez. (14ymedio)

The director of this newspaper, Yoani Sánchez, is under house arrest

14ymedio, Havana, 30 December 2014 – Contacted by phone at her home, the director of 14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, explained the circumstances of the arrest of her husband, Reinaldo Escobar, and of several other people this Tuesday in Havana. She is under house arrest. Patrol car No. 507 is stationed in front of the building where she lives, while four plainclothes offices are controlling the building entrances. continue reading

Reinaldo Escobar was arrested when he left the building where he lives in the company of the activist Eliécer Ávila, founder of the group “Somos Más” (We are More). Both were handcuffed and put in a patrol car waiting in front of the building in the Havana neighborhood of Neuvo Vedado. Reinaldo’s daughter, Luz, who was with her father, has not been arrested, but a State Security agency told her, “We are not going to let you leave.” The same official visited Luz Escobar’s home yesterday to warn her not to go near the Plaza of the Revolution today, where the artist Tania Bruguera has scheduled a performance titled “Tatlin’s Whisper #6” for 3:00 in the afternoon, to demand freedom of expression for Cuban’s citizens.

Also arrested were photographer Claudio Fuentes and his companion Eva, while the activists Antonio Rodiles and Ailer González were not answering the phone. Social networks also inform us of the arrests of José Díaz Silva, Raúl Borges, Lady in White Lourdes Esquivel, and of the 14ymedio reporter Víctor Ariel González.

Members of the #YOTAMBIENEXIJO [I also demand] platform issued a press release denouncing their inability to contact Bruguera. The organization explained that the artist’s telephone number is blocked and expressed their fear, given the arrests of the leaders of civic organizations currently underway.

Several Activists and Reinaldo Escobar, Editor-in-Chief of “14ymedio”, Arrested / Cubanet

Cubanet, 30 December 2014 — The activist Eliezer Ávila and journalist Reinaldo Escobar, Editor-in-chieft of the independent daily 14ymedio and husband of the blogger Yoani Sánchez, were arrested this morning at 11:40 am by members of the State Security outside the building where Escobar lives, according to the lawyer Laritza Diversent from Havana.

The source, after a telephone conversation with Yoani Sánchez, added that the patrol officers of car N.328, carried out the arrest violently. So far the whereabouts of detainees is not known. According to Yoani she was not allowed to leave her residence.

It is presumed that the authorities are trying to prevent the attendance of opposition figures at the performance of artist Tania Bruguera to be held this in the Plaza of the Revolution.

Also arrested were activists José Díaz Silva, leader of the Opposition Movement for a New Republic (MONR), and the Lady in White Lourdes Esquivel, according to the Twitter account the opponent Manuel Cuesta Morua.

Five Years of “Crossing the Barbed Wire”: How Long Should I Continue? / Luis Felipe Rojas

Photo of the author: @alambradas
Photo of the author: @alambradas

My baby, my third child, this blog, is five years old and at times I ask myself this question. How long should I continue? I started writing against the grain of what a blog was, doing it like a daily without wi-fi, nor nearby cybercages, but with the recklessness with which one distributes a samizdat.

I remember, it was December 2009. My brother Orlando Zapata Tamayo #0ZT began a hunger strike, impelled by the Castro regime to take off the mask: the arrests and beatings of activists for supporting #0ZT happened in Holguin and several other cities, one after the other. I wanted my neighbors to know, the neighborhood snitches, the police, those who were afraid and those who supported me then and have supported me since, that it is you, the cyberactivists, the fine people who have accompanied me in sixty months of words and actions.

Now with the new refrain of “intimate enemies” I paused, passing several weeks without publishing, listening to my friends, reliving the same party with such naivety. My parents told me that in 1959 people were stunned by so many firecrackers and so much sabotage, on January 1st coming out to salute the rebels, and on the second loudly crying out “To the wall!” (demanding executions), and on the third beginning to fall silent, three days after the Cuban Revolution.

Now the road is long because in Palma Soriano, Manzanillo and Cumanayagua there are still hungry people who know nothing of diplomatic relations. In Camagüey, my friend Millet continues to have the Rapid Response Brigades after him every day to prevent him from putting up a poster against the government or buying kerosene on the black market. Last weekend they defaced Mirna Buenaventura’s house with tar, in Buenaventura, where people now call the Yankees “the fraternal and supportive American people.”

Now that the Furies have changed their spots there are friends who stayed inside the fence and are not going to shut their mouths because they never have. Yannier P. wrote from Guantanamo to tell me, “You don’t have to write for us, we know the horror. Write so that the world will know the horror to come.” I want to send a bouquet of flowers to my friend Nancy Alfaya, a Christian woman with a bulletproof resistance: her husband, the writer Jorge Olivera Castillo received 18 years in prison, but Nancy refuses to stop laughing. In Havana she leads a workshop against violence against women, is the first to read Olivera’s poems, and goes to church every day in the poor neighborhood where she lives. I want to send flowers to Nancy but I would not want them to arrive wilted.

I would like to write an article and travel to shake hands with Manuel Martinez Leon, in La Jejira in Holguin, with Emiliano Gonzalez in El Horno, in Bayamo, or Barbaro Tejeda in Mayari. The three are dissidents, open opponents of the Castro brothers’ tropical dictatorship and work the land from sunrise.

Emiliano has given me interviews seated on a mountain of peanut bags, and wrote to tell me of the tortured rules of the State cooperatives and that he dreams of fields of peanuts while they hold him prisoner in stinking dungeons.

Barbaro has talked with me on a trail where he goes to fish illegally, to be able to eat and to feed his family. For years the “Watching the Sea” Detachment — a kind of rapid response brigade with the pretext of being anti-drug troops— monitors and represses its neighbors in Puerto Padre, Levisa and Macabi, throughut Cuba. They cannot sell fish, catch fish or eat fish. They don’t know which law prohibits it, but the people there who talked to me are afraid of breaking the rules. Sometimes Barbaro Tejeda fries plantains or beans and dreams of a modern fishing rod.

With friends like this my blog will have ten more years of life. Still, I have to explain to the world why Cuban mothers live without their children and what the Law of Pre-Criminal Social Dangerousness is; first I have to learn to write a legal monstrosity of such a package. Ileana, my Venezuelan friend living in New York doesn’t know what Showing Contempt for the Figure of the Commander-in-Chief is, and I have to explain with examples.

Many more years of life, of survival, remain to this blog. A house organized from within and not for elegies without knowing its neighbors, living in the turbulent and brutal south or north that now appreciates us.

27 December 2014

Economic Crisis in Venezuela Leads to a Black Market Among Travelers / Ivan Garcia

en-la-habana-se-raspa-el-cupo-mejor-f-620x330
It is 7:30 PM in a commercial shopping district in San Diego, Califormia. Four Venezuelan tourists approach Spanish-speaking customers browsing among tablets, smart phones, flat-screen TVs and laptops with a business proposition.

“If you are going to buy something with cash, please let me pay for it with my credit card and you can give me the money instead. The thing is that in my country, Venezuela, getting hard currency is very complicated,” says a young woman in a slow, deliberate voice.

Venezuelans can find such “swiping-the-card” transactions difficult in a country like the United States where people rarely make large purchases with cash. But on this particular warm autumn night, one Venezuelan is lucky.

A group of Latin American journalists who were attending a workshop in San Diego did some bartering. To understand the official exchange rates and the black market for US dollars in Venezuela requires a quick doctorate in economics.

According to these Venezuelan tourists there are three different exchange rates. The official one is for necessities but varies when it comes to dollars for travel or for purchasing raw materials used in products the government considers luxuries.

In the treacherous streets of Caracas the US dollar trades at a different rate of exchange on the black market. These different types of exchange have contributed to runaway inflation of almost 61% and an uncontrollable rise in prices for staple foods such as powdered milk powder and cornmeal.

Venezuelan tourists describe how an Apple laptop is two and a half times more expensive in Venezuela than in any other country in the world due to the devaluation of the national currency, the bolivar.

Because of the economic crisis, business seizures and rules governing fixed prices, many people — especially those in the middle class — have been forced to turn to the informal economy to weather the storm.

The young Venezuelan woman, a mother with a young daughter, told me that despite having both an undergraduate and a graduate degree, she takes advantage of trips abroad to “swipe the card,” or to buy merchandise on credit to resell in Caracas.

“We’re becoming nothing more than peddlers thanks to Maduro and the way he blindly copies Cuba’s inefficient socioeconomic system and its controls,” she says.

Another Venezuelan bought two Sony Play Station 3 video games. “One is for my kids; the other is to sell. I have to take advantage of the $1,800 I got at the official exchange rate. If I can lay my hands on a few hundred dollars, I can exchange them for 110 “bolos” (bolivars) when I get back to Venezuela. And with the money from the sale of the video game, I’ll probably be able to have decent Christmas dinner.”

Whether it be California, Florida or Havana, the unstoppable economic crisis has turned many Venezuelans into brokers. In central Havana’s Carlos III shopping mall Venezuelans can often be seen “swiping the card.”

Transactions involve buying a freezer, television or furniture for a client and paying for the purchase with a credit card. Later the client reimburses the credit card holder with cash in the form of convertible pesos.

They often have an angle. Joel (not his real name), a medical student, notes that “for purchases of several hundred CUCs (convertible pesos), we offer a 15% to 20% discount. Cubans, who are nobody’s fools, agree to this. Then with those convertible pesos, we buy dollars on the black market at 95 or 96 cents per CUC. Back in Venezuela, those dollars we got through transactions or the official currency exchange, we sell on the black market. It is a windfall. This way I can support my family without any problem.”

Maura, a Venezuelan on a visit to Cuba, is getting ready for her wedding to a Cuban. She wanders the markets where things are priced in Cuban pesos and buys large quantities of bath soap and detergent.

“In Havana a bar of soap costs five to six Cuban pesos, around twenty cents to the dollar at the official exchange rate. I have already bought eighty bars of soap to resell in my country.

Liudmila, a resident of Caracas’ violent Petare neighborhood, took advantage of a training trip to the island to purchase over-the-counter and prescription medications through a Venezuelan friend who is a medical student in Cuba.

“It’s the only way I have to get medications for my relatives,” she says. “For me it’s profitable because I get dollars at a favorable exchange rate since I am here on an official visit. Life is hard for everyone.”

Iván García

Photo: Increasing numbers of Venezuelans, both government supporters and opponents, travel to Havana to acquire dollars, “swipe the card” or buy merchandise intended for sale on the black market. Ríete del Gobierno. http://www.rietedelgobierno.net

Fideless / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Last Christmas with Fidel Castro

-Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

December is a sad month, precious, blue-lit and dreamily silent. I was born in this month. And in this month, in a year not so distant as it now appears, I shall return to Cuba with a Nobel Prize in Literature, the first of the Cuban Nobels, which I will rub in the face of the dictatorship that we will still have in Cuba by that date, and of which prize money I will use unto my ruination to hasten our liberty.

December is over before it barely starts. It is an atemporal month, achronological, almost uchronic [imaginary], outside the calendar, at the border of that mystery which is the changing year.

We are others, and we die piece by piece every December. In fact, almost never do all of us who started out the year reach the end of it. We who gather together this month do not know if we will get to the next month a year from now. Death reaps the best among us. Every December there are fewer and fewer Cubans left. We survivors are the worst, we are the one discarded, even by the gods.

This Christmas 2014 is also our first Death Celebration* without the dictator, who died on us without ever facing justice. With Fidel deceased ** (1926-2014), all now seems easy, expeditious, unnecessary. The Revolution was a nightmare had by a few million. The memory is renewed at a vertiginous velocity. In a little while, the new Cubans will not know or be able to spell the unnameable name of Fidel Castro – which in a few months will barely resonate in the curriculum for the Prehistory of the Nation, dissolved by the virtue of apathy and the amnesia of new generations.

The death of the hegemonic one has surprised us all. He didn’t even say goodbye, the jerk, just as he didn’t announce his arrival but rather imposed it by death blows, lies and evil. Fidel Castro has gone forever from our nation and he has left us incredulous and distrustful, to the point that we prefer to pay attention to this historic milestone. We still do not believe ourselves to be alone, without the delirious despot. We will not believe it, either, when his brother Raúl Castro announces it to us, surrounded by his octogenarian military elite — perhaps on January 28, 2015, to make Fidel’s death coincide with the birth of José Martí.

But today once again is Christmas. Part of the lost country will gather together the best of its spirit on this date. Hope will cease to be a congenital illness, and the blue light of the child-god will warm our home-mangers, making them less awful, making us less perverse in being human zeroes who aspire to be human beings,*** after a half-century or half- millennium of multitudinarially murdering each other over nothing.

It is Christmas once again, my soul brothers and sisters, and in 2015 will shine the words that for centuries should have been spoken among Cuban, but which have remained buried by the string of tyrants that have brought about our unnecessary independence. Perhaps it is the season to grow closer to being a civilization of free cosmopolitans and move ourselves away from Slaveamerican barbarity.

It is Christmas, and I love you all.

Translator’s Notes:

*The author is making a play on words in Spanish, using the common name for Christmas, “Navidades” (Nativity) to contrast with the quasi-rhyming word for morbidity, “Morbilidades.” 

**An alliterative play on words – deceased in Spanish is “fallecido.” 

*** A play on words in Spanish – the word for “zeroes” sounds very similar to the word for “beings”

25 December 2014

Change of Scenery / Fernando Damaso

Clearly, though we have not been aware of it until its recent announcement, there has been a change of scenery in Cuban policy, at least in regards to differences between the two governments.

This shift requires a repositioning of the forces in play as well as a tactical and strategic revision. To simply accept or reject it based on preconceived notions is not enough, nor does it demonstrate intelligence or responsibility. A serious and profound evaluation of what this represents and of the possibilities it offers or precludes is necessary. All human actions — especially those involving politics — present both positives and negatives. Taking advantage of and advancing the former while minimizing the latter is not easy but it is certainly possible.

After more than fifty years of maintaining intransigent positions, a major hurdle has been overcome through the will of the governments of Cuba and the United States. This is good for both the Cuban and American people.

It it is now the turn of  Cuban civil society, both on the island and overseas, to help consolidate this initial change and advance other political, economic and social policies. Therefore, the government and civil society must set aside years of confrontation and rejection, and put Cuba first.

What has been achieved externally must be repeated internally. This constitutes the best path towards achieving a peaceful transition to a democratic, inclusive and peaceful regime in which there is equal opportunity for all Cubans with all their differences.

The repetitive, triumphalist rhetoric — exemplified just a few days after the announcement of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in the phrase, “With a people like the Cubans, the Revolution can last for 570 years” — should not be a cause for concern; it is simply more of the same.

Incidentally, it reminds me of Hitler’s claim that the Third Reich would endure for 1,000 years. Fortunately, history does not take verbal overstatements seriously. Nevertheless, one should be cautious; the best-laid plans are sometimes destroyed on the ground. Let us hope that is not the case here.

One truly worrisome aspect is the suggestion that only a few Cubans are opposed to the system — and this because they receive material and moral support from outside Cuba.

In reality, there are hundreds of thousands who disagree with the regime, although only a few hundred say it out loud. It would be a terrible error for the authorities to believe their own myth about the unity of all Cubans with regard to the Revolution.

23 December 2014

MONEY MONEY MONEY / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo and Clive Rudd

How to Raise Funds: A Manual for Cuban Democrats  

Clive Rudd, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The successive “investigations” (or filtrations of intelligence) of the Associated Press (AP) and other media, that try to demonize the material support of Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and governments in solidarity with the democratic cause in Cuba, is not a new phenomenon nor is it exclusive to the free world.

The Cuban government has known how to utilize the attacks on the funding for democracy. This has been at the expense of committing historic malapropisms that defy any comparison with the fundraising done by José Martí and his Cuban Revolutionary Party, or even by Fidel Castro in his insatiable quest for dollars in Mexico, Costa Rica and Venezuela (which was then not to fund anti-government propaganda but to buy weapons and train armies and, in short, impose violence for life on our society).

The new form of expression of this demonizing campaign (which essentially plagiarizes the methods employed by the Havana government) is led by the AP and The New York Times (NYT). There are many other “useful idiots” but their voices don’t resonate as much. Since the time of the Sierra Maestra and the bad reporting by Herbert Matthews, Castroism has been a series of blows to maudlin effect on North American public (shameless) opinion.

It is obvious that the message of these hegemonic media cannot be so clumsy as that of the Havana dictatorship, being that they convey between the lines a subliminal message to the Good Capitalist of the North: “The donation of funds by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other organizations to support democracy in Cuba, far from achieving the desired objectives, is counterproductive and useless.”

This message is more than well-known. It is the same argument employed with impunity to lobby for the lifting of the embargo: “The embargo doesn’t work and therefore should be lifted immediately and unconditionally.”

All right, then. In the name of the Cuban and North American peoples, thank you. However, the problem lies in that to defend this argument of inefficiency, there need to be firm proofs, not opinions. Also, the most solid proofs are achieved by comparing the initial objectives of a program with its final results. Here is where things get tough because, for a serious news medium to say that a program was “amateurish and profoundly unsuccessful,” there must be access to documents that have gone cold and are now obsolete (which the AP has been able to gain) but there also must be investigative reporting done that includes access to all or the major parties involved in the matter, including the Cuban people.

As has been known from responses of certain parties included in the AP’s last crusade, all indications are that there have been lies or results have been fabricated to rate these USAID programs as “profoundly unsuccessful.”

According to his interview in the El Nuevo Herald newspaper, Aldo Rodríguez, leader of the musical group Los Aldeanos, did not receive one cent from USAID, he did not compose his songs at the request of this agency, nor did he receive a laptop from subversive foreign elements — three assertions made in an “objective” piece by AP.

These campaigns of the AP, in symbiosis with the Cuban government, to demonize fundraising in support of pro-human rights projects on the Island, have media reach precisely because the national public is a captive audience under the monopoly of the State, and also because it is not common for us Cubans to do public fundraisers, as occurs in any democratic country of the world.

In countries where there are free elections and institutions, fundraising rules and regulations have been created and there are even specialists trained in the technique of quickly and effectively raising monies for political campaigns and the propagation of ideas. This is a subject yet to be included in the curriculum for Cuban democrats and any other social actor who will not want to submit himself to a despotic governmental dictum.

It would be most useful for our civil society, inside and outside Cuba, if we would create a sort of manual for raising funds legally and efficiently to support the alternative projects on the Island. Thus, we Cubans would be the ones to judge which citizen initiatives have been successful and which ones not so much, as we learn from their results to improve those methods of collecting, distributing and utilizing funds for democracy in Cuba. The ends justify the means.

Cuba’s solvency was always handicapped by Castroism. Only a poverty-stricken people is vulnerable to enslavement. At the beginning, it was accomplished through ideological class hatred. Currently, in Castroism’s latter days, it is done through paranoia about a foreign conspiracy (even though Havana has received funding from the United Nations as well as from Qaddafi’s criminal regime).

Therefore, People, perhaps it is time for us to behave less as secret victims and more as modern members of a global economy, transparent in its accounts and convinced of the legitimacy of its anti-totalitarian mission, beyond the laws of Castroism and the media campaigns that prop it up.

Enmeshed in the Raul regime make-believe reforms, we Cubans should not lose our focus to a Fidel who is as much fossil as fatal. Despite the pathetic AP and the NYT, our radical redemption still goes by this watchword: “Within the dictatorship, nothing; against the dictatorship, everything.”*

*Translator’s note: This last line is a riff on Fidel’s famous/infamous statement, “Within the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing,” from his so-called “Speech to the Intellectuals” delivered in June 1961.

 Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

26 December 2014

Will the poorest Cubans whose properties were seized be indemnified? / Cubanet, Jose Hugo Fernandez

Photo:Havana’s Chinatown prior to 1959
Photo: Havana’s Chinatown prior to 1959

Cubanet, José Hugo Fernández, Havana, 24 December 2014 – How many – and which – private properties seized by the regime could be returned to their owners or their descendants? Alternatively, how many indemnifications could there be once the US embargo is finally lifted? This topic has once again taken its place in our discussions, online and on the ground. Once again, we are given to speculate about everything pertaining to major enterprises, and North American and Cuban landowners.

Curiously, there is less talk about the small businesses. Those were the ones whose owners worked hard all their lives, never suspecting the disrespect and cruel coldness with which the Revolutionary government would expropriate them. These entrepreneurs were forced to abandon their establishments and take nothing but the clothes on their backs. Begging the pardon of the large investors who saw their assets taken away, it seems to me much more crucial to consider the tragedy of these small business owners. I believe that now that “our” dictatorship is trying to make a place for itself among “normal” governments, it should start with the intent to mitigate (being that it cannot erase) this shameful chapter in our history, by at least indemnifying the descendants of the entrepreneurs.

They must number in the hundreds of thousands, if one considers that each town, each neighborhood, and often each street, hosted swarms of small businesses owned by persons of modest means, who built them up penny by penny with the sweat of their brow.

By way of illustration, it would perhaps suffice to cite the example of the honest and hardworking business owners of Havana’s Chinatown – just one case among millions, but one which helps to clarify the issue because of being concentrated in a small area.

By 1959, a little more than a century had passed since the arrival of the Chinese to Cuba as quasi-slaves. The only property owned by each and all of them upon disembarking here was their family name – and even this they had to give up. Even so, when Fidel Castro took power, Havana’s was probably the most important Chinatown in the continent.

The neighborhood boasted its own Bank of China, with $10-million in assets – a true fortune in those days. It had a network of import businesses that directly brought in products from Asia to be used and sold here. There was a Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, which was connected to a considerable number of entrepreneurial associations, such as the Union of Commercial Retailers. It would be exhausting to list the vast number of dining establishments – some world-famous – and other businesses providing the most diverse services, that were located in this neighborhood.

Havana's Chinatown today
Havana’s Chinatown today (photo by author)

The Chinese population of Havana operated its own health care system, endowed with medical practices and laboratories, as well as a fully-equipped clinic and patient pavilions, and a broad network of pharmacies. Three independent newspapers, three radio stations, four cinemas, a theater, an athletic club, a retirement home, a cemetery, multiple societies and recreation centers – all of these composed the cultural life of the neighborhood. In short, as I have indicated, the list of assets would be too long. Just on one small block, on San Nicolás Street, between Zanja and Dragones, one could see more commercial activity than what is observed today in the whole neighborhood. It goes without saying that the scene on that stretch of San Nicolás is heartbreaking to see.

In 1960, Alfonso Chiong, president of the Chinese Colony and editor of one of its newspapers (The Man-Set-Ya-Po), was informed by the regime that he would have to resign his post. Upon refusing to do so, he escaped to Miami to avoid being sent to jail. According to the newspaper Avance Criollo*, when Chiong arrived at the Miami airport he carried, as his only capital, five dollars in his pocket. Mario Chiu, secretary of the Colony, had less luck – when he refused to resign, he was thrown into the dungeons of La Cabaña prison.

The tragedy was already in progress. It was unstoppable and quite possibly defining. Soon afterwards the flourishing Chinatown turned to ruin, while the entire poor neighborhood found itself as lost, vulnerable and frightened as had its ancestors when, a century before, they arrived on our shores.

*Avance Criollo newspaper; Friday, November 18, 1960.

Translated by Alicia Barrequé Ellison