Devaluation / Yoani Sanchez

Strictly Prohibited: Drinking alcohol, Animals, Ball games, Skimpy clothing

It’s difficult for a cell to maintain its health inside a sick organism. In an inefficient society the bubble of functionality bursts. In the same way, certain ethical values — selected and filtered — cannot be strengthened in the midst of a debacle of moral integrity. Rescuing codes of social conduct implies also accepting those that clash with the prevailing ideology.

We are now being called upon by the official media to recover lost values. According to the version put forth by the commentators on TV, responsibility for the deterioration falls mainly on the family, a portion on the schools… but not at all on the government. They talk about bad manners, rudeness, lack of solidarity and the extent of bad habits such as stealing, lying and laziness. In a country where for half a century the educational system, the entire press, and all the mechanisms of cultural production and distribution have been monopolized by a single party, one can only ask: what is the source of such impoverishment?

I remember that when I was a little girl no one dared to address another person as “señor” — mister — because it was a bourgeois throwback. As the use of “compañero” — comrade — is associated with an ideological position, many of us began to adopt new forms: “cousin,” “young man,” “hey you,” “Pop”… along with a long list of phrases derived from vulgar speech. Now they complain on TV that when we address others we are insulting, but… who started this deterioration?

The Cuban system opted for social engineering, and toyed with individual and collective alchemy. The most perfect example of this failed laboratory was the so-called “New Man.” This Homus Cubanis would supposedly come of age in sacrifice, obedience and loyalty. His uniformity was incompatible with the particular ethics of each home. So to achieve him, millions of Cuban children were removed — as much as they could be — from the family environment.

We went to daycare centers just 45 days after we were born; the Pioneer Camps took us in right after we learned our first letters; we went to schools in the countryside as soon as we left childhood, and spent our adolescence in high schools in the middle of nowhere. The State believed it could take over the formative role of our parents, thought it could exchange the values we brought from home for the new communist moral code. But the resulting creature deviated greatly from the one they had planned. We didn’t even manage to convert ourselves into the “New Man.”

They also launched themselves against religion, ignoring that dissimilar creeds transmit a share of the ethic and moral values that molded human civilization and our own national customs. They made us denigrate those who were different, we insulted the presidents of other countries with obscenities, mocked historic figures from the past, stuck our tongues out or blew raspberries when passing a foreign embassy.

They instilled in us the “Revolutionary promiscuity” that they themselves had already practiced in the Sierra Maestra, and incited us to laugh at those who spoke well, were deeply cultured, or showed any kind of refinement. This was carried out with such intensity that many of us faked speaking vulgarly, left off syllables when we talked, or shut up about our reading, so no one would notice that we were “weirdos” or potentially “counterrevolutionaries.”

One man — from the podium — screamed at us for fifty years. His diatribes, his hatred, his inability to listen calmly to an opposing argument, were the “exemplary” postures we learned in school. He instilled in us the gibberish, the constant tension, and the authoritarian index finger when we address others. He — who thought he knew everything but in reality knew very little — conveyed to us the pride of never asking forgiveness and of lying, that deception of rogues and scam artists that he was so good at.

Now, when the ethical picture of the nation looks like a mirror shattered against the floor, they call on the family to fix it. They ask us to shape values at home and to pass on order and discipline to our children. But how can we do it? If we ourselves were shaped to disrespect every code? How can we do it? If there’s no process for the powers-to-be to criticize themselves, for those who played at social engineering with our lives to recognize what they did?

Ethical codes are not so easily reassembled. A morality devalued by public discourse can’t be put back together overnight. And now, how are we going to fix  this disaster?

7 March 2014

Only ETECSA, There’s Nothing Else / Juan Juan Almeida

Since the decontrol of the contracting of mobile phone services in 2008, the number of lines rented has reached almost two millions, which has given ETECSA [Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A.Telecommunications Company of Cuba, which is a government owned telecoms company] an income of about $2bn. Now, with the announcement that they will include the astronomically expensive internet service with mobile phones, the Cuban state monopoly ETECSA will end up valued at about $3bn.

Good heavens, and not for one moment are they going to soften the blow by dropping their prices a little.

Translated by GH

6 March 2014

The Ministry of Revenge Imparts Punishment in the Castros’ Cuba / Angel Santiesteban

Raul Castro, are you satisfied now?

By The Editor (of Angel’s blog while he is in prison)

One year can be a sigh in time or an interminable nightmare; it depends on how you pass the year. To be deprived of freedom is always a bitter drink, but when in addition you’re innocent, when you’re condemned and incarcerated by a judicial system answering to the guidelines of political power of a dictatorship like that of the dynasty that you incarnate today, it’s much worse.

To this you have to add the characteristics of the prisons and concentration camps elaborated on by your Regime, which in no way resemble, neither in form nor in treatment, what you tried to make the national and international journalists who visited last year believe. They cowardly and immorally endorsed the farce to which they were subjected, ridiculing the tragic reality of the thousands of Cubans who, the length and width of the island, are brutally treated, tortured, humiliated and living in conditions that are absolutely inhumane.

As if the dirty complicity of the press wouldn’t have been enough the year before, this year, you, Castro II, tried – and with great success – to gain support for your dictatorship from the member presidents of CELAC, the secretary of the OAS, the director general of the United Nations and the European Union – which only a few days ago, announced that it would resume negotiations with your dictatorship, without caring in the slightest about the destiny of the 11 million inhabitants of the island. Economic interests are more powerful than the fundamentals at the dawn of the 21st century, but the OAS and the UN seem not to notice that they are consenting silently to letting other nations enrich themselves at the cost of Cuban blood and tears. Pathetic but true.

Meanwhile, in the concentration camps and penitentiaries of the Prison Island, more than a hundred political prisoners wait in vain for justice and freedom, and much of the opposition who are being besieged today will, before long, be political prisoners also. continue reading

The existence of the opposition in these circumstances should cause an international scandal, but on the contrary, it’s ignored obstreperously by those who can do something. Only the governments of Chile and Costa Rica showed interest and concern for the reality of the opposition in Cuba, and not for the Chinese story that they sold to all the rest of Havana in the context of the Second Summit of CELAC.

How far can the hypocrisy of the bigshots of the world and their selective blindness go? If the clamor for freedom, democracy and justice by the Cuban people isn’t enough for them, they should lend an ear to the people of Venezuela, whose country was colonized by its dictatorship in order to exploit the natural resources, to submit to its people and thereby perpetuate the badly-named “Revolution,” whose true name is “military dictatorship,” which attains power through a coup in order to subvert another military dictatorship.

Now we can’t understand the suffering of Cuba without understanding what’s happening in its sister country, Venezuela. There you have 30 million inhabitants who are submitted to the designs of Havana through its dauphin, Maduro, who came to power through electoral fraud, and since then has only intensified the task of “Castroization” of the country initiated by the deceased Chavez, another general who attempted a coup, and who governed as a dictator for 14 years in spite of having come to the presidency through the ballot box. The same as Adolf Hitler.

Venezuela also has an increasing number of political prisoners; the communications media are being accosted and gagged; and the students who go into the street demanding freedom are brutally massacred by the FANB and paramilitary groups. There are many denunciations with photographs of Cuban State Security agents who are infiltrated into these barbarous acts and who, only by seeing the images, are clearly recognized by their “style.”

In Cuba we can’t talk about electoral fraud because the whole communist system set up by the dictatorship is a fraud. For 55 years they call “elections” with a system of one party and candidates chosen by the elite of the Communist Party. Only they are chosen; only they can be voted for.

All this terrible situation that both countries live, twinned by the stomp of your boot, Castro II, unites the whopping number of 41 million people who cry out and need liberty and democracy NOW, and the full presence of their rights and guarantees.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats is a talented Cuban writer, a national and international award-winner, who one day decided to take off the mask and – whatever it cost – denounce to the world the sufferings of his country through his blog, opened in 2008, The Children Nobody Wanted.

Once he opened the blog, the “good” and the “bad” started arriving: the messages and warnings that he abandon his path. The pressure didn’t matter to him, and he went forward with his moral duty as a citizen of denouncing the Regime and reclaiming the rights that all sovereign people should have.

He undertook a long and difficult path the day he took the side of liberty and democracy, from physical aggressions, all types of threats, even ostracism and marginalization, including from those who called themselves good friends; and of course, betrayals here and there. None of this stopped him.

Finally the biggest infamy happened: His ex-wife and mother of his son made a false accusation with the support and advice of her then-partner, an agent of the political police. It didn’t matter to her to lie shamelessly and buy a false witness to send her ex-mate to prison because she couldn’t handle – after having abandoned him and leaving him with a small child during two and a half years – coming back to him to try again, and at that point he was involved in a happy and stable relationship.

These Machiavellian false denunciations finished by sending Angel to five years in prison for crimes that he did not commit after a farce of a trial that should be the shame of the Cuban judicial system. But no, in place of that, they insist on multiplying the violations of Angel’s rights, now ignoring the request for review of his trial that was presented in July last year by his lawyer, Amelia Rodriguez Cala, (recently disqualified – in a surprise move – for six months from exercising her profession in the courts).

He has been assaulted, harassed and threatened by his jailers, and they invented disciplinary punishments for him, like taking away the 70-day pass required for his type of penalty. In seven months he has left prison only once, at the end of September. That’s to say, not only are they violating rights universally consecrated but also they’re violating their own law, because it’s a right in force in the Cuban constitution to repeat the trial if the condemned requests it.

Today, February 28, 2014, Angel completes one year of imprisonment, hoping for a justice that doesn’t come, nor can it come while a dictatorship continues to occupy power in Cuba illegally. International solidarity can pressure the Regime to demand not only justice for him but also that the United Nations pacts be ratified. But that solidarity must be huge in order to counteract the immense harm that the presidents of the region have caused to Cubans: Secretary Inzulsa, Mr. Ban Ki Moon and the European Union, which drools over the chance to profit by doing business on the island.

I am calling for international solidarity on the part of governments, organizations and well-meaning citizens, to mobilize for Cuba and for all its political prisoners.

And meanwhile, I remind you, Raul Castro, of your absolute responsibility for the life and integrity of Angel, and for all political prisoners and members of civil society who are punished every day for expressing themselves and demanding freedom.

And I ask – now that you’re trying to make the world believe that you’re a reformist president and that you’re bringing change to Cuba – at least hide it a bit and take democratic steps that show your “good will.” Free all the political prisoners, ratify the UN pacts and call for open and free elections. If you don’t take these three steps, it will only go to prove that you continue being a ruthless dictator as you have been up to now, the same as your older brother.

I know perfectly that the ambition for power blinded your brother the same as you, but at that height of life, you should ask yourself if you can feel satisfied and rectify the course, so that at least the few haggard people who still have confidence in you don’t feel so defrauded when freedom finally comes and they can recognize the difference. And by the way, may God forgive you.

The Editor

Translated by Regina Anavy

28 February 2014

Fidel, the Lawyer Who Never Won a Case / Rene Gomez Manzano

Fidel Castro, “a lawyer without any cases”

The awarding of the National Law Prize to Fidel Castro—who abolished the judicial branch, established “revolutionary courts,” did away with procedural guarantees, and outlawed unfettered advocacy—is a mockery of justice.

I acknowledge that when I read that item my first thought was: “But hadn’t he already been given that?” We know that in these totalitarian regimes dominated by Marxism-Leninism, the bosses, by virtue of being that, are destined for all the distinctions, recognitions, and awards that have been or might be given. That the alumnus Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz had not been previously considered when this Prize was first granted probably cost some bureaucrat in the judicial sector a good scolding.

Now that it is an accomplished fact we should ask: What objective reasons exist for granting it? Was it based on the person’s performance before or after coming to power? The dilemma warrants that we briefly address these issues in order to give a response.

The professional practice of the older Castro after graduating as a lawyer was practically nil. In this he is no different from other figures who have gotten into history carrying a law degree. Internationally: Robespierre, Karl Marx, Lenin. In Cuba: Agramonte, Céspedes, Martí. These are just a few examples.

Fidel and his logorrhea

Of course I’m not making value judgments, simply naming people who, for better or worse, have earned a place in history. “Lawyer” is the title that is generally used to describe those figures. Although the appellation is not false, it is not really accurate nor illuminating. To more accurately describe what is common in these characters, we have to use a slightly longer phrase: “Lawyers without cases.” continue reading

This last characteristic is what distinguishes these beings. Unlike their colleagues, their activity is not devoted to drafting legal documents, outlining legal theories, or obtaining the acquittal of an accused. No; in the universities they were outfitted with the same tools, but they use them, if at all, to achieve more ambitious and broader political or social objectives. If they represent a clientele, it is political and not professional.

In the case of Fidel Castro, the grantors argue that the Prize is granted “to mark the 60th anniversary of his self-proclaimed defense ’History will absolve me.’” According to Granma, the obliging colleagues of the association of legal officials described this document as “a seamless legal piece . . . that has transcended the boundaries of space and time.”

We know that if anything has characterized the honoree, it is his overwhelming verbosity (rightly documented in The Guinness Book of Records). But the tens of thousands of pages containing his discourses, such as History Will Absolve Me, cannot be found anywhere else; they are not quoted in history books or cited alongside philosophers of past centuries. Haven’t the obsequious jurists noticed? Can’t they draw any conclusions from this?

José Ramón Machado Ventura received the National Law Prize on behalf of Fidel

In his plea, Castro criticized the mechanism (reminiscent of the classic tale of the chicken and the egg) established in the Constitutional Laws of the Batista regime: The President of the Republic appointed the ministers, and these in turn elected him. The curious thing is that after the climb to power of the revolutionary team in 1959, the Basic Law established exactly the same vicious mechanism.

A detailed description of the illegal acts perpetrated by the recipient during the scores of years of his absolute rule would require a collection of books. He did away with the judicial branch, established “revolutionary courts” composed of guerrilla fighters lacking legal education, eliminated procedural guarantees, outlawed the unfettered practice of law, and converted the prosecution into a body guided by political criteria. In a word, he dismantled the solid Cuban legal system.

If the bureaucrats of the Union of Cuban Jurists consider that the perpetrator of such acts deserves the National Law Prize, they are saying very clearly what they really think about this award, which they both created and bestowed.

Cubanet, March 6, 2014  /  René Gómez Manzano

Translated by Tomás A.

Ernesto Santana, a Needle in the Haystack / Angel Santiesteban

It’s very rare to find an artist belonging to the Cuban Artists and Writers Union (UNEAC) who leaves the narrow fold of the government. We all know that those who have done it will pay for their boldness at some point.

When I met the writer Ernesto Santana Zaldivar at a meeting of Estado de Sats, his solidarity made my soul happy. After the hug, I was pleased to hear that he was aware of my situation and it was his intention to help make these absurd accusations against me better known by publishing them in Cubanet. And we agreed that he had no intention to destabilize my harmony, thus damaging my creativity and — from exhaustion or the logic of survival — causing me to abandon my blog and my demands for democracy.

Ernesto Santana was aware of every story that happened in the crude process that  brought me here. his continued solidarity has proven through phone calls, opening his home to me, or arranging in some place in Havana to make known the tricks of the regime for silencing me. His solidarity also makes me happy because he is a Cuban who exposes his life in the pursuit of individual rights. It was not enough to travel abroad, win prizes, be published or receive the gifts of the powers-that-be if he could not be honest with himself.

It is a pleasure to make this journey at his wide for the freedom we need and that we are not willing to renounce, at the risk of abuse and prison, from this child nobody wanted. An honor to share him with my readers.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Lawton Prison Settlement. February 2014


Sign the Amnesty International petition to support Angel.
21 February 2014

Let’s Go Venezuela / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Beautiful Venezuela, so weighed down for such a long time with your own revolution. Is that what you wanted? No! That’s why we are going to save ourselves.

So much left wing higher education, so much nostalgia for Silvio Rodríguez and so many other dogs’ breakfasts of patriotic poetry, so much Castroism disguised as uncomfortable intellectualism, so many arms smuggled from Havana (the scroungers were previously the guerrillas), so much of our parents’ out of date Marxist social criticism. Is that what you wanted? No! That’s why we already saved ourselves.

Thanks, Venezuela.

Fidel Castro hates the Venezuelans as much as he hates Cubans a much as he hates human beings. Much more now, because he will die soon. And he hates the idea that millions and millions of people should live when he doesn’t.

The Venezuelans resisted Fidel too much, since January 1959 when the Commander in Chief proposed a diabolical pact to President Rómulo Betancourt: Venezuela will give Cuba all its oil and also its land as a trampoline for expanding the Revolution: in return, Fidel held out the promise of the destruction of the United States in a few years’ time and the damned imposition of the dream of Bolívar and Martí (he almost managed it in October 1962, at the cost of the Russian nuclear missiles, which showed that Bolívar and Martí, far from having dreams, had terrible nightmares). continue reading

Fidel tried military invasion of Venezuela several times. The continental consequences were negligible. No-one had any faith in his invasions. There were fabrications of Yankee imperialism and of national oligarchy. And the repressed people applauded that argument which seemed at the time to be conciliatory rather than totalitarian terrorism. Do you get it now, my dear Venezuela? Yes, I know, my strong and beloved little girl.

Also, it is possible that the Venezuelans felt a certain demoniacal left-wing pride at having been invaded time and again from the little island. You agree? Doesn’t matter.

Finally, when Fidel noticed that the world had changed, and that he had become older, he recruited thousands of Venezuelans, taught them his jargon of hate and thuggery, and he gave them the money to empower them (money which in fact came blood-soaked from Libya and Iran)

In this disgusting chess game, Rafael Caldera was the anonymous ally of Castroism, which cost many Venezuelan lives, including countless soldiers who were massacred in “accidents” authorised by Hugo Chavez and including later the assassination of Chavez himself when the very obedient one let the wild beasts know that he, Chavez, ought to be Fidel’s successor.

Beautiful Venezuela, so pregnant for so long, to give birth also to your own Revolution. Is that what you wanted? No! Now all of this is about to happen. Maybe it has already happened.

Today, those who don’t know about any of this, are angry on the streets in Venezuela.  They are a legion of heroes. They are life. They are beauty. They are truth. They don’t yet have the strength to give up. They are not going to surrender. Let’s not abandon them, please. We are not going to abandon them.

Those free Venezuelans don’t want to live a life without liberty until the end of time. They are as tired as the Cubans, but they still have a last breath of hope. Best of all, this little ray of light may also wake up us apathetic Cubans.

Free little Venezuelans do not want to exist in a caricature of Castroism without Castros. In Venezuela today the future is showing itself, for fuck’s sake, and they are slaughtering that future in full view of the world. Don’t abandon them, please.

Please

What do we do?

I propose some International Peace Brigades, to put together a Freedom Fleet in a couple of days, and then sail from all the ports in America to Venezuela, loaded up with all our love, and more love (and food and clothes and medicines to cure the wounds of torture, and arms to close ranks by your side, and togetherness in our looks that we will never turn our backs), and once we are there, relaunch a country where words are not a perverse parody, where despotism is just a relic of the Corpse in Chief cooking in his dreadful nearly ninety years old delirium in a buried, inhuman Havana.

Venezuela, I love you.

Venezuela, let’s go.

Translated by GH
21 February 2014

Angel Santiesteban Celebrates His First Year in Prison With a Cake

First anniversary in prison of the intellectual and writer Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

This 28th February marks the first anniversary of the unjust punishment imposed by the Havana provincial tribunal on the prize-winning writer Ángel Santiesteban-Prats. Judgement prepared by the Cuban government.

Santiesteban-Prats, has passed more than 5 months locked up in the Lawton centre, situated in the 10 de Octubre area, under constant restriction by the Heads of the Havana headquarters.

The celebrated literary figure, holder of various international and national prizes. In his critical blog of the¨Los hijos que nadie quiso¨(The Children Nobody Wanted) he has continued in his perennial role as stone-thrower into the middle of a pond. He redoubled his efforts. When the government attacked him, his ability to do this reduced.

In these 12 months he has suffered physical and psychological torture.

He found out that the appeal process which was presented to the Ministry of Justice (MINJUS) on July 4, 2013, had been filed away for more than six months on the basis of lack of a contractual agreement. Finally he presented another document, which is proceeding, has been accepted and is to be found in the Provincial Review Department, where they are keeping it while they wait for the sanctioning tribunal to forward them the lawsuit.

The injustice perpetrated against Santiesteban-Prats has served to strengthen him more. He has maintained his writing as a sacred space for this celebrated creator.

We hope that the Cuban government will accept responsibility for committing a grave error. Santiesteban, when he is free again, will continue to insist on the rights of all Cubans, because not even imprisonment has been able to stop him.

To all his readers, lovers of literature, do not give up the fight for his immediate release.

This day he was presented with a cake so he could celebrate his first anniversary in prison.

So that Amnesty International will declare the Cuban dissident Angel Santiesteban to be a prisoner of conscience you can sign the petition: please click on this link.

Published by: Dania Virgen García on 2nd March 2014 in Desde Cuba.

Translated by GH
3 March 2014

From Teddies to Flat Screens / Yoani Sanchez

6a00d8341bfb1653ef01a3fccd0da4970bOnce there were stuffed animals. Bears or dogs with enormous ears as the doors of the Havana airport opened, arriving on the suitcases of the recently arrived. Dolls that parents, after a trip to the socialist camp, brought home as trophies to the kids they’d left behind. Status symbols for those who could leave the island, those toys represented the world that stretched across to the other side of the ocean and that also promised the future.

Those teddies dominated part of the eighties until the cassette radios arrived. Then the most precious booty that could be acquired on a trip abroad was one of those gadgets with speakers and buttons. Their happy owners turned them on right in customs and emerged winners, blaring their new acquisition at full volume.

Now the new cult objects of these travelers are flat screen TVs. These emblems of modernity travel in vividly colored rectangular boxes. Plasma, LCD, LED are on the front line of the technologies most brought into Cuba via travelers’ suitcases. No one knows the exact number of these items that arrive every day, but it’s enough to glance at the luggage belt to see them everywhere.

On the black market, the price of these TVs has fallen almost by half in the last year. A 32-inch Samsung is less than 380 CUCs (about 340 USD), delivered right to your door. Meanwhile, the price in the state stores could be triple that and they barely manage to sell a few units a year.

Marco Polo Cuban style…

Richard is one of the prosperous TV merchants. He has a network of “mules” who bring them directly from Panama. For the most part they’re Cuban citizens with Spanish passports who can travel without visa restrictions. They also move through Florida, Nassau, the Caiman Island and other countries in the area to buy appliances they can later resell on the Island. In a country with so many shortages, every product brought from abroad can pay dividends.

“I offer them by catalog, the customer chooses which he wants,” boasts Richard, describing his business. A young man asks if he also has 3D TVs, to which the clever merchant answers, “How many inches do you want?” Despite the restrictions on selling important merchandise, these tropical Marco Polos manage to bring them into the country and sell them.

Audiovisual players are in greatest demand. The house may have a collapsed hydraulic system, empty fridge, and mattresses with the springs poking out, but in the living room most families want to hang a modern and very thin TV.

In less than three decades Cuban airports have been the scene of a peculiar metamorphosis. The teddy bear transmuted into music equipment and then into these shiny screens of pixels and cells.

5 March 2014

The Hard Fate of Those Who Grow Old / Alberto Mendez Castello

Cuba, old age, selling little cones of peanuts on the street.

PUERTO PADRE, Cuba — Old Raul was a worker for Communal Services, but an unyielding cervical disease at age 54 made the Medical Commission discharge him. Now he is 74 years old and has a pension of 242 pesos, “but I go over 40 just on my wife’s drugs,” he says.  Most of the time he stays seated on the sidewalk in front of a market that sells unrationed products, and sells spices and homemade bags to take on errands.

Raul gets around on a bicycle, but old Gilberto has to fight on foot, with short steps, in order to sell the occasional homemade cumin packet.  He was a truck driver.  He spent 41 years behind the steering wheel:  “I was driving throwing rods since I was 11 or 12 years old,” he says.

Skeletal illnesses took Gilbert from work.  Now a septuagenarian, he and his wife “live” with a pension of 242 pesos, and of those some seventy go for medicine. Those retired because of illness cannot get a license to work for themselves:  “The other day an inspector wanted to give me a fine of 700 pesos.  Take me to the police, to say there everything I have to say.  In the end he left me alone.”

Mariano had a better position than Raul and Gilberto, and unlike them, did not retire because of illness but because he finished his years of work.  At the time he retired, he held an administrative post in the municipal hospital.  After retirement, other institutions took advantage of him until his health took a bad turn.  Now Mariano is a paraplegic. Pedalling a tricycle with his hands, he tries to earn a living selling prú, a soft drink made of herbs and fermented roots.

Blanco also pedals a tricycle with his hands.  He is an ex-operator and driver of tow trucks, who was transformed into a babbling paraplegic by two thromboses.  Now he has to get by with a pension of 242 pesos for him and his aged mother:  “More than 40 pesos go for nothing more than medicines; if I don’t sell knives we die of hunger,” he told me at the same time he was lamenting the difficulty of finding knives to sell because Customs has limited their entry into the country.

In Puerto Padre there exists a Grandfather House where, for 25 pesos a month, old people receive breakfast, lunch, dinner and two snacks.  “Sometimes here we even have beef, today we have chicken,” said Jimenez, a retired bricklayer.  But this Grandfather House only has capacity for 40 old people, who have to go sleep in their homes.  So it is no more than a small remedy for this great wound that is old age, not only in Puerto Padre but in all of Cuba.

Hundreds of old people, almost all of them sick, almost always in precarious conditions and not a few on the edge of the law, have to pursue working in order to earn a living in this city.  False reasoning does not produce a good soup.  According to Law No. 117 of the State Budget for 2014, incomes for contribution to Social Security are 3,034.5 million pesos, but the expenses exceed 5,122.7 million pesos, therefore there is a deficit of 2,088.2 million pesos, to be covered by the central budget account.  That is okay if the numbers are real.  But they are not.

Cubanet, March 3, 2014,

Translated by mlk.

Open Letter to the European Community / Angel Santiesteban

I am addressing each one of the twenty-eight nations which make up the European Community, to demand more depth, through an exhaustive investigation with free people, unencumbered and unafraid, to find a just consensus to the national issues of the Island, more so when we know that the historic practice, in more than a half century of socialism, has not been the welfare of the people, but the maintenance of the cruel machinery for the sake of their “Iron Totalitarian Power,” the imprisonment and daily repression of dissenters, and the mysterious deaths of opposition leaders.

I appeal to you, in the light of the recent decision of your Foreign Ministers, to open up a bargaining agreement with Havana, which we consider to be a grave mistake, in view of the fact that while the European Union was arriving at this agreement, the regime was imprisoning its opponents.

We hope that you do not see Cuba as a palliative to help you solve the crisis you are dealing with, at the cost of permitting the violation of our rights.

Exposing ourselves to risk, we have learned that the Castro brothers will never permit any imposition which gives any space for opposition, so that they have not even signed the United Nations Covenants, which in this 21st century should be the minimum indispensable requirement for the self-respect of any state, in the face of the international community; achieving this, and thus liberty and respect for the opposition, would be the contribution that the European Community could present to the Cuban people, and in turn this would be a credible step forward on the part of the Raúl Castro government, showing that it really is its intention to provide openings and improvements in terms of the Human Rights of the Cuban people.

In actual fact, they have filled up the jails with young people who, without any other option, have preferred to be criminals rather than submit to hunger and the absence of basic necessities. In those prisons, you will find many professionals, “embezzlers”, who have had the same misfortune as those who haven’t studied, since they haven’t had the opportunity to emigrate, as is the case with the overwhelming majority.

With respect, we urgently request that the European Community does not change its Common Position, without previously assuring itself in respect of the necessary change for the political democratisation of the Cuban archipelago.

Sincerely,

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Lawton prison settlement. February 2014.
Please sign the petition for Amnesty International declare the dissident Cuban Angel Santiesteban to be a prisoner of conscience

Translated by GH
26 February 2014

Collapse in Havana Leaves More Than 600 People on the Street / Agusto Cesar San Martin and Pablo Mendez

Building in danger of total collapse — photo Augusto Cesar San Martin

HAVANA, Cuba. — Since the afternoon of last Thursday the 27th, the residents of the building located at 308 Oquendo, between San Rafael and San Miguel, Centro Havana remain on the street.

The partial collapse of the upper floors put in danger the structure of the five story building of 120 apartments.

From the first concrete crashes, the more than 600 residents began to abandon the property, transferring their belongings to the street.  Facing the imminence of total collapse, the local authorities ordered an evacuation.

The residents keep doors, bathroom tiles, toilets, electric appliances, beds and all kinds of belongings on the street.  These people have not been evacuated.

At 7:00 pm on Saturday the police ordered the electricity cut off and prohibited entry into the building until Sunday morning.  The order caused a disruption for the residents who have not finished gathering their belongings.

On Friday, local government officials met with some of those affected.  According to one of the victims, they made assurances that they would evacuate everyone gradually.

One of the building’s residents who did not want to be identified told the independent press said:

“We don’t know where to go.  Yesterday nine buses came by here in order to take us to shelters, and they were empty. . .  We want homes, not shelter.”

It is also known that some affected families were installed in apartments of buidlings located in Santa Fe, Playa township.  The provision of dwellings is prioritized by the composition of nuclear families with children.

The building constructed in 1928 was declared in danger of collapse in 1988.  All the victims consulted agree on the reiteration of the government alerts about the deterioration of the building.

Photo gallery of collapse in Centro Havana, sent by Augusto Cesar San Martin and Pablo Mendez

1 El-derrube-en-los-pisos-superiores-puso-en-peligro-la-edificacion-420x5052 Edificio-desalojado.-2.3-53 Edificio-desalojado.-2.3-1 4 Derrumbe-1-feb-2014-5-400x505Cubanet, March 3, 2014, Augusto Cesar San Martin and Pablo Mendez

Translated by mlk.

Criticism: Constructive or Complacent? / Yoani Sanchez

Revolutionary Vigilance, a Permanent Task

He raised his hand at the meeting. The director had told them “don’t hold back,” so he took advantage of the chance to say what he’d remained silent about for months. He started with the very low wages paid to public health workers. Then he talked about the dirty bathrooms, the water shortages, that the only sterilizer was broken, the leaks all over the hospital. He continued with the heat in the waiting room packed with patients and the lack of surgical instruments. He finished up with the exclamation, “it’s more than anyone can stand,” which plunged the room into a heavy and uncomfortable silence.

At the end someone approached him to say that his criticism hadn’t been constructive but merely a catharsis. So he didn’t speak again at any other meeting.

Behind the argument of looking for opportune and uplifting criticisms, hide those who in reality do not want any kind of criticism. For them, being proactive means bowing and preceding every statement with a flattering phrase. One should never, according to these encouragers of applause — question the system, much less the inefficiencies that don’t allow it to function. Being “constructive” amounts to not calling to account the current leaders of the political process, much less questioning the ideological model. One also needs to show a blind faith that everything will be resolved with “wise leadership” at the highest levels.

If someone deviates from the script of tolerated criticism, the disqualifiers will rain down upon them. Chip on the shoulder, whiner, crybaby… will be the first insults, although later it’ll move on to the already hackneyed “CIA agent,” “counterrevolutionary” or “enemy of the nation.” Their observations will never find the opportune moment, because they don’t include submission or self-blame.

Criticism doesn’t need a name. It doesn’t need to be classified as “constructive” or “destructive,” but it should be delivered with total rigor, regardless. Like rubbing medicine on a festering sore, criticism hurts, it makes you cry, it’s torture… but it cures.

5 March 2014

The Experiment of Hope / Francis Sanchez

Dagoberto Valdés, director of the periodical ‘Convivencia’. (BARACUTEYCUBANO.BLOGSPOT.COM)

On the 15th of February 2008, with the uploading to the internet of Issue 1 (January-February), the magazine Convivencia was born in Pinar del Río.  Since then, six years have passed of uninterrupted bimonthly publication.  The new publication invited one to live on a horizon at once broad and intimate, democratic, heavy with possibilities and without the scourge of restrictive determinations.  “A dawn for the citizenry and civil society in Cuba”, the title of the first edition’s editorial, would become the motto of the magazine.

The beginning of the new alternative project within Casa Cuba, passing between the homogeneity and impersonality of the official press, brought a signal of hope or possible restoration of diversity from the westernmost of the Cuban provinces, after the retirement had taken place in 2006 of the bishop José Siro González Bacallao to a farm in Mantua.

Confusions and disappointments have taken place, at times imperceptibly, but knowing the difference between one and the other helps us to understand and to hope.  Let us see.  It is known how, during the nineties, a weave of publications belonging to the Catholic Church was assembled in Cuba — although sociocultural in ecumenical spirit — that allowed intellectual communities in many provinces to have a means of expression for the first time.  I met Dagoberto Valdés in that setting: we founded the Catholic Press Union of Cuba (UCLAP-Cuba) in November 1996, in the church La Merced of Camagüey.

The new magazine movement was thriving (Vitral in Pinar del Río, Palabra Nueva in Havana, Amanecer in Villa Clara, Enfoque in Camagüey, Cocuyo in Holguín, Iglesia en Marcha in Santiago de Cuba, etc.) and independent of state control, which, as it must be supposed, would influence the State to respond by assembling a national system of editing houses and territorial magazines.

The unique impact of Vitral, its operation, its alternative editions, compelled the Government to strengthen the world of Pinareño culture in proportions that would have otherwise been unthinkable.  Great sums were thus expended on projects such as, for example, the beautiful Ediciones Cauce and the Hermanos Loynaz Centre, elements that taken together would subsequently pay for themselves by achieving such a rich diversity there that this province would stand out in the civic, cultural, and editorial spectrum of the country.

The magazine Vitral, the Church, Dagoberto Valdés, and Pinar del Río were key points of reference in a phase of optimism that was marked by the first visit of a Pope to Cuba. Days of illumination were lived then — before, during, and after the brief crossing of Wojytla, the Pilgrim Pope.  “Have no fear,” he said in mass in the José Martí Civic Plaza on the 25th of January of 1998, and at some moment everyone or most of the people present there were springing up — we were springing up — calling out “Liberty, liberty.”  Either we no longer had fear, or we did not want to have, indeed, any more fear.  Two days before, John Paul II had held the Encounter with the World of Culture, in the Great Hall of the University of Havana.  continue reading

Among the few photographs that came out of those I took at that meeting, I save one in which I appear standing next to Dagoberto Valdés on a wing of the second floor.  He was attending as a representative of Vitral, while I found myself in that hall as a young writer who was creating, along with others, a similar magazine: Imago, founded in 1996 and belonging to the diocese of Ciego de Ávila.

The opportunity of that encounter with the world of culture and John Paul II has been moreover the only day of my life in which I have seen Fidel Castro in the flesh, dressed strangely in a collar and tie there below in the first row, likewise to hear the religious leader, and, certainly, he seemed to me then very pinched, perhaps as an effect of the contrast with the image I had formed in my mind.  I think I took some pictures from afar with my modest camera, but they did not come out.

Why stir up such memories to refer to the fifth anniversary of the magazine Convivencia?  I have come back to the mentioned photo, and to another in which I am raising up a little Cuban flag in a very packed square, and with an enormous Heart of Jesus covering the façade of the National Library.  Without a doubt, a new phase of the old and complicated experiment that time and again has seemed easy was being tested or beginning, although in the long run it shows signs of error: the experiment of hope.  The hope of liberty.

Cuba must open itself to Cuba

Up to what point hasn’t the search for a spiritual and collective liberty been a controlled trial, condemned to failure?  Who motivates our reactions and rations out our actions?  Who distributes the social reach of intimate or true result?

Apparently a return of Cuba to the universal accord of democracy is tried once and again, and what is sad is that we who live out this trial from below and within, repeating it it, putting into every expression all of the energy and urgent need of our mortal nature, at times simply cannot get nor give answers.

The international repercussion of the first visit of a Pope to the island brought back to us, with great underscores, the petition that Cuba open itself to the world and that the world open itself to Cuba.  It was urged at the coexistence between hemispheres without the great polarities of the Cold War.  Without a doubt, that invitation impressed well, but although such a call-up and the wake of open expectations aimed to create a point of rotation in the tradition of rigidities, they continued giving preeminence to the problem of the role of a nation constructed for an international political conflict.

An emblematic scheme has continuously been inflated which has been incapacitating, agonizing for we who live it from within and beneath in Cuba, scheme or favorite script of those who enjoy power, and some who covet it, where this tale would supposedly have only two actors obliged to share one same scene: Cuba and the world.  An enormous tale of love-hate.  A libretto not for liberty, but rather to depersonalize.

That assumption, used as a straitjacket, has served to pretend justifying a stop to civic liberties and rights on the island.  It has been brandished to silence or make invisible all the rest of us subjects who fill what they wish to present to us merely as a great international “scenario”, historic laboratory table, when it is no more than the area and the time of life, like the life of every human being: inexorable, unrepeatable.  Lives, or unique novels where everyone is either protagonist of himself, or has been no one.

In light of the suspicion that we suffer artificial experiments, ill-constructed scenarios, we human beings have a metaphysical dilemma which remodels our civil condition: to open up to ourselves, to be, to live as we consciously are, then it will only be possible to build other reliable ontological and social figures, to open up among ourselves, to coexist.  Cuba must open itself to Cuba.

Not for fun have despotisms based themselves historically in a false gigantism that claims to annul faith in free will and the mortal, real, imperfect but infinitely worthy nature of the human being: from the untouchable castes, representatives of the afterlife, kings that were considered the direct descendants of gods, up to leaders and political groups that in modern history have declared themselves “the vanguard of society” or claim to head up scientifically superior social classes.

Another invitation of John Paul II’s extended in that giant plaza had more effect in my heart, where for the first and only time –also surely the last one– I found myself among the multitude when he invited us to be “protagonists of our personal and national history.”  Words taken as though by an annotator under a shell in an old theatre, at the bottom of our hearts that were wounded, half forgotten, thrown into the trash, to put them in our ears when the sky seemed clearer.

This last quote of John Paul II’s appears crowning the first editorial of the magazine Convivencia, where one can also read a programmatic maxim that became perhaps the necessary echo rising up from the earth, inevitable, personal: “We believe in the strength of the small.”

A renovation of the interior of Cuba

Somehow, despite the poor quality of the roads inside the country, and all of the broken bridges, I always get the magazine Convivencia.  I believe in this inner weave, cell to cell.  It is the same ethical motivation — for me in the final instance an active choice will always have a metaphysical reason — for which I also endeavour to make Árbol Invertido, “inland literary review”, without more interest but also with less illusion than this– the word which opens and closes the editorial “Tierradentrismo” from the first issue of the 2nd period of Árbol Invertido, corresponding to January-April of 2013: to be.

Convivencia is.  A word with a very deep power of announcement.  It does not enter the game of artificial paradises to substitute one old utopia for another, supposedly new or better, in that poor tradition of idealisms with which spiritually insufferable, baseless policies have sought to adorn themselves.  It sounds like the future and is full of reality.  Soft yet hardy.  Open.  Abundant.  It changes.  It flows.  It grows upon itself.  It branches out.  It shelters.  It explores.  It deluges and demands.  It arrives and it leaves.  Coexistence as a challenge, a possibility, arises from the condensation of life experiences.

Convivencia looks like itself.  Imperfect.  It imagines, it reflects the image, the metaphor of Casa Cuba that it has made its own from the identifier that appears on each title page.  If a person can accept themselves, or better put, should do it, as a plural being, box of echoes, impulses, defects, good and bad memories, the alternative of a civil society that bases itself on the creative relation of different peoples seems no less concrete.

From its structure, as a “socio-cultural magazine”, comes a model of inclusive edition.  Through its pages run the popular outcry or murmur, the calculus, the song of the artist, the prayer of the believer and the intellectual discourse, among an infinity of themes dear to natural people.  The Casa of the magazine Convivencia is not held up by the nails of so many dogmas, but rather moving upon the crests of the waves, in a spiritual impulse, when it is defined as “from Christian inspiration.” And I believe that here, in its entrance to tremblingly small things in the middle of the night, in its contribution to the light of spirituality, can be felt its most transcendent consequences.

We are not in need of another restoration, we who within a same residence felt that time and space were running out.  Let them take them from us.  Because definitively, a lasting “spiritual response” from anyone who feels oppressed may be based on the great ignorance of the institutions of hatred, not recognizing their perceived authority: do not do it with fear, but neither with more hatred.

One of the gratifying testimonies that I have found in Convivencia was that of doctor Hilda Molina.  I did not know her until I read this account of her life, it being revealing that a scientist like her — founder of the Cuban and Latin American schools of Neurological Restoration and the International Center for Neurological Restoration –, after living close-up the dogmas of practiced atheism and even suffering uncountable problems when she decided to express herself differently, would arrive at the following affectionate, perhaps idealistic? conclusion:
“Nevertheless, any reconstruction of material sort will prove useless, if we do not prioritize from this precise moment onward the spiritual reconstruction of our afflicted country, the rescue of its confiscated souls; and the resurrection of its faith, and its hopes.”

Convivencia is and resembles a too-ideal house, so real that it has only been possible for some as a miracle and for others, of course, as a great sin.  It is occupied and under construction.  It opens and connects communicating veins.  It is filling a stronger void: the hope in the necessary restoration of the “inside” of Cuba, in the soul.

Every time that a new issue of Convivencia arrives before my eyes from the other side of the walls of Havana and all the unexpected, I aspire to relive, to star in a free reading of the infinitely small time and space that is mine to live in, to embrace.  An edifying read, personal, making contact with other experiences no less authentic.  Can one ask for more?

Francis Sánchez, Ciego de Ávila

Diario de Cuba, 15 February 2014

Translated by russell conner