Guided by low-flying vultures, three young men, who moments before had been cutting wood on the mountain in order to build a fence, found the remains of a cow, which 24 hours earlier had been stolen and killed by unknown rustlers.
Though they could smell the odor of meat exposed for a long time in our hot climate, the newcomers felt that it could be useful for their dogs, or perhaps with some treatment, for their own consumption. With their tools they then proceeded to cut the bones along with the remaining meat and hide.
The task was interrupted by the police, who arrived with the animal’s owner, who already knew where the animal had been slaughtered, having found it before youngsters had, also guided by the birds of prey.
At noon it was decided to incinerate the remains of the animal and what the three boys had cut up, necessitated by the state of decomposition.
Not knowing who the perpetrators were and powerless to discover their identity, the police took the three young men as defendants to the police station. Because one of them was a soldier, it was decided that the case would be transferred to military jurisdiction, unfortunately for the three.
Over three months passed before it was presented to the regional Military Court based in La Cabaña. Do not be shocked:
– Acquisition of beef slaughtered illegally, under Article 240.1.3 of the Criminal Code, and
– Illegal Possession of Weapons, under Article 214 of the Criminal Code, both accomplished.
The latter charge, perhaps to justify the prison sentence, which exceeded the minimum limit for the first offense, which was charged from the outset.
The penalty imposed was six months imprisonment for both offenses, or three months for each one.
The incorrectness of these sentences is beyond absurd. To claim that a rotting carcass, which had to be incinerated, has the same character as meat fit for human consumption, as required by law, is extremely unjust.
Further, to treat the woodcutting tools used to cut bones as illegal weapons is breathtaking to any jurist. There is no known way to relate and illegally connect the two offenses, one a crime against public order, the other a crime against the economy.
How do these inexplicable things happen?
Someone should review these cases of clear judicial blundering.
The saddest thing about this story is that the people in court reacted with happiness, considering the sentence appropriate because, as the prosecutor explained, they had already served three months of the six, and had almost become eligible for probation.
Havana, Cuba. September 27, 2013 . José Antonio does not have family to send him dollars, so he had to work more than a month in a private restaurant to be able to buy a pair of jeans.
Taking his wages and tips, he had a little over $40 and went to store offering Fariani, the military-owned state chain Caracol SA, located in the Comodoro Hotel in Havana, to choose some jeans.
He didn’t buy the jeans that he wanted, but the ones that he found there. But he no more than hit the streets in his “new” jeans than the seams split. They were rotten.
José Antonio’s odyssey is common in Cuba. This reporter has suffered the same. He could not recover the money invested, as it is not customary among men to save the receipt. And besides, he was afraid of inviting ridicule by appearing at the store with such plunder.
Caracol, at 1st and 20th in the Miramar neighborhood, stocks its chain of stores with goods from the Panamanian supplier Ariela SA, directed by Miguel Alonso. Fariani is one brand offered.
Basically they offer out-dated clothes, aged and deteriorated, bargain lots acquired by the Cuban military, who for their bad taste are nicknamed “Bananas spots” by their subordinates.
Brands like United Colors of Benetton, Rifle, Paul and Shark, are sold to Cubans at the prices of European boutiques. But be careful ! They are out-dated clothes, having been in the stores for years. Garments that have remained unsold in the international market.
Shirts with enormous lettering, huge pants about to split at any seam. The Adidas brand is, perhaps, an exception because it requires that its foreign buyers to be the same sellers who show their faces to the public.
Cuba is a captive market. Cubans have no other option than to buy in the shops of the generals.
The customs authorities imposed a penalty of $10 for each additional pound of imported clothing. Now the Ministry of Labour just passed a resolution that, from the first day of next month, they will no longer allowed self-employed people who operate little businesses under tailors or dressmakers licenses to sell current and cheap clothing acquired by people traveling outside, who leave without luggage and return loaded like mules.
Shortages in the State markets are nothing new like the authorities want us to believe. Since the coming to power of the current regime in 1959, it’s not even possible to keep using one brand of toilet paper so people usually use the official organ of the Communist Party, the newspaper Granma, as a common replacement.
The absurd Cuban system is loaded with prohibitions — despite certain changes — where some professionals such as veterinarians are forced to open business facades as dog groomers, because they are not allowed a license to practice privately.
You finally brought me my glass of milk. // Hmm… no. It’s sugar water. But it was made by a self-employed person. Try it, bobita… By Garrincha
HAVANA, Cuba , October, www.cubanet.org – More than six years ago, President Raul Castro announced that he would guarantee a glass of fresh milk to the majority of children as a result of the plan to distribute this food through a group of bodegas (ration stores), experimentally. He said that as production increased, it would be extended to the whole country.
As of today, it is unknown how many bodegas and municipalities are distributing daily milk to children. Something that did not work as expected.
At the end of 2012, nationwide milk production was 516,246,500 liters. Of that amount, livestock enterprises produced 62,660,200 liters, but it is unknown what really was the destination of this production, because in none of the bodegas in the major cities in Cuba, nor in the chain stores selling in hard currency, is fresh milk or butter produced in Cuba offered.
Of the remaining 453,586,300 liters, most of it was provided by farmers who delivered 341,834,400 liters. Agricultural Production Cooperatives (CPA) and Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPCs) produced 111,751,900 liters.
Given their dispersal throughout the country, both private producers and cooperatives were assigned the task of ensuring that fresh milk reaches the majority of the ration stores in the municipalities that are contemplating the sale of milk.
This would be very important substitution for imports, as the price of a ton of milk powder exceeds 4,000 dollars, but it’s unknown if, in the last legislature of the National Assembly of People’s Power, the issue was analyzed by the deputies and government.
It seems that substituting for milk powder, which costs so much, for domestic production, is not among economic priorities of the current Cuban government.
With regards to milk production, the official press does not provide any information. When it does, it is very general. Evidently they are not authorized to go into detail on the matter.
Nine months into the present year we do not know how many millions of liters of milk are produced, how much has been destined for industry, what number of bodegas directly distribute it in how many municipalities, total households that receive it and what this represented in foreign exchange savings through import substitution.
The latest data available are for the period January to March, when there were 84,778,800 liters of milk. Of these, livestock enterprises reported a production of 11,297,800 liters, the remaining 73,481,700 liters were collected by cooperatives and private producers. The latter produced the most, with a delivery of 55,233,200 liters.
An example of how rapid the decline in milk production in livestock enterprises has been, we have in the province of Camagüey the largest producer of milk nationwide. In 2012, its dairies reported a production of 96,299,600 liters. Of that total, livestock enterprises only produced 43,896,600 liters. Between January and March of this year, it was reported that 14,507,500 liters were produced in Camagüey. Livestock enterprises only produced 761,800 liters.
Historically, drought served as justification to hide the poor results, but since June it has rained continuously throughout the island. Those who tore out the marabou weed, prepared the land and planted king grass so there would be no shortage of food for cows, and also provided the dairies with water and lighting for twice a day milking so that they could meet their respective production plans with no complications.
From January to August, most livestock enterprises, despite the good performance of the rain, recorded very low milk yields. Serious organizational problems, the lack of control, lack of demand, lack of foresight, have adversely affected production and brought these poor results.
“President” Raul Castro, cynically, busied himself patching the leak, as we Cubans say, when in his speech he said, “I imagine the news in the coming days, in the great international press that specializes in denigrating Cuba and subjecting us to a frenzied scrutiny,” that is: their having a different opinion, as they have for the more than half century of the dictatorship, is an attack on the country, a subversive plan.
With complete shamelessness, he said, “We have become accustomed to living under siege and don’t restrict ourselves to debating the reality with total harshness,” which might seem like a joke had it not cost the Cuban people so dearly.
Later on, although it seems impossible, in increased the government’s audacity.
He spoke of the pain of twenty years, of the “increasing deterioration of moral and civic values, such as honesty, decency, shame, decorum, honor and sensitivity to the problems of others,” as if the great school of these losses wasn’t his mis-governing, for more than fifty years, a country that he has administered as if it were a private ranch, an extension of the Biran of his parents.
A subject people, that has been brought to a high level of poverty and human misery, where crime began to be a method of survival and stealing food from workplaces, in order to survive, began to be seen by society as acceptable, permitted, and as the years passed the act of stealing came to be called “struggle” and those who did it “fighters,” as he recognized in his discourse: “So, one part of society has come to see stealing from the State as normal,” as if it weren’t legitimate and they hadn’t stolen the lives of several generations.
That was the beginning of the amorality, they turned the country into that: a gold digger people, going to the West, risking everything to try their luck. Except that for the Cuban, any latitude looked promising, a better song than reality, like an unreachable promise offered by its leader Fidel Castro.
In this way, Raul Castro summarized the negative which had been known for years: it is an unstoppable epidemic. This, the massive number of Cuban prisons, overcrowded with young people waiting for the chance to get out and commit crimes, because they know no other way of life; there is no hope ahead for them or decent way to survive, other than to emigrate.
At the end of his speech he detailed, photographically, the Cuban society they turned it into, the “new pines that dreamed“; but never acknowledged their guilt, never admitted that we need another model, that fifty-four years are more than enough to understand that they are not offering a dignified path, and that it’s time to allow Cuba to start its ascent to economic development and human betterment.
In his speech Raul Castro asserted that screaming out loud in the street is bad behavior, forgetting that earlier it was they who screamed and called it “Revolutionaries defending the Revolution.” When they screamed “Worms! Let them go!” and handed out beatings and humiliations, their conduct then wasn’t improper. From the time we were children they trained us to scream slogans in the street in support of some national event, or to repudiate, in the world they programmed, those they classify as undesirable.
Illegal constructions, like the black market, have been the relief of the Cuban family, because their non-working government has not given them solutions to their needs.
How can they demand that people work full days when they don’t pay them for their real work? Their sacrifices, like during colonization, are paid for with trinkets.
One of Raul Castro’s great lies in his presentation was to assert that if society is warped and overrun with disorder and marginality, it has been, “Abusing the nobility of the Revolution which hasn’t resorted to the use of force, favoring conviction and political work.”
Don’t panic dear readers, it’s not a joke, although it could be in the genre known as “noir.” Later he urged State agencies, “the Police, the Comptroller General of the Republic, the Prosecutor, and the Courts,” to push even harder. That is, we should expect the prison population to grow even more than its already excessive numbers, the prisons will triple. It will be one great prison within the other floating prison.
Then, the ruler “meditated” on the negative demonstrations, thought about everything that had deceived the world, the specialized agencies, like the United Nations, and he had “the bitter feeling that we are an increasingly educated society, but not, perhaps, a more cultured one.”
Unfortunately this is Cubans’ reality, but even worse is that in his speech he didn’t recognize his inability to govern, nor even touch on the possibility of accepting some blame.
One comes to the conclusion that he presides over a putrid society that should force him to resign, to give way to a new formula that reawakens and steers the twisted path followed in this half century.
To retrace all our steps will cost us just as much as the distance we have strayed from the dignity and honesty of José Martí that we have lost.
But we must come to the conclusion that our country was corrupted, crime and marginality became widespread, by the work and grace of the Caribbean winds.
The Castros… they never had anything to do with this reality.
Ángel Santiesteban-Prats, Prison 1580
Editor’s note: This post is the second part of what Angel sent me when he was still in Prison 1580, in San Miguel del Padron. It refers to Raul Castro’s speech at the First Ordinary Session of the VIII Legislature of the National Assembly of People’s Power at the Convention Center on 7 July 2013. The first part was published August 5th.
A great concern for public health is the epidemic of urinary incontinence that has been plaguing us for a while. It cannot be attributed to the endemic lack of public toilets, given that the public toilets disappeared long before the first cases appeared; on the contrary, now with private businesses there are many bathrooms, which are required to be clean, have running water, soap and toilet paper, a requirement that was never present in the bathrooms of the State restaurants. So, this troubling epidemic worries me, but cannot be linked in any way to the lack of sanitary facilities.
At first they were nocturnal cases, anonymous overnight emergencies, only recognizable by ammonia odor in the atmosphere, but the advance of the epidemic has changed the knowledge of the ill. In its etiology it is described a loss of modesty, so that those infected can be detected with the naked eye in public and in broad daylight discharging their urination. Also, it more frequently attacks males under forty years.
Given this proliferation, it’s no longer just the area around the Capitol or the doorways of the Hotel Cohiba’s mall that are affected, now may be an innocent hibiscus in a planting strip, the entrance of a private garage, the side of a bakery.
My mother often repeats a phrase and I surprised myself several times repeating it also: “In my day …” And in my day, readers, people did not so blithely piss in the middle of the street.
By Lic. Dora Mesa Crespo Coordinator of the Cuban Association for the Development of Early Childhood Education, and Lic. Odalina Guerrero Lara, Attorney for the Cuban Law Association.
Labor Law is a system of principles governing employment relations. Thus, we understand that the essence of Labor Law is precisely the employment relationship.
Analysis of the draft Labor Code Law [1]
Chapter III. EMPLOYMENT CONTRACT. Section One Formalities and the Capacity To Make Employment Contracts
Article 20 (Chapter III) provides:
ARTICLE 20: The employment relationship between employer and employee is formalized with an employment contract…
In the Draft of the Labor Law Code, hereinafter Draft, when it defines Contract, it omits that Article 20 refers only to an individual contract.
The Individual Employment Contract is entered into individually between the employee and the employer, which can be a person, although reality shows us that in one employment relationship there can be many physical or legal parties, simultaneously or successively, corresponding to the employer.
The Draft of the Labor Code, Chapter III, Article 20 explains it in the following manner:
Acticle 20. The employment relationship between the employee and the employer is formalized via an Employment Contract, in which the employee, on one side, is committed to perform the work, follow disciplinary rules and the employer on his side, is required to pay wages to the employee and will guarantee safe working conditions, labor rights and social security which are established by legislation. The contract will be considered null if there are any violations to this Law.
The employment relationship
Per professor Cavazos, the employment relationship starts at the same moment in which the employee begins work; however, the employment contract is achieved with the simple fact of agreement. Therefore, there could be instances of the existence of an employment contract without an employment relationship; it occurs when a contract is entered into and it is agreed that the service will be performed at a later time.
The existence of an employment relationship presumes the existence of a contract, between the party performing the work and the one that receives it; it presumes the employment relationship, and the lack of agreement is always imputable to the employer.
Chapter I GENERAL DISPOSITIONS, First Section, Principles and Fundamentals to Employment Law. Perhaps to make it easier for the employees, the legal article defines the ones subjects to the “employment relationship”, (Article 9), identifies the employer and worker, but omits the description of the “employment relationship” which does exist when defining the contract, but with an inexplicable omission as to what an “Individual Work Contract” relates to.
In the section that relates to Contracts (articles 26 through 28) it really refers to the length of time of the individual relationships of employment as established in Chapter III, Draft of the Labor Code Law.
Chapter III Employment Contract – Second Section – Types of Employment Contracts
ARTICLE 26: Types of employment contracts used:
a) For an undetermined time, the work is to be undertaken in character permanent in nature and it doesn’t express the date of termination;
b) for a determined time, for the execution of a determined work or project, to complete potential or emergent work, for seasonal work or for the fulfillment of social work, for a trial period, to fill in for absent employees due to justified causes protected to continue for an undetermined time; they are arranged to be performed in a permanent manner and it doesn’t express a termination date.
Therefore, in a legal definition, it’s said that there is a contract when two or more parties, with contractual capacity agree under a common declaration of intent, meant to regulate their rights and obligations.
In modern law, the employment contract is not freed to the autonomy of the contractual parties, the law imposes limitations, fundamentally intended to protect the rights and obligations of the employee, or beneficiary, especially if they are under the age of 18.
There is a reciprocal relationship between both parties in an employment contract. By adhering to the limitations, what is a right to one party it becomes an obligation to the other. This is the legal relationship that is protected by the legal bodies.
The Divine Shepherdess in the background, in El Morro Havana.
A title that cheesy might seem like something straight out of the most mediocre thriller, but it refers to real events: The Divine Shepherdess restaurant, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Gaviota corporation of the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (MINFAR), tucked away in an area of the Historic Morro-Cabaña Park, has been closed to start a bidding process. Its workers have been made “available” on the “employment exchange,” in hopes of future “relocation.” They are the new victims of another conspiracy of the olive-green mafia.
None of them saw the blow coming. Frustrated and deeply worried about the loss of their income and anxious about unemployment, the 23 workers have addressed letters of complaint to different agencies, including the Ministry of Labor and Social Security. To date, they haven’t received any responses.
However, many of them resist assimilating what happened, without understand that the conspiracy was planned in careful detail by the uniformed leaders. There are those who, naively, still believe there is hope of a solution. But theirs is a lost battle: from the beginning the die was cast and their fate sealed. The economic interests of the military leadership would not stop for trifles such as respecting the work of a handful of perfectly dispensable individuals.
The Plot
Months ago it began to be rumored that The Divine Shepherdess would be among the restaurants that would form part of the pilot experiment of non-agricultural cooperatives that the Government proposed to develop, immersed in its controversial “reforms.” In the beginning, the workers were concerned about the possibility that this would give rise to a layoff plan to increase profitability and efficiency, characteristics of a cooperative; but soon their enthusiasm over the idea of working autonomously and increasing their personal incomes, without incurring the risk of the illegalities that abound in all state institutions, in particular in those operating in convertible currency, as this one did.
Given a major venture “from above,” they were assured there would be no layoffs. This dispelled their initial reserves and raised the expectations of those who thought it would be a new and advantageous start of a restaurant in a privileged position, right at the entrance to Havana Bay, within La Cabaña fort, on the other side of the city: a panoramic view of the capital and a place frequented by numerous foreign tourists.
The first surprise surfaced when, on a Roundtable TV show dedicated to the topic, a journalist declared that “the workers of The Divine Shepherdess” didn’t want to form a cooperative. Astonished at such a slander, they wrote the program demanding that the Institute of Radio and Television elevate their written complaint to the most diverse authorities. The official media have not rectified the mistake and, with the passing of days, they took the incident as a small involuntary slip up, perhaps due to misinformation or confusion on the part of those responsible for the program.
Shortly after, the president of Gaviota corporation appeared before the workers at the restaurant in person, conciliatory and paternal and, among other things, explained to them that the cooperative would be positive, favorable to everyone, and was an essential part of the economic transformations that were imperative for the country. It was a plan prioritized by the Government, ineluctable. So, they had to elect four workers who would represent all of them, to attend a seminar about what a cooperative enterprise would be and the characteristics of the transformation process to the new way of operating the restaurant.
The elected representatives, in effect, went to the seminar and gave their utmost to educate themselves about the issue, while the expectations of their comrades rose given the imminent change.
The Blow
The first blow to their illusions came when, at another meeting, they talked to the employees aspiring to be cooperative members about taxes and concrete figures. They were simply astronomical. According to the parameters imposed, they would have to pay, in addition to all the taxes imposed by disimilar concepts, 40 CUC for each square yard of occupied space, including the parking areas, which, for obvious reasons, don’t generate the same income as the lounge-restaurant itself.
And this was the least of the figures they heard: to start the cooperative they would need an advance of 116,000 CUC, a definitely shocking sum. A sense of unreality started to set in, expanding like a solid body in the middle of the meeting and sparking a general outcry. This must be an error, they couldn’t be serious. Surely someone made a mistake. Where could they get such a huge sum of money? But no, the number had already been assigned by the specialists and Gaviota’s board. Ah, comrades, we must ask for a bank loan and accept the repayment terms and interest rate!
They decided that a representation of the workers would go to the bank to apply for the loan and make the arrangements. Nobody wanted to be discouraged.
MINFAR: A Tax Haven in Itself?
The friendly bank employee didn’t understand what these people were asking for. What credit were they talking about? Based on what funds did they believe they could qualify for a loan, and especially such a large one? In fact, she explained to them, The Divine Shepherdess had never invested a single cent in the coffers of the bank. What’s more, Gaviota itself hadn’t realized any income in all the years of its existence, from any concept, as if it were a ghost entity. But then, what could the workers do? The kind bank employee didn’t know; she only knew what they couldn’t do: obtain credit.
But, beyond the drama of a work collective, this leads to considerations of another kind in a country where, at least by right, there is a tough battle being fought against corruption and illegalities, for which the General-President has created an implacable Controller who conducts the most rigorous searches and who operates through an inflexible body of inspectors in coordination with the People’s Revolutionary Police (PNR). Those with carts, hustlers, small traders and every kind of operator of a timbiriche — a very small business — could attest to the frequent operations and physical inspections that regularly subjects them to a ton of fines, in addition to the other scoldings at the slightest violation (or suspicion of it).
But, assuming it’s true that there are no visible traces of the financial transactions of the “state” corporation Gaviota in the bank (also a state entity), if we ignore that their income, investments and accounts are absolutely unknown, how can they be subjected to the controller’s checks? By virtue of what supra-constitutional rights would a military corporation be exempt from fiscal scrutiny? Do they consider their finances to be “sensitive information” and so secret, simply because they are an economic entity of MINFAR, though eminently capitalist?
And is it that this is a corporation which includes both restaurants and hotels in the country’s different tourist sites, transport bases, stores and other establishments, with significant income, and in which, in addition, thousands of civilian employees work, paying social security and earning salaries, vacations, and other benefits such as maternity and sick leave, etc. Are there no bank records of their costs and incomes from these concepts.
Undoubtedly, there are dozens of unanswered questions in this as in other macro-businesses of the olive-green elite. We know that the elite doesn’t market through timbiriches. At least no one has seen anyone with military epaulets dragging a cart with food, fruits and vegetables through our streets, nor selling jewelry or other merchandise in little stalls; humility is good only in speeches. Everything suggests that in Cuba there are three currencies circulating, two of them visible, the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC) and the Cuban Peso (CUP), and an invisible and untraceable one, the capital of the military monopolies.
So it’s no surprise that, given the obvious financial incapacity of The Divine Shepherdess workers, and given their complaints and demands, the director of Gaviota stood before them again, this time frowning, authoritarian and invested with all the powers, and he unceremoniously snapped that the assigned figures for the taxes on the space, as well as the initial capital, “were not negotiable.” Curtain.
Epilogue
The beleaguered workers were told that on Friday, September 20, 2013 the restaurant would be closed and a bidding process would proceed. Because it turns out that there already is (and in reality, always has been) an investor with disposable capital to take over the “cooperative. ” As readers may have guessed, it is a prominent member of the anointed caste who surely did not need a bank loan or an income statement to amass the money needed.
As for the workers, well — and thank you for asking — each one is at home trying to swallow the bitter pill. You might be wondering what use it was to them to pay their union dues promptly for years, to attend “Revolutionary” marches called by the same power that has now evicted them, and that — trying “not to distinguish themselves” — meekly and without question obeyed every direction from the heights. For now, they are just waiting for someone to explain to them what the president of Gaviota meant when he told them that “no one would be left defenseless.”
Source – Access to Cuban Universities of Qualified Workers and Trade School Graduates, Mesa Crespo, D.L.
Although Cuba’s reputation as an advanced third world country with regards to education, annually thousand of students and workers under the age of 18 don’t have access to college level education due to social and governmental obstacles.
The Youth Code, a law implemented in 1978 and approved by the National Assembly of Popular Power, the supreme organization of the State power, explains in one of its articles that newly graduated students from basic education (up to 9th grade) can continue their education depending on their academic performance and political and social attitude.
In reality, new directives and resolutions added to the code present obstacles to the academic development of a portion of the students, who due to their age are considered adolescents.
Since the 90’s, social investigative centers run by the government have conducted studies, where diverse realities among the Cuban youth were identified: disintegration and poor social mobility in the most vulnerable population sectors and the incipient lack of motivation to continue college education.
This post belongs to a series that attempts to analyze the access to higher education of the students attending polytechnics; especially those classified as “qualified workers” who are a part of the Technical and Professional Education (ETP). After this analysis we can concentrate on the deep fundamental aspects related to the socioeconomic and educational environment at this level of education.
The term “polytechnic student” applies to qualified workers, which refers both to the studies for qualified workers — in some specialties that relates learning a trade or skill — and to the category known as mid-level, known generically in Cuba as mid-technicians. The differentiations between the two level of students will be made when the need arises in the coming articles in order to better understand the topic.
Noises in hotel rooms. I begin to hear noises in the hotel rooms where I stay from coast to coast in the United States.
In Cuba, I was never a victim of the homeland paranoia; I only had the certainty of being spied on with criminal cruelty. Millimetric, butcher. I am sorry for Castroism: it failed to sow in me the syndrome of suspicion.
But, in Philadelphia, for example, or in Washington DC, in LA, in Miami, in La Crosse, in Madison, in Chicago, in Boston and who knows in what other city of the union, it is very different. There are hotels, those labyrinths that in Cuba are a rarity in terms of civility. And in the hotels things are heard late at nights. Sounds, whispers. And a cosmic cold that penetrates the soul and only then do you understand that you do not exist here.
Halfway through the late hours of the night, frantic knocks on my room door wake me up. Or not. Perhaps they are at the room across, who knows. The fact is that I wait and wait, but the assault does not repeat itself. Until the next day, during the wee hours of the night, at any time after the silent midnight.
They drag cleaning carts at random times. They scratch the parquet or the cardboard walls that make every building Made in USA.” They walk loudly. They speak a language of unknown accent that in Havana I would have perceived as English. There are little permanent lights that come in through the curtains or fall from the ceiling tiles in the form of a sea of alarms that never cease. And then begin my dreams. My North American dreams. North American dreams about Cuba, it is understood.
At this point in history, to dream of Cuba is purely a preservation instinct. I dream that I am back there, of course. And I laugh, I laugh like a madman.
I laugh at the assassins paid by the powers-that-be who did not arrest me or search my things with the twisted pleasure of rapists at the airport customs. I see things as if they were very small, dilapidated, but with an insane shine, like a drug addict. I see the houses of my city, the ones that I can recognize with my eyes closed. I see the small house of wooden planks, the only one in my life, the one in which I was born and died several times in Lawton; and I see my sacred objects, the ones I barely said goodbye to; and then someone tells me (usually someone I loved a lot, but not anymore): “When are you returning to the United States?”
“Never,” I reply, and suddenly I cannot breathe in the dream, and at that point I invariably wake up crying. With pouting. A baby’s cry, a cry of mental patient.
To return.
Cuba.
Never.
The United States.
The agony of the fighting fish. Their branchiae wide open, like swords. The oxygen of an atmosphere that will never be my atmosphere. Not having ground under my dreams. To be without existing. Orlando, Orlando…why have you forsaken us…?
I open my eyes. It is not dawning yet. I want to forget. My temples hurt. There are weird noises in the rooms around me. I am alone. Desolate.
If one day I go out on a walk, if it snows, and I get lost erasing my footsteps, who and when is going to ask about me? Who takes care of me? Who misses me? Who will feel sorry for my loved ones if one bad day my country’s military death reaches me by edict so that I do not live my life after Fidel?
I turn to the other side of the bed. I sleep naked. I curl up under the blankets and sheets which the American hotels provide me from coast to coast in the nation. The beds are cold here. More than exciting, they are pure erection. I cannot resist myself.
Nor am I sleepy now, but I surrender very quickly. I yawn, I must be exhausted. I nod. I myself make the noises and whispers that are going to reach, incognito, the other room. Strange. I do not stop myself. It is warm and tender like the deep light of the northern skies. Like the smile of teenagers who dispense insipid dishes at a cafeteria while they complete their PhD. I swallow air. I retain it. I am choking. I am not here.
I think about collecting all the Cuban dreams of exile. They are not here.
I am asleep, we are asleep. Soon it is about to be dawn.
*Translator’s note: The word “Dreaming” appears in English in the original. “Gusano” (worm) here refers to the insult hurled by the Cuban regime and its vassals at every person who has opposed the regime in any way, or who has left the country to escape it.
LA HAVANA, Cuba, September, www.cubanet.org – I must confess that after the episode of the North Korean freighter, Gan Chong Chon, it is increasingly difficult for me to imagine what might be behind each of the surprising happenings of the Raul regime. And if, in fact, Silvio Rodríguez is involved, everything becomes more convoluted.
The troubadour-in-chief, has just announced on his blog Segunda Cita, that he has invited Robertico Carcassés and the Interactive group to be his opening act at the concert that will take place on September 20 in Santiago de Las Vegas.
The invitation comes at a time when the hype over Robertico Carcassés’ slip is not yet over: at the Protestdrome concert on September 12th, in which “as a result of an alcoholic outburst” or otherwise, he could not contain himself, in his tongue-twisting improvisation he demanded, “Freedom for all Cubans.” Boy, was Robertico out of line!
Did Robertico really think that Cuba would change with the Raul regime? That cracklings are pork meat and that mothers-in-law are really family? Was the outburst that big? Or did he just do it with an eye to his upcoming little jaunt to Miami?
Indeed I must confess that with so much yellow ribbon to demand the release of the four*, and so much drunkenness with the pachanga timbera and reggaeton, we didn’t know what was being celebrated: whether it was the dismantling of the Red Wasp Network*, the Day of Oshun, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the coup that defeated Allende, or the bombing of Syria.
Rodriguez, who claims to have an appointment with the angels — flying angels and fallen angels — after the little-yellow-ribbon revelry went off-script, should know what he is weaving when he steps up to rescue Robertico Carcassés, just as we got a whiff of the smell of Bobby’s son burning.
And several questions occur to me:
Is Silvio’s intention for us to forget his ridiculous performance with the graying Amaury Perez and a musical accompaniment that could have been first class but was incoherent due to the haste of the recording by Abdala studios, of the little ditty about the yellow ribbons and the old oak tree?
Does the author of The Blue Unicorn want to put a patch on the burst seam Robertico provoked at the concert of “Cubans of all stripes” demanding the return of the four*?
Recently, Silvio invited Isaac Delgado to sing at his concert in Santos Suarez: Is Silvio now into indulging musicians who are in trouble with the regime? Could we expect him to invite Willy Chirino and join him in singing “Our Day is Coming”? Is he planning to record a CD with the Interactive group, a rather odd CD, opportunistic, to please generación asere** and indulge the dissidence?
It occurs to me to ask Silvio whether, with this lifeline to Robertico Carcassés — taking into account his tour of the prisons, and the water tank that he resolved for the residents of the Lugardita neighborhood — he’s not aspiring to run for president, without having started the campaign for direct elections that Robertico asked for in his improvisations.
With Silvio everything is possible, especially in these times of miracles and reshufflings. Didn’t he engage in an epistolary controversy with Carlos Alberto Montaner at the risk of losing his mind? Or did they already forget how he got involved in the mess with Obama, Elton John, Pied Piper of Hamelin and The Little Green Men?***
Ultimately, Silvio’s turnaround has been so wide, he’s even talking about taking the R out of the word Revolution***, for those “dead of his happiness,” the dead provided by all of us under circumstances just as bad or worse.
When I watch the father of “Nueva Trova” in his attempt to be on good terms with the angels and the demons of change, I feel sorry for him.
I cannot help but admire his songs, but in all honesty, not as much as I did then, say 30 years ago. I have convinced myself that even if I’m condemned to listen to the music of the ’60s with nostalgia, I would never be a good dancer at his party.
I can not longer stand him and his songs, they lack freshness, clear accounts: How can I figure out what Silvio is up to now?
Translator’s notes: *”The four” refers to the Cuban spies of the Red Wasp Network serving sentences in the United States; originally known is “The Cuban Five” and “The Five Heroes” in Cuba, one of the original five has been paroled and allowed to return to Cuba. ** “Generación asere” is a cultural reference to those — generally of the younger generation — who like the kind of music the regime calls vulgar, thuggish, cheesy and overly-sexed. “Asere” is a casual form of address that means roughly “bro.” ***In a response to Carlos Alberto Montaner, Silvio Rodriguez asked a number of rhetorical questions relating to the pied piper leaving with all of Cuba’s children, Elton John saying that Christ was gay, people of all colors including green, and so on. And in a new song, Silvio suggests “transcending” the “R” in “Revolution” in favor of “Evolution.”
The theme of a lack of spaces to voice opinions has been a constant in this last half century of our national life. It has always started as a request for an opening to the authorities themselves and, using the pretext of a powerful enemy ninety miles away, their refusal to grant it.
The practice of recent years has shown that if citizens want to express their opinions they have to open their own spaces (independent journalism, blogs, twitter, etc) and, whenever possible, also use those of the government as well as others that exist.
This happened recently at the so-called Anti-Imperialist Bandstand, with the musician Robertico Carcassés: he took advantage of a government space to express his opinions as a citizen. This is something absolutely valid and shows courage, something most of his critics lack, as they seem to go along with the absurd demand that “criticisms and opinions are to be expressed in the right place at the right time to the right people,” a real straitjacket to avoid anyone’s doing so.
If, in all these years, every citizen had acted with civility and expressed his opinions honestly, taking responsibility for them, many of our problems would never have reached their current magnitude.
It has been precisely the lack of this civic exercise that has allowed our leaders, despite the multiple errors they have committed, to perpetuate themselves in power and to hold onto their positions in society, refusing to cede them, despite the speeches and lukewarm measures put into practice in recent times.
As long as the voices of citizens are not massively reverberating in the ears of the authorities, demanding the necessary changes and reforms, these voices will fall on deaf ears, so that the authorities may continue to act in their own interests, turning their backs on the true interests of the nation.
Osvaldo Rodríguez Díaz
