Translating Cuba

To Live in a Tenement, Without Hope / Leon Padron Azcuy

Foto León Padrón Azcuy — Photos: León Padrón Azcuy

Havana , August, www.cubanet.org – Over a year ago, the Havana news channel reporter, Graciela Resquejo, tried to report the terrible living conditions, life-threatening, in which many families live in the solar — tenement — at No. 12 Jesus Maria between San Ignacio and Inquisidor, in Old Havana.

But to no avail. That report was censored by political commissars of Cuban television.

Resquejo apologized days later to neighbors and urged them to relentlessly pressure the institutions responsible for housing, so that one day they might get out of this hell.

The solar at No. 12 Jesus Maria is a disaster. Its tenants live in fear of a collapse, or the spread of disease, because when it rains, the water penetrates the roofs and walls, leading to a steady drip, even hours after the sky clears. Nor do they have drinking water, which comes through a pipe installed between sewer pipes, and rats and cockroaches swarm everywhere.

Neighbors have appealed, time and again, to the government. But the problem persists in every session of the Popular Power. Finally they went to the Department of Citizens Support of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, who toss the ball back to the municipality.

One of the biggest frustrations of tenants, was in 2007, when they were assigned to some old offices in a four-story building near the tenement. They only had to wait until the bathrooms and kitchens were put in. But while waiting for the arrangements, the government itself gave these offices to other victims who had lost their homes because of a cyclone. Back to square one.

Year after year, this miserable citadel of San Ignacio Street waits for the fulfillment of the promises of the authorities. But promises are always empty .

One of the neighbors of the tenement, whose husband recently had a heart operation, said, “The authorities remember us every time a hurricane comes,” adding, “their cynicism knows no bounds, at times we’ve been asked to find our own shelters, on others they’ve taken us to a multipurpose room at Avenida del Puerto, and as soon as the weather improves, we returned to our citadel, ignoring the building collapses that happen when the sun comes out.”

A young woman who works as a waitress at the pizzeria at 264 Prado and who has lived in the tenement for seventeen years said, “We are not asking for a palace in Miramar or Vedado, we want at least a roof with better conditions, but we are always victims of deceit and manipulation.”

The nine families the No 12 Jesús María tenement, living without hope, victims of government neglect .

Leonpadron10@gmail.com

FLASH GALLERY photos Leon Padron Azcuy

29 August 2013

Some Uncertainties / Fernando Damaso

Though it has no leading role in socialism as it is practiced in this country, the self-described “new Cuban left” is trying to find its place in the current economic, political and social debate, one in which no one is participating. Perhaps it is inertia that leads it to simply repeat certain well-worn arguments put forth by the government, which are far removed from historical reality.

When referring to the Cuban Republic, the “new left” accepts as fact that it was a neo-colonial and subjugated pseudo-state, constrained by the Platt Amendment and subject to foreign interference. It assumes that only a tiny minority lived well while the rest of the population suffered in misery without education, health services or employment opportunities. It also believes that discrimination against racial minorities and women was rampant. The current authorities have been incessant in their demonization of past eras, facts and historical figures, while some have accepted these claims as absolute truths and go on repeating them.

The reality is that the situation was not quite so gloomy. Cuba was one of the most advanced countries in the world in terms of agricultural and industrial production, health services, education, salary levels and labor rights. Its gross domestic product was also one of the highest in the region, making it an attractive destination for immigrants from other countries. It had an established and thriving middle class, and both its population and cities were continually growing, both from an economic and urban standpoint as well as in terms of infrastructure.

In fact, most of what we still have of value we owe to the republican era. To ignore this truth — even keeping in mind the political situation as well as other shortcomings and problems that existed at the time, and that still have not been resolved — is like listening to only half the story.

When referring to the disastrous years of socialism, however, the new Cuban left characterizes it as true, authoritarian, statist and Stalinist. It focuses attention only on its distorted features, blaming them for all its failures, as though it were not the system itself — independent of its atrocities and its leaders — which has failed wherever it has been tried.

When discussing the future, the “new left” rejects a return to the past, presuming it might lead to something as ridiculous as a return to pre-1959 capitalism. It accuses those who propose abandoning Raul Castro’s model of being responsible for a possible loss of independence and sovereignty (language which daily falls further out of use in a globalized world) or for subjugation by the neighbor to the north. It is a perhaps unintentional reprise of an official rhetorical phrase: “You are either with me or against me.”

The only thing that Cuban socialism has distributed equally throughout the population — which does not include of the tiny elite which hangs onto wealth and power — is poverty. This is the equality that its domestic and foreign supporters applaud. Cuban socialism has enjoyed fifty-four years of missed opportunities, which makes it highly unlikely that the population will be inclined to give it further opportunities either in the present or in the future.

As the popular saying goes, the Castro model’s “last fifteen minutes are up.” Therefore, new opportunities present themselves to other political, economic and social initiatives which can and must include all citizens who care about Cuba. They cannot, however, impose narrow concepts, whether or not they are what we call socialists, democrats, participatives, critics, conservatives, liberals, capitalists, anarchists, rationalists, centrists, decentralists, pluralists, reformers, etc.

It is only natural that this political opening would occur after years of living under a single economic, political and social ideological mindset. The wide variety of new ingredients should produce a dish capable of satisfying the palates of most of our citizens. But this dish cannot be prepared by one single chef. It has to take into account the opinions and participation of those who will consume it, and must include economic development, freedom and social justice.

The goal is to enter the current global jet stream and advance along with it in ways to be determined by citizens exercising their full democratic rights, with participation by everyone but without new and ridiculous political, economic and social experiments or the kind of one-party nationalism that has left us light years behind the world’s democracies.

29 August 2013

Shoal Philosophy / Miriam Celaya

HAVANA, Cuba , August, www.cubanet.org – Every Cuban must have heard countless times a compilation of phrases that try to encompass all the Island’s popular wisdom: “don’t bother”, “you’re not going to solve anything”, “what the heck, you are not going to change anything”, “don’t look for trouble” , or this next one, which is the paradigm of evading commitment: “I don’t care about politics”, though the ones who utter it ignore that mere membership in the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution implies a direct relationship with the politics of government.

All of them, without exception, could be part of a manual on how to better serve the interests of the dictatorship because they appeal to passivity, to limitless waiting, to subordination, and to complicit subterfuge. But, without a doubt, the crown jewel and the one most frequently used is “don’t call attention to yourself”. It is the quintessential advice, and it serves to brake the spontaneous impulses of any dissatisfied individual in any circumstance, because “to call attention to yourself” in Cuba is to leave the flock, to rebel against absolute power, to fault at the most elementary prudence, and it can manifest itself even in the smallest sign that could set the individual apart from the rest.

It is interesting that such a no-nonsense phrase should be the currency in a country where people don’t think twice about hurling themselves into the sea and crossing the Florida Straits on board any artifact buoyant enough to take them to the other shore, to another realm, where calling attention to yourself isn’t necessarily an imprudence, but just the opposite, most of the time.

But let someone express his intention to stop paying the syndicate, the MTT (Territorial Troops Militia), not attending the May Day parade or the assembly of accountability for the well-known phrase “don’t call attention to yourself” to make its appearance.

Recently, a young man working in a private restaurant told me about a visit an official of the national union made to his place of employment, to educate employees about the importance of “creating” a union, affiliated to what she called” the national union movement”, to “defend the workers’ interests.”

It’s beyond the absurd, only possible in Cuba, that a State official will interrupt the work of a private business to encourage employees to organize to make a stand against management – the prime and essential reason for unionizing — with the complacent consent of that same management, and with the independence that a true syndicate must have as its premise the freedom to associate, which doesn’t exist in Cuba. The strangest thing of the matter is that the vast majority of workers in those private businesses have joined the “syndicates” created from and by the same power that has unleashed a wave of layoffs at State workplaces.

My young friend insists that, initially, some workers were reluctant or undecided, and there were those who naively asked if membership was compulsory, but, here and there, an infiltrated delegate would drop the little phrase “don’t call attention to yourself” and the stirrings of rebellion were diluted, wrapped in the protective anonymity of the collective.

“It is the philosophy of the shoal, the school of fish,” says my friend, a definition that is based on the tactics of the sardine or anchovy in which the individual is diluted in the group so he’ll have a better chance at survival, which, however, does not prevent predators from feeding on them.

I acknowledge that my friend is somewhat cynical, but this does not negate the gist of his remark. And the civic abandonment and the lack of rights in Cuba is such that it has developed a kind of slavery syndrome of thought, so that when some people have a modicum of freedom, they refuse to make use of it and continue to be subjected to the snare and the master.

Nevertheless, the emergence of private initiative could mark a major turning point in the resurgence of sectors that might strengthen the weak fabric of civil society, a reality which the independent unions that exist in Cuba cannot ignore. This requires implementing a program, or at least for these groups to make specific proposals which are attractive to this new labor force. It would be an essential step to achieve union autonomy.

Government’s interest in keeping this labor force subjugated indicates the recognition of the risk implied by the potential autonomy of the sector; an opportunity that activists could well take advantage of in order to fight that widespread social evil, the shoal philosophy.

From Cubanet

Translated by Norma Whiting

29 August 2013

The Golden Age / Regina Coyula

In a very short video lasting less than a minute and a half, Javier Castro (about whom I have found no additional information) discusses one of Cuba’s social icebergs. Boys (and girls, to be politically correct) of primary and secondary school age reply on camera to an often-asked question. In the style of Cuban television news, their responses were narrowed down to match only what the producer wanted to show. Furthermore, the boys (and girls) were interviewed in what appeared to be a poor neighborhood; in Miramar or Vedado the responses would likely have been different. Nevertheless, the answers were still disturbing.

Hustlers (and hookers) or moving overseas, some said. Others aspired to be a DJ or a singer, a hotel manager, to own a money-making business, to be a flight attendant, a sailor, an economist, a chef, a restaurateur, a baseball or soccer player.

Except for the boy who wanted to be an astronaut, all the responses pointed to an overwhelming economic need that supersedes any ethical concerns. Policemen don’t count because they are very well paid, even without the money they make from extortion or bribes. And there was one that was particularly unsettling. It was the boy who would take everything for himself as he has already seen happen, the boy who wanted to be a dictator.

These boys (and girls) are quite used to hearing money being discussed at home. And although they are not included in the conversation, having to get by without it affects them. They learned very quickly that it couldn’t be helped, that wishes had to be postponed, lessons more valuable than any to be found in a book.

At this point anyone should be able to realize that not only education and health care are free, that there are other things that are also free and also worthwhile that were lost in the process of forging the New Man. They will not be recovered over the short term in the headlong rush to rebuild this odious variant of capitalism without democracy.

30 August 2013

Every Night, The Night / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

unanoche270813 — Image from “One Night” by Lucy Molloy

People without God and the State, after the incessant media deaths of Fidel Castro, as in a classroom-cage that’s been left without their despotic teacher, our society is doomed to becoming unhinged overnight. Even in a single night, without having to wait for the morning, our little lives can experiment the one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine anecdotes and extract from them a single significance.

In effect, Cuba is beginning to resemble a tele-play, class Z revolutionary themed. An uncaptioned series. Pasture for foreign productions. Scenario where all the characters are extras: scraps of the script floating in the wind of an unbearable island dullness.

Nothing is old under the same post-socialist sun. Ecclesiastical guidelines. Newspeak, newhistory, New. Cuba is not the tedium of a cinematic Moebius strip with no inside, no outside, but rather it is an empty adventure in the style of The Matrix, where the despotic power is unseen but present. And where all that still shines in the middle of the barbarity are the glasses of the General President, whose clapperboard controls not the fraud change but the unchangeable fraud. Ad islinitum.

Much of this televised velocity is included in the copy-and-paste of a New York film, One Night, from the director Lucy Molloy, a film made in Manhattabana that even its actors mistook for a reality-show, using it as a springboard to escape the Castro catacombs of our Caribbean North Korea.

Here in the beginning and at the end it is the verb: the action, the persecution whose only purpose is to take away from Death a few minutes of film, cut to Che. Poetics of the video-clip, of the ephemeral gimmick, of the superficial that almost always is a symptom much more sincere than so-called profundity.

The rush-rush of faked sequences, anger and haste, sometimes with hints of a fake police documentary. Words like kicks. Free, crazy and loquacious language, as befits a professionally amateur cast. And, in the background, in addition to the redundant Cuban music, it’s not even necessary to voice-over Desnoes’ rudeness that our capital “looks like Tegucigalpa.” And it doesn’t seem so at this point in the story. The ironies of Memories of Underdevelopment confronting the illusions of the Left, at half a century of totalitarianism, is already an inevitable background, spontaneously occupying even the worst of tourist photographs of official propaganda.

One Night is not a bad story-board for when Lucy Molloy returns to Havana one night, not only to recreate but to create the tragedy. We need that, a culture without capitalist guilt resulting in an “unjust” dessert for the Cuban people. Or “inappropriate” before the altar of American academia (without the Revolution there would be no PhD theses nor copyrighted textbooks). I fear that we need a reactionary filmography. From the indecent Right. Neocon. Movies disposed to precipitate the debacle not from art, but from the disaster.

The other would be another half century of kitsch.

Cubansummatum est!

From Diario de Cuba

27 August 2013

A Thousand and One Cuban Hexes to Enchant Arabs / Juan Juan Almeida

When my great grandfather was born, there was an Arab presence in Cuba. It is impossible to exclude from national history the Lebanese Antonio Farah, who arrived on the Island in 1879 and achieved the position of city councilor in the local government of Pinar del Rio. Likewise, there is an ample list of Syrians, Palestinians and inhabitants of the southeast zone of the Arabian peninsula in the Gulf of Persia (today the United Arab Emirates) who with the force of their bravery and talent rose to important positions in our Liberating Army.

And it is curious, because unlike many other groups of migrants, the arrival of the Arabs on the island had a very individual form, they did it in small groups that could freely choose their destiny.

All this, plus the enchanting stories depicting camels, turbans, sultans, deserts, castles with golden domes and thieves with thick eyebrows who with their sensual coffee looks made carpets fly, made the nationals offer them a Caribbean refuge.

For the current Cuban government, calculated by nature and pragmatic by necessity, Arab is synonymous with riches. So it demonstrated a few days ago, when after carrying out a campaign last July in Qatar to attract investors, Havana paid respect and lent its newly bought fleet of Teutonic cars to a discrete group of multimillionaire Saracens who made landfall on the island in an airplane where all the unthinkable eccentricity escaped from fantasy and became reality.

A palace of luxury in the sky–that’s how the flying vessel was described by the workers of ECASA (Cuban Company of Airports and Aeronautical Services SA, the only company that operates within Cuban airports)–where an entourage of investors traveled showing off their opulence and, to flatter their vanity and by orders of the General, received special attention. Explainable, power is a venom that carries the challenge of losing a lot to gain everything.

All options were made possible in an attempt to curry favor with a heap of petrodollars who seemed disposed to buy the world. And the Cuban civil servants, determined to end their old autobiography of failures, during the negotiation avoided the debate of sovereignty and the familiar old tensions that constantly stimulate pyrotechnic politics between Cuba and the United States.

They saw the mine and they offered to let the visitors drill in favorable conditions in strategic sectors of the national economy; participate in the development of the metallurgic industry, invest in tourism, agriculture, medicine, education, and the financial system and banks of the nation; in the generation, transmission and supplying of energy; in transportation, in construction, in buying or running luxury hotel chains, exuberant marinas or even to make the island one enormous brothel.

I still haven’t discovered the reason behind so much genuflection; I only know that after the two full days of exhausting meetings described as “The thousand and one nights,” the Arabs decided to make it clear that they didn’t want to invest but simply to buy. They paid in advanced an exaggerated sum, even though in reality not so fair, to acquire exclusive rights to the production of Cuban marble for a period of time. Shortly after they said goodbye with a cold handshake and a smile, bland and insipid as a piece of bread without salt; an admirable form of saying, “Don’t even dream about it, Havana is no Beverly Hills.”

30 August 2013

UPEC and the Freedom of the Press / Dimas Castellanos

The few expectations generated by the Ninth Congress of the Union of Journalists and Writers of Cuba ( UPEC ), held last weekend, ended in frustration. The changes that demand journalism plays an effective role in social transformations were conspicuous by their absence. The conclave ignored the issue of press freedom, a vital issue to delve into the causes of the current crisis and suggest possible solutions, although Cuba has a rich history in this area.

The Camaguey national hero Ignacio Agramonte, in defending his thesis in law said: The right to think freely corresponds to the freedom of discussion, of doubt, of opinion, as phases or directions of that.

The press in Cuba was inaugurated with Papel Periodico (Newsprint) in Havana in 1790; it disseminated the accord reached with the Pact of Zanjón of 1878, thanks to which Juan Gualberto Gomez won the legal process against the colonial authorities which allowed the public disclosure of the ideas of those supporting independence. It was multiplied during the Republic: Diario de La Marina, Bohemia, El País, El Mundo, Alerta, Noticias de Hoy, La Calle, Prensa Libre, Carteles and Vanidades, to cite just ten. In 1930 there were 61 radio stations, a number that placed Cuba 4th worldwide; and as for television, in 1950, almost immediately after the United States, Television Radio Union Channel 4, the third television station in Latin America, followed the same year by Channel 6.

Thanks to the media, from the colony to the Republic , the debate of ideas reached such importance that it is impossible to explain any event in our history without considering the role of press freedom. The best evidence was the allegation of Dr. Fidel Castro, known as History Will Absolve Me, in which he said: Let me tell you a story: Once upon a time there was a Republic. It had its Constitution, its laws, its freedoms, a President, a Congress and Courts of Law. Everyone could assemble, associate, speak and write with complete freedom. The people were not satisfied with the government, but the people could change it… Public opinion was respected and heeded and all problems of common interest were freely discussed. There were political parties, hours of doctrine on radio, debate programs on television, public meetings…”

The Russian historian, sociologist and politician Pavel Milyukov, in an article entitled In defense of the word, defined the press as the finest and most perfect expression of socio-psychological forms of interaction; he explained that the rules of relationship between man and society constitute the core of human rights and freedom of the press is the only civil liberty can guarantee all the others. continue reading

If, from the ideas expressed, we accept that press freedom is an indispensable factor for social development, any action to preclude it, can only be described as an act against the development of the country and the dignity of the people.

Yes, the nation really is everyone, Communists or not, revolutionaries or not, intellectuals or not, everyone has the right to think, express and disseminate their ideas freely, as active subjects in national issues. The opposite is exclusion, totalitarianism or apartheid. So in the age of the newest information technologies and communications, any restrictions on press freedom in a country with such a rich tradition of freedom are inadmissible.

Suffice it to recall that in difficult years like 1947, 1950 and the day after the assault on the Moncada barracks in 1953, Noticias de Hoy (News of Today), organ of the then Communist Party (People’s Socialist Party) was shut down. However, time and again, thanks to the so-called freedom of the “bourgeois” press, the communists, supported by much of the existing press, demanded that they be re-opened and succeeded, even though Noticias de Hoy advocated class struggle to overthrow the ruling system.

However — returning to the Cuban of today — the member of the Politburo, Miguel Diaz-Canel, at the closing ceremony of UPEC, suggested that what is needed to feed the desire to improve the press and make it more virtuous press is dialogue. That is, the official press is virtuous and those virtues, in his words, lie in having denounced the imperialist campaigns of internal and external enemies, so it is able and has as its mission to contribute to the achievement of a prosperous and sustainable socialism. We need to support — said Diaz-Canel — a set of principles for the Cuban press, extracted from the thoughts of José Martí and Fidel.

The question to Diaz-Canel is if what Fidel said about civil society and citizens’ freedoms during the Moncada trial retains its value, and with respect to Martí it is good to remember the central idea that he presented on the Third Anniversary of the Cuban Revolutionary Party: A people is composition of many wills, vile or pure, frank and grim, hindered by shyness or precipitated by ignorance.

Several journalists from the official press praised the subordination of the press for the purpose of PCC, as in the case of Oscar Sánchez Serra, in his article “The Congress of those we see, hear and read,” published in Granma on 15 July, that posited that the journalist is a builder of socialism.

But the person who more clearly summarized the praises of the subordination of the official press to the PCC was Victor Joaquin Ortega, who in a short editorial appeared in the weekly Tribuna de La Habana, Sunday, 14 July, wrote: “We are the weapon of the Communist Party of Cuba, the only one we need for the struggle, the son of the dignity and creative line of the Cuban Revolutionary Party founded and led by the Apostle [José Martí].”

These and other similar proposals demonstrate that the journalism of UPEC is the journalism of a political party and of a specific ideology, so that it cannot define itself as representative of the Cuban press in general, whose natural plurality extends beyond the communist ideas.

The official press sustains itself on the base of restrictions on the freedom of the press, it as not — as Jorge Barata expressed it well in a dossier on the subject published in Lay Space — plural, nor open, so it is prevented from speaking in the name of Cuban society in total. The PCC defines it politics, based on the limits established in the Cultural Congress of 1961: Within the Revolution everything. Against the Revolution nothing, a limit that should begin by defining what a revolution is and then demonstrating that there is a revolution in Cuba.

The exclusion is not only unjust and unacceptable, but unreal, because the new technologies prevent it. Another press has emerged, parallel and coexisting with the official press. Lay Space, Coexistence, Critical Observatory, Voices, the SPD Bulletin, Cuba Spring and dozens of blogs and websites that do not respond to the PCC, whose importance lies in the decision to participate, without permission, from differing views on the problems of the nation. An alternative journalism, independent, citizen and participatory, reflecting realities ignored by the official press and complying with the requirements of traditional journalism and includes others which are possible with the new technologies, despite the obstacles represented by the lack of freedom of the press.

From Diario de Cuba

2 July 2013

Prison Diary LII: Dear Vilches, Welcome to the Space of Decorum / Angel Santiesteban

Any injustice against a single person, represents a threat to everyone.
Montesquieu

“God makes us, and freedom joins us.”

This post I owe to the brave writer and friend Rafael Vilches Proenza who, by dint of talent, earned the recognition of the intelligentsia of the Island.

Vilches has followed the call of conscience to do his duty, and responding to his feelings, forgot the gifts that the Government gives to those who follow its dictates without opposition; thus, he is about it enter the Cuban insile, his career as a ghost writer beginning, and now many who call themselves friends will distance themselves from him, especially those who were, for a time, advising him to leave this path of freedom and continue to suck on the teat of the State.

They ar already plotting some strategy, so I ask my friend Vilches to walk with firm steps. State Security is on the hunt, searching, trying, how to muddy, at times, without an alibi, the desperation with which they carry out their coarse punishments, as in my case, but they don’t know that the lash of their whip tastes heavenly, giving us another reason for living.

Dear Vilches, welcome to the space of decorum, of transparency, tired of speaking sotto voce, after making sure that nobody will be listening to an honest judgment.

I swear I’ve heard those who called themselves friends, who wrote me extravagant dedications in their books — and then came forward to sign the document of the “eight women against violence” — being more critical of the government than I am; as also happened with my literary masters, hearing their discontent, their pleas for a way out of the crisis and a political change, but then, when it was time for decency, they showed caution and moved the flags, writing odes to the leaders of the dictatorship, and signing whatever open letter is organized against their colleagues.

Vilches, my brother, now it touches me to be in solidarity with you, you have stayed to give me encouragement since the regime launched its filthy thrust. I am experiencing the contradiction of feeling myself happy to know that History will not record you as pusillanimous, that you prefer to remain silent to not exchange your dignity for perks, but in turn it saddens me to know that misery you will receive from many around you, the betrayal, the loneliness; yet I predict for you that in the end you will have the compensation of one who stays by your side, worth more than a hundred, how else would you have discovered false friends, the cowards?

I only ask that you notice that in addition to the fear in their souls, they are acting in a mediocre play, none will go down in literary history, so they do it, because it’s the only way to be valued as writers and receive trips abroad, of those who bring soap to clean the skin because they have soiled their spirit; of those who have been taken over by UNEAC. Do not expect solidarity, nor even bureaucratic protection from what is supposed to the space that represents artists, to defend us; because that place is just another arm of totalitarianism.

In the end history will render its accounts, because history is what matters, it is where you can live forever.

From my captivity I send my thanks to you for joining the fight against the dictatorship.

The embrace of forever, your brother Angel.

Lawton “settlement”*
August 2013

*Translator’s note: “Settlement” is the euphemism for the Ministry of the Interior “special” prison where Angel is now being held.

30 August 2013

Castro’s Strategy, in Short: A Perfect Manual for Disaster / Manuel Cuesta Morua

HAVANA, Cuba, August, www.cubanet.org — Does Raul Castro have a vision for the state? After seven years in office the question bears asking. Perhaps few people thought about it during the previous forty-six years because most observers just assumed that Fidel Castro had a grand plan for the state. But in perspective I do not think so. One can be a political animal yet lack a strategic vision for the country. What is clear, however, is that Fidel Castro did have the political fiber required to constantly to remain in power.

He demonstrated the abilities necessary to fuse a founding myth with a sense of opportunity and social control. And everything seemed perfect politically as long as he was able to hide the brutality of his regime, his absolute lack of principles and his incompetence at financial management behind this fusion. But where his lack of vision for the state can be seen is in not having left behind anything serious, such as a legacy, in the three areas where he uprooted the myth: in the social, in values and in the reconquest of the nation. In the end he did not know how to do what politicians with a head for strategy do. He did not know how to reinvent himself.

The followers of Castro, the tall one, can say what they want in his defense. However, this only demonstrates that the confusion between expectations and results continues to be fascinating material for two types of study: mythology and clinical psychology. It has nothing to do with reality.

Milk and marabou

It was hoped that whoever came to power in 2006 would take a healthy dip in reality. Cuba had strayed so far from its revolutionary dreams that this cleansing would be a preliminary step in confronting the task refreshed and with mental clarity. Asians know a thing or two about the relationship between the sauna and the mind. And this appears to be what happened when Raul Castro, in a speech on July 26 of that year in Camaguey, said two trivial words: milk and marabou. They indicated a fresh return to the abandoned land, and an idealized return to the land as metaphor; this after a lofty, fattened regime anchored to the rest of the world only through rhetoric and foreign subsidies.

But strategically the shorter Castro could write a how-to book on disaster. I will not dwell on the long list of his economic adjustments and their social consequences. Much has been well and wisely said about the failure of his so-called economic reforms, notwithstanding the analytical obstinacy of an unwavering group of academics, prominent in the news media, who did (and do) not realize that in terms of economic reform Cuba had (and has) to learn to run, not just move. So I am not interested in judging Raul Castro by his own words. We must measure the man by his results, not by his efforts.

There are two areas I would like to visit in order to analyze what I consider to be a worrying lack of national vision or strategic proposals. One is the port of Mariel and the other is the set of factors facilitating the exodus to what Cubans refer to as la Yuma, meaning everything outside the island, whether it be Brazil, Haiti or the United States itself.

The island as banana republic

Many see in the construction of the port of Mariel a brilliant strategic move. I see the new port as a step towards turning the island into a banana republic, as we used to be portrayed in the schools of most Central American countries. A social poet, who visited several places in our archipelago to feel its vibration before reflecting them in his poetry, described us at the time as a synthesis that was simultaneously powerful and depressing: Cuba, the ruin and the port.

I find no strategic value in a project that ratifies Cuba as a landlord state, living off of a couple of assembly plants and on being the connecting port-of-call between a super-power (the United States), an emerging power (China) and a jolly secondary power (Brazil). Foregoing the economic possibilities offered by the knowledge economy in favor of one for which we are better prepared — one which depends on the crude economics of the exploited and poorly paid port worker — does not get us much closer to a strategic vision for the state. Nor does a property owner prepared to collect tolls and warehouse fees from all who pass through his ports. But that is indeed what is happening.

Mariel: a circle of illusion

This is because — and here the circle of illusion becomes complete — such a step presupposes two additional elements. One is a deep knowledge of the internal reality of the countries in question. The other is effective control over the temptation of the governmental elite to decide things lest they forget that there is a new port in Cuba called Mariel.

Keep in mind what happened in the Soviet Union in 1989 and in Venezuela in 2013. Having information about what really takes place in countries that affect us economically, and being able to process it, is not the strong point of revolutionary leaders. The former socialist superpower collapsed and Maduro won in spite of losing. China is only interested in money and we have none. And Planalto Palace — the headquarters Dilma Rouseff took over from Lula da Silva — has been trembling lately.

Let us remember that investments in Mariel were being managed by a risk-taking partner, President Lula, who held out the promise to a Brazilian business conglomerate, Odebrecht, of a hypothetical opening by the United States to Cuba. It is as though a fiancée were to put on a wedding dress without knowing for sure that her intended would show up to satisfy her nuptial ambitions. A fiancée who, on top of everything else, behaved as though she did not have to do anything to attract the very specific type of suitor she was after by showing him anything he might possibly find attractive in her.

From subsidies to an economic enclave

There is nothing strategic about turning a subsidized economy into an economic enclave within the confines of old-fashioned capitalism, especially for a country that loudly demands — or rather politely requests — a comprehensive modernization built on the foundations of a knowledge-based economy.

If you are wondering why the government of Raul Castro is involved in this issue, which we know as state strategy, then imagine all that can be done by using Cuba’s potential to assure the structural integrity of the country, guaranteeing a relaxed transition and re-legitimized mandate for successors who lack the pedigree of the mountains we know as the Sierra Maestra.

A new port development provides no insurance in either of these areas. It puts Diaz-Canal in quite a precarious position relative to two interest groups. One is made up of real estate interests tied to unproductive corporations, and the other is made up of citizens excluded from sharing in the pie, which can only grow arithmetically rather than exponentially.

And the exodus to la Yuma? Well, this is where the disconnect between the sense of the treasury and the sense of State is perhaps best revealed. Now that the treasury no longer puts food on the table, we have weakened the possibilities of redefining the State by making an overseas sojourn possible for what the utilitarian language of economics calls human capital. It really surprises me that the emigration reform law has been so widely applauded. After granting fifteen minutes of fame to the restitution of a right that did not have to be taken away, there should have come a serious and sober analysis of its medium and long-term impact on the nation and the country, which are really the same thing.

Living off remittances

Two facts continue to be confused: as an economic reform measure, the migratory reform converts Cuba into the El Salvador of the Caribbean: living off remittances. And as the restitution of a right, it destroys the options to rethink an economic model to export the best young minds of the country, as a country like India has avoided.

The media analysis has blurred the problem, focusing the discussion on superficial political terms. They say that the Cuban government has thrown the ball in the court of the rest of the world, as if it were a tournament which, in reality, doesn’t exist between states — all countries let their own citizens leave and abrogate the right to allow the citizens of other countries to enter — and obscure the principal debate: the fate of a country, aging, losing in a trickle or a torrent its potentially most productive and creative people and, on the other hand, not rebuilding its image as a possible nation.

This the principal problem of our national security. And it only has one origin: The concentration of the political in a single lineage. The philosophers of this matter are right: politics begins beyond the family sofa.

The problem takes on a new light, more dangerous in terms of national security, with an immigration reform targeted to Cubans by the United States, much deeper than that of Raul Castro. The granting of a five-year multiple-entry visas to those who live on the island grants a right foreigners greater than that granted by the Cuban State to its own nationals living inside and outside the country. This is somewhat embarrassing. Cubans from here can freely enter and leave the United States for much longer than Cubans can enter and leave their country of birth without renewing their permit.

Citizens of both countries

One of the results we have, one which I want to focus on, is this: we Cubans have become, in theory, resident citizens of two countries. Cuba is one, you choose the other. This is an issue that goes beyond the transnational nature of our condition — very well analyzed by Haroldo Dilla, a Cuban historian based in the Dominican Republic — because over the long term it weakens the center that serves as the axis to the global nature of citizenship. We Cubans will stay in the same place in an ambivalence that weaken loyalties to a nationality that one now feels and lives anemically. A strange and dangerous situation for a country lacking a sense of solidity.

If the story says that the new U.S. policy serves to promote relations between Cubans and Americans and between Cubans and Cuban Americans, in reality we are moving to a scenario in which relations between Cuban-Americans, in fact, resident on the island, and Cuban-Americans by law, resident in the United States arise and are strengthened; and on the other hand between Americans and Cubans residing on both shores.

All that will be left is an irreducible minority, regardless of their ideological leanings, who will resist nationality in both, taking American or Spanish nationality as strong reference points.

So, we return to the economic and cultural circuit of the United States — in some way we have already entered that of Spain — which we supposedly left more than half a century ago. Not to mention other smaller circuits such as those of Jamaica and Italy.

Surrendering to this reality, hiding behind the anti-imperialist rhetoric of “no one surrenders here,” that keeps obsolete arms oiled and “repaired,” is evidence that the strategy of the State has never accompanied the Castros. Will our paradigm as a nation ever be viable? The question is not rhetorical.

From Cubanet

18 August 2013

The New School Term in Cuba: Teachers Hoping for Raises / Ivan Garcia

The Minister of Education, Ena Elsa Velázquez, is hoping to turn corruption and academic fraud in Cuban schools around.

In her tour through several provinces to check on preparations for the new school term beginning on September 2, Velázquez highlighted the “social commitment of teachers and professors” to address illegalities and acts of corruption.

She spoke of strengthening families’ confidence in the educational system and confronting “scholastic fraud and other more subtle and nefarious distortions.”

This requires great political and oratorical skill in analyzing the conditions that for years have affected education on the island, to say nothing of the low salaries paid to teachers.

As always in Cuba, one must separate demagoguery from reality. The complacency of government officials causes them to suffer from an irreversible myopia.

They only see the successes. And they do exist. For a third-world country, it is laudable to be able to provide free education and public health. We may be better than Burma or Haiti, but there has been a qualitative reversal in sectors which once were showpieces of the Revolution.

There are schools but they lack good instructors, teaching material has to be recycled, the merienda* has been eliminated in primary schools, and lunch for boarding students is wretched.

And we have not even talked about the extreme politicization and ideological content in course material and extracurricular activities. These include everything from classes on how to load an AKM assault rifle to fundraising for self-defense militias.

Too often the Cuban government likes to remind us that education and health care are free. These are the cornerstones of the socialist model that the world sees.

They are, however, distortions of reality. The state can subsidize the health and education system thanks to the high tax rate it imposes on workers. In countries where students pay not one penny towards the cost of their education, the money to fund this “privilege” must come out of the taxpayers’ pocketbooks.

But this is not the case with Cuba. A percentage of the ridiculously low salaries paid to workers and employees, excessive taxes on the self-employed and import duties of up to 300% on hard-currency remittances subsidize a significant portion of the national educational system.

However, everyone who one way or another contributes to society — whether it be by cutting cane or spending dollars they have received from relatives in Miami — can and should demand a better education for their children.

For a decade primary, secondary and pre-university education has been in marked decline. Because of poor wages and low social status many instructors go to work as porters in five-star hotels or as fry cooks in a street-side stalls.

It is inconceivable that a policeman or armed forces officer would make close to 900 Cuban pesos a month — not counting their ability to acquire groceries, cleaning supplies and clothing at low prices, or to stay in exclusive recreational villas — while a professor at a secondary school makes only Cuban 350 to 400 pesos a month.

The teaching profession is one that is not highly valued in Cuba. It is not an attractive alternative for university graduates. Only when there is no other option, or when men are trying to evade military service, do young people choose to study pedagogy.

The new school term will begin on Monday, September 2 in schools which have received a fresh coat of cheap paint, whose furniture and windows have been repaired and whose families have put aside some money for their children’s meriendas. Believe me, it is not easy to provide five meriendas a week. Children’s backpacks resemble those of mountain climbers.

The school uniform presents another problem. Some sadistic bureaucrat decided that each student would get a new uniform every two terms. The dim-witted technocrat did not stop to think that in their primary school years children grow quite rapidly. Or that given the heat and the carelessness typical at this age, students often return home with their uniforms in tatters.

The solution was for families to buy uniforms on the black market for five convertible pesos apiece. These are not their only expenses.

In case a child gets a mediocre professor — something now quite common in primary and secondary education — parents must pay ten convertible pesos a month to a retired teacher to tutor him after school.

As the Minister of Education follows her road map through the country, checking on preparations for the next school term, teachers are hoping the official will agree with them and announce a salary increase.

Teaching remains the worst paid profession in Cuba.

Iván García

Photo: Cubanet

*Translator’s note: A traditional afternoon snack or light meal somewhat comparable to tea time.

28 August 2013

17 Abstracts of a Notebook’s Entries / Polina Martínez Shviétsova

Double-nationality hybridity. Survivors without context or ontology. Tepid waters between the fire of being and the ice of nothingness. Poetry’s infinite foam in the middle of the desert. Pamyla, protagonist.

I’m riding in an old American truck and I wonder, “What will I feel after I make love?”

We’re headed toward central Hershey. Not the one in Pennsylvania, but rather the twin brother built here, the Camilo Cienfuegos. I’m carrying my notebook along with my backpack-home, which today doesn’t weigh so heavily. I’m granting myself a day to think less and try to be a normal person. Though I can’t help but wonder, “What will I feel after I make love?”

I’m riding in an old Russian truck and I don’t wonder anything anymore.

All around me, the great patriotic march of June 13: The people cry out in support of a constitutional reform. The pain is plain and honest. The isolation, the poetry of my little fantastic tales which I try to work out but can’t tell right, the delirium: All of it put down in this notebook, pale testimony to the adventures of a Slavic girl on an island of frozen fire, where I gather up the remains of its dead nature with bovine mushrooms.

The world tastes like recycled plastic and I’m a fried patty of sun, cruxified on the purity which leads to forgetting, annunciation of death. It can’t be easy to shout about virtues when the pot keeps turning the soya mince into steam. And without any money. None. Not a damn cent. Where did I put my shawl with Arabic scrawling soaked in Eau de Cannabis?

I believe it was Cortázar who spoke of a “poetics of sponges and chameleons.” I put that down. Sponge: Figure of minute and fragmentary porosity, of an interstitial nature. Chameleon: Figure of confusion, caosmos, and otherness dating back to unknown ages. Of a medieval nature.

“Hey, Vlady! Finally catching you awake.”

“Stop fussing around and get in, Pamyla.”

A cassette of Slavic music: Zolotoe koltso. And everything was in a wonderful heap, circles of gold and clouds of green pyramidal smoke.

“Hey, weren’t you saying you didn’t like the name Brandy as a person in my stories? Well, I’m thinking I’ll change it up for Whiskey instead, how’s that?”

“Nah, homie, I can’t get down with Whiskey either. Make me Vodka, it’s stronger and not so hard on the pieschien.”

“You sure about that? Whiskey’s the best.”

“Shit, you can get vodka up to 99 proof. In Russia the peasants used to make it out of rotten potatoes, and they’d get loaded off of it to pick faster and ferment more of it again.”

“Da, da. They drink to eat and eat to drink. Alright, Vlady, I got you. I’ll make you Vodka in all the stories I’m going to write.”

“You should make me Stepan Razin, the rebel, instead. Or the soldier Suvorov. Or general Kutuzov. Or Vlasov. Homie, what you know about any of them?

READ THE REST OF THIS STORY IN SAMPSONIA WAY MAGAZINE, HERE.

Translated by David Iaconangelo

The publication of this story is part of Sampsonia Way Magazine’s “CUBAN NEWRRATIVE: e-MERGING LITERATURE FROM GENERATION ZERO” project, in collaboration with Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and a collection of authors writing from Cuba. You can read this story in Spanish here, and other stories from the project, here.

El Vedado: From Modernity to Brutality / Juan Antonio Madrazo Luna

HAVANA, Cuba, August, www.cubanet.org –The identity of El Vedado has been in jeopardy for a long time. This neighborhood in the old Elegant Havana is no longer a museum of modern architecture. Here Cuba entered modernity, which was always an accent of its identity. It wasn’t just a neighborhood founded by families of the aristocracy, it was also a neighborhood of tourism and prosperity.

This neighborhood, which germinated from the forest, today has aged very badly. It is a scrap of city that is no longer prepared to handle hard hits, its views have been sacked, deteriorated and blurred, it stopped being an ostentatious site and today its facades are merely a game of appearance.

I remember the homeland of my childhood as a hospitable place, an ecological settlement in which the way of life breathed dignity. Having been born in the Sagrado Corazon and being from El Vedado demanded an etiquette of distinction and elegance, even among the humblest.

Teresa, a woman from Guantanamo who was born in La Loma del Chivo, vowed, from very young, never to go back to her hometown: “I arrived in this neighborhood in 1962 –she testified–and I was dazzled by El Vedado, one could distinguish the personality this place held, it had its own glamor, it was a place where one breathed decency. Back then, the beat of a drum, witchcraft and the sacrifices of animals under the ceiba tree was foreign to this place. Today this identity has disappeared and a culture of flip flops and barracks has been superimposed.

With the new social contract pushed by the Revolutionary inquisition, the customs and culture of El Vedado, as a style of life for the elite of Havana, was amputated by decree and replaced by a culture of barbarity.

The Hotel Trotcha, the Govea and Alaska buildings, or the gardens of the Loynaz home, are some of the lost local patrimony. The Alaska building, that could have been saved, was destroyed by dynamite, and today in its place is the park of the Provincial Communist Party Committee. It’s possible that the same fate awaits the Medical Retreat building, located on N, between 23 and 25. Cinematographic rooms, such as the Gris theater, and cultural plazas, such as the Casa de la Cultura Checa have been lost.

According to Hilda, a Havanan born in the neighborhood of Cayo Hueso, today many mansions in El Vedado are citadels: “I remember that here there weren’t many ancestral homes, among them were the home of the Chalas, now known as Blumer Caliente, and the Guillermina home, where the most troublesome family was that of Silvia, known as La Cochina, white with dark hair and eyes, who left the country in 1980. Now there are other places , such as La Mierdita (The Little Shit), El Sopena, el Hormiguero (The Anthill) and the Pentagon. Chivalry is over, as is good taste and the pride we once felt for this place.”

Areas linked to the echo of fine dining, such as the Varsovia, Sofia and El Jardin restaurants, as well as coffee shops, La Cocinita (The Little Kitchen), El Avioncito (The Little Plane), La Piragua (The Canoe), La Fuente (The Fountain) and Sol Mar (Sun Sea), no longer exist. Other restaurants like Rancho Luna (Moon Ranch), Los Andes (The Andes), Vita Nova, El Cochinito (The Little Pig), Centro Vasco, Casa Potin, Las Bulerias, El Castillo de Jagua, (The Castle of Jagua), La Roca (The Rock), El Mandarin, Siete Mares (Seven Seas), where it is now very difficult to eat seafood and fish, or the pizzerias Cinecitta, Buona Sera and Milan. They are all grey places, abandoned to their fates.

The few places with foreign currency have cancelled opportunities for free entertainment of the common people. The Vedado Tennis, today the Jose Antonio Echevarria Social Circle, is a jungle in which the floating class free their repressions and lay out the trash talk. The Club Sayonara is a sad warehouse of food administrated by the Provincial Management of Gastronomy of the People’s Power of the municipality. The Escondite de Hernando and Club Oluku clubs disappeared and were transformed into a piloto* for the mass consumption of beer. The feeling vanished from Pico Blanco. The children’s hospital Pedro Borras, and the maternity ward, Clodomira Acosta, have been waiting to be demolished for more than 20 years.

While El Vedado continues to lose its role as the Garden neighborhood it once was, new places are being superimposed, as part of the emerging economy: Dulcilandia (Candyland), La Farandula (Showbiz) and La Moraleja ((The Moral). The walk along the Avenue of the Presidents is the sanctuary of the urban tribes (emos, rockers, preps and gangsters). The culture of parks is also crumbling, the Victor Hugo (H and 21) or Medina and Menocal are now animal cemeteries, for the permanent offerings to the ceiba tree of the spirits.

A long time ago, El Vedado stopped being this elegant gentleman, an intellectual dressed in white with a blue cummerbund. Of its traditions, which constituted their own culture, all that is left is the eroticism of La Rampa and the romanticism of the Malecón.

*Translator’s note: The name “piloto” comes from Plan Piloto (Pilot Plan) that began around 1969 after the regime expropriated all the remaining small businesses, including bars, in 1968. There was still a need to sell beer to people to keep them happy-ish, and the regime turned many of the bars and clubs into cheaper “beer halls” under the Plan Piloto. Cubans started to call these establishments “pilotos” (singular: la piloto). In short, a piloto is a trashy, dirty, state-owned beer hall. [The translator thanks one of our most faithful collaborator’s mother for this explanation.]

About the author

Juan Antonio Madrazo Luna: Civic Activist and leader of the Citizen’s Committee for Racial Integration (CIR).

He lives in the city of Havana.

From Cubanet

27 August 2013

Federation of Cuban Women: Reasons to Celebrate? / Yaremis Flores

HAVANA, Cuba, August, 2013 www.cubanet.org – At age 16, every girl who is part of an “integrated” and “revolutionary” family, automatically becomes a “federated” woman. Perhaps, like me, the only memory they retain of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) is when a neighbor came by the house to collect the dues.

On August 23rd, the only state organization that “defends” the human rights of women celebrated its 53rd anniversary. At the time, extensive articles in the official press accentuated stories about Heroines of Labor, including a female crane operator, among others.

They stuck to those cases of women who were able to overcome the barriers of sexism, but as usual this is a government strategy to hide those Cuban women who are victims of discrimination and of domestic and institutional violence.

Recently, Cuba was examined by the Committee against Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW, for its acronym in English) and the FMC was challenged about the absence of complaints on this issue.

As noted by one of the experts, “the absence of complaints does not always mean the absence of problems; sometimes it’s because of fear and various other reasons that women do not get around to making the complaint.”

In fact, Cuban women do not recognize the House of Guidance to Woman and the Family, nor the FMC, as potential organizations to resolve their problems. This is demonstrated by the low numbers provided by the State regarding assistance to members of the Federation in cases of violence between 2006 to 2008.

Eloísa Ricardo, after a history of mistreatment and abuse by her former husband, a government official, looked in vain to the FMC. On the other hand, Mrs. Regla Bárbara complained to the Federation, and received a response letter sending the case to the Prosecutor’s office, which is standard practice.

The FMC reached this anniversary under the disappointed and concerned gaze of international bodies such as CEDAW, for failing for, so many years, in getting the Parliament to pass a specific law protecting women.

By Yaremis Flores

August, 27, 2013

From Cubanet

Translated by: Tomás A.