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

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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

escuela-cuba620-620x330The 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

KILL WORMS  Artist: El Sexto
KILL WORMS Artist: El Sexto

1.

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.

2.

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.

4.

“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.

Tomb Raiding and Wreath Robbing / Rebeca Monzo

The scandal of thefts in cemeteries continues, despite all the denunciations published inside and outside the island. Of course for many years here there was a silent complicity by the official press, the only one accredited in the country. But with the advent of technology and the access, although greatly restricted, to the social networks, this seems to have escaped the censors and now, from time to time, an occasional critical comment appears in local newspapers on this thorny subject.

No longer is it only the Colon Cemetery, perhaps the most looted simply because it has the most works of art of household value, but also Baptist, Chinese, and Jewish graveyards have recently been vandalized, by practitioners of African cults, who use bones of the dead (preferably unbaptized) as offerings for their “religious” practices, in the face of the unpunished and easy access to them.

Another phenomenon that occurred since the appearance of the two currencies — the current Cuban pesos (CUP), in which they pay you wages and pensions, and the strong pesos (CUC), in which you are forced to pay for almost everything — is the reappearance at burials of two types of wreaths: the poor ones, with sparse flowers, unattractive and mass-produced, with paper tape and letters in purple ink, offered for CUP, and occasionally in limited supply, depending on time and death; and the others, for “hard currency,” well-made with beautiful imported flowers, fabric ribbons for the dedication in gold letters, and in unlimited supply. As a result of this another type of theft began: that of wreaths.

It is sad to think about the people who have made a sacrifice offered to their deceased friend or family member of one of these beautiful wreaths acquired in hard currency which, just after the burial is concluded and the accompanying mourners dispersed, then disappears “as if by magic” and is offered, in CUC of course, by other unscrupulous mourners, or is simply dismantled to sell its flowers, to people who already have pre-established contacts to buy them.

This has led increasingly to seeing fewer floral offerings on the graves. This type of desecration also may occur at some of the monuments to heroes in the city, where foreign delegations deposit elegant wreaths, as recently occurred at the monument to Eloy Alfaro on the Avenue of the Presidents, between 15th and 17th in Vedado.

Until now, as far as I know, there is no effective measure for stopping this miserable and criminal practice. Nor do I know of anything having been returned to the owners, any of the sculptures or large bronze crucifixes stolen over the past twenty years. My family’s burial vault was plundered; I submitted the complaint, supported with before-and-after photos, over five years ago, yet the cemetery authorities have not given me any response.

It is shameful that these activities continue to occur in the 21st century, practices that seem better suited to the Middle Ages, and which are perpetrated in the face of the apparent apathy of the authorities, who have the obligation of ensuring the preservation of our historical and cultural heritage.

Translated by: Tomás A.

29 August 2013

Uninformed or Poor? / Yusimi Rodriguez Lopez

internet150813A couple days ago two neighbors were talking outside my house about the notice published in the newspaper Granma, official organ of the Communist Party. I don’t know what the news was, but one said to the other, “It came out in Granma, I read it,” as proof of veracity. The other responded, “I don’t believe what Granma says, I read the internet.”

A year ago it would have been difficult to hear a conversation like this between neighbors, I don’t think anyone would have talked out loud about the question of the credibility of the official national press. Nor do I know if my neighbor could connect to the internet a year ago, or just a few months ago, and by what route if he was able to do so.

Many Cubans connected before network access became widely available in a legal form for nationals. How? Some from their workplaces, legally and free, had access to the pages that the Government allowed. Others accessed from embassies, which is perfectly legal, but frowned upon by our authorities: many did not use this route for fear of stigma, for example that anyone could reproach them on seeing them enter the United States Interest Section.

Other compatriots accessed the internet “under the table.” Someone whispered to you “so and so has internet, but you can’t tell, it’s under the table.” Not the least bit strange in a country where illegality appears to be a prerequisite for things achieving the desired legal status. For example, people sold their homes and cars before it was legal to do so, not surprising in a country where you can go to jail for an illegality one day before it ceases to be one. This happened with holding currencies: one day made the difference between an “integrated and compliant citizen under the law” and a “criminal”; the next day the same difference was between “someone dying of hunger” and “a privileged citizen.”

Because in the end, it’s all about money. It’s money that makes the difference. We don’t want to have the right to enter the hotels in our own country, to travel, to buy a house or a car, unless we are high performance athletes and important cultural figures? Then there are our rights, let them. What’s stopping us? Money.

The Government seems to be so aware that we do not have money, that, according to the vox populi (which almost always is right), when a Cuban citizen living in Cuba has stayed at hotels with a regularity outside what is considered normal, their names are noted in a list and the government then comes around to ask how they can afford it. But this may be a rumor. Many good and bad things are attributed to our Government. Not all are true (bad or good).

The truth is that money now not only divides us into Cubans can stay in a hotel and those who can’t even dream of it; between Cubans who can dine at restaurants like Doña Eutimia, The Decameron or The Mimosa, and Cubans who can only afford a pizza for ten Cuban pesos (and barely that). Now money also divides us between Cubans who can access the Internet, and Cubans who never will nor care to, because first they need to think about eating. You can’t think about having information, unless you have a full stomach and more or less decent clothes to dress and clothe the family.

I guess that’s the difference between my two neighbors. One of them can afford to discard Granma in favor of the internet as an information source (I don’t know if he’s aware that not everything that is published on the Internet is reliable); the other goes along with the official national press that does not cost more than two Cuban pesos, even if you buy from resellers.

A year ago, I complained that Cubans only had access to official national information media, which contained information that the Party-Government’s interest in our consuming, processed in the way that the Party-Government’s interest wants us to have it. Now you can go into the rooms that have opened in the country, and pay for services to navigate the web (national and international) and email (national and international). It’s not news that one hour of internet costs 4.50 CUC, just over $ 5 US and just under half the monthly salary of a worker. The cheapest is the using national email only, 1.50 CUC. Well, you decide, you aren’t forced to access the internet.

I was told that these cyber rooms you could get access to the The Miami Herald, for instance, and it’s true. I was able to check a couple of weeks ago, when I decided to commit harakiri and create myself an internet account. The connection is fast, at least compared to what I knew, and yes, you can access any publication even if it criticizes the government. This is freedom of information, I thought. I can no longer talk about uninformed Cubans; there are simply poor Cubans.

To be informed costs, in Cuba and in the world. It’s only that we are entering the ring right now. In the world there are places where the information is free, and sites where you sign up to receive information, places where you read a piece of information, and pay for the rest, and places where you pay for quality information. Cubans are just entering the XXI century. What happens is that at this stage of the game, it still amazes us sometimes to discover that things are not as we were led to believe that they were; that in reality, we are not all equal, and in the future will be about the same.

That was my conclusion until I tried something as simple as accessing the blog Generation Y, by the blogger Yoani Sanchez, who, believe it or not, I had never read. I read a couple of her articles that were linked to or posted on other sites, but not her blog. The worst thing is that it took me a while to realize I could not access it. As I’m used to the internet being I slow, waited, waited and waited, watching the minutes that for me were money.

I tried the same with the blog Sin evasion, by Miriam Celaya, and that of Reinaldo Escobar. In all cases I access articles and interviews from elsewhere, but not their blogs. I repeated the operation with David Canela, a journalist at Cubanet. I couldn’t even read his articles. I also could not access the publication.

I asked the workers staff the cybercafes, if Generation Y, for example, was blocked. They didn’t know what Generation Y is, or who Yoani Sanchez is. No surprise, it happens to many people in Cuba. I explained, with some difficulty because I realized I do not know how to define Yoani: Dissident? Opposition?? Citizen? Highly embarrassing for the government? Finally I was told that such sites or blogs are blocked. Then I learned that the classified ad page Revolico is blocked too.

I could have saved money and time, if I had read the internet contract I signed: Article 9 of the generalities of the service states “ETECSA is exonerated from liability for the limited access to the content, accuracy, quality and accuracy of the information posted on sites …”

Now I’m not sure it is enough to have money. Things do not seem so simple. You can pay, but that does not guarantee that access to the information that interests you. You do not decide what information to consume. In the end will we be only poor? Or we also uninformed?

Yusimi Rodriguez Lopez

From Diario de Cuba

19 August 2013

My First Book in Exile / Luis Felipe Rojas

FEEDING THE FIGHTING DOG, new poems by Luis Felipe Rojas. Now for sale on Amazon.

Poster designed by Rolando Pulido (cover designed by Idabell Rosales).

Here is the link for my book, “Feeding the Fighting Dog,” published by NeoClub Press under the direction of Armando Añel and the talented hands of Idabell Rosales. This poster would not have been possible without the work of Rolando Pulido, under the original cover. My first book in the land of liberty. Thank you, everyone who has bought it, you have been very generous. In a couple of weeks we will be giving a public presentation, which will be dedicated to my brother in prison, Angel Santeisteban. What better homage could I make for a colleague who continues writing and doesn’t stop telling the truth, no matter where he is.

Translated by Regina Anavy

11 March 2013