Translating Cuba

The Crisis of the Sugar Missiles: Scenario and Possible Solution / Yoani Sanchez

The unforeseen, situations that nobody predicted, are for politics like pepper on food. When it appears that all the possible variables of a scenario are on the table, an event sneaks in among them that changes everything. Such is the case with the diplomatic crisis generated by the arms transported from Cuba in a North Korean ship, discovered in the Panama Canal.

After years of trying to clean up its act before international bodies, this incident sets Raul Castro’s government back decades, returning it to the era of the Cold War. There is no time left for the octogenarian politician to reverse the effect of such a a misguided operation. Between now and his announced retirement in 2018, there are not enough days to make people forget the bungling of those missiles hidden under a cargo of sugar. Someone else, in his position, would renounce or remove the Minister of the Armed Forces, but a play like that has no precedent in the Castro regime.

On hearing about the trafficking in this arsenal of war, the question that immediately jumps to mind is how many times have operations like this been carried out without being discovered. The testimony and speculations about Cuba’s sending troops and arms to countries in conflict abound. It is symptomatic that on this occasion the contraband has been intercepted mid-journey, which raises a new question. Why in this case has it come to light? Clumsiness or intention? Bungling or being out of touch with the workings of the real world? The questions will be asked, but the answers are known only to a few.

The truth is that these events confirm the denunciations of those who, for years, have documented the support of the Plaza of the Revolution for guerrillas, insurgents, destabilization groups, and governments sanctioned by international organizations. Wrapped in the halo of “proletarian internationalism,” the help offered in most cases was hidden with subterfuges, such as merchant ships transporting soldiers or military equipment on the sly. It was the era when the sharp eyes of the satellites didn’t track the planet with such precision, and the Soviet bear was there to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for its outstanding disciple in the Caribbean. A bygone and remote era.

If Cuban political leaders believed they could still hide planes and missiles on a ship, send it through the Panama Canal and successfully arrive at a North Korean port, it is proof of their great disconnect from the reality of the world they live in. The statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is also a part of this anachronism, attempting to explain the cargo as a shipment of “obsolete” military equipment off to be repaired in the country of the Kim dynasty.

The justifications or falsehoods that were once effective, fall on the ears of the citizens of this third millennium like bedtime stories for unsuspecting children. Their naiveté was left behind in the 20th Century and it’s a good thing, because the leaders can’t fool us as easily as before. In fact, the performance of the Cuban authorities has displayed such stupidity that it suggests it was an operation prepared by the Castro regime itself, in order to be caught red-handed.

Every time that relations between Havana and Washington seem headed for a rapprochement, some event generates an abyss between the two governments. The most famous example was the shooting down of the Brothers to the Rescue planes in February 1996.

Could it be, on this occasion, that the orthodox within the power structure are dynamiting what they perceive to be Raul Castro’s weakness in trying to talk to the neighbor from the north? Or is it the General-President himself who has built this scandal to try to avoid getting to the negotiating table? The “conspiranoia” is infinite.

However, there could be a simpler answer behind all this, as incredible as it seems: the Cuban leadership really believed that it could still continue playing with toy soldiers and ignoring the provisions of the United Nations, without being discovered. Holding power for too long makes those who exercise it into a species of autistics, disconnected from reality. So this could be one of the most chronic cases of political autism we now have in our global village.

In the midst of the complex situation in Cuba, why would the government dare to undertake such a ridiculous operation? After so many efforts to appear before the international community as a country transitioning through a process of openings, where does this “sugar missile” piece fit? Well, it doesn’t fit!

Evidently the relations between old ideological allies are still placed above pragmatic diplomatic strategies. Old comrades are still prioritized, although to the eyes of the world they are seen as a family dynasty, a recalcitrant violator of the human rights of their citizens, constantly threatening the rest of the planet with nuclear conflict. The fellow travelers support each other, so they have to violate the same UN resolutions to achieve it.

Now that the boxes of missiles are discovered — the MIG-21 airplanes and the rocket batteries — it remains to be known how Raul Castro will get out of such a delicate situation. An apology would not be enough, because the government would still have to comply with some diplomatic sanction resulting from its actions. Acting the fool and reaffirming their “sovereign right” to send arms to be “repaired” in North Korea, will further isolate the island’s authorities at a time when economic support from abroad is urgently needed.

The insolence will also conspire against a possible loosening of the European Common Position, and against the easing of the American embargo. To reply with a barrage of government attacks against the president of Panama won’t accomplish much, because this problem involves other nations who don’t appear willing to forget so easily.

So, then, how does the Castro regime turn the page, minimize what happened, and present the world with a real posture of mea culpa and peaceful engagement? The only solution that remains is to announce political change, the opening so often demanded by its citizens and by international agencies and governments.

The only thing they can do to overcome this huge mistake is to focus all attention on the total decriminalization of dissent in Cuba, the legalization of other political forces and the final dismantling of totalitarianism.

From “Cuba Libre” in El Pais.

23 July 2013

Savagery to Strays / Fernando Damaso

Photo: Rebeca

In Cuba, although before there was, currently their appears to be no effective organization to protect animals, although there is talk of one, Aniplant (Society for the Protection of Animals and Plants), which doesn’t appear in any telephone directly, and whose activity is so non-existent it lacks a presence and activism.

The outrages committed daily, mainly against dogs and cats, caused anger and pain to sensitive citizens in the face of their helplessness to avoid them. The so-called stray dogs and cats that roam our towns and cities trying to survive — many of them abandoned to their fate by their original owners, who use them as pets when they are young and then when they grow up and require responsibility dispose of them like a useless old shoe — are the objects of absurd beatings, tortures and even acts of vandalism that kill them, as denounced on Tuesday the 15th in the Rebel Youth newspaper under the title “Diary of death and kindness,” without the authorities of public order, or any other, taking action on the matter, nor those responsible being prosecuted.

This reality, palpable at any time in the streets of our neighborhoods, shows the citizen ignorance that exists, regardless of the vaunted but very questionable education we are said to possess, which seems to leave much to be desired and be more bark than bite, considering the serious problems in education for years now.

Oddly enough, it is precisely the youngest (teens and even children) who are involved in these inhumane acts, with the complicity or indolent gaze of adults, which, rather than stop them and get their attention, often to find it funny or participate in it.

Among the many evils present, dozens of them denounced recently by the highest political authority, the lack of animal protection, with institutions and laws that safeguard the street stray, is one more, which must not be allowed not to escape our attention, if we live in a civilized society.

20 July 2013

Prison Diary XXXVII: Cowardice Disguised as Naivete / Angel Santiesteban

The naiveté of Cubans on the island sometimes dresses itself up and asks my family if they’d really tortured me in prison.

I remembered when, on the first beating, back in 2009, they fractured my arm, many doubted that fact because, some told me, State Security didn’t behave this way, given the scandal it would mean to publicly beat a writer. Other colleagues questioned the incident, and the then Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, appointed a commission who investigated the events.

I have said previously that another of the ways they harassed me was to stop friends who visited me at home, hold them for hours, asking them if I received foreigners in my house, or if I met with them somewhere else; if I received money from abroad and so on.

When I denounced the proceedings, all thanks to my blessed blog, they began to deploy their agents disguised as artists, that the incident that had happened to me was personal and had nothing to do with the State.

I was never said what definition the investigative commission arrived it, everything was forgotten and my fracture was “forgotten.”

I remember that at that time I published how they were going to find themselves.

On November 8, 2012, State Security beat me savagely, the following day, inside the cell, they beat me harder; only this time, a dissident had the courage, the audacity and ethics to divulge the horrors of the dictatorship, by filming the event.

I always wondered if those intellectuals, having seen the brutal beating, were then convinced that State Security did act that way, and what they think of their own silence back then, when they doubted, and now that they know how is it possible that they can continue to remain silence. Do they know that if they speak up they’ll get the same? Do they know if they talk they will come to this prison where I am?

Here, they have beaten me, forced me to eat food against my will, food that stinks and is colorless and tasteless. They torture me psychologically at all times. What do they need? Another video?

Their cowardice disguises their naiveté, it will be veil that accompanies them until they die. Thus, they will be collected by History.

I don’t understand how they can sleep.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats, Prison 1580, July 2013

22 July 2013

Warning Signal / Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antunez

By: Jorge Luis García Pérez Antúnez, Orlando Zapata Tamayo National Civic Resistance and Civil Disobedience Front. FNRC-OZT

Attention, attention: Never has Cuba been so close to freedom, but never like now has danger loomed that can be cut short and mediated by opportunistic efforts, lacks of faith and even the occasional traitor added to this clear and shameful pact with the Castros…

If we do not stop this dirty and unpatriotic plot in time the results will be the huge fraud-change fraud where the continuity of the Castro regime will be guaranteed when descendants of the leaders of the regime and certain opportunists from here and there will divide up the nation like the booty of corsairs and pirates.

We won’t allow them to eliminate the Cuban resistance. The memory of our fallen and the sacrifice of our compatriots deserve respect and they can’t sit at a negotiating table. I speak on behalf of those who are opposed to a reconciliation without justice first.

As one of the most important Cuban resistance slogans say: I do want real change.

Placetas, 18 July 2013.

19 July 2013

Castro vs. the Cuban People: Where was the President? / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Photo courtesy of Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

With a speech that lasted 35 minutes, Commander in Chief Raúl Castro destroyed the very last traces of the New Man that would complete the 1959 Castroist revolution. In doing so he created a paradox in which a leader accused the masses of living without moral and civic values: Without honesty or decency or shame or modesty or honor or sensitivity or solidarity.

Raúl Castro (who is also the First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party and President of the Council of State) made this condemnatory speech on July 7 during the 8th Legislature of the National Parliament. At times, the General seemed to be on the verge of ordering an ethnic cleansing of the Cuban nation. He threatened to impose discipline at any cost, even though we Cubans are used to that after more than half a century of watching the government use repression as a mechanism for creating consensus and governability.

So, the governing elite is now discovering that the island is in ruins, and that its raw human material is reprobate at best, guilty of: Theft, impunity, squatting, black-market dealing, noncompliance with working hours, illegal slaughter of livestock and endangered species, breeding animals in the city, hoarding products in short supply and reselling them at higher prices, illegal gambling, bribery and perks, harassment of tourists, computer hacking, drunkenness, swearing, and littering in public (as well as defecating and urinating in parks and on the street), graffiti, pounding music, academic fraud, vandalization of phone booths and pylons and even drains and traffic signs…

For speeches similar to Raúl Castro’s most recent one (what we can call a Cubanicide), many people who are critical of the socialist system have been officially punished with ostracism, stigmatization, jail, exile, and death.

The question that never gets answered is this: Where were brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro while Cuba was falling to pieces? Were they ignorant or inefficient or indolent?

From Sampsonia Way Magazine

22 July 2013

One Year Since the Deaths of Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero

Without answers, without Oswaldo, without Harold. Anniversary of their disappearance.

One Year After the Scaffold / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Oswaldo Paya at the entrance of the National Assembly of Popular Power in Havana. (CUBAOUT.WORDPRESS.COM)

I waited until the end of the line, after hundreds of mourners had filed past his casket. It was the month of July, criminally hot. In the Savior of the World parish in Havana’s Cerro municipality, the wake was being held for the founder of the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL): Oswaldo Payá, 1952-2012.

I bent over the glass of the humble box. There was the national flag, with its ever repressive geometry of blue and white bars, and that red triangle with the star like a predatory eye. The odor of dead flowers was unbearable, along with the hypocritical incense of a Church whose Cardinal is today almost a minister of the already fifty-year-old Communist government, turning his back to the faithful as at so many other times in our national history.

I looked at the face of Oswaldo Payá. He had a bruise on his left cheek. Among the Cuban exile, he was accused of being a supporter of the Castro regime for working for a peaceful transition to democracy :from law to law,” one that would redeem the truth and not end up in the fraud-change of exchanging one military caudillo for another in a suit in tie. In the ranks of the opposition, he was criticized for the virtuoso vehemence of this convictions. The loneliness of that fresh corpse was typical of our martyrs.

I thought about how the life of the young MCL leader named Harold Cepero had been claimed along with his. And at this point it was as if Oswaldo Payá looked at me with guilt, without needing to open his eyelids, heavy as backdrops.

At that moment I had a sweeping vision, inspired by the radio address I had just heard in the voice of his even younger daughter, Rosa María Payá, who announced to the world, with pain but great self-possession, that after decades of surveillance and constant threats, her father had been attacked, as demonstrated by the text messages sent to Sweden and Spain by the two foreign survivors of the “accident.”

In my vision, Oswaldo Payá was taken from the rental car he was traveling in and tried in situ by a military court, which condemned him to death without letting him speak, to satisfy the old personal vengeance of the Commander in Chief of the Revolution who never forgave him for being a free and happy man inside Cuba, capable of collecting more than 25,000 signatures against him, of speaking without fear but without hatred in his heart on receiving the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, and being on the point of receiving of receiving the greatly deserved Nobel Peace Prize (a title that Fidel Castro always coveted for himself).

Then, a trickle of blood began to flow from the left ear of Oswaldo Payá, streaming down his neck to settle in the pocket of his shirt. No one else saw it in the church packed with opponents of the regime, foreign press and infiltrated secret agents (all indistinguishable in more ways than one). Without realizing it I started to cry. The tears ran down my cheeks, I was powerless to control them. People called me from abroad and I reported crying, although I wouldn’t say I felt sad; I was just devastated. What had begun with some guerrillas who executed without trail since long before 1959, now ended with a State assassination, meanwhile investors in the free world are already counting their money to invest, seeing themselves investing as the saviors of the last totalitarian utopia on Earth.

The MCL’s Varela Project, the idea of reducing the tyranny by ordering it to comply with its own legislation, still exists today, and no Cuban official (not today and not tomorrow) will have legitimacy as long as the National Assembly of People’s Power does not comply with what it stipulates, and recognizes that this citizen’s petition came to them from within the framework of the constitution. This legacy of Oswaldo Payá will survive the Castro brothers. And even the capitalism-without-human-right that is being tested today in order to enthrone it after the Castros.

It is quite possible their crime will go unpunished in legal terms. But the lives of Harold Cepero and Oswaldo Payá (having been torn away as in my vision or in some other cruel way) are already a living gospel, patrimony of all Cubans, so that the violence of the State will be incinerated in Cuba along with the last of the green-executioner uniforms of State Security.

Translated from Diario de Cuba. Note: This is a longer version of an article that appeared a few days ago in the Prague Post.

22 July 2013

Just Another Sunday / Rebeca Monzo

Due to media secrecy, which is institutionalized here on “my beloved planet,” we have had to find out about this mess, involving Cuba’s “sugary missiles” on board a North Korean ship, in snippets from here and there. Naturally, this has exacerbated our native tendency towards speculative imagination.

In the end, another Sunday has caught us by surprise which, for me, is the most boring day of the week. I always promised myself that if one day a gentleman suitor should approach me named Domingo*, and I like him so much that I couldn’t leave him, I’d call him Tito. Maybe something similar happens to you, especially in the evening hours, when the imminence of a new Monday at work approaches us.

Well, if you’re also a member of the club for those who can’t stand Sundays, why not spend a little time today on your family and flatter them with a simple yet delicious recipe made by your own hands, thus turning Sunday into something less ordinary? Here you have my suggestion:

Coffee custard

Ingredients:

1 liter of fresh milk

1 cup of sugar

4 tablespoons of cornstarch

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

4 eggs

1 demitasse of brewed instant coffee

1 cinnamon stick

1 lemon peel

Procedure:

Boil the milk together with the cinnamon and lemon peel. Lower to medium heat and add the four egg yolks and cornstarch, which should be dissolved in a small amount of milk or water. Pour this mix into the milk, while gently stirring it with a wooden spoon to prevent lumps from forming. Once you have a smooth consistency, add the vanilla extract and coffee, while gently stirring. Lower the heat. Make a meringue with the egg whites of the four eggs. Remember: it’s two teaspoons of sugar for each egg white. You can add lemon zest. Once it’s ready, bring small dollops of the meringue to a flame with a fork, to make toasted meringues to decorate the custard with.

Bon apétit!

* Translator’s note: Domingo is a common first name in the Spanish-speaking world ; domingo is also the Spanish word for Sunday.

Translated by: Yoyi el Monaguillo

21 July 2013

Waiting for “the boat” / Miriam Celaya

Ghost ship. Graphic taken from the internet

These days, mothers of babies are in search of disposable diapers, missing from almost all stores of Havana. Shortage crises of such articles take place every once in a while, a product that is so useful, and needed so desperately by mothers today, and despite being marketed only in convertible currency. Gone are the days when women had to boil with soap again and again our children’s antiseptic cloth diapers, and hang them in the sun to keep them pure. Fortunately, these days women have left behind slave labor to take up, as far as possible, the benefits of innovations, however expensive that may imply in Cuba.

But the same is true with other essential items, such as sanitary napkins and cleaning articles like mopping cloths, descaling products, toothpaste, detergents and toilet paper, among others, whose intermittent disappearances from store shelves become a nuisance to the people, given how much time is wasted in pursuing such products, going from store to store, many times without results.

On the other hand, some other popular products that are more “economical”, such as butter — for months absent at the foreign currency stores, the only place where it could be purchased — some chopped poultry (such as Canadian chopped turkey, the most popular), hot dogs, and many others, without any explanation on the part of store management… and even fewer explanations through the official “information” media.

Cubans, with a deep awareness of insularity, sown from the very beginning of the colony, without information about what drives these empty spaces on store shelves, and for decades used to not having anything produced here and everything coming “from outside”, have coined a phrase, half joke and half truth, to explain the shortages: “the boat has not arrived”. A kind of imaginary vessel that could come full of anything that has disappeared, from flour, needed to make bread (oh, the favored bread, the first point in the Cuban political agenda!) even the spices that caused so many wars in antiquity and, for many here, almost entirely unknown, or oil with which we cook our humble daily rice. Just comment anywhere that there is a shortage of anything for the popular answer to make its appearance: “they are waiting for the boat…”

A grocer in my neighborhood is of the opinion that we don’t need for the boat to arrive, but a flotilla to take us all out of this Island, while an illegal loudmouthed street vendor of air freshener and clothespins disagrees and has an easier solution: “Nah, with just one boat they can take all of THEM and their relatives, and you will see that then there won’t be any shortages!” In our Cuban cryptic language we all know who “THEY” are. These are quaint touches of everyday life that begin and end in such a castaway complicity as sterile as the system itself.

So, these days, Havana mothers anxiously await “the boat” of disposable diapers with which to alleviate, at least to the extent allowed by each pocketbook, the burden of keeping babies clean and neat, without ruining hands, nails, and wasting time in the process. And meanwhile, they pray that soap and many other cleaning products won’t fall in the cycle of disappearances, just in case the ever-awaited “boat” is delayed.

Translated by Norma Whiting
19 July 2013

Dances / Regina Coyula

Young people want a break in the routine. They are on vacation. What are the options?

Rafael, 19, is a student. His Federation of University Student (FEU) card facilitated his entry into some places for a lower price. La Cecilia, El Diablo TunTun, Café Cantante at the National Theater are in this category, but if you don’t arrive early, other more savvy college students fill the FEU quota of five or ten Cuban pesos (~ 20¢ to 40¢ USD) per person, and the entry fee stays the same but in Cuban Convertible Pesos (about $5 to $10 USD).*

Several places are the trendsetters. Once a month Parque Villalón brings together the lovers of electronic music with the DJ Lejardi y Analógica with their Fiestas Uniks. It’s a public park, it’s free, and the urban tribes of G Street go down to Villalón for lack of anything better. Both projects have spaces in the Tropical Gardens for twenty pesos.

The rock is concentrated at the Maxim Rock, with an almost always metalcore sound, and the Yellow Submarine and Stairway to Heaven has nostalgic rock. Cover bands alternate with recorded music, there are also bands with original music. In these places the entry price between 30 and 75 Cuban pesos.

The Alamar Amphitheater and the Metropolitan Park are places for hip hop. Apparently, they are the least favored, with both places weather dependent.

The young trova have the Casona de Línea. Trova and fusion music alternate in many places: Café Cantante, El Sauce, La Cecilia, Morro-Cabaña Park, Barbaram … At Café Bertolt Brecht and La Zorra y El Cuervo mix jazz and fusion. Entry is between 25 and 100 Cuban pesos.

Projects like PMM, Havanashow, Fiestahabana, with recorded music, powerful equipment, smoke machines and foam are a good party idea for many young people. The Copa Room of the Riviera, El Pedregal, at 3rd and 8th and at 7th and 22nd are some of the places where these projects are presented. The price of these parties varies between 3 and 5 CUCs, although they usually have more economical presentations for youth activities.

Timba and reggaeton dancers have the Salon Rosado at the Tropical, and the Casa de la Musica on Galiano with live groups; here the prices are from 50 Cuban pesos at the Salon Rosado, up to 10 CUC in the Casa de la Musica, if the artists are famous like Baby Lores or Gente d Zone.

Private businesses begin to appear in the list of preferences. Buddha bar at the back of La Cabaña with an excellent price (25 Cuban pesos) and good atmosphere, is very popular despite its remote location.

The nightclubs in the hotels and recreational centers are big. You can also forget about distance and the carrying on if you get a stereo, put the amplifiers facing the street and torment the neighbors according to the decibels your equipment puts out. It’s free and all, ‘n’ nothin’ happens.

Translator’s note: The average monthly wage in Cuba is less than 500 Cuban pesos. 1 CUC is worth about 24 Cuban pesos.

19 July 2013

Cyber-bembes / Rosa Maria Rodriguez

http://actualidad.rt.com/actualidad/view/84710-rusia-agencia-internet-reglas

On June 4, the 118 Internet centers that had been announced in the State press begin operating in Cuba. As I receive the newspaper Granma on Mondays I get Juventud Rebelde, Trabajadores and Tribuna de La Habana, several days earlier I began to search the newspaper, which should have information about the places that would offer the services, the addresses, but as of the writing of this text, nothing has appeared; why?

The downpours of the five days prior to the date in the western provinces drowned my ability to access the network during that time in places where usually I connect and so I do not know if in the foreign press showed the list to which I refer. Maybe the leaders hoped that foreign tourists come to navigate the Cuban cyber waters and for this they maintained discretion.

The fact is that the government media did not pay much attention to the issue. It could be that the silence that is due to a Party direction, perhaps thinking, from their disconnected cloud, that it might produce social congestion at these access points and are trying to avoid it with silence.

It is also possible that, on the contrary, they forgot to coordinate with the newspaper editors — which is unlikely — in order to “give abundant air” to the news in question. There is also possible, even more remote, if we take into account the tight control over the media by the authorities, and that the indifference is due to how distant the Internet is for the majority of the citizens, the excessive process of computer and telephone equipment, and that computers are almost never offered for sale in this country. Generally computers are imported by the minority of Cubans who can travel abroad.

The so-called southern television (TeleSUR) that is weighs on me to mention, committed and manipulated and whose north is leftist propaganda, mentioned the fact with great media fanfare on one of their news broadcasts, and assured that the opening of these cyber centers is part of the process of the “computerization of Cuba.”

If in the national media they claim there are already around two million cellphone users, why not include these potential navigators who already have the tools to set sail? As always happens in dictatorships, the paralyzing fear, secrecy, rights violated with extremist caution, and the unjustified deception on the pretext that “the enemy is listening,” are already very fragile arguments in a globally interconnected world.

This Monday the 10th the newspaper Granma mentioned for the first time that there was a cybercafe in the Focsa Building, with 9 seats for internauts. Where are the others?

The bembé is a religious festival of the Yoruba pantheon inherited from ethnic groups uprooted from Africa and we incorporate it into the Cuban cultural monuments. The news of cybersurfing points, however, wasn’t the celebration that many had anticipated. We’re left, then, with continuing the long and patient wait because everyone uses that service with the tools at their disposal, without ridiculous prohibitive pattakíes or discrimination, to celebrate with all Cuban users the respect of one of the fundamental rights on the part of the Cuban dictatorship, which constitute a real national celebration.

11 June 2013

Oswaldo Paya: The Act of Serving / Luis Felipe Rojas

Note: I published this a year ago and have nothing to say I didn’t say them, I have reposted the text (on the anniversary of his death).

Still dazed and in shock I compose these words to Oswaldo. When I started to get the first messages about Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas’s death they were showing the film “War Horse,” and in one of the scenes a soldier leaves his foxhole to save his charger and before the imminence of his death he is praying parts of the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” as if nothing should be lacking now to someone who is and well be a man-bridge, man-dialog, man-country.

The messages clogged my phone with the hashtag #OswaldoPayá and the mention ©OswaldoPaya. The questions of friends from every corner of the island and of the world. The police cordon at the hospital in Bayama, the details of the fatal incident, the doubts of a witness about a supposed police chase, the construction crews in the middle of the road on the El Naranjo curve. The questions. The answers. The words. The damn words.

It’s difficult to think of Payá and not go back to the now well-known EFE Agency photo where he, Antonio Díaz Sánchez and Regis Iglesia, on that 10th of May 2012, are approaching the site of the National Assembly of People’s Power to deliver the 11,025 signatures of citizens who supported the Varela Project.

There was the map of tomorrow’s Cuba. I say that because now the faces of the three blend together for me with those of hundreds of anonymous opponents, without a visible mark for the “mass media” merrymaking, those who gave birth to and collected these desires.

The most insignificant of the Cuban dissidents saw pass through their hands a form, a copy, or a summary of the range of strategies that Payá wanted to tune into so that Cuba would be different. Along with virtues, defects and contradictions, there was his greatness. The Cuban regime had to move, in an acrobatic high-wire act to the people to amend those articles that gave a glimpse of freedom and that were a dead letter in the Constitution until Oswaldo Payá grabbed hold of them.

The Varela Project was a lever that moved the country

I think of Payá, but also of Osmel Rodríguez (The Chinaman Manicaragua), of Ezequiel Morales and Juan Carlos Reyes Ocaña, of the Ferrer-García brothers and of the hundreds of Cubans who armed with courage went out through our dark country to seek signatures for the Varela Project, to spark the desire to be free or to dream with this treasure that is freedom.

I didn’t support all of Payá’s initiatives, and for this I won his friendship. The first time we met he listened to my arguments without interruption. In 2007 he invited me to review the draft of something he’d been “cooking up” for months and I still appreciate that gesture, that cunning to get me to participate. From that time he called me and I him.

The first close people who talked to me about him were Father Olbier Hernández and Deacon Andrés Tejeda who described him as a contradictory being, helpful, a rebuilding. They and the way in which the former American president Jimmy Carter in some way presented him on that day in 2002* in the Great Hall of the University of Havana depicted the face of Payá Sardiñas in the tapestry of an inclusive Cuba for everyone. It will come, we will have to find it together.

*Translator’s note: Jimmy Carter was allowed to address the Cuban people on live TV and took the opportunity to praise Oswaldo Payá and the Varela Project.

22 July 2013

Everything Ready for Fidel Castro’s Funeral / Juan Juan Almeida

A group of Cuban-American congressional representatives has formally requested that Washington deny a visa to Fidel Castro’s heir, Antonio Castro Soto del Valle. Rather than being concerned about the son’s entry to the United States, the island’s government seems more focused on his father’s exit from this world.

Yes, the father’s farewell. The former Commander-in-Chief’s curious fascination with death and funerary trappings has reached such a level of outrageousness that some time ago he ordered the creation of a special commission (obviously headed by himself) to organize and supervise the perfect execution of what will be his funeral.

Though only in the planning stage, this adiós is already enough to satisfy the voracious appetite of even Francois Rabelais’ fictional giant, Pantagruel. Communism’s dying superstar loves to compartmentalize. As a security measure the various parties involved have not yet been allowed to meet to design what the deceased-to-be foresees as a ceremony replete with the solemnity and precision of a Swiss watch.

The key military component seems more than ready. The same goes for the twenty-one gun salute, the eulogies, the mournful ceremony, and the band fully outfitted with conductor and musicians, some of whom will be dressed in black while others will be in military fatigues.

Of course, as in any other official parade, popular participation will be obligatory and massive. On this occasion, however, there is sure to be a formidable contingent of mimes serving as portrait bearers, mourners and weepers who, between sobs, will be sure to spontaneously chant the characteristic slogans we must not forget. These include: Cuba yes, Yankees no; Long live Fidel; Fatherland or death; Socialism or death; The ten million will…* no, sorry, probably not that one.

To avoid surprises and keep the machine well-oiled, the Ministry of the Interior, the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution regularly review two chapters of a plan whose titles share a certain association with combat missions: “Actions to Safeguard the Physical Integrity of the Nation” and “Preserving Order.”

The author of Reflections has expended so much energy on this mega madness — one we hope will be his last — that Saturday, July 13 and today, Monday, July 14 he attempted to immortalize the spot once used as his speaking platform by closing the entrances to the José Martí Memorial in the Plaza of the Revolution to the public to carry out a pair of rehearsals for the Pharaonic entombment. This was done in spite of the fact that children’s activities had previously been scheduled to take place there the entire summer. In addition to reviewing details for the ill-fated ceremony, the not-yet-deceased sought to analyze, select and personally authorize the various pieces of film footage on his life and work to be broadcast on Cuban television during the period of national mourning.

What remains unclear is the proximity of the guests to the coffin. Every time there is a new rehearsal, he changes the arrangement — crowned heads, heads of state and heads of government — breaking all the rules of protocol, making adjustments based solely on the way that, according to the prophet, each will behave.

The gentleman designated to carry out the plan noted in a jocular and somewhat theatrical way that so much of the decision-making has been concentrated in the hands of the soon-to-be deceased himself that it was hindering his ability to respond to changes which — due to paranoia, superstition, belief or bi-polar disorder — have evolved from embalming to burial to that Olympian bonfire, cremation.

*Translator’s note: The Harvest of Ten Million was a failed 1970 campaign which marshalled all the island’s resources in an effort to produce ten million tons of sugar.

19 July 2013

10 Questions for the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) / Reinaldo Escobar

At the end of this morning’s TV news magazine, Buenos Dias, conspicuously absent in the official Cuban media was the issue of the North Korean ship loaded with missiles. I am absolutely certain that the coming days will produce nothing like a press conference with the Minister of the Armed Forces to respond to questions from foreign journalists accredited on the Island, not even with the accomplices of the national press. However, I would like to make public, in this small space, what my questions would be, should I be given the opportunity to present them to the minister in question face to face.

Do you consider that contracting with North Korea for armaments repair services is consistent with the policy or replacing imports set out in the guidelines from the 6th Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC)?
Does Cuba lack the technical facilities and personnel capable of maintaining combat readiness of the armaments available for the defense of the Homeland?
To what point does the obsolescence of our munitions affect the often proclaimed military invulnerability of Cuba?
What elements were taken into consideration in choosing North Korea as a destination to repair our armaments instead of contracting this service out to Russia, where they were built?
Is it true that in the agreements signed by the Cuban government with the USSR there is a commitment established not to re-export the arms acquired?
The note from the Foreign Ministry (MINREX) mentions that there were two complete rockets on board the North Korean ship. Were they so entirely broken that they had to be shipped in their entirety to be repaired?
Is the fact that the weapons were covered with sugar an intent to mask the military cargo, or is it a new method of taking advantage of the space?
To what extent does the Cuban government share the responsibility for not having informed Panama what was being transported in the holds of the ship?
In the contract signed to repair these armaments in North Korea did the government of Cuba introduce any clause about the discretion, any warning, that would prevent the North Koreans from doing something else with these weapons?
At what level was this high-risk operation organized? Was it your personal decision or was it known to president Raul Castro?

19 July 2013