Celebration of the 4th Anniversary of the Network of Civic Libraries / Wendy Iriepa and Ignacio Estrada, Jennifer Fonseca Padrón

By Jennifer Fonseca Padrón, Activist and Independent Journalist

(www.miscelaneasdecuba.net) | Four years after the birth of the Network of Civic Libraries (NCL), its members and founders decided to come together to honor the date, look at the accomplishments of their work and set new goals to reach. The celebration took place at the NLC headquarters where a dozen librarians exchanged ideas and made a brief account of the founding and development of the organization; among them the presence of Teresita Castellanos, co-founder and integrant of this civic organization, should be highlighted.

“The Network of Civic Libraries was created in mid-June 2009 at the request of a group of librarians who were then dispersed without being part of any project or already disappointed at others,” says Omayda Padrón, National Coordinator from the start to this day. One of the future goals to achieve is the growth and rescue of libraries across the country, she added. “The work of independent libraries is equally important to the work of movements, political parties and other civic organizations because it represents a permanent source of resistance against the government in any community, city or province,” said León Padrón, a reporter invited to the talk.

The main objectives of the Reinaldo Bragado Bretaña Network of Civic Libraries are book launches in independent libraries, giving lectures, literary gatherings, offering courses on leadership, human rights, Twitter, among others; exchanging ideas with other organizations and mainly to make known books that have been censored by the government, as well as to promote unknown literature in Cuba by Cuban writers from the diaspora who were once convicted and even their work was banned. This was the case of Reinaldo Bragado Bretaña, the writer and reporter the Network is proudly named after.

Also it needs to be highlighted that within the Network we are developing the Animated Smiles Project which consists in rescuing civic values, encouraging reading as a habit and regaining the culture where children play children’s games, particularly for those who live in the outlying communities of Havana where most of the families are dysfunctional and present problems of alcoholism, drug and domestic violence and many more, expressed Padrón.

Translated by: Chabeli

21 June 2013

WE ARE ALL HERE / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

WE ARE ALL HERE BUT WE HAVE NOT LEFT

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The Tucumanian night of Miami seizes me with hunger and with no desire to leave the hotel. I am alone. They have already forgotten me, luckily. I have already forgotten myself. Love is not waiting for me outside. Not yet. Not today. Tomorrow we’ll see.

I turn on the internet. A bit of crazy videos. A bit of Cuban culture. Some music I don’t recognize. I prepare my next month here. I hear the Metro that runs on the elevated track. I hear the moon rotating, and it is not the northern moon that I know so well from the United States. We’re not there. I hear the “shipwreck” tone from my AT&T smartphone.

Some friends of the barbarity are calling my mobile. It’s past ten o’clock. But barbarity is always about to knock on my door. And I hear them, having fun, über-Cubans, repeating the wonderful and filthy jokes from two decades ago. They are Erick and Nelson and already they are coming, driving over for me. In the Palmetto sports car. There is no option. I tell them “Don’t show up without a good plate of spaghetti.” And fruit.

My luxury hotel is a boarding home. I do nothing. I am homeless in Miami. But still not exactly out on the street. I make contacts with the so-called “counter-revolution.” What a privilege. I make myself intolerable to State Security, the guarantee that my criminal red Lada* will take my life in Bayamo or in Boston or in whichever of these hotels transparent to the Havana mafia. I wonder how still there does not preside in this country an agent of Cuban intelligence. I do not doubt that they have placed a hidden camera in the room to blackmail me when I return. Or a radioactive pin to guarantee me cancer, as the Cuban subsidiary of the KGB. Poor little assassins.

It’s a question of waiting. For the moment, I type. I go down to the lobby and finally I swallow the spaghetti with desperation. Fuck, was I hungry. It is beautiful to go hungry. Don’t feel too bad for Orlando Luis. In Cuba he was weary of swallowing and swallowing. There is a surplus of Cuban food today. It is needless. Hunger is an invention of the dissidence movement, when it doesn’t know how to have another vision, when it doesn’t think. I came to the United States to see if I could stop eating in Cuba. And I’m achieving it since March 5, when I set foot in a beautiful New York park.

We talk with Erick and Nelson about our work there on the Island. We were scientists. We were excellent. We were a disaster.

It was all comical and Machiavellian. We leave the hotel as we left Cuba. We buy stuff to drink. The city looks like a deserted airport. At these hours of the night I continue still more convinced that it is not at all about Miami. This is West Berlin and we, the newly appeared from the barbarity, we are going to upset its urban logic with so many Cubans fleeing towards here.

The man who serves us is an Afghan. The guy does not know Spanish in Miami. For nothing more than that, he deserves an automatic deportation. To Guantanamo, of course.

For a moment we seriously consider turning him in. Not for any specific motive. To screw with him.  So that something more than exile happens in our lives.

We continue talking of the Biotechnology Era in Cuba. My friends cannot stay past twelve. In the morning they work. I’m just a witness. This was why they took me out of the hotel. So that I could give testimony about their lives. I’m a hostage.

Half of Havana now is now passing through Miami. This will be the final evidence of Castroism as the measure of all things, as a criterion of truth. One of the two cities does not exist. They would annul themselves by coinciding at the same time. One of the two cities will have to die. And I want to be in it at that moment.

Nor are any of our thousand and one lives here. We all leave a very important phone call that is left for us to make. Or it gave us a busy signal and for that reason we need to try again. None of us has fully arrived here. Nobody deserves the thousandth-and-first death of returning there.

The laughter has given me a little indigestion. They drive me back to the hotel and in the bathroom of the room, I attempt without result to return the spaghetti with  my head stuck in the bowl. Not even that. I digested it too fast. It’s called vertigo. I wish that none of this would have happened to us. I wish that we were all awake, but the nightmares stick to us like a bad slogan. I would not like to leave it unsaid here and now, that impossibility.

 *Translator’s note: Lada: A Russian-made car common in Cuba and used by the police, among others.

5 June 2013

In Serious Condition in Holguin Hospital and Police Don’t Bother to Show Up / CID

Mirta Velasco Toledo found herself in serious condition in a hospital in Holguin after being hit by a stone as a result of street brawl, in front of her house, involving three dangerous and well-known thugs from the area. The incident occurred on Thursday, June 27, at seven in the evening and two hours later the police still had not appeared, despite constant calls from the family.

From the hospital Zusleydis Pérez Velasco, national president of the CID and niece of the victim denounced the lack of police interest:

“If they had been alerted to any kind of opposition activity there would have been a surplus of cars, fuel, police and State Security agents arriving to repress it immediately. But when it is a matter of protecting or defending the population they are not the least bit interested.”

This is one more symptom of the degree of disorder and inefficiency of this regime. All the Castro elite care about is anything they consider a danger to their own security, not the people’s. Meanwhile they use the resources of all Cubans for personal gain, while they continue monopolizing everything to sell it, or for their own use, and they do not care about anything else.”

The incident occurred at No. 14 Playa Girón Street, between  Bay of Pigs 14th street between 24 de Febrero and Avenida las Américas in Holguín.

28 June 2013

Followers of “For Another Cuba” Campaign Continue to Increase / For Another Cuba

Workshop offered to activists and volunteers by Antonio G. Rodiles, general coordinator of the campaign, and the activist Jose Díaz Silva, campaign coordinator in the City of Havana (Santos Suárez, 10 de Octubre)

Antonio G Rodiles with activists and volunteers

Workshop offered to activists and Campaign volunteers in Consolación del Sur, Pinar del Rio.

26 June 2013

Afraid of Change / Rebeca Monzo

In close circles of friends there has been a lot of conversation recently about the slow, almost imperceptible changes announced by the government. What is certainly clear is that soto voce, almost secretly, there is some perceived movement — a hint that “something is up” — out of view, as usual, of the public.

The government is experiencing a never-before-seen crisis. The Cuban economy is virtually non-existent. The country produces no wealth and the hope placed in the government of neighboring Venezuela is fading away along with Chavism, like a mirage in the middle of the desert just as one is about to die of thirst. Our only options lie in the north, not the south.

Are we ready for change? Not as I see it. As an uninformed and isolated people we have waited for solutions to come “from outside.” Many people, perhaps a majority, fear the unknown. On the other hand the daily struggle to survive leaves almost no opportunity for analytical thought.

During the last fifty-four years they have been scaring us with the threat of “the enemy in front.” It is an invention used by the government to paralyze private initiative. It is an attempt to make us complacent—into a people without expectations, always searching for food, blaming all our problems on the so-called blockade, which is itself is clearly on a path to extinction also.

Now that there is a subtle hint that “something is up” with the neighbor in front, instead of being happy, many are terrified and even believe that this is going to turn into a “move out of the way; I’m moving in”* situation. We should never have allowed ourselves be manipulated to such a great extent when in reality the United States has always been our natural market.

A neighbor, whom I consider to be a wonderful person, told me that what he really fears is “what will become of us, the opposition, when it happens.”

We will keep writing, I told him, pointing out what is wrong, come what may. Then our inventiveness and creativity will be given free reign. At the very least we will have equal opportunity. We will regain our freedom as individuals and with it our free will.

An architect, for whom I have great appreciation, shared with me her concerns about the changes. “Those of us who stayed behind and put up with everything are not even going to have a penny in our pockets, while those from over there are going to come in with money to invest,” she said.

“Look,” I told her, “we are the ones who are to blame for accepting everything without complaint. And when it comes to those who are going to come here with money, I do not mind at all; quite the opposite, I am glad. Besides, many of those who are coming to invest their capital are Cubans, or their descendants, from whom the government stripped everything away, and who recovered economically with their sacrifice, intelligence or good luck. That will be good for everyone.”

I believe that now is the time to smooth over political differences and be pragmatic. In many cases this will mean having to “pick ourselves up” and start over without bitterness. To forgive but not to forget, letting the appropriate authorities pass judgement on criminal cases perpetrated against human dignity, which must not go unpunished. Apart from that, we must try to contribute our own grain of sand in the rebuilding of our country and putting it on the path of development in the XXI century.

*Translator’s note: In the original Spanish this is, Quítate tú para ponerme yo, a Cuban expression and title of a popular song.

27 June 2013

¡No, Not That! / Miriam Celaya

Diez de Octubre Street

Diez de Octubre Street

This past Tuesday June 12th was for me a personal errands day in the hot Havana sun, the thick smog of the avenues and the usual dirty streets. It was one of those days that are doubly exhausting because of the slow pace at which life moves on the Island, the mundane nature of any movement, and the irritation of the people under the scorching summer that makes us wish we hadn’t left home. So I felt almost blessed when, at the end of the day, I managed to board a full almendrón*, on my way back home.

As is custom and folklore, the passengers were doing their daily catharsis with complaints about all small and great evils: our lousy public transportation service, the sweltering heat, the cost of living, the bad potato harvest, no one can live in this country, etc. Our driver, however, seemed determined to maintain a good mood and had an optimistic and comprehensive response for each complaint. He was a man of about 50 and seemed to know everything, as if he possessed the gift of universal philosophy. Heat?? “But ma’am, we should be happy for this climate. Don’t you know that there are countries where people are dying due to heat waves or, conversely, cold waves?” Transportation is bad? “Yes my friend, but in a pinch, at least ten little pesos seem to appear to pay for a car, right?”  The potatoes? “There are potatoes, but they are being kept in refrigerators so they won’t rot this rainy season in the fields.” Are the prices high? “Well, they’re doing a study to raise wages, you know.” The country? “It’s the best in the world. Here, anyone will lend you a hand and people will help.  In other countries, you can die and no one will lift a finger to help.” It seemed that this driver, in addition to being a philosopher, was a noted expert traveler and knowledgeable about the world.

But I was definitely amazed about the man’s infinite capacity to appease hotheads and his ability to spread a positive atmosphere inside the vehicle. I think that, deep down, I even thought he was right.  It must be awful to spend your whole day listening to complaints and disagreements, however profitable being an almendrón’s driver might be.

So we went on like this, balancing between the disgruntled and the peacemaker, until we got to the Esquina de Tejas and we had to stop for a red light. Then the driver noticed, on the porch of a nearby house, a group of street dogs: a female dog in heat and a gang of eager suitors wishfully sniffing at her, while a male dog was busy, in turn, sniffing the other dogs, loftily ignoring the female. Unexpectedly, the driver exploded and started yelling at the dog in question: “Sniff the female, you queer, the female!” And turning to the astonished passengers, red with anger, he almost shouted at us: “It turns out that being gay has become fashionable, and even dogs are trying it out! And I will not put up with that! What’s this country come to?” He snorted in a real fury, and accelerated violently when the light turned green.

Suddenly, the quiet philosopher was gone, and in his place emerged an irate homophobe, able to tolerate any of the many problems that plague the lives of ordinary Cubans, but not the right of the people (or dogs, obviously) to choose their own sexuality. Fortunately, none of the passengers backed his opinion and a heavy silence descended in the car until, with great relief, I got off at the corner of Infanta and Carlos III. I didn’t say goodbye.

Believe me, dear readers, this is my testimony, faithfully taken from real life.

*An Almendrón is a taxicab that operates as a small bus.

Translated by Norma Whiting

The University / Henry Constantin

The University belongs to the Revolutionaries, says the slogan on a central wall of the University of Camagüey, the first opened by the government of the older brother, Big Brother, in the gray gray gray years of the seventies, on the northeast side of my city. But today, when sometimes we feel just half gray, we look around, a little sadly, to see that little has changed.

I haven’t woken up yet, but, like in a Monterroso story, I see the sign, the dinosaur footprint, is still there.

The 2012-2013 school year has ended, and the reforms in this country don’t touch the essential: respect for the other. Even Ignacio Agramonte University — as if The Older had once refused equality of rights to his enemies — displays the same discriminatory sign in front of which I was photographed 7 years ago, recently expelled from another university.

A dean of this place still shouts this little phrase at a meeting, and a rector, from ISA (Superior Art Institute), remembers the student he ordered out of the university. Still the university, like the armed forces, elected offices, political and business administration, the press, the diplomatic service, “solidarity” missions, and who knows how many more things on the island, are not for all Cubans: they are for the Revolutionaries. The country still is not with all nor for the good of all, but for the Revolutionaries — and even for them, to top it off, all they get is leftovers.

We all know today that the only requirement to be a revolutionary is to remain silent, smile and look away while Cuba is falling apart on us. The best revolutionary in Cuba is he who tries to revolutionize the least.

Ignacio Agramonte is the same university that expelled Harold Cepero and other boys at the beginning of 2000, when they collected signatures for the Varela Project. It is the same place where the freedom of other friends as turned bitter while they studied and worked there.

It’s where some who knew me have said, “Beware of being friends with Henry Constantin.” But this post is not only about the trip I took this afternoon to the University of Camagüey and its little sign stinking of apartheid; it was to talk about everything Cuban universities lack.

Cuban universities need not only to erase this sign. They also need to raise salaries and student stipends, reconstruct and modernize their facilities and services, de-politicize the internal rules, authorize free association among students and professors and remove all the partisan controls on their properties.

We also need to support non-state universities — because a single educational system is the best way to prepare us for the single command — to update the curricula, become more focused on technology and information sciences, eliminate military and political subjects, connect professors and students with the reality of the country and the word, and empower them to influence it, so that physical and spiritual exile are not the only options.

Cuban universities urgently need to become self-sustaining, modify subjective and imprecise evaluation methods, measuring only academic and creative performance, abandoning discrimination in admissions according to geographic provenance, increasing the evaluative demand, applying exposition and opposition of ideas in the classes, introducing the civic and human component in the curricula.

It’s a lot, but to eliminate the little sign would be a good step.  Or to change it so that we make it into a wall-museum, where our children and grandchildren will stop for a minute, and remember that that university and that Cuba should never return.

27 June 2013

Message from Angel Santiesteban, sent to the event “Detained Writers/Dispatched Writers” / Angel Santiesteban

Dear writers – French and from other nations present – critics, editors, translators, readers and the public in general:

I do not deny to you that after several days the news of this event slept inside the prison, mocking the constant and deep watchfulness over my person, without it being possible to calm my anxiety after receiving the news, as well as the fear that my contacts would be surprised and punished severely, until I was happily delivered on this past Thursday, May 30, I never imagined that solidarity against injustice and in favor of free writing, by bringing me back, would take such dimensions and awaken such beautiful feelings at the same moment in which I suffer unjustly.

Already you ought to know that my “crime” was to think differently, wrongly or not, to err is my right; but dictatorships, as everyone knows, do not accept the most negligible possibilities of dissenting from their policies.

Now, in order to write these words, I outwit all surveillance in my surroundings; any informer who reports on me, especially on my clandestine correspondence and contacts that mock the eyes of the censors, is awarded with gifts, and whoever does not do so, if the military learns that something was not reported – something as simple as me writing this now – is maligned as not being reliable and sent to a distant province, where his family can not visit him.

I could not deny to you and not make you participants, in the midst of so much negativity and arid penance, of the excitement that the news of this meeting today, Day 4, caused in me; I know that similar readings take place in other cities of Europe, convened by the PEN Club and other important institutions, and later on in September, the International Book Fair in Berlin. Several tears escaped from inside me as a sign of celebration and a thanksgiving to you; it was the only way to demonstrate my stealthy tribute.

Nor could I deny to you that, despite the misery that lives my country, and the misery that I live in my case in particular, I am on the altar of the homeland. I will have no space in another place, inside or outside of Cuba, while the dictatorship reigns.

I will definitely not leave our island while they do not respect the human rights and freedoms of the Cuban people. I will keep fighting, more now that I have encouragement from you, your prayers and the activist support that comes to Cuba, to me, from that meeting you are now holding.

Until freedom comes to my country, I will keep on denouncing the abuses and outrages against all hope, willing to pay the price of my life, if the time comes; but until today, I swear that God has not left me. I have no other way, I have this, that I am master of my steps though they have me behind bars. Meanwhile, and it is the unique luxury of revenge that could shelter my feelings, I write and I attempt – as all of you do – that literature justify each inhalation of my life and, in particular, of the place where I am today.

I want to reiterate my eternal gratitude to all the organizers of this reading, and to each and every one of those present, feel my embrace, one bathed with enthusiasm and optimism.

Long live the word, and long live freedom!

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats
31 May 2013
Prison 1580
Havana, Cuba

Note from the Editors:

This message was sent by Ángel Santiesteban-Prats to give thanks for having been included in the reading tribute to the writers who suffer persecution and imprisonment, organized by La maison de l’arbre, la Biennale des poètes en Val de Marne, La Maison des écrivains et de la littérature et le Pen club français, “Écrivains empêchés/Écrivains dépêchés” (The Tree House, the Biennial of the poets in Val de Marne, The House of the Writers and the Literature and the French PEN Club, “Detained Writers/Dispatched Writers”).

In solidarity with the imprisoned Chinese writer Li Bifeng, the International Book Fair in Berlin called upon intellectuals, artists, universities, media, theaters and other cultural institutions around the world, to organize readings of tribute with the motive of the sad anniversary of the repression in Tiananmen Square and of the day of the World Wide Reading on the topic of resistance.

Among the readings which were done, Angel Santiesteban-Prats was distinguished, who is unjustly imprisoned in Cuba by the Castro dictatorship, for the simple “crime” of expressing himself freely in this, his blog.

His story, La luna, un muerto y un pedazo de pan (“The moon, a dead man and a piece of bread”) has been read by the French writer and poet, Irène Gayraud.

12 June 2013

El Sexto, Between Paints and Searches / Miguel Iturria Savon

Tall like a pine and genuine in his desire to express himself through art that is ephemeral and challenging, describes the young Cuban graffiti artist, Danilo Maldonado Machado — alias El Sexto (The Sixth) — who does not smile at the spring greenery nor the excess of tropical light, despite a love for the colorful trees and ocean breezes that cool the bustling night on the streets of Havana, the city whose walls are the objects his paints, as explicit and allegorical as the reality that he tries to capture with spray paint.

It’s not that El Sexto wants to beautify this bittersweet city that defies moisture and time and official apathy. More than embellish, his nocturnal murals call the attention of the bored capital pedestrians, accustomed to looking without seeing or listening without hearing in the midst of violence and the helplessness generated by the servility and cowardice induced by the despotism of the State.

And so he has problems with the political police and the other police, who control the order and carry out the order to arrest him on the public street for having a spray can in one of his pockets and later they made a search of his house and seized his works and painting supplies as well as fining him a thousand pesos without specifying the crime he committed.

In a short video shot by photographer Claudio Fuentes, El Sexto refuses to pay the fine because “I would demonstrate that I’m doing something wrong, that being an artist is a criminal act.” And he says: “I prefer to force the courts to make a judgment for me to demonstrate how and why I’m doing harm.”

We hope that Danilo Maldonado Machado, whose pseudonym satirizes the demented political campaign of the Castro regime to free to Five Spies convicted in the United States, comes out well in this new police hunt, one among so many detentions and searches to dissuade him from his “disturbing” street art.

For those who wish to know the urban odyssey of this Havana artists who exercises freedom of expression without permission, I suggest you go to his blog, located in the Vocescubanas.com portal, where there is the video made by Claudio Fuentes. You can also read the enlightening article from the writer Ernesto Santana Zaldivar, who recreated the last fight of Sexto against the police and legal harassment on this island of automatons dressed as functionaries and of intellectuals vaccinated against common sense.

In my case, I can attest to the personal, artist, and solidarity value of this tall boy who draws, with banned spray cans, stars and satiric cocks and naive and frightened faces. I met him several times at the house of Yoani Sanchez — famous author of the blog Generation Y — and at the residence of the physicist Antonio Rodiles, leader of the virtual program Estado de Sats; in addition to attending and commenting on for Cubanet the Exhibition put on by El Sexto in the apartment of the singer Gorki Aguila, on October 29, 2011. I brought to Spain the sheet that Danilo Maldonado Machado painted on my floor in Central Havana, days before we caught the plane to freedom. El Sexto converted this sheet into a protest my being held in police custody that is a testimony to denouncing and friendship.

21 June 2013

Humor as Exorcism / Yoani Sanchez

9152419424_dac84809ec_oI leaned against the window carefully. The glass had a crack running through it and with each jolt it seemed likely to shatter. A few minutes, a roadway traversed by collective taxis, an arithmetic exercise: count all the people on the street who were smiling. In the first stretch, between Rancho Boyeros Avenue and the Maravillas Cinema, none. One lady was showing her teeth not for joy but because of the sun, which made her eyes squint and her lips open. A teenager in a high school uniform shouted at another. I couldn’t hear because of the engine noise, but there was no joking in his words. Coming to the Plaza de Cuatro Caminos, a couple was locked in a kiss at the corner, but there was nothing playful about it. Rather it was a carnivorous kiss, devouring, predatory. A baby in a stroller looked close to laughing, but no, it was just a yawn. Coming to Fraternity Park, I was barely able to calculate some three laughs, including one from a cop who was mocking a boy in handcuffs being shoved into a patrol car.

It’s an experiment I’ve carried out on several occasions, to see if we really are the smiling people so talked about in the stereotypes. In most cases, the number who express some level of happiness has not exceeded five in a trip varying between two to six miles. Clearly this doesn’t prove anything, unless it’s that in our daily circumstances laughter is not as abundant as they want us to believe. Still, we remain a people with a great deal of humor. But the jokes act more like the rescuing piece of driftwood that saves us from the shipwreck of depression, not as evidence of our happiness. We laugh to keep from crying, from hitting, from killing. We laugh to forget, escape, shut up. So when we see a comedy show that touches all the painful springs of our laughter, it’s as if the valves open and the whole of 10th of October Avenue starts to laugh, including the buildings, the street lamps and the traffic signals.

Last Friday something like this happened at the “De doime son los cantantes” show, presented at the Karl Marx theater by the actor Osvaldo Doimeadios. A tribute also to the best of our vernacular theater, the comedian offered magisterial interpretations and monologues. From the economic hardships, the migratory reform, the excessive controls on the self-employed, to the corruption scandals associated with the fiber optic cable, these were some of the themes that most made us roar. We laugh at our problems and our miseries, we laugh at ourselves. After the distraction ended, the audience crowded into the hot aisles to exit. Outside, Primera Street was packed in the late night. I took a bus home and leaned against the window… no one was smiling. The humor had been left in the seats and on the stage, we had returned to our sober reality.

27 June 2013

Prison Diary XXXII: My Gratitude / Angel Santiesteban

Making a cut in the first quarter of a month in prison, I must thank in principle, the tantrum of the Castro brothers for my blog, for my opposition to the system, which led them to create a terrible judicial process against me that imprisoned me without proofs, and for having been convicted in advance by Agent Camilo of State Security, before the Court ruled.

I must also be grateful for the opportunity to share the pain of so many Cubans, mostly young people not able to leave the country or see any option other than crime, given that the spectrum of opportunities for young people is infinitesimal. I should also be grateful for the invaluable opportunity brought to me by power to conduct this sociological study of the problems in the nation from this “privileged” scenario, because here in this horrific concentration camp, everything is exposed.

Being here has allowed me to corroborate one more time that my attitude towards power is correct, and I will not stop denouncing the abuses and irresponsibility of the Government toward its citizens.

To top it off, during these four months of confinement, I have maintained the level of complaints because the violations of the human rights they commit daily, because there is no day when they don’t beat the prisoners, who although fainting, continue to be badly beaten; because the food, which I have never accepted, is terrible with fetid odors, badly processed, lacking refrigeration, in short, pestilent; because the overcrowding reigns, because hygiene is non-existent.

Despite all this daily calamity, I have finished three novels and a book of short stories. By the way, the last I wrote was seized by Major Llorente, the “unit’s politico,” in reprisal because in Paris he read a story of mine, at an event that paid tribute to imprisoned and persecuted writers. Thank God it was a work I’d managed to get out with my family, and it is well-protected. As a gift, when I have it completely finished, I am thinking of giving him a copy, precisely because it talks about his horrors in the prison to which I have been confined.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats
Prison 1580

Editors’ note: The day after tomorrow, June 28, Angel Santiesteban will complete 4 months in prison, months in which he has contributed in an exemplary way to denouncing all the abuses committed in Cuba which the world, with its complicit silence, blesses. The most difficult 4 months that he has served with absolute dignity, with his head held high and looking into his eyes, with the peaceful spirit a peaceful conscience provides. He is “doing” and writing the story that few dare to tell. We, his family and friends, are very proud of him. God bless him!

26 June 2013

Rafael Alcides, Who is a Very Important Person / Regina Coyula

Rafael Alcides, poet, writer and my husband

My husband is not just any writer.  He belongs to the generation known as “The Generation of the ’50s,” a rather arbitrary poetic grouping that started with Carilda Oliver (1922) and ran through David Chericián (1940). His generation’s peers — if they haven’t died or emigrated — have received the National Literature Prize and enjoyed social and official recognition. This is one of the reasons he is an extraordinary writer. Not only that he wasn’t seduced by the siren song of the National Prize ten years ago. Not only that he willingly “inxiled” himself from Cuba’s cultural life for twenty years and is not published in Cuba.

For him, the prize has been that his book Agradecido como un perro (Grateful As a Dog) was traded for cigarettes in the Combinado del Este prison in the late eighties, and asked around for; kids coming from the provinces discovered him by chance in a second-hand bookshop. His books today would be collectors’ items, of a writer unknown to the young and unpublished after 1990, if it weren’t for the Seville publisher Abelardo Linares who knocked on our door one day.

He is not a run-of-the-mill writer. Foreign publishers are highly sought after, their visits to Cuba put them in a position to receive a ton of unpublished and published texts from hopeful authors who either fete the foreign visitor or put a Santeria spell on them.

Alcides is incapable of boarding a bus, a shared taxi (almendrón), a called taxi (panataxi); he is incapable of walking even 200 yards to meet a celebrity. Instead, he is an extraordinary host, so warm and attentive, who immediately makes even new acquaintances feel comfortable.

In this era of ideological polarization, he maintains an intact and intense affection for those he loves, whether a high government official or a senior opposition leader in exile. He forgives (but does not forget, he has excellent memory) some highbrow (?!) silliness from a fledgling poet to a functionary who from his new position has been allowed to treat him coldly. He will regrets the error of omission in the dedication to Roberto Fernández Retamar in a poem in a book just published in Colombia.

Another of the things that makes him extraordinary has to do with his appearance. When we started our relationship 24 years (!!) ago, my niece, with all the candor of ten years, wondered if he was Eliseo Diego. He was then a venerable white beard unsuspectedly balding. His contemporaries seemed like younger brothers. It turned out the joke was on them as he didn’t get any older while others lost their freshness, hair, pounds, physical and/or mental agility and for a long time the tables have been turned. That, despite a copious medical record very well concealed.

With the bias of affection, there are those who say he’s the best poet in the world. There’s no need to exaggerate, although some verses are saved for posterity.

These fires feed this man who writes and writes on a battered computer with no more to give. Leaving poetry behind he is dedicated to finishing enormous drafts, novels that became priorities in the rush of life.

No one would expect that behind this thunderous voice asking who’s last in line at the farmer’s market, this competent cook who saves me from the daily doldrums, is this Amazing Poet in “atrocious invisibility” who tomorrow, June 9th, will be 80 years old.

8 June 2013

Playing Dirty / Fernando Damaso

Archive photo

With those incomprehensible absurdities of politics, the United Nations Decolonization Committee adopted the resolution presented by Cuba, with support from Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela, on behalf of the inalienable right of the people of Puerto Rico to self-determination and independence.

By any chance does this Committee know that on 6 November 2012 a plebiscite was held in Puerto Rico, where the majority of the population voted to join the United States as the 51st state, somewhat smaller numbers to maintain the current status of the Commonwealth, and only a tiny minority to be independent? Is it, perhaps, not the will of Puerto Ricans, for years now, to remain joined to the United States in a way or another, as demonstrated in the four plebiscites?

That Cuba and its populists friends propose every year, in an act of manifest interference in the internal affairs of another country, is nothing unusual, but that the United Nations accepts it is shameful. In addition, the information offered by the official Cuban press is manipulated, stating that the text now adopted stressed the majority pronouncement made last November 6 by the population of this country in rejecting the current condition of political subordination. In reality, the majority pronouncement was to cease being a Commonwealth and to become a State of the United States.

How long will they continue politicking in favor of a small group of separatists who, convinced of the rejection of its citizens of independence (the minimum percentages obtained in four plebiscites prove it), have chosen to live it, his backed by the will of most Puerto Ricans, who have not lost their language, nor their flag, nor their music or dances, their customs or their identity, but have enriched it with new contributions? How long the UN will be continue to lend itself to this dirty game?

25 June 2013