Translating Cuba

This Mother’s Day has been distorted over the years. In among the shortages you see everyone going crazy looking for treats for their teacher, their aunt, for the neighbor who is so good, for my friend Fulanita* who gives me something every year, and also buying an impressive number of picture postcards to give to every mother they know.

I do not know if it is a practice of the so-called consumer society that has infiltrated around here, but for me it doesn’t matter. I enjoy my mom every day, I spoil her whenever I can, and if I can’t I already did, we don’t get all in a twist on the issue dates.

But this is me and my circumstances. For all my readers, have a wonderful day and love those close to you very much. If you can, give them something, but don’t give them something as a substitute. (Horrors!!! Now I feel in a position to give advice…)

*Translator’s note: “Fulano/a” is equivalent to “so-and-so”… the unnamed somebody.

12 May 2013

Mother’s Day is a custom that has been practiced in our country for generations. It continues to be celebrated, though differently and under certain limitations, in spite of the current state of familial disintegration. The main objective of the celebration was to return to the matriarchal home to be with one’s family. It never mattered how far one person lived from another.

I remember a great commotion all through the house beginning early in the morning. Even the youngest family members had their assigned chores. Unmarried girls like me, who still lived together under the same roof, were in tasked with cleaning. The males were in charge of gathering dried leaves from the garden. They would put them in a metal tank in the patio to become compost, which would later be used as fertilizer. Or they would burn them, which was an easier way of getting rid of them. The women manned their posts in the kitchen. The maid had been given the day off since she would also be having a celebration at her own house.

On Sundays, as well as this on this special day, my mother, an expert cook, was in charge of creating the menu with the help of my grandmother. Uncle Pedro had to be kept out of the kitchen because he was fond of “dipping his spoon in the pot.” He was, therefore, given the task of setting up the big table with the help of his son. For this and other occasions a “little room in back” was used for storing a pair of wooden burros, or saw horses, and an immense slab. continue reading

The French General Charles de Gaulle used to say that when two people or two countries associated with each other, one always tries to have the upper hand. Cuba, which because of its geographical situation is considered the Key of America, after 54 years of the exclusive mandate of the Castro brothers still has pretensions of being a lighthouse of redemption.

As the first Communist country on the continent it has forged the natural right to be an ideological mentor of the rebellious, seditious, or outdated Latin America anarchists.

The Havana government has outlined interventionist policies. When in the time of the “proletariat internationalism” the Soviet titty connected a tube of rubles, funds and oil, Fidel Castro offered guerrilla apprenticeship courses in Cuba.

Terrorists, such as the Venezuelan Carlos “The Jackal,” currently in prison in France, learned to use C-4 explosives from his Cuban comrades. On behalf of the dictatorship of the proletariat, an enraged poor island sent troops to civil conflicts in Africa. continue reading

There is a word in the Spanish language, which is used in different ways by the Cuban authorities, according to their interests: this is diversity.

In international relations it is widely used by the top leaders and their representatives, who demand respect for it. It’s logical. When the majority of countries have democratic governments, diversity is represented by those who do now. In this situation, the presence of these, Cuba among them, is only possible if it is accepted and respected. This happens in the United Nations (UN), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), and so on.

For individual countries, diversity works in two different ways. If in those countries that have democratic governments, which do not share the Cuban political-ideological spectrum, the defense of diversity support parties, movements and opposition groups. If governments are authoritarian and populist, and respond to the interests of the Cuban authorities, then diversity is attacked, accusing its representatives of being bourgeois, stateless, fascists, mercenaries, lackeys, allies of the empire, and so on. continue reading

Adela is the first Transsexual who was elected as a deputy to People’s Power in Caibarién.

11 May 2013

Miguel Diaz-Canel criticized the information silence imposed on us by the authorities and called it an “impossible dream” to maintain it due to the circulation of news that circulated among people who surf the internet or who have email, and the avidity of our compatriots to have alternative sources of knowledge of the news.

In the National Seminar in Preparation of the 2013-2014 School Year, held in Havana, the Cuban government’s second in command acknowledged publicly and tacitly — even without saying it — that the authorities have violated the rights of a society to free information have imposed an incidental ignorance, biased information, and an obligatory official and irresponsible journalism.

Which authorities is he referring to? Evidently, the number two Cuban is alluding to the “gray quarantine” of the mandate of Raul Castro.

We all know that in Cuba people use the internet at their workplaces — those who have it — to be able to communicate with family and friends living abroad, and consume a little information about what is happening in the world from an alternative perspective to the classical posture of the unconditional government journalists.

A great part of the population is fed up with the visions and versions aligned with the party and the high command offered by the professionals of the national press, so distant from the Cuban reality that suffers daily lines to buy meager food for the day, who have to face full buses to get to work, and who at night consume super-politicized television programming, mediocre and outmoded, that seem anchored in the decade of the seventies.

The Cuban Vice President did not speak, however, about the cable that, under the leadership of President Hugo Chavez, we have had in Cuba since February 2011, which those in power tried to hide with all kinds of misinformation and rumors, and the growing demand of the computerized Cuban society to have their free access to information through the Internet be respected.

This silent but progressive demand, which is imposing a renewed conception of the information paradigms that should be established and rule in modern society. There is no point in insisting on a lifting of the so-called secrecy of the Cuban press unless the authorities take the first step to greater transparency and information freedom, if there is censorship, if they do not allow alternative news agencies, and if they harass and condemn independent journalism.

The so-called socialist models that have been imposed in Latin America, also have their share of influence in the new directions that should guide our destiny towards greater social justice. What are called the new systems of the continental left, have pulled the rug out from under the Cuban regime with their multiparty system, with their social programs, housing and technological development, among many others to cajole their people.

When thinking about the development of their countries and giving them greater benefits, they have left their Cuban ideological benefactor and sponsor as the hemispheric “ugly duckling” with regards to freedoms and rights.

But it seems that the day “is coming” when “the silence of the innocents and the lambs” that the powerful has so greatly mocked and abused, will break the wall of cyber censorship and begin at least to walk along the highways of information and communication. New times dictate this, but we expect more, much more that they owe to Cuba, to our people and our history.

11 May 2013

After the attempted riot in Prison 1580

Last night, Sunday May 5 at 7:45 PM, an inmate — Reniel Agramonte Valle — was beaten by two guards: Jesus and Andy the karate man. The inmates of both barracks started shouting against abuse and almost all looked through the windows and bars while the guards continued the abuse of the black, slight and famished 24-year-old.

The prisoners began to hit the gate until it broke and opened; the guards seeing the possible population unnerved all about them, fled and forgot how numerous they and their batons were, the same ones who minutes before struck the prisoner in question, and who by then had been taking their pills for chronic mental illness that are supplied  to them several times a day.

To stop the potential riot, the senior officer, when he reached the scene, freed the prisoner, and when they saw him return to the barracks it began to calm the spirits of his comrades who had already begun yelling “Down with Fidel,” “Down with dictatorship,” “Tomorrow we will get the news to Radio Martí,” “Assassins,” and “Abusers,” among others.

This morning, when the inmates attended the breakfast, they were met with German shepherds, the ones who on just seeing a prison uniform begin to bark and are very aggressive with them, Nazi-style.

In previous days they also beat several prisoners and after the beatings, they put them in cells hidden from the eyes of the rest of the prison population to hide their injuries and bodily signs of violence against them.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats
Prison 1580, San Miguel del Padrón

Sowing Terror

One day after the attempted riot in the prison, they began the interviews and the removal of all persons who regularly conversed with me.

They want to keep inmates away from me because they consider a dangerous element my relating to them. And so they were taken to other barracks.

Now the prisoners afraid to approach me because they don’t want to be harmed. I am also concerned about some who claim not to care; because when they receive reprisals for being close to me, my guilty conscience is great because their fates are worse just for talking to me.

Even so, some have changed strategy and started to leave me papers on my bed with silent solidarity messages.

A prisoner on a hunger strike, Jesús Guerra Camejo, for talking with me, has also been taken from the company to an unknown destination.

The inmates are constantly interviewed to obtain information about me, writing or any data they might provide about me.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats
Prison 1580, San Miguel del Padrón

10 May 2013

In San Luis, a small town in Pinar del Rio, two young men caught the attention of State Security for distributing flyers for the Zero Violence campaign, and were detained.

Taken to the police station, one of them asked the repressor, “Are you in agreement with the violence?”

The cop responded no.

“Then, why stop me if all I’m doing is calling for no violence?”

The guy in uniform responded, “Because I’m not in agreement with what you’re distributing (the message). Give it to some other citizen to distribute.”

“Then I’m giving it to you, so that you will distribute it, among your people who are violent,” concluded the boy.

The Zero Violence campaign is an initiative from within the independent New Country platform, and is being conducted throughout the Island to create a change toward tolerance; which inevitably contradicts — disagrees with — Revolutionary politics; which is by nature intolerant and, let no one doubt it, violent.

“The authorities are trapped in their own contradictions. Between the image they want to sell of a calm and civilized country and their real conduct relative to repression,” says Manual Cuesta Morua, independent journalist, political analyst, president of the social-democrat Progressive Arch party, and national coordinator of New Country.

The victims of the repression agree with regards to the style flaunted by the agents: whether they’re uniformed police or State Security agents; even people recruited to carry out an act of repudiation try to ignore the existence of the other, the right to different, with an attitude masterfully defined once by Padre Conrado — recipient of the Tolerance Plus prize created by the same Platform — as “The Nullification.”

According to Cuesta Morúa, political violence, in Cuba, feeds on marginality, crude language, barbarism. People who are recruited to perform an act of repudiation are rarely the grande dames of the Revolution. Those who are mobilized to carry out these acts of verbal and physical violence are people who inhabit the marginality reproduced by the Revolution.

The Zero Violence campaign aims to work in marginal communities across the country, because from the moment that people learn not to use certain language and not to engage in certain behaviors, acquiring education instead of ideology, it is quite difficult later to break their own rules; also severed is the possibility of the State buying the attitudes of the marginalized for acts of repudiation, which are, as Cuesta-Morúa noted, “the suspension of politics.”

“When you become aware that you can’t, nor shouldn’t, project yourself violently against others, it quickly activated the culture of conversation,” says Cuesta Morua.

The culture of dialogue has been marginalized by the Cuban authorities, who need to be reminded of that phrase of the far-off Voltaire: I disagree with what you say, I completely disagree with that, but would defend with my life your right to say it.

“Violence in education is part of the organizational structure of State violence,” continues Cuesta Morúa. “Children in Cuba are taught to salute the flag with the slogan, We will be like Che.”

“El Ché,” as the Argentine guerrilla Ernesto Guevara is known, was a Communist and officiated for years, running the deaths before the firing squads of La Cabaña. Cuban mothers and fathers have never been consulted about whether they agree that this is the best educational paradigm. Cuban schools are State-owned, and are an investment in the ideological field. “When you teach a child to be like Che, he is subliminally instilling the culture of violence and disrespect for human rights,” added the activist.

The women who joined New Country created this campaign and are its main promoters. They have organized workshops to teach their peers how to defend themselves in situations of violence, whether domestic or institutional. Through the Zero Violence Help Line, a series of phones have been placed at the service of people who seek advice, literature, or who decide to report an act of violence to the coordinators of the campaign. The coordinators would be responsible for investigating the complaint and for ultimately entering into the Orange Report, created for that purpose, cases of violence that come to their attention. With the hope of seeing what they can do to reduce them to the minimum.

Each year, 18 to 25 November, the Zero Violence Festival will be held, which last year featured guest artists like the rappers the Patriot Squadron, Silvito the Free and the punk band known as Porno para Ricardo. The boys of Omni Zona Franca, who are engaged in poetry, slam, performance, have also joined.

The days of November 18 to 25 coincide with the international day against child violence and gender violence, respectively.

Paradoxical as it may seem, as we said above, there have been a number of arrests of activists and promoters of the Zero Violence campaign in the west and east of the island. They are political arrests, obviously.

Taken from Cubanet.

10 May 2013

Some are advertised online. And they pay taxes to the state. Other work by the left. Either way flowers grow like Havana.

All are located in private homes. Prices vary between one and three CUC with the right to a bag of popcorn and a soda. They also sell ice cream and beer, rum, vodka and whiskey for adults.

There are runs for children, adolescents and youth. And sessions just for adults with horror movies or violence. These private 3D cinemas have a wide collection of films in three dimensions.

Avatar or Tintin, are now all the rage among children. In the neighborhood of La Vibora there are now several 3D cinemas. One of them is located in a house on the side of the former primary school, Pedro Maria, today a dilapidated shell.

So many children, youth and adults attend, making reservations days in advance with Roinel, the owner. The house has air conditioning and a small wood and metal bar. About twenty yellow and white plastic chairs, four large sofas and three high-legged stools.

In one of the showings last Saturday, the makeshift 3D theater was packed. Each session lasts two hours. “It’s tremendous, the reception given the 3D. It is a unique experience and people are loving it. In one day I have to 5 showings with a full house,” says Roinel.

He has 40 polarized glasses. A formidable 60 inch flat screen and a special projector for films in three dimensions. When Roinel is asked about the profits he responds with a smile. “I’m making good money,” he said without giving figures. The olive-green state, owns 90% of the companies in Cuba, and keeps an eagle eye on the new 3D cinema private businesses.

The first public exhibition hosted by the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) was held in the province of Camagüey, a little more than 300 miles east of Havana, at an event for film criticism, last March. “It was more symbolic than anything else, because we only had 20 glasses, but for historical purposes it must be as the first exhibition in a public space by the State,” he told the film critic Juan Antonio García from the Spanish agency EFE.

According to ICAIC officials, the agency is considering adapting a small room at its headquarters at 23rd and 12th in Vedado, for three-dimensional projections. As always, the State lags behind the creativity shown by the self-employed.

The equipment in these particular 3D cinema comes to the island thanks to relatives residing in South Florida or Cubans married to foreigners.

Although 3D cinema is now causing excitement, this type of experience is not novel in Cuba. “In the 50s, in various rooms of Havana they showed films with the anaglyph 3D technique, blue and cyan. The new thing now is the polarized glasses,” says a capital cinephile.

According to official data, Cuba has just over 300 cinemas, with 16 and 35 mm format. Most were built before the Revolution. Today, operating theaters have severe damage and do not have the technological equipment to make the jump to 3D. Others have disappeared or turned into juggling schools, theater companies and stores selling schlock.

A movie ticket is very cheap on the island. Two pesos (ten cents). But talking about comfort is another thing. You can count on the fingers of one hand the air-conditioned rooms, ushers with flashlights and clean bathrooms.

The days of the old children’s matinees in the local cinemas where the children saw Chaplin and for the first time and the comedies of Laurel and Hardy, gone.

That magic of a dark room and a large screen has begun to be replaced by new private cinemas in 3D that proliferate in Havana. The difference is that the experience can cost a family two week’s wage.

Iván García

7 May 2013

The Cuban Independent and Democratic party (CID) in Santa Clara marked the 2nd anniversary of the murder of Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia — “The Student” — at 8:00 pm on May 8, with a talk and prayers for the repose of his soul, in the home of Joel Fonseca Machado, municipal vice delegate.

Rolando García Casadeval said by telephone:

The event began with the national anthem, the participants shared their experiences of living with Juan Wilfredo Soto and the circumstances of his death, beginning with a personal statement from Rev. Mario Felix Lleonart Barroso, pastor of the Baptist Church of Taguayabon, in Camajianí, and professor at the González-Peña Baptist Theological Seminary professor in Santa Clara.”

The memorial event was preceded by an activity held on May 5 at the same venue, a day on which the beating given him by the political police to the victim that led to his death was denounced on the social network Twitter.

The activists concluded with a march in the street to the municipal cemetery where there were scripture readings, prayers for the repose of Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia and shouts of:

Freedom!, Glory to the martyrs of the Castro dictatorship!, Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia Lives! and Long Live the CID!

9 May 2013

Cesar Portillo de la Luz (La Habana, October 31, 1922), one of the kings of Cuban music, has died. He departed this world but he left behind his songs and a guitar widowed from arpeggios and creative harmonies. He crossed the threshold of “feeling” into the light of immortality alongside other greats such as Jose Antonio Mendez, Frank Dominguez, Nico Rojas, Frank Emilio, and Aida Diestro, through Elena Burke’s voice. His art converged the melancholic equilibrium of guitars with emotions born from the genre, which marked a time of renovation in Cuban music. Our Cesar, one of the creators of “filin,” took Rebeca, his first stringed wife, and taught a generation and many musicians that one could compose and accompany the feminine instrument – evoking its forms – and he left behind to the history of Cuban music great hits such as Tu, Mi Delirio, and Contigo en la Distancia, or Realidad y Fantasia, works that earned him international fame.

His bohemian soul knew full well his (our) nocturnal Habana that he sculpted and immortalized in the notes of Noche Cubana. I know that he has not hung up his guitar, as some might think, but rather he left her waiting, hung in the walls of all the nightclubs in the capital city, through the multiple voices of interpreters from all regions and cultures and through all the phonographs that play his songs. Just in case, and in honor of our teacher, I will leave his melodies playing in my sonorous memory so that every time I come back to his raspy, fresh voice and his sober, serious image to delight myself with, I can imagine him there, in the eternal international musical scenery of the great.

9 May 2013