Translating Cuba

The Capitol building in Havana is beginning to emerge from its long punishment. Like a penitent child, it has waited 54 years to return to its status as the site of the Cuban parliament. Visited by everyone, it was a natural sciences museum with stuffed animals — plagued with moths — and in one of its hallways the first public internet site in the Cuban capital opened. While the tourists photographed the enormous statue of the Republic, thousands of bats hung from its highest decorated ceilings. They slept upside down during the day, but at night they swooped around leaving their feces on the walls and cornices. It accumulated there for decades, amid the indifference of the employees and the giggles of teenagers who pointed at the waste saying, “Look, shit, shit.” This is the building I have known since my childhood, fallen into disgrace but still impressive.

Visitors are always captivated by the history of the diamond that marks the starting point of the Central Highway, with its share of cursing and greed. And on observing this neoclassical colossus, these same travelers confirm — what we all know but no one says out loud — “It looks a lot like the Capitol in Washington.”  In this similarity lies part of the reason of the political exile suffered by our flagship building. It is too reminiscent of that other one; an obvious first cousin of what has come to pass for the image of the enemy. But since, by decree, no architectural symbols are erected in any city, its dome continues to define the face of Havana, along with the Malecón and el Morro which stand at the entrance to the Bay. For those arriving from the provinces, the photo in front of the wide staircase of this grand palace is obligatory. Its dome is also the most common reference point in paintings, photos, crafts, and whatever trinket someone wants to take back home to say: I was in Havana. While they insisted on downplaying its importance, it only became more prominent. The greater the stigma attached to it, the more enthralling its mixture of beauty and decay. Among other reasons because in the decades after its construction — right up to today — no other construction on the Island has managed to surpass it in splendor.

Now, the National Assembly of People’s Power will begin to sit exactly where the Congress of the Republic of Cuba once met, a congress the official history books speak so badly of. I imagine our parliamentarians meeting in the chamber of upholstered seats, surrounded by the large windows with their regal bearing, under the finely decorated ceilings. I see them, as well, raising every hand to unanimously — or by huge majorities — approve every law. Silent, tame, uniform in their political ideas, eager not to offend the real power. And I don’t know what to think; whether, in reality, this is a new humiliation — a more elaborate punishment — in store for the Havana Capitol; or if, on the contrary, it is a victory, the triumphant caress it has been waiting for for more than half a century.

30 April 2013

What remains of the Virtue Guardian of the People? What remains of the Progress of Human Activity? Everything, of course, They were forged for posterity.

The Capitol was decapitated as an institution. Its decadence expressed majestically in the tattered officials under its vaults and the urine of the stateless drunks around about. The odd graffiti on the steps. Scaffolding and shadows, nothing more, a most Cubanesque puppet theater.

The people learned the advantages of fleeing, like the plague, from any left-over virtue. Progress was definitely taboo, half bourgeois and half Marxist. Our humanity itself sank, from excessive levity. Island of Cork, Capitol chipped away.

Each morning the statues are more alone. Looking off into the distance but not even seen there, despite continuing at the same distance, guarding the steps.

When we went to kiss, it was super funny, like high school, you do not know where to stick your tongue, your teeth collide and then you wonder why so many people do this. Perhaps one day two Neanderthals’ mouths inadvertently collided and poof, monkey see monkey do. We stopped. We moved away a little. We laugh. We don’t have to kiss if you don’t want to. Only now she laughed. I want to, but I think I forgot how.

We got in the starting position again. Again, only she laughed. On your mark, get set, go. Lest there be mistakes and everything would flow, I threw myself on her lower lip, which is the nicer one. I bit. She bit too. Now that we were not in high school.

We then went back casual conversation, the typical chess game. I like singing in the shower. Oh yeah, I like insects. Well, I throw myself off the fifth floor whenever I have time. Me tooooooo. I can not believe I found someone who does that. Also sometimes I breathe through my nose. Ha ha. I think we have a future, we seem so much alike. So I was devouring some of her pawns, until suddenly I was giving away a bishop. Come here … and you… what team do you play for? Do you have a boyfriend or what? No, nothing serious. Now I just laughed, I didn’t pay attention and she took two pawns.

From “The Importance of Doing Nothing“

As usual, at this time of year Varadero is full of foreign tourists. The best beach and the most stunning hotels in Cuba are full of workers, employees, small business owners, retirees, professionals and young recent graduates from the remote corners of the world: a representation of the working class who, according to the ideologues of Marxism and Communism, would be the great exploited in the capitalist countries. Here, fortunately, they swam on the beaches of the island of the proletarian Revolution.

The irony is that the workers of that island remained outside these beaches, because they are very poor. If they didn’t manage to climb the ladder to a high state office, or to lose a relative in the waters of exile who would later come back and invite them, or learn some difficult way to prosper in a Cuba where almost all ways of prospering have something illegal or shady about them, these proletarians Cuban who will parade on May Day on Wednesday will not enter the hotels where the foreign proletariat stay.

The first Cuban government that manages to fill, without subsidies or handouts, the hotels in Varadero with domestic tourism will not need red flags or banners in the streets: their parade, the more honorable one you could conceive us, will be the thousands of Cuban workers finally visiting the best, furthest, and most impossible  beach in their own country..

30 April 2013

A month ago I wrote about the motto that will preside over the May Day celebration in Cuba: United for a Prosperous and Sustainable Socialism. I thought anyone with half a brain would realize the absurdity of that and would recommend replacing it with something more palatable.

This didn’t happy and today, a couple of days from the day, they are repeating that slogan to the point of exhaustion in the press and on radio and TV. It’s like fingernails on the chalkboard. Socialism never has been and never will be  prosperous and sustainable. Its global failure proves it. The motto seems more typical of capitalism, despite its crises and problems.

The motto and the slogan, which in this case is the same, I brought to mind some used in different years, when they wanted to mobilize the masses in pursuit of some task or goal. I remember “Humanism yes, communism no” (clearly they were hiding the ball), “Fidel this is your house” (political innocence), “Fidel and Khrushchev, we two together” (survived until the October Crisis).

Also, “The ORI (Integrated Revolutionary Organizations) is the fire, take care you don’t get burned” (pure sectarianism), “The ten million [tons of sugar harvested] achieved” (the harvest failed), “Convert the setback into a victory” (as a sequel to the prior one), “Armed struggle is the only way” (lasted until the triumph of the Popular Unity in Chile), and the most absurd of all, “Now we are going to build socialism” (after more than twenty years of sacrifice for it). The latter ranked first for a long time, until displaced by the current one.

In the world of advertising, when a slogan is developed for a campaign, that is as like the motto and the slogan, there is usually some random sampling from a certain number of people to determine if it sticks in people’s minds. Depending on the results obtained, it was used or not.

It seems that now the mottoes and slogans are made by one or a number of feverish minds, sitting behind their desks, believing that their ideas are shared worldwide. They forget that times have changed and with them the people as well. Even a cursory glance would prove otherwise, it is not so easy to actually fool most of the population.

Anyway, as I wrote then, the events on that date will be a success, both in the capital and in the provinces and municipalities. Cubans will come, not because they wish to do so or believe in what they do are doing but because they feel they must do so to avoid possible effects on their jobs, schooling, travel abroad, promotions and other scraps that depend on the state.

This situation has been repeated year after year, and if it shows anything, it is how much we still lack of having a civil society that is the driving force of the nation. Therefore, the mottoes and slogans are the least important and can be absolutely false and even virtual. They actually do not mobilize anyone: the instruments of mobilization are completely different.

27 April 2013

My interest in Human Rights in the United States is merely informative. There, if any or all of these rights are violated, the organizations of civil society themselves will enforce their demands. But it seems cynical to me on the part of the Cuban government to condition their commitment to compliance with the inalienable rights recognized by the international community on their enemy’s breach of them.

This attitude of being victimized is very bad when it come so this subject where Cuba has gaps; if we are a model society to which humanity should aspire, that example should start by guaranteeing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in full to all its citizens. As long as respect for human rights is selective, everything else will be nothing but demagoguery.

29 April 2013

Call for the release of the blogger Angel Santiesteban-Prats, imprisoned two months ago.

Reporters Without Borders calls on the Cuban authorities to release Ángel Santiesteban-Prats, writer and author of the blog The Children Nobody Wanted, who was imprisoned on February 28, 2013, as soon as possible. The prisoner, currently on hunger strike, was placed in solitary confinement when he was transferred to [another] prison in early April.

“The same day that the authorities agreed to release the dissident journalist Calixto Ramón Martínez Arias, Angel Santiesteban-Prats was transferred to Prison 1850 and placed under a maximum severity. This detention is both absurd and cruel. The authorities, who believe that this will set an example, can never prevent pluralistic expression among the population. Ángel Santiesteban-Prats should be released without delay,” said Reporters Without Borders, which continues to encourage the blogger to end his hunger strike.

“The Cuban government, which in January 2013 assumed the presidency of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), fails to meet its international commitments on matters of human rights and fundamental freedoms. Member countries of CELAC should remind it of this requirement,” the organization added.

The blogger, who was transferred on 9 April to Prison 1850 in San Miguel del Padron (Havana), began a hunger strike shortly after he arrived at the prison, before they put him in an isolation cell, without light or water. He is only allowed to talk on the phone a few minutes a day. On April 22 Angel Santiesteban-Prats reported that he was assaulted by prison guards. Immobilized he was forced to swallow a stinking liquid that made him sick.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats was sentenced to five years in prison on December 8, 2012, officially for “violation of domicile and injury” following an expedited process. The writer, who has won several major literary awards, had been arrested several times before this final instance, because of his political stance. They redoubled their efforts to harass him since he created his blog, independent and critical of the government.

In addition to Ángel Santiesteban-Prats, there is another “information action” imprisoned in Cuba and that is it is Luis Antonio Torres, an employee of the newspaper Granma, who was arrested in 2011 and sentenced in July to fourteen years in prison for “espionage,” a crime he never committed. Reporters Without Borders is also calling for his swift release.

From Reporters Without Borders

29 April 2013

This Wednesday we will once again see the traditional May Day parade. In a difference from other countries, where the working class takes advantage of these events to make its demands, our workers will march with photos of Hugo Chavez (to whom, at the last moment, this day is dedicated) and will carry a variety of previously approved slogans. The major placards of the day will hold the slogan: “For a prosperous and sustainable Socialism.”

Although it seems incredible, not a single person will carry a sign asking for higher wages (even though the whole world knows and proclaims it that no one has enough to live on), no one will demand the liquidation of the system of dual currency, or a reduction in prices, or the building of affordable housing, or improvements in transportation. Much less will we be able to read something relative to the freedom to unionize or any protest over the elimination of jobs.

The official response to the absence of these demands is that this is a government of the workers and peasants and there is no reason for them to march in protest against themselves. They know that they will have to wait until there are the objective conditions to improve the situation. They have been persuaded that if progress is not faster it is because the country can’t manage to produce more and better and this, it’s obvious, is their own responsibility, so how can they come out in protest?

Those watching the parade from the grandstand have been very busy lately satisfying the conquests of the middle class. The purchase of cars and houses, expanding the cellphone network, freedom to travel the world, marketing of modern home appliances, permission to open a little business and to hire workers, acceptance of the law of supply and demand in the marketplace. Someone from that other sector of the self-employed will happily wave their prosperous flags and, at best, they might even be allowed, in the midst of the parade, to sell something to the workers who are those who ensure their sustainability.

I think it was Lenin who said once that reality is stubborn and obstinate.

29 April 2013

It wasn’t a too Christian life that brought him to his too Liberated homeland, but a barbaric war that devastated Cuban families to the point that he killed himself in a such a scenario of caudillos and criminals; his black frock coat attracting the Spanish bullets and the machete slashes of an Afro-Cuban ex-slave.

Equally his hand raised today in an L more lucid than loquacious. That kind of noble stone on its pedestal is like collecting signatures, like reuniting true wills to give the socialist system its final thrust (frying it in its own unbecoming sauce).

Then let’s go with him. Let’s make a decentralized flash-mob in Central Park. Climb on his shoulders and even turn back to pee on him (nothing more human than exchanging fluids). We have to get him out of those dead marble cloisters.

Translated from Elblogahora.

American cars continue to be a fifth column nailed into communist heart of the Revolution. They come from the republican prehistory and yet belong to the democratic future of the nation. They lasted, despite the asphyxiation and the repressive workshops without replacement parts, where they “adapted” them to change their original bodies. But the American cars are not a museum, much less a mausoleum of memory, these hard-shelled “almendrones” (named after almonds) are nothing more than a rolling plebiscite.

Translated from Elblogahora.

Like Deng Xiaoping in China, General Raul Castro is using capitalism to save Cuba’s brand of socialism. It worked in China. The party and its ideological stalwarts achieved results.

Not only did the market and capital investments transform China into the second largest economy on the planet, creating spectacular economic growth, the party also performed Olympian ideological acrobatics. Sweeping away the resounding failures of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the barbarities of the Cultural Revolution was a masterpiece of Chinese advertising magic.

Deng experienced the violence of the revolution personally. He was a victim of the Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao. Accused of being a counter-revolutionary, he was stripped of power. He was confined in 1969 to a remote region and forced to work in a tractor factory in Jianxi province. After Mao’s death he was rehabilitated. Once in power he gradually began China’s transformation.

From a rural economy he created a superpower by fusing the tools of capitalism with the supremacy and control of the Communist Party. His first steps were gradual. At the time his Soviet comrades and Cuba’s Fidel Castro branded him a traitor to Marxism.

In the 1980s, while Fidel Castro dismissed the new Chinese government, his brother Raul took note. The Chinese reforms began seven years before Gorbachev’s perestroika. They met with approval from the United States which, astonished by the economic and social experiment, granted China most-favored-nation trade status.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International accused China of violating human rights, imprisoning political dissidents and carrying out 18,000 death penalties a year.

During the uprising in Tienanmen Square in 1989, Deng Xiaoping did not hesitate to order the army to fire on peaceful protesters calling for democracy. Deng was clear; no one but no one was going to impede the progress of the reforms.

Millions of people got out of poverty thanks to the economic transformations. Today the Communist Party applauds people who make money, as long as they remain silent, obedient and do not succumb to democratic rhetoric.

Today China is a quiet empire – a country where laborers work for seventy dollars a month for as many hours as an investor wants without worries about losses from strikes or independent trade unions.

China is a cocktail of voracious capitalist ambition combined with the rigid societal controls typical of an autocracy. The entire reform process in China has been carefully studied by the accountants, technocrats and economists advising the Cuban general.

Raul Castro has been in charge of the nation’s economy since the mid-1990s, but it was only after July 31, 2006, when his brother gave up power due to illness, that the path was clear to introduce economic changes on the island.

In Cuba the capitalist methods of a market economy are to be introduced gradually. As in Deng’s China, lip service will still be paid to a planned economy, but the doors will be discreetly opened to capitalist investors. The economic czar, Marion Murillo, is careful to camouflage his future plans.

Among the first steps will be overtures to millionaire Cuban businessmen living in the United States. Unlike China, however, Cuba is of no particular interest to the world’s power centers.

A limiting factor is that its market of eleven million impoverished Cubans in not a seductive draw for foreign investment. Its complicated investment laws also do not inspire confidence.

Until now the Castros have acted like swindlers, breaking it off with capitalists and closing down their businesses when they feel like it. General Raul promises to change the rules of the game.

The embargo is another big obstacle. No capitalist with any sense of pride is going to invest money in Cuba if it means not being able to do business with the world’s superpower.

There is nothing more cowardly than a million dollars. To reverse the situation, sensible people in the regime are trying to strengthen the anti-embargo lobby in the United States.

They can count on the support of most country’s in the world as well as the proven inefficacy of the embargo. Economic pressures from Washington have brought neither democracy nor free elections to the island.

Eleven administrations have passed through the White House during the fifty-fours years of this autocratic government, having committed themselves to democracy in Cuba.

If Raul Castro comes up with cosmetic political changes and creates business opportunities for all Cubans — exiles and non-exiles — the next American president could change policy.

At the end of the day, China is no more democratic than Cuba. And the United States wants a neighbor that keeps illegal immigration under control and combats drug trafficking and terrorism.

These are the trump cards the government of Castro II will proposed to sit down and negotiate with the Americans. The current regime could be innovative in creating democratic pockets.

For some time, the special services have been colonizing certain areas of dissent. As an international image it doesn’t hurt. And, above all, to engage the rest of the nations of the continent, where the opposition is legal.

Raul Castro’s intentions are to revive the economy so that people can to live better without questioning who governs. His goal is to extend the Castro regime beyond his death.

His guide has been China’s reforms. His strategy is similar. That capitalism saves a shipwrecked socialism.

Iván García

Photo: Iberostar Ensenachos. Five star hotel with 440 rooms, located on the north coast of the province of Villa Clara, in the center of the island. Among the benefits of the environment are two pristine beaches, the Ensenachos and The Mégano. Built on a virgin key in a the shape of a horseshoe, the area is considered a Biosphere Reserve, for having endemic species of flora and fauna and an aboriginal settlement.

25 April 2013

Welcome to a new blogger, Diana Karen Tur Garma, and her blog “The Importance of Doing Nothing.” This first translated post develops the theme.

I spent much of my life hearing that creative people are usually lazy with no money, and they spend their lives wasting time and living on air. This image of living on air was always very powerful for me. Very young I read the novel of Peter Pan, where the lost children, when they have no food, imagine they are eating. They play at asking each other what dish they would order in the world’s most expensive restaurant, which undoubtedly turns out to be imagination. Then it stuck in my mind that this is people doing what they want. You already know, if you want to be truly free, eat air.

This blog is dedicated to all the air-eating slackers who are proud of it, because after all, at least for me, it has been shown that we are the hardest workers, that no one listens to us and very few believe in us.

Here I will be talking about anything that goes through my head. I’ll post some of my writings, my photos and my videos. I will also talk about movies, books and other things I like.

Welcome to any friend who wants to publish something of yours here, in whatever manifestation.

17 April 2013

The Cuban government sponsored blog Herlado Cubano is trying to intimidate Rosa Maria Paya in a recent post in which it criticizes the allegations Oswaldo Paya’s daughter had made about his death. The official blogger, who goes by the name Arthur Gonzalez, said that for accusing the Cuban government for being behind the death of the opponent Oswaldo Paya, Rosa Maria Paya could be indicted for false accusations, a crime under article 154 of the Penal code, which provides penalties from six months to two years in prison.

“It is not appropriate for Rosa Maria and her mother Ofelia Acevedo, with complete impunity, to accuse and defame the Cuban state; Cuban Institutions can also exercise their right and bring their accusations. Whoever plays with fire is going to get burned,” writes the blogger.

Paya just returned to Cuba after several months in different European countries and the United States to build support for the opening of an international investigation into the death of her father.

From Punt de Vista, the blog of Joan Antoni Guerrero Vall

27 April 2013