Translating Cuba

On our small island many have felt the need to emigrate. Most do it out of disillusionment, others out of desperation, some looking for comfort, and a few rare specimens simply to be different, out of morbid fascination.

When the hirsute insurrectionists came down from the mountains hungry for promiscuity — which certainly did not go unrequited — they were very young and the only diseases they could contract were venereal. In such circumstances they could not go to ordinary hospitals.

It was to provide care for these people with very unique profiles that a small clinic and laboratory were set up in a house (on East Street between 37th and Park in Nuevo Vedado) belonging to then comandante René Vallejo, whom everyone respected because, in addition to being an extraordinary doctor and wonderful conversationalist, he was an excellent spiritualist.

With Vallejo they could kill three birds in one shot, as the saying goes. “The first hospital for revolutionaries” was a little rough. It started off very small, but Cuban leaders were procreating with the agility of claria,* unlike the broader population who were desperately emigrating from the east to the west, and from the west to Miami. They needed to expand this health care center for the elite, so it was moved to Miramar.

Two lavish mansions which occupied the corner of 34th and 43rd streets were transformed into a clinic. It included a pharmacy, hospital admissions, emergency room, operating rooms and a physiotherapy center in the basement. This initially was the facility that some now refer to as the 43rd Street Clinic, the Council of State Clinic, or the Kohly Clinic, named for the district where it was originally located.

The country’s most senior leaders, their friends and family members are not the only ones treated there; bigwigs from Africa and Latin America are also its patients

Within a short time the little clinic grew like an empire, taking over the houses in front and later those on the side. They added a delivery room, neonatology, surgery, and dentistry departments, a spa and all the rest. It was a full-service hospital for the criminal jet set, run by an on-duty medical colonel, always under the supervision of the invisible but much feared Dalia Soto Del Valle.**

At the time, “according to Raul Castro,” Nuevo Vedado was becoming a vulgar neighborhood where the rabble-rousers lived, while Miramar was taking in a new caste of people — those who seemed rich but were not. By practicing the type of fraud that can be hidden within legal loopholes, evictions were carried out in several homes and a new ghetto was created quite a bit to the east. There are luxurious houses in Siboney that share the same level of inaccessibility.

The leadership got older and, although a doctor, ambulance and experienced nurses accompanied each of the most senior officials, ailments and ongoing emergencies were beginning to be a problem. The clinic was far away and too exposed, which meant that rumors about one leader or another often leaked out.

With this in mind they were hurriedly transferred to CIMEQ, where they could be looked after in the mysterious and impenetrable Objeto 20.***

Politics in Cuba is like a wall behind which something dirty and unknown is always hiding. In this case it is Aesculapius — the god of medicine — dressed as transvestite.

Translator’s notes:
*Claris is an invasive species of catfish introduced into Cuba from Asia.
** Fidel Castro’s current wife.
*** A private area within the CIMEQ complex for exclusive use by Fidel Castro and his closest family members.

21 March 2013

Let’s say that for a long time the damn phrase hasn’t been heard in the mainstream media (although I must admit I’m not exactly a follower of that media). In any event, it’s been missing from the speeches, which slyly avoided it, like those who choose to ignore as far as possible the hard expressions of the Stalinist period before 1989. However, a few days ago, during a news broadcast, a young and elegant announcer mentioned it and it fell on my ears with the force of a blow: “The activity demonstrated the ‘revolutionary intransigence’ that characterizes our people.”

Revolutionary intransigence, the girl said, and her face, far from being grim and fierce, glowed with the happy enthusiasm of someone alluding to an invaluable treasure.

The negative charge of this buzzword is overwhelming, along with some of its synonyms — intolerance, fanaticism, obstinacy, stubbornness, persistence — but I understand that no word is bad in and of itself. In fact, almost all of us refuse to compromise on some essential issues or principles, without doing harm to others and without clinging to a deliberate, insurmountable rigidity of spirit. However, context marks the differences. Personally, it makes me sick to recall the whole nightmare brought on by the practice of revolutionary intransigence as a vehicle of terror and social control in times that, perhaps naively, we prefer to assume are in the past.

Let us briefly review some forms of expression of this official strategy called intransigence, which marked the lives of everyone in the Castros’ Cuba and by virtue of which every Cuban was supposed to betray their comrades at the slightest suspicion of not sufficiently appreciating the process and its leaders or not showing the zeal and enthusiasm (also revolutionary) appropriate in every circumstance:

“Obstruct” even the slightest critical manifestations — and if they were veiled or moderate, these tended to be the most “dangerous” — if they were directed against the government, official regulations, a mere member of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), etc. Combat “softness,” the “tendency to individualism” and certain “aberrations” such as homosexuality, or deeply rooted and damaging scourges such as religious beliefs of any denomination; clearly demonstrate a rejection of “petty bourgeois deviations” such as a taste for  things, fashion, music, etc., and for capitalist countries, particularly the United States (sins classified as “ideological diversion” and of which wearing jeans, listening to rock music, and having long hair were considered among the most serious); and many more. Not to mention recognizing any kind of political opinion that different from the line carefully monitored by Moscow.

Past and present damage

Due to the application of the intransigence as a strategy in the service of power, there have been crimes on the Island such as the firing squads, the the Military Units to Aid Production* (UMAP), schools in the countryside**, discrimination and harassment of individuals and groups on grounds of religious belief or sexual preferences, the repudiation rallies*** in all their different gradations — which continue even today — annulment of independent civil society and a free press, and many other diabolical variations designed to enclose in the iron fist of totalitarianism even the slightest hint of public will.

Intransigence has been the mother of censorship in literature, film and other forms of art and culture, and also has gagged creation and initiative in all spheres of national life. It is not by chance that Ernesto Guevara is considered the paradigm of intransigence and what should have been the “New Man.”

We could talk about other disastrous events that left us a legacy of intransigence throughout our history, including examples from all stages prior to 1959, but I’m afraid that the count would be too extensive. If I prefer to refer to the so-called “revolutionary” stage it is because it was after that deceptively bright January when to be intransigent was generalized and established itself as a policy and became a feature of decorum and social recognition. Many accepted it, many others remained silent and everyone, absolutely everyone, was afraid. And so it was able to do so much damage.

Thus, I was perplexed when a smiling barely thirty-something speaker pronounced the word malignant, and shuddered at the regenerative power of the perversity of the system that is trying to perpetuate itself like a crust on the psyche of certain individuals of new generations.

Does this girl know how much pain revolutionary intransigence has produced in this nation? Since then and going forward, fighting revolutionary intransigence has become a permanent item on my personal agenda.

Forgive me readers if this decision makes me look somewhat intransigent.

Translator’s notes:
Military Units to Aid Production was a system of concentration camps for undesirables such as religious believers, homosexuals and others.
** Schools in the countryside were boarding schools for teenagers designed to produce the “New Man” away from the influences of their families.  This program has only recently been ended.
*** Repudiation rallies are government sponsored and directed mobs (often using school children) who confront “counterrevolutionaries” screaming slogans and even physically attacking them.

Translated from DiariodeCuba.com

27 March 2013

By Ignacio Estrada, independent journalist

Havana, Cuba – Media collusion and police secrecy on the island have masked a very large number of disappearances of taxi drivers in both the private and public sectors.

This claim can be corroborated in different parts of the country and even in the capital itself. When getting into a taxi, passengers might notice that many of the drivers are accompanied by another person who serves as fare collector. This fare collector or co-pilot is a security precaution to make sure that monies cannot be taken from the driver of the vehicle.

If you ask drivers about the disappearances of their colleagues, many will confirm that this has happened, and will even provide information about the criminals’ modus operandi.

The official press and directors at National Revolutionary Police headquarters have made no mention of the increase in these criminal acts, nor have they alerted the population and specifically the drivers of vehicles which serve as taxis in the three areas affected.

Some drivers have begun taking security precautions such as availing themselves of mobile phone technology, bringing along another person to serve as fare collector, or carrying sharp-edged or blunt objects such as clubs or baseball bats. In the most extreme cases they will carry illegal firearms, one of the few precautions that will guarantee they return home alive.

The Cuban people do not know the total number of the missing, but what many agree on is that we are not looking at a baseless rumor.

25 February 2013

In my response to the statement “March 8: Everyone against violence” — a campaign to collect signatures against gender violence that exploited the supposed crime imputed to me — launched from Havana by Sandra Álvarez, Marilyn Bobes, Luisa Campuzano, Zaida Capote Cruz, Danae Diéguez, Laidi Fernández de Juan, Lirians Gordillo Piña and Helen Hernández Hormilla, I didn’t only say I was innocent.

I said much more through the means of expression that has given me the chance to be as emphatic and explicit and warranted by the events in which I’m implicated. But knowing that my words may not be enough, I sought help as well, from the forceful video that demonstrates my innocence with absolute clarity.

I did more: I interviewed the lead official investigator in the case, in the presence of witnesses. He didn’t remember me, I had to remind him of some facts, and later would remember, he was surprised that that archived file was copied, and that it had been copied behind his back.

I related the events and his reaction was complete surprise. I talked about the version of the complaint about a rape and told me that the first night she had already presented a medical certificate. He sent her with a police officer to the doctor, but the new certificate did not reflect the injuries that appeared in the first certificate that she had, and with regard to the rape, she barely insinuated it, the instructor told her to call Legal Medicine and she refused. It was then that the complainant decided to change her account.

While this first investigator was off the case to take a course through which he would become a lieutenant, another official had taken up the case against me and returned to the charge of supposed sexual violence and failed to say that the first Investigator had the Legal Medicine report and that she had retracted the accusation and changed her version.

When this official Investigator returned to his duties and read on my computer the statement that the complainant had made before the new Investigator who had taken up the case, he was furious and asked me to present it at trial as a witness for the defense.

The complainant has lied left and right about everything that didn’t suit her, and not only against me, because her statements are contradicted by what she declared to the first Investigator.

It was my lawyer who decided not to this officer as a witness for the defense, because he believed it unnecessary with witnesses and evidence presented, and analyzing the weak evidence of the prosecution, it was clear we had a considerable advantage.

As could be seen in the trial and then in the judgment and the appeal of my conviction, my verdict never relied on evidence or on a serious and legal analysis. The number of irregularities and violations and the police and legal budgets make more than obvious the Government’s revenge.

Still those who live on the island could understand, since they don’t have access to the media to inform themselves. Some do, but those never say anything against the process, always fearing the consequences, but those who live abroad, they have a way to inform themselves and seeing the brand new “witness” for the Prosecution telling the truth of all the facts: how he was bribed, pressured to testify against me, they have resounding evidence of what lies behind this process.

Do not ask about my innocence, see it with your own eyes. I communicate one thing: the witness, after being filmed and when the video was made public, was visited by the complainant and accompanied by here to the Police Station to accuse me of “threat” and lied again saying the video had been recorded under that threat, so they opened another line of “attack” because I had allegedly threatened a prosecution witness.

But thanks to the response of police experts, it was determined that the video is genuine, not edited or manipulated and that the witness is not threatened. They recommended then to the Investigator that he clarify his statements, making it clear that I was right and that the witness was manipulated in his statements against me.

I’m not saying anything you can’t see on the Internet. We have put many things there to prove my innocence. However, no one has access to the accusations of the Prosecution it would be very easy then to discover any irregularities in the process, the contradictions in the statements of the complainant and the alleged witness.

As for me, the evidence defends me. So I repeat: I urge the Government, that is the real Prosecutor in this process, to present any evidence against me other than my slanted handwriting.

Ángel Santiesteban Prats
Prison La Lima.
Guanabacoa. Havana

15 March 2013

I’ve found a Cuba outside of Cuba, I told a friend a few days ago. He laughed at my play on words, thinking I was trying to create literature. But no. In Brazil a septuagenarian excitedly gave me a medal of the Virgin of Charity of Cobre. “I have not been back since I left in 1964,” she confirmed as she handed me this little gem that had belonged to her mother. During my stay in Prague, a group of compatriots living there seemed to be more aware of what was happening in our country than many who vegetate, inside it, in apathy. Amid the tall buildings of New York a family invited me to their house and their grandmother made a “coconut flan” in the style of our traditional cuisine, so damaged on the island by the shortages and scarcities.

Our diaspora, our exile, is conserving Cuba outside of Cuba. Along with their suitcases and the pain of distance, they have preserved pieces of our national history that were deleted from the textbooks with which several generations have been educated or rather, raised to be mediocre. I’m rediscovering my own country in each of these Cubans dispersed around the world. When I confirm what they have really accomplished, the contrast with what official propaganda tells me about them leaves me with an enormous sadness for my country. For all this human wealth that we have lost, for all this talent that has had to wash up outside our borders and for all the seeds that have germinated in other lands. How did we allow one ideology, one party, one man, to have felt the “divine” power to decide who could or could not carry the adjective “Cuban.”

Now I have proof that they lied to me, they lied to us. Nobody has had to tell me, I can grasp it for myself on seeing all this Cuba that is outside of Cuba, an immense country that they have been safeguarding for us.

30 March 2013

It’s Wednesday night and from a nearby radio I hear the theme song of Nocturno, the old Radio Progreso program which on this day of the week is devoted to the music of the prodigious decade (the ’60s and ’70s). The Spanish group Los Mitos with their pipi pipi pipi (It’s Very Easy) burst my sound space and take me back to my childhood, when not being old enough to enjoy this music, I copied the tastes and preferences of my older sister who was already a young woman and did enjoy it.

A neighbor yells to another that the water’s on, my children no longer fight over the remote control, but the World Baseball Classic is about to start and Rafa, my husband, who is a fan — well addicted, actually — to the news, is watching Telesur non-stop. It’s been a long time since I listened to the radio, because there’s nothing like the perfect and indissoluble marriage of image and sound.

Other voices come from the passage next to my house. A dog barks, someone hits it and it squeals, another neighbor passes under my window fighting with her two-year-old daughter, and the drunk from the block is having his night of fame giving “a concert” in which he spews flowers — obscenities — from his mouth as if he were the noon loudspeaker. I also hear some of the information broadcast by Telesur, including that from now on, in speaking of Latin America, we will have to refer to before and after Chavez.

Such an historical inflection makes me think of the Cuban ex-president, Raul Castro’s brother, who both sparked and supported — although I have no evidence I assume he also had patronage — a Latin American guerrilla movement against the United States. I’ve always felt that in his actions, and even more in what he said, he paraphrased a thought of Jose Marti: “All the glory of the world is contained in me.“

So it was his tenure, history, and his different work teams, offering praise, grandstanding and mystique in that guerrilla sack and fabricating a myth. I think the comment by Telesur doesn’t do him any favors, because although Hugo Chavez was his political partner, the zeal for his image has been a constant, especially since his involuntary retirement.

He will invent something, be it a campaign, a new book, or some other trick, but surely it will more of the same from recent years, as he doesn’t have the time or health to return to his old ways.

My reflections were long and took me to the recent Cuban vote — that the official spokespeople call elections — when a Telesur reporter approached Fidel Castro after he voted and asked his opinion about the current changes in Cuba. He responded with a parody of his former energy — a genius and figure to his grave: “What changes? Here the changes were made in 1959, with the Triumph of the Revolution,” which silenced his interlocutor.

I laugh at myself because I can’t focus my attention, rather I look like a receiving antenna of all information around me, an inverted oscillating fan that instead of blowing air tries to receive the breeze from its environment.

I shake off the abstraction of my thoughts and return to Wednesday night when the melody “Your Eyes,” by the Spanish duo Juan and Junior comes on, missing for years from the radio; it tells me with its note that for the time being we’ve reached the end. “Almost as grey as the sea in winterrrrrrrrr….“

28 March 2013

(After seeing a meeting of Cuban bloggers at City University of New York (CUNY))

I clarify this is pre-mortem, because the Spiritualist Congress here is not going to believe that it is my ectoplasm who speaks for me. And as for post-mortem, I don’t believe in it, the only post I give credit to is coming from my keyboard.

The cathartic need to express an opinion, at first led me to write steadily at a rate of two, three or even four weekly postings. I thought about everything, and consciously, although diffuse, fixed a position, which does not necessarily have to be aligned with anyone, so I had (I have) affinities and disagreements with friends and strangers, officials and dissidents.

When the heady sense of freedom derived from expressing an opinion or connecting to the Internet ceased to cause me anxiety and insomnia, I lowered the crest of that wave with the desire to compare views with real people, whether or not they had a (better) way of thinking like me.

My long-time readers will remember the opinions in the form of the posts I dedicated to responding to the blog La Joven Cuba (Cuban Youth), an experience that more than once made me “get serious” and pull our my History, its sister Philosophy and its cousin Ethics. I stopped commenting there when I realized that the young people from Matanzas were not interested in an open-door exchange with someone with a different position.

After complaining and suggesting rules of behavior; not wanting to use censorship, unable to use moderation, and unable to interact with the opinionated, I stopped having expectations about the comments area of the blog as a space for debate.

I thought to find in Estado de Sats that physical space, but this being our society where freedom of expression it so restricted, Estado de Sats proved to be sufficiently transgressive as to merit a warning (prohibition?) for anyone with a governmental affiliation.

In Jueves de Temas* (Thursday Topics) they identify opinion trends, people committed to the future of Cuba, but the selection of the panel, having to ask to permission to speak before listening to the guests, and the two hours allotted, don’t allow any possibility of “hot” debate.

And I’m not usually a good speaker, so I return to the blog. I also use Twitter, this tool so valuable in our state of non-communication, only to try to supplement what you are doing now, with what is happening now.

I feel so comfortable with my blog what I visualize myself older (that is, as a little old lady) writing about recipes, or the grandchildren, although it will be difficult not to write about everything — especially — to speak about the evils of the government of the time.

*Translator’s note: “Thursday Topics” was a discussion space in the officially sanctioned Cuban culture organization La Jiribilla, but it was cancelled in 2012.

27 March 2013

A year ago, while preparing the official pomp to receive Pope Benedict XVI, elite troops from the Ministry of the Interior violently assaulted the house of the dissident Sonia Garro Alfonso, in the Los Quemados neighborhood of Marianao, in western Havana.

It was a spectacular operation. All the neighbors still remember what happened. “There were guys dressed like anti-riot troops from American movies. They used rubber bullets. They employed exaggerate violence, arresting Sonia and her husband Ramon. They took them and almost all their belongings. It was incredible. They treated them like they were terrorists,” one lady commented.

Sonio Garro’s path towards dissidence is marked by poverty and racism. “In my childhood, the happy moments could be counted on the fingers of one hand. I was the tenth daughter of a poor family of twelve siblings. I grew up in a violent slum. I never had toys at Christmas. I always had worn out second-hand clothes that were given to my mother by charity. I went to school with old broken down shoes, but with an immense will, thinking always about studying and bettering myself to change my fate,” Sonia told me in 2009.

She suffered racial discrimination while pursuing her lab technique studies. “I lived racism first hand. I remember one day I wanted to lodge a complaint at school and the vice principal of the center told me, “Go where you want, you’ll always be black.”

When I graduated, with a gold diploma, there was a ceremony in the Astral Theater. The Minister of Public Health came to deliver the award for the most outstanding student and an official came over and told me another person was going to collect it for me because my skin was so dark I wouldn’t look good in the photo. ’No offense, it’s not racism, but you’ll spoil the picture,’ he said. I never collected that award,” she told me in an interview I did with her at her home.

Later she was expelled from the polyclinic where she was working for having married an opponent to Fidel Castro’s government. She learned to sew on an old machine from the ’50s, to make a living and support her daughter, Elaine.

“And from the door of my house, while I sewed, I could see girls of 13 and 14 prostituting themselves. I also saw several accidents with children who were playing without their parents watching them. So from there was born the idea of creating a community project, where the little kids could entertain themselves, play and interact with others without danger,” Sonia said.

On February 27, 2007, Garro created the first independent center. In her home. She had some 20 kids between 7 and 15. It was free. And it didn’t matter if their parents were revolutionaries or not.

“The first rule was no talking about politics. I organized activities of drawing and sewing and my husband, Ramón Alejandro Muñoz, a musician, was in charge of choreographing dancing and teaching the kids to play musical instruments.  On the weekends we had parties and shared children’s books and toys. Foreign NGOs helped us with materials and medicines, as did embassies and individuals in a modest way, giving us what they could,” explained Sonia while showing me photos of the activities.

After that initial experience, Garro went for more. She opened another center in the slum area of Palenque, in the municipality of Marianao itself. What seemed like a noble action within society, which would bring more benefits than problems, triggered an earthquake on the part of the State Security. “The government’s response to my social work were three acts of repudiation and a couple of beatings. The last act of repudiation did not work, no one in the neighborhood attended. They left empty-handed.”

Much happened in those four years. Her community projects closed due to harassment by the Special Services. Sonia Garro then joined the marches of the Ladies in White. And also half a dozen seasoned women, who featured in street protests demanding respect for political rights and demanding democracy.

Her husband Ramon was not far behind. In May 2010, desperate because he didn’t know where Sonia was being detained, he climbed to the roof of their house, still under construction, with a machete and began shouting slogans. The indignation of this Havanan was recorded and uploaded to YouTube. Recently, from the Combinado del Este prison he wrote a letter (they are kept separate).

It has been 12 months that this couple has been in jail. They live in an authentic legal limbo. Officially they are accused of public disorder and attempted murder. But there is no trial date.

Yamilé Garro Alfonso is the mother of two young children. She was a simple housewife, who now takes the place of her sister in the marches of the Ladies in White. Every week or every two weeks, according to the visits, she loads heavy bags of food and toiletries on her shoulders and heads for sometimes to the women’s prison, Black Mantle, other times to the Combinado del Este prison. In her tenement room in San Leopoldo, she also cares for Elaine, the daughter of Sonia and Ramon who will soon turn 17.

The controversial dissident of the barricade is strongly suppressed by the tough guys of State Security. Raul Castro does not want the opposition to take to the streets as public platform for their demands. The General knows that could trigger a domino effect among ordinary Cubans, tired of living with a future in quotation marks.

The only way to pressure the regime to release Sonia Garro and Ramon Munoz is a strong international campaign. There is no other way.

Iván García

22 March 2013

At present, despite the continued pervasiveness of the political police, which hinders the proper performance of our work, and systematically violates our rights and freedoms, harasses and threatens us with many years of jail, alternative civil society is strengthened numerically and ethically and works for certain outcomes, possible and definitely better for our country.

Those brave peaceful fighters — from the Black Spring of 2003 — were already released and some of them remain in the country. They were 75, but there are many more stories of errors and horrors of the government to discourage the opposition movement in Cuba. Nevertheless, this multiplied from 2003 and it is an intellectual and moral power that denounces the arbitrariness of the powerful and proposes politically democratizing alternatives to the redundant and systemic immobile modus operandi of the totalitarian regime.

I hope to God that that repressive episode with another sequence of arrests like in 2003 is not repeated, which would make even more difficult the necessary reconciliation between Cubans and prevent the permanent insertion of my country into the group of the world’s democratic nations.

21 March 2013