Translating Cuba

Years ago, when I left Cuba for the first time, I was in a train leaving from the city of Berlin heading north. A Berlin already reunified but preserving fragments of the ugly scar, that wall that had divided a nation. In the compartment of that train, while thinking about my father and grandfather – both engineers – who would have given anything to ride on this marvel of cars and a locomotive, I struck up a conversation with the young man sitting directly across from me.

After the first exchange of greetings, of mistreating the German language with “Guten Tag” and clarifying that “Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch,” the man immediately asked me where I came from. So I replied with “Ich komme aus Kuba.”

As always happens after the phrase saying you come from the largest of the Antilles, the interlocutor tries to show how much he knows about our country. “Ah…. Cuba, yes, Varadero, rum, salsa music.” I even ran into a couple of cases where the only reference they seemed to have for our nation was the album “BuenaVista Social Club,” which in those years was rising in popularity on the charts.

But that young man on the Berlin train surprised me. Unlike others, he didn’t answer me with a tourist or music stereotype, he went much further. His question was, “You’re from Cuba? From the Cuba of Fidel or from the Cuba of Miami?”

My face turned red, I forgot all of the little German I knew, and I answered him in my best Central Havana Spanish. “Chico, I’m from the Cuba of José Martí.” That ended our brief conversation. But for the rest of the trip, and the rest of my life, that conversation stayed in my mind. I’ve asked myself many times what led that Berliner and so many other people in the world to see Cubans inside and outside the Island as two separate worlds, two irreconcilable worlds.

The answer to that question also runs through part of the work of my blog, Generation Y. How was it that they divided our nation? How was it that a government, a party, a man in power, claimed the right to decide who should claim our nationality and who should not?

The answers to these questions you know much better than I. You who have lived the pain of exile. You who, more often than not, left with only what you were wearing. You who said goodbye to families, many of whom you never saw again. You who have tried to preserve Cuba, one Cuba, indivisible, complete, in your minds and in your hearts.

But I’m still wondering, what happened? How did it happen that being defined as Cuban came to be something only granted based on ideology? Believe me, when you are born and raised with only one version of history, a mutilated and convenient version of history, you cannot answer that question.

Luckily, it’s possible to wake up from the indoctrination. It’s enough that one question every day, like corrosive acid, gets inside our heads. It’s enough to not settle for what they told us. Indoctrination is incompatible with doubt, brainwashing ends at the exact point when our brain starts to question the phrases it has heard. The process of awakening is slow, like an estrangement, as if suddenly the seams of reality begin to show.

That’s how everything started in my case. I was a run-of-the-mill Little Pioneer, you all know about that. Every day at my elementary school morning assembly I repeated that slogan, “Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che.” Innumerable times I ran to a shelter with a gas mask under my arm, while my teachers assured me we were about to be attacked. I believed it. A child always believes what adults say.

But there were some things that didn’t fit. Every process of looking for the truth has its trigger, a single moment when a piece doesn’t fit, when something is not logical. And this absence of logic was outside of school, in my neighborhood and in my home. I couldn’t understand why, if those who left in the Mariel Boatlift were “enemies of the State,” my friends were so happy when one of those exiled relatives sent them food or clothing.

Why were those neighbors, who had been seen off by an act of repudiation in the Cayo Hueso tenement where I was born, the ones who supported the elderly mother who had been left behind? The elderly mother who gave a part of those packages to the same people who had thrown eggs and insults at her children. I didn’t understand it. And from this incomprehension, as painful as every birth, was born the person I am today.

So when that Berliner who had never been to Cuba tried to divide my nation, I jumped like a cat and stood up to him. And because of that, here I am today standing before you trying to make sure that no one, ever again, can divide us between one type of Cuban or another. We are going to need each other for a future Cuba and we need each other in the present Cuba. Without you our country would be incomplete, as if someone had amputated its limbs. We cannot allow them to continue to divide us.

Just like we are fighting to live in a country where we have the rights of free expression, free association, and so many others that have taken from us; we have to do everything – the possible and the impossible – so that you can recover the rights they have also taken from you. There is no you and us… there is only “us.” We will not allow them to continue separating us.

I am here because I don’t believe the history they told me. With so many other Cubans who grew up under a single official “truth,” we have woken up. We need to rebuild our nation. We can’t do it alone. Those present here – as you know well – have helped so many families on the Island put food on the table for their children. You have made your way in societies where you had to start from nothing. You have carried Cuba with you and you have cared for her. Help us to unify her, to tear down this wall that, unlike the one in Berlin, is not made of concrete or bricks, but of lies, silence, bad intentions.

In this Cuban so many of us dream of there will be no need to clarify what kind of Cuban we are. We will be just plain Cubans. Cubans, period. Cubans.

[Text read in an event at the Freedom Tower, Miami, Florida, 1 April 2013]

A beheaded Indian atop his white horse races around Las Tunas, this faded and drab Eastern balcony what I love so much because there they have loved me. The Indian is a bad omen, according to the elders of Las Tunas, perhaps because of the already genetic fear of a population that in the 19th century was attacked too often and burned too often. There are those who say, to spread fear at night, that the last apparitions of the headless one were before an apocalyptic hailstorm and a bloody car accident many years ago. But it has not come out again.

And I think it’s because, decapitated after all, he has no head to see his surroundings. Because a subtle tragedy, without blood or fury or visible cataclysms, happens every day. In the schools of Tunas — as its citizens abbreviate Las Tunas — and in the whole country.

If you travel to the village of Cucalambé — eminent poet of Las Tunas, whose formal name was Juan Cristóbal Nápoles Fajardo – drop in on Vicente Garcia park. Look at the statue of the much-discussed gallant general, walk through the bright new boulevard that stretched from the little Catholic church, have an ice cream at Las Copas, take a peek at Jose Marti Plaza, the most inventive Cuban monument to the man from Dos Rios. All that is very nice. But if you don’t want to upset yourself, don’t want any further on the boulevard that Ramon Ortuno Street.

Because a few blocks further on, like someone looking for the bus station, there’s a nursery school, a kindergarten — as the grandparents call it — that is called “Little Friends of MININT,” that is the Ministry of the Interior. I went through there at the same time as the parents were picking up their kids under 5, who do not read or write, but who surely have already received lectures in that place about the institution in charge of control and exhaustive surveillance over Cubans, those who spy, interrogate, beat and imprison people. I discovered that place and, dying of laughter at the excessive brainwashing, took a a picture of it. Then came the bitterness.

Bitterness is not the name of the place, which is just a detail in the landscape of Cuban education. The bitterness is because I remembered that I’m alive and I have a son who lives in a country where all this, these kindergartens for toddlers, primary and secondary schools for kids and teens, the high schools and poly-techs, and the universities belong to the state. And those who control the state — which I insist on writing in lower case, because that’s how I think of them — manage them without any ethical respect for our children.

On the contrary, they use them to teach and evaluate the discipline of their own political ideas. And worse: they train them in the arts of obedience, of saying yes when they think no, of setting aside their truth, of running away when they can’t take it any more. Without the permission of the parents, who also took the same classes.

Once I asked Dante, my son, who just turned 7,what letter he’d learned that day. “F for Fidel,” he answered. Not F for Family, which is what I try to teach him, not F for fortunate, which is what he deserves. No, those were not the most important words he learned that day. That day he learned F, for Fidel.

They saw education in Cuba is free. I don’t know. It’s true that in exchange for so much schooling and education the government doesn’t ask us for money, no. It asks us to give our liberty, which is worth more.

The Indian doesn’t go headless any more in Las Tunas. Or there is no disgrace to say it, or those it happens to are so used to it and silent, that that rider on a white horse dissolves in the past. But this April 4th there’s a party for our children, the students, who, for now, continue in that only possible — free and compulsory — school. For now.

1 April 2013

From a town on the Spanish Mediterranean I just witnessed on television the designation of the new Pope of the Catholic Church, which fell for the first time on an American cardinal, the Italian-born Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who from the St. Peter’s Plaza in Rome addressed the faithful and evoked his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who resigned weeks ago but is considered Pope Emeritus despite his retirement.

The unexpected new Pope was names after several ballots and two plumes of black smoke. According to media accredited in Rome, the 76-year-old Argentine cardinal will take command of the Vatican under the name of Francis I. He was archbishop of Buenos Aires and is the first Latin American and the first member of the Society of Jesus to lead the Catholic Church, that “will experience as of today an unprecedented situation.”

Bergoglio is considered “an orthodox Jesuit on dogmatic issues but flexible on matters of sexual ethics,” important issues given the demand for reform from the Curia, whose internal problems were reported in the media from the disclosure of documents known as Vatileaks and the crisis around the IOR — Institute for Works of Religion — analyzed in the last assembly of the Church.

It remains to be seen if the new Pope will be the ”pastor that announces the gospel and mercy” as Cardinal Angelo Sodano claimed. It is expected therefore, that he will address the challenges addressed in the days before the conclave, whose members exposed “The need for a strong pope, who can reform the Curia, organize ministries to make them more effective” and resolve leak scandals, plus “promote dialogue with Islam, address the role of women in the Church and the official position on bioethics at a time of global crisis. “

For Argentina, the appointment as Pope of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires may offset the crisis triggered by the defeat of the government’s claim to the Falkland Islands, whose citizens, in a referendum yesterday, expressed the desire to continue being a part of England.

Miguel Iturria Savón

13 March 2013

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