Translating Cuba

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

Juventud Rebelde didn’t lie when it said in its Sunday edition, “Raul returned to the fatherland with the emotion reflected in his face after intense days in Caracas.” I believe it wouldn’t be wrong to say that their words set a road map and marked guidelines.

The revolutionary government has lost its wet-nurse and knows, clearly, that without patronage it cannot choose to continue its unbelievable discourse, nor seek the permanence of something within Cuba that almost no one needs.

As my grandmother used to say seated before her balance sheet, before taking some tobacco, “What creates real uncertainty and despair is not what happens but what is going to happen.”

Times are changing for everyone, and we have to change with them. I know that within the island there are, at least, two sides. One has the power and, as so often happens with precious bounty, it is not disposed to cede it, but to hold onto it it will have to urgently reinvent itself.

Its main enemy, within and outside the public arena, is the ballast that generates its own inertia. Today, like never before, the dominant class on the island needs with urgent haste, and not discretion, a more democratic approach. It is disguising itself in a moderate esthetic, although its target continues to be the same, to gain time, always betting on biology, the oxygenation and multiplication of forces.

I think without renouncing any of their “convictions,” they can’t do anything other than to bend their orthodox path slightly toward a space with more understanding, including with the dissidence (which confuses Uniformity and Union) which at first glance doesn’t seem separated by great differences.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I dare to say that before next year, perhaps before this coming summer, they will announce new economic reforms, including political reforms, designed to create a new Constitution or to reform the current one.

They will separate the State, the Government and the Party to increase power in support of more political evangelism, and more legitimacy. It’s clear, they will build barricades that would allow them to remain immune faced with those of us who want to judge them or at least want to see them sitting in the dock.

Havana is becoming a territory that everyone — even I who have never been very cautious — need to look at with moderation and care. Someone wrote, that the most well-tried method to absorb the enemy is the make him feel important. We recall that for the Cuban government the world is nothing more than a great battlefield.

And yes, they still have the old traps capable of catching the naive, manipulating the sentiments of those who have for years enjoyed the pleasure of eating as a family, and handling the innocence of so many others who don’t even have a table to sit at. The danger is over tightening the nut and breaking the thread of the slight social cohesion.

The new role of the Castro regime is to show new-found false benevolence. Now they will invoke the necessary words — Justice, Liberty and Democracy — as they share out food to later collect votes. Because if it really is true that when you go hunting you don’t use the rifle in reverse, there are true stories in which the shot of the marksman has backfired.

13 March 2013

After having experienced during my stay in France what can truly be called, without any fear of exaggeration, a medical powerhouse, I return to the contrast of our sad reality.

Some doctors, family members and friends to whom I proudly showed the x-rays of my injured hand and its current state after recovery all unfortunately say the same thing: “Be happy you fell down in France and not here.”

Speaking to each of them separately, they have commented to me on the ever more noticeable state of deterioration of health services in our country. They are also in agreement on the lack of financial stimulus in this sector, which is leading to disenchanted young people to forgo medical careers. Then there is the exodus of doctors, now made possible by the “new emigration regulations, which grant them the ability to travel. They are leaving the country in search of better economic opportunities and greater recognition. Some leave only because they want to go exploring, but unfortunately most will not return.

One of the other issues most affecting health care workers at the moment is that, following demands for increases in their salaries, authorities have decided not to raise them “owing to economic problems confronting the country.” Instead, as a humiliating consolation, they have decided to pay two Cuban pesos (the ordinary kind) to doctors for every hour worked, fifty centavos to nurses and twenty-five centavos to all other auxiliary personnel. In other words, after working twelve hours in a hospital, a doctor receives a compensation of twenty-four pesos (approximately one dollar). Nurses receive six pesos, and auxiliary personnel get three. This situation is truly shameful, especially given the shortage of personnel, who are called upon to work more frequent shifts.

It is no wonder that increasingly we have fewer and fewer doctors. At some point we may have to seek treatment overseas, where the services of our excellent doctors are valued.

28 March 2013

“In life there are loves you can never forget…” says one of the songs recorded by the flamenco singer El Cigala accompanied on piano by Bebo Valdés. A few days ago this man of 94 years died, after more than five decades of not returning to the Island of Cuba. He promised his mother, before leaving in the autumn of 1960, that he would not return to Cuba until “the system” fell. So he spent the rest of his life in exile, mostly in Sweden where he found love and a second home.

The sad history of Bebo is that during his entire time as an émigré, he was erased from the repertoire of Cuban culture in the national media. They tried to remove him for good from the lists of Cuban pianists, although now and again his talent seeped into some clandestine recording or into  a documentary that spread through the alternative information networks. And so it was until the worldwide success of “Lagrimas Negras” – Black Tears – a record the Cuban musical censors could not bury. Tourists started coming to the Island asking to hear the melodies that excellent interpreter had immortalized with his hands.

Despite this, most Cubans today know nothing of Bebo Valdés and when his death was announced last week many looked puzzled trying to recall this six-foot tall man with the prodigious fingers. So something magical happened to Bebo, something already narrated in one of those melodies he played so often. That song that said, “nothing is better than the verse we can’t remember,” and so it has come to refer to him, that musician we can’t remember.

Some friends have asked me not to continue responding to the letters and posts of those who have sought a few minutes of fame at my expense, which, for the most part, are blogs that join the fray publicly for the first time despite the efforts put into them; others, are read only by the official Nomenklatura and written by people who have never been important except to their families, I suppose, and who for the first time, and also possibly for the last, received some ephemeral public attention in the virtual world, which encouraged — with luck! — their irrelevant and dull lives.

I’m sure the suggestion of these friends is reasonable, in fact, every time that I draft the answers I understand them, but I am an extrovert and I need to be very timely especially with those who manipulate their letters to confuse and, thanks to the high level of ambiguity consciously used, to distort the reality of the facts confusing their readers.

This occurred, for example, with the witness heard or referenced used by the prosecution against me. That witness mentions another woman, my friend, whose name he made public without consulting her or asking permission, and if that is not enough he put words she never said into her mouth. Both my friend and her husband, who was with her at the times referred to by the prosecution’s witness, have expressed feeling very offended by his lack of ethics and a high level of deceit.

The conversation I had with this friend of mine went through my cell phone and if I had said a single word that betrayed my guilt, that word now would be evidence that the prosecution filed against me as the investigator reviewed all my calls and my emails.

I can only repeat endlessly until my last breath — and this is what I have been saying in every answer I provide — I demand hard evidence to sustain the conviction that has been imposed on me; evidence other than the word of a manipulated person, a friend of the accuser, who repeats what she was told; proofs that are not those “contributed” by a Lieutenant Colonel calligrapher who swore, violating all the legal and scientific conventions on the legal value of a handwriting expert, that my “slanted handwriting” is proof of my guilt.

These proofs were exposed by a video made of a testimony of a false witness whom the prosecutor wanted to sneak in, and who was immediately discarded when we recorded him explaining how he had been bribed and forced to testify against me. This video was enough to prove my innocence. He disproved, for its falsity, all the lies the Court fabricated to hide my innocence. But — I repeat — it’s impossible to hide it. It’s impossible to deceive people even if they have a minimum of understanding.

The Government, Prosecutor, Courts, Police and every person who signed a letter condemning me for the alleged violence I’m accused of and for which they sentenced me, not one has presented a single proof against me.

Enough already with the talk and insinuations; it’s not sufficient to imprison anyone.

They say and accept that I got in their way; that in political life, to my regret, I earned recognition and respect; that my blog began to have ten thousand visits a day, and they saw me become too close to those on the island defending the truth, like the project For Another Cuba and the signatures for the U.N. covenants; projects that, I know, worry and frighten them.

They recognize that my presence in front of the police station demanding the release of Antonio Rodiles was found unacceptable for an intellectual, that the of the beating they gave me traveled the world; that thousands of people all over the world were terrified by the image of my blood-soaked shirt; that I maintained a hunger and thirst strike for those days; and above all, they confessed their helplessness because of the obvious evidence of their abuse of me and the international pressures.

They admit that I bothered them by not compromising when the State Security official Anibal told me to stop my political actions. That they took as a taunt my returning to the same place where they beat me the next day, accompanied by Rodiles’s wife Ailer Gonzalez, and his father, all three of us wearing T-shirts with the image of Rodiles demanding his release. That every day, during those 19 days of injustice, we sat in front of the police station until they released him, which they did only after the swelling had gone down and his black eye had disappeared.

And officers Camilo and Hannibal had warned me. And to stop me there was nothing they could so other than show me more sophisticated objects, more sophisticated instruments: the “Revolutionary Courts” that they both boast about.

The culpability of State Security is as obvious as that of those who have supported the typical and predictable campaigns against me looking to raise a smokescreen to hide their misdeeds. History will be responsible for each of us and will put us in the exact place that we have earned. That’s for sure.

However, despite the media campaign, I fought with the tools that my circumstances allowed me. I have exhibited my strong evidence, I’ve put it in front of their eyes, including the much talked about video of the false witness who retracted,  yet the Police and Prosecutors prepared to convict me for the rest of my days.

Whoever bites once, does it forever. So they brought military and State specialists, that is people forced to respond without the slightest intention of questioning orders, to flesh out versions that always favored the Prosecution. So they blatantly lied in court without the slightest pretense, dismissed my solid witnesses, some of them with no affection for me, but who took the risk to do their duty consistent with their consciences.

This was the case with my son’s teacher, the school principal and — a detail that has not been mentioned — a member of the Communist Party, whom the Delegate to the People’s Power went to see to pressure her, because “how can you defend a counterrevolutionary?” In a gesture of dignity I respect, she responded that she was defending a student, the boy, that he was the most injured because he — my son — had confessed to her that his mom had asked him to tell lies to denigrate my public image.

Another witness, thanks to the level of friendship he had with the accuser, testified that my ex had told him on several occasions that she “was preparing a number eight legal case against the father of her child.” By then my ex and I had been separated more than two years.

There was another witness with him I only exchanged a polite and cordial greeting, because I was visiting a family that lived in the back of his house, and I was obliged to park my car in front. At exactly the day and time when my ex said she ran into me in her house, I was passing through the home of this witness whom I heard strongly rebuking her son and, unable to contain myself, I asked her not to be so violent in the reprimand, he was just a boy.

She explained he had broken the windshield of a car and the owner was demanding 900 pesos. Then I said, according to what she herself remembered at the trail, that a windshield could be replaced a hundred times, but a child, no. She, according to what she told the court, didn’t forget the day because thanks to me she wasn’t unjust with her son: later she learned he hadn’t been the child responsible for breaking the windshield.

There were two other witnesses: a Lodge brother, who need to re-pass his exam for Master Mason which was coming up in a few days, and his mother, who prepared us lunch that day.

So in summary, the Court decided to ignore them in favor of the Prosecution’s witnesses, and did it with blatant lies and contradictions that can be seen in the judgment. Before the ease and agility with which the Court accepted everything against me, I was left in a legally hopeless state.

Instead they accepted a hearsay witness, who repeated what his friend told him, a witness who wasn’t present at the alleged events which I was accused of and yet they validated his “testimony.” (Editor’s note: According to the dictionary: Witness: 1. Person who testifies to something or attests. 2. Person present or who acquires direct and verifiable knowledge of something.)

As of today, no one has responded to my questions:

Why did the trial take place in the First Division of State Security, or specifically on the special site for “relevant” cases in Carmen and Juan Delgado, as they communicated to my attorney.

Why was my sentence announced by the Official Camilo, from State Security, a month before the Court issued it?

No doubt many do not want to see how obviously my case was rigged, and I understand their interests. And although I do not share them, I respect their complete right to be unjust.

A State of Laws?

Some friends have also told me to use the law to accuse those who have lied, but that would be another naivete. Friends, brothers, international public opinion: we do not live in a State of Laws, this is the Biran Ranch — the Castros’ ancestral home — where the foreman obeys the orders of the owner. We live in a feudal state with no rights where the only thing that protects us is to do whatever the King says, without question, because if you question, they will send you to where I am today: behind bars.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

La Lima Prison, March 2013

27 March 2013