Translating Cuba

Although I do not often think of Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Castro or other Latin American caudillos, I confess that the tragicomic saga taking place in Venezuela after the death of President Chávez causes me embarrassment mixed with revulsion. Perhaps I have been conditioned by having grown up under Castro-ism, a rich nutritional source for new populist patriarchs who, after coming to power, impose measures in favor of the dispossessed, whom they use as shock troops against the rest of society, thus facilitating the exclusion of some to the detriment of others.

This binary concept of friends and enemies is as old as society itself and can be illustrated with examples put into practice during the decades of the Cold War. It is what led Hugo Chávez to adopt Fidel Castro as a patron and the Cuban dictatorship as a social model.

The red wave of Chavistas, the interminable line to the coffin, the media campaign and the attempt to sanctify the deceased – mummified like Lenin – by the governing elite causes feelings more of sorrow than embarrassment. Sorrow because of the factions created by the leader and by the stupidity of the masses, who applaud him in exchange for bread and promises, unable to think through the consequences of their actions or of the hostage status to which they will be relegated by a caudillo who promotes hatred and discord in order to carry out his plans for reform.

Chavism is but the latest chapter in the Cold War. It is another attempt at absolute domination by the machinery of the state. Chávez was a hybrid between the tradition of the Latin strongman and Soviet ministerialism. He, like his Cuban mentors, followed the same outline as the former Soviet Union. Though he was not able to fully apply them, he showed himself to be an excellent apprentice of the essential precepts of a model that ran aground decades ago, and which survives only in Cuba and North Korea.

One could talk at length – especially nowadays when Latin American analysts are trying to discern every facet of Chavism – about the intersection of a Venezuela facing the future and the helplessness of its allies in the wake of the passing of the Bolivarian Caesar, who so revered the Comandante from the dilapidated island in the Caribbean that he even inherited the old guru’s cancer. And what about the people who believed in the new redeemer? They will remain in limbo, much like those elderly people in Cuba, who make withdrawals from their much devalued checking accounts and at times, only at times, speak of the horrors they committed in the name of the revolution and the leader, who left them hanging from a diving board of misery.

9 March 2013

Looking back from 2013, I think one of the most controversial measures for the Cuban people last year were the approval of Law No. 113, the new tax system. and Decree No. 308, which since its appearance in the Official Gazette, regulates the norms and procedures that, according to the newspaper Granma, began to be applied in a gradual way starting in January.

In principle, I agree with the new legislation. The economy of my country was built on the cement of an architectural system of arbitrary crime, where many thieves, from all over the world, came to Cuba with suitcases full of money to evade international regulations and, without explaining the origins of the money, deposited it in our bank and invested it in our country.

Here I should point out that some of those crooks ended up cheated, because we were living — and I’m not sure if I should refer only to a time in the past — in a tax and moral amnesty, which among other things affected our candid island modesty, and without any justification, forced us to practice that worn-out Chinese proverb, “A thief who robs a thief…”

One of the meanings of the word freedom is to be part of a disorder; but even so, we Cubans (solvent or not) must recover our culture of taxes.

I invite you to consult the law that went into effect on January 1, which obliges people to pay taxes: personal, utilities, sales, services, land transport, transmission and inheritance of goods, documents, etc. And to review the nine taxes that, although they appear in the body of the ordinance, it will not be in effect for now.

If we immerse ourselves in the spirit of this new tax policy, we will find that it is basically economic. The country is falling apart and this danger falls on everyone in sight. It’s a source of additional relief that it only seeks to collect, not benefit.

This statute passed by the members of the National Assembly of People’s Power (people who are well-read, erudite and eloquent), is an act of publicity which, like any discourse carried out in parables, should not be put into effect. It is nothing more than an incomplete law riddled with loopholes which, subtlety saturated with gimmicky babbling, appears as quasi-chimerical perfection and manages to convert the defrauded into the defrauder.

In a punitive spirit, small tax frauds are persecuted as if the nation’s corruption rested in the carpenter, the shoe repairer, the kiosk vender; and not in the big cities or the State enterprises. Who did they think they were fooling; just a few years ago the Ministry of the Armed Forces (MINFAR) disbursed the shameful sum of several million dollars to set up a project of private jets with airplanes that never flew or left their hangers because there were no buyers. This, indeed, was a mega tax fraud, worthy of being punished.

But Lae No. and its Decree No. 308, are chess moves. A cold creation of the Cuban government which, hidden behind the typical trip of the old poker player, launches on the world, and especially on the United States, a message of solidity and change. If the Spaniards know wine, Havana knows lechery and deceit.

9 March 2013

Some official, unofficial and foreign media outlets have been subject to a certain government manipulation, serving as an echo chamber by focusing special attention on the fight against corruption, which seems to have the become the principal challenge facing the Cuban president. It was for this reason that in 2009 he created the office of Controller General, the bureau in charge of conducting audits of state businesses and institutions.

“We can`t think twice about the battle against crime and corruption,” said the General in a speech before the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party. He thought it sounded catchy and since then the refrain has become a leitmotiv.

I ask myself how far the mighty sword of the controller’s authority or scope of action might reach. I suspect that the purpose of this imaginary wordplay is more mythical than real. It has the hint of a purge and less transparency than a Tamagotchi screen.

We all know that the concept of corruption goes a little deeper than the corrupt bureaucrat. It does not enjoy “real official consent,” yet it leads to unnecessary and superfluous expenditures from the state treasury. I prefer not to call it “stealing,” which is such a horrendous word.

The anti-corruption verbosity of the president-general is simply a Stanislavsky-like mannerism — something energetic and appealing to the ear. He should channel all this talent into something more constructive, or more respectable, like not ordering crowds of paramilitaries out into the streets every Sunday to attack defenseless women.

Cuba does not realize that this is just another infection eating away at society.

Has the General forgotten that during his term as head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces military leaders participated not only in military campaigns, but also in popularity contests and licentiousness?

I cannot believe that Raul Castro, a symbol of Victorian puritanism and a man obsessed with scrutinizing other people’s lives, has not read even one of the many reports dealing with incidents of assault or sexual abuse by Cuban military personnel.

The president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Cuba knows perfectly well that there is an endless list of high-ranking leaders and important officials with gargantuan appetites, who are as high spirited as festival clowns. They have been seen to be involved in one or another “little scandal” related to inappropriate sexual practices in which they have made use of pressure, position, rank, deceit, subjugation or shamelessness.

How to combat this degeneracy? Here is a telling figure. According to the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces’ own figures, which are no doubt overly conservative, more than 40% of Cuban women who served in Angola during the war years or afterwards were victims of sexual assault or rape. And this does not include those who remained silent out of fear.

The island’s leadership is made up of perverts, who are very attuned to all the meanings of the word corruption.

1 March 2013

After a prolonged ordeal, which saw the release of more political statements than medical reports on his state of health — all in an effort to keep hope for a recovery alive in a society as convulsive as Venezuela’s — its president has passed away.

Aside from what this loss means for his country as well as for the left and for Latin American and Caribbean populism — his stature as a charismatic leader makes it difficult to replace him with any of the officialdom’s current leaders — it will lead to many problems after the initial period of grief and mourning has passed. Once people’s lives get back to normal, uncertainty will loom over our country.

Accustomed to living off subsidies from other countries — first for more than thirty years from the former USSR and the defunct Socialist camp, and later from a chavista Venezuela — we once again find ourselves in a disadvantaged position, without having resolved our long economic crisis, and without having created either the conditions or the mechanisms for doing so.

We were committed heart and soul to political and economic agreements with Venezuela, mainly with its president, who in most instances made decisions and took actions based on his own personal judgement, which did not always correspond to the interests of his country, as he tried to emulate Bolívar. Now that he is physically gone, no one can predict how the new authorities will act, and whether they will be confirmed or replaced in the coming constitutionally mandated elections. In the end what happens in Venezuela will not be determined by Cubans, regardless of all the official expressions of support for the chavista authorities, but rather by the Venezuelan people in the exercise of their rights as citizens of a free and sovereign nation that does not tolerate foreign interference.

This complex situation for Venezuela, a country rich in petroleum, is even more complex for Cuba, a poor country without properly utilized resources. I think that our authorities, both before and now in the face of this new reality, have been and are analyzing how to avoid the tempest blowing our way. After two disasters we are trying to resolve once and for all our economic problems by ourselves rather than continuing to look to others to pull our chestnuts out of the fire.

7 March 2013

For Joel, a 29-year-old engineer, the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez marks a before and after moment in the Cuban political landscape.

“It’s too soon to be able to analyze the consequences, positive or negative, of someone new in Miraflores. Even if elections are held soon and Nicolás Maduro wins, the exchange of oil for Cuban medical specialists could be adversely affected. Being an optimist, I hope Maduro keeps sending oil to Cuba at favorable rates. On the other hand we are entering a new period of crisis within a crisis that has been going on for 22 years,” says Joel while following developments on TeleSur.

To people waiting in line at a bakery in Sevilano, a neighborhood in Havana’s Tenth of October district, the passing of the Venezuelan leader is also a concern, especially if the flow of oil to Cuba is cut off. Among ordinary people on the island the concept of Chavismo is an abstraction.

The reality is that, after he took power in 1998, his open checkbook policy towards the Castro brother’s revolution and the sale of 100,000 barrels of oil a day at wholesale prices was the main reason Cuba did not suddenly revert to the Stone Age.

A large segment of the population has not forgotten the stark years of the “special period.” Power outages lasting twelve hours. Factories closed down. Economic development projects cancelled due to a shortage of hard currency and empty coffers preventing the purchase of fuel on the world market.

For Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez was a Santa Claus from the south. We now know what this political alliance between the commandate and the Bolivarian represented – a new type of political platform and torrents of petrodollars, which advanced the outlandish theories of socialism, now disguised using different rhetoric.

If you asked people on the streets of Havana what they thought of Chávez, you would probably find he has more devotees than Castro. “The man is more jolly and cheerful than Fidel and he sings boleros and rancheras,” observes a taxi driver.

The other reason is simple. The average Cuban sees him as the man who brought us light. Because thousands of our countrymen also worked in different missions set up by the former parachutist from Barinas, hundreds if not thousands of families on the island have been able to repair their homes or start a small business selling cheap merchandise acquired during their relatives’ sojourn in Venezuela.

This is the case for Lourdes, a 32-year-old nurse. She has travelled half a dozen times to Venezuela. With the money she saved, she was able to start a small business selling clothing with counterfeit labels, whimsical costume jewelry, and electronic equipment such as plasma screen televisions and computers, which she acquires through contacts in Caracas and resells in Havana.

Since the end of December Lourdes has not been able to travel to Venezuela. “The Ministry of Public Health told me, ‘Not until further notice.’ Maybe it is because of Chávez’ illness. Now with Hugo’s death I am afraid the business will fall apart. I don’t trust either Maduro or Cabello. They are from the same party. But if you take Cuba as an example, you will see that Raúl, although faithful to his brother Fidel, has brought new people into his government and eliminated obsolete restrictions.”

At 8:55 PM the Cuban government released a letter of condolence and declared a state of national mourning, to be officially observed from March 7 to Friday, March 8. It is striking that, unlike Rafael Correa, Evo Morales or Sebastián Piñera, General Raúl Castro did not give a televised address.

Moves are made in Cuba at the pace of a slow, rhythmic dance. The margin of error for every word is carefully calculated, as are the repercussions that a speech might have. While we wait for funeral services to begin in Caracas, which Castro II is predicted to attend, the main topic of conversation on Cuba’s streets is the death of the Venezuelan president.

A death announced. A bomb squad silence characterized information on Chávez’s state of health. The lack of transparency in news reporting meant people had to read between the lines of the few and cryptic reports issued by Caracas.

In Havana, sympathizers and detractors alike were respectful during this painful time for the family and followers of the Venezuelan president.

The fate of Venezuela is intimately linked to the future of Cuba. Because its leaders have performed their economic duties so poorly, the island is now more dependent than ever on external factors.

With the death of their leader many Venezuelans are going through an emotional earthquake whose seismic shockwaves could reach all the way to Havana.

Although not unexpected, the demise of Hugo Chávez Frías might lead to more profound economic reforms in Cuba. General Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz Canel, his second-in-command, will find their ability to maneuver put to the test. We will see if they are up to the task.

Photo: A Cuban walks in front of a large portrait mural of Hugo Chávez. From informacion.com

6 March 2013

There was an issue Yoani Sanchez did not address in the Brazilian Congress: the conspiracy of the Cuban ambassador against her.

When the blogger set foot on Brazilian soil we recommended that she not refer to the intrusion of the Cuban ambassador, because we still didn’t have sufficient evidence to make a fair judgment, nor did we know what was the real participation of the officials of the office of the President of the Republic in the events of the conspiracy.

As a foreign visitor, Yoani maintained a prudent silence about it, despite being a victim of envoys from the Cuban ambassador. However, the Brazilian documentary filmmaker, Dado Galvão, whose presentation was sabotaged by the embassy employees, had the complete right to protest before the Congress of his country about such interference.

In effect, when we visited the Brazilian Parliament and before giving the floor to the Cuban blogger, the deputy who presides over the sessions, Otavio Leite, not only gave the floor to Galvão, but to make up for the forced suspension of his documentary in “Feria de Santana,” right there in the National Congress the part of the documentary was shown where Yoani denounces and criticizes the repression against the Ladies in White, who appeared led by the well-remembered Cuban martyr Laura Pollan, whose figure appeared on the screen of the Brazilian Congress. Dado Galvão, on speaking before the Parliament, demanded from the Congress — and the judicial authorities — “a thorough investigation of the participation of ‘a foreign ambassador’ organizing extremist groups to sabotage the exhibition — on Brazilian soil — of a documentary made by a Brazilian. This is inadmissible,” said Galvão, demanding justice.

We left Brasilia for Sao Paulo for the second stage of Yoani’s visit. There were no mishaps with demonstrators in the Brasilia airport because Deputy Leite had accompanied us the entire time up to the door of the plane, but not before inviting Yoani to visit Rio de Janiero the following Sunday, to enjoy a program of visits to tourist sites. An hour and a half later we were in Sao Paulo, the largest city in South America and among the five largest cities in the world. Waiting for us at the door of the plane was the president of “Contexto” Publishers, Mr. Jaime Pinsky, who had translated and launched in Portuguese Yoani’s book “From Cuba with Affection,” two years earlier. The book is a collection of Yoani’s blog posts. Pinsky was in charge of the blogger’s program in Sao Paulo, which included visits to large newspapers, television stations, debates with Brazilian bloggers and the relaunch of her book, with an autograph night included.

Pinski invited Yoani to stay in his private home, and Dado Galvão and I were transferred to one of the city’s major hotels, where, by coincidence, the 35th anniversary of the founding of the Labor Party (PT) was underway with Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. Upon arrival, we ran into the party leadership in the common areas of the hotel. The following day, Thursday the 21st, Galvão and I went early to the headquarters of the daily “O Estado de Sao Paulo,” the largest circulation newspaper in the city, which publishes the posts of Yoani in Portuguese and which had prepared a voluminous program for her at its headquarters. Yoani started early with a half-hour radio program with the “Estadão” group, which is the popular name for the newspaper.

From there, the blogger was taken to an auditorium full of journalists, personalities of the culture, and Sao Paulo intellectuals, invited to meet her personally and ask her questions. The auditorium was full and when Yoani appeared on stage she was greeted with loud applause. Her appearance lasted just over an hour, answering questions of every kind, after which Yoani recorded a TV program, with questions and discussions about opinions of the Cuban reality and the blogosphere. This program is on-line at “Estadão’s” site. After the TV show we were invited to lunch with the executives of the newspaper and some prominent Brazilian journalists especially invited to meet Yoani.

We finished lunch and after a long post-lunch chat, with Yoani answering other questions, Jaime Pinsky and the blogger left for the studios of TV Cultura, where Yoani was a guest on the most important interview program on this Brazilian TV station, with the largest audience, “Roda Viva” (Live Wheel), on a magnificent set. This program has interviewed major world figures who visit Brazil, including Fidel Castro. TV Cultura in Brazil is a public television station, administered by each state of the federation, which has a very diverse cultural programming, following regional interests. The program recorded by Yoani was acquired by TV Cultura de São Paulo and was broadcast on Monday the 25th for the whole country.

During the nearly three-hour interview (conducted with simultaneous translation), Galvão and I were able to get away to record another TV program, taking advantage of Yoani’s fame. In “Roda Viva” there were about eight journalists in a circle around the blogger. In the interview they asked virtually the same questions that Yoani had already answered many times over the extended 40-plus hours of recording in the South American giant, but she  went far beyond the detail previously mentioned in this article, because it is important to say that our emblematic blogger dismantled, in Brazil, the Castro regime’s scaffolding brick by brick with painstaking patience, simplicity and credibility. It was a lesson in patriotism.

On Thursday night, the 21st, there was a meeting scheduled with Yoani and São Paulo bloggers, for an exchange of opinions, techniques and how-to’s. When the discussion had barely gotten underway, the Cuban embassy’s protestors appeared, trying to sabotage the meeting. Another group of Brazilians, “friends of Yoani,” also appeared in the auditorium where the discussion was being held and there was an unpleasant encounter between the two groups in the auditorium itself, resulting in the meeting being suspended, to the detriment of those interested in this specialized exchange. The instructions of the Cuban ambassador to São Paulo were apparently, “Don’t let her talk.”

On Friday, the 22nd, Yoani taped a program for the Bandeirante television network, one of the major private TV networks in the country, which was aired in its prime time interview program on the 24th, and broadcast during the week on other stations in the network. That day, the governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alkimin, one of the ‘heavyweights’ of Brazilian politics, invited Yoani for lunch, followed by a visit to the Memorial that tells the history of that state. In parallel with these activities, the largest private TV network in Brazil, TV Globo, assigned a permanent cameraman to follow Yoani, to prepare a long story for one of the most-watched Sunday programs in Brazil, “Fantastico”, which aired the interview with Yoani on Sunday the 24th in prime time, where Yoani Sanchez was seen up close and personal, packing, eating breakfast, joking with her companions, among other scenes rarely seen in public.

On Friday night, the 22nd, an “autograph night” was scheduled, with book signing by Yoani, which had to be suspended because of the embassy’s protestors, who again encountered a pro-Yoani group, which even led to a scuffle, but without major consequences.

On Saturday the 23rd the re-launch of her book, “De Cuba con Cariño” was scheduled at the Saraiva bookstore in one of the largest shopping centers in the city, in the Higienópolis neighborhood, which was suspended by the shopping center management which would not authorize the activity, based on a fear of new confrontations in an inside space, full of glass and fragile objects. The Cuban embassy continued in its determination to sabotage the Cuban blogger, despite the unanimous repudiation of its actions. This effort against a frail woman with easy words and a sweet smile, were the culmination of a landslide victory for the cause of democracy in Cuba. Brazil saw very clearly that the Cuban government does not respect its citizens and also interferes in any friendly country with such ignoble purposes as discrediting a person of such clear and organized thinking.

In view of the need to suspend Yoani’s activities in São Paulo, Pinsky coordinated with Deputy Leite to move up Yoani’s rest break to Rio de Janeiro for Saturday night, a time when the group of us who accompanied her stay in Brazil said goodbye to her, because I  would return to the city of Belém, Pará state of Brazil, where I live, and Galvão would return to to Jequié in the state of Bahia. Yoani spent a great Sunday in Rio de Janeiro, without her friends along, accompanied by Deputy Otavio Leite, who led visits to the most important places in the beautiful city of Rio. Her route was public and like rest of her public endeavors, there were the expected spontaneous signs of solidarity and appreciation, lacking in the organized “acts of repudiation.” On Monday the 25th Yoani Sánchez left from Rio de Janeiro, bound for Prague.

Leaving aside the purely partisan interests or those of organized groups of Cuban dissidents and considering that every Cuban has a point of view on the whole universe of issues associated with the struggle for democracy–with little chance of agreement–Yoani Sanchez’s trip to Brazil has been a complete success for the Cuban democratic opposition as a whole. For the first time a recognized opponent of the regime, in this case Yoani Sanchez, has been given an authoritative voice in the Parliament of the largest and most influential Latin American nation. She was given access to the country’s major media, including the highest rated programs on radio and TV in Brazil. We can say without a doubt that Yoani Sanchez’s visit to Brazil definitely has lifted the veil from the Cuban political reality for the Brazilian people. Brazil finally knows that Cuba is not the Communist Party, nor is the Cuban nation Fidel Castro; it knows that Cuba is a diverse people, intelligent and battling for their freedom.

I want to recount the main points touched on by Yoani Sánchez in the dozens of hours of recording time for Brazilian TV, all aired in prime time, in addition to the points made earlier in this article:

• She dismantled the myth of education and health care, currently in a state of collapse.
• She analyzed the type of repression characteristic of Fidel, different from his brother Raul.
• She answered all questions circulating on the Internet about her.
• She demonstrated with examples that the Cuban people are as plural and ideologically varied as the Brazilian people.
• She explained in detail why the so-called Cuban Revolution “has not existed for many years.”
• She demonstrated with data that in Cuba there is no socialism, but rather state capitalism.
• She demonstrated with examples the failure of the regime with regards to the national economy.
• She referred several times to the miserable wages paid to Cuban workers,
• She spoke of the profit that the Cuban State makes off of workers in the tourism sector.
• She predicted a few days in advance the rise of Díaz-Canel.
• She spoke critically about the limited changes implemented by Raul Castro.
• She explained in detail her views on the ideologies of ‘left’ and ‘right’.

Articles by this author can be found at http://www.cubalibredigital.com

2 March 2013

In Minority Report, the precogs were used in the pre-crime unit to predict possible murders. Already the presupposition is morally questionable while at the same time familiar as we have seen in our own Penal Code the “crime” of “pre-criminal dangerousness.” But can graphology emulate the precog, or at least can prove with scientific accuracy that traits of a criminal personality, or criminal, can be detected through handwriting? The answer is categorical and is negative.

I speak advisedly. Certified as an expert in documents at the Central Laboratory of Criminal Science, my specialty was handwriting. Many books have been written on the subject that “prove” that the handwriting reveals personality traits still hidden or that one tries to hide. Always using familiar characters, whose life history is closed and whose biographies have been widely documented to “prove” what their handwriting reveals in this or that characteristic. But nothing can be found in the wide literature on this subject with respect to a single systematic study of the relationship between handwriting-personality, and if there is, it is greatly subjective.

It is possible to establish the authorship of a document, because handwriting is a somewhat scatterbrained sister of the fingerprint in its individuality; by the same principle it is possible to detect a forgery, although there are fakes with a high degree of complexity and elaboration that shed a false positive. By the handwriting may know the approximate age and sex. Writing reveals, among other things, personality traits, cultural level, if a person is writing with their other hand, if they try to disguise their writing (for which there must be a comparison between two or more documents).

I find it irresponsible and manipulative to present at a trial an “expert” to certify by the handwriting of a paragraph, that a defendant has such and such a tendency in his personality. With a mere glance at a piece of paper copied reluctantly and under pressure, an expert certifies in court with his statement that the accused has the characteristics necessary to convict.

Graphology is a pseudoscience. No crime lab expert could offer an unproven statement by a photo-tableau illustrating their expert conclusions. To do so borders on the ridiculous: the case of my friend Angel Santiesteban, was judged in advance.

March 4 2013

Two of my independent journalism colleagues asked me from Havana about corruption in Spain and in particular the cases of Iñaki Urdangarin, son-in-law of King Juan Carlos, and Luis Barcenas, former treasurer of the Peoples Party and former senator from that political group, which seems to be in jeopardy after the discovery of their Swiss bank accounts.

Both colleagues explain to me that the official press in Cuba is highlighting the Barcenas case as a symbol of corruption of the governing party which, according to them, shows the cynicism of the Island mandarins, who have spread corruption and poverty as a way of life and their domination over the island they alone have governed since 1959.

As I already said to these friends, I just said that Barcenas and Urdangarin are two examples of a phenomenon that comes from Spain’s past and seems to multiply with the economic, social and ethical crisis. In the area of the politics of budget cuts, the millions of unemployed, the public protests and the expressions of uncertainty aired in the press to report with precision the more than 200 directors processed by the courts for defrauding their electors in four districts in the country. At bottom there are the structural problems that threaten democracy and the need for reforms to lead the nation toward a state of social well-being.

They are investigating the King’s son-in-law for appropriating money obtained from promoting sporting events in Palma de Mallorca. Luis Barcenas, who admitted having 38 million euros in Switzerland, on charges of bribery, tax evasion, and defrauding the public treasury. The judge is looking for the origin of so much money and the patronage implications of this conspirator in a melodrama that, along with stealing from the party, is in the public eye.

I made it clear to my friends that Spain has problems and is a difficult country to govern, like others in the European Mediterranean basin. In Spain, however, they air their dirty laundry and expose the politicians who forget their commitments to the voters and focus on their personal enrichment. Luis Barcenas, alias “the bastard,” is one example.

March 4 2013

The writer Angel Santiesteban-Prats is now in La Lima prison, located in Guanabacoa. He was transferred there on Saturday after spending a day in Valle Grande prison where he wrote this post, the first that we have from him in his captivity.

Each and every one of the posts he writes we will publish here in his blog “The Children Nobody Wanted.”

Behind Bars

Finally, the Cuban government has me behind bars. After 4 years of an arbitrary “legal process” where they have violated the most basic rules of the legal system and I have faced multiple charges, all of them with the clear intention of degrading my image before public opinion, and so my process will serve to intimidate Cuban writers and artists and I will close my blog, “The Children Nobody Wanted,” with which I’ve reached the light, that once possessed is irreversible.

Despite the suffering and the pain it has caused, especially for my family, I feel proud of being in the place where so many good Cubans have ended up.

From here I will try to write my posts and fulfill my modest role in achieving a democratic opening in Cuba, I will continue my struggle and resistance to the totalitarian regime. I’m just a citizen who decided to take off the mask and expose the truth of my country as as far as I can, in writing.

Now I find myself surrounded by men who committed various crimes but complain of racism, beatings and social injustices. When they hear that Cuba will soon change their eyes light up.

Other inmates have had the term ’’dangerousness*’’ applied to them, a supposedly legal term in our country. Individuals are sanctioned in advance, on suspicion that they might commit some illegality; the majority of them are black and do not have State jobs.

Today begins a new stage in my life and the path I have chosen. The hope of Cubans, their persistence in the fight will bring the change needed to become a prosperous and democratic state.

Without more from my “tall and slanted” handwriting I send you my hugs and thanks for all who have shown their solidarity and support for the cause.

From Valle Grande prison, 1 March 2013

Ángel Santiesteban Prats

*Translator’s note: The Cuban Penal Code recognizes the crime of “pre-criminal dangerousness” which carries a sentence of 1-4 years. The “crime” is the potential to commit a crime, not actually having committed one.

March 5 2013