The old Communist dogmas dictated that certain behaviors were seen as socially immoral actions. There are several testimonies of people interned in concentration camps were they tried to reeducate the so-called “Dispersed Sexual Addresses.” Loving someone of the same sex was a criminal act that entailed consequences and established punishments.

I will not write about a degrading “yesterday” that is restless when you dig into it. There are more than a few leaders who, knowing the power of weapons, especially when they point, decided to hide themselves and squeezed into a closet where social differences had no distinction. The prudish modesty of the barricaded closet just like the Caesars, Alexanders, conductors of the new path, and Moncada heroines.

But times change, the USSR died, and Socialist Camp came to an end, and the days of the Messiah Hugo Chavez appear to near their end, the Revolutionary eyes no longer see a certain enchantment in the battlefields and with an extravagant touch, perhaps something obscene, convert soldiers into magnets for investors.

The new Cuban fashion mixes the lines of pleasure, torture and humiliation, transforms martial units into sadomasochistic dungeons, and for discriminating tastes even arranges home delivery.

With a simple call to the military unit UM 1011 in its enclave south of Havana in the municipality of Managua you can receive, direct and with no additional cost, like Valkyrie stags of the gods, and with no fear of a glorious death for waiting the reward from the lewd pimp that is your fatherland: young recruits who will be willing to offer their noble and manly charms.

After hearing “at your service” on the other end of the line, you have to answer in code something like, “I need a green jacket for my blue passport.” That the recipient is free, does not mean that the dream is free, yet the clientele seems to increase.

The sad excuse of a human seems chilling to me. Incredible sincerity, unparalleled effrontery. A spiral of decadence, the degradation of the market, I would have to be very indolent not to want justice.

Military service in Cuba is obligatory, every young man on reaching 16 must go to the military office where he lives and register; not to do so is to subject himself to criminal law.

Now I repeat terribly convincing phrase of a “distinguished entrepreneur” who assured me he had been a casual user of this type of service, of official pandering: “There is no creature on earth who does not fight for survival. Cuba encourages the causes, and fights the consequences like someone who says close your eyes, hold out your hands, and open your mouth.”

February 10 2013

The literary desert that Miami was considered to be a few years ago is ending. On Friday night, February 8, the La Otra Esquina de las Palabras (The Other Corner of Words) hosted Daniel Morales who presented his novel La casa del sol naciente (The House of the Rising Sun) (Homagno 2011).

Among the fragments of his minimalist prose and the winks at a phantom country everyone associates with Cuba, we can discover a narrator with the strength to tell the truth, enter the premises of the imagination and create for us a world of realities that belongs to us for having lived it or having lost it forever in exile, disillusionment and the death of hope. La casa… finds its breeding grounds in those atrocious years of the 70s and 80s, the marginalization and the institutionalized repression against anything that smelled “foreign.” It is a well constructed narrative body and only someone with Daniel’s patience can go so far… and so well.

La Otra Esquina de las Palabras is a gift to us from the poet Joaquín Gálvez, a place for book lovers and bohemian Miami. Located in the courtyard of Café Demetrio, Joaquin specified that the night was dedicated to the writer Angel Santiesteban, who is in Cuba with the terror of the sword of Damocles hanging over his head.

Any afternoon a little man dressed in blue might appear to nicely ask him to accompany him to the dungeons to serve his five-year sentence.

The reason? In the absence of evidence, the withdrawn charges by his accusing ex-wife, and the testimony before the cameras of a false witness, a police expert decided that Angel’s handwriting, the slant of his letters, revealed that he was lying.

On the night of February 8, the fiery words of Idabel Rosales, and the presence of Santiesteban’s sister and his friends was an act of human solidarity. The results of the sale of the book have been sent to Angel, and more, according to those closest to him.

A couple of years ago when this odyssey began an excellent Cuban narrator said something like: “They say that Angel is the center of attention,” which then was only rumors. Now the fire has grown and consumed not only his house but those of all who believe ourselves to be his friends, needing only to rise within the voices of those who accompanied him to literary soirees, to the projects to find young writers, and those who believed they could constitute a learned republic with room for all: those who applaud without being asked and the restless, those who already make up a long blacklist.

All photos by Luis Felipe Rojas

February 9 2013

World Classifications of Freedom – Reporters Without Borders

February 10 2013

My grandfather chewed tobacco, biting down on it and moistening it with his saliva in an obsessive ritual that continued throughout the day. He also had a pipe, to which he added the coarse-cut tobacco he prepared himself, which he smoked only after meals. He belonged to the generation that grew up watching the most famous Hollywood stars smoking on the big screen and he imitated them from his seat in the movie theater. My grandfather didn’t look anything like a Humphrey Bogart with his irresistibly gallant cigarettes in Casablanca; nor a Marlon Brando enveloped in nicotine-filled smoke and sensuality. Because, unlike those glamorous men, Basilio Eliseo was a surly islander with calloused hands incapable of writing a full sentence. But he did share, with such famous characters, the enjoyment of a good cigar. The aroma that emanated — I can almost smell it now — was a mixture of sweat and nicotine, which hung in the air for hours after he’d left.

For Cubans, who still enjoy Havana cigars, it has become difficult to satisfy this preference. The market that operates in convertible pesos has absorbed most of a production that now trades at stratospheric prices in specialized luxury stores. Before the astonished eyes of passersby, whose monthly salaries barely exceed twenty-five dollars, the windows display boxes of the Romeo y Julieta brand for the a year’s salary, or a single Cohiba for a month’s wages. The offering of puros for sale in national money, at a price accessible to locals, is practically extinct. In part because the astute traders of the illegal market have captured the supply; they change the bands and sell them to the tourists as higher quality products. But also because the State has lost interest in selling to their own citizens a product they prefer to export, in order to earn juicier profits.

However, beyond commercial or even medical considerations, the truth is that the image of the old Cuban man with a puro between his lips is becoming a thing of promotional posters and commercial advertising. Neither a retiree nor an active professional — whatever their specialty — can afford to buy quality cigars at a price that bears some relation to their legal income. Thus, a national product has become an international one, a symbol of Cuban identity transformed into a trophy for visiting foreigners. Except for the growers who reserve some leaves for their and their family’s own consumption, ever fewer compatriots can choose this type of “smoke.” And it is not about defending, now, a habit harmful to the lungs and prejudicial to the pocketbook; but about recognizing that the so-called Havana cigar is no longer a product for those who live on the island, contrary to what many foreigners believe. The picture of my grandfather Elisha chewing the leaves or tamping the shredded tobacco into his pipe, is just that… an image full of anachronisms from those long ago days.

10 February 2013

This time I will talk about Camagüey, after many trips to my city, trips that are always of return and obligatory because with it, without my neighborhood of La Vigia, without the alleys, the dilapidated rail, the vibrant Republica Street, the thousand church domes bowing to the heavens wherever you look, the Casino Campestre park, the most insistent love poems in the world — courting Dolores Rondon even after her burial — and the statue of Ignacio Agramonte showing me how a man must walk, without all this, I can’t live.

And I speak of Camagüey because the State, always the State, is celebrating its 499 years — even though history says it’s not so — and because there are brave people and brilliant artists there, confirmed lately, in the midst of so much exile by plane or of the soul.

What we from Camagüey celebrate this week is the founding of Santa María del Puerto del Principe — which did not happen in February 1514, but in the summer of the following year — in a remote part of the north coast, tens of miles from the current city. At the site of today the great-great-grandparents of our great-great-grandparents didn’t come to live until January 1528, so we are celebrating 23 years in advance.

But there is little point in showing off so many centuries with no reasons, if the local people live disgusted with their reality, sheltered in their corners, disinterested in or fearful of what happens outside their walls, or having lost faith that life will be better tomorrow.

There is not much to celebrate when some children stand in endless lines to get a passport and leave, and others elude the gaze of the coastguard to launch themselves on the sea. Not when there are the poorest of slums, prisons, pockets and stomachs, leaving such a sad echo.

Rather, these are reasons for the city, between the music and the beer, to stop a moment and say, loudly, “This has to change now.”

And to scream it at every corner, like at the 1514 Restaurant — what a symbolic place to celebrate Camaguey’s birthday — where some guys, this February 1, some guys filled the air with shouts of “Long live human rights!” and “Down with…” before being overwhelmed by State Security.Without even knowing them I like these people who protest, simply for taking the risk of saying loudly and in the city center what thousands of Cubans whisper, with fear and hesitation.

Because Camaguey was always marked on the map of Cuba for its women and men of rebellious and lofty heart, for Joaquin de Aguero being first to free his slaves, Ignacio Agramonte of the army, Ana Betancourt and Amalia Simoni taking to the jungle not to look in the faces of the henchmen making themselves comfortable in the city, Ignacio Mora publishing his paper even from the Nasaja caves where he could share his ideas without pay.

In Camagüey all Cespedes desires for command ended, in Camagüey Huber Matos from Manzanillo found a quorum to tell him Communism was his boss, Camilo Cienfuegos left Camagüey with his head full of different ideas and was never heard from again, in Camagüey… In Camagüey.

On February 2, the Day of our Lady of Candelaria — Camagüey’s patroness — when the city began its anniversary party, some very kind and loving officers dragged me from my house, with cops and without the law, and hid me in an office for four hours to try to terrorize me, to try to buy me — “every man has his price” and I answered “mine is a free Cuba” — trying to dirty me, even grabbing me to receive their effusive kisses and hugs, the more they tried and tried in vain, so naive, it only made me laugh inside. Such desperation in them made me think about their fears.

Two days later, at City Hall, in front of the picture of the Commander-in-Chief diffuse and decomposing on a podium, I smiled again. Maybe next year, for the five hundredth birthday, Camagüey will feel more free. May the Virgin of Candelaria hear us and help us.

February 7 2013

The elevator is a concentration of odors at all hours. When fish arrives at the ration market it’s impregnated with a strong smell of mackerel for days. The man who sells homemade pizzas on the upper floors leaves his aromas, as do the colonies of babies whose mothers take them out for a walk. Sometimes there is a sweet fragrance, most intense, that sticks to the clothes of those who rise and fall in the small metal cabin. Everyone knows it’s the strong effluvium from a flirtatious neighbor who seems to “bathe” herself in colognes and creams every time she goes out into the street. So the joke of the day is to refer to the “tremendous staying power of her perfumes…” A phrase also used outside the context of cosmetics and creams to indicate when the effect of something is strong and long-lasting.

Well, our entire reality lacks staying power. A service is inaugurated today and four weeks later it already begins to lose quality and is restricted. They announce with great fanfare the expansion of train departures or an improvement in bus frequencies, but a few months later everything returns to what it was before. They open the doors of new cultural or recreational institutions and barely half a year later they fall off the cliff for lack of supplies and deterioration. Maintaining standards is an impossibility, even for many self-employed workers who seem to have inherited the State sector’s propensity to decline. Popular wisdom advises using or visiting certain places within the first 72 hours of their opening, because later… nothing will be the same.

The lack of staying power extends from architectural restorations — that will soon have damaged paint from the humidity and leaks in the roof — to bureaucratic procedures which only work efficiently on the first day. Ephemerality marks our pace, transience is the fate of quality in Cuba. Proof of this are the services provided by our post offices and banks. Every now and then, there are reports of administrative transformations to make then efficient, but the improvements don’t last. The time is takes for us to learn about an advance is enough for it to evaporate. Like a ephemeral artwork — or a cheap perfume — the advances often fade without our ever having time to realize they existed.

9 February 2013