Translating Cuba

I entered the terminal cafeteria. They sold various snacks: mortadella, sausage, croquettes; some soft drinks and, obviously, cigars, tobacco and rum. But this time there was another product: a rectangular carton with four papers stuck to is, each one with the photo and biography of one of the municipal candidates to the Provincial and National Assemblies, for the February 3 elections.

The most striking was that of a woman, probably a good person, who is the parliamentary candidate, although in Najasa I asked and no one knew her, they hadn’t seen her at nine in the morning on the road to Cubanacan for lack of transportation to get to her job, nor getting up in the morning with a farmer to see the conditions in which she milks the cow even though it’s prohibited to eat it.

Her election is assured, although I may have been the only reader of her biography. This candidate for Najasa was born and educated in military schools of Havana, she was the military prosecutor and director of the legal counsel of the Council of Ministers, and the only thing that makes me mention her in this blog is to show evidence of how people who are placed where they should be deciding the present and future of Cubans, are precisely those least suited to defend it.

The other candidates of the troubled township are Communist Party cadres, those of who will fill the seats of Olympus; we know they will not change anything in the lives of their constituents. I’m sure the are better people than those who post their dry resumes, but what are the the needs of the people of Najasa?

Because none of the biographies tell me which of those candidates will desire and have the courage to take the floor in the Assembly and rail against the inefficient state monopolies — ECIL, Acopio, and the Meat Collective at the head — that absorb the milk, crops and meat produced by farmers.

Or which of them will tell the commander Guillermo Garcia Frias, director of the deeply in debt National Wildlife Company, to ask permission and pay for every air conditioned night by the pool for himself — about 40 CUC for other Cubans — on his visits to the La Belen (un)Protected Area; for every State pig — or is the people — that he orders roasted for his pleasure, when tons of children all around the school that morning have half-empty stomachs; for every half-gallon of gas he burns on his family excursions. Where does the promotion of these candidates announce which one is interested in what and explain them to the thousands of farmers who in 2013 still don’t know what the Internet is and how it can change your life, and then go to collect their signatures and throw them on the table of someone who can’t even log off to get them?

Anyway, how do I know if any of these candidates prefer to be true to the people they represent rather than to their political leaders? Their biographies don’t tell me, nor do their faces. And it seems the same all over the country, that has passed across our TV screens lately.

I think all this sitting at the stop heating toward the mountain, where we waited almost 3 hours without transport, we being a pregnant girl, a high school boy, an old woman with two children, a drunk man, and another who became desperate and went to drink beer or rum — that we don’t need. Like us, like Najasa, this February 3rd Cuba still waits, and votes against itself.

But with less and less patience.

January 31 2013

Meanwhile,Santiesteban said that Leonardo Padura , as in the past, has been indifferent to injustices being committed by the Communist authorities and that, despite the fact that some news agencies present him as a dissident, the writer of detective novels “plays with the chain, but never with the monkey,” as the common expression goes in Cuba.

However, Santiesteban recognizes that Leopoldo Luis, a former member of the Bearded Cayman cultural publication, asked on Twitter for the writers of the island to protest the court case that had been fabricated and said that no author deserved to be sentenced for his writing.

The Superior Court upheld the Cuba regime’s sentence of 5 years against the award-winning writer Ángel Santiesteban, who was accused of housebreaking and injury. The author, who was awarded the Casa de las Americas prize, among other awards, regretted the decision and said that he is an innocent man.

Santiesteban said that at the trial they did not present any evidence against him, and that one of the supposed proofs rests on the declaration of a lieutenant colonel in the regime who argued that his handwriting indicated his guilt.

Meaning, more than anything, the official said that the author is guilty of his own writing. The Cuban writer added that his problems with the law in Cuba began when he decided to write freely in his blog, The Children Nobody Wanted.

Angel Santiesteban, waiting to be sent to prison to serve his sentence, said his only regret is not having taken off the mask, which he was forced to wear to live under the regime in Cuba, much earlier.

From Martí Noticias

February 1 2013

I will not attempt to recount, much less make a personal comparison between Martí and José de San Martín, the valiant warrior who ceded the glory to Simon Bolivar, in Peru; the Mexican priest Miguel Hidalgo, who was magnanimous to his defeated opponents; Sucre, the betrayed and murdered Mariscal de Ayacucho; or the Indian Benito Juárez, El Benemérito de las Américas, who furthered the ideals of Father Hidalgo, who went in his carriage to defeat the invading French, when he said: “The people and the government should respect the rights of all. Among individuals, as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace. ” They all were and are great Americans.

From a very young age he became interested in reading. Inhis imagination he traveled with thinking of the classics of Greece and Rome to the most ancient East. Drank as from the national fountains of the priest José Agustín Caballero, of José Antonio Saco, Domingo del Monte and Father Felix Varela. He recognized the work of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and internal struggle of the misunderstood exil José María Heredia, the “Cantor del Niágara.”

He castigated Carlos Manuel de Cespedes and Ignacio Agramonte for disagreements, what’s more he understood that with them predominated zeal for the best performance of duty to the Fatherland. He praised Constituent Assembly of Guámiro, which he considered the birth of the democratic future of the Cuban people.

He loved beauty, life, flowers, women, children, poetry, his neighbor, the freedom and independence of his homeland … but was also misunderstood.

José Martí still remains a misunderstood figure for most Cubans. The infinite legacy he left is in his voluminous correspondence sustained through the years with family, friends, writers and literati, personalities of his era and independence fighters; in his speeches, in his newspaper articles; in his reinvented, multifaceted complex poetry and his tremendous work as a revolutionary fighter.

His oratory, his power of persuasion, passion and personal commitment to provide the basis and foundation of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, and his hard work on the unification of the Cubans, rising above differences and opinions found between independence fighters prior to the “necessary war” to achieve independence from Spain, are still themes that are studied today.

He was a prophet or a predestined, perhaps ahead of his times. He always lived with the worry of finding solutions to the complex problems of his beloved Cuba. In many ways he lived an adverse life. A third of his life was spent outside the island. Spain, Britain, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Jamaica and the United States formed the corollary of his extensive experience as a political exile.

Now, 160 years since the birth of the Apostle, his dream of a Cuba, “With all and for the good of all,” is unrealized. Used as propaganda standard for the personal ends of the dictators for more than 50 years, Cuba is far from the example of civility and morality I was always taught since I was a little boy in school.

Those who recall his birth every January 28 are aware that Jose Marti still has much to teach and do for the future of Cuba.

January 28 2013

Organized by the Partido Demócrata Cristiano de Cuba (Christian Democratic Party of Cuba) and the Cuban Democratic Alliance, and sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a workshop was held in Mexico City on January 28 and 29 in which members of Cuban civil society on the island, in the diaspora and guests from various countries participated. Proyecto Demócrata Cubano (The Cuban Democratic Project), an active participant in the workshop, sent this document to share with our readers.

KAS Conference Papers 2013 and Council of the ODCA in Chile

Documents Conferencia KAS 2013 and Consejo de la ODCA en Chile

Spanish post
January 31 2013

Very few governments have manipulated emigration in such a grotesque way — as an escape valve, as an instrument of repression, or as a weapon of mass unrest — as has Cuba. From the arbitrary separation of families in the early years, through the Camarioca Exodus in 1965, the forced labor of at least two years of farm work for anyone who asked to leave, the end of the “freedom flights” and the release of the political prisoners, the massive asylum in the Peruvian embassy and the subsequent Mariel Boatlift, the Maleconazo of 1994 and the murders of those trying to leave clandestinely or through hijacking boats, to the years-long condition as hostages of the family members of athletes, professionals and those serving on official technical missions abroad, ending with repercussions against all the family members of those who deserted, Cuban migration policy has moved between various shades of terror. And that’s not to mention immigration policy.

In the last fifteen years they have relaxed their fist, and have seen the economic benefits of the emigration-immigration flow, given the material need after the fall of the socialist block and much of the population’s loss of interest in ideology, as well as the loss of the narrative of those in power. We must also consider the collapse of the world economy in the last five years and shadowy international terrorism, which have led many countries to restrict the entry of immigrants to their countries, and to watch over those who visit with greater zeal.

Now, with their brand new passports, Cubans will face the task of applying for visas to leave as tourists. For six decades Cubans have been one of the few people in the world (I dare say the only people), who with their labor cannot earn a currency that has value in the international market. Without tricks, gimmicks or help from family abroad, almost no one can save enough convertible currency to pay for a trip. Knowing this, the rulers pass the hot potato to foreign governments.

Many years ago, when I left the Peruvian embassy with a safe conduct and a passport, and under the Cuban government’s promise that if I obtained a visa from any country I could leave, in the four weeks between that day and my departure through Mariel, along with a constant juggling act to avoid the crowds that surrounded my apartment every day throwing eggs and rotten tomatoes while screaming insults and threats, I took the trouble to make the rounds of as many embassies in Havana as I could. I went to the then West German embassy, the Austrian, Canadian and Swedish. Everyone refused me a visa even though I assured them that it would just be a transit visa and that I had financially solvent family abroad and would not be a burden on their governments.

It got to the point where I was so fed up with his attitude that I asked the Austrian ambassador if there were some cultural or economic accords with Cuban that were so important and so fragile that they had to refuse me a transit visa. He did not answer, he just grimaced with an expression that was almost a commiserative smile. Only the English listened to my case and promised me a visa, which required a second visit I never made, because the police came looking for me to send me out through Mariel.

Clearly things have changed a lot everywhere since then, and many countries have liberalized their awarding of visas to Cubans, but we can already see that after the new measures of the Cuban government, many countries, such as Ecuador, which previously required had no visas for Cubans, have changed their requirements. Now Cubans waving their passports in search of visas, will encounter multiple negatives or excuses to delay or not grant them a visa.

I don’t expect the situation with respect to the United States to change much. Other countries will add new requirements. Eventually, those with letters of invitation, or financial support from some family member or acquaintance, will receive their visas. The rest, it’s very unlikely they will be granted anything and will have to wander from embassy to embassy to realize their that dream of departure could eventually become a nightmare.

But there is hope. Among the few countries who don’t require visas from Cubans, many are in areas devastated by recent wars or famine, such as Botswana, Kyrgyzstan, Montenegro, Serbia, Haiti and Mongolia, and they will find a soul mate in the Pacific Ocean.

This is the case for the island of Niue, a tiny coral atoll, 2,400 kilometers northeast of New Zealand, with a population of 1,400 inhabitants, with a constitutional monarchy government but associated in almost all respects to New Zealand, where 15% of its population lives, sending remittances — which constitute 40% of the island’s economy — back to their families. It turns out that Niue, for ten years now, has been associated with a major scientific project with New Zealand to develop the cultivation and export of… moringa!

There is no doubt that with this background, Cubans can become a bulwark for the economic and demographic expansion of the small country.

Roberto Madrigal

Translated from Roberto Madrigal’s blog.

31 January 2013

I speak to her. A thread of tension between us. A rush of erectile blood in our crotches, I know. We are all still raw between memory and imagination. One slip could introduce us into each other for the thousandth time. We grope each other, we preserve each other. I tell her things. I speak of the utility of spite. I ask her not to be crushed by her own goodness. To despise and be vile, to escape her contemporaries and believe only in God and in me(many times resurrected after being discharged as a volcano, vomiting spasms and moans, so now I’m her more tangible god, as she was mine after the white screenshot of my supernovas). I demand that she hate Cuba and her depressing post-Castroism Sundays. Don’t be afraid, my love, if in any case the soldiers are going to kill us one by one, before the winter comes that purifies the hell that is this country.

She hears me. She cries. She sounds disconsolate. She speaks to me with a sepulchral calm (provincial cemeteries are worse than the worst death). I make note that for us life doesn’t even exist in any other place. We are alone. We get old (I see her as a baby through her forty years, as virgin as the decade of the seventies, as spring-like as someone born in her own backyard and within her shamelessly unpronounceable organs). It is too late for everything. The rabid vengeance is not enough to catch our breath. We are sick and no one will believe us. We cannot go on like this. What will we do, then, my love. And we won’t hang up the phone at least for the rest of today.

And so the crazy time of a Sunday afternoon in the Cuban September of 2012 stretches on. Sometimes I just hear her swallowing. Sometimes voices of the holocaust arrive. A dog. A girl. A horn. Trendy music that crosses the Bacunayagua chasm and brings us back to reality.

She reads me her latest wonderful poems. Texts out of nowhere in Cuban literature, because they were written before and after any literature or nation. She asks me what I’m writing and I have to confess that I stopped writing years ago. I am a puppet in the criminal hands of the Cuban State. I live in someone else’s biography. But I am proud to be just that, because it would not have been worth the trouble to have been me.

September 9 2012

Blue elephants, clay roads, arms stretching to the horizon. Escape, fly, jump out the window without getting hurt… to the very abyss, were the sensations pursued by so many teenagers far from their parents, living under the few ethical values conveyed to us by the teachers. Some nights the boys went to the sports area and made an infusion from trumpet flowers — belladonna — the poor people’s drug, they said. At the end of my sophomore year powders to inhale and “grass” also started to appear in that high school in the countryside. They were brought in mostly by the students living in the slum neighborhood of El Romerilla. There were giggles in the morning classes after they ingested it, far away looks staring right through the blackboard, and heightened libidos with all those “life attractions.” With regular doses your stomach no longer burns or feels hunger, some of my already “hooked” classmates told me. Fortunately, I was never tempted.

On leaving high school, I knew that outside the walls of that place the same situation repeated itself, but on a larger scale. In my neighborhood of San Leopoldo, I learned to recognize the half-open eyelids of the “hooked,” the weakness and the pale skin of the inveterate consumer, and the aggressive attitudes of some who, after taking a hit, thought they were kings of the world. When the 21st century arrived the offerings in the market-for-escape grew: melca, marijuana, coke — this latter is currently 50 convertible pesos a gram* — EPO pills, pink and green Parkisinol, crack, poppers and every kind of psychotropic. The buyers are from varied social strata, but for the most part they are looking to escape, to have a good time, get out of the rut, leave behind the daily suffocation. They inhale, drink, smoke and then you see them dancing all night at a disco. After the euphoria wears off they fall asleep in front of the television screen where Raul Castro is assuring us that, “there are no drugs in Cuba.”

*Translator’s note: More than $50 U.S. in a country where a doctor earns the equivalent of about $20 a month.

January 30 2013