Translating Cuba

In geology, a fault is a discontinuity that is formed by the fracture of the surface rocks of the earth, when tectonic forces exceed the resistance in these rocks it causes tidal waves and earthquakes. The same thing happens with power; readjustment is accompanied by apparent cataclysm.

In Cuba, the punishment, harassment and expulsion campaign for foreign businessmen based in Havana started in 2005, days after the General Raul Castro, his entourage and family, returned from a tour of Spain and Portugal, where they had gone as guests by the grace of a man named Amerigo, not Vespucci but Amorim, who is, according to Forbes magazine, the richest man in Portugal; his fortune amounts to 7 billion dollars.

Américo Ferreira de Amorim long ago inherited a small cork factory founded by his late grandfather in 1870; today the Amorim Group is the largest cork producer in the world. A diversified emporium, ranging from oil to banking, textile, forestry, agriculture, real estate and tourism. They have representations in countries such as the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, Russia, Angola, Canada, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, England, Netherlands, USA, and Spain.

Mr. Américo, a personal friend of Fidel and Raul Castro from the 60s, set up his company (Amorim Trading Import and Export SA) in Havana in the 80’s. Located at 6604 5th Ave between 66th and 68th in Miramar. Amorin, is principally involved in the provision of inputs for the Cuban ministry and industry of fishing. It finances major commercial operations of the Cuban government such as purchasing fuel, milk powder and frozen fish for the army and the population. It has the exclusive right to export Cuban seafood to the European market. With the French group ACCOR it maintains investments in the construction and management of hotels such as the Sevilla in Havana and the Punta Arenas in Varadero. Why does this company stands out above the rest of all foreign firms based in Cuba?

During the trip to Europe mentioned above, and over a platter with brie and raspberry jam, a perfect delight to the eye and palate, General Raul Castro asked his old friend Amorim, that for better enforcement of joint ventures (without specifying the meaning of “sets”), one person in particular should carry the reins of the Amorim Group in Cuba. Wish granted, favor paid. In 2006 Mr. José Guimares, a Portuguese businessman, and one of the oldest directors in the management group was replaced; by someone unscrupulous with ambitions and a bandit’s heart who knows the danger of betrayal. Paolo Titolo, Italian by birth and extortionist by profession, husband of Mariela Castro, Raul’s son-in-law.

Corruption in Cuba is a common practice that has always been present in the most inaccessible of the halls of power, and from there it descends, contagious. The flood of smugglers we’ve seen recently, cases of embezzlement we read about in the press, the diversion of resources, foreign firms dissolved, and the many officials who are publicly renounced or are sanctioned by an apparent anti-corruption policy, is no more than a smoke screen and temper tantrum by power to subtly hide the indecency of a brothel.

January 21 2013

Although far from my beloved planet, I keep up with what is happening there thanks to the internet, which here in this corner of France, as in almost every other country, is available to all, which is not the case back home, where only the most privileged have free access to it.

This small city of 20,000 inhabitants has everything any human being would need to live—heated homes, well-paved roads and excellent traffic signals, clean streets and sidewalks, a system for sorting out the trash generated in the course of daily life, schools, churches, stores, restaurants, parks, supermarkets and museums. Most notably the state and the citizenry also pay a great deal of attention to protected ecological zones, the preservation and care of plants and wildlife, and to city rules and regulations. It has,in other words, everything that a human being needs for a good and healthy existence.

Being with this very important part of my family, I cannot get out of my mind how ironic it is that my small island is being punished— as though all the exhaustion and suffering that has built up for more than half a century were not enough— by an epidemic that had been eradicated since the 19th century.

Today, I carefully observed citizens and neighbors taking their own trash to locations near their homes, where all this material was sorted into separate containers to be later recycled and repurposed as new commodities. Even children know about and take part in this activity. In their homes and in their schools they are educated and informed about the importance of this civic activity. They are also taught respect for community property and the need to abide by rules and regulations. All this made me embarrassed for my country, which until 1959 was at the forefront in Latin America with respect to hygiene and public health. This was also true in many other areas, where we ranked at or near the top, not only in the region, but also in relation to some European countries.

As it began to snow, the picturesque landscape of Alsatian buildings— some very old ones mixed with modern ones, all built according to regulations and respectful of an architectural sensibility that does not disrupt the harmony of the surroundings— took on a new enchantment as it became cloaked in white.

Returning from out stroll, we walked along Allée des Platanes, between the villages of Blotzheim and Altkirsch, which had been planted with trees on both sides of the roadway during the reign of Napoleon III. I could not help thinking about my neighbors in Havana, Carmelo and Felipe, who had not left a single tree standing on our street. Here is but one example of the differences in culture and education.

January 21 2013

Source: Yoani’s Twitter

21 January 2013

The phrase, attributed in Cuba both to Stevenson and Savon, the complete super greats of Cuban boxing, is my compass, my alpha-omega, my real reality since I deal with hardware, software, platforms, all to become technologically literate, struggling to reach the sixth grade.

Whenever I face something new — in this area, and that’s every day, and I, for my part, also find something worthwhile every day — my first reaction is to be stunned. I don’t understand anything, if it’s explained to me I forget it immediately, I am afraid to do something on my own and mess everything up. In therapy to overcome my inferiority complex, I have become a student of manuals, a watcher of video demonstrations, there is no instruction booklet I haven’t examined with a magnifying glass to read how to put the Ariel font in six-point type. It’s ironic because with this aura of knowledge, young people come to me for help, which gives me a tingle of insecurity: of losing the respect of those I try to help, and facing my own ignorance and affecting them.

When I already think like that, imagine last Friday when I got a double challenge: My cellphone debut and I also had to activate MMS to connect my Twitter account with TwitPic, the application for images. I spent a 10 CUC car and a little more (every MMS costs. 2.30 CUC [about $2.50 U.S.]), and I would have continued had a not received a very nice text message, I don’t know from whom: “Congratulations, Please, do not try to send any more Twitpics, you already sent the same photo three times.”

So my training ran between pride and embarrassment. Me? I’m not saying if the technique is the technique.

January 21 2013

Once again Mr. Jose Ramon Machado Ventura addressed the issue of the speed of “the transformations” driven by Raul Castro, warning that these processes are distorted from the outside by voices “paid by the empire” who demand more rapid progress naively believing that they are going to lead to capitalism.

On this occasion Cuba’s first vice president had the audacity to add that Cubans enjoy freedom of expression because “the people are constantly stating their views and opinions without any type of coercion.” According to the version published in the newspaper Granma, “Cubans talk on the street, on the block, at the meetings of the CDR [Committee for the Defense of the Revolution] and the FMC [Cuban Women’s Federation]; and if they are students they freely express themselves in the systematic interchanges in the student organizations, and everyone is heard.”

The second Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party forgot the detail that the freedom of expression of a nation is not measured by the examples he mentions, but by the access people have to the media. On the other hand, to affirm that there is no type of coercion for offering views and opinions is to deny the existence of the repudiation rallies, of State Security’s taking note of who on the block and in the workplace dares to push the limits of what can be openly criticized.

It is true that people are increasingly less afraid, but that is not a credit to the executioners but rather to the victims. To say that people express themselves freely is like saying that the number of people who drink milk at breakfast is three times the number who receive it on the ration book, or that in Cuba no one is barefoot, or that the number of people with cellphones is already equal to those with land lines, data that may be true but that are not the results of the achievements of the system, but rather a victory of the citizens who find alternative paths to earn a living and better their standard of living.

The so-called measures of perfecting or updating the model are not steps towards capitalism although they do, indeed, deviate substantially from what we once described as Socialism. In proportion to their ceasing to resemble that deceiving egalitarian utopia, people feel better. The aged leaders can disguise as continuity what is clearly a dismantling, but life will have the last word. Perhaps by then “they” will no longer be among us, or no longer occupy their current positions; and then the blame for the final collapse will fall on the new wolves of their own litter, who today applaud them and who tomorrow will tear them to pieces without pity.

21 January 2013

In Havana you can get a hooker to make a house-call for 20 convertible pesos. Illegal “cable” antennas for a monthly fee of 10 CUC. Pirated internet connections for 2 CUC an hour. And illegal copies of soap operas, mini-series and movies, especially those from the United States, are on the rise.

There are houses where on weekends spectacular dance parties with enormous plasma screens and techno music take place. They charge a 10 peso entrance fee in hard currency. If you like sports, for 25 pesos you can go to certain homes whose residents have converted their living rooms into actual mini-stadiums. Between swigs of run, you can watch the Atlético-Real Madrid match.

At the moment the local Cuban video game market is also on the rise. Of course it does not have the power and scope of foreign companies which in 2011 alone earned 74 billion dollars worldwide through non-stop distribution of cinematic quality productions.

It is almost all illegal, but Cubans do it by cobbling together a minimal infrastructure. Using pre-historic access to the internet and obsolete technologies, they have created a fledgling entertainment industry. Why do they do it? To provide distractions for their stressed-out loved ones, neighbors and friends, who spend most of their time looking for food.

Pirated disks with the latest editions of video games can now be purchased at private stalls which also offer CDs and DVDs of movies and music videos. If you so desire, you can also call a guy who knows about information technology.

The man will arrive at your house with an external hard drive and a long list of games for sale. The prices range from one to two convertible pesos, depending on how recent they are. Within a few minutes he will install SIM 4 or FIFA Player 2012 on your computer. There are also experts at “cracking” Xbox, Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation in order to read their disks. In case anything breaks down, there are no state-owned shops which repair video games, but there are any number of private shops that will do this work.

If you do not have relatives on the other side of the pond who can send you sophisticated video games, you can buy them on Havana’s black market, but you will need a fat wallet. If it is a new PlayStation 2 still in its box, you will spend between 100 and 120 convertible pesos. A used one will cost perhaps 40 convertible pesos.

Prices for recent versions of PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo vary between 300 and 400 convertible pesos. Video games are not for sale in hard currency stores. Some owners will rent them for 20 pesos an hour. And, believe me, there are plenty of customers. Everyone in the neighborhood with gather in someone’s living room to play violent video games in which blood and mayhem abound.

Many parents will gladly pay these prices to keep their adolescent children entertained with video games and off the street corner, a place synonymous with bottles of rum and Parkisonil* pills.

Sometimes the entire family gets in on the act. After 7PM the Gonzalezes and their eight- and eleven-year-old sons plug a video game into their 32 inch plasma screen TV and keep playing until 9PM, the time when the soap operas start.

“I made the investment (of buying the video game) as a way of being together during the dead hours of Cuban television when they usually broadcast reruns or those suffocating round table talk shows. It’s true we don’t realize it most of the time, but playing the game is more interesting,” says Roberto Gonzalez.

Faced with a bleak future and a hard life which produces waves of anxiety and hopelessness, people prefer to take refuge behind a joystick. And it is not only the young who take pleasure in video games.

Just ask Juana, a 68-year-old housewife. She often sits for up to ten hours in front of a computer, and any number of times has left the beans to burn after becoming absorbed in the search for clues in a detective game.

Iván García

Photo fromdiario ecuatoriano Hoy. Havanans also like going to the movies, especially in December when the city hosts the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, as it has done for the past 34 years.

*Translator’s note: Also known as trihexyphenidyl, it is a drug used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and to treat the sides effects of anti-psychotic therapies. In recent years it has become an illicit recreational drug in Cuba. Untreated overdoses can be fatal, especially in children.

January 19 2013

An old-fashioned TV antenna projects from the window, but it’s just a masquerade, a simulation. The television signal actually comes through a cable running across several roofs and one street. The illegal tendon brings several families a selection of cartoons, soap operas and musicals for some ten convertible pesos a month (a little more than ten dollars U.S.). Only the owner of the satellite dish can decide what can be viewed at any moment. Remote control in hand, he has the power to change the channel and to decide what all the clients on his network will have access to. He avoids political topics to stay out of trouble, and favors reality shows. The final result is escapist TV, something to get away from the daily grind, a collection of little cultural value but a lot of fun.

As a rival to this “entrepreneur’s program schedule,” as of this Sunday, we have TeleSUR, the Venezuelan channel sent via satellite to Cuban State TV. For years Cubans have had access only to three hours of the programming offered by this multi-country channel. Now we will have 13 and a half hours of live broadcasts, with content ranging from the informative to the educational; from crime reporting to professional sports. A novelty, indeed, that won’t lack a big dose of ideology. TeleSUR takes after the productions of our Cuban Institute of Radio and Television in its broadcasting axiom: the ALBA countries are as close to paradise as the rest of the world is to hell.

Fortunately we don’t have to choose only among these two options. The “leaked” satellite TV or the biased vision of TeleSUR are not, today, our only choices. For months now the alternative market offerings have been widening, with collections that join documentaries and series. A kind of on-demand television, a programming for every taste, distributed on digital media such as hard drives and USB flash memories. If the national production doesn’t diversify and expand, it will lose a part of its audience to these new competitors. And it will end up being a collection of programs borrowed or pirated from other broadcasters, an overlapping of unattractive audiovisual material without its own personality.

Yoani Sánchez

21 January 2013