Translating Cuba

Lately my days are like weeks concentrated into twenty-four hours. I have Wednesdays that come one after another, Saturdays full of work and Mondays on which nothing seems to start, it all just continues. Sometimes I combine the most incredible events in a single day: sublime or mundane; extraordinary or tedious. But there is, every now and then, a date into which it seems I’d like to drain the entire calendar. December 10th was one of those days and I’d have liked to have on hand “The Devil in the Bottle” — as imagined by Robert Louis Stevenson — to ask him to delay nightfall by at least 72 hours.

This year has been no exception. From the night before, we began to notice “the syndrome of the eve of Human Rights Day.” Everyone notices it, even those who refuse to acknowledge these situations. We can observe an increase in the number of police in the most central parts of the city, and an increased tension in the security forces. For a while now here, the official institutions also try to appropriate a date that, for decades, has belonged to the critical sector of this society. We see television announcers smilingly presenting activities throughout the country that are honoring “rights…” and see their mouths dry up, their tongues falter, simply trying to come out with the words “cultural and social.” For too long the phrase “human rights” has been stigmatized, such that it provokes, at the very least, a blush among those in government spaces who now try to repeat it.

They carry out arrests and threats throughout the country on this day, but we always manage to do something. This year I participated in the opening day of the Endless Poetry Festival. This alternative fiesta in Cuba resurfaced yesterday with a fair of diverse projects. A hundred people gathered at the site of Estado de SATS and erected various exhibition spaces that ranged from music making to activism for racial integration. It was possible to visit the work of the Civic Libraries, the brand new “Journal of Plural Thinking” from the city of Santa Clara, and the young DJs of “18A16 Productions.” There was also our booth under the name “Technology and Freedom,” offering a sample of the work of the bloggers, independent journalists and Twitterers.

An island within the Island, this space was a foretaste of that day when respect for plurality will exist in our country. Laughter, projects, united in diversity and great friendship, formed the magic of the first day of the Endless Poetry Festival. When I got home it seemed I had lived a whole week in the space of one day and — for once — had not needed a bottled demon from a story to do it. With the energy of so many people we had managed to fit into every minute the colossal density of the future.

11 December 2012

The anniversary arrives uneventfully. Today is the Day of Latin American Medicine, and in this or that Cubanmedical center this or that political-cultural-recreational-allegorical act will be held, in which this or that director will repeat this or that second-hand patriotic phrase opportunely memorized. On the platform will be those who live to talk, pretend or lie, and those who simply work saving human lives. When the staging is finished they will leave behind the same panorama as always: a health care professional who asks what do the words accomplish without the support of the facts.

There are heard again these days rumors of an imminent “salary increase” that our sector will get, even specifying that it would be around 30 or 40% of base salary. Personally I very much doubt it — because in one of his last speeches Raul Castro made clear that for now that would not happen. To create expectations today would be like taking the heartbeats for the galloping horse that is expected, but it would be worth the effort, stage direction apart, to reflect on the value of such a “raise” for an economic sector that earns for this country much more than a billion dollars annually.

If true, that would be a raise of around $200.00 pesos (CUP or “national money”), which is the equivalent in Cuba of $8.00 in convertible pesos (CUC), or what would be the same as $8.80 US. That is, as long as we generate billions, they will offer us $8.00 a month for such a “salary increase.”

But the Cuban government says it has no more to spend on public health workers. True, they have to prioritize the wages of those policemen who stoically sacrifice to maintain such quiet that we do not hear anyone screaming in the middle of the Revolutionaries’ street that they can not afford to live on their salaries, which would create too awkward of a landscape for the tender eyes of the tourists and foreign reporters.

What defines the quality of a gift is the posture, the dignity of the recipient: if you receive something from a position of subservience or submission, to the detriment of a single shred of dignity, it’s as if you receive a handout but consists of millions received in an unworthy manner; this is what they do with us in 2005 and it would be the same now, if it is true what is rumored.

I think if some sector in Cuba is comfortably able to triple the base salary of its employees, it is the public health sector; tripling the basic wage — and from there add no less than $500 in Cuban pesos for each specialty practiced, or another way to look at it, each diploma or mastery –and this would begin to be more respectful, the rest would be pure symbolism, pure window dressing.

But as for now everything is pure speculation, and not to be accused again of being “metallic” for demanding a decent wage, I am happy today to congratulate from my humble site those I hold in high esteem, those working with very modest resources, ignoring the shortages they suffer personally, to return to health and to life as many people as possible; to my teacher, for whom I have an admiration and a respect bordering on fanaticism, and a devotion similar to that professed by the martyrs and the saints; to that professor who does not know my voice and who, but for the limits imposed by behavior and gallantry and good looks, like the kiss for a father, whenever I met him I would kiss his clean hands.

December 3 2012

The shortest monologue in the world has just been presented in a small room in Havana: “And where did Cuba end up?” (It is at the level of the short story “The Dinosaur” by the Guatemalan Augusto Monterroso.)

Its name is Rhapsody for the Mule, and it is directed by Nelda Castillo for her theater group The Enchanted Deer.

A heptalogy of madness, directly from the trash, collage over a bare wagon-cart for a collector of homeland waste (a trash collector of revolutionary residues: the actress Mariela Brito walking her brutish biology, drooling and urinating in circles on the stage, excited under the crude lights, its male-female sex only barely disguised under the coagulated dirt of silent desperation).

Go, beast. (“Horse horse,” here crackles the memory of a poem by Juan Carlos Flores.) An invitation to rape. To vomit. To live that which is evil (but without a trace of vaudeville, please: we’re speaking of an incredible hyper-realistic mirror). Push, sweat, give birth to nothing, abort almost an hour of underworld snorts, turn around. Turn a harness inside out.

The Havanothing or Satan Clara: cynical cities unrecognizable in a minimal set with background noise from Radio Encyclopedia, a station that incarnated better than Cuban TV’s Roundtables the discreet charm of the proletariat.

Rhapsody or, rather, Rhapsodium for domesticated animals of the contemporary Cuban street. Not necessarily the megametaphorical mule of José Lezama Lima with that “sure step (…) into the abyss” under a “load of lead,” although “glassy, short-sighted,” moving its “portable lamp (…) of some horror or another” on his “four feet.”

Quadriplegia. Much less would be that enchanted nineteenth deer that would be the delight the Historian of the City. No. The romance has fallen by its own weight before the idiocy (and who knows if the ideology). Memory is factual here. Dirty nouns tossed in a Tareco Plan of the XXI century: family, faith, future, fidelity. Be cultured to be crappy. Cuba fits into any pot.

It stinks. And yet, it hurts you. This song of the wounded invokes some of the most beautiful images that will be remembered over the noisy rhetoric of the Revolution in the year, say, 2059.

Extirpated from the work Galiano Varieties of the group itself, this micro-mispronounced-monologue (the character is very probably missing teeth), deeply moves a corner of El Vedado in a packed room over the last weeks. Every mise-en-scene of The Enchanted Deer leaves the same fear in the chest, this other impossible to translate into words, an ill-defined unease of farewell. Something ends here every night, although we still don’t know how to say what.

July 21 2012

At least once a week (Fridays) I acquire the newspaper Granma, to track its Letters to the Editor section, the only place where people can raise some problems and give some opinions other than the official ones, which occupy its daily pages and also all the other pages on this day, monotony piled on top of monotony.

What when it first appeared created some expectations, however slim of course, in an opening in the impenetrable wall of controlled information and opinion in Cuba, with the passage of time has become a resounding disappointment.

Here, instead of a civilized meeting space for different opinions, looking for the best solutions to the problems that beset us, are usually laid out inconsequential complaints about particular minutiae of city life, and the responses — more and more justifications and bureaucratic — from the agencies and institutions involved. In addition, it teems with the extensive views of some representatives of the most backward thinking and caveman-like who, on principle, oppose any change, however minimal.

I am not suggesting they not publish them, but there should also appear,on an equal basis and in equal space, opinions from those who think differently, so that the readers, educated, trained and cultured, as the official propaganda says, would have the possibility to compare and come up with their own opinions, in a climate of tolerance.

Maybe someone, a staunch advocate of immobility, contended that this is the organ of the Party and so it must be this way. In short, in Cuba, all national and provincial newspapers are official Party organs, because there is only one Party that controls them all, and they only publish what it decides or approves.

However, there is a latent contradiction. When some senior leaders, in their speeches and statements, talk about necessary changes, changing the mindset, allowing different opinions, etc., in official journalistic practice the opposite happens: every time the media tightens the straitjacket. In other words: rhetoric and reality are not in sync. Letters to the Editor is a great example of this.

December 7 2012

I do not know if I’m “ratting someone out,” although I do not think that I am because the illegal hardware and housewares market that has flourished alongside the Carlos III mall could not be more evident. About a year ago they closed an old tenementand self-employed vendors set up shop across the street from the park entrance of this commercial hub. There on organized stands you can find everything from a lightbulb to a selection of faucets, from pipe fittings to waterproofing.

In any event, trying to place the blame here would have no effects on such a flourishing market, today comprising most of the housefronts of this area, which display an amalgam of the same products forbidden last year and more as well. Young people strive to be more solicitous than their peers and expound in detail about the virtues of this or that merchandise, or if they don’t have what you need they assure you they can get it in two hours, or it can be resolved by the following day at the latest, all this with a professionalism that is lacking in State-run establishments.

These kids have learned the laws of the market on the fly and without a single class in theory. The technocrats who “update the model” could learn a lot from a visit to Retiro Street.

December 6 2012

For those who believe that in writing I mean to do harm, release repressed hatred, or seek the sympathy of those who argue with dangerous vehemence to defend extreme positions, I hope that with this article they will reflect and understand that I do not belong to the left or to the right. And for me, the anarchists venerate too many rules.

There are more than a few people who compared to Ernesto Che Guevara with Jack the Ripper. I agree with many of them, for example, both studied medicine. Today I do not intend to talk about such a controversial parent, but about a criticized son, little known, and with strong values, from my point of view.

Ernesto Guevara March, the youngest son of Aleida and Che, is accused of being egotistical. And he is, he is also kind, charming, and extremely sensitive. It’s not easy to be yourself in a society that professes equality. The media accentuates certain things, but I will try to put almost everything in context.

Ernesto never knew his father, he was born in 1965, and although there were victims of the revolution that deserve our respect and consideration, we can not forget that it was a time of euphoria in which the winds of passion raged, and the “bearded ones” were as idolized as democracy is today. These men, turned into dictators, represented for many the image of the spotless hero, the unblemished sun.

Ernesto, similar and different from his three older siblings (Aleida, Camilo and Celia), grew up in the Nuevo Vedado neighborhood in Havana, studied in “Fighters of Bolivia” primary school, attended junior high school at “La Lenin”, and then went to Vedado high school. He became a lawyer, and I can assure you unequivocally that, with that name, and the semantic weight that it carries, had been for him as influential as the flattering environment and persistent ghost of an absent father who, like it or not, is known around the world.

Let’s do an experiment. Let’s take a greased baking sheet and on it put an idealized portion of economic deterioration, season it with internal chaos, knead the mixture until it has the texture of enthusiastic support and popular worship; put the product in the oven, and after a dusting of the night of long knives, it is ready; the dish is called dictatorship. It is not difficult to make a list with the names of those who actually did and do the damage; but we can not include children for being children.

Equipped with a roguish charm, Ernesto is a good man, sometimes stubborn and at times temperamental, with a strong sense of friendship. He is an extrovert and not prone to confessions, he shelters in his own inner volcano. He willingly acknowledges his mistakes, likes to hold onto his childhood, though it is in the past, and has been saddled with an unfair guilt foisted upon him. I understand that it is harder to recognize than to attack; but to ask, seek, find information is very easy with a country teeming with informants eager to be bribed. Pull the trigger only against those who deserve it.

December 10 2012

Havana, Cuba – The reaction on the part of the parliament to the modification of the Cuban family code lays bare the institutionalized homophobia of the government structures led by Raul Castro Ruz.

The discussion of the new family code was again dismissed by the National Assembly of People’s Power. The family code was drafted by a group of lawyers working under the direction of Ms. Mariela Castro, head of the National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX).

Mariela Castro, in different interviews to foreign media and the national press, declared the agreement or the consent of her father to this new code, which is intended to provide for the first time in Cuba the right to legal recognition of same-sex couples. It is not the first time so far this year on the island that such a scandal is revealed that is nothing more than a political ploy intended to keep the Cuban Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community immersed in a total crisis of absence of their most basic rights.

There is evidence that in last Population and Housing Census of 2012, as well, that the Cuban government did not recognize those couples that are made up of people of the same sex who live together in the same dwelling. The events are reason enough to raise unrest in the Cuban LGBT community and to demonstrate the bad behavior of the self-proclaimed leader of this community, although she still has never confessed her reasons for identifying with it or what makes her supposedly march at the head of these proposals which are increasingly inadequate.

Different voices have been raised in protest at this new outrage against the LGBT community; human rights activists, organizations, journalists and civil society leaders have recently expressed concern in different ways and have denounced this latest act of outrage by a regime that is afraid to restore or establish the rights of its nation.

It shall be demonstrated despite the Cuban government’s lack of commitment and the evil role of CENESEX and its director, that in CUBA, despite the constant denials, Two Who Are The Same Also Make A Couple.

December 10 2012

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias announced that he will again have surgery for malignant cancerous cells found in in medical check up performed in Cuba.

Cuban television interrupted regular programming on 8 December 2012 to let Cuban citizens know the current state of health of president Hugo Chavez.

Chavez commented that he is having problems that are preventing him from fulfilling his presidential duties, counseling the Venezuelan people that there may be new elections to choose a new president. “Vote for Maduro,” Chavez said.

Tomas Gonzalez, 65, says, “Now we see the desperation of the government, when I saw them interrupt the broadcast I thought something serious had happened in Cuba but it was Chavez crying for a miracle. He also emphasized that, “Sadly, this is a hard fight, to keep the cancer from winning, it is another surgery and possibly the last. It reminds me of the song by the group “Queen” when they declare they have AIDS and could die at any moment,” Gonzalez said.

Pedro Lopez, 49, commented that president Hugo Chavez has confidence in Cuban doctors and that they might be able to save his life. “But there are better specialists in the world but he would be afraid to receive medical care from an “enemy”, a completely crazy aberration.”

Lopez comments that the situation could become even more difficult. “Venezuela is the principle source of Cuba’s oil and if Chavez dies we Cubans could experience blackouts all over again.” Of even more concern is a new “Special Period.”

December 10 2012

For more or less the last five years the national media has begun to talk about human rights. But not all of them. Education and health seems to be “the Human Rights that we advocate,” a narrow concept that allows them to appear to be talking about the subject when in fact they are ignoring it.

If in the United States (I mention it because in the official press it is obligatory to do so) Human Rights are violated, it is the concern of the Americans. Individually, in organized groups created for that purpose, or appealing to the courts, they can fight for their rights. What worries me is that in Cuba those that “are not advocated” in the official propaganda are “forgotten.”

So the government is procrastinating — and will continue to procrastinate — in ratifying the U.N. Covenants on Human Rights (which they already signed in New York). We can’t speak selectively about Human Rights.

December 10 2012

The news about Calixto Ramon Martinez is worse and worse. We have to jump out of our chairs and agree it could be us or one of our brothers. The last thing we know, thanks to Hablemos Press, is that Calixto is continuing his hunger strike and refusing medical care. According to reports from some inmates in Combinado del Este prison, yesterday the agent “Rodolfo,” chief of Unit 3, ordered that he be given a savage beating. He is still confined in the punishment cells, naked, beaten and on hunger strike. He is demanding to be treated with respect, respect that includes his immediate release.

Woe be it to Fidel and Raul Castro that someday, if they escape from the Courts of this world, they cannot escape God’s judgment. Eternal death is too small to punish those who in life have produced so much pain and the deaths to so many people, so many families. So much terror in a population, so many lies, so much physical and spiritual harm to a nation. Calixto can have screamed in rebellion for the treatment he was given by the agents of State Security and the police: “Down with Fidel and Raul Castro!!” As a universal citizen is entitled to do so, but in Cuba these two figures, so reprehensible, in order to protect themselves have declared it crime. It is a shame and a scandal, they are both so small that they have to retaliate for so little against that which merits greater acts of rebellion and civil disobedience.

But they have achieved something worse than fear in this population: they have achieved that many people don’t have a hint of conscience or responsibility for their acts.

I ask for help from all of you in an explicit way. I have sent an email to Amnesty International, an account so public that I am afraid it won’t be read quickly. Colleagues and friends of Calixto can provide Amnesty International all the information it needs to declare him a prisoner of conscience and give him international visibility so that the Cuban government is pressured to release him immediately. According to data published in October by the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation the number of political prisoners on the island is 82.

Regulating the coexistence between citizens and the state is urgent in Cuba. There is a tremendous disparity between the two powers. And compared to the macro ideas that have been injected into the population, human rights are understated and the sensitivity of many natives is dulled with regards to their ability to recognize the situation in which we all find ourselves.

December 10 2012

On the evening of November 4th some members of the Coexistence team had the privilege of being invited to participate in the activities celebrating the 50th anniversary of Christian Life.

The occasion brought together many at the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, where there was a mass presided over by the Cardinal of Havana Jaime Ortega Alamino, his auxiliary bishop Monseñor Juan de Dios, Father Alberto Garcia, director of Catholic Sunday publications and other priests of the Jesuit Congregation.

God wanted the Gospel proclaimed this day, as appropriate for the occasion, with love your neighbor as the central theme. In his homily the Cardinal emphasized that love conquers all, all hopes; he recalled the words of Father Felix Varela when he said “There is no Fatherland without virtue”, highlighting that virtue is in love rather than knowledge and recalling the first Encyclical Letter of Pope Benedict XVI making a call to live in faith and love in all its facets.

After the Mass there was a cultural evening that began with a few words about Christian Life followed by the invitation of Father Alberto for other voices to take the floor. I remembered when he shared in Pinar del Rio, more than six years ago on the 10th anniversary of the magazine Vitral and ceded the floor to who was at that time director, and is still the director. of the project and the magazine Coexistence, the engineer Dagoberto Valdés Hernández.

Dagoberto focused his words in an infinite gratitude to this publication, “this little leaf” as everyone there calls it, a symbol of perseverance, of how much can be achieved by the love of Christ, for others and society. He emphasized that Christian Life today is a sign of how far we can get if we truly believe in the power of the small and the usefulness of virtue. He thanked also the older sister of all publications that later emerged within the Church, for this necessary catechism, simple but direct, for all the good both do for the Cuban family. Finally he thanked Padre Alberto, the Editorial Board of Christian Life and God for allowing us to participate in the celebration and for teaching us that “everything has its time, and there is a time for everything under heaven.”

The Editorial Board and staff of the magazine Coexistence are most especially grateful to Father Alberto Garcia and his invitation to the team, congratulate Christian Life and urge them to continue working for the love of Cuba and its Church.

by Yoandy Izquierdo Toledo

November 8 2012

“Notes for a History of Pinar del Rio” is now, after the hard work of almost five years in the hands of reviewers and a reward to Wilfredo Denie Valdés for the work of his lifetime, a gift for all natives of Pinar del Rio on the island and in the world. Under the label of Coexistence Editions (which adds another three titles: “Draft economic thought for the future of Cuba” -2008, “Cuba: Time to raise its head” -2009, “Anthropological damage and human rights in Cuba” – 2009) appears this new way of building bridges of history, to fill gaps despite the distances, to chase away forgetting with the remembrance of places lost to the mind, but resuscitated in sight with just the contemplation of a broken image in the recesses of our existence. It is the humble contribution of these sons of caiman’s tail, weaving coexistence between the two shores, to intensify the Cuban identity and fulfill the legacy of Blessed John Paul II who, flying over our Diocese on January 21, 1998, said about the wealth of spiritual values, “We are called to preserve and transmit to future generations for the good and progress of the nation.“

On Thursday, November 1 at seven in the evening it was presented in conjunction with Casa Bacardi, the Institute for Cubans and Cuban-Americans, University of Miami, by the Pinar del Rio in the Diaspora and by the wall of Coexistence in Pinar del Rio, by those from Pinar del Rio who worked on the design and realization of the book, its author and some guests. In Miami the panel included Dr. Omar Vento as moderator, and panelists Marcos Antonio Ramos, PhD in History and Theology, Wilfredo Cancio Isla, PhD in Information Sciences, and Belisario Pi Lago, poet, essayist and professor from Pinar del Rio , founder of the magazine Coexistence (www.convivenciacuba.es)

Wilfredo Denie, author of such a precious jewel, very excited at 86 years, offered a special thanks to all who made this history of our beloved province see the light. Everyone in Pinar del Rio expressed their thanks and congratulations for a well-deserved and needed work.

Today we have a detailed view of Pinar del Rio that puts in the hands of the reader more than 200 articles, 170 images and 70 tables. A small contribution of the children of the westernmost province of Cuba, an offering to the hometown and an example of how much can be done to rescue our roots, the defense of our identity and the reconstruction of Cuba, from civil society.

By Yoandy Izquierdo Toledo

November 8 2012