My brother, Raul, came over to my house on Saturday, very happy because he had gotten a job at one of the newly emerging food stands. He works twelve hours a day and goes home with 60 Cuban pesos (the equivalent of 2.50 CUC — less than $2.50 U.S.) every day, plus breakfast, lunch and a lot of coffee. Even though he lacks culinary knowledge, his skills will suffice to make omelets or fry croquettes.
“I’ve never earned so much money here, and I work two blocks from the house,” he told me with satisfaction.
My brother is 70 and looks ten years younger, is in a very good health, never smoked, and swam his whole life. My brother retired two years ago after a long career as a university professor and research fellow. He had been “pulling in” scientific translations to round out his retirement, but his contract expired and was not renewed because of the labor adjustments. If in another time he’d been given the right to buy a car, now he could work as a taxi driver.
My brother is (or has been, I don’t know if the title still holds) a U.N. expert in Food and Agriculture in an area called “Population dynamics,” is highly qualified, and a pioneer in computing in this country; in addition to Spanish he speaks English and French with a terrible accent but impeccable grammar.
Starting today, a Havana fry cook standing in front of the stove can boast of having two doctorates.
In Cuba it’s the bad word composed of the letters “pee, ar, i, cee, and kay” with which the masculine sexual organ is defined, and it’s become as common as the surnames Rodríguez, Valdés, Pérez or Hernández, and more well known than a salsa or reggaeton group of proven popularity. If we stamp our feet, it flows from the frustration of tens, dozens, hundreds and thousand; from the craziness we feel sentenced to a life in tune with the same radio soap opera, performed by the same actors, as is we have deliberately broken the radio dial to force ourselves to listen, for more than fifty years, to the same program.
Thus, the abused word spread and became so common that it’s become an interjection. Until the ’70s it was an expression used by certain social classes. The prejudiced popular stereotypes assigned it to the tenements of Old Havana, Central Havana and other so-called marginal neighborhoods.
I remember a few years ago that people looked askance at its use in the street–usually in a loud voice–and even more so if it was said by a woman. Today it has become so common that it seems strange when you don’t hear it. It’s embedded in our daily hearing and speaking and used to affirm something or someone positive as well as the complete opposite. It’s a heavyweight curse that expresses very well either discontent or pleasure, and that is stacked with others, similar, such as “you bet your f**kin’ a**,” in a popularization of the political-social machismo that still exists in Cuba.
In Cuba it’s the bad word composed of the letters “pee, ar, i, cee, and kay” with which the masculine sexual organ is defined, and it’s become as common as the surnames Rodríguez, Valdés, Pérez or Hernández, and more well known than a salsa or reggaeton group of proven popularity. If we stamp our feet, it flows from the frustration of tens, dozens, hundreds and thousand; from the craziness we feel sentenced to a life in tune with the same radio soap opera, performed by the same actors, as is we have deliberately broken the radio dial to force ourselves to listen, for more than fifty years, to the same program.
Thus, the abused word spread and became so common that it’s become an interjection. Until the ’70s it was an expression used by certain social classes. The prejudiced popular stereotypes assigned it to the tenements of Old Havana, Central Havana and other so-called marginal neighborhoods.
I remember a few years ago that people looked askance at its use in the street–usually in a loud voice–and even more so if it was said by a woman. Today it has become so common that it seems strange when you don’t hear it. It’s embedded in our daily hearing and speaking and used to affirm something or someone positive as well as the complete opposite. It’s a heavyweight curse that expresses very well either discontent or pleasure, and that is stacked with others, similar, such as “you bet your f**kin’ a**,” in a popularization of the political-social machismo that still exists in Cuba.
A different new article was to appear in this blog today. But the big news, never-expected nor announced in advance. It simply appears. And to distort or ignore it is folly.
The electrifying announcement of the locating and death of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, at the hands of U.S. soldiers, I believe occupies the place of the “News of the Last Decade.” I have no doubt.
In the second when the avalanche of news began, I can only publish a few paragraphs that express my pride as a simple human being who loves his life and that of others, for this victory over a mass murderer, as aptly described by President Obama in his official statement.
It comes in all languages , in every possible and impossible way, my embrace of solidarity for all those who suffered from the action by a criminal who no longer exists. And it arrives to the memory of the first passenger on the first plane, and to the fireman who gave his last breath in the Dantesque ruins, my simple tribute to the memory of these beautiful people.
I invite all commentators and readers of this blog, to let their words as a mark of the joy we, good people, feel on this date worth marking.
Near the house there is a store in CUC where after closing it seems they turn off the refrigerators and then turn them back on in the morning when they open again, such that when they open the frozen food is thawed with an unpleasant look and a horrible smell. Just in case, I never buy at the store, but the other day I went for a bottle of oil and I heard this surreal dialogue:
– Compañera! Why are the hot dogs always soft? (An older gentleman with a baseball cap that has left a bag with groceries in the door.)
– Compañero, it’s that the fridge is defective.
– What do you mean by defective!!!
– Defective, it doesn’t freeze well.
– Are you sure?
– What do you mean am I sure, Compañero?
– Yes, young lady, because it seems the refrigerator is neurotic, or Mr. Fridge is giving her a bad time, because if I come in the morning the products are thawed, but in the afternoon they have solved their problems and everything here is frozen.
MANY FRIENDS HAVE written me to ask why my posts are postponed when the always turbulent Cuban reality, unfortunately for us, requires direct and constant attention. My closest friends demand a commitment to my readers. Others, most of them strangers, have approached me in the street to tell me that they are aware of my blog and miss new writings.
On reading the emails or hearing the words I couldn’t help but feel a certain irresponsibility and, at the same time, an infinite pleasure, because to demand my opinion is a sign of recovery of the social health so lacking in our society, the need for information, and the search for it no matter what.
Something is changing in the minds of Cubans, perhaps because we have begun to lose our fear, others because the blinders have fallen from their eyes. They know they were misled. There is nothing left, now, of what was so much promised in exchange for the sacrifice of several generations. They have been cheated of their lives, and the only thing left is to search for the truth, then to tell it to those close to you, because they need it, and urge them to share it and to feel the relief provided by it. Knowing the truth is like a virus that, after an incubation period, runs through our bodies, and at the instant of filling them, is contagious.
I owe my readers an explanation: my work as a writer, these days, occupies all my time and I don’t believe I’m able to write all the literature that, emerging from within me, kick with anger because it is the moment of their birth. I finished two books of short stories, started a novel, halfway, and happened to have another almost finished. I am preparing an anthology of my stories to be published in Europe. A publisher asks me for a noir novel that a wrote for amusement some years ago and haven’t looked at again, and so I have taken it up again lately.
I have also been regularly summoned by and met with the police authorities of the country. Since I haven’t received any new denunciations after their accusing me of being a “rapist,” “assailant,” “thief,” “murder suspect,” “threatener of a stranger,” “running over a child with my car,” etc. without any victims nor witnesses coming forward; in short, the years the Prosecutor is asking for these supposed crimes, exceed fifty.
As I wrote in a previous post, after the presentation of a hidden camera video where a supposed “witness,” who never came to testify against me, confesses the pressure and offers made to him to agree to discredit me, that haven’t continued this line of government blackmail.
Now there’s a new variant. They’ve referred me the Havana Psychiatric Hospital (Mazorra),where they make me write, draw cartoons, answer questions from doctors who tell me secretly that they like my books. In a way, there’s nothing for it but to enjoy it, I know that in some way I have to collect this experience, and it is a post I have to write, because I looked for the pavilion where, last year, they killed the elderly left unprotected.
At this time I add my duties to a fraternal organization which I have belonged to for twenty-three years and which I love with a passion, where I hold positions of importance. Add to that, due to an accident, I lost the phalanx of a finger. But all is well now, the rest of the fingers type. Anyway, I have lost other spiritual pieces that were more important to me.
But nothing is overwhelming when I think that “something is changing,” I’m sure that’s the salvation of our country. This is a silent “re-evolution,” an insubordination in the minds of people that leads to postponed resolutions.
These days I write the posts I owe, it’s my duty, because “something is changing” in the Cuban population, and it’s for the better.
