Month: July 2011

The Anti-Bread

It should be done with wheat flour, but is often reinvented with sweet potato starch, is supposed to have grease, but it’s missing in the recipe, and salt, but because it causes the modified dough to collapse nobody uses it: the result is the anti-bread — one a day — which is the quota assigned to Cubans by the imposed rationing card.

With its ugly appearance of a Middle Ages crust of bread, in “the middle” of the stench and unhealthiness, the bread is one of the areas where the government timeservers show their contempt towards the people. It is the pandemonium of the underestimation and disrespect of cuban society. If you try to eat it the day after, most probably you will have two obnoxious experiences. The first one is that for sure you will have to pinch your nose or hold your breath to ignore its acrid smell, and second, you may chip a tooth in the process. The acridity is because it is made with bad quality yeast and because it has too much water added to ensure the proper weight just in case an inspector “shows up”, he won’t be able to verify the ingredients adulteration — in which case ‘the dough’ to silence him would rise;  the hardness, because the lack of grease in it. In addition you have to bring your own bag to buy your bread, the employee snatches the pen from behind his ear to write in your rationing card the one and only bun that you are entitled to buy for that day. He takes your money, shakes hands with all the people who greets him, swipes the sweat from his forehead and then, he serves your bread using his bare hands (without using tongs or gloves) and without washing them.

A few years ago the State made an important investment in modern bakery technologies acquired overseas. In that chain of bakeries the bread is more expensive — ten Cuban pesos a pound — and in the beginnings the quality was noticeably better; but now days it is almost as bad as that for sale in the bodegas but the price didn’t drop as the quality did.

On many occasions and because of consumer complaints, the TV news did on-site interviews with the managers of such bakeries, they had been questioned about the production failures and urged to make public statements promising the solution to these and other problems. But the media news involvement has not been effective and the result is the same: the anti-bread.

The core of the problem is systemic and happens because the lack of control, the low salaries and the dearth of civic awareness provoked by the “grab whatever you can” way of life brought by the deceptive concept of the social property, because it is very well known that the Cubans are not allowed to own any kind of real estate. The local small leadership is struggling to survive when there’s no choice: either survive taking the “bread” home to sustain their families, joining the generalized corruption and unlawful activities, or live a poorish life in the legality of a virtual Cuba outlined by the only party and its unsuccessful government model.

Those who like to invent trash, or to reform what is already invented and works well, have to be reminded of that old Cuban saying: “It’s better to copy from something good than to create something bad”. We, the Cubans of the generations after 1959, could never be accused of being copycats.

 Translated by: Adrian Rodriguez

July 8 2011

XY, Axis of Coordinates or Chromosomes of Survival

A little while ago I left my house and a neighbor in my sector (whom I shall call ‘X’) signaled me to come to the sidewalk in front. The attitude of her corporeal whisper intrigued me. I crossed the street to go meet her, looking all around, because her conspiratorial gestures put me on alert. There were only a few kids playing football in the street, and on the corner, a mysterious man with short hair was walking in small circles. Nevertheless I calmly approached her and her expression changed to one of admiration when I reached her: “Mi’ja, you didn’t tell me you have a blog!” ‘X’ only knows how to send and receive mail on “the appliance” which for her is the computer, as her youngest child (Y) showed her how before emigrating. So she regularly goes to an internet cafe to exchange messages with her offspring. In ‘Y’s’ most recent email, she commented that she’d found my journal via Google, that she subscribed to it and reads my works. She also sent X the link so she could visit me.

After a few minutes of talking, in which her flattery rose up into my face, I humbly thanked her and told her I’d write about this. She reacted with fear and the insistence of someone verbally begging on her knees and made me promise her I would not do it. She would not even agree to the option of changing the names, as she is in the phase of “behaving better than ever” to avoid problems and be able to reunite with her family in the United States.

During our farewell I turned my face and saw that coming towards us was the man on the corner who I was suspicious of, with a woman who appeared to be his wife and who carried a large purse. As they passed close to us, she told him–looking back secretively–that she was late because she had to walk about to avoid the police, and she feared they would confiscate the merchandise. ‘X’ and I looked at each other–with the indifference that tedious and repeated stories awaken–opened our eyes and with a sarcastic and silent smile we said goodbye that day.

I’ve come across her two or three times more, and after assuring herself that no one is observing her, she greets me with affection and she gives me the thumbs-up sign, the “V” of victory, or the “L” of liberty. I saw her again last night and she had an expression of repugnance. She greeted me coldly–like some revolutionary CDR* spy who knows my dissident activities–went toward the group that was gathering a few meters from us, where the CDR president’s house is and in front of which they were going to celebrate the National Assembly of the People’s Power.

The repressive agencies of the regime have implanted over decades, in regard to political matters, an osteomiedosis–a “fear in the bones”–that has penetrated deep into Cuban sociogenetics, generating frustration and forcing habitual pretense as a survival strategy. Regardless of everything I am an optimist, so I am sure that those problems that now seem hopeless will not be permanent in our society.

*Translator’s note: CDR stands for Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. These neighborhood-by-neighborhood and even block-by-block watchdog groups are one of the key mechanisms through which the state controls every individual.

Translated by Julietta Appleton

June 15 2011

Collateral Effects / Miriam Celaya

Photo taken from the Internet

The saga filling space on the news–note that I do not call it “information”–this season is the discovery of the mortal nature of that other Latin American caudillo, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, as a result of what constituted a surgical conspiracy led by his decrepit mentor, Fidel Castro.

The brief chapters offered by Cuban and foreign media–beyond the bad luck of the cancer running riot on humanity to which it turns out not even the anointed are immune–recall the schmaltzy tastes of our people and also explain the success, among us, of television soap operas. But when Cuban TV channels chained themselves, not once but twice in a matter of minutes, to broadcasting from Havana the messianic speech loaded with parables of a president not their own, it also evidenced how many and how strong are the commitments that have been woven between the ruling elites of Cuba and Venezuela. I don’t believe it necessary to comment with respect to that.

However, beyond the inevitable surprise that an excess of haughtiness always provokes in me, I have been meditating on the collateral effects that would ensue from an eventual disappearance of the Castros’ South American ally; not in the fundamental economics of the matter–which by itself would have a cataclysmic magnitude for the so vaunted as well as illusory regional socialist project of the XXI century–but on the seemingly minute human detail of the tens of thousands of Cubans who offer their services in Venezuela. And it is those Cubans who, despite the limitations of living in a foreign land, the low salaries they receive compared to their colleagues from other countries, and the pressures and controls exercised over them, have reaped material benefits they never before enjoyed in Cuba, and who have been able to substantially improve the living standards of their families as compared to their compatriots on the Island who have not worked as collaborators in the amazing programs and “missions” of the so-called ALBA.

The end of Chavismo would not necessarily mean, in absolute terms, the massive “desertion” of all those Cubans, but it could involve, on the one hand, a new breach of our emigrants who would opt to stay in the post-Chavez Venezuela, or perhaps choose to escape to other countries, rather than return home to the eternal cycle of poverty in Cuba; while, on the other hand, it would also mean the return to the country of an important nucleus of non-conformists who would choose to return to the family bosom but would bring a new conscience of the need for changes in Cuba, making many of them a potential source of social tensions. In fact, it is already possible to draw a line, not always very subtle, in the thinking of Cuban collaborators before and after their missionary experience.

In this sense, one has to conclude that the Cuban-Venezuelan adventure of Chavismo, more than a temporary economic advantage that breathes artificial life into the broken Cuban model, implicitly brings a high political cost which, sooner rather than later, will end up taking a toll on the Castro system. Of that I have no doubt.

8 July 2011

End of Vacation / Reinaldo Escobar

Dear Friends,

I took the month of June off on vacation, and now I am going to add a few days until Monday the 11th. On Saturday the 7th we will have a party at home to celebrate three events: Claudia Cadelo’s birthday (with is the 8th); mine (the 10th); and the 18th anniversary of my tie with Yoani, which occurred on July 11, coincidentally at a party similar to the one we will have on the 9th. I will then be back with renewed strength.