Month: December 2011

My small end-of-year tribute to the commentators

Water* falls from the balconies. It’s midnight and sonorous waterfalls spill from the windows and doors that give on to the street and terraces. It is the overflowing liquid of a slow scrubbing, the residue of a national bath taken under tossed buckets and without soap. The body of the country badly washed, with filth here and frustrations there, smelling of sweat but still with the coquetry of talcum-powdered armpits, perfume over the stench, an elegant handkerchief wiping the forehead. If that torrent of midnight could talk, if instead of ending up on the asphalt and the on-lookers it could say something. It would be a scream, a death rattle. Water has been a permanent feature of every New Year’s Eve, the most constant. When there was no pork, no tomatoes, when even a pound of rice cost half a month’s salary, we still had this elemental and complex liquid to get rid of the anger, the frustration, the fear. Parents spread the food out on the plate to make it look like more, but when the time came to take a bucket and throw its content into the darkness, no one skimped. It was full, overflowing, like our monotony.

A few days ago on TV a white-coated scientist explained that water has memory, it carries the impressions and traces of where it has been. Thus, the streams that run every Saint Sylvester Night* by our facades give us away. If we put them under the scrutiny of a microscope that would reveal particles in the shapes of paddles and rafts, molecules that have adopted the profile of a mask, of a red card that some prefer to hide in the back of a dresser drawer. It carries our morning grimace, the sound of our knuckles in the washtub, the bubbling of water boiled for tea. Every drop of this substance is the most complete report that can be written about us today. The journey through the plumbing, the oxidation and holes of some; the new ones of plastic and teflon. The faucet that turns on with a single touch and another fixed with wire so it won’t drip all night. And, later, falling on the warped metal plates of many, or aerated by pressure above the pristine dinner service in some house in Atabey.

The child is bathed in a basin because the suds must then be used to clean the floor, and the bent-backed retiree drags a water cart from the hydrant to the shack where he lives. The jacuzzi jets in some hotel, the stillness of of the blue waves of one of those swimming pools that can only be seen on Google Earth, so hidden are they behind the hibiscus hedges and watchdogs of certain residences. It is not the same water. Evaporating in a pool from which a stray dog might drink, making a wet spot on a roof that won’t last another year before it falls in. That making concentric circles caused by the voice of the interrogator in some cell in Villa Marista.** “Do you want a drink? Are you thirsty?” A question and the prisoner knows that a sip of “that” might make him sing like a canary, or give him a crushing pain in the chest. But there is also another, cold with ice that we are offered on entering the home of a friend. The newcomer wants to know if it is boiled so as not to be left with amoeba that will remain for years, but prefers the risk to showing his distrust. Water with honey and egg white that dampens our feet in any doorway in Reina Street, because the “bad” must be thrown out, to put little footprints or droplets in the street is all the same.

And then, in unison, without being advised or ordered by anyone, we take a pot, a bucket, and wait until the clock strikes twelve. Our most reliable and free ritual of every year, the baptism with which we try to make this island ready for the twelve new months that lie ahead. But the water doesn’t reach far enough, it is not enough to cleanse and expel the accumulated waste. Purification is far from complete. We have to repeat it every December 31st, eager to empty the contents of our containers at the exact second of the new day. The pools down below continue to reveal us, the torrent speaks and in these diminutive atoms of hydrogen and oxygen we leave the mark of our desires. The most complete account of our aspirations will disappear in the morning, dried up by nothing more than the rising sun.

Translator’s notes:

*It is a Cuban tradition to throw a bucket of water out the door at midnight on New Year’s Eve to wash away all the bad things of the year that is ending. New Year’s Eve is Saint Sylvester Night in Cuba and other countries with a Catholic tradition.

**Villa Marista: Headquarters of Cuba’s security services/political police.

Thousands of eyes were glued to national television screens this last Friday. The social networks and text messages also vibrated nervously. A strong rumor had been growing all week, feeding the hopes of Cubans on and off the island, killing sleep. Initiated and fed by official voices, the speculations centered on the possibility of the National Assembly announcing travel reforms.

In a country where citizens face severe limitations on leaving and entering their own territory, such suspicions are too important not to pay attention. Bags packed, airplane tickets reserved, and long-delayed hugs between relatives not seen for decades about to be realized. But the illusion lasted only a few days and was deflated with the same haste with which passports are stamped “denied.”

Instead of proclaiming the end of the demeaning Exit Permit — also known as the “White Card” — Raul Castro reported on a pardon for more than 2,900 prisoners. People sentenced for diverse crimes, among which were some against State Security. In the words of the official press release, it affected prisoners, “older then 60, sick, women, and also young people with prior criminal histories.” A gesture that could be aimed at paving the way for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI this coming March.

The General thus preferred to open the doors of the small prisons, seeing that he is still not disposed to pull back the bureaucratic bars of the great prison. The island as a penitentiary and the immigration officials as stern gatekeepers with a bunch of keys hanging from their belts.

Although the president reaffirmed his “unchanging will to gradually introduce the required changes” in the current migratory policies, he could not prevent a snort of frustration bursting forth from the mouths of those who listened at home. For the umpteenth time hope withered and the embrace of an uncle or brother who would not be returning remained annoyingly locked in the trunk of the postponement.

The family and friends of the newly pardoned, however, did have reasons to prepare a Christmas with greater happiness. Although the penal code keeps intact that crimes that led them to prison, those released this Christmas feel themselves to be the beneficiaries of a magnanimous wink from the seat of power.

The presidential indulgence has touched them this time, but thousands of Cubans wait for a similar gesture in matters of basic human rights: A pardon that manages to open the heavy gate that blocks free travel, coming and going from one’s country without having to ask for permission.

30 December 2011

The monster publicly confesses that be brought down the Cuban airplane and that he’s proud of the 73 souls plunged into the sea in 1976, in cold blood, a crime consummated in Barbados where the entire teenage fencing team died as they returned to Cuba with all the Central American gold medals.

He also confesses that he organized the chain of bombings of hotels and public places in Havana where Flavio died — a young Italian “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” according to the words of his assassin — but it just as well could have been my children. His contempt for life also plunged Venezuela into mourning for decades, with his claws covered in blood along with the executioners’, under the sinister wings of the condor. Wherever he was, he always engendered the greatest possible human suffering.

Recently a court in El Paso, Texas refused to find guilty such an accomplished and confessed assassin, not even of the initial charges of lying to the authorities of the country, and so the beast was acquitted of all charges and today walks the streets of Miami with satisfaction, clean as a daisy, immune to U.S. law, like the equally unpunished Orlando Bosch, his accomplice in the Barbados, who died in April.

In the country that saw John F. Kennedy slaughtered before the television cameras, also in Texas, and then saw the investigation squelched by the same power that killed him, nothing should surprise us. The same country that saw the destruction of the World Trade Center, burying thousands of innocents now tries to offer me a pill I can’t swallow: that Osama Bin Laden was killed by Seals commandos in an operation worthy of a Hollywood script, and was later thrown into the sea or something like that, without even showing a photograph of the precious trophy. The power in the shadow that perpetuates such affronts on mankind today is the same one that pardoned the homicide in the Barbados.

I can’t stop wondering how many dark secrets Luis Posada Carriles knows, that give him such a capacity to blackmail the forces of power in the United States. In any event, we must not forget that the now “respectable” gentleman, was wandering around Dallas on that tragic November 22, 1963.

This this notorious terrorist continues to go unpunished is also an insult to whatever of dignity survives in the people of Washington and Lincoln and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. I can’t conceive of a better stimulus for global terrorism. Starting now, every new terrorist barbarity will also take a bit of the aroma of this criminal pardoned in El Paso.

June 10 2011

 

To Dr. Adelaida Fernández de Juan.

Esteemed colleague:

I recently read your article, “Medicine defended, which circulated on the web this past August. Before I read it I saw your name at the bottom, and as this is a sign of responsibility and courage — as those who dare not to hide in anonymity may be arrested — for me, in advance, I felt your sincerity and valor, and so I feel a reverence, far beyond what I can share. Like you, I am a doctor, graduated in 1994, and I find in your writing references to the abuse and misunderstandings, so I would like draw your attention to some details.

During the time I practiced medicine I was a witness to various situations in which a health worker mistreated, consciously or unconsciously, some patient or family member. This is undeniable. But as undeniable as this, is the fact that for each of these cases of mistreatment I can recall a dozen cases (without exaggerating), on the contrary, only in these, different from the others, were rarely reported.

When a patient feels mistreated, frequently they immediately complain to the different levels of the Health System, the Government and the Party, but this almost never happens when the mistreatment — much more frequently than people think — happens in reverse. Sometimes the patient isn’t even aware of his attitude, as the grievance is assumed from the professionalism of the mistreated, in this case us.

However, there is a point where I disagree with you or with whomever suggests it. When you refer to the topic, “…the extremely low and disproportionate salaries, the undervaluing of the vocation, the truly abusive treatment of which we are victims and other grave matters…“; then giving the sense that, “…there are possibilities of lessening these evils.”

This takes me to past times, when our sector was on the list of the so-called “budgeted,” that is those depending completely on State financing. This was the excuse to explain why professional salaries in the health sector were so low and could not in any way be raised. But time passed, then came the era of medical missions abroad and now we live in a very different reality.

Today Cuba maintains collaborative medical missions in over 70 countries, which have been reported in recent years to bring up a sum of between five billion and eight billion dollars annually. A rapid calculation converts 8 billion dollars — in the Cuban peso in which we receive our wages — into 180 billion pesos annually.

With this alone we are the most productive economic sector of this country. But to these millions in income (which greatly exceeds even Tourism, which generates some two billion) we have to add that contributed by the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, the third highest exports after nickel and petrochemicals. It’s clear: our section has become the engine of the Cuban economy, so there is no compelling reason that we should be paid this miserable salary, equivalent to less than 30 dollars for an entire month’s work.

If I go on about the numbers, it’s only because they are very eloquent. You know, as I do, that the added human sensibility that makes our work priceless, despite our great scarcities that perhaps those who judge with surprising lightness us don’t know, don’t fully understand the seriousness of the matter.

You, like me, have been on medical duty where there is a lack of vital medications, reagents, X-ray film and essential disposable materials; where we don’t even have running water, where we can’t even wash ourselves on a 24-hour shift, without even being able to wash our hands; resting in such tough conditions that people wouldn’t even believe it if they saw it; eating poorly — for example broth and mashed potatoes, or corn flour and boiled potatoes for every meal — knowing beforehand that this shift did not bring us a penny to feed our children and knowing, as well, what is even more painful, that other State sectors like ours, which don’t generate anywhere near the income we do, are much better paid.

For decades we have been a very poorly served sector. In my case, I remember that since 1994 I worked for seven years with only the two doctor’s coats I was given as a recent graduate, and this compares with other sectors that have received uniforms and shoes every year — some even every six months — as well as extra monthly pay in convertible pesos, personal hygiene products and food. I couldn’t explain this if it weren’t accepted, with pain I say it, hard evidence: those responsible for dealing with this sector don’t concern themselves with the well-being of our workers, nor with our families, everything is a matter of sheer laziness, a proverbial irresponsibility, or both.

You quote another journalist, Fernando Ravsberg, as part of what is already becoming a crusade, also on the attack — according to what I infer from what you wrote, because I haven’t had access to that article — extending the shadow of bribery on the just and the unjust. I read it and remember, however, such elevated examples of moving dedication: professionals who are second to none in knowledge, and also in ethical principles, people of integrity, who carry their wisdom with a shining humility, living in the midst of shortages and that it shames me even to remember, and who even so, prefer to die rather than stoop so low.

I know there are the unscrupulous among us, I know its face, its name, its last name, they are not abstract examples but reality. But for my pride and yours, Doctor, and perhaps to the surprise of Mr. Ravsberg, they will never be the rule, they are a painful exception. That I know and I would hold both my hands to the fire for that, my disinterested and honest people. Who search the trees for firewood, who look above us and find enough reed to cut it; but when there is not enough courage, it is more comfortable and certain to take from us, those below.

For saying words very similar to yours, Doctor, I was stigmatized, and some idiot even accused me publicly of being “money-grubbing,” when I am among those convinced that capitalism is very far from offering a solution to the problems of the world, but to belabor this point would take us far off topic.

I think it is stupid to run after the superfluous, following a consumer culture that compels me to buy a cellphone every month or a new car every year. But as absurd as this is, after working 26 years, to be without a penny three days after being paid; that the workers of our sector eat lunch at noon without knowing if they will eat dinner that night; that our “salaries” honorably earned don’t even allow us to feed our families for more than a week a month; that a specialist with 20 years experience has only one pair of broken shoes; that the most that we can aspire as physicians is to a battered bicycle.

Before such a picture, even Kafka would pale, would certainly suffer a massive heart attack with all the complications described by cardiology. I don’t ask for irrational opulence, but nor do I deserve the miserable existence they seem to want to condemn me to.

Excuse my manners, allow me to present myself: I am Jeovany Jimenez Vega, I live in Artemisa and I have been a specialist in Internal Medicine since 1999. Five years ago I was disqualified to practice Medicine anywhere in the national territory indefinitely, since October 2006, for having channeled to then Minister Dr. José R. Balaguer Cabrera the opinions of 2300 professionals in Public Health about that disrespectful “salary increase” in our sector in mid-2005.

At the time of my punishment I was a Party member – since 1995 – and was studying the final year of specialization in Internal Medicine; I was expelled from the party immediately and suspended from my Residence, and several months later was disqualified, along with a colleague and friend who accompanied me on that initiative.

The details of they flat out lied to try to legitimize our punishment can be found in the first post of my blog “Citizen Zero” (http://citizenzerocuba.wordpress.com), open since last December to denounce this injustice and fight to regain the exercise of the profession that was taken from me.

Doctor: Despite everything, I have no doubt, we can count on the respect and caring of the majority of our patients and this is a great encouragement to continue. Along with this, I am comforted that there are professionals like yourself, who are not resigned to look on with indolence and shame, but who break their silence and share the truth. We consecrate our lives to the medical profession, as we must, but this should never be understood as renouncing the right to proudly defend our rights.

We live proud of our sublime profession, far beyond that “…contempt for the vocation, the abusive treatment…” to which we are subjected by those whose job it is to ensure our well-being as workers.

We will never forget that our oath imposes on us the duty to comfort man in his sickness and at his death, and to always comfort him in his pain, even if in his delirium he comes to bite the hand that cures him. In this endeavor, Doctor, we hold our heads high and our hearts open, and nothing else matters. Be assured, better times will come.

September 12 2011

I confess that when I found myself referenced as an “alternative” voice, lacking previous reviews and bordering on misunderstood, I manned the battle stations against Elaine Diaz’s blog “La polémica digital” — The Digital Controversy. But when I noticed the objective and conciliatory tone in her post “Blogger, period,” I quickly took off the helmets of war and went unarmed to a discourse that seems sincere.

My initial reaction, though primitive, has a simple explanation: too much despotic, too much hypocritical invective has been released at my door and when that happens, something hardens inside and easily bursts into the guttural reflection of the battle. But once calm I take on the proposal, because we always have time to liberate the beast, since any bridge of reconciliation, once laid, is a trophy that this people can’t afford to lose.

But I think that saving the qualitative highs and lows that are natural in every human congregation — and the blogosphere, although virtual, in some way is that — I find that the lack of arguments is not the rule but the exception. Among our bloggers — who continue in their effort not to spin off into factions and will be called bloggers period — we can count more than one impassioned, “What Cuban isn’t one?” Just that each one goes in the direction dictated by his conscience.

This “exhausting war” on both sides is nothing more than a virtual reflection of what they’ve forced ordinary Cubans to fight for five decades, within and outside the island, a painful sequel to the quarrel between the powers on both sides of the straits that has profited them both — money for some, allegations for others — while the Cuban people are the big loser in this saga.

On the way to harmony it should be the State that makes the first move, because being the power it has at its disposal all the resources, being the strongest it is ethically obligated to respect the weaker, for being the one who makes the laws that stoke or dampen the embers of discord.

Here, everything is summed up in the common sense, because if the Cuban Adjustment Act is inappropriate, it is also inappropriate to prohibit us from traveling abroad; if this policy called the blockade by some and the embargo by others that is forced on us from outside is misguided and anachronistic, so is the excessive centralization of the state, forced on us from within; If the world press is biased, so is, in no lesser measure, the Cuban press; if it is immoral to lie to pardon Posada Carries, it is also immoral to do so to disqualify a doctor for something he never did, or in the end both sides are capable of cheating and in what falls and rises on the tide life escapes us.

The world today experiments with alternative routes and social networks to gain prominence, but in Cuba we seem to go in the opposite direction. I do not think that the principle demand of the bloggers is free access to the web, nor is this comparable in size to the critical situation in housing, food, or absurd wages.

Starting from the precept that the solution to a problem doesn’t imply ceasing to fight for the solutions of others, if there is an essential difference between the Internet and the rest of these issues: it is that while the others demand a logical reordering of the physical infrastructure of the country, a massive deployment of resources, and short and long-term investment, in comparison giving people the keys to the Internet would be like snapping one’s fingers; it would imply an immeasurably more discreet investment, possible in the short-term, and in fact only requires rearranging the mental infrastructure of those who make the decisions, it is purely a question of political will, and to refuse the people this right, at this juncture in history, is pure medieval obscurantism.

At the place where I connect once a week — where nobody charges me, nobody pays me and nobody censors me — it takes me a three-hour journey to get them, eight hours total to hang this post, something that at home would take eight minutes. It is no sin, nor does it bother me, that the “revolutionary bloggers” access the global network, but it is a capital sin to deny it to the “alternatives” — along with the rest of the people — especially if they are then labelled mercenaries by the same power that refuses it to them, when they are forced to connect through an embassy.

There is an obvious cynicism in this and I don’t propose to make you pick at the scab, but there is one inescapable fact: when a blogger plants a flag in the shadow of the authority he assume very little or no personal risk; if the flag, however, is an “alternative” one, he must pay dearly for boldly confronting a power that sees everything as black or white, that does not admit of any diversity of tones, and whose slogan continues to be “with me or against me!” A power that constantly incites the dogs of war, that does not forgive that these words posted in Cuban voices it being Cubans who write them, a power whose intolerance itself becomes the original sin, the first stone thrown into this maelstrom with neither winners nor losers,and in the end the Cuban nation loses.

History is full of examples of people bled by killings and resentments lasting decades or centuries, who were able to raise themselves from the ruins through indulgence. Our sublime Marti comes to mind, who still convinced of the inevitability of the war of emancipation, knew to launch it without hatred towards Spain; the example of Gandhi comes to mind, whose great soul brought an empire to its knees with only his word, who without a single shot being fired founded a new India; the great Mandela comes to mind, who after 27 years of as a captive of the racists, emerged from the prison, forgave his jailers,buried a regime of more than a century and founded the South Africa of the new era.

Before these high testimonials, results of confrontations that seemed insurmountable, the question arises: could Cuba follow the same paths? Will we overcome our differences and found for Cuba a new era of tolerance? In that hope I live and believe that this is the true mission of my generation.

It is along this line that the Cuban blogosphere must press today, which is both sides of the same coin in this dichotomous relationship, inevitable and difficult. We are all in the same boat, stripped of the same rights — because these are not privileges — and this is something that unites us. In the end, every nation needs to be reborn from the ashes. In the laudable task of reconciling the best and most authentic of each part, I would extend both my hands. I would demand, as a condition, to desire the highest good of the country. For now, all who love the diverse and free colors in the same flag could begin calling each other, without epithets, Cubans, period.

May 30 2011