Month: December 2011

For some time here the leaders of the Cuban government have been given to talking about diversity and defending the importance of respecting this in different groups of people in our national home. It’s a positive discourse, of course, but something rather “tricky” if we take into account that it only refers to the social and cultural which in our country is always imposed with militaristic criteria from the seats of power. But perhaps it is the sowing of a seed — I tell myself — of the context for a transition towards which Cuba seems to be beginning to “crawl,” toward a society of openness in which we all can walk. I don’t want to be too innocent, but neither do I want to be too skeptical about some curtains that seem to be moving, although they still won’t let us open the window.

The Cuban government is going to integrate “in its own way” into the world and needs to legitimize itself with slow and calculated steps, into the community of democratic nations in the world, most concretely in Latin American, where it is the only one that currently has a single-party system. With its radar focused on this hemisphere — keeping in mind the recent creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, CELAC; its partial reconciliation with the Catholic Church which covers the majority of the continent and is a force for action — although with great fear of losing power; timidly instructing and ordering as Party concession the spaces and socio-economic achievements and policies we used to enjoy in society and that they took from us on violently coming into power.

After almost fifty-three years, these steps are the tacit acknowledgment that their model failed and they are preparing the society for its incorporation into the democratic world when they are no longer. However, it is illogical to talk about diversity only for a part of the social fabric. For a people subjected for decades to assimilate this concept, it should cover the entire spectrum of national life, including the political. It should legitimize political parties and respect for the human rights established by the United Nations. Diversity in everything and for everyone should be the motto, which is synonymous with pluralism and rule of law; if not it is a euphemism for the repression of progress. To offer it in a partial sense, according to the interests of the state is demagoguery, at least I think so.

December 13 2011

It came carefully wrapped in a page of the newspaper Granma, but bore no relation to that official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba. The dull wrapping was just camouflage, the mask under which a copy of The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel was hidden. The friend who first brought it into our home had been ousted decades earlier and was expiating his crime in some forgotten department of the public library.

Like the Czech playwright and politician, our supplier of “banned literature” had shown his concern over the entry of Soviet tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968. For Havel, his position had cost him the banning of his work, harassment, and even prison, while our acquaintance had better luck and only lost his promotion, the possible Soviet-made Lada car he might have earned, and his wife — who could not stand living with someone without privileges.

This shared ordeal might have brought about the sympathy expressed by that habanero in his fifties for the man who would become the first president of the Czech Republic. He spoke of him as if they had shared space in Tvar magazine or in Charter 77, with the camaraderie of a cellmate.

Punished politicians have an immediate predisposition to solidarity among equals, and recognize and admire each other from afar. So, more than once, in informal gatherings and conversation, the gift-giving librarian declaimed fragments of Democratic Ideas: The Arms of Freedom. It was his obsession and also became ours.

Words live fighting with power, culture rarely has access to the political heights. Its creators wash their hands of it and assert – not without a certain hypocrisy – that they aren’t interested in public office, that government is something dirty that ends up paralyzing the pen and muddying the soul. And they have a good point, as the historical misfortunes of president-writers and artist-ministers confirm.

But still, we must not settle for the reign of the ordinary and the regency of the mediocre. Fortunately, once in a while creation and political office are not mutually exclusive, ideological play and the beauty of language come together in one individual. Coming from the theater, Vaclav Havel was familiar with the deceitfulness of human nature, with the certainty of its masks and its moods. Poetry provided him spiritual armor, an essential inner courage to survive in a totalitarianism whose favored weapon was the invasion of privacy.

His own literary work probably saved him from suicide, from being paralyzed by the ostracism this kind of regime directs to nonconformists. The man of letters never let the political animal get the better of him. Nor did prison manage to convert him into screaming leader demanding a rematch from the podium.

He knew that from the other side of the stage the audience could applaud or whistle when the spectacle ended, he was prepared ahead of time for the vagaries of popularity. Havel was a scriptwriter. He decided to write the libretto of his days and left the secret police nothing but the ability to scribble a few glosses on the margins of his life.

A portion of Cuban intellectuals – who even today won’t admit it – was captivated by this rare specimen of poetic writer and activist. Few dared to publicly profess their admiration for the leader of Civic Forum, or to acknowledge that they read his texts. But the truth is that when certain breezes of Perestroika blew over the official media of this island, he was one of the most common references among journalists, novelists and playwrights.

The cult of Havel kept its voice down; only a few of the intrepid, like our ousted friend, dared to leave the house with one of his books under their arms… of course it was always wrapped. The Czech president enlarged the pantheon of banned faces and censored figures. We lost Havel, as we had lost Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Milan Kundera. Because, as he himself said, “Between the plans of the post-totalitarian system and the plans of life there is a deep abyss.” We wanted to learn more of Havel, but in the Plaza of the Revolution they always had other ideas about what we should know.

Last weekend  Vaclav Havel died, just at the time when he was most read in Cuba. He left and we can’t hear his voice in a classroom of our University, nor listen to his extensive collection of anecdotes about the years of Soviet control. Raul Castro’s government still hasn’t made the slightest public allusion to the death of the Czech democrat, but it decreed three days of official mourning for the death of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Il.

Of this latter, the official media of his country say that he wrote more than 1,500 books over the course of his life. None of them, today, is reading material for us. However, the author of The Garden Party (1963) and Temptation (1986) is increasingly well known and admired. Like missionaries of a peculiar religion, many now distribute his works, and spread his writings across the Island. But, in an irreverent and defiant gesture, they no longer hide the covers with the monochromatic pages of Granma.

Like all the airports in the world, ours is impersonal, stressful, glass and aluminum on all sides. Once in a while the door to customs opens and someone comes out with their luggage wrapped in cellophane. The waiting family members scream, tears running down their faces, the newcomer is flushed with emotion. Meanwhile, on the first floor are the departures, the last hugs between people who may never see each other again. There are booths with glaring officials who check the documents. Passport, visa, ticket… permission to leave. I always wonder what happens to those who pass by this window without a “white card,” without this demeaning authorization that we Cubans must have to leave our own country. But there are few testimonials, the denials happen far from the runway where the planes take off.

The rumor that tomorrow, Friday morning, Raul Castro could announce an easing of the restrictions to enter and leave won’t let me sleep. In four years, my passport has filled with visas to arrive in other countries but lacks a single permit to leave this insularity. Eighteen denials of permission to travel is too much; more like a personal vendetta than the exercise of some bureaucratic regulation. I’ve had my suitcase packed for a long time. The clothing it contains is yellowing with time, the gifts for friends have expired or gone out of style, the papers I would read about current events are outdated. But the suitcase keeps looking at me from the corner of the bedroom. “When will we travel?” I imagine its worn-out wheels asking me. And I can only answer that perhaps this Friday in a parliament — without real power — some decree will return to me a right I should have always enjoyed.

In the event that the anticipated “immigration reform” is announced, I will test its limits from the airport, facing that checkpoint so many fear. My suitcase and I are ready. Willing to see if the guard will press the button that opens the door to the departure lounge, or if he calls security to take me away.

22 December 2011

A solitary man sweeps the dry leaves on the wide avenue where not one car is traveling in either direction. He lowers his head and avoids talking with the cameraman. Perhaps it’s a punishment for not applauding with sufficient enthusiasm at a meeting, or not bowing with theatrical reverence before a Party member. The scene of the sweeper on his desolate street is captured in a documentary about North Korea that has circulated on our alternate information networks. A painful testimony, with people all dressed the same, grey depersonalized buildings, and statues of the Eternal Leader on all sides. Hell in miniature, which leaves us with a sense of relief — at least in this case — for not having been born under the despotism of the Kim dynasty.

When Fidel Castro visited Pyongyang in March 1986, almost a million people greeted him, among them thousands of children waving flags with suspicious synchronicity. Cuban television reveled in the chorus that sounded like one voice, in dancers who didn’t differ from each other by even a hair out of place, and in those little ones playing the violin with surprising mastery and anomalous simultaneity. Months after this presidential trip, on the artistic stages of Cuban elementary schools they tried to emulate this robotic discipline. But there was no way. The girl next to me threw the ball seconds after mine had already fallen to the floor, and some abandoned shoe was left behind on the stage after every performance. The Maximum Leader must have felt disillusioned by the chaotic conduct of his people, so different from those syncopated genuflections before the Secretary General of the Workers Party in North Korea.

On Monday the images of thousands of people crying in the streets over the death of Kim Jong-Il called to mind those perfectly timed children. Although our tropical experiment never managed to “domesticate us” like them, we did copy something in the Korean model. In these parts, as well, genealogy has been more determinate than ballot boxes, and the heritage of blood has left us — in 53 years — only two presidents, both with the same last name. The dauphin over there is named Kim Jong-un; perhaps soon they will communicate to us that over here ours will be Alejandro Castro Espin. Just to think about it makes me shudder, as I did one day before those long rows of little girls throwing a ball at the exact same millisecond.

December 20 2011

María is a beautiful woman in our neighborhood who, every afternoon, very made up, is out walking her dog, and each time that I see her I can only think of Chekov.

Today she woke up with her body in pain, a little cough and feeling chills, so she decided to go to the polyclinic nearby. Once there in the emergency room, she was attended to by a young doctor who, upon seeing her, immediately sent her to get blood tests. When the results came back the doctor, not wasting any time, had her admitted to the hospital and covered her with a mosquito net to isolate her, saying that she had dengue fever, and he immediately informed her husband, who was in the waiting room.

When the ambulance came, they told him the husband couldn’t accompany her, but he flatly refused to let his wife go off without his even knowing where they were going to take her and both of them gave up going to the hospital and returned home.

Not even an hour had passed when a doctor and nurse showed up at the couple’s house to tell them that they had to go with the nurse. Faced with the insistence of the husband and his refusal to let her go alone, they agreed to his accompanying her. This time there was no ambulance, it was a closed transport from some State company, and inside there were other patients they had collected along the way. Maria said that this improvised transport drove like a kitchen mixer through the streets of the city, making stops to pick up others presumed ill, until it was almost like a crowded bus.

Finally they arrived at the old Covadonga hospital where, in a ward crowded with patients, they lined up to be treated. Maria asked who was last in line and said she had the impression, for a minute, that they were handing out beef, because the line was just as long as at the ration store. Her turn finally came and they sent her for tests, this time it was foreign students who were drawing blood; they poked her several times until finally they got it right. Sore all over, she huddled with her husband and waited patiently for the results.

After a while a doctor came and told her, “Ma’am you can go home, you don’t have dengue fever, you have a simple cold. Do you feel well?” “Perfect!” she replied, though she was quite dizzy, but fibbing she added, “I never felt better!”

She motioned to her husband and once she lost sight of the doctor Maria said that it reminded her of her early years at the University when she was running track and field as they made a rapid beeline for the Covadonga exit, and grabbed the first old taxi they saw to get home-sweet-home as fast as possible.

Fortunately, she’s well. She told me of her odyssey herself while, with her accustomed elegance, she walked her little dog, parading past my house.

December 7 2011

None of the classics of Marxism-Leninism could foresee the possibility that a country formally declared as socialist would be governed by a family dynasty. But now we get the news (?) after the death of Kim Jong Il that the leadership of that country will be left in the hands of his third son, Kim Jong-un, whom they call “the brilliant comrade.”

With the information available to us on this island, we should not make predictions about whether the new Kim has reformist tendencies, or is subnormal, or is more totalitarian than his predecessors. What I do consider useful to put on the table is the ease with which in this country’s public offices are inherited and, what interests us most, is how the Cuban media, private property of the Communist Party, approaches the issue: taking it for granted.

In the name of an alleged respect for the sovereignty of nations, they will recognize the legitimacy of the new leader, happy that a precedent exists, quick to point out the “imperialist maneuvers” or “media campaign” launched with regards to a family clan’s perpetuating itself in power. We must pay attention to the degree to which such a monstrosity is accepted, because said acceptance will be directly proportional to the proclivity to repeat here what happens there.

And I won’t even try the line, “this is not North Korea.”

19 December 2011

I was talking with a neighbor in his thirties or forties, who confessed to me with relief that, “Raul’s regime has improved the conditions of life, given us some oxygen, because the brother had suffocated us.”

I smiled before throwing a bucket of skepticism on his head. “Yes, Raul is lifting the prohibitions on a lot of absurdities his brother introduced; but this hasn’t improved the economic base, nor improved the lack of individual freedoms.

“You’re always criticizing! Do you deny that we are better off? And now we don’t depend on the Americans or the Russians. For the first time we are free.”

“Freedom is not synonymous with sovereignty. Why do you think they made these openings?”

My neighbor just opened his eyes and shrugged his shoulders.

“Governability, chico, governability. It is the only reason for these changes.”

“What freedom are you talking to me about? Now I can open a little business, quit the Party and the Union, be my own boss, make my own rules. This makes me free.”

“Sure, if you want a freedom like this,” I said, my thumb and forefinger nearly touching. “You’re the ideal for the future for our society. I congratulate you.”

I changed the subject. The guy was left half content between my congratulations and the plans concocted in his mind. He understood nothing.

December 12 2011