Author: Henry Constantin

The University belongs to the Revolutionaries, says the slogan on a central wall of the University of Camagüey, the first opened by the government of the older brother, Big Brother, in the gray gray gray years of the seventies, on the northeast side of my city. But today, when sometimes we feel just half gray, we look around, a little sadly, to see that little has changed.

I haven’t woken up yet, but, like in a Monterroso story, I see the sign, the dinosaur footprint, is still there.

The 2012-2013 school year has ended, and the reforms in this country don’t touch the essential: respect for the other. Even Ignacio Agramonte University — as if The Older had once refused equality of rights to his enemies — displays the same discriminatory sign in front of which I was photographed 7 years ago, recently expelled from another university.

A dean of this place still shouts this little phrase at a meeting, and a rector, from ISA (Superior Art Institute), remembers the student he ordered out of the university. Still the university, like the armed forces, elected offices, political and business administration, the press, the diplomatic service, “solidarity” missions, and who knows how many more things on the island, are not for all Cubans: they are for the Revolutionaries. The country still is not with all nor for the good of all, but for the Revolutionaries — and even for them, to top it off, all they get is leftovers.

We all know today that the only requirement to be a revolutionary is to remain silent, smile and look away while Cuba is falling apart on us. The best revolutionary in Cuba is he who tries to revolutionize the least.

Ignacio Agramonte is the same university that expelled Harold Cepero and other boys at the beginning of 2000, when they collected signatures for the Varela Project. It is the same place where the freedom of other friends as turned bitter while they studied and worked there.

It’s where some who knew me have said, “Beware of being friends with Henry Constantin.” But this post is not only about the trip I took this afternoon to the University of Camagüey and its little sign stinking of apartheid; it was to talk about everything Cuban universities lack.

Cuban universities need not only to erase this sign. They also need to raise salaries and student stipends, reconstruct and modernize their facilities and services, de-politicize the internal rules, authorize free association among students and professors and remove all the partisan controls on their properties.

We also need to support non-state universities — because a single educational system is the best way to prepare us for the single command — to update the curricula, become more focused on technology and information sciences, eliminate military and political subjects, connect professors and students with the reality of the country and the word, and empower them to influence it, so that physical and spiritual exile are not the only options.

Cuban universities urgently need to become self-sustaining, modify subjective and imprecise evaluation methods, measuring only academic and creative performance, abandoning discrimination in admissions according to geographic provenance, increasing the evaluative demand, applying exposition and opposition of ideas in the classes, introducing the civic and human component in the curricula.

It’s a lot, but to eliminate the little sign would be a good step.  Or to change it so that we make it into a wall-museum, where our children and grandchildren will stop for a minute, and remember that that university and that Cuba should never return.

27 June 2013

A common school, half in ruins, half with children in uniform, with its Cuban flag and signs on the walls. The boys talk among themselves, then look with curiosity at the stranger, who takes photos of enormous homeless sites behind the surviving classrooms. Everything seems normal in that country schoolhouse. But there is a shadow. The stranger quickly quits with the photos. The last: some cement squares next to the door, “like a booth in a military unit,” he thought. He crosses the potholes of the road and approaches the wooden houses. They welcome him, give him water, talk about the sunshine and the plums. The stranger, who has already been introduced, happily drinks the coffee they also offer him, smiles, and thanks the lady and shuts up. It’s that there is a shadow.

Then, he asks the man of the house, an old man with a mustache, “Is it true that the elementary school, a long time ago, was a UMAP*?” He points at the half-boarding Batalla de Guisa school, whose kids have no idea what was suffered there forty-some years ago. The farmer stops smiling. He hesitates, stutters, speaks softly, looks at the floor. “Yes, yes… but no. I’m not looking for problems.” Someone says, “They took the people there to some banana groves to work.”

Other visits to the farmers around then, other evasions, “Yes, yes, some of that happened.  One guy set himself on fire and the screams could be heard for miles. But I do not know anything else. “

One lady says, “There was a lot of damage. There were dungeons, there at the end.”

So I ask, in other houses, people who lived there, in the hamlet of Manolin, ten kilometers from the southern town of Cuatro Caminos, Camagüey, in the sixties, that time of so much luminous Revolution, and so many prison cells and firing squads — more than any time in the history of Cuba.

Those who respond say yes and open their eyes as if amazed at what they’ve just be reminded of. They know more or less that the collapsed schoolhouse was a UMAP camp, run by officers of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, and serious things happened to those interned there.

“What things?” and then they hesitated, “Better ask so-and-so, who lived closer.” And the faces of mystery, the silence, the evasions in the faces of the interviewed farmers tell me more than everything they can say to me: there are the silent screams of an abysmal shadow that hangs over the people in Cuba, not only those of these fields of Najasa, but so many in this country who live filled with fear of saying in public what they want and what they know.

And I write it of course: the biggest problem with the forced internal silence about the UMAP issue is not that there is discrimination based on sexual behavior today in Cuba and it remains in the minds of thousands of Cuban men and women and in the structures of leadership, nor that the one who manages this issue officially here is a member of the governing family — which stinks of nepotism — nor than they try to hide the past, among other reasons to avoid a settling of accounts, inopportune repentance and reparations for the victims. The worst is the infinite fear that still infects millions of people in this country, a logical fear induced from above which, while it exists, prevents Cubans from speaking freely of their desires, concerns and complaints, of their past, and even more seriously, of their present.

That grave mystery that the people around the little school that was UMAP remember fearfully, is proof. Where there are people afraid to speak there is no peace.

*Translator’s note: UMAP, “Military Units to Aid Production,” was a series of concentration camps where the regime imprisoned its “enemies” including homosexuals, religious believers, writers, artists, intellectuals and others.

18 May 2013

I will not site this trip in any place in Cuba because it could have taken place in any of the thousands of fields in this country with any of the hundreds of thousands Cuban peasants.

I’ve had travel companions more distinct in this world. I’ve traveled among fresh pines with workers in the sawmills in Pico Cristal; among hives and smoke with the collectors of bees’ honey; on a mountain of ice with fishermen from the Bay of Pigs; surrounded by resigned conscripts to military service; or with euphoric musicians from an orchestra; with the president of the ICRT who did not specify what kind of journalist he was when I talked to him and began to wonder about his acquaintances from Camaguey; sandwiched between dozens of faithful Pentecostal or Catholic missionaries; in official cars — when they thought they could make another official journalist out of me — or in the cop cars of lawless people with grim looks when they were convinced otherwise; crammed with Cubans of all provinces and odors…

But a few days ago I had an unusual travel companion.

I traveled with a cow. A very sad and sick cow, lying on the floor, not mooing, as if she guessed that her journey was ending at the slaughterhouse. “She got stuck in the mud, spent the night there, and when we saw her and managed to get her out, she couldn’t stand up,” the owner told me, unknown but talkative, sitting beside me in the truck.

And why were they taking her to a slaughterhouse more than twenty miles away? “We don’t want any problems, my son. We don’t have a certificate for the death of this animal. And without this paper we have to keep delivering the milk as if she were alive.”

Then the interviewee started to turn toward me: “And how much to they pay at the slaughterhouse for the cow?”

“For this one, 700 pounds, it will be some 90 pesos total.”

Ninety Cuban pesos is less than four U.S. Dollars. Almost what this peasant paid to hire transport to the slaughterhouse.

“But they will give you some of the meat?”

“No, nothing my son. And afterwards I have to take more paperwork to the vet, get the stamps on it and pay more. I’m the owner of the cow, but I have to give an account to the State of everything I do with her, even after her death.”

And he smiled at the absurdity, while I ended up outraged at so much abuse. But the hardest thing is not the cow itself that the law forces you to give to State functionaries, after having raised it for so many years, without help from any State enterprise; the worst is not even the possibility that the children of this peasant eat a lunch of offal and their mother suffers from low iron, while the fortunate functionaries eat the meat itself but avoid the sun and the getting up at dawn, and others meet and exhort and scold the farmers so that they will keep on working, and others spy on them so that everything gets works. The hardest thing, the most devastating was the end of the conversation.

“And you don’t protest all of this?”

“Ah, my son, what for?”

7 May 2013

Nemesia Rodriguez is the most famous person from the Zapata Swamp. She lives in Soplillar, which is nothing more than houses around a ball field near Playa Larga, in a simple masonry house with iron railings at the door and a comfortable sofa — a gift from by Fidel Castro — in the living room. Friendly, talkative, open, humble in her manner and her environment, she welcomed this stranger who interrupted the sewing work, with no reproach for the unexpected visit.

I confess that I sat in her uncomfortable little living room: three huge portraits of Fidel Castro, at my back and side, one of Raul and another of Celia Sanchez watched me all the time, smiling and victorious from the simple innocent victim they knew how to bring to their trench. The portrait of the mother dead in the April bombing — an amplification given by Kcho — lies amidst the Cuban presidents. When I arrived, Nemesia had in front of her, covered with her sewing work that she put aside to talk with me, a Bible.

I listened with respect. I was not there to provoke mournful memories, or discuss about the two opposing Cubas that we defend, but to know her closely. I felt it was my pain for her lost mother. I remained silent before all her words of affection and gratitude to people who, for me, the deserve the most resounding oblivion, but to her they brought some interested compassion and support.

I understand because I too have seen my mother in distress and crying every time the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) interrogates her for the crime of being my mother, and the murky emotions against those individuals and bosses are inevitable. The pain of Nemesia is of being an orphan, endless pain that no one wants to come to, it is dignified that we remain silent before it; her appreciation of those who see as protectors those who definitely damage them, and then don’t want to know, nor can they repair the damage, it’s understandable and human.

But there is forgiveness, that few attempt to cultivate in this country — and never those who should ask for it — and reconciliation among Cubans who have amassed mountains of errors, as high as the Sierra Maestra.

They encourage all of the grudges of the past and only speak of unity for the trenches and the power, not of forgiveness and coexistence, they composed this poisoned elegy of politicking and manipulation, and have made millions of children repeat, they provoke a victim to pubicly repeat their bleak history, and swell all the sadness of the victim in this last trip of 2011 in Santiago de Cuba, and they could not prevent their ending up in intensive care in Saturnino Lora hospital because the heart failed so much revived emotion, “They don’t speak any more in the suffering of the past because they kill you, not the planes,” the doctors told the MININT officials, Nemesia’s guides, those, those who enjoy cultivating bad memories in a country that needs reconciliation and to speak of the present, who are the real culprits of every open sore still on Cuban consciences.

And that, apparently, they lack.

22 April 2013

As usual, at this time of year Varadero is full of foreign tourists. The best beach and the most stunning hotels in Cuba are full of workers, employees, small business owners, retirees, professionals and young recent graduates from the remote corners of the world: a representation of the working class who, according to the ideologues of Marxism and Communism, would be the great exploited in the capitalist countries. Here, fortunately, they swam on the beaches of the island of the proletarian Revolution.

The irony is that the workers of that island remained outside these beaches, because they are very poor. If they didn’t manage to climb the ladder to a high state office, or to lose a relative in the waters of exile who would later come back and invite them, or learn some difficult way to prosper in a Cuba where almost all ways of prospering have something illegal or shady about them, these proletarians Cuban who will parade on May Day on Wednesday will not enter the hotels where the foreign proletariat stay.

The first Cuban government that manages to fill, without subsidies or handouts, the hotels in Varadero with domestic tourism will not need red flags or banners in the streets: their parade, the more honorable one you could conceive us, will be the thousands of Cuban workers finally visiting the best, furthest, and most impossible  beach in their own country..

30 April 2013

Unbelievable. Some time ago the post office left at my house an envelope full of my maps that I had inadvertently left behind at a little house in Sierra del Cristal, back east. The extraordinary thing is that they arrived at my house two years and two months — the date was shown on the postmark — after they day they were sent: something suspicious they kept longer than usual in our respectful post office; they opened it, and then sealed it and sent it on.

How different the peasants and workers in the wood whom I could never thank for this postal favor, and all the others of those trips, who accepted no pay, although they lived so humbly it hurt. A chicken, the only one, sacrificed and cooked for guests; the little rice shared with strangers from Camaguey; a workday dedicated to free guide service for some stubborn boys climbing, among the thorns and mountain streams; the most falling-apart shoe in the world immediately sewn up; all that solidarity, integrity, even amid the monumental scarcities with which they live.

All this on the Pico de Cristal — Crystal Peak — which at 4,000 feet is the highest mountain in Cuba outside the Sierra Maestra. And the least docile of all I visited. Relatively close to the northern coast of Holguin in the area of Levisa, they say it is easier however to climb it from the south, coming from Santiago town Mayari Arriba, which is about 15 kilometers away.

The summit is almost on the border of the two provinces, although it falls on the Holguin side. A bust of the Mambi General Calixto García, facing north, surrounded by thorns, gives the sense of belonging that those from Holguin have.

The Sierra del Cristal beat me once, when I ventured unguided with a fledgling group, which went into shock three hundred meters from the top, our shoes broken, completely losing the way forward and back, out of water and crackers and with threatening rain that poured down on us, what they call “drizzle” in those uninhabited hills, which are the wettest of the country, is the same thing as saying torrents of water or mud pushing you off some cliff.

The annihilated scouts advanced and recoiled a thousand times, without reaching the top. Afterwards I didn’t not know if we went down or fell down. A hospital worker from the forest company that cuts down the pine trees in that region, came out to find us with the shock that any mountain spring would have hit us with. She found us wasted in little pieces, lying there exhausted and peaceful on a sandy ford of the Levisa River.

But last year we had a rematch, more organized and tough, and better guided, and we got there. That stretch of the Levisa river is the most striking natural thing in Cuba. In the first trip we only passed through it in our way to the mountain — if you come from the southeast, as we did, it’s a crossing point — but in the second trip, with more time and knowledge of the field, we continue downstream to the north.

And the discovering of the great white sand beaches, and the infinite waterfall ladder, more abrupt and continuous than the ones of the niches of the Escambray, conquered us. The white sand seems to release from  the saline deposit of the slopes of  Pico de Cristal itself; from that beach surely comes the name of the mountain and the region.

The water runs down there, constant and very cold no mater the season, through plastic pipelines that take advantage of gravity, from the mountain to the houses where the workers spend the night. The hidden caves of that prehistoric mammal, the almiqui, can be found with a little patience and a good eye. The wild dogs howl all night, and traces of wild pigs can be found any path near the river. On the mountain there are treacherous roads that the guide doesn’t warn us end at some precipice and vines everywhere. Pico de Cristal, stubbornly locked in it isolation and trails, is the only great mountain in Cuba for travelers who love the difficult.

But another mountain, less easy to beat, amazes in these parts: a mountain of oblivion. Tucked in the middle of nowhere, are the workers of Sierra Cristal Forest Enterprise and dozens of coffee farmers. Those who cut or plant pines — although deforestation always wins — usually live there, in the middle of the mountains, one or two weeks or two weeks at a time, because the difficultly they have — with the bad transport and the bad roads — getting back and forth from their homes in Mayari Arriba or Tumba Siete or Los Jagüeyes.

But in those immense hills, in their camps there is no electricity no, no phones or music or shops or parks or people to talk to but themselves. And they die of boredom and apathy, with old clothes and the frugal food they eat not to faint — beware, in the middle of the lost mountains there are no doctors — and some drown their nights in waves of alcohol, in a boring destruction it’s not easy to escape. All for a very poor wage that leaves their families in poverty, a wage they cannot haggle about because they have no union to engage in the battle of rights.

The coffee farmers, even with the recent increases of the money the state company pays for their product, continue to suffer the evils of the Cuban countryside: a forced and demanding monopoly with non-negotiable prices paid for production — and always watching for skimming — and this amid an almost complete lack of equipment and supplies to facilitate the work.  After an endless series of absurdities from higher up, it always ends with the overwhelming presence of the State and its officials.

These are the stories one hears while walking through the felled pine trees or sliding through the wet and muddy coffee plantations, where it seems those who should solve the problems never come.

The person who first talked to be about the Crystal Mountains was a gentleman who was with the rebels there in the ’50s, with that guerrilla troop protected by the incredible nature and the even greater solidarity of the people of Mayari Arriba.

This “Second Front” as they call it in the town, a few days ago celebrated the 55th anniversary of the struggle to improve the lives of many people. Whoever walks along those mountains realizes that obviously those guerrilla leaders didn’t accomplish much. And time is running out.

14 March 2013

I came to Cienaga Zapata — the Zapata Swamp — a few days ago, without housing or transportation or mosquitoes or crabs on the roads, only with guidance from a battered map and the goodwill of all the swamp dwellers I found along the way. I wanted to go to Giron (known to Americans as the Bay of Pigs), to Playa Larga, to talk with Nemesia, see crocodiles and coal, and to know the depths of the Zapata peninsula, where my map showed the names of hamlets. I did almost everything, except the last. In this April, those people who were never bombed, don’t exist today. They’ve gone.

There are two swamps: an exterior one all along the road from La Boca to Playa Giron and Cayo Ramona, a swamp dotted with private restaurants and rooms-for-rent in well-painted masonry buildings, in Pálpite, Playa Larga, Caletón or Girón, where people live hoping for the tenuous capitalism that is permitted and a tide of tourists. It is their sensible businesses that support the relative prosperity of the swamp dwellers.

It’s true that in Cienaga there are a hospital, schools and roads, and that the majority of its communities have regular transport. There’s a computer club but no Internet for Cubans because they have no right to is anywhere. There are a civil registry office, bakery, electricity, police, forest rangers and others who work for the Ministry of the Interior — detecting illegalities among ordinary cities, blind to the high officials. There are hotels, campsites, museums, a bookstore, snack bars, a theater group, and a video place. It’s true that almost none of this existed in 1959. So far so good — although the stench of the montage in the showcase is unbearable.

And is this enough for a human being? After 54 years of continual sacrifice, will all the prosperity that the people of Cienaga aspire to be contained in the badly delivered basic services, and a discreet comfort that, at the first opportunity, makes them put out the “for sale” sign and get well away?

But you have to shake your head in amazement when you compare the privileged places of the swamp, with those outside the tourist route.

Because there are villages in Cienaga — the real one, not the tourist or museum one — with no phones, no cell coverage, like the remote Santo Tomas, where electricity comes from a plant that runs a few hours a day. There’s a doctor, a little school with a teacher and computers but no Internet, a video place where you can only see what’s permitted, prefab cottages and a social circle with rum and cigars.

That’s better than nothing, of course, if a person doesn’t have the spirit of progress and children don’t mind getting older in the same conditions in which they were born. Those places have fixed transport once a day, and to get to civilization they have to pass through dust or mud, depending on the season.

So, naturally, people flee from Santo Tomas, Guasasa or La Ceiba, gloomy villages becoming deserted, because they fugitives suspect they will never improve their lives.
“What you see here is the work of the Revolution,” says a billboard to the right of the road at the entrance to town of Cienaga de Zapata — Zapata Swamp. I would add “What you DO NOT see here, is also the work of the Revolution.”

What is most needed in Cienaga? For starters, what I say in everything I write: Freedom. Freedom in the economic initiatives of the people, who can only engage in certain businesses; freedom in commerce and property; freedom of information, assembly, association, education and labor unions …

On this trip I couldn’t see any crocodiles, free in the wild, even when I went into a channel of soft and nauseating shores where something splashed from time to time. A child told me that in the old villages of the Zapata Peninsula they no longer see crocodiles: they’ve fled from the people. I thought, you don’t see people either: they have fled from despair.

This Revolution over the same Cienaga for such a long time, weighs it down. And little by little, it is sinking.

18 April 2013

What makes a city is its people. The Capitol is not the most important thing in Havana, nor are the abundance of churches and alleys what is most striking of Camagüey, nor is the Moncada Barracks the greatest thing in Santiago, nor are their seawall walks the most pleasant parts of Caibarién, Cienfuegos, Gibara and Puerto Padre. It is the people who live or have lived there, their work, their faith, their worth or their dreams, who give meaning to those places.

And Pinar del Rio is a city that — forgive me for all the other valuable things that don’t appear in this blog — makes more sense because in many of its houses, ever stronger, grows the magazine Coexistence.

Occasionally Dagoberto Valdés, friend and editor of the magazine Coexistence, sends me a text message, a text that is not like the others, although it is also news: there is an Editorial Board. And I must be, and the finicky editor of texts that he lets loose in his alert counsels, and I’m glad because I cam going to see a ton of friends and good people, “good for me and good for this island bathes in waves of despair,” all at once.

So once more I pack my backpack, and correct the commas in an article I’m sure I haven’t sent them yet, and get a ticket or hang around the waiting lists at the bus stations. And begin the trip to Pinar del Río.

I’ve traveled a lot to the city that seemed a remote land before: since that first trip of curious journalist, when with my beard and covered in road dust I arrived at the home of Dagoberto Valdés, a few months from the end of the magazine Vitral, to help put out the first issue of White Rose. And instead of people consumed by sadness or resentment against the deserters, and the every-man-for-himself in which so many Cubans sail today, I found a team focused on their work, optimistic and affable, wonderfully resilient.

(That was my first trip to Pinar del Rio and the Magazine, in a very journalistic and traveling summer, when I still hadn’t been out of the University of Santa Clara did two months later, which I was two months later, by chance. And I joined the Editorial Board in February 2011, my own birthday present, four months before I was kicked out of the ISA. Obviously, my relationship with the magazine had a strong impact on me).

Coexistence brought me to the home-based museum of Pedro Pablo Oliva*, and The Great Blackout epic my Cuban favorite. Coexistence gave me the chance to film, which I still owe them for, when a phenomenal jury gave Henry Constantin its audiovisual prize. Coexistence, that had managed to weave together a ton of friends in Pinar del Rio and outside the city, which they shared with me.

And Coexistence included me in its Editorial Board, and that night of the first meeting my modesty about being an upstart, for being the last to arrive and from the farthest away, they treated me almost equal to the founders, freely and without hesitation, with the right to edit and critique every new issue of the magazine.

Usually the traveler goes to see Soroa and Las Terrazas, climbs the hills of Vinales or goes down in the caves of Santo Tomas, spends an afternoon at Guyabita or breathig in the best tobacco brangs, bathing in Maria La Gorda, taking the waters of Los Portales and looking how it flows to the Gulf of Mexico from Cano de San Antonio or enjoying the clouds from Pan do Guajaibon.

All that is good, if one wants to know only the superficial. But if you want to know something of the best of humanity reborn in Pinar, and you left without a greeting to the people of Coexistence, without the magazine, a photo or a conversation, the traveler, possibly, would have missed everything.

Henry Constantín

*Translator’s note: Pedro Pablo Oliva is a painter in Pinar del Rio who fell on the wrong side of the government. The associated events are detailed here by: Yoani Sanchez, Dagoberto Valdes, Miriam Celaya and Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo.

20 March 2013

A beheaded Indian atop his white horse races around Las Tunas, this faded and drab Eastern balcony what I love so much because there they have loved me. The Indian is a bad omen, according to the elders of Las Tunas, perhaps because of the already genetic fear of a population that in the 19th century was attacked too often and burned too often. There are those who say, to spread fear at night, that the last apparitions of the headless one were before an apocalyptic hailstorm and a bloody car accident many years ago. But it has not come out again.

And I think it’s because, decapitated after all, he has no head to see his surroundings. Because a subtle tragedy, without blood or fury or visible cataclysms, happens every day. In the schools of Tunas — as its citizens abbreviate Las Tunas — and in the whole country.

If you travel to the village of Cucalambé — eminent poet of Las Tunas, whose formal name was Juan Cristóbal Nápoles Fajardo – drop in on Vicente Garcia park. Look at the statue of the much-discussed gallant general, walk through the bright new boulevard that stretched from the little Catholic church, have an ice cream at Las Copas, take a peek at Jose Marti Plaza, the most inventive Cuban monument to the man from Dos Rios. All that is very nice. But if you don’t want to upset yourself, don’t want any further on the boulevard that Ramon Ortuno Street.

Because a few blocks further on, like someone looking for the bus station, there’s a nursery school, a kindergarten — as the grandparents call it — that is called “Little Friends of MININT,” that is the Ministry of the Interior. I went through there at the same time as the parents were picking up their kids under 5, who do not read or write, but who surely have already received lectures in that place about the institution in charge of control and exhaustive surveillance over Cubans, those who spy, interrogate, beat and imprison people. I discovered that place and, dying of laughter at the excessive brainwashing, took a a picture of it. Then came the bitterness.

Bitterness is not the name of the place, which is just a detail in the landscape of Cuban education. The bitterness is because I remembered that I’m alive and I have a son who lives in a country where all this, these kindergartens for toddlers, primary and secondary schools for kids and teens, the high schools and poly-techs, and the universities belong to the state. And those who control the state — which I insist on writing in lower case, because that’s how I think of them — manage them without any ethical respect for our children.

On the contrary, they use them to teach and evaluate the discipline of their own political ideas. And worse: they train them in the arts of obedience, of saying yes when they think no, of setting aside their truth, of running away when they can’t take it any more. Without the permission of the parents, who also took the same classes.

Once I asked Dante, my son, who just turned 7,what letter he’d learned that day. “F for Fidel,” he answered. Not F for Family, which is what I try to teach him, not F for fortunate, which is what he deserves. No, those were not the most important words he learned that day. That day he learned F, for Fidel.

They saw education in Cuba is free. I don’t know. It’s true that in exchange for so much schooling and education the government doesn’t ask us for money, no. It asks us to give our liberty, which is worth more.

The Indian doesn’t go headless any more in Las Tunas. Or there is no disgrace to say it, or those it happens to are so used to it and silent, that that rider on a white horse dissolves in the past. But this April 4th there’s a party for our children, the students, who, for now, continue in that only possible — free and compulsory — school. For now.

1 April 2013

La Mensura is nearly a kilometer high and 25 individual and dusty kilometers from Mayari, there in the eastern part of Holguin province, Cuba. One kilometer in height that becomes an infinite zigzag to climb, although most travelers find it easy.

It is a rough hill, very rough, and guarded: the slopes are like the back of someone who lost out in a duel with machetes, as has the embankment. The level of deforestation is remarkable; the pines that cover the mountain are young; the dense damp forest vegetation that often covers mountains in the east is missing. At the end of the winding road, right at the top, stands a military zone with a corresponding “Do Not Enter”, which seems to warn: you, be careful, don’t try to get too high.

Far away to the northeast, are other mountains, and the reddish deserts of the Nicaro mines. To the south, the road continues in the foothills, and leads to Mella and Palmarito de Cauto, Jose Daniel Ferrer’s village. Taking advantage of the excellent coverage, we call on the mobile phone but didn’t get a signal: it was later revealed that it had been blocked, once more, by the owners of Cubacel.

Below, between the hill and the road, a nice tourist site, with pool and alpine-like huts, surrounded by fresh green and songbirds. All for a price per day that exceeds the average monthly wage of any Cuban. At the entrance, another sign of prohibition of access in English only, but as crystal clear as the military zone, “Welcome to Villa Pinares de Mayari.”

7 March 2013