Luis Cino Alvarez – Translating Cuba

Jorge Gómez and the Silence Surrounding His Fall From Grace During Cuba’s Five Grey Years

Jorge Gómez / Moncada group (Photo: Prensa Latina / blogspot)

Cubanet, Luis Cino, Havana, 24 March 2026 — There is much talk about Jorge Gómez Barranco, leader of the band Grupo Moncada, who died on March 23—and it’s almost always good talk, because there is no doubt that Gómez was a good person and much loved by many in the cultural sphere, particularly music and television.

What is not talked about (it seems that few remember or prefer not to remember) is how in 1971, when Gómez, a young philosophy professor at the time, fell out of favor with the regime because of his connection to the magazine, Pensamiento Crítico (“Critical Thinking”).

This publication, which brought together left-wing intellectuals—veritable human think tanks but who differed from the Soviet line, such as Aurelio Alonso and Fernando Martínez Heredia—was shut down shortly after that infamous and misnamed “Congress of Education and Culture” that ushered in, on orders from Raúl Castro, the Five Grey Years. Castro, then-Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, labeled the periodical, along with the University of Havana philosophy department, “a bastion of revisionists and counterrevolutionaries.” All because they dared to dabble in the ideas of Marcuse, Gramsci, Sartre—and, perhaps, even Bakunin and Trotsky—precisely at a time when the Castro regime, still reeling from the failure of the Ten Million Ton Sugar Harvest, didn’t want to upset the Kremlin, to whose chariot they had hitched themselves so that the Soviets could pull them out of the crisis.

Jorge Gómez, like most of his colleagues at Critical Thinking and in the philosophy faculty, preferred to forget that time of closed-mindedness and censorship of intellectuals, to downplay its importance. He even ignored the controversy that led a recalcitrant commissioner to accuse him, playing on his second surname*, of wanting to send Marxism tumbling off a cliff.

After all, the end of his foray into philosophy allowed Jorge Gómez, who had learned to play the piano as a child, to return to music, his great passion. In 1972, along with several university students, he formed a group that continue reading

combined Cuban son with Andean music, and which he named Moncada in honor of his uncle, the poet Raúl Gómez García, who died in the attack on the Santiago barracks on July 26, 1953.

Years later, after replacing the influence of Quilapayún and Inti Illimani with more pop and catchy tunes—and the overly serious Alberto Falla and Manuel Calviño, first with Carlos Enríquez and then with other long-haired, handsome and younger singers—Moncada managed to become popular in the 1980s and mainly during the years of the Special Period, when his concerts packed the steps of the University of Havana.

Music lovers, and especially rock fans, have Jorge Gómez to thank for his 80s television program, Perspectiva, where we had the opportunity—unusual at that time when prohibitions on rock music remained staunchly in place—to see groups like Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, etc. on the small screen.

Ten years ago, on August 30, 2016, when singer-songwriter Amaury Pérez interviewed Jorge Gómez on his TV show, Con dos que se quieran (“With Two Who Love Each Other”)—a kind of confessional for the singer-songwriter’s big and little friends—Pérez asked Gómez how the philosophy department came to be terminated and why Critical Thinking magazine was shut down.

When asked that question, Jorge Gómez dodged it, sidestepping the issue. He said the magazine “had been gradually losing circulation,” excusing this development by saying that “these things happen in revolutions.” It would have been too presumptuous for the obsequious Jorge Gómez to say more and thus jeopardize his moment in the spotlight as a successful musician within the mainstream culture.

Besides, I would think, why would he look for trouble by stirring up the past? What for? After all, most guests on With two who love each other—when asked this type of confrontational question by Amaury Pérez—far from complaining about grievances and reprisals, evade the issue, choose forgiveness, and almost always end up proclaiming their devotion “to Fidel and the Revolution.”

Jorge Gómez preferred to forget ‘the mistakes of the past,’ to turn the page, as did some of his Critical Thinking colleagues, who after being rehabilitated, became tin-pot repairmen dedicated to reinventing socialism.

* A “barranco” is a narrow, winding river gorge.

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

Author’s biography:

Luis Cino. Born Havana, 1956. He worked as an English teacher, in construction, and in agriculture. He began working in independent journalism in 1998. He was a member of the editorial board of the magazine De Cuba and deputy director of Primavera Digital. A regular contributor to CubaNet since 2003, he writes about art, history, politics, and society. He lives in Arroyo Naranjo. He dreams of being able to dedicate himself fully and freely to writing fiction. He is passionate about good books, the sea, jazz, and blues.

The ‘Five Grey Years’ Kept Going Much Longer Than a Decade, Primarily Because of Fidel Castro / Cubanet, Luis Cino

That dark, inquisitorial period lasted much more than five years. It did not, as some would like to pretend, end in 1976.

The work, “1971,” from the series, “Reconstrucción. Quinquenio Gris,’ [Reconstruction. Five Grey Years,” by the plastic artist Alejandro González. Image: MNBA.

Cubanet, Luis Cino, Havana, 7 June 2025 – It was the late essayist Ambrosio Fornet who coined the term, “The Five Grey Years,” to refer to the repression of artists and intellectuals during the 1970s–a disastrous time for the national culture.

Fornet first utilized this expression in January of 2007 during his appearance at an event convened by fellow essayist Desiderio Navarro with the blessing of the Ministry of Culture, and by which Fornet attempted to resolve the so-called “email storm.”

That storm, also known as “the little war of emails,” was provoked by the fawning presentations on the TV programs “Impronta” and “La Diferencia” (hosted by singer Alfredo Rodríguez) of Luis Pavón and Jorge “Papito” Serguera, executors of the cultural policies of that period—the former as president of the National Council of Culture (CNC), the latter as director of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT).

During his appearance in that roundtable, and in his attempt to do some belated damage control by minimizing the era as much as possible (and above all, by not indicating who bore the primary responsibility for it) Fornet understated matters by employing the term, “five-year period.”

That dark, inquisitorial time lasted much longer than five years. It did not, as some claim, end in 1976, when the National Council of Culture was continue reading

replaced by the Ministry of Culture, with Armando Hart at the helm; several more years would elapse before the darkness would begin to dissipate in the early 1980s.

Nor did it start in 1971 with the Congress of Education and Culture, and the Heberto Padilla affair. For a long while already, dark clouds had been gathering over writers and artists. Before the commissioners, irritated by the homoerotic tone of Chapter VIII of Paradiso, ordered Lezama Lima‘s monumental novel to be removed from bookstores and turned into pulp; before the ordeal visited upon Heberto Padilla and Antón Arrufat for their books Fuera del juego and Los siete contraTebas, respectively, began in 1968; before that Stalinist ectoplasm who would sign his name as “Leopoldo Ávila” (and whose authorship remains unknown, whether it was actually “Lieutenant” Pavón, José Antonio Portuondo*, or both of them in a duet) began to fire mercilessly at writers from the pages of Verde Olivo, the magazine of the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

Several years before Lieutenant Armando Quesada* ordered the burning of the Guiñol Nacional puppets related to Afro-Cuban traditions in 1971, considering them to represent “backwardness, underdevelopment, the stuff of black santeros,” other figures in official culture, imbued with “revolutionary fervor,” were already setting themselves up as inquisitors.

In October of 1963, one of the most Stalinist cultural commissars of the regime, the scholastically Marxist Mirta Aguirre, declared: “In the hands of dialectical materialism, art can and should be an exorcism, a form of knowledge that contributes to sweeping the dark shadows of ignorance from the minds of men, a precious instrument for replacing the religious conception of the world with [Marxism’s] scientific conception, and a timely Marxist resource for the defeat of philosophical idealism.”

In 1965, a recalcitrant and obtuse extremist like Magaly Muguercia believed she was capable of deciding that Cuban theater had to be “an obligatory socialist expression.”

The writer and folklorist Samuel Feijoo, on April 15, 1965, in order to get in tune with that statement from the Union of Young Communists that screamed “Out with the homosexuals and the counterrevolutionaries from our schools,” and anticipating the UMAP by a few months and the Parametración*** carried out by the Evaluation Commission of the CNC in the early 70s by six years, published in the newspaper El Mundo a commentary entitled “Revolution and Vices,” in which he stated:

“This most virile country, with its army of men, should not and cannot be expressed by homosexual writers and artists. Because no homosexual represents the Revolution, which is a matter of men, of fists and not pens, of courage and not trembling, of integrity and not intrigue, of creative courage and not cheap surprises. Because the literature of homosexuals reflects their epicene natures, as Raúl Roa said. And true revolutionary literature is not and will never be written by sodomites… Destroy their positions, their procedures, their influence. That is what is called revolutionary social hygiene. They must be eradicated from their key positions on the frontier of revolutionary art and literature. If we lose a dance group because of this, we are left without the sick dance group. If we lose an exquisite literary figure, the air becomes cleaner. Thus, we will feel healthier while we create new virile figures emerging from a brave people.”

The witch hunt against artists and intellectuals would reach its climax with Fidel Castro’s speech in April 1971, at the closing of the Congress on Education and Culture. But the scribes of official culture and some of those who suffered from Stockholm syndrome yesterday, when speaking of the Grey Decade, prefer to reduce it to a five-year period and avoid mentioning that the responsibility for that dark and sad period lay with Fidel Castro, beginning with his “Words to Intellectuals” in June 1961**, and culminating 10 years later with the closing speech of the Congress on Education and Culture.

Luis Pavón, Papito Serguera, Armando Quesada, and other anti-cultural henchmen, however extremist they may have been, were merely the underlings with limited authority who, in compliance with “the instructions from above,” were charged with carrying out those aberrant policies to bring artists and intellectuals in line and “within the Revolution.”

Translator’s Notes:

*Portuondo and Quesada are pictured in this Translating Cuba article, Cuban Writer Jorge Ferrer Releases the Recordings of Heberto Padilla’s ‘Confession.’

**A reference to a speech by Fidel Castro on June 30, 1961, in which he set limits to the free expression of artists and writers: “Within the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing.”

****Parameterization/ parametración: From the word “parameters.” Parameterization is a process of establishing parameters and declaring anyone who falls outside them (the parametrados) to be what is commonly translated as “misfits” or “marginalized.” This is a process much harsher than implied by these terms in English. The process is akin to the McCarthy witch hunts and black lists and is used, for example, to purge the ranks of teachers, or even to imprison people.

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

The Celebration of a Bloody Failure / Cubanet, Luis Cino

It is an aberration that the Moncada carnage, which began a nightmare that seems endless after 65 years of dictatorship, became a national holiday.

Celbration of 26th of July / Poverty in Cuba. (Fotos: Cubadebate / CubaNet)sdsd

Cubanet, Luis Cino, Havana, 26 July 2024 — A few days ago, writing in 14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera recalled when Fidel Castro, appearing on a State TV “Roundtable” [Mesa Redonda] segment in 2000, admitted that he could have avoided the attack on the Moncada Barracks and gone up the Sierra Maestra to begin the battle against the Batista regime.

This would have prevented the loss of 86 lives: 22 military personnel and 64 revolutionaries — eight who died during the assault and 56 who were killed by the soldiers after being taken prisoner.

Fidel Castro’s plan of using 160 men armed with pistols and 22 carbines to take the Moncada Barracks—Cuba’s second military fortress, defended by a garrison of a thousand men—had no chance of success.

Even assuming that they had managed to take Moncada, and that a large part of the Santiago population would have joined the revolutionaries, and that they had also managed to take the barracks of the National Police and the Navy, Santiago de Cuba would have become a mousetrap for them. Even if the Fidelistas had managed, as they had planned, to also take the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks in Bayamo, they would not have been able to contain the army reinforcements that would come to Santiago. And it would have been difficult for the rebels to withdraw from the city, escape the bombings of government aircraft, and take refuge in the Sierra Maestra to start the guerrilla war. continue reading

But Fidel Castro, a delusional guy who was given to hatching the most outlandish plots, needed to make big headlines before taking up arms against the Batista regime. And he achieved that with the tragic debacle that was the attack on Moncada and, to top it all off, his subsequent statement with a title inspired by a quotation from Mein Kampf: “History will absolve me.”

Starting on July 26, 1953, and throughout the following decades, Fidel Castro’s specialty would be to take advantage of his setbacks and turn them into victories or, at least, into something that seemed like success or that he could present as such.

It is an aberration that the Moncada carnage, which began a nightmare that seems endless after 65 years of a dictatorship that has led Cuba to ruin, became not only the most exalted passage in Castro’s history but also a national holiday: the so-called “Day of National Rebellion,” the longest celebration of Castroism, with three holidays.

If it’s a matter of celebrating failures, they could have chosen, among many others, the Ten Million Ton Sugar Harvest that did not happen, the Havana Greenbelt [or Cordon], the energy revolution, the experiments that wiped out the country’s livestock, the destruction of the sugar industry or, more recently—in keeping with the post-Fidel-continuity regime—the Tarea Ordenamiento (Ordering Task) and its consequent uneconomic rearrangements.

But Castroism requires stories of martyrology, mourning, the cult of the dead. Like vampires, it needs blood.

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

We In The Cuban Opposition Should Take A Lesson From Ricardo Bofill / Cubanet, Luis Cino

Cubanet, Luis Cino, Havana, 15 July 2019 — Despite my great admiration for him, I never thought I would write about Ricardo Bofill, who died this past 11 July. I thought that such a task would fall to, and be done much better by, those who knew him and were at his side during the hard years when the struggle for human rights in Cuba was begun. But I feel that there are things that should be said, and I don’t want to choke them back.

We in the opposition should take a lesson from Ricardo Bofill. In many respects, we should look to him as a role model.

With the creation in 1976 of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights while he was imprisoned at Combinado del Este, and later of the Pro Human Rights Party in 1988, Bofill was among the first to show that what up to that point had been unthinkable was actually possible: to deal with the Castro regime through peaceful means. Bofill and those who dared to follow him – Tania Díaz Castro, Reinaldo Bragado, Rolando Cartaya, Adolfo Rivero Caro, and others – who, for their recklessness were called crazy, proved that it could be done. Had it not been for them, the current pro-democracy opposition and independent journalism would not exist on the Island. continue reading

Thanks to Bofill and his partners, the world, which up to then had not listened – indeed had refused to listen – realized that in Cuba ruled a dictatorship that violated the most elementary human rights.

Said dictatorship, upon feeling challenged by Bofill, tried to crush him but was unsuccessful, despite devoting its most vile energies to the task. Imprisonment was not enough. Personal attacks by Fidel Castro (who denounced him as though to write against the Revolution were a terrible crime) were not enough. Neither were threats, character assassination, insults, Granma newspaper dubbing him “The Fraud,” – nor state-run television that reran to exhaustion that video edited by State Security which, to discredit him, cut and spliced it to take his words out of context so that Bofill would appear to be saying, “living off of this [dissent], man, living off of this…”

It was all counterproductive for the regime. The world understood what was going on and would never again view the Castro regime the same way.

That Bofill did not end his days in the regime’s dungeons was thanks to international pressure, particularly from the government of France.

In 1988, Bofill was able to travel to Germany. The regime forced him into exile upon not allowing him to return to his country.

They say that Bofill lived his last years in poor health, in poverty, in a humble house in a sketchy Miami neighborhood. Luckily, he was not without the company of Yolanda, his wife, ever faithful and unwavering.

Bofill, modest as he was (too much so), never sought honors or starring roles – and he had every right to do so. Certain dissidents who chase after recognition and renown even to the point of ruining the best project should learn from him and follow his example. I refer to those who refuse to sign a document if their signature is not at the top or if they disagree with even one comma, who think that they are always right and arrogantly view as enemies any who are not in total agreement with them.

We ought to be grateful to Bofill for the struggle that he initiated – but above all, for the example of virtue and dignity that he leaves to us. Hopefully, we will learn from it.

luicino2012@gmail.com

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

Why Do Independent Journalists Matter? / Cubanet, Luis Cino

Hundreds of Havana protesters gathered in the streets of the Diez de Octubre neighborhood after five days without electricity. (Facebook Andy Michel Fonseca)

Cubanet, Luis Cino Álvarez, Havana, 11 March 2019 — Oftentimes while traveling in other countries, independent journalists are challenged for, as some say, being “hyper-critical” and “lacking objectivity.” Thus, their dispatches are received with doubts and skepticism. But it turns out that the detractors of Cuban independent journalism do not harbor good intentions.

Among those most critical and skeptical can be found many of the foreign correspondents accredited in Cuba. This should not be so because they know, from their own experience, under what conditions and rules that they themselves – despite the immunity that they supposedly enjoy – are forced to comply with in order to practice their profession. They know that when they try to interview people on the street, these subjects act evasive and seldom really and truly say what they think.

Despite their press credentials, these reporters have little or no access to government functionaries, and they collide with laws that guarantee official silence. Besides, they are under the surveillance of State Security, informants for the CDR and rapid-response brigades – and even by their colleagues in the official press, who tend to provoke and lay traps for them. continue reading

So, why are these foreign press members so critical and demanding, for example, with respect to sources and official data cited by independent journalists who are doing their work under much more disadvantageous and difficult conditions than they?

The foreign correspondents accredited by Havana’s International Press Center (CIP) find it much more convenient and secure to ignore reports by independent journalists, and to quote Granma newspaper and Cubadebate when saying that the majority of Cubans voted “Yes” to the new Constitution, that the update to the economic model is proceeding full steam ahead, that Cubans are happy as clams with cuentapropismo [self-employment or entrepreneurship] – along with repeating the usual refrain about “the fragmented and State-Security-penetrated opposition” that “lacks convening power” and is “incapable of garnering the mass support of the population.”

For a long time, and not just from the official media, there were those who affirmed that the majority of independent reporters were unprepared, individuals of low educational level, who lacked a command of the rules of grammar and composition, and who confused political activism with journalism.

We made ourselves vulnerable to such attacks because of the paternal solidarity (a legacy of socialism’s false paternalism) towards individuals who regrettably demonstrated from the start that despite their great desire and enthusiasm, they would never be journalists. By tolerating ersatz practitioners in the ranks, all we gained was to be discredited. And also to be infiltrated by moles, like that dopey Carlos Serpa Maseira, who turned out to be Agent Emilio.

Not just anybody can be a journalist, just as not just anybody can be a physician. The profession deserves respect. But some of us long-time veterans cannot forget how we got our start in independent journalism. Reporters will always be needed to cover the activities of the opposition and to denounce human rights violations. It can’t all be political analysis, opinion pieces, and columns worthy of Tom Wolfe. We would run the risk of turning into a reduced and exclusive club of snobs. It appears that such a coterie is not what is most needed to win the struggle for democracy and freedom of information in Cuba.

Within the last decade, the quality of independent journalism has improved extraordinarily following the addition of bloggers who are outside of state control, writers who have broken with UNEAC and have joined CubaNet, journalism students, and journalists who have unleashed themselves from the official media to write for alternative sites such as El Estornudo and El Toque.

We independent journalists have no need to invent or exaggerate, to publish diatribes in the style of Granma – on the contrary: we write about what we live daily, not what people tell us or what we suppose.

The topic that the majority of foreign correspondents accredited in Cuba report on the most is the “flourishing private restaurant sector in Havana.” As if there were no blackmailing inspectors and obstacles of all kinds. It’s as if the exceptions were the rule. As if all paladar [private restaurant] owners had the good luck of the proprietors of La Guarida, the setting where some scenes in Fresa y Chocolate were shot and where various pop celebrities have dined.

Who cares about what we independent journalists – hypercritical and overly passionate as they accuse us of being – have to say, given that regarding Cuba, everything that needs to be said and should be heard is said by the international press?

Therefore at times we become discouraged. We know that, in our situation – lacking access to official, trustworthy statistics and relying on sources who will probably retract when facing State Security officials – it is very difficult for us to produce the great news reports we dream of writing.

There is no need to be so pessimistic. There are always subjects that are a few degrees beyond the grasp of foreign journalists and which are not covered in the magical statistics that they cite. We still have the stories about jineteras [female prostitutes] and pingueros [male prostitutes], the garbage dumpster divers, the transvestites who haven’t been coaxed by CENESEX to dance in their conga, the artists who oppose Decree 349, the palestinos who struggle to make it to the capital, the inhabitants of the peripheral shantytowns and the tenements of Centro Habana and 10 de Octubre. But there will always be those who consider these depressing stories to be fiction – and even those who opine that Pedro Juan Gutiérrez does it better in his novels. And then they will again seek in the foreign press the fable of the successful and prosperous entrepreneur, the administrator who is given to reforms, and the soulless and corrupt bureaucrats who hamper her efforts while never showing their faces.

luicino2012@gmail.com

Translated By: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

Sixty Years On From Fidel Castro’s First Trip To Venezuela

Visit by Fidel Castro to Caracas in 1959 (Archive photo)

Cubanet, Luis Cino, Havana, 23 January 2019 – Right around this time, 60 years ago, Fidel Castro was making his first visit to Venezuela, in what was also his first official foreign trip as ruler.

Fidel arrived in Caracas on 23 January 1959, accompanied by a large delegation. It was only 15 days since the revolutionary leader’s entry into Havana a week after the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled from the country.

Absorbed in what he called “Operation Truth,” Fidel Castro — self-proclaimed prime minister as well as commander-in-chief — was trying to convince the world that reports about the summary trials and executions of hundreds of soldiers and police officers of the former regime were tall tales spun by the international (especially the American) press. continue reading

The visit to Venezuela ended up being a success, despite the bad omen of a tragic accident on the Maiquetía airport runway, when Francisco “Paco” Cabrera — a commander of the Cuban rebel army who was hurrying nervously to take his place as Fidel Castro’s bodyguard — was utterly decapitated by the airplane’s propeller.

In Venezuela — where exactly one year before, on 23 January 1958, a civil-military movement had overthrown the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez — the Cuban revolutionary leader was welcomed as an idol. A fascinated crowd listened, unwaveringly and enthusiastically, to the bearded revolutionary’s seven-hour-long speech.

Fidel Castro’s itinerary in Caracas was exhausting. But more exhausted were those individuals charged with protecting him, who — despite the warmth evinced by the Venezuelans — thought they detected potential assassins at every turn.

As can be seen in some photos taken by Raúl Corrales of the Cuban delegation, the Comandante’s bodyguards — all of them bearded and with a wild look about them in their slovenly, olive-green field uniforms, with weapons always close at hand — turned the Cuban embassy in Caracas into a replica of the guerrilla encampments of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra.

Some years later, after Fidel Castro would include his old host, President Rómulo Betancourt, in the list of his most hated enemies, the Venezuelans would again see Cuban soldiers — clean-shaven this time and on the warpath — landing around Machurucuto to penetrate the Falcón, Yaracuy and Lara mountains, where Arnaldo Ochoa, later executed by his Cuban bosses, earned his appointment as Deputy Commander of the General Army Staff of the Revolutionary Armed Forces

Who could have imagined that half a century after the disaster, Cuban military and security types, by the thousands, would be all over the place in Venezuela, providing consultation in the repression of dissidents, to shore up the shamelessly illegitimate regime of Nicolás Maduro?

Nobody could have known what Fidel Castro was referring to, in that seven-hour speech in Caracas, when he thanked the Venezuelans for the welcome they gave him and the weapons that Admiral Larrazábal had sent to the Sierra Maestra when, in turn, they had received nothing from him.

Forty years later, they would receive — besides subversion and guerrillas — they would receive his adoption of Hugo Chávez, who would turn Venezuela into the replacement for the Soviet Union to subsidize the Casto regime at its most critical moment.

Hugo Chávez’ ascent to the presidency following a failed coup attempt — and thanks to Venezuelans’ fatigue with the politicking and corruption of the Democratic Action and Copei partisans — was the consummation of Castroism’s conquest of Venezuela, which begin on 23 January 1959, when a smiling and friendly Fidel Castro stepped foot on the runway of the Caracas airport.

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

From Minint Official To Political Prisoner Incarcerated For “Espionage” / Luis Cino Alvarez

Luis Cino Álvarez, Cubanet, Havana, 5 November 2018 — The temper tantrum and bunkhouse scene put on recently by Castroism’s anti-diplomats, who grew indignant that the issue of political prisoners in Cuba was brought up at the United Nations, brought to mind a case of which I learned a few days ago via an inmate of Guanajay prison, of a young ex-officer of the Interior Ministry (MININT) who also is confined there, serving a 25-year sentence in terrible conditions.

His name is Jorge Frank Iglesias Fernández. He is 29 years old and was a lieutenant in State Security until February 2015, when he was detained and tried for “espionage.”

Iglesias Fernández refused to commit what he considered to be an injustice, giving warning of the imminent arrest of a Cuban American woman and a North American man who were visiting Cuba and whom State Security were investigating for presumed “counter-revolutionary activities.” continue reading

The authorities also linked to the case the ex-lieutenant’s brother, Víctor Eduardo Iglesias Fernández, 18, and sentenced him to five years in jail – which sentence was later commuted to “limited freedom,” with the added requirement to periodically appear before the enforcement judge.

After being detained for a year at Villa Marista, the head barracks of State Security, where he was subjected to continuous interrogations and enclosed in a cell measuring 3×2 meters, Jorge Frank Iglesias was sent to the maximum security area of Guanajay prison, in Artemisa. They have been holding him there in solitary confinement for almost the last two years. He has no phone privileges. His parents can visit him once a month, for two hours, and always in the presence of a guard.

My source tells me that in Iglesias Fernández’ cell, the guards have not turned off the lights for even one minute since his confinement. This continuous exposure to light has affected his eyesight and he suffers from frequent and intense headaches. When for such reasons they have had to transport him to the prison hospital at Combinado del Este, he has been taken in handcuffs and in the custody of an impressive team of armed guards.

I supposed that in any other country, a crime such as that committed by ex-lieutenant Iglesias Fernández – whom it would be a stretch to classify as a spy, being that he never was recruited by the North Americans – would be punished, as well, but not with such despicable and inhumane viciousness.

Could it be for cases such as this that the regime’s anti-diplomats refuse to speak about political prisoners?

The Cuban government refuses to admit that there are political prisoners in Cuba, and even less, prisoners of conscience. And don’t even mention the conditions of their confinement. The official spokespersons, when they deign to speak of the matter, provide assurances that these prisoners are convicted of crimes referred to in the Cuban criminal code – especially violent criminals, hijackers of planes and ships who had the good fortune to not serve as a lesson by being executed, or various ex-military personnel or intelligence agents convicted of espionage or revealing “state secrets” (which would be the case of Jorge Iglesias Fernández).

This in a country where a state secret can be how many bushels of plantains were lost in Alquízar, or of tomatoes in Consolación del Sur, because of there being no trucks or fuel to collect the harvest in time.

It would be fitting, so as to evade international pressures, for the governmental cheerleaders to keep in mind the hundreds of peace-loving individuals who, in a country governed by moderately normal and just laws, would not be in prison but in Cuba are locked away, in terrifying conditions, for legal aberrations in the Cuban penal code that are frequently applied against dissidents, such as “contempt,” “disobedience,” and “pre-criminal dangerousness.”

Author contact: luicino2012@gmail.com

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

Rafael Alcides: May He Rest In Peace / Luis Cino Alvarez

Cubanet, Luis Cino Alvarez, Havana, 20 June 2018 — The writer Rafael Alcides, who died in Havana on June 19 at the age of 85, had a warehouse of novels and unpublished poems in his home. It had been more than three decades since a book of his was published in his homeland. First it was because the commissars, unable to make him submit, did not want to publish him. Then, it was Alcides who did not want to be published. He made it clear: he said he would not accept it until the day his books could be in Cuban bookstores along with those of all the Cuban authors prohibited by the regime.

He resisted fearlessly, without losing heart. And, industrious and stubborn as he was, without failing to write for a single day.

The author of Agradecido como un perro (Grateful as a Dog) had the stubborn patience of poets, who do not rush because they know themselves to be the absolute owners of time and words. continue reading

Born in 1933 in Barrancas, a remote hamlet in eastern Cuba, Rafael Alcides was one of the main colloquialist poets of the so-called ’50s generation.

Once he believed in the Revolution. But poets, if that is what they really are, can not sing in the chorus. The praise bores them. They are reluctant to follow orders and commands, they do not accommodate themselves nor fit within the battalion of the submissive. And that is why he broke with the confining official culture and stepped aside, to witness the sad parade of the mediocre, servile and coryphaeus. He continued to listen to “the rumor of what life was before the future came,” warning that “nothing is as we supposed.”

His time of vain illusions passed, converted into ashes, without smoke or grudges. The poet did not answer to illusions. He lived between the past and the future, warning — he said in verses — that: “Everything we had we lost and it was more than we could have.”

He spent his last years surrounded by the affection of his loved ones, at peace with his demons, without fear, decent, unwavering.

I had the privilege of enjoying the friendship of Rafael Alcides. I used to visit him in the small apartment in Nuevo Vedado he shared with his wife, blogger Regina Coyula and her son. His conversation, always lucid and interesting, never ceased to inspire courage. Not even when cancer was about to win the game.

Rest in peace Rafael Alcides, if the souls of poets can ever resign themselves to rest and stop dreaming.

luicino2012@gmail.com

Cuban Festival in Washington: One More Victory for Castroism / Cubanet, Luis Cino Alvarez

Omara Portuondo and Aymée Nuviola (Credit: Kennedy Center)

Cubanet, Luis Cino Álvarez, Havana, 15 May 2018 — Omara Portuondo, Ballet Nacional, Pablo Milanés, Haydée Milanés, Los Van Van, Teatro El Público, Aldo López Gavilán, Jorge Luis Pacheco, Orquesta Faílde, Teatro El Público, Orquesta del Liceo de La Habana… The top drawer talent went to Cuba, to the Kennedy Center, to the Artes de Cuba festival. The best and most reliable, the ones who can be trusted to not defect or say something inappropriate–because it would not be to their advantage to do so.

It matters not if Pablito Milanés, who has been whining lately, were to make some controversial statement, because this would only show that Cuba has changed, that we are completely transparent, and that dissent is allowed (of course it is!)—provided, that is, that the dissent is expressed as the Maximum Leader wanted: “within the Revolution.” * continue reading

As the journalist Yuri Nórido wrote, with utmost optimism, a few days ago in the Trabajadores newspaper: the Kennedy Center patrons will see for themselves that in Cuba, “questioning and committed” (we all know to what) art is made.

You will pardon my cynicism, but I do not trust the assurances given by Alicia Adams, the festival curator, that the Cuban government did not intervene into the selection of artists. With a regime like this one, I’m not buying that story…

What a coincidence that among the more than 250 performers selected by Adams—let’s say we believe that she alone made the selection—there are no independent artists (except the Mal Paso dance company, which, it is true, does not receive state subsidies)—and even less any of the writers, filmmakers, painters and other artists who are censored and condemned to be ostracized, such as those plastic artists who, at this very moment and while being harassed by State Security, are holding an alternative Bienal in Havana.

What a coincidence that among the artists in the Cuban diaspora—let’s not call it “exile,” that ugly word—who are fewer, were not included, for example, such virtuosos as saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera and trumpeter Arturo Sandoval. Could it be because they are openly anti-Castro?

By the same token, just to allay any such suspicions, the quintet of New York-based saxophonist Yosvany Terry, and the singer Aymée Nuviola, who lives in Miami, were at the Kennedy Center. Neither of them have ever made a peep against the regime, which Adams must have taken into account when making her selections. Because we wouldn’t want the festival to be politicized…

It’s not that artists must spend their lives making political statements, but in the case of individuals who have been forced to leave their country for reasons that always, one way or another, can be traced back to politics, it would well be worthwhile if, occasionally, when it’s relevant, they would declare themselves, speak plainly and leave off the subterfuge. They should follow the example of Alicia Alonso and Omara Portuondo, who whenever they have the opportunity to do so, they give witness to their unbreakable loyalty to castroism.

Speaking of Omara Portuondo, her fan Aymée Nuviola appears to be trying with her what she was unable to do, no matter how hard she worked, with Celia Cruz: to prosper in her shadow. Maybe she’ll even get to cut a duo record with the Diva of the Buenavista Social Club. And continue taking trips to Havana, where, to some people who don’t care about put-downs, snubs and payoffs, applause sounds sweeter than in Miami.

For the moment, the Cuban regime is winning another propaganda battle. With so many good artists at the Kennedy Center—the majority of them “educated in the art schools created by the revolutionary government,” as they insist on pointing out—anyone would think that the official culture in Cuba is a marvel, another “achievement of the Revolution.” Perhaps this, and not so much the building of bridges between Cuba and the US, is the objective of this Cuban art festival, the largest celebrated outside the Island.

luicino2012@gmail.com

*Translator’s Note: A reference to Fidel Castro’s “Words to the Intellectuals” speech of June 30, 1961, in which he set limits to the free expression of artists and writers: “Within the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing.”

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

Castro Conquers Miami With Cannon Blasts / Luis Cino Alvarez

Cubanet, 4 April 2017, Havana, Luis Cino Álvarez — A friend was telling me, horrified, that last Friday at the Hard Rock Café in Hollywood Beach, Florida, Cuban reggaetoneros [musicians who perform the musical genre of Reggaeton]–from the Island and from ‘over there’, no way to tell anymore what with all the going and coming–put on a show. The lineup consisted of El Chacal, El Taiger (spelled just that way, not “Tiger”), Diván, Chocolate, Harrison, and Descemer Bueno (the only one of them whom I would classify as a musician).

This Cubatón (Cuban-style reggaeton, guachineo included) spectacle was aptly titled The Cannon Blast, as it was an explosion of “Made in Cuba” vulgarity and bad taste. And there will be other such events, many more, in Florida. continue reading

To my friend it was all a joke (or a nightmare): The crème de la crème of the reggaetonero set–who would have to include also Yakarta, Baby Lores, Misha, Insurrecto, the detestable Osmany García, and Gente de Zona–profanely performing their low-class crudities, with their sinister appearance and annoying taca-taca beat, on a stage that has recently featured artists such as Don Henley, War, America, ZZ Top and Daryl Hall and John Oates.

No need to be surprised. This particular cannon blast and those yet to come are part of the none-too-slow colonization by the Castro regime of Miami and indeed all of South Florida. They want to turn it into a type of Hong Kong, to exploit and emotionally blackmail it with nostalgia for fatherland and family. Not satisfied with maintaining their failed regime at the expense of remittances from emigrés and exiles, the Castroites also–in an effort to stir up problems, debase the milieu, and collect even more dollars–send over infiltrators from the G-2, scam artists, provocateurs, short-fused jokers, propagandizing academics, know-nothing cameleons del tíbiri tábara (from the back of beyond and staying out of trouble),TV shows, and…reggaetoneros.

For the record, it’s not that the head honchos of the regime are aware of the damage they do with the reggaetoneros, thus employing them in a macabre plan to penetrate the exile community and turn Miami into one big Hialeah, full of homeboys and every day becoming more like Marianao or Arroyo Naranjo. Save for the minister Abel Prieto, he of such exquisite taste, the top bosses don’t seem to mind the proliferation of reggaeton. On the contrary, their children and grandchildren, as lacking in good taste and class as their parents and grandparents, go crazy to the beat and enjoy it to the max.

Pertaining to music, the bosses export what they have. This is what there is.

My friend would ask himself what became of Cuban music. Little of worth is left in a country that produced Ernesto Lecuona, Sindo Garay, Rita Montaner, Celia Cruz, Benny Moré, and, post-catastrophe, Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, Chucho Valdés, Polo Montañéz and Juan Formell. Regarding the few good musicians and singers who remain on the Ilsand, the big guns–with their shopkeeper mentality and proverbial bad taste, and their (anti)artistic promoters–believe it not worthwhile to send them to Miami because they wouldn’t sell enough tickets and, worse, might even get away and defect. It’s better that they remain home, making do as best they can (even though they are rarely featured on radio and TV), making music for “the most cultured people on the planet”–even though these people only want to tie one on and hear reggaeton.

Reggaeton is the perfect soundtrack to accompany the breakdown of a dictatorial system that has lasted too long and which, if not finally dissolving, is coagulating.

Vulgarity, bad taste and social alienation were imposed on Cuba. And this is reflected in the music that is broadcast the most. Reggaeton, the apotheosis of low class and degradation, came about at just the right time in the right place. It is the perfect music for the national chaos.

How was Miami to ward off reggaeton, what with so many recently-arrived homeboys who the only things they left behind were their ration books?

If, in the final analysis, we are all Cubans, whether here or there, we bear a common karma, and we must share our misfortune: portion it out, and see if we can reduce it.

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

The Taliban Has Returned / Cubanet, Luis Cino Alvarez

Cubanet, Luis Cino Alvarez, 15 March 2017 – At the beginning of the last decade, when Fidel Castro would call a “march of the fighting people” for any reason whatsoever and the multitudes who seemed to have arrived from Pyongyang would chant slogans and wave little paper flags, prominent for his impetuous verbiage was a young man called Hassan Perez Casabona.

Gesticulating like a dervish, with a crew cut, camouflage trousers, and huge Russian military boots that seemed suitable for kicking any dissenters, Hassan Perez, who at that time was the second secretary of the Union of Young Communists (UJC), was the most Taliban of the Taliban of the so-called Battle of Ideas, Fidel Castro’s personal version of Mao’s cultural revolution. In this “battle,” young men like the bellicose Hassan, indoctrinated to the core and supposedly immune to the corruption, were called to play the role of the Red Guards. continue reading

Hassan Perez, who improvised his leftist militant teques* of the barricade with the ease of a Candido Fabré, seemed to have no brake. Nothing contained his quarrelsome and intolerant eloquence. When in 2002, in the Aula Magna of the University of Havana, the former American president Jimmy Carter referred to the Varela Project, quickly and aggressively Hassan Pérez requested the floor to refute him, in the presence of the Maximum Leader, who observed him pleased, although ready to stop his jackal if he let his passion run away with him.

With the retirement of Fidel Castro in July 2006, the Battle of Ideas was fading away, and the Taliban, who with their supra-institutional nonsense represented a nuisance to the succession and the Raul regime reformers, were removed from the scene.

In 2008, in an extraordinary meeting, the National Communist Youth Bureau agreed to work with Hassan Pérez and send him as a professor to a university of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. Although they acknowledged his work as a youth leader, first in the Federation of Middle School Students (FEEM) and later with the University Student Federation (FEU) and Communist Youth, this was interpreted as a setback. Especially given that, shortly before, at the Fifth Congress of the UJC, he had not been elect, as expected, first secretary of the organization.

From that point Hassan Perez lectured in full military uniform – which must have been to his liking, in view of his fondness for military attire – as a lieutenant, in the classrooms of the Military Technical Institute (ITM) teaching history classes.

For almost eleven years there was no mention of Hassan Perez. He only saw himself on TV, dressed in uniform and in his delegate’s chair, during a meeting of the National Assembly of People’s Power, where he voted unanimously in favor of everything that was put before him.

But now, the entrenchment of immobile orthodoxy is generating a neo-Stalinist reflux that has once again brought Hassan Perez to the fore. He is now an assistant professor at the Center for Hemispheric Studies and the United States at the University of Havana and his extensive and bizarre articles appear in the official press.

It seems that Castro’s monks do not have too many better options to choose from if they have had to dust off and get to grips with the annoying Hassan Perez. In short, if it is a question of becoming intolerant and frightening in the discourse toward the sheep who want to go astray, the boy does the job well. And in the years that he spent in professorial penance he is assumed to have overcome the immaturity that he was previously reproached for.

*Translator’s note: (Source: Conflict and Change in Cuba, Baloyra and Morris) “El teque is Cuban slang for the unrefrained barrage of official rhetoric that emanates from the state. I is the old, the formal, the staid, that which has become meaningless through repetition. El Teque is the officialese, the discourse of a revolution that is no longer revolutionary.”

A Hero To Justify The Cuban Failure / Cubanet, Luis Cino Alvarez

What in abundance are those who distort and manipulate the ideology of José Martí (Reuters) — What we have in abundance are those who distort and manipulate the ideology of José Martí (Reuters)

We continue on without wanting to admit that if our “wine is sour,” even if “the wine is our own,” it is no more than that: sour wine.*

Cubanet, Luis Cino Álvarez, Havana, 28 January 2016 — Today marks the 163^rd anniversary of the birth of our national hero, José Martí. It is the time to repeat by rote the two or three of his sayings that all of us Cubans learned since grade school. It is but a short time before we again commemorate his death on May 19. Those two remembrances comprise most of the veneration of Martí that was instilled in us from childhood. What a shame! continue reading

We have the myth, but the counsels and teachings of Martí have served us precious little. Rather, from the era of independence [from Spain] up to today, we have systematically devoted ourselves to incurring everything against which he warned us. We have done as the Israelites in the Old Testament, who continually disobeyed Jehovah and were punished for it. Although we are not even remotely like the Hebrews, our people, too, have received their due punishment. And what awaits us, still…

Whatever became of all that which was quoted so often but has never come to pass, of the republic and the nation “for all, and for the good of all”?

We Cubans have exploited, with no compunction, the legend of Martí. Few peoples enjoy the privilege of having a poet as their national hero. But poets and their worldviews are not easy to comprehend. We never understood Martí well, and we have idealized and inflated him into the politician that he was not and never wanted to be.

Upon preparing for the War of Independence, Martí fulfilled his principal historic role. There was little else by then that he could do. His death at Dos Ríos, on 19 May 1895, confronting a Spanish patrol, was almost a suicide mission. It provided him the out that that he could not find before such great obstinacy and lack of understanding among the principle leaders of the Mambíses.

But the official story, that which was taught before [the 1959 Revolution], and which is badly taught today, refuses to acknowledge the conflicts that existed among the leaders of the independence movement…

Would Martí, after independence had been won, been able to work with those who were intending to lead the Republic as if it were a military camp**, and instill in them his civic and democratic vision?

Very few Cubans have read Martí deeply. What we have an abundance of are those who distort and manipulate his ideology. Thus, they have created a multi-purpose Martí, useful and convenient for all.

The greatest plagiarist, Fidel Castro, made of Martí the intellectual author of the attack on the Moncada barracks, his guide for the construction of a socialist society, and mentor to his pathological confrontation with the United States. To justify his single-party dictatorship, Fidel cited the case of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, overlooking the fact that it was created solely to organize the War of Independence, and not to perpetuate the rule of any political caudillo.

The legend of Martí contributed to the construction of a meta-history, a teleology of the nation’s destiny, which has done us more harm than good. Rather than redeem us, it bequeathed to us, among other things, a bad conscience and the fate of national misfortune.

Writing from exile, Martí idealized a Cuba in which he lived barely 20 years of his life. But the Cuba he invented surely would have been much better than the real one, if we Cubans had been able to make it come true—if not exactly as Martí envisioned it, at least close to it. But we were not able. And we continue not being able.

They beat us over the head so much with the pure heroes and the bronze statues that they ended up boring us. As a result of this boredom, today many Cubans, especially the young, associate Martí with the Castro regime’s harangue, and they reject him outright.

We Cubans should be ashamed of all the ignorance of and distortion of Martí. But it is easier to feel sorry for ourselves. So we continue to quote his sayings—even if they are out of context, or we do not understand them well, or we interpret them according to our whim and convenience—to justify our failure as a nation.

Thus attached to Martí, we continue not wanting to admit that if the wine is sour, for all that it is our wine, is no more than that: sour wine. Or even worse: vinegar. Which stings so much in our wounds…

luicino2012@gmail.com

Translator’s Notes:

*A reference to a quotation of Jose Martí well-known to Cubans, “Nuestro vino es agrio, pero es nuestro vino” – Our wine may be sour, but it is our own wine.

** A reference to another oft-remembered phrase from José Martí (though not one commonly invoked by Fidel or Raul Castro): “Un pueblo no se funda, General, como se manda un campamento” — A people is not founded, General, the way one commands a military camp. Martí wrote this in a 20 October 1884 letter to General Maximo Gomez, in which he resigned from the revolutionary movement.

About the Author

Luis Cino Álvarez (Havana, 1956) has worked as a professor of English, in construction, and in agriculture. He entered independent journalism in 1998. Between 2002 and Spring 2003, Cino was a member of the reporting team at De Cuba magazine. He is assistant director of the online magazine, Primavera Digital [Digital Spring], and is a regular contributor to CubaNet since 2003. A resident of Arroyo Naranjo, Cino dreams of being able to make a living from writing fiction. He is passionate about good books, the sea, jazz and blues.

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

Forgive the Castro Regime? Never! / Cubanet, Luis Cino Alvarez

Cubanet, Luis Cino Álvarez, Havana, 11 January 2016 — I am a resentful person. I have to admit that, at least in this regard, the officials from State Security are correct, they who have condemned me as such during multiple, more or less menacing, interrogations throughout the past almost-20 years.

I am full of resentment against that calamitous abomination that some people still call “the Revolution.” And how can I not be? I would have to be a masochist, or emulate Mother Teresa of Calcutta, to love the perpetrators of the system that has crushed my life for as long as I can remember.

I would have to be exceedingly hypocritical to say that I am willing to reconcile with and forgive those who have never, in the slightest way—arrogant as they are—asked for forgiveness.

I am not a man given to hatreds and vengeances, but I cannot abide duplicity and hypocrisy. So leave me to my resentment which, in the reasonable doses in which I dole it out, will do no more harm than it already has; on the contrary, it helps me to keep going and not give up. continue reading

I cannot forgive those who thought themselves infallible, with a monopoly on the country, keepers of the keys to Paradise, with the right to decree the collective, obligatory happiness of the masses—all at the price of turning us into cogs in a machine, with no freedoms nor hope, yoked to the wagon of a mistaken history.

I cannot help but begrudge those who caused our individual dreams and aspirations—grand or simple, but valid and legitimate as any others—to be indefinitely deferred, annulled in the name of the Revolution, the Homeland and Socialism: all of which, according to what they said, were of a piece, despite the fact that the words did not rhyme, and we knew they could not rhyme.

I cannot be at peace with those who, in keeping with catchphrases that invariably posited death as the alternative, divided our families and pulverized our values, turning us into impoverished, vulgar riffraff, cynical and suspicious, perennially wandering in the desert…

My love for my neighbor (why deny it) is insufficient to be lavished upon those who fucked up my life: those teachers who, applying punishments prescribed by Comrade Makarenko, pretended to be forging The New Man; the sergeants in the compulsory military service; the psychiatrist-prison guards; the jailers at police precincts; the snitches who compiled exhaustive reports on me; all those who were wont to expel me from anyplace because of ideological divergences; the agents of the political police who “tend” to me, that is, who watch me even while I sleep…

Of no use have been the many times that they have tried to convince me that all the bad things that happened were not the Revolution’s fault—no, Man, of course not, they happened because of those extremists of which Lenin spoke—opportunists, as he called them—and all kinds of other shit. As if such as these were not the ideal subjects of a system like this!

Do not tell me anymore that those terrible events were errors—because in those “errors” have our lives been lost, and there is no getting them back…

I do not resign myself to having been one more rat in the Castros’ laboratory. The damages have been irreversible, and I do not believe that at this point they can be compensated.

Therefore, all we have left is the memory of what was and what could not be, because they prevented it, by force.

The poet José Mario—one of those who suffered the severities of the UMAP*—was right when he said that that those explanations of how “things were not as bad as they really were, it was a matter of errors committed by some extremists,” are worse than forgetting.Do not expect me to slobber. I am one of those who do not forget. I cannot, nor do I want to. For this reason, I am a resentful person. And proud of it.

luicino2012@gmail.com

Translated by Alicia Barraqué Ellison

About the Author: Luis Cino Álvarez (Havana, 1956) has worked as a professor of English, in construction, and in agriculture. He entered the field of independent journalism in 1998. Between 2002 and the spring of 2003, Cino was a member of the reporting team at De Cuba magazine. He is assistant director of the online magazine, Primavera Digital [Digital Spring], and is a regular contributor to CubaNet since 2003. A resident of Arroyo Naranjo, Cino dreams of being able to make a living from writing fiction. He is passionate about good books, the sea, jazz and blues.