Author: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

A Farewell to Souls / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo


The first time I saw Havana was when I walked it holding your hand.

The city smelled of coarse capitalism, of drinks and meals suddenly very expensive, of transparent dusk, of lateral light, of placards that no one will renovate now, of Fidel Castro the cadaver, of dirty grey, of a stampede of guayaberas and neckties, of restrained madness, of cool air from the secret police’s modern sedans, that smell exactly like the modern sedans of the Cuban exile.

The tyranny of the market is universal.

The first time I walked Havana holding your hand I understood that I was losing it forever.

You didn’t know anything.  You still don’t know anything.  But, yes, all of it was a trap.

Castrismo in Cuba is a question of genetics and it is carried into the future like a curse of phobia against Man, against those who are different, against the Other.  Fears and mediocrities that make us miserly, mean, very mean, precisely against that which we love most and least want to see laughing with the rabid laughter of freedom.

The soul of Cubans is a roofless jail, open to the sky.  That is already the most immortal legacy of the Cuban Revolution.  There is absolutely no totalitarianism, rather only sadness.

You and your skirt of fine white fabric looked like eternity.

And eternity is ephemeral, we know that already.  A vision.

Havana passed by slowly at our side and didn’t touch us, we wouldn’t have allowed it to touch us.  That cowardly, shitty, abusive, ignorant city, where it’s impossible to say “I love you.”

The city was only a set.  Cardboard streets.  Cane pulp façades.  Prop arches.  A dictatorship of backroom deals where only assassins survive.  Little men of cotton padding.

Because only death could go on being real.

Death like a gleam of wisdom in our eyes.

Death like a promise that Havana will soon be an uninhabited planet.

Death like that gentle breath that we needed.

Death like the very sense for loving.

Death like the dead waters of Havana Bay, where the smokestacks hoist their flags of stinking incense, little cocktails of churches and animals decapitated in the middle of the street in the anonymous name of a god.

Ah.

I looked at my hands, with yours inside them, and told myself: it can’t be.

I wept under the rain of one cold front after another, we lost track of those tears among those belated little drops from the sky, and I talked and talked to you about attack ships on fire in my imagination, in a Cuban novel that would unfold among those stars that we watched burning out up there, on Orion’s pelvic sword; I talked and talked to you about infrared beams cracking on the edges of the main gate at Colón Cemetery; I talked and talked to you with a delirium right out of the end of times that wanted to be from the beginning of another time, another world, other souls, other bodies, another Cuba that, upon being possible, would no longer be possible, please; I talked and talked to you about things that you all, Cubans, will never create.

All those words, like the rain in the United States, that announces itself in two languages before falling on transmitters from coast to coast.

All those words, like digital maps that regenerate a strange reality, cognizable and unrecognizable.

All those words, said for the last time, and after them the silence facing the rest of you, Cubans, that you all would never believe.

You can’t.  You won’t.

The last time I saw Havana was when you let my hand go.

The city smelled of childhood, of abandoned mothers, of genocide.  I didn’t care.

I still don’t care.

As you get out of the trap, you also learn while getting out of the trap.

Remain, then, in the posthumous peace of the perplexed.

Translated by: Yoyi el Monaguillo

23 June 2013

Abel Prieto’s Travels / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Miguel Luna drawn by Abel Prieto, in Viajes de Miguel Luna.

“The day that rabble gets into the UNEAC*, we’re lost.”
– Abel Prieto, from his Viajes de Miguel Luna

What does a Minister of Culture think about when he turns into an author? What does he aesthetically cling to and what does he judge as too politically incorrect to include in his work? Does he play? Does he confess? How does he balance the influences and disguise the secrets of the State? Does he compare his stories with the classics of the Cuban canon or only with his contemporary competition? Does he censor himself? Is he sucking up to or betraying his superiors (His Superior)?

Viajes de Miguel Luna is an invaluable document for dissecting the mind of citizen Abel Prieto, public official in the upper echelons of power during the last two decades of the Revolution. Literally, the last. And the most profitable from the point of view of fiction: those of the decline and fall of just about everyone, here on the Island as well as in Exile.

The official presentation, in February 2012, at the Book Fair of the Cuba Pavilion, required (perhaps due to the bulk of the novel, 540 pages) three veterans in turn: Graziella Pogolotti, Eduardo Heras León and Rinaldo Acosta. To this was added the presence of Ambrosio Fornet, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Eusebio Leal, Miguel Barnet, Frank Fernández, Fernando Martínez Heredia, Reynaldo González and, of course, his predecessor in the post, transformed that evening into an involuntary vision of a generational wake.

A devotee of Lezama among the earliest after the death and burial of Lezama (between the ambulance sent by Alfredo Guevara and the bugs planted by the secret police), at last Abel Prieto achieves the miracle of a book as arduous to read as Paradiso, although for diametrically opposed reasons: Lezama’s magnum opus is an untranslatable labyrinth that forges its very reader (the rest get burnt out); while Viajes de Miguel Luna is the spasm of the legibility of Cuban dialect loud and clear (quasi-military jargon), an anecdotal hyper-transparency that ends up overstuffed (the accursed circumstance of the drivel-ography of Miguel Luna, or “Mick or Mike or Miki or Mickey Moon or simply Mikimún” from all sides).

In a Stakhanovite effort of “popular dissemination”, written like volunteer work from behind his political desk at the Ministry of Culture or the Central Committee of the Communist Party, this is the sympathetic saga that the New Man had been expecting to read since 1989 (the perestroika on paper); it is the coming-of-age story that our middle class cried out for, demanding a relief from the vacuum of this Imaginary Era of transition toward State capitalism; it is the best seller that we intellectuals can give as a gift on a Sunday in May to our mothers (without awaiting the death of a Rosa Lima, such an affectionate repressor); and it is, also, more than a travel epic, the last of the “scholarship novels” of 20th century Cuba, that genre that was born senile, yet has yielded so many functionaries during peace time.

There is a lot of kitsch in this type of tropical gaiety in the gulag: from Marcos Behmaras to Enrique Núñez Rodríguez, from José Ángel Cardi to F. Mond, among other ourselves-and-others, the text wants to laugh but what comes out isn’t a smirk, but something worse: a grimace (rigor mortis of the State).  Falsehood as poetic license used by a bully in search of authenticity.  Because here we won’t find even traces of the stigmatizer of young Cuban artists, nor of the audiovisual censor, nor of the manipulator of pro-Cuba solidarity movements, nor of the hijacker of Cuban exit permits, nor of the bandit-hunter setting his sights on the Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana magazine, including the coercion of this island’s hostages who collaborated with it (a publication that, after observing a minute of silence at UNEAC when its editor/founder died, they finally managed to sabotage).  But it is precisely these omissions that open up a bridge, a great bridge to our residual freedom in so many perverse readers.  Thus, the archeological eloquence of these Travels of Miguel Luna will face the researchers that will descend from, let’s say, North American academia to celebrate the Great Centennial of 2059 — mulg-kästrismo beaming as one of the fine arts.

The proof of success, guarantor of an imminent Critics Prize and perhaps a National Literary Prize, is that this book by Abel Prieto is nowhere to be found inside the country: it sold out before its introduction into the market!  This will not impede Abel Prieto’s trips now to collect praise and euros from a parliamentary Europe suffering from nostalgia in its terminal stages, plus the corresponding thousand and one translations of this work, including into Mulgavo: a dead post-socialist language (part Basque, part North Korean, part Iranian?) in which an unbearable percentage of monologues of our “Kübb-hím-póet-Míkel-Lún” are written (the ex-minister uses Mac or gets by with the accent marks in Microsoft).

It is curious that Cuban literature (the same as with the more recent Dictionaries of Cuban Literature) does not dare over-mention that dystrophic year of 1989.  In style and theme, we are nailed to a remote, ludicrous past: Cuba’s trauma is that no holocaust will be tragic.  Our day-to-day amnesia can’t withstand it, and we lack the capacity to narrate the horrifying void of a nation forced into fidelity, at the whim of a personalistic power that made us live un-chronologically outside of global history, anachronistically in that stop-motion time of absolute totalitarianism.

Abel Prieto, upon writing (or dictating to his deputy ministers) the screenplay of this Goodbye Lenin awash in semen, need not be the exception: the action transpires in hops between the September 29 of 1948 and the September 29 of 1989, while the author’s alter-ego masturbates from the start (over the fields and cities goes the onanist…), while Congolese hutias as demonic as they are endemic (pardon the redundancy) masturbate, while the masses and sub-Soviet leaders of the putative proletarian utopia masturbate, while the mobs rush out to shoot themselves to death, no sooner does mulg-demökratia arrive in the Pastoral Agricultural Democratic Popular Socialist Workers Republic of Mulgavia.  It’s obvious that Abel Prieto can see the processes of change like a blitzkrieg of mafias (Mulgavo-American?) and fluorescent McDonald’s icons, where today’s communist hierarchs will without doubt be masters of war and capital (let us trust that it will have been for health reasons, not this kind of imagination, which will have cost him his ministerial purse).  Of that hypothetical country that yesterday was associated with Cuba, we know nothing after page 540 (Wikipedia isn’t God either).  For the author, it probably wasn’t worth wearing oneself out on an anti-climax of economic growth, the opening of borders, respect for human rights and, if it’s not too much to ask, the training of Mulgavan Boy Scouts by People in Need to fratricidally undermine a still surviving little revolution in the Caribbean Sea.  I don’t recall even one single mention of the word “revolution” in the novel, as if this situation were out of context, of zero influence on the thesis (even though “counter-revolution” is mentioned and even provokes a fainting spell in a supporting character: someone taken out of the novel who writes the character who in turn is written by Abel Prieto).  Ecstatic with retrospectives that cover up any association with local historical horror, the jovial jargon of the sexagenarian Abel Prieto achieves a novel for all and for the good of all.  It doesn’t matter that he himself could have gone to jail for daring to write it in real time.  It doesn’t matter that he would have been shot by firing squad without trial for having published it then in the “Red Island in the Black Sea”.  What is transcendent here is that all future time must be better (an idyll of the Left), and that this text in Cuba now proves it against our Eternal Enemies.  Thus, due to its ecumenism or maybe its communist Catholicism, from the theorist of global anti-imperialism, to our provincial dissidents with “Made in Miami” digital copyrights, all should find something to praise in this mammoth opus by Raúl Castro Ruz’s current salaried subordinate.  Congratulations!  I suppose the consensus-building had to start somewhere.

What does an advisor think about when he turns into an author?  What does he politically cling to and what does he judge as aesthetically correct to include in his work?  Is he free or does he run every concept by State Security?  Does extensive writing distract his parliamentary concentration, is it a diversion of resources from the Council of State, or is it simply an extracurricular hobby edited in record time by Letras Cubanas publishing house?  Is this an exemplifying work meant to monitor the literary market (for good reason, the novel imparts a Delphic mini-course on adolescent-adventurer readings)?  Will Abel Prieto retire with this dramatic effect or is he already plotting a new hilarious project for his next two decades in power?

In an interview, the author implores us to not abandon reading his work until the KONIEC** (“not because it’s so good, but because I’d like it if someone reached it”).  As with Paradiso, in effect, I recommend resisting until the bitter end the half-a-millennium of pages in Viajes de Miguel Luna.  Maybe this is the novel that, since the “Revoluzoic Era”, Armando Hart should have written for us?  This is a book that can be put to use as a Rosetta Stone of 21st century socialism, Cuban style, and it includes, as a bonus track, a histrionic colophon that parodies, or maybe pays homage to, the telenovela writer Mayté Vera, not to mention half of a century’s worth of excellent vignettes signed by the author (the untapped potential of a Marjane Satrapi emanates from Abel Prieto, self-portrait included).

Mikimún has died, long live the Ministrún.  Quod scripsi, is crisis.

Translator’s notes:
* National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba
** This is the Polish term for “finish” or “end”.

From Diario de Cuba

Translated by: Yoyi el Monaguillo

The Son that Nobody Wanted / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Angel Santiesteban

From Sampsonia Way Magazine.

Since the end of the 1980s, Ángel Santiesteban has been known as one of the most brilliant writers of his generation. In this position he touches upon subjects that are pretty uncomfortable for Cuban political culture: The island’s military interference in Angola and Ethiopia, the genocide of people fleeing towards liberty on rafts, the barbarity of the local prison system, and the human body as a temple for all demons and desires.

Throughout his career, Santiesteban has had the honor of winning the country’s most prestigious literary prizes: The Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba prize in 1995 (for Sur: Latitud 13, South: Latitude 13), the Alejo Carpentier prize in 2001 (for Los hijos que nadie quiso, The Children Nobody Wanted), and the Casa de las Américas International Prize in 2006 (for Dichosos los que lloran, Blessed Are Those Who Mourn).

Always the nonconformist, Santiesteban joined the booming Cuban alternative blogosphere in 2009 and created an online space for his critical opinion, Los hijos que nadie quiso. A few months later he was attacked in the street—a group of strangers broke his arm and warned him of the risks of being a “counterrevolutionary” in Castroist Cuba.

Finally, four months ago, after a court case based on very shaky evidence, Santiesteban was sentenced to five years in jail for alleged domestic violence against his ex-wife. He has declared his innocence of this crime and maintains that the charges are fabricated and politically motivated. Thanks to loyal supporters, his voice has been kept active on the Internet, and with tweets and posts to his blog that begin “Diario en la cárcel XXXI…” (Journal XXXI in jail…) the Cuban writer has now become a live-chronicler of his own incarceration, life, and literature.

The free world knows of Santiesteban’s case, but doesn’t seem to be paying much heed to the crescendo of harassment that he has been suffering since he opened the Los hijos que nadie quiso blog. Such violations of fundamental rights worry the international intellectuals only when they occur in capitalist democracies, never when they take place in a left-wing dictatorship like Cuba.

8 July 2013

Things You Cubans Wouldn’t Believe / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Days in Queens

The bang-bang of the trains is permanent on Roosevelt Avenue. Our little house in Queens trembles, refuge of Cuban immigrants, patriot performance of the passports with which Raul Castro has blessed us, with pretensions of State-God.

As there are electric trains, as New York is an electric city, when they pass (and the trains always pass), it sets off the AT&T phones, such that not only for the noise is it impossible to speak. Much less is it conceivable to communicate with Cuba, where I left my elderly mother and my young love.

None of this happens in the United States, of course. Cuba reproduces like a cancer in our heads. Months ago I couldn’t express myself in English, except in some chats I’ve given in universities. The set continues to be Queens and then Brooklyn and then Manhattan, but the United States is what we’ve all left back there: in Cuba, it’s understood, in our enthusiasm to leap over decades of sub-socialism and finally escape.

This little area of Queens is the most atrocious neighborhood of Latin America. Low prices, nocturnal screaming, rude looks, pre-literate Chinese, railway accidents, oily smells, Dominican-New-Yorkers, police who ask for drivers’ licenses (I haven’t seen this done since Cuba), enigmatic medieval little castles, Japanese teenagers with their on-line iPads, wholesale freedom, cats (copulating and fighting off-stage, what a marvel), Old Coronabana bookstores, cold mornings in May, earplugs to avoid nervous breakdowns from the bang-bang, Mexican housewives running errands decked out with rapper jewelry, and keychains that screech louder than the elevated subways of this city.

I’m an absolute witness, I’m happy.

It looks like the United States. Just that: it looks like the United States, but it’s another country that we Cubans of Cuba always imagined. Without us, the North American union would be incomplete. And I say again, it could be at risk of disappearing, among the voracious Latinness and the anonymous candor of DC, city of spies and the pro-Castro lobby.

We Cubans without Cuba are the spontaneous equilibrium. The faithful of a great nation.

I brush my teeth. Here nothing tastes of anything. Not the pasta, not the apples. But I brush my teeth with a spring-like delight, almost for the first time.

I spend the 24 hours of the world hooked to wi-fi, I recover the visibility of the planet with simple click-click (this is the country of onomatopoeia and acronyms), I think of my homeless future, for now I choose a tentative stairway where I sleep without my laptop being stolen. Because I think, also, in the Cuban novel I’m going to exterminate myself here, and in one of these corners, in absolute poverty, surely a little sick, my useless genius despised by the triumphant Cubans (that pragmatic pandemic), spitting and spit up until the for the last of my compatriots, looking over their shoulders for God’s spokesmen on the island (here) as in exile (there), abandoned (as it is only right that they abandon me) by elderly mother and my young love.

I never eat breakfast, I never eat lunch. I wait with more or less luck for your invitation to dinner. I try to save money. I don’t spend anything. It’s entertaining to see how long I will hold out.

The mistakes and the pressures begin. The threads of the labyrinth are cut. Nobody wants me back in Cuba, that foreign country where I wouldn’t have a passport or a penny (now I say “céntimo, not “quilo,” and this relocation is beautiful).

While typing in secret, to the rhythm of the bang-bang, I myself become a train. Meanwhile I tweet my quick blasts and some column or another so it seems I survived. It’s not true. I already took off. The midnight sun waits for me along with that long polar night I dreamed of in my boyhood dreams (I think when I was a boy, I was really a girl). A solitary night of shadows to the horizon, eternal and exceptional, in which I will enter without footsteps because I aspire to never have to return.

I have seen things that you, the Cubans, will never believe. And I am about to enumerate them, with periods and commas (and the occasional parenthesis), in a language that you, the Cubans, will never create.

Things like…

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

5 July 2013

WE ARE ALL HERE / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

WE ARE ALL HERE BUT WE HAVE NOT LEFT

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The Tucumanian night of Miami seizes me with hunger and with no desire to leave the hotel. I am alone. They have already forgotten me, luckily. I have already forgotten myself. Love is not waiting for me outside. Not yet. Not today. Tomorrow we’ll see.

I turn on the internet. A bit of crazy videos. A bit of Cuban culture. Some music I don’t recognize. I prepare my next month here. I hear the Metro that runs on the elevated track. I hear the moon rotating, and it is not the northern moon that I know so well from the United States. We’re not there. I hear the “shipwreck” tone from my AT&T smartphone.

Some friends of the barbarity are calling my mobile. It’s past ten o’clock. But barbarity is always about to knock on my door. And I hear them, having fun, über-Cubans, repeating the wonderful and filthy jokes from two decades ago. They are Erick and Nelson and already they are coming, driving over for me. In the Palmetto sports car. There is no option. I tell them “Don’t show up without a good plate of spaghetti.” And fruit.

My luxury hotel is a boarding home. I do nothing. I am homeless in Miami. But still not exactly out on the street. I make contacts with the so-called “counter-revolution.” What a privilege. I make myself intolerable to State Security, the guarantee that my criminal red Lada* will take my life in Bayamo or in Boston or in whichever of these hotels transparent to the Havana mafia. I wonder how still there does not preside in this country an agent of Cuban intelligence. I do not doubt that they have placed a hidden camera in the room to blackmail me when I return. Or a radioactive pin to guarantee me cancer, as the Cuban subsidiary of the KGB. Poor little assassins.

It’s a question of waiting. For the moment, I type. I go down to the lobby and finally I swallow the spaghetti with desperation. Fuck, was I hungry. It is beautiful to go hungry. Don’t feel too bad for Orlando Luis. In Cuba he was weary of swallowing and swallowing. There is a surplus of Cuban food today. It is needless. Hunger is an invention of the dissidence movement, when it doesn’t know how to have another vision, when it doesn’t think. I came to the United States to see if I could stop eating in Cuba. And I’m achieving it since March 5, when I set foot in a beautiful New York park.

We talk with Erick and Nelson about our work there on the Island. We were scientists. We were excellent. We were a disaster.

It was all comical and Machiavellian. We leave the hotel as we left Cuba. We buy stuff to drink. The city looks like a deserted airport. At these hours of the night I continue still more convinced that it is not at all about Miami. This is West Berlin and we, the newly appeared from the barbarity, we are going to upset its urban logic with so many Cubans fleeing towards here.

The man who serves us is an Afghan. The guy does not know Spanish in Miami. For nothing more than that, he deserves an automatic deportation. To Guantanamo, of course.

For a moment we seriously consider turning him in. Not for any specific motive. To screw with him.  So that something more than exile happens in our lives.

We continue talking of the Biotechnology Era in Cuba. My friends cannot stay past twelve. In the morning they work. I’m just a witness. This was why they took me out of the hotel. So that I could give testimony about their lives. I’m a hostage.

Half of Havana now is now passing through Miami. This will be the final evidence of Castroism as the measure of all things, as a criterion of truth. One of the two cities does not exist. They would annul themselves by coinciding at the same time. One of the two cities will have to die. And I want to be in it at that moment.

Nor are any of our thousand and one lives here. We all leave a very important phone call that is left for us to make. Or it gave us a busy signal and for that reason we need to try again. None of us has fully arrived here. Nobody deserves the thousandth-and-first death of returning there.

The laughter has given me a little indigestion. They drive me back to the hotel and in the bathroom of the room, I attempt without result to return the spaghetti with  my head stuck in the bowl. Not even that. I digested it too fast. It’s called vertigo. I wish that none of this would have happened to us. I wish that we were all awake, but the nightmares stick to us like a bad slogan. I would not like to leave it unsaid here and now, that impossibility.

 *Translator’s note: Lada: A Russian-made car common in Cuba and used by the police, among others.

5 June 2013

My Patriotic Papito Who Rests in Peace / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

CLICK ON PHOTO FOR SLIDE SHOW

CLICK ON PHOTO FOR SLIDE SHOW

My papá never saw the United States in person. But he spoke of this country with idolatry. I suspect papá was a natural annexationist.

His patriotism did not believe in the good will of the nation, and thus aspired to save the Cuban people from some historical horror. Papá bet on the Law, but — and this he experienced in his own flesh, then, and now in the flesh of his flesh which in some small part is me — he sensed that the law in Cuban is a noose that Cubans put around the necks of Cubans.

In the Republic or the Revolution (Papá was born on April 8, 1919, a year that I love as much as mine: 1971), that gentle man with green eyes and parents who were cousins in Cudillero, Asturias, collected commercial information about the United States. Magazines from the fifties, pocket-books stolen from the National Library, letters and accounting tomes, and a thousand little things from his family exiled so quickly that even another son he lost, in 1962, Manolito Pardo Jr., who wrote to us from Miami until my father died on August 13, 2000, eaten up by undiagnosed cancer but without the slightest wince.

One had to hear how my father said, at breakfast time, after coffee with milk in the wooden house in Lawton,, and before lighting the first cigarette of the universe: “The United States…”

He was called Dionisio Manuel. And he was my papá.

Today the United States is a wasteland for me.

And not just for me.

If you don’t have someone to give a nicotine-smelling hug at dawn, if there is no one to fight with over his radical democrat nonsense, if disease took away his belly and then his son’s heart (he didn’t pay attention to it when he asked me on his deathbed to be quiet until the last of the criminals of Castros’ Cuba died of old age), if a simple or battery-operated Father’s Day postcard does not have any meaning to you, then all the fathers in the universe are missing from our souls.

I’m sorry for those who can still be comforted.

I can’t. Nor can many others.

Not to mention, me, I don’t want to.

The memory of death is our best talisman.

15 June 2013

Fear and Loathing in LASA / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Poster by Rolando Pulido

After three months moving from coast to coast of the United States like an off-balance electron, finally I receive a little from dirty faces, the smell of croquette and military comemierduría (“crap eating”). I deserved it: I already missed my homeland so much…

Welcome to LASA 2013, Cubans.

Indeed, also after three months meeting there at the University of Havana, as if they weren’t a delegation but a Fidelista fascio about to enter combat, I saw myself finally trapped once again in our country. Like Chacumbele I killed myself. The scaffold is just like…

I squeezed into LASA 2013, thanks to the readers of my PayPal, who paid so that I’d be the final member of the Cuba Section of its XXXI Congress, in Washington DC. All my friends warned, in Spanish and in English: “Don’t appear in this lair, do not present yourself to this insipid isle of ideologists of inertial idiocracy (the alliteration is mine, it’s beyond my control), better to continue as “homeless” with your little columns, photos, chats, fiction and anthologies, better you flee from our history while the post-Communist string in this other country lasts for you.”

But eventually curiosity gnawed at me. And I had to insert myself into the dimly lit little classroom with the halitosis of the hysterically baked left in the USA (someone would have to present a PhD on why those who “defend Cuba” never get good dental insurance).

There inside, at seven in the evening, from the near and the far of America, I discovered a troop of Cuban economists, technocrats that the system uses and discards every five years, and an elite team of security people in their guayaberas, the de rigueur shirts of the diplomats, whose executioner muscles from the Cuban streets I recognized right away, just like their totalitarian moron crewcuts. I realized that I was in the capital of imperialism and had gotten myself, by my own taste, in a Castro box, where the only thing that occurs to them is just what happened: an act of repudiation (revolutionary imagination is very common; the government is insolvent in everything except in the organization of hatred as a source of governance).

The prestigious Cubanologist Ted Henken of Baruch College in New York, an academic coerced years ago at an airport in Cuba and expelled from the island by an anonymous big-mouth, was the victim of the revenge. It occurred to the charismatic Yuma to become publicly interested in the fate of the Cuban colleague Omar Everleny Pérez, evangelist of the fraudulent-change of the Raulista reforms, recently ousted from the Center for the Study of the Cuban Economy, with the extra bonus of preventing him from traveling to LASA 2013, despite the fact that his speech “Direct Foreign Investment in Cuba: possibilities and challenges” was still included in the official program. (A colleague justified his absence by claiming that Omar Everlany was happy, and that he had entrusted to him to witness that no one mention his name in the USA).

The reply to Uncle Ted was with throats trembling with anger and raised index fingers (was it in homage to the former Chief Economist?) that were pointing like lightning rods to the ceiling of the Marriot Wardman Park Hotel. They denigrated the poor poster of the Cuban-New-Yorker designer Rolando Pulido, which was one key of hope to undo so much closure (they had crapped themselves from fear with the #OccupyLASA hashtag, because, as specialists in boycott and sabotage, they are well aware that “from saying to doing is no stretch”).

So then, with their brand-new USA visas like a rapid response medal in their passports, they took shifts passing around the “microphone of dignity ”: Carlos Alzugaray (LOUD SPORTING APPLAUSE — like at a baseball game), Juan Triana (LOUD SPORTING APPLAUSE), Jorge Mario Sánchez (LOUD SPORTING APPLAUSE), and some other native, likewise the Canadian John Kirk (LOUD SPORTING APPLAUSE), while from the stalls Miguel Barnet smiled in sinuous satisfaction (OVATION). Mission accomplished, comedians! (CURTAIN)

I wanted to make up a little American Airlines bag with the brochure of the 5 Heroes, that they gave me upon entering the room (more a call to launch a public scandal in front of the White House) and barf into it the simulacrum of coffee that is consumed here.

I already had forgotten the rudeness, the authoritarianism, the illustrious mediocrity, the “mustaches” of sub-socialist soup, the copper complexion and the accompanying tummy, the sparse clothing, the self-victimization due to the “conditions of the American blockade” (even a petal from a free flower hurts them, these “poor-little-me” types, because surely it is a part of a multimillion-dollar campaign to damage the “savior of children” image of the revolution: and here sneaking around right in the open was the activist Frank Calzón of the Center For A Free Cuba, to prove it). My soul had forgotten the cold scar left by the the implicit terror when they shout at you, and you know full well that they drive a red Russian Lada, which is the end of the rabble rousing and the beginning of the crime in a gutter in Bayamo or Baltimore.

Fuck. I’m glad that the LASA 2013 congress is over. Go fuck yourselves, I repeat, so you can get over with excommunicating me and no other American institution will remember me. What a relief.

For dessert, two female acolytes from Havana’s Superior Institute of Art went about stalking us Cubans who didn’t belong to the official delegation. I was about to denounce them to the hotel guards. Ugly like only they are, Communists with the strength of celibacy. But then I figured that hotel security was being paid off by them. It would be the same as typing in a password in the computers of the event, it would have been a suicide. Like living in the United States is the best way to come into the range of that clan, which begins with the Cuban Academy and ends in the catacombs (so that later those same scavengers of academia study my work and charge for their cretinous summer courses and travel to Cuba before the season of The Fall).

You have to leave the country, comrades. Leave that nightmare of a country. Leave this paradise of a country. You have to emigrate truly, it’s not enough to make intelligent faces or impart their spiels in any public or private Made in USA university. We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of triumph, that would be our most degrading defeat. We must continue to the north, comrades of the pack, always further north like a pack of wolves of boreal adventure. The view of the implausible glass star that does not move in the pole, mirage of barbaric light, midnight sun, body which crystallizes into a corpse but is not corrupted. We must tread the lost steps on the fossilized snow where nobody has ever pronounced the word “Fidel.”

Return to Cuba, now, you despots and unlucky ones. And wait for me, since in my flight toward the antipodes I am always going to return.

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

From Washington DC

Poster by Rolando Pulido
Translated from: Penultimosdias.com

6 June 2013

A Post-Totalitarian Tourist from Coast to Coast / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

In which a visit to a Hollywood mall feels more “real” than the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From Sampsonia Way Magazine.

I walk into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and everything seems very false. It must be a trauma that I’ve dragged along with me from Cuba’s totalitarianism. Mummies, jewels, paintings, masks: Hundreds of objects that I previously knew only as photos in newspapers and books. When all of a sudden they appear before me in real life, none of the artifacts seem real. So I leave with a sense of failure, of incredulity, and with fewer dollars after having donated some to the museum for my visit.

Is it worth-while to focus on the last images and letters coming from the inside of the last living utopia on Earth? Is Cuba by now a contemporary country or just another old-fashioned delusion in the middle of Nowhere-America? A Cold-War Northalgia maybe? Can we expect a young Rewwwolution.cu within that Ancien Régime still known as The Revolution? I would like to provoke more questions than answers.

A few days later, I’m lucky enough to have switched coasts and to be glimpsing the USA’s other ocean. There, in a mall in Hollywood, I manage to make up for that bad first impression. They too are showing off treasures from Egypt and almost all the other empires of antiquity. But the impression I get from those kitsch capitalist trinkets is that each piece represents a unique, invaluable, original style.

Thus, one of the greatest museums in the world comes across as a mausoleum of untruths, as the domain of that fraud whereby History uses Beauty to hide its genocidal nature (with the museum as the house of Evil). The Hollywood mall, on the other hand, in all its warehouse monstrosity and its consumerist candor, seems more like a vortex of desires and interactions, of wanting and participating, of life dramatized, but true, in which anything is still possible. Whereas in the museum, even memory is repressed by the guide’s intentional omissions.

I know that these are delirious ciphers, but they are perfect for writing my monologue as a tourist terrified in the face of Liberty (as a people, while we Cubans cry out for change, we seem to avoid it more and more): “The Museum not as a metaphor, but as castrating Castroism in itself,” I write with irony in my diary. “The Mall not as exile experience, but as a post-historical hope.”

Translated for Sampsonia Way Magazine by Alex Higson

27 May 2013

RIVER H / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

THE WAILING OF THE HUDSON RIVER

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Why does it wail, do you know?

The Hudson River wails at dawn. It makes like a low curve underneath the bridge or against its columns and then its metal waters arrive up to the terrace where I take cover from the cold that comes from the most ancient New York (city of a thousand films in my provincial imagination). And where a little bit of a Havana fled, that tried and tried, but still won’t die in my soul.

It would be cruel if at these heights of the dis-history my city wouldn’t let me forget her. I am a man. I lived in her for 40 years. It’s time to rest now. I’m exhausted. My eyes are so sad from so much seeing and seeing, without you looking at me. Even the colors have changed, like the afternoon that puts itself out from pure tedium. It’s time to rest. Havana, listen to me, please. Stay the fuck back.

If the Hudson River didn’t wail of doomsday at dawn, I would have to pull my head out of a 19th Century brick building. There are such beautiful and free people in this city. They look for you with a certain light of hope. Spring doesn’t manage to distort the jewel grey of Washington Heights and its desperate terracotta facades. This neighborhood all at once reminds me of the Lawton of my childhood. I know I don’t know what I’m saying, but it’s true. I had 40 years built up living secretly in a corner of the planet like this. A slice of insanity. A vision, a mirage. Miracle. Come along now, you.

The little glass-coffin windows filter voices coming from the floor below or the next state of this super-country. At last, after having counted so many stars and adding one more for Cuba (I grew up around these kinds of jokes), I don’t know how many shine in the blue rectangle. The US flag, let’s say it before it gets any later, is one of the most precious in the world. By some miracle, I prefer the Cuban, I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because of its sensation of geometric imbalance or incompleteness.

I’ve seen beggars covered with circus tarps in New York and in Washington (I’m going to come to stay and live in Washington when I feel that my heart won’t die: it’s not a city, it’s a stage, and I love spaces that overflow their own extensions). Very few beggars, but I’ve seen them just the same. Many times more swarm in the streets of downtown Havana, and they smell worse. It’s just as cold and the night is long. I sympathize. I think I don’t have money enough to even buy one of those tarps. I’m a mannequin recently departed from the hands of a State that no one stops talking about here. I am in New York somehow only for that: to disown myself of all possessions and stay like the dream of a simple voice. The voice of those who indeed have a voice and are now about to lose it forever in a mock country. My country, a deal between the high powers of crime and the economy and the purple boasting of those who believe in incubating God in the archbishopric. And my voice, you know well that it’s your voice because so it has always been, brother, from Cuba. Your voice from Cuba where you shall want what you might be and shall now never return to listen to it, my love.

Hudson River, howled by Steppenwolf. There is a fury of end of the earth in me tonight that requires me to chew the glass from the windows, rip curtains, and business up out there, and sink myself in the trachea of a subway that reminds me of the dim light of Route 23. In the cafes the neighborhood girls are all left-handed and read A Streetcar Named Desire for hours. I click the arrhythmia of an anti-academic counterrevolution, as intolerable on the island as it is in exile. Inmanipulable, for that matter, intoolerable. Let me go home. And I go.

And my home turns into being my body, housing a frightened mind. It’s obvious that the government is hunting us crassly, tuning their aim as if we were ducks fleeing in the spring. And we are. A night in 1900-something, three days ago, I saw ducks in the frozen water of the monolith in Washington. I also saw a mistake in the Lincoln Memorial. I saw smoke in the sewers. Special pins from the State Department. And a loneliness of staff meetings that held me with pain to my bones until someone said something to me and laughed afterwards, restoring the order of things in the universe. The universe as a billiard ball, rolling as a vile buffalo.

Sometimes it howls. Wail. World Wide wail that makes the Hudson indistinguishable from an ambulance (those ambulances of the soundtracks with saxophone and sex that I used to see when I lived there, on the other side of the bay and the sky with microscopic flakes from the end of winter).

All writing is a farewell to mourning. New York is preparing itself for our slaughter. We are going to annihilate the Cubans. The desert must rule, life is a leftover. I’m announcing it with a gushing pleasure that will not explode on you. In more than one sense, until the last Cuban does not die violently, Fidel Castro will not know how to die.

(This last prayer is the most intimate crystallization of the beauty exposed before the dismay of those who don’t know how to hear. Then hear me, my characters: Ipatria, Olivia, Sally, finally …)

I’m going to stop. I’ve spent many days without being able to add an image to my madness. I’m trying to invent words. Other names for another novel. Rosemary, Samantha, Kate. Always girls without end … of boys I wouldn’t be able to write even a dialog. The boy is me and I’m dissolving more with each period.

Amen, my dears. Let me go.

Translated by: JT

13 March 2013

While You Were Sleeping / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

While you slept

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Ice is dead water.

I smell bad, like a homeless person in a subway car in New York. Although my scent doesn’t please me, it belongs to me. Private property in my absolute state of biologisity.

Exile is so exciting. All of us have been waiting for this occasion so much.

Dying among strangers is a privilege of the virtuous and angels. You know that I have no virtues.

There is no homeland with virtue. All homelands are a virtual shaving.

The transparent May night won’t let me sleep. I dream about North American scenes. Do Cubans dream with electric sheep? This is the way we wash the clothes, wash the clothes, wash the clothes, every Monday morning. Tom is a boy and Mary is a boy, too. One, too, how old are you?

Days of untranslatable drama (I prohibit the English version of this line*), dawns where the Hudson River falls silent, dizziness of a new century and end of the Revolution. I ask myself if somebody is peeking out at Night York in the Cuban mission by the UN.

It will be beautiful to see the new hatreds in the distance. The hour approaches, our time is near. Ideology turns into crime without the complexity of guilt. Idiot discipline. The mediocre efficacy of selective genocide is being committed against the citizens of my country. I ask myself if serial killers are sleeping with loose legs at the pile of Lexington Avenue and I-don’t-know-what street.

In human annals, nothing equals the marvelous despotism of an island left behind by the change of another island without interpretation. Freedom is an act. Manhattabana, mon amour.

My word is immaculate as a real virgin. My word perpetrates, penetrates. My word is an ephemeral fountain of reality. And reality is dirty ice, base material of the comets, water of stone or metal. continue reading

The only solid that survives is an automatic revolving door, some automatic stairs, an automatic cigarette, an automatic taxi driver, a piece of bread that from two months ago until today doesn’t know anything about me when at last I shove it down my throat.

Saliva. Sub-socialism. Individual salvation, intimate. Intimidating. Is this country very far from Alaska?

Human life is sick to death of skyscrapers. We weren’t building this city, we were destroying another. Art-deco: the art of deconstruction. We looked like the metal-eating termites of Stephen Vincent Benet, gnawing and ignoring the digital maps of that metropolis abandoned to half-ruin, a dried-out metropolis. We idolized the polichromy of a door called New York. Without a homeland but without love.

Terminal termites. Termites of totalianarism. The termite as a trending topic of that intemperate called sigloveintiumnidad.

The artisans of the United States have decided that the first Monday of each May shall be an immense feast day for all the Nation’s workers: hammers and sickles up! Souls down! What bubblehead needs a dysfunctional angel of God at these heights of the story (have you seen the homeless in the grave of God’s hand?), of a tax-free God sitting in his easy chair made of red velvet (the color of whorehouse lights), all His hair thinning out (unchaste, putrid), leaves that boil, barbarism flowering on to his chest (level with imported penne, with a rigid penis like a torch about to sink the heavenly hymen), eyebrows like a lawn (there are companies that specialize in surgically implanting them), Eve’s nut like a curse (until, pardon me, what am I saying?), have you wondered why all the Windows in heaven were broken, the hairless embedded chin on top of his sternum (do you want to acquaint the larks with the fatuous music of war: music of pipes, of carnival, of meat after decades of decadence)?

I’m corrupting myself. I wait for a click of love, I hope for an arched island. I don’t go silent. Without limits. My family still goes and I manage to remove them, a natural orphan. The absence of Cuba automatically makes you good, always and when you restore Cuba into your heart where no Cuban can see it. I’m as happy as a piece of bread. As a taxi driver in Tajikstan (they’ll drag out the rhetorical thievery of the USSR to the Big Apple). Like a carcinogenic cigarette of 1959 volts (the illusion, like all Utopias, ends up in the electric chair). I’m so joyful as a stairway or an automatic revolving door (they stop at midnight, perhaps to deny a song).

When injustice weeps, a people diet and feminine trembles. It tempers. Thus was tempered steel. Human zeros, buried. Smoke is your lies. Nothing is old in the moonlight.

Manhattan has an obsolete face and a million fashion pixels. It’s not New York, it’s much more than that: it’s barely its description. And it is, also, our inertial memory of what New York should have been before having been converted into New York.

The ambulances howl with their express packages of suicides, promptly hanged in a bathroom shower with end conditioning (the Spring of 2013 never quite arrived all the way, the landlords are lowlives and cut the heat off). New York remembers everything in an instant, likeable amnesia, amabilis insania. New York can do it all, hope for it all, forgive it all. It’s New York who sees, not love.

Love is my naked body that jumps backstroke from a bridge too similar to the Brooklyn Bridge over the top to be the real Brooklyn Bridge.

The dick is a parabola of unpronounceable precision (José Martí would never go here, despite his prudish promiscuity like a useless shield against bullets: although it might not be an enemy bullet that kills us tomorrow, but the illiterate machete of a national Negro), pressure.

Splash. Splatter.

A comet seems to have fallen over the city. I’ve saved 3,455 US dollars. I’ve been collecting them with my hand open from point to point on the blue line of the subway.

A.

A for Ana.

Is New York under or on top of the Arctic Circle?

He who pulls the levers on the A train, that’s me.

O.

O for Otto, the pilot.

And everything happens a little accelerated, jumpily, because we still have to discover the cinemascope.

The human species has its craters, its cavities. The stench of a dead raccoon is also a harbinger of spring. Out there are the great lakes, as a local cinema that I missed in my childhood: Erie. And to think I was so close to Lawton and Luyanó. Truly I tell you, love is a very splendorous thing. And in Alaska death comes next to the dismal sled of the worst of another century’s literature.

The catcher in the Ryevolution.

Yoko Ana.

The only hero here and now would be a burst of laughter, language of the crazy, a grimace or miracle. I look forward so much to a jail with the seal of the Supreme Court or the Association of American Psychiatrists.

Insomnia is something much more splendorous than love. I dream in North American scenes. I am hungry and cold, although they don’t recognize my princehood in New York. Do the sheep dream with electric Cubans? Paint me an olive, please.

Do not tempt me. Click gropingly. I press countless buttons of grammatical death.

Till State do us apart, Ana.

Till State do us apart, Otto.

There won’t be mercy from us, sinners. The struggle of mankind against power is lost beforehand. Come by us to this island from the other island. Barbarism is also true.

*Translator’s note: Sorry, Orlando. At least it was an easy translation this time. You know why they say rules are created, right? :-)

Translated by: JT

6 May 2013

Willy and the Magic Beanstalk / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

willytoledo23_0As a birthday present, Willy Toledo announces that he is going to live to Havana.

At forty something and with his own First World “savage capitalism” bank account, it was now time for the actor to star in one of those “humanist processes that have improved the lives of people” and which are an “example of heroic resistance” to imperialism (that ghost that corrodes Europe: envy of life in America).

Perspicacious people that we are, Cubans, not without curiosity, give him the most post-Communist of welcomes. No one who feels pressures in a “fascist national-Catholic” regimes deserves to live in it forever. And Cuban has half a century of compassionate experience in that respect, which is why accept with our proletarian patience one more of the many media stars who have come to discretely detoxify themselves in a private State clinic.

The “Spanishfication” process of the Island (where nearly a third of a million nationals are looking to escape thanks to the baptismal faith of their grandparents) now has a reverse flow of Iberians: after the Basque ETA terrorists from decades past — half entrepreneurs and half hostages in Cuba — we receive a terrorized Willy Toledo. Literally, because “democracy in absolute deficit” has collapsed his emotional stability. No one is alive there. It’s a question of brains.

Willy Toledo will come as an ideological tourist to find that the most beautiful land is the same one espied by him from his Marxist hound’s crows-nest, with its idyllic ration book and its atrocious business inefficiency, with its scarcity of guaranteed rights even in the Constitution, with its national apathy and criminal hypocrisy, with its zero internet and prophylactic Majority Report style laws, and, above all, with its “suspected dissidents” imprisoned as “traitors” and “common delinquents” like Orlando Zapata Tamayo, his family filmed while he was left to die in the hands of State Security after a hunger strike and torture in prison, and towards whom in 2010, while his body was still warm, Willy Toledo showed no mercy.

Or perhaps he comes with the academic pretensions of a performing Patrick Symmes, who pretends to survive thirty days like a Cuban in Cuba, with fifteen Yankee dollars in exchange for reading, with sleepless irony, not so much Harper’s Magazine as Les Miserables (unspecified if in a local edition).

Or he could come like a killer whale with cancer that stops in the Cubag Archipelago to immolate himself on the shabby stretchers of Havana hospitals, and even donate his body to the aboriginal quacks of the Latin American School of Medicine: a kitsch Keiko with no reasons to rebel, except to evade his taxes (like leftcopy Gerard Depardieu renouncing Europe in favor of the ex-KGB). In this case, our William Tell could end up like Antonio Gades, buried in the east of the Island as a Hero of the Revolution, with the profits from a dwarf statue in Old Havana.

The Cold War rhetoric of Willy Toledo is as simpatico as renting his unshaven face for the Christmas 2007 campaign for the World of Warcraft video game. In any case, with his putative visa as “foreign trainer,” Cuba could be continue to be a “reference” and “symbol” for the “real socialists of the world” where the “Rule of Law has been completely wiped off the map,” though for him, it will not be. In fact, in Cuba he will be much more hidden from within, thanks to the guarantee that nothing will happen like what occurred in Spain at the end of March in 2012 (with the silent consent of the Catholic hierarchy) when hundreds of peaceful activists were kidnapped by the political police just when Willy Toledo was xenophobicly vandalizing a bar in Madrid. In Cuba, what’s more, his anti-monarchic intolerance could heal, through living without outrage for the rest of his life under the democratic dynasty of Castro & Castro Ltd.

The Cuban population pyramid, like a mimetic trend of the rest of our society, is also upside down. There is a permanent plebiscite of the feet: everyone leaves (we all left). Hence, the importance for Raulism of reforesting with subjects who guarantee their governability. Privatizing Cuba with faithful foreigners so that we Cubans won’t reconquer the end of the Revolution. Operation Free Willy would be inserted within these objectives of the transition scheme announced for 2018.

Welcome, then, to the Revolutionary Court, Comrade One-Eyed Willy.

From Diario de Cuba

13 May 2013

The Writer’s Block: A Video Q&A With… / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

MEgMXkQQytmFz1fBfUryD49X8_v33-uuyDosPxlvatI-e1367350163842Photo: David Lewetag, Elevation Loft.

The Writer’s Block is an ongoing video series of interviews with visiting writers at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh. In these Q&A’s, conducted on Sampsonia Way, writers sit down with us to discuss literature, their craft, and career. View all previous interviews here.

In April 2013, Cuban writer Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo visited Pittsburgh as a part of his U.S. trip. He read at a City of Asylum/Pittsburgh event held at Bar Marco in the Strip District. Before the reading, Lazo sat down with Sampsonia Way to talk about how he views himself as a writer, his least favorite interview questions, and why he can’t stop writing.

From Sampsonia Way Magazine

2 May 2013

On the WWW Road / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

DSC03415Last month, social activist Yoani Sánchez (blog Generation Y) and I became the first pro-democracy bloggers that, while still living in Cuba, were allowed to visit and speak freely in USA.

We were welcomed in Washington by U.S. Congressmen, and by ministries of the White House and the State Department. During the last half century of the so-called Revolution, such behavior has been considered by our government as a declaration of war. This is why the solidarity of the international community is so important under these unprecedented circumstances.

As part of the Cuban State’s efforts to silence us, our presentation to U.N. journalists in New York was boycotted from Havana. Via a top-level protest (supported by anti-democratic nations), they denied us our right to speak in the scheduled public room. Instead, our speech took place in a tiny corridor, where Sánchez’s voice resonated like a ray of hope, and the world came to see how human rights are disregarded in today’s Cuba — and perhaps in tomorrow’s, too, once Raúl Castro has imposed a kind of State capitalism which no Cuban ever voted for.

During those brief, but intense encounters, the focus was on mutual respect, the process of building bridges through dialogue (something that the Cuban State would never tolerate), and on a future of understanding, rather than dwelling on a past of irreconcilable mistrust. Freedom is not a luxury of the First World. As the dissident leader Oswaldo Payá said: “Without hate but also without fear in our hearts, Cubans are ready for freedom and we are ready now.”

During our tour, we shared with a community of Cubans in several cities, who until then knew us only through the internet: virtual friends who for years have been actively collaborating with our independent projects inside the island. These projects include the digital magazine VOCES, the photo documentary contest PAÍS DE PÍXELES, and the filmed debates of RAZONES CIUDADANAS.

Civic society in Cuba is a fragile emerging phenomenon that has gained global attention despite the limited access to internet and repression in Cuba. As a reader, you can shed light upon the real Cuba that tourists and enterprises are willing to ignore. You can help our people to peacefully achieve a more inclusive nation. You can help us reach the future that all human beings deserve, regardless of ideology.

From Building Bridges, the official blog of Boston College’s Cuban American Students’ Association (CASA)

28 April 2013