Author: Yoani Sánchez

But the years passed and on this long and narrow island there has never been detected even a single piece of that twin-engine Cessna. New technologies burst into everyone’s lives, satellites search every inch of the planet, and mythical cities, submerged or buried, are found all over the globe. But of Camilo, not a single clue.

The illusion that he would return to unite “the highest leadership of the country” was giving way to another desire. In the mid-eighties I heard talk of Camilo Cienfuegos as the hope for change. “If he were here, none of this would have happened,” the elderly intoned. “He wasn’t a communist,” my grandfather said.

Once again we want to find alive the hero of Yaguajay, but this time to lead our dissatisfaction and to help us overcome our fear.

In the Special Period the urge to discover at least a vestige of that tailor-turned-guerrilla forcefully resurfaced. We speculated that if the circumstances of his death were unraveled, Fidel Castro’s government would fall like a house of cards. The best-kept secret of the Revolutionary era would also be its end. But even in those years the mystery was not solved.

A few days ago a little girl reminded her mother she needed to take a bouquet of flowers to school to throw into the sea on the day this Havanan not yet turned 30 disappeared. A second later the girl asked, “But is he dead, or is he not dead?” Her mother explained the official version in a bored voice, ending with a categorical, “Yes, he’s dead… he is not breathing.”

The mystery has collapsed. Not because we found answers, but because we got tired of waiting for them. Right now, nothing would change because we know that Camilo Cienfuegos is alive somewhere – with his graying beard – unless it is scientifically proven that the official version is true. Nor would there be a great commotion on finding out his death was an assassination order by his own compañeros from the Sierra Maestra.

Time, implacable, has ended up burying Camilo.

Before the spectator’s eyes, a story develops beginning with the pain of exile and memories of a life left behind on the island. A reference that is maintained throughout this play, currently being staged at the Marquis Theater in the Big Apple. Directed by Jerry Mitchel, the musical successfully details the transformation of sadness into energy and of the melancholy of emigration into entrepreneurship.

On your feet! is primarily a celebration of Cuban identity that manages to get the audience out of their seats and dancing, with tears still running down their faces. Through the excellent musical performances of Ana Villafañe in the role of Gloria Estafan, and the rest of the cast, the play captivates without becoming cloying, and connects the audience with the culture of our country beyond the stereotypes.

The musical deserves a prolonged applause not only for its artistic virtues and superb staging, but above all, because it exalts values our society urgently needs to reclaim. It is about the lives of people who inspire in way very different from the models imposed by the Cuban government’s official propaganda. Gloria and Emilio do not provoke uncritical appreciation, fear, docile gratitude, but rather the desire to imitate them… to overcome.

Someday, when Cuban children open the schoolbooks that teach them to read, they will no longer see individuals dressed in military uniform with rifles on their shoulders. Instead of that excessive worship of men at arms, we will find real images of success, of social, scientific and cultural achievements. In those pages the real models will appear, the faces of the Cuban dream.

Cuban immigration law is perhaps one of the strictest on the planet for a foreigner who settles in the national territory. For decades, living here was a privilege allowed only to the “comrades” of Eastern Europe, apprentice guerrillas, and political refugees from Latin American dictatorships. Diplomatic personnel and some chosen academics completed the map of natives of other countries who would stay in Cuba more or less permanently.

The island ceased to be a country of immigrants, where the crucible of identity joined together cultures far and near. Chinese, French, Arabs, Haitians, Spaniards and Poles, among many others, brought their customs, culinary recipes, and entrepreneurial initiatives to achieve the wonder of diversity. Today it is rare to see gathered around family tables people who were not born here.

At the end of 2014, the National Bureau of Statistics announced that the number of foreign residents in Cuba in 2011 represented just 0.05% of the population. A figure that contrasts with the 128,392 foreigners – 1.3% of the population – that we shared the island with in 1981. Two factors explain the sharp drop in foreign residents: the implosion, in the 1990s, of the socialist camp, whence the “technicals” of yesteryear; and, above all, because our country long ago ceased to be a nation of opportunities.

While foreign residents were leaving, temporary visitors were becoming an economic “lifeline” in the face of an increasing material misery. These latter were, for a long time, the only ones with hard currency, and with it the ability to buy shampoo in the “diplotiendas” (diplomat stores), and to experience the enormous luxury of enjoying a cold beer in a hotel bar. The tourist became the Prince Charming of many young Cuban women’s dreams, the son-in-law that every father-in-law wanted, and the preferred tenant of rooms for rent.

Even today foreigners are seen by many Cubans as wallets with legs who walk the streets, which must be emptied of every coin. It is difficult for a foreigner in Cuba to determine to what extent the friendliness they come across in the streets is the natural kindness of our people, versus a histrionic performance the objective of which is to get one’s hand in their pocket.

Cubans have lost the habit of living – equal to equal – with “the other.” Sharing jobs with immigrants, accepting that people speak different languages on a public bus. Our kitchens have been impoverished by lack of contact with other gastronomic experiences, we have become less universal and markedly more “islanders” in the worst sense of the word. We have lost the capacity to tolerate and welcome other ways of doing, speaking and living.

How will we react when our country becomes a destination for immigrants? Will they be condemned to the worst jobs? Will xenophobic groups emerge that reject those who come from overseas? Will there be NGOs to protect them? Programs to help them integrate? Politicians who don’t fear them? All these questions need to be answered in a shorter time frame than we think. Cuba could again be, very soon, a nation of people who come from many places.

Meanwhile, Ernesto Guevara, who inspired the motto of the Pioneer organization now celebrating its 47^th anniversary, has become the face on T-shirts, paintings and ashtrays sold to tourists. In the midst of a political scenario where the Cuban Government serves as a mediator for peace between the Colombian guerrillas, Guevara’s call to create “two, three, many Vietnams” sounds like the advice of a madman eager for the Apocalypse and dreams of the end days.

Those enthusiasts who inaugurated the OPJM, today sneer at the Pioneer salute that obliges the fingers of the right hand to join together “demanding the indissoluble union of the peoples of the five continents.” The military gesture must be performed with the elbow at a 90 degree angle to ratify that “collective interests are put above the personal.” This, in these times of “every man for himself,” driven by the economic shock therapy decreed by the Government itself.

In this time of makeovers, where Cuban television broadcasts homilies and speeches by American officials, it is surprising that they have not eliminated this purely ideological organization that absorbs Cuban children. In the midst of so many daily priorities, we parents have also strongly demanded that our children not be soldiers of a political experiment from such a young age.

The OPJM also brings with it decades remote from reality. Like in 1991, when in the midst of the collapse of the Special Period, the first Pioneer Congress was held under the slogan, “We are happy here.” People still had the energy to mock the phrase and there are those who insist it was painted along the outer wall of Colon Cemetery in Havana. An awkward joke, but so was, and is, the pioneer movement.

And the mockery hasn’t ended. In the room of a friend from elementary school there is a fading photo of his Pioneer initiation day. It is black and white, although time has given it a golden tone that makes it more unreal and distant. “That was a time when I could not see,” jokes the forty-something.

He alludes sarcastically to the popular joke of a boy who comes to school and tells his teacher that his pet cat just gave birth to ten kittens. A few days later the concerned teacher asks about the health of the litter and receives the unusual response, “Five of the kittens opened their eyes, and the rest remain communists,” said the boy sharply. “I was like that, I didn’t see what was in front of my nose,” my playful colleague explains. Now, he has a look that scrutinizes everything, tacitly accepting nothing.

Nearly half a century after the creation of the OPJM, children who begin their studies in Cuban schools are forced to repeat its anachronistic slogan. The mothers who sheltered them in their wombs also shouted it, and even their grandparents did, with their neck veins swollen, full of conviction that Communism would arrive any minute now.

The piece of cloth that on this morning of 8 October is tied around the necks of thousands of Cuban children still has the shape of an isosceles triangle in which the vertices mean “study, work and fight for the conquests of the Revolution.” The ritual, which has become routine, keeps intact its burden of ideology and imposition. It is the gesture of the winners that marks the children of the vanquished, the hot iron stamping conqueror on the offspring of the conquered.

The vocalist, 72, has made his way through the streets of Havana leaving a trail of incredulity and beating hearts. It is not, admittedly, the excitement provoked by Beyoncé or Rihanna with their escapades in this theme park of the past, but Jagger’s visit has more profound connotations. For several generations of Cubans he represents the forbidden, an attitude toward life that was denied us by an obsessive police control.

For a political system that tried to form the “New Man,” with a Spartan spirit, “correct” and obedient, this skinny guy with his turbulent life signified the anti-model, what we must not imitate. However, the laboratory man hawked by the pedagogical manuals didn’t work out… and Mick Jagger won the battle against the prototype of the militant boy, hair cut short and willing to denounce his own family.

A friend close to seventy came out into the streets this Sunday with the energy of girl celebrating her fifteenth birthday. “Where is he?” she asked the guard at Hotel Santa Isabel, where the official news reported the idol of her youth to be staying, but the man gave her no details. Like an obsessed schoolgirl, she walked all the streets around the hotel looking in the windows, to try to see the lean figure of the leader of the Rolling Stones.

Mick Jagger won the battle against the prototype of the militant boy, hair cut short and willing to denounce his own family

The lady displayed none of these reactions toward the American secretary of state, nor before the Bishop of Rome. For her, all these exalted visitors were in the range of the possible, no longer surprising nor moving. But Jagger… Jagger is something else. “I don’t want to die without seeing him,” she told me on the phone, with the conviction of one who will not tolerate leaving this world without “closing an era,” putting the capstone on her “best years,” she told me.

My friend infected me a little with her enthusiasm, I must confess. No sermon in the Plaza of the Revolution, no speech to open an embassy, caused my stomach to jump this way, a sudden feeling of living in historic times. A nervousness that will last until we see the legendary British band play next March at the Latin American stadium, in front of a crowd that will try to recover its lost years.

Jagger is much more than the living legend of rock and roll presented by the media. This beanpole, all mouth, all energy, all life, embodies a time that they snatched from us, an existence that we could have had and that they took from us.

It seems a shame to me that the political analysts don’t realize it: the future Cuba could start with the Rolling Stones in Havana.

Social behavior is shaped by one’s environment. On a spotless floor, a clean sidewalk, in a cared-for city, many will imitate the environment and avoid dirtying, destroying or degrading it. Context greatly influences people’s attitude toward public spaces and common goods. But when the environment is dirty, assaulted by carelessness and becomes hostile, those who inhabit it will neither respect nor care for it.

Cubans are no more unruly than other human beings and yet, right now, a park filled with children’s play structures needs to be guarded like a bank, so that the swing seats, the iron from the carousels or the ropes from the climbing nets aren’t stolen. In poorly lit areas of the city people defecate or urinate, microdumps rise in thousands of corners and a stream of dirty water can fall from any balcony, directly on pedestrians below.

When the environment is dirty, assaulted by carelessness and becomes hostile, and those who inhabit it will neither respect nor care for it

The situation has gone on for so long that many have come to believe that it is in the DNA of our identity to not care for our surroundings. “This city couldn’t have a subway, because imagine the stink in those tunnels with people taking care of all their needs down there,” states a gentleman with the tint of a shabby official, while waiting at a bus stop.

With his words, the man suggested that we Cubans cannot enjoy the privileges of modernity and comfort, because we are unable to maintain them. However, this same “unredeemable exterminator” that we have become can get on a plane, go to New York or Berlin, and in two weeks in those place be throwing trash in the bins, not lighting up in public places, and cleaning the mud off their shoes before entering an office.

Vandalism is a problem present in all societies. Laws and control regulate it and keep it in check, but there it is. It is a part of our human nature that a moment of rage makes us take a blade and inscribe our name on a recently painted wall, or rip the fabric of a movie theater seat. Fines and other penalties should keep this vulture we all shelter within us from getting out of hand.

However, the context has to encourage people to care for things. It is not enough to call for discipline and formal education, the individual has to feel that it’s worth the trouble to preserve his or her surroundings. A street full of potholes, a late and overloaded bus, a sidewalk plunged into darkness, its single streetlight broken years ago, are the ideal components for depredation and pillage.

Many, like the lady who complained at the butcher’s, no longer perceive the scenario of constant attacks on the rights of consumers and citizens that our society presents. So accustomed to the abuse, the inefficiencies, the breakage and the high prices, they throw all the blame on those “unruly Cubans” who couldn’t “live anywhere without destroying it.”

Despite the sudden mystical fervor, national television carefully avoided showing images of the Cuban president when the faithful were reciting the Mass, making the sign of peace, or repeating some prayer when he was present. The cameras only focused on his arrival and departure from temples and plazas.

Some television newscasters who participated in a special ‘magazine’ feature, broadcast during these three days have faced a particular plight. Several faces well-known for their staunch ideological discourse have had to moderate their vocabulary, and are salting their phrases with psalms, biblical allusions and reverence for religious figures.

The pirouettes performed by these presenters and journalists, to avoid words like “revolution,” “communist” or “comrades,” have also been worthy of the political circus they represent. All that was missing in the studio was a crucifix and a Bible, but they weren’t necessary.

The excessive incense of these days is not appreciated by many. “This goes from the sublime to the ridiculous,” a 63-year-old Communist Party militant who lives in my building told me. “From atheism to religious servility,” he added, referring to the attitude of the Cuban authorities and the broadcast of complete Masses in the national media.

Now, all we need is to hear Raul Castro’s next public speech, to see if he also has replaced the bellicose “Homeland or death!” with the more concise, “Amen!”

The answers to these questions not only alert us to the insolvency and inefficiency of our state apparatus to handle certain issues, but also clearly indicate that they have not been up to the task to preserve this valuable resource. As long as leaks and breaks in the country’s water system continue to waste more than 50% of the water pumped, no water project will be sustainable.

As long as leaks and breaks in the country’s water system continue to waste more than 50% of the water pumped, no water project will be sustainable.

On the other hand, it is worth questioning how water management has been approached for decades in our nation, which has prioritized the creation of large reservoirs. This decision has ended up damaging the riverbeds of the countless dammed rivers and has reduced the sediment they carry to the coasts, with the consequent erosion of flora and fauna in the deltas.

­Of course, many of these reservoirs–now below half their capacity, or totally dry–were built at a time when the Hydrologist-in-Chief made decisions about every detail of our lives. The marks of his excesses and harebrained schemes are still apparent in our country, excesses that failed to give our people more food, more water and more freedom.

The marks of excesses and harebrained schemes are still apparent in our country, excesses that failed to give our people more food, more water and more freedom

So enormous public works of damming the rivers and streams were undertaken to the detriment of other solutions that would have helped us to ease the current situation. Among them, investments in wastewater treatment and the desalination of seawater, which surrounds us on all sides. Every hydrological bet in the country was placed on one card: the rain. Now, we are losing the game.

If the announcement of “cloud seeding” had been made in a country with an environmental movement, we would see protests in the street. The method is not as innocuous as the newspaper Granma wants us to think. In fact, the critics of this practice consider it “an alteration of the normal rhythm of nature,” and argue that interference with moisture in one part of the country could compromise the rain pattern elsewhere.

Looking up to see whether or not the rains come, we Cubans are waiting for something more than a crop of clouds altered with a blast of silver iodide. We deserve a coherent hydrology policy, over the long term, without magic or spells, but with guarantees. May the next drought not find us like Voltus V, destroyed and thirsty, raising an arm to draw our majestic sword… that we haven’t carried for a long time.

For a couple of years now I have been talking in a climate of trust with at least eight women friends, all of them graduates of higher education, with professions in the humanities and a certain economic autonomy. Most of them confess to having been beaten by their husband at least once, a couple of them have suffered rape within marriage, and three have had to flee “with just the clothes on their backs” to avoid domestic violence. Most alarming is that they tell these stories with the equanimity of “this is what we get for being women.”

They stuff us full of only some of the numbers, to show that the women’s emancipation has reached this country, while remaining silent on the data about the dark side of reality, where the man commands and the woman obeys.

If we move away from Havana, the problem worsens and takes on connotations of tragedy. It burns you up to hear about the humiliations women experience, the wife battering that is a much more common practice than is admitted in the statistics. Odieti, a peasant from a little village lost in the Cienfuegos countryside, drank a bottle of India ink to put an end to the ordeal her husband subjected her to. After hours of suffering, her life was saved and she earned the next beating for “being loose.” This is what he repeated while whipping his belt against her back.

Living in a country where there is no female circumcision or forced marriages, where women are not forbidden to drive a car, is not sufficient reason to breathe easily and believe that the serious problem of gender inequality is resolved. To display the numbers regarding professional development, integration into the workforce, and the responsibilities of millions of women throughout the island, doesn’t silence the drama so many of them are mired in.

They need to display other statistics. Those that reveal the number of kicks that fall on women’s breasts, backs and faces each week. They should clearly publicize the number of victims who have gone to a police station begging them to keep the abuser away from home and who find only a yawning duty officer who says, “you have to take care of that between the two of you.”

Where do they keep the inventory of the suicides, or of the suicide attempts, because of the indignities suffered at the hands of an abusive man?

They also need the numbers of those who are “slaves” to the stove after a full work day outside the home and it would probably match the four million number of members that the FMC boasts about. The numbers of single and divorced women with ridiculous pensions that aren’t enough to feed a child for even a week. Who includes these in the numbers reported to official journalists? And what about those whose partners have threatened, “If you leave me I will kill you”? Where do they show up in the statistics? How many have had their faces cut with a knife like one “brands” a cow, so that everyone will know they belong to the male, the man, the masculine, who cheats on them with so many others?

Where do they keep the inventory of the suicides, or of the suicide attempts, because of the indignities suffered at the hands of an abusive man? What is the number of those who have been harassed by a jealous boyfriend who follows them everywhere and beats them and causes public scandals? How many have to give in to pressures for sex from their bosses at work, because they know there is no other way to get ahead professionally? And what about the number who are harassed on the streets by those who think it is a virile obligation to accost a woman, touch her, to insinuate himself all the time?

We can only be proud of what has been achieved with regards to the dignity of women when we can begin to solve all these evils, evils that right now cannot even be publicly debated. Having autonomous women’s organizations is essential to achieve these demands. Shelters for abused women, a legal framework that forcefully penalizes the abuser, and a press that reflects the suffering of so many, are essential if we are to leave such atrocities in the past.

Tsipras has accepted what until recently he rejected. All his incendiary nationalistic rhetoric has ended in a pragmatic gesture of compliance. Political greatness? Awareness of defeat? A final grimace of goodwill before heading out the backdoor of power in Greece? It’s hard to know. Most importantly he has chosen not to separate Greece from Europe, to exorcise the demon of the “Grexit,” and in passing has disappointed all those who incited him to lead an entire nation to economic suicide.

The lines in front of the ATMs, the empty shelves, and the growing fear in the population have done more than all the winks of solidarity from other corners of the world that fell on this Greek, though the crisis has not marked his face with a single wrinkle, there is no ‘tic’ of concern. Even at the agreement table, where he spent his last political capital, he has been seen as imperturbable, beautiful, young.

The adversaries of the European Union will accuse him of having sold the country to foreign interests and those who never believed him will look on him with pity while muttering “we told you so.”

Now the diatribe rains down on him. The adversaries of the European Union will accuse him of having sold the country to foreign interests, and those who never believed him will look on him with pity while muttering “we told you so.” There is no way this Greek play where the Syriza party leader is the protagonist ends up as something more than a political tragedy for his party and himself.

Like a sublime statue, Tsipras has ended up trapped in the marble of his verticality; the populism he himself unleashed has devoured him. Some promises meant to charm the voters, when put into practice made the country fall below the point it had reached until now. The pantomime of a referendum was the ultimate gesture of vanity before reneging on his positions.

Tsipras will be diluted in the coming weeks, when the parliaments of the European nations, including Greece, discuss the agreement and approve its implementation. Every step toward getting the rescue and complying with its demands will extinguish this figure that dazzles a part of a nation with his rhetoric.

None of those who applauded his daring will pat him on the back to acknowledge he has chosen for his country and not for himself. For them, Tispras is the uncomfortable reminder of what might have been, the missed opportunity to project, through Greece, their own vendettas.