It has always surprised me how Cuban intellectuals, particularly the generation that lived through the seventies, which later came to be called “the five gray years,” have this bad public memory, and in general, among people they trust, they express the pain they still feel for the abuses committed against them by the functionaries faithful to Fidel Castro and his ideological and military leadership.
Many decades went by without these demons that marked them for life being exorcised, some called traitors for writing “counterrevolutionary” literature, others classified as homosexuals for being weak, along with “ideological licentiousness,” being religious, having long hair, wearing tight pants or listening to the Beatles, Nelson Ned, Cheo Feliciano, Julio Iglesias, Roberto Carlos. There was so much censorship and insanity that Kafka’s narrative began to be realistic.
They created the Military Units to Aid Production (known as UMAP*), concentration camps in the style of Stalin’s Russia. The voices of the dead from this time, who didn’t survive the torture, still call out for justice, and their souls are still waiting, impatient, for the day their names are cleared and returned spotless to their families, and their executioners pay for the injustice committed, as well as those who planned the punishment.
Many of those intellectuals who are still silent, were witnesses of those abuses, others they learned of from friends and acquaintances, all in the end were silent accomplices to evil and crime. A generation that mostly preferred to pretend they had forgotten and to continue to repeat ad nauseam compulsory slogans such as “I’m a revolutionary,” “I support the Revolution,” “I’m loyal to Fidel,’’ and to maintain that imagefearing they would suffer again what they already endured.
The executioners’ return
When the famous “War of the Emails” or I should say, “little controlled war” — when those terrible characters, visible puppets of the Cuban socialist fascism — coincidentally began to reappear in the public media, the officials of that time said it wasn’t on purpose. But in this country for more than half a century nothing happens by chance, where everything is controlled by Fidel Castro, like the great plantation he’s turned Cuban into: Birania, in honor of the name of his father’s ranch and the place of his birth, which, by the way, as part of his personality cult was turned into a museum many years ago. And, remembering his father who used to give exhaustive orders, where nobody dared to make a decision, as happens now with his brother Raul Castro who doesn’t take a single step without having consulted with the “Maximum Leader.”
The truth is that a young writer raised the alarm by email and, for the first time, the spirit of rejection was contagious. The State, seeing that the intellectual situation was running high, called to the still very disciplined elite of that generation for a meeting at the Writers and Artists Union (UNEAC). They promised, there, that these ousted officials would not return to the cultural arena, that everything that had happened was a “coincidence” and outrage of the official media censorship.
For the intellectuals who had been called together, it was enough that they’d been taken into account and they guaranteed that their executioners would not be “reactivated.” With pretty words, Fidel Castro and the Party Central Committee, that is the Party’s Department of Ideology, had no other choice than to make an official declaration, like a sea wall holding back the tsunami, that would be published in the official organ, the Granma newspaper.
And what a surprise it would be for those intellectuals that the final version published was very different from the one written at UNEAC! Some details, words, commas were erased or changed. But that generation that well learned very well to shut up, to whisper in the corridors, also let that event pass unnoticed.
Another unnoticed detail is that at that famous UNEAC meeting, the President of the Cuban Televisions Studios was summoned — a “retired” army officer who, dressed in plain clothes continued under military orders as a clerk at the whims of the Regime — and he didn’t show up because he knew that they would make him accept the blame for those mysterious appearances of the wicked on “his” television. Instead he sent another minor official who took notes of what happened, in which intellectuals demanded a retraction, an official apology from the President of the TV that would be published in the national media.
Promises gone with the wind
Weeks later, when they intellectuals present at the meeting began to inquire into public repentance, they were told it was a promise of the above mentioned President of Television and it would be given at the right moment; of course it never came. And again these intellectuals silenced their voices faced with that commitment. Of course they didn’t understand, or didn’t wish to, that they had been manipulated in the very rights of their spaces, of their work, and of their history full of ears; they were the seawall.
Meanwhile, the emails continued, and some started narrating passages of those events. The note in the newspaper wasn’t enough, they had to be other concessions, they let the blood run from their old wounds. And behind closed doors, by personal invitation to the headquarters of the Casa de las Americas, they agreed that they would expiate their sufferings. Later, far from social media, they went to the Superior Art Institute (ISA), and there like little girls they shed their long-stifled tears.
I was always waiting for one of the injured to point out the real culprit, whom we all knew was Fidel Castro, the intellectual author of all our national sufferings. But, unanimously, they all preferred to remain silent. Nobody mentioned the name of the Beast of Biran, for them was enough being allowed to expel, like volcanoes, all they had suffered, so that, satisfied, they went back to silencing their secrets and stopped being news.
Mentioning the real culprit of the terror
In an email exchange with the writer Amir Valle, I told him the artists had spoken their minds with those functionaries who were no more than puppets, but that nobody mentioned the name of the real cause of the Evil: Fidel Castro.
I was surprised to see a file with all the collected emails, from one side and the other, and that mine wasn’t taken into account. Then several writers who were present in the meeting at UNEAC told me that wouldn’t be very “intelligent” to mention the comandante, that they must act sensibly. In other words: they could play with the chain, but never with the monkey.**
That was enough to confirm what I already knew for sure: the fear of that generation was so deeply seated, that the roots barely reached the surface. Thus, the names of those victims of UMAP, the parametrados***, the excluded, the executed (no one remembers, any more, the atrocious shooting of the writer Nelson Rodriguez Leyva, author of the marvelous book “El Regalo” (The Gift), published in 1964 with the Virgilio Piñera’s collaboration), the censored, the anguished, the tortured, like Piñera himself, Lezama Lima, Rodríguez Feo, Reinaldo Arenas, Heberto Padilla, among others who should be still expecting their compatriots, friends and colleagues to settle the debt and point out the real culprit of their personal disgraces and the national cultural ones.
The culprit of all that literary and artistic work that the established Regime of Terror had cut short by their authors’ fear, and the need to survive at any cost, a military and communist dictatorship that launched its absolute Power against any vestige of free creation.
Translator’s notes: *UMAP — Military Units in Aid of Production, a euphemism for concentration camps for homosexuals, religious, and others considered in need to “re-education” or simply confinement.
*“You can play with the chain, but not with the monkey,” is a common Cuban expression.
***Parametrados / parametración: From the word “parameters.” Parametración 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.
Translating Cuba is in the process of translating the emails exchanged in “The little email war,” also called “The Intellectual Debate,” and they can be found here and here.
Angel Santiesteban, 13 August 2012 — The painter, Alex Leyva (aka Kcho) has stated in a session of the Parliament of the Assembly of People’s Power, in which he serves as a “deputy,” that artists should work for the people voluntarily and for free without receiving any monetary compensation.”
At a meeting of intellectuals and artists he attended last February, he also declared that, in general, the state should impose a 100% tax rate on both working and non-working citizens since, according to him, “those of us who are Cuban all emanate from the work of Fidel Castro.”
In his particular case it should be understood that—during the years he was at school, which he quit at an early age—Kcho attended the Gerona School for Special Education, which provided schooling for children with learning difficulties. You might recall the documentary on his work in which subtitles had to be used so that what the artist said could be understood. Thanks to the work of speech therapists, we can now at least understand what he is trying to say.
How is it possible that an artist can ask his compatriots and colleagues to work for a system that exploits them. Of course, it is understandable given the way he explains it. Whenever the Marta Machado Artistic Brigade —named after his late mother, whose greatest achievement was giving birth to him, developing his innate talent and setting him on his way—calls a meeting to “help” the people, it serves as nothing more than as a means of self-promotion and a way to loot municipal and provincial coffers, whose funds he coldly and larcenously extracts.
A few years ago I was invited by the National Union of Cuban Artists and Writers (UNEAC) to visit a camp set up by Mr. Kcho in Candelaria, Pinar del Rio province to provide “artistic” aid to residents who were victims of a hurricane that had left them homeless, impoverished and virtually without food.
After visiting the site and listening to accounts from the camp’s neighbors, I learned that what was actually ravaging the place was the presence of voracious brigade members, who, in spite of the shortages being suffered by the population, were demanding fresh salads, fruits, desserts, wines and other refrigerated luxuries.
The most appalling thing to me was that these expenses were paid not from the artist’s own funds, but rather by the state, specifically on the orders of Fidel Castro. All the televised propaganda that reported on this project served no purpose other than to give a politically false impression.
But the greatest horror experienced there was that the most scandalous orgies were organized under the camp tents. Kcho and the painters who made up his retinue chose girls they found beautiful to serve as companions. They were selected from art schools or taken from their homes with promises to rescue them from the deprivation and hunger they were enduring.
This was done with the consent of their parents, and the support of the school and regional officials, who introduced the girls as a way to satisfy the sexual pathologies of Kcho and his cohorts. Those who went in as young ladies were something quite different when they came out. Many turned to uterine scraping in an effort to undo their pregnancies.
Of course, pigs roasting on a spit were a daily occurrence, at least on the days Kcho chose to be present, since he only occasionally made the sacrifice of sleeping under a tent. He justified his trips to Havana with the excuse that he had to go look for provisions, allowing him to flee the toil and misery left behind by the natural disaster, and to sleep peacefully in the air-conditioned house at “El Laguito,” given to him by his “comandante,” Fidel Castro.
It was worse at Isla de la Juventud (Island of Youth), where he plundered the culture budget to such an extent that there was no money left to pay artists. Year’s end was drawing near and they had not been paid for two months. Might this be what he means when Kcho talks about working for free — a way for him to enjoy luxuries and binges with his friends? With money from the culture ministry he bought televisions and refrigerators, which later, after his stint with the brigade appeared to have ended, were given to family members. The residents observed how his uncles and cousins came looking for these appliances. Is this not theft? And none of it was hidden. So ignorant is he that the did it openly in front of people who, in general, prefer to remain silent to avoid losing their jobs, which are their families’ the only source of income.
His depredation became so great that many of the island’s artists considered going on strike if they were not paid by the end of the year. To get the matter resolved, someone had to call “Ministry of Culture,” which issued a bank transfer to help the artists and calm heated emotions.
That same official, a fan of dominoes, once invited Kcho to play a game, and to this he responded no, because he couldn’t bear to lose. Of what free work, then, would he be talking if he doesn’t know how to lose. Of course, it’s not about him, he gets thousands of dollars for his work, for which we congratulate him, not for asking his compatriots to be slaves which goes against the essence of an artist. It’s absolutely certain that Kcho didn’t read Marti, because he doesn’t know that the Master wrote that Socialism is the highest stage of slavery.
In one of my published books, The Children Nobody Wanted, in fact, the designer chose a photo of an installation that Kcho made with several rafts and inner tubes, precisely because it expressed the pain of Cuban youth who feel forced to emigrate, and in which he was able to consummate the dreams of several generations who through their luck on the sea in hopes of a better future, and of the other great part of the same youth who never get there, so their lives and dreams are truncated, works whose titles speak for themselves: The Road to Nostalgia, The Infinite Column, In Order to Forget, In The Sea Nothing is Written, The Jungle, The Sons of William Tell, Delaying the Inevitable.
Until Kcho was lifted up by power, his work was a reflection of his generation, since then it has become many things, but sincerely and without rancor, we must recognize that his talent has evaporated, and that for several years it’s been a repeat of the same: the pot and the palm.
Indeed, back in Gerona, his birthplace, friends, neighbors and acquaintances were always ready for this mania many painters have for drawing on any available piece of paper, and sometimes on napkins Kcho would make some sketch for what would later be a painting.
So he gave his friends these sketches warning them they couldn’t sell them. Some, when they were financially pressed, managed to get a few bills from tourists, and when Kcho learned of it he lashed out against them and ended the friendship. In his little understanding it was as if he didn’t comprehend the neediness of those around him, nor that with their sale they managed to subsist in the daily misery, and that the best measure of a friend is when he can, with his art, provide food and comfort to those with whom he shares a friendship.
Summing up the case, in addition to knowing that the human being Alexis Leyva isn’t one of the great lights, the money he raises for his work, for which we applaud him, and the benefits he extracts from the government, which we criticize, and what he has achieved through his disjointed and unintelligible fanatic adoration of Fidel Castro, has made him the favorite son of the dictatorship, and has led to a level of disconnect with the Cuban reality, such that like a robot he only expresses fatal words, lapses before the history that will recall him and the opportunist he is.
Like many artists he’s only interested in living in the moment, and it is not his fault that he lacks the capacity to assimilate a little bit of the knowledge of history, and not knowing the future, when all the horrors he committed in defending Fidel Castro and his followers are exposed before his eyes, then we will hear that he didn’t know, that he could never have imagined, and, like now, we will have to simply look with pity on his bulk that gets fatter every day at the tables of the Palace, the Council of State. That is his pay: the giant shrimp, huge lobsters, and the arm of the dictator around his shoulders as he poses.
When the funeral cortege left the chapel in Cerro with the body of the political leader Oswaldo Payá, having barely advanced a few yards, it was stopped for some twenty minutes. Something happened at the beginning of the caravan. Several people got out of the car to find out what; we feared the worse although we hoped that nothing was happening and we wanted to give a Christian burial to our dead.
While celebrating the Mass officiated by Cardinal Jaime Ortega, outside, the authorities were planning the engagement. I looked out of the door of the church, looked down the street and I could recognize the faces of the State Security agents, but there, at the end, where the Calzada del Cerro terminates, I saw an officer talking to a large group of civilians.
I remembered that it seemed very much like the operation they had every time the Ladies in White met at their headquarters: the house of their spiritual leaders, the feisty Laura Pollán. I recorded some footage of what was happening and approached as far as the camera lens would let me. In any event, I couldn’t imagine they planned something similar in the midst of that pain, that they would disrespect the family of the deceased, the Cardinal and the entire delegation of the Catholic Church, as well as the broadcasters and the international journalists covering the event.
But despite the constant proofs of the governmental abuse, we still insist on being naive, as if this attitude would save us from contagion by the all the evil that always surrounds us.
What I do know is that the partner of Antonio Rodiles, Ailer Gonzalez, with the intention of finding out what was going on, got out of the car, and, coming to the crowd, witnessed how they preyed on Fariñas and another group of opponents. She demanded their release and the police pushed her also, and forced her with beatings onto a Chinese-made Yutong bus that they’d prepared by way of a rolling jail cell. And inside there, they continued beating her.
Antonio, impatient on seeing that his partner didn’t return, went to look for her. While he was walking he heard a State Security Agent shout to another who was nearby, “Look, there goes Aleaga, let’s grab him.”Rodiles observed that Aleaga wasn’t even taking photos, just walking on the sidewalk, and he said to the “securities” to leave him alone. They looked at him and responded, “Come on, you too, you’re going.” He refuses, meanwhile seeing that Aleaga is being put in a car handcuffed. Rodiles resists their putting him into a car, finally they lay him on the backseat and two burly agents climb on top of him to immobilize him with the weight of their bodies.
Fariñas returns slap
The lawyer Vallín is in the car with me, and deducing that something happened at the beginning, we get out, and when we’re about to go to the place the procession resumed its march and we got back in the car. In the Calzado de Cerro they’ve already armed an operation of the repressive forces, we managed to see a woman with the rank of colonel waving for the caravan to continue.
They had two Yutong buses on each direction of the street that were blocking traffic. Without distinguishing the faces I could also see that there were several people inside the buses that they were hitting. Later I learned that they were Fariñas, whom they hit at that moment, which he returned with the same energy.
Ailer was in that bus; and she said the struggle was maintained for a while, that the driver took the route toward the beaches to the east of Havana. That there was a moment when they thought the bus would turn over, it looked like a swing and gave the impression that the driver lost his way, that they would be killed and she began to plead with Fariñas to stop, because he was continuing to brawl with the agents who were trying to hit him.
Fariñas looked at her and understood her fear and appeased them to please her and calm them down. It was a humane act and one of chivalry that made the difference with the government’s henchmen, who continues their insults and provocations.
Ailer handcuffed
They take her to a place that looked like a shelter or abandoned classroom, and told her to hand over the memory card of the camera. She had already secured it, taking it out of the camera and putting it in her purse. And she refuses to surrender it, warning that they themselves are violating the laws, she has been kidnapped on a public street, and they are violating her civil rights that she knows well.
But two women and a man come and push her and throw her on the floor to demobilize her and take the bag. She yells at them one day have to answer for their abuses and repressive attitudes that tarnish the name of all their families. She warns them that she has heart problems and has arrhythmia. They show their fear. Soon they take her to the outside of the Naval military hospital and tell her to exit the car. And leave her there abandoned.
Rodiles refuses to enter the cell
When they take Rodiles to the police station, Aleaga has just arrived. The “securities” continue provoking, they want him to enter a cell but they can’t make him do it despite the shoving, they have given him a lot of punches, scrapes and torn his clothes. I’m not a criminal, Rodiles tells them, I haven’t committed any crime and I am not going in any cell.
A lieutenant colonel in the police intervenes and tells the “securities” that they will allow him to talk, look, he said, I give you my word I will not let them take you to the cell, but first you have to give me your shoelaces and belt, it is mandatory; they put in the waiting room. And what about Aleaga, asks Rodiles. The officer keeps looking at him and understands it will have to be that way or he will continue his protests. Fine, he stays with you at him and know that you will have to be so or continue their protest. Okay, it stays with you, he responds. The “securities,” against their will, accept keeping them out of the cell.
The bells in the cemetery receive us
We arrived at the cemetery worried, we didn’t understand clearly what had happened. Someone said they had arrested Rodiles, Aleaga, Ailer, Fariñas, among many other dissidents. Singing, accompanied the remains of Oswaldo Payá, from the entrance to the chapel, then to his grave. That death had changed us, the living. Taught us, once again, the lack of scruples of the Cuban government. Nevertheless, we agree that Payá received the funeral honors worthy of a President. That last space I toured hugging the great Cuban poet Rafael Alcides, who, recovering from a recent hospitalization for his diabetes, had not wanted to fail to pay his respects and say a final goodbye to the brother in the struggle.
He told me that of course all of us who are fighters like Payá are aware of the risk that faces us when we defy a totalitarian government. But we know that despite risking our lives, it’s impossible to avoid our protest.
Demanding freedom in front of the police station
We were told that Aleaga and Antonio remained in detention at the 4th Police Station in Infanta. In half an hour we were there, along with a group of young fighters, Yoani Sanchez, Reinaldo Escobar and Santana (the writer), to accompany the families of those arrested who were waiting outside the station. There I found a lawyer Vallín who went inside, from time to time, to demand that at least they present the arrest warrants, which they had not yet done; he warned that they were detained there as hostages, in open violation of applicable laws.
Soon a Major of the police came to ask Vallín speak with us and to tell us to go home. By that time we were over twenty people. Vallin told us the desire of the officer after he had retired. We were laughing that the officer thought, just ask, we would retreat. At the time the Major came out again and warned us that we could not be there (we stayed right across the street from the police station). He said that in twenty minutes they would release those arrested.
So we decided to go to the facing sidewalk. The Major returned and told us we could not be there either. To facilitate the release of Antonio, we decided to retreat about fifty feet, our position was no longer right in front of the station. But those twenty minutes passed when they promised to release him; and we waited an hour. Then it occurred to someone to make “a small geographical pressure,” and we returned to the place where we were earlier, on the sidewalk right across from the station.
From there we could observe every movement. The Major returned and told us he was the Chief of the Municipality, and that it we continued there he would have to send the “forces of order” to remove us. We were already over thirty people demanding the release of our brothers. The writer Orlando Luis Pardo had come, with his girlfriend and another girl.
We told the official they we felt for him for all that he’d gone through, given that he had been patient and at all times, had turned to us with respect, but we urged him to keep his word. Reinaldo Escobar told him to put himself in our position, would he be able to abandon a comrade in these circumstances, and we didn’t even know under what condition Antonio was in, if he was beaten.
The officer tried to deny our suspicions, saying they didn’t hit him, but when we showed the wounds that had some had recently received from the repressive forces, among the other detainees Ailer, who had just joined us, the soldier chose to remain silent and, nevertheless, seemed to understand, or maybe it was our decency and sympathetic stance. Finally we told him that if he felt that he should pressure us, we were determined to accompany Antonio in the cell. They we had no objection to his doing his duty.
Then he left and never came back. After a while they released Aleaga and we applauded as he walked out in front of all their captors. But if they thought we would settle for one of two taken, they were wrong; they were left waiting to see what we would do and when they saw we would continue stationed there, they formed the idea to devise other action against us.
Half an hour later a truck of the Special Branch appeared, full of guards. Also two ambulances arrived. In one corner State Security agents in plain clothes began to meet. Ailer saw one of the ones who had beaten her and took advantage of it to tell her abusers to their faces that one day they would have to pay for such abuses. The men did not answer. They turned away and we saw them climb the stairs to shelter in the police station.
Someone phoned to say that Fariñas had been taken to his province in a police car. Soon we were approached by a “security”: a black guy six feet tall who, in order to provoke us, stationed himself very close to us. But his presumed bravery was just a show for his comrades who were watching, because Reinaldo Escobar also went to meet him, and when he passed behind him, I saw the “security’s” cowardly eyes, his six-foot body shrank, he turned to follow Reinaldo with his eyes as if he was afraid of being attacked, something Reinaldo would never do, quite the contrary, because what he did was fake a call for him to overhear, as if he were telling someone that everything was fine.
After that the provocateur also pulled out his phone and informed us we were clowns. I took mine and he heard me and I said there were no problems, that the provocation was sheer monkey business. Then the black guy quickly left, frustrated at not having received the order to beat us and take us by force, which is what he wanted.
After one o’clock in the morning, Vallín and Reinaldo spoke to the Colonel, who said he was the Head of the Station. Vallín said he had twenty-four hours to make the decision to charge the person or not, and to define the offense for which he’d be tried. The official acknowledged that was true, by law, and confirmed that ten o’clock marked the term, and then he would report back what they would do in that case, which they were now studying the decision to make. Vallín and Reinaldo made it clear that it was an agreement, and the Colonel agreed.
The elderly parents of Antonio said as long as we were there they would not leave. Then we got them to agree to let us take them home and come back and meet at ten o’clock. The couple agreed. And so we all went.
At ten o’clock the future of Antonio was decided
When I reached the police station with the attorney Vallín, already there were Antonio’s parents, his partner and some other opponents. Forced to sit in the sun on the sidewalk in front of the station, they would not let us approach, in fact no pedestrians could pass through the place. The whole street was blocked by police cars and policemen. We had to wait twenty yards from the station.
When Yoani and Reinaldo arrived, they hurried their steps to join Antonio’s parents, and police tried to stop them, but they, like experienced athletes of the opposition, managed to dodge them and sit on the wall where the elderly parents were. A police captain said they could not stay there, and Yoani and Reinaldo told them about laws and rights and the police were astonished.
All they could do was exert force, but their order was to avoid confrontation at all times. They were very close to the fateful date of celebration for the defeat of the 26th of July, and they didn’t want to tarnish it, it was bad enough with the mysterious death of Oswaldo Payá.
Immediately the Colonel came out, it was 10:10 in the morning and he should comply with the agreement. He spoke with the parents and then with Vallín, the decision was he would be released, and then we saw Antonio could out in a patrol car and greet us. The Colonel said that the prisoner would be brought to his house.
When we got to Antonio’s house he already was there and told us the abuses they committed, all the horror that his oppressors made him suffer to force him to give up; we saw his ripped clothes ragged, the bruises and scratches on his body.
We all returned to our homes knowing that Antonio, Ailer, Aleaga, Fariñas and the rest of the group were already in theirs, wanting rest, until a new warning alerts us that another injustice has been committed, and we have to once again be present for the freedom of Cuba and our brothers.
Those hours helped us to push the wall of the dictatorship that oppresses us a few inches. We know that the worst part of this difficult struggle is yet to come, that to achieve democracy we will make many sacrifices. But the good thing is that these days we confirm that, despite all the repression of the Castro regime, we worthy Cubans are ready to give ourselves for the ideals that Oswaldo Payá died for.
A few years ago I accompanied a friend from the Basque Country to the home of Oswaldo Payá. I left him nearby so as not to call attention to ourselves, because Payá’s house was always under heavy surveillance. The Basque wanted to do an interview with him and had already arranged the appointment. It was to be two hours. We agreed I would collect him at the same place and take him directly to the airport.
When I returned the Basque was nowhere to be found. I waited half an hour. Then I began to worry. First for his person, and then for the departure of the plane and the loss of the ticket. When I’d waited an hour I began to ask where Payá’s house was. Finally I found the address and leaving the car two blocks away, I approached the house. It was close to ten at night. I knocked softly so as not to frighten him.
Payá was the one who opened the door, and after greeting him and understanding that he wasn’t afraid, I explained. He assured me the Basque had been there exactly two hours, and he had told him they would be waiting. He told me this had happened on several occasions, and later his visitors showed up at Villa Marista (headquarters of Cuban State Security). He confessed he was getting worried, and gave me his phone number to let him know as soon as I had any news of the whereabouts of the Basque.
I returned to the agreed upon corner. My friend had not arrived. It was the corner of the Children’s Hospital at the Calzada of Cerro. The words were: “I will pick you up at the corner by the hospital.” I began to calculate that the hospital had four corners, and that I should make a circuit to assure myself that he wasn’t somewhere else. When I went to the back of the hospital, right in the middle of the block, at the entrance to the Emergency Room, there on the bench the Basque was seated, legs together.
The image reminded me of my son when I would go to get him at daycare: He opened his arms and gave me a smile of total happiness. He was all nerves and told me that his legs had given out and that the light from the Emergency Room offered him a perfect hideout. He was determined to die sitting there if I didn’t appear, he told me, and we laughed.
Then he was silent for a while. Only by listening to the simple testimony of a what one person had suffered, could we be made to believe all the horror that a totalitarian government is capable of inflicting on an entire people.
We raced to the airport. Remembering Payá, I called him on the phone. He was still awake, waiting for the news. The man is safe, I said, he’s already on the plane. Thank God, Payá responded. He thanked me for the call and after he hung up I wondered how a man who had suffered so much, who had been harassed and abused on so many occasions, including depriving him of his freedom, could still have so much love to give, even to strangers.
Then I knew it was his faith: it was always his shield and his protection.
Oswaldo Payá has died and left us, this man who with his “Varela Project” taught my generation and Cuba that freedom is possible. We were very young then and our idea was to shout liberty through literary works, which, from our naivete, we thought was the most direct path to democracy, and that this was the only possible weapon with which to fight.
We have just left the parish where we were offering a last farewell to the body that accompanied him — because his spirit, as we all know, has remained with the Cuban people: his great love. We began to shout “Payá vive!” Payá lives. Our hands hurt from clapping while his coffin was carried from the entrance to the altar.
The priest had to intervene to stop this show of grief and admiration that seemed, and is, interminable. Finally he was able to start the ceremony.
As happens, the image that came to my mind was that of the Father of the Nation: Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who suffered his dying moments similarly, the final minutes in San Lorenzo and that sad and solitary road on the outskirts of Bayamo. And to make matters worse, the mysterious vagaries of the convergence not only in their ideals but in geographic space.
When the service ended we once again began to shout: Freedom, Freedom, Freedom…
His wife, devastated, went to the microphone and asked for silence as they wished to pray. Then we started to pass by the coffin. One of the first who reached it was Monseñor Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. When I was able to approach the coffin I could see, in Payá’s face, the blows he suffered in the fatal fall, and also the permanent light shining in his image that will accompany him always.
At 8:00 pm we participated in the funeral. Tomorrow* at 8:00 in the morning Cardinal Jaime Ortega will offer mass. Then, it’s said, one of the two survivors will give a press conference to describe what happened. Then we will know the truth.Until then we only have suspicions and conjectures.
And anger which, hopefully, we know how to use to our advantage.
Ángel Santiesteben-Prats.
*Translator’s note: This article was just posted, but the “tomorrow” that Ángel refers to is today.
HAVANA, Cuba, June, www.cubanet.org – In the ’90s, the generation of the Novísimos (the Newest) brought to Cuban literature themes and narrative forms that marked a certain rupture with the previous generations. Angel Santiesteban, born in 1966, became one of the most emblematic creators of this time, not only for the prizes he won, but also for the acceptance he achieved with readers. The son of a businessman and a nurse in Cienfuegos, Santiesteban studied in the “Camilitos” when he decided to begin a career as Commander of Tactical Troops.
But, according to the story, “God took me violently from this path sending me to prison for having accompanied my brothers to the coast in 1984, when they left the country. I was in prison for 14 months in La Cabaña, accused of conspiracy, although I was absolved at the trial because this crime doesn’t exist among brothers. But I know that God sent me there for a reason, and I thank Him, because it made me grow up and understand the pain of people. It was there that I discovered I wanted to be a writer, that it was through writing that I could give a voice to those who suffered.”
He then started going to night school at the Faculty of Letters, but, needing money for his family, he went to work as an assistant director at ICRT (Cuban Radio and Television Institute), at the time he was completing his studies as a film director at ICAIC (Cuban Institute on Cinematographic Arts and Industry). However, the urge to write imposed itself, and he abandoned his work to dedicate himself to writing.
To his surprise, in 1989 he received an honorable mention with his third short story in the French Juan Rulfo contest. In 1990 he won the national literary workshop prize with his story, “South: Latitude 3″ and later, in 1992, he sent a book with the same title to the Casa de Las Americas contest, which he won, but immediately the political police prohibited the jury from awarding him the prize.
“In 1995,” Santiesteban said, “I submitted the same book under another title, “Dream of a Summer Day,” which, in spite of winning the UNEAC (The Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba) prize, came out three years later with the condition that I take out five stories.” In 2001 he won the Alejo Carpentier short story prize with “The Children Nobody Wanted,” and in 2006, the Casa de Las Americas prize with “Blessed are Those Who Mourn.”
CUBANET: From your first publications it was evident that your subject matter was raw, modern and controversial, and besides the reader could think that you were relating personal experiences. Why did you choose these themes?
ANGEL SANTIESTEBAN: I experienced a raw reality and my writing started to be raw. For example, the theme of Angola. As I came from a military world and aspired to be a soldier, I discovered that many feelings of the internationalist soldier coincided with those of the prisoners I knew in La Cabaña: They were far from home, their family and their environment; they were under pressure; they had profound sexual desires; they committed acts of indiscipline; they were given orders by the Army; they had to keep rigorous schedules. So behind this internationalist soldier that I describe is my experience as a prisoner.
Occasionally some veteran of these wars asks me if I was in Angola, but I tell them that I was a prisoner and that I know these feelings. In addition, I have a brother who lived that experience. Before going he was the most rational person in the family, and he always gave good advice. When he returned he was the crazy person in the family.
I never planned to write this kind of story, but it emerged from my experience. It never occurred to me to write against the system. One time a writer I respected told me my writing was unfair. In that moment I understood he was right, that it was unfair that I expose the ugly side of those men who had sacrificed so much. But later another writer told me something that helped me a lot: “Literature is not fair or unfair. It’s true or false. That’s what you should worry about.”
CN: Where do you feel most comfortable: in the short story, the novel, in your blog?
AS: I feel most comfortable with short stories. Although it seems weird to say, the truth is that when I feel like writing, a short story comes out. Then I only have to fix some words. I’m short-winded. Writing a novel requires tremendous work. I suffer a lot, I procrastinate, I don’t want to continue. Furthermore, I can’t sit still, and a novel requires me to be more stable, more concentrated, and I’m very unconcentrated. As for the blog, I’m afraid of losing the discipline because it’s like a more refined journalistic chronicle. I’m not a journalist; I’m a writer, but sometimes life takes you to unexpected places. All in all, I started to write to give a voice to those who don’t know how or can’t do it.
CN: Do you have favorite writers? Which ones have influenced your writing?
AS: I constantly read and re-read Hemingway, Rulfo, Isaac Babel, Dostoyevsky. They are the ones I follow and the ones who from the beginning brought me the most. Although I should also note that Kafka always was there, sleeping (of course, I’m preparing a book of short stories about the absurd). From Cuba, I should mention Eduardo Heras León, who was the closest thing to a maestro writer I had. And, well, the writing of Virgilio Piñera has always been fundamental for me.
CN: There’s no doubt that you were one of the most famous members of the Novísimos (the Newest). How do you see yourself with respect to your generation and, in general, with respect to present-day Cuban literature?
AS: I believe that the Novísimos were a kind of family. I don’t know if it was so important as a literary movement, but as a movement of brotherhood, yes, it was. We all took a lot of care of one another. Now we’re dispersed, which is like a puzzle that you can’t put back together. Inside Cuban literature I feel alone, separated, in internal exile. And from the time I started my blog, I was no longer tolerable. They chewed up my writing, but they didn’t swallow it, and with my blog they spat out everything I was thinking inside.
Iroel Sánchez, who was then the President of the Cuban Institute of the Book, was the Taliban who “executed” me, who ordered me to be taken out of any anthology, any presentation. And he had me by the balls. He had been in the war in Angola, and his buddies asked him how it was possible that he would agree to publish “The Children Nobody Wanted.” Also, the Association of Combatants sent him a letter complaining about the book. He told me things like, “Angel, aren’t you aware that you’re serving the enemy? Don’t you see that without wanting to you’re putting yourself in the service of the Yankees?”
CN: Do you think Cuban intellectuals are obligated ethically to be critical of the Regime?
AS: I believe they are obligated above all to follow their conscience. If you believe that you should defend Fidel Castro, defend him. If you have to defend the Revolution, defend it with your teeth. I don’t criticize that. What happens is that there is an amazing opportunism. In private there are those who are more against the Regime than I am. Extreme right. I have ended up feeling like a Leftist with these people. And later they do whatever they can to get a trip abroad. Their banner is opportunism, cynicism. They’re capable of saying in public that Cuba is the best, and later, in private and under their breath, they tell you that Fidel Castro should hurry up and die.
CN: You have lived through almost unbelievable experiences — detentions, beatings, a shooting, very grave accusations, harassment, persecution, surveillance, without, properly speaking, being a dissident or an active opponent. To what do you attribute this obstinacy on the part of the political police?
AS: I don’t even know how many political parties there are in Cuba. I don’t belong to any. I don’t go to any political meetings. I fight for the dreams of Cubans who want to live with dignity, in a democracy. This country cannot endure any more caudillismo.
CN: You reported that once an old man asked you if you thought civilization existed outside this island and then confessed to you that he was tired of throwing bottles into the sea. Do you think that once you could have said the same thing?
AS: I think Cubans who leave are the first to ignore these bottles. A large number of Cubans leave and begin buying and living what they couldn’t have before, disentangling themselves from the reality they left behind. Many say they are economic immigrants as if this didn’t make them political immigrants.
If you leave for economic reasons it’s because your country has a bad economic administration. Furthermore, it’s terrible to know that you don’t have a way back. Sometimes I wonder how many bottles have to be launched and if they will continue being thrown into the water if many of the Cubans who leave don’t even look at them. However, Facebook is for me a tremendous thing, something that almost surpasses a blog, because it’s more alive, quicker.
CN: This year is the official celebration of the centennial of the birth of Virgilio Piñera. What do you think is being done to honor him?
AS: Virgilio Piñera merits a major homage. That a man like him has passed through this island should be for us a reason for perpetual pride. The terrible thing is that those who killed his spirit, who condemned him to fear, who did him so much harm, pretend now that they didn’t have any responsibility, that they acted without wanting to. His crime was being gay without being a revolutionary, and furthermore being a great writer. I’m happy that they published the most possible of his work. He deserves it, and Cubans deserve it also, especially the generations that don’t know him. But you can’t forget all the suffering they caused him. There is nothing that can erase that.
CN: How do you see the present situation in Cuba?
AS: There’s an impasse. The rhythm we had has slowed down. I think that’s the result of the Pope’s visit. I feel that nothing is happening, that we’re lost. I don’t see an immediate way out of our situation.
CN: Why did you run in the last marathon in Havana with the image of Laura Pollán on your chest?
AS: I ran several years in the Marabana, but this time I felt very hurt by her death, for having lost her as a leader. I thought that Laura was going to be the person who would topple the government, because of her vigor, her vitality, her courage that few are capable of. Perhaps she was God. Others say that they took her out. In any event we Cubans owe her for everything she did for us, and the least I could do was to wear her image on my chest so that people who don’t know her would ask who she was. It was my way of demonstrating to her, in Heaven or wherever she is, my gratitude for what she did, and to tell her that her sacrifice was not in vain.
CN: Why do you continue living in this country when you probably could have a quieter life outside?
AS: Someone once commented in my blog that surely I was one of those who has enough pull to go to the United States. However, I’ve traveled to the United States several times and never stayed. Precisely, they have not let me leave the country since I started the blog. I’ve had to post a bond for three years because of the stupid denouncements against me.
On the other hand, leaving would be like surrendering. I believe that where you contribute, the more you are there. You can also contribute from abroad, but here you can contribute more directly. What I fear is to wear myself out in vain, now that I have sacrificed my writing. It’s been eight months without writing and that hurts me in my soul, because that’s the only justification I have for living.
CN: How would you describe your life in this precise moment?
AS: Right now I don’t know what’s going to happen with me or what I have to do. I don’t represent anything in the cultural world, which makes me feel very proud. I don’t want to interfere with them in anything, although I can’t return to publishing in Cuba.
Luckily, this month an anthology of my stories is coming out in France. I also have published another anthology in Spain, Italy and Miami. There are professors and foreign academics who contact me because my writing interests them.
As for the accusations against me, everything continues being very murky. I was with my lawyer at the public prosecutor’s office, and they told us that the file had been sent to the State District Attorney’s office. We went there, and they didn’t have it either, and finally they told us that a lieutenant colonel of Villa Marista had taken it. When we went there, they informed us that it wasn’t there either, that they didn’t know anything about it. Finally, we couldn’t learn where we could find the file.
At least they had seen that they couldn’t shut me up. Since the time I began my blog, my life has changed completely, but I can tell you that If I had known from the beginning everything that I would go through, I would have done the same thing anyway, because now I feel freer in my conscience. When my last moment arrives, I’m going to feel happy because I did it. To have renounced the pleasures that they offered me to satisfy my conscience, for assuming my civic life, it was something I had to do. To not do it would have sickened me with disgust for myself, and then it would be better to be dead.
In a recent column I published an anecdote with which I’m sure you agree: our meeting in 2004, by chance, on the corner of Palacio de los Matrimonios in Vedado, after months without seeing each other, in which, very concerned about the political and cultural pressures you were under, you told me, “You’re wrong, brother, this isn’t the way. Your way and mine is to write. They have to respect us for what we write. And besides, let the politicos take charge.”
My wife, Berta, who was there, reminded me a little later, whispering, after hearing your words: “What’s happening to Angel is that he still hasn’t been shocked like you”. But I knew by our conversations that already you were disillusioned by everything you saw, the censorship, the lack of liberties, the fact that most of our group had been forced to emigrate.
But I’d like you to tell me, how did that change happen to convince you that there was a need for your voice as a social individual to be heard, as well as your writing, and when did you decide to definitively jump into the search for liberty that had been taken from us and that they’re still trying to take away from many writers in Cuba?
It was forced on me. Now I would like to tell you it’s the same, but the reality is different. First we had to prove ourselves as writers, maybe that was the idea, for them it was easier to leave us “outside the game” taking advantage of the fact that we didn’t have a tangible presence in Cuban culture. Formerly you had to earn that place, that right that literature itself grants you. So we were educated to be teachers.
Heras always told us that there was a moment where the pupil killed the Teacher. I never understood him. He said it about the literary plane and he expressed it with sadness, because at the same time he accepted that it was a part of the natural process of the ascent of the writer. I never saw that moment arrive. I always accepted him as the Teacher. But I experienced that death in part, let’s say, as a citizen, because of deviations from the social and political point of view. There I killed the Teacher. And the Teacher killed the pupil. It was an assassination on both sides, something for which I was not prepared.
In any event I jealously keep a dedication that he wrote to me a few years ago, where he assured me of his admiration, because I’ve been upright in my position, in my honesty, and I never wavered in spite of official inducements.
My need to express myself, to communicate, to say what was inside me and which I also think is an essential part of being a writer, was an unconscious motivation, like the act of writing. I never intended to be a writer, it was a bitter and necessary need that quietly arose. Perhaps it pushed me to be a communicator of my circumstances. That also happened unexpectedly. Many times I said I would be happy if I could find a little corner on the last page of any periodical where I could express my point of view, however mistaken, superficial, personal, but definitively my way of seeing life, opinions I would assume in the face of history with all the responsibility that goes along with that. Then on a trip to the Dominican Republic, certainly my last trip outside Cuba, I learned from a Cuban writer friend, Camilo Venegas, and Zilma, his ex-wife, that something called a “blog” existed. That word meant nothing to me. And they taught me what it was and it seemed to me a great invention of the 21st century. And I could read for the first time the posts of Yoani Sanchez.
I went back to Cuba wanting to have a blog, but at the same time I wasn’t naive, I knew every thing that it would open up and bring about. I had several months of conflict and internal struggle. Finally I decided to do it. And I called the Book Institute and spoke with the President, Iroel Sanchez. I told him what I intended to do, and I asked him for a national space in order to anchor myself, I was thinking Cubaliteraria. After asking me what the subject matter was, I told him that I would take a cultural and social view, something different from the usual, with the intent of driving debate and prompting opinions. He told me that he didn’t have the famous “band width” (the title of an unpublished book I have written).
Then Cubaencuentro offered me the chance to be included with them and without asking me what my blog would be about. It was the first big find. They still support my statements and writings. To appear blatantly in the Cubaencuentro magazine was unacceptable impudence for the establishment.
I remember everything they did to Antonio Jose Ponte for having been part of the editorial staff of this magazine. In one of my first posts I referred to a delegation of writers that attended a book fair in Mexico, and I talked about their having to beg for funds. That image stayed with me.
When I attended an event in Martinica with a poet who won the National Literature award, I saw him asking for pocket money and saying that we Cubans were poor and they should help us. I remember that I fled from his side. It was obvious that this poet was used to these denigrating scenes. Before leaving I warned the organizers that he was speaking on his own behalf.
I remember writers who traveled to the same Guadalajara Fair, who at the end of their days of participation, had to stay wherever someone offered because otherwise they would be out on the street. I also remember the Cuban ambassador in the Dominican Republic fleeing, aghast, from the airport because he might have to take charge of two young writers whom the organizers hadn’t gone to pick up. And a lot of other things that people talked about.
Then, when I wrote the post, it caused a scandal. They branded me as a traitor. And even those writers in the delegation, knowing I told the truth, asked me why I wasn’t afraid that the possibility of traveling outside the country would be taken away with me, although they were among the ranks of the poor.
But that rejection was a promotion. You remember that they intercepted me in plain view of the public and beat me. They fractured my arm, after warning me that “being counter-revolutionary didn’t suit” me. The latest was that petition from 15 years ago that now joined another accusation of assault.
In summarizing all these stories, they haven’t left me any other choice but to take my time with all the force and energy of my soul.
Amir, you always were precocious; in literature and politics you had more clarity than the rest. You always came in first. And that expression of mine at the time was a strategy andeventually a naivety on my part. But I’m happy that things happen, at least in my case, through my own need. That they’re natural, not provoked or hurried, least of all thought out.
And here you see me, assuming responsibility for my acts and their consequences.
One of the methods of the dictatorship that exists today in Cuba has been to introduce the virus of fear in all citizens, whatever position they’re in, whatever their origin or training, whether they live on the island or in exile. Recently in an open letter you wrote that now it didn’t matter to you to go to jail for your ideas, to die. I know, because I had to live this also in 2001, which is a hard, difficult process, but how was it in your case?
It’s been two years of waiting. Everything started like a game. I start and you continue. I resisted it for two years. Continued detentions, acts of repudiation, scorn. I continued with the game because it embarrassed me, although my conscience was clear, from those shameful accusations that still weigh on me to write them here. But the game turned serious. They started to give a serious character to the case file, an instrument of the system, and Captain Amauri Guerra Toyo, with the dirtiest violations, has created a file without proof, from top to bottom, in conspiracy with State Security and the public prosecutor’s office, where they managed to forge my signature, to change documents that my lawyer and I had seen before.
Finally, in the presence of my attorney, I signed a document and made marks with the ball point pen so they couldn’t add other words that would incriminate me, and even so, after the period I put and on top of the marks that I demanded they make, this man added a comma and a sentence that I didn’t say, according to the testimony of my lawyer. The whole file is very ambiguous, as is the Prosecutor’s petition that plays with what they don’t have or don’t know, and only a third of it is readable.
My position is to be conscious and honest, so I can continue to live. There is no way of making me change my ideas or of stopping me from making my present situation better. There is only one way out of the quagmire, and it’s that the Counter-Intelligence officials accept that they should drop the judicial proceedings. And as we know, although times are different, they don’t want to lose, above all because they fear that later other intellectuals will try the same thing. They don’t want to permit this precedent, and they will try any way they can to make an example of me.
Finally, as I put in my open letter, I’m prepared for the worst. In that case, I will resist by conviction and innocence, even go on a hunger strike.
Tell me how you yourself see something that is very delicate but very important to understand: What is happening today with Cuban writers? Is there a difference between what they think privately and what they say in public? Is it true, as Barnet and Abel Prieto say, that the immense majority of artists and writers are on the side of Fidel, Raul and the Revolution?
For me, perhaps more than anyone, writers have given me proof of their real position on the system. Sometimes, when I listen to them, they make me feel closer to the politics of the system than they are. They have two speeches, the official and the critical, which they hide from the officials. Because they want to travel, as I said before, like poor people, but they can travel, because they resolve something, besides breathing free air. But I don’t believe most of them are honest. They pretend to be “traveling companions”, it’s a cynical status that both sides accept, and they use it and take advantage of it with the goal of remaining human for some and being part of the social system for others.
Writers wave the famous little flag, at times faster than others, according to the free gifts offered, and they silence their true feelings about the system. In this way they invent the history that infallibly garners hypocrisy for each one of them.
What about the powerful Cuban culture that has been created these past five decades in exile, in many parts of the world? How do you believe it can contribute, from outside Cuba, to the need for social change on the island?
Without trying to be an analyst, a political strategist, a philosopher or a demiurge, and someone taught me to avoid subjects I know nothing about, but it’s my opinion, more as an artist who humbly offers his point of view, I am of the opinion that the intellectuals in exile should remain very attached to Cuban culture, to defend it first as art and later from their own political position. They shouldn’t forget anything, first the culture, then everything else.
I’m sure that this artistic pressure will create conscience and respect for a national dialogue that will produce a political change for the rebirth of democracy and free will for Cubans, although some of them, as usually happens, will find themselves in the minority. The sentence I like so much and that surely I don’t quote exactly because I have repeated it so much I have it inside me and have made it mine: I will die for your right to think differently from me. Therefore, continue to take advantage of the space that freedom gives you and its methods of communication with advanced technology, and you can’t be persecuted or suffer direct repression like the confiscation of computers.
In some way, creating a space for national complaints will be the voice for those who are on the island. Refining esthetic rifts, attitudes of personal convenience, in order to advance unity. The strengthening of the diaspora offers us who remain here security, we who directly demand the rights of all to live together in a future free and democratic land that opens its arms for the longed-for reunion of its children who are now dispersed throughout the world.
So yes, I don’t have any doubts that Cuban intellectuals, inside and outside, are called on to contribute profoundly to a future political transition in the country.
So much emotional disequilibrium, so much psychological pressure, so much direct repression against you, so much responsibility for your blog, “The Children Nobody Wanted,” do they allow you to write? And if so, what could we offer that is new to a writer interested in your books?
Writing is an escape; it’s a space of sanity that protects you, when it should be the opposite, since being creative is the closest thing to being demented. But reality, as has been said so many times, surpasses fiction. And that’s true. On the outside everyone seems crazy to me. They know what they are looking for but even so, they walk in other directions. People I respect and with whom I agree on the facts.
In spite of everything, I try to write. I have several unpublished books, around 10, that are waiting for their moment patiently. I’ve never been in a hurry to publish, because writing them takes away that distress of residing on the cultural plane of the country. I know that they are there; I sense that they are of an acceptable quality, strange and moderately original, as far as subject matter and form, and that gives me peace. It hurts to write from your conscience because it’s not for your time, so it can be for a future in which you won’t even be present. But it’s not important; it’s a way of discharging a debt from your time and leaving a mark.
An obvious question comes up now about an old polemic, which started when Sartre and Camus discussed the role of the writer in society. Specifically in the case of Cuba, with its singular circumstances and from your personal experience of the last years, what should the responsibility of a writer be in regard to his society, his country?
My responsibility is to assume my conscience and feelings honestly and carry this over to my acts and position in life, whatever bitterness and harm follows. In my case it means fulfilling this need to communicate, to state my opinion and that of those who don’t find the way or the form of expressing themselves.
I try to be a voice for my people, who always will be those who suffer the most, the innocent ones. I know that confronting the system carries a high price, but I don’t have a choice. I always wonder what the formula is for shutting up, to think one way and speak publicly with another. How can you accept gifts at the price of seeing your country under a dictatorship, its people in poverty, and remain silent? How can history ignore that you are a hypocrite, an ally of a manipulative system that in more than 50 years knew only how to censor, muzzle personal opinion and fill us with a degrading sacrifice, full of sadness and ravenous hunger?
To be direct, the responsibility of Cuban writers, more than ever, is to protest, to make their disagreements public. To insist on their rights as independent artists and accept the consequences. It is the artists’ responsibility to be the echo of their time, their people and their conscience. And they will then be doing enough to say they follow in the footsteps of Marti.
Translated by Regina Anavy, AnonyGY,Rafael Gomez, and William Fitzhugh
There are five moments in your literary career that I want you to talk about, trying to salvage the most important details, those details of each success that would mold you into being the writer you are now, or those other moments that made you open your eyes to the harsh reality that you are experiencing today.
A. Honorable mention for the Juan Rolfo International Short Story Prize, in 1989
A surprise. I considered myself, more than now, an experimental writer, not an accomplished one. I only entered the contest hoping to receive an opinion from a foreign jury. I wanted to know if my writing worked outside Cuba. If it would be interesting or boring, with a regional theme. It was the first time that established writers heard my name. In a certain way, I put myself on the map of the “newbies”.
B. The two times they took away your Casa de las Americas award.
Very sad, not just for me but also for the position they put the jurors in. The book’s subject was the war in Angola, where we remained for 15 years and where many lives were lost by Cubans who never understood why the hell we were there. The book was not an epic, as this war was usually treated. I was only interested in the human side, the men who were immersed in a foreign war.
I’ll never forget the face of Abilio Estevez giving me the unexplainable dissertation about the book, and that you later would write that the worst book of all won the Casa de las Americas prize that year. Abilio said that in the hotel when they were reading the works, they paged him on the PA system to come to the room. When he arrived, Security was waiting, and they told him that no one wanted to give this book an award.
They did the same thing with the Argentinian juror, Luisa Valenzuela, who later wanted to take me with her to her country because I was the same age as her daughter, and with this fact I understood how difficult it would be for me to rise in the literary world under the Regime. This was in 1992. Since then I’ve been reluctant to leave the country, and I told her I was grateful, but only God knew why I had been born here and that I wanted to stay. She never agreed, I imagine, and when the Alejo Carpentier prize was launched, I did everything possible so she could get an invitation to Cuba and be present.
Later in 1994 something similar happened, but this time State Security was more careful and tried, without success, to infiltrate the jurors. But the books survived the Tyranny and its Totalitarian Leaders. Censorship has never been able to stifle art. Once a writer told me that my book was unfair to those who had been in this war. And when I told Heras those words he told me that books weren’t fair or unfair, they were only good or bad, speaking from a literary point of view.
C. The 1995 UNEAC short story prize for Dream of a Summer Day and the publication of the book, with the censorship included, in 1998
Books catch on when one more person needs them, they are like life jackets. And this award finally gave me the possibility to be a published writer, because they knew me in the cultural milieu, but I didn’t have a book, which is definitely the calling card of a writer. It was also the genre of the short story, which is the most coveted genre in Cuba, above all for our generation. But the book was the same one that had been censored, anticipating that State Security would come back to spoil the award for me.
I changed the title (Dream of a Summer Day) and it passed through the filters and won. When they saw this book was going to be published, and that it talked about the human part, man immersed in that war, the contradictions, then the book started an emotional discussion. The book floored them. It went from one bureau to another. Occasionally they called me in to talk about my negativity in publishing it before they were able to edit it. And again I assumed the silence of Gandhi, but with the variant that I didn’t want a political scandal, what I wanted was literary. To be part of cultural news.
They even decided to call me to negotiate. They spoke to me openly, there were several stories that couldn’t see public light, above all the story The Forgotten, “It wouldn’t be published in 25 years”, the functionary told me (I managed to publish it in 2001 in the book The Children Nobody Wanted, which won the Alejo Carpentier prize).
As I told you before, I urgently needed to present a book, but I hurt myself with this book, because I accepted that it would be published without those stories. This was a betrayal, the worst of all, a betrayal of myself. But the need to publish was joined with another unexpected one: A woman was expecting my child and I didn’t have a place to live. They offered me an apartment. I thought about it a bit. I immediately saw the possibility of giving the woman and my child some stability in the next few months.
I also thought that any publisher would have the right to read the book and determine what to publish, and that the functionary was finally giving me the possibility of having a book published. And in exchange for the unpublished stories they were giving me an apartment. I felt like I was bargaining in a market in Baghdad, and at any rate, man is and always will be “a part of his circumstances”. I accepted. The book came out in the 1998 Book Fair, with a dark cover. They did it on purpose, so it looked less like a book and more like a box of detergent. Thus I achieved my goal of presenting myself to readers, and incidentally my first child was born in a dignified place.
D. The 2001 Alejo Carpentier Prize for The Children Nobody Wanted
This book has all my censored stories. That’s why I gave it this title. Furthermore, the story with the same name is included, and I felt that those scorned, censored stories were like the young people who escaped on rafts from the island. I found a similarity in both cases.
The jury’s vote was divided, of course. They all knew what they were risking by giving me the prize. The two votes in my favor were from Arzola (he had won the prize the previous year), and what decided him was a telephone call from the office of the then-President of the Cuban Book Institute, the “Taliban” Iroel Sanchez, who, as you know, is a new version of that person named Pavon who harmed Cuban culture so much.
They told me that Iroel opened his eyes as if praying to his gods, I imagined Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Marx and Engels, and his adored Fidel Castro, for whom he felt an almost homosexual love.
But coming back to the jury, Arzola left Cuba a little time after the award, but the other juror was none other than Eduardo Heras Leon. And certainly I entered the competition even when I didn’t know who the jurors were going to be, because if I had known he was there I wouldn’t have entered since that added fuel to rumors about our friendship later. And Heras, at least until 2009 when he lost his path, hadn’t been invited to any other competition than the one convened by the Book Institute.
That was the punishment that Iroel imposed on him, who told me that the Association of Cuban Combatants had complained in a letter, demanding an explanation for the publication of the book, and on a more personal plane, he commented that his buddies who were in Angola with him criticized him for publishing such a ruthless vision of war under his position as President of the Book Institute.
I asked him if the book told lies. “That’s the problem,” he answered. “We know it was like that and worse. But Angel is the enemy who takes advantage of our weaknesses to attack us. We can’t give him the pretext.”
Later it was funny. They took me to the Book Fair in Guadalajara, as every year they did with the Carpentier award winners. And they coordinated various presentations in universities, and in charge of this were some Mexicans from a Committee of Solidarity with Cuba. When the students asked about human rights in Cuba, my companions answered trying to discredit the dissident groups and calling them”factions”, a word coined by Fidel Castro, which everyone repeated later. That bothered me so much I took the word and said that 100, 50, 10, five or one, we had the same rights to think and choose as the other millions of Cubans. And the students and cluster of professors stood up and applauded me.
Upon my return, the organizers spoke with Iroel so they could exchange me for another writer, because I wasn’t giving them the right result. That made me laugh. And they exchanged me, of course, in the way that is typical of socialism. No one says anything to you, but everyone shuns you as if you had the plague. And later I saw several times that people I knew on the bus wouldn’t greet me. Of course, I took this on myself and didn’t mind.
In the official presentation of the book at the fair, all the functionaries of Cuba were there. At my side was Jaime Sarusky, who that year had won in the novel genre. And while I was talking, I saw how his hands were sweating. I’ve never seen anyone sweat so much. Drops were falling on the paper he later would hold to read and I started to worry that it would get smudged.
I was saying, in answer to some question from the public, that I wasn’t trying to bother anyone, but yes, being honest, above all with myself, that I identified with that sector of young Cubans who didn’t find any common ground between the Revolution and our generation. That the Revolution was something from the past with which we didn’t feel a connection. And I finished by saying that the majority of young people I knew were of the same opinion.
The functionaries remained stoic. They put up with it, but many years later, Iroel reminded me of it as a disagreeable moment in his life. For my acts of honesty I always was punished. In Manzanillo I knew that they had received calls and emails from the Book Institute, from the writer Fernando Leon Jacomino, who at that time was Vice President, criticizing them for inviting me and suggesting that they substitute the writer Rogelio Riveron for me.
On another occasion they called me to make me President of the Wichy Nogueras prize, and later they didn’t advise me of the countermand. And when I arrived at the Capitolio, to know the results, they told me I no longer was part of the jury. Or what happened in the last Book Fair in which I participated: I was in the Moron Hotel and Security asked to have me removed from my room. That night I slept at the home of our taxi driver.
Now I am a phantom writer.
E. The 2006 Casa de las Americas prize for Blessed are Those Who Mourn, the hardest and most critical of your books
It’s because the book touches the knottiest fiber of human beings: prison, the prisoner immersed in the most profoundly undesirable condition for survival. I could finally use all those experiences that I lived through in La Cabana. Some friends begged me, I think with the best intention, to not do it. They didn’t want to see me harmed, banished, as they had been in the Five-Year Gray Period, I shouldn’t write it since it wouldn’t be published. And the book contains only 20 percent of that repulsive reality. Now I’m writing a novel that frightens me because I’m releasing what I’ve kept inside. I want to be empty, to not return to this subject. To get it out. Because when I write, I hurt, I rip myself up in a way that makes me feel that everything is happening again.
The book, in one of those ironies in life, was presented at the Book Fair in the Cabana. It took place in one of those cell blocks in which I was incarcerated. While the others were expressing their impression of the book, I in my imagination was walking with the prisoners from one side to the other. I had gone back in time, and the people interested in Culture were substitutes for those who had struggled to survive physically and morally, who served as characters, so that my suffering and anguish would not be in vain. That was my way of paying homage to them, offering them my gratitude in spite of their being the same people who enthusiastically had rejected the gesture by not being part of that reality that so marked us.
For having shared the experience, the book is dedicated to Jose Marti, who really is the perennial convict blessed with Cuban goodness.
Translated by Regina Anavy, AnonyGY, Rafael Gomez, and William Fitzhugh
There was a definitive moment for your career as a writer that I believe is worth remembering, even when I know that it can be a difficult question: your meeting with the writer Eduardo Heras Leon. Leaving aside the possible differences that you could have had from the clear ideological differences between Eduardo and us, how did that meeting nourish you spiritually and intellectually and give you that brotherhood over the years, which is known by our whole generation as an example of loyalty and sharing for many of those kids we called “the group of the Chinese guy, Heras”?
When I got out of prison, like I said before, for going with my sister to the beach, and when I was acquitted in court (the judges considered that I had not committed the crime of “conspiracy,” because I was her brother, and the only interest I had was to protect her, but because of that I had been in prison for 14 months), I then had the illusion that I could be a writer; the idea of creating filled me with magic. I passed from being a king of my neighborhood to being a god of my creation.
Since I was a child, I had been attending painting classes at the Casa de la Cultura ,and when I inquired I was told that there was a House of Writers, which I joined immediately. Later, I learned through the newspaper about the anniversary celebration of the Cuban Book Institute and that entry was free. A group of friends, their girlfriends and I decided to attend. There I met Eduardo Heras, whom I immediately approached with the intention of asking him to read a hand-written version of a horrendous novel that was the beginning of later horrendous books I would write. Heras, with evasions and explanations of how his work kept his schedule very tight, since he was the Director of the section on narrative, did not guarantee that he could read it, but because at that time I had all the time in the world, I said I could wait. I started to feel the first symptoms of anxiety after three months. After six months, I was desperate for a critique of my “novel” because I felt that until I received his valuable feedback I shouldn’t continue, and, on the other hand, the pressure of being 20 years old, as if time was running out. To dedicate my life to literature, I needed to hear the sound of the starting gun.
After I showed up in his office several times, I wore him down and he promised to read it the next weekend. And I waited. The following Sunday he called me at my girlfriend’s house to ask me to visit him the next day.
When I arrived, he had the novel on his desk, which made me happy. After 20 minutes telling me that he had many other works to read and that the novel was not publishable, of course, that I needed to learn literary techniques — and it seemed to me reading between the lines that the idea of being a writer was unattainable — Heras paused silently and told me, “I assure you that I can tell after reading a text when someone is wasting their time….and in your case, reading some sentences, I can say that you have talent, and if you want to, you will be a writer and will be able to accomplish everything you want. It only depends on your instinct, your will, your persistence in reading. There you will find everything you are looking for and all you should learn”. He kept looking at me, perhaps he knew how to read my alarm, since I think I was more prepared for criticism than for acceptance. It thrilled me to assume that I could be a writer. At that time, it was a very large and distant word, and I assure you that in some respects it still is today.
So I started on my way, where each minute had the purpose of going beyond the most recent one. It was a war of internal progress, where his advice assisted me. He’s a professor without equal because he has that vocation. Eduardo Heras has had many jobs, the most incredible ones, but I’m sure that his vocation is teaching. Through him I also met you all, the brothers that life has gifted me, you who support me, my first critics and editors. I met you all in that seminar at the Alejo Carpentier Center in 1985. In that moment I was the happiest being in the universe, perhaps we all were. I remember that you taught me that it was poetry in prose that I wasn’t able to decipher, and you were so tactful with what you did with my story, South: Latitude 13. I remember even the sentence that you pointed out to me as an example, and I surprised myself by writing poetry without being aware of it.
At the 1985 Writers Conference, I was invited as an observer. Of course, I was still not considered a writer, I had just opened my eyes to the literary world. That was the day that I met them. Arzola was amazed by all the lights in the city, a far cry from the darkness of Sanguily, his birthplace. To another writer it seemed incredible that some glass doors opened by themselves solely by approaching them, and he looked everywhere for the man who must be pushing a button, or the surprise of seeing the stairs at the department store Variedades de Galeano go up by themselves. We were so innocent!
There was a story that happened there and that remained in my memory and it happened at the Hotel Lincoln. For the first time, I had heard about Rulfo, about Hemingway’s iceberg theory, and all the others. It turned out that at lunchtime, you all had told me that you always had room for guests and that I would be able to have lunch with you. I wanted to decline but you insisted and I, who was as fascinated by this group as was Arzola by the lights of the city, had discovered how I wanted to dedicate my life, and I was in such a hurry to learn more, in a hurry to write, to bring out a world that was beating within me, itching to escape, to be born. And when I seated myself at the table, a staff member of the Center, in spite of having seen me in the conferences and lectures, asked who I was and told me I should leave the room, and I left, ashamed.
In truth, I didn’t want to have lunch. What I wanted was to keep listening to you speak of literature, the profession, a fascinating, magical world that excited me, that wouldn’t even let me sleep. It was my last attempt to join the “generation of the brand new” as we would later call ourselves. Maybe this was my punishment for praying for this.
I left the restaurant in a hurry wanting to get the hell out of there, not so much offended as embarrassed for having taken a seat that didn’t belong to me, that I had not earned. When I was about a hundred meters from the hotel, I thought they were calling me and it was all of you following me: You were out in front, then came Arzola, Gume, Garrido, Guillermito Vidal, Marcos, Alfredo Galeano, Torralba, and Eduardo Herras. You had decided to leave with me in solidarity, and we continued discussing literature while we ate a pizza together right out there on Galeano Street.
That meant to me a love pact. Anything negative that happened or would happen in the future with the members of this group could not equal that gesture of yours to me.
And as if to prove that everyone is born assigned what he will always be, a few months ago my ex-lawyer for the trial where I must confront slanderous accusations designed to convince me to shut down my blog, asked me for a letter from the Union of Cuban Writers that would list my literary achievements. And though something told me not to do it, because of her insistence I called and was answered by the same officer that expelled me from the hotel table, something I forgave him for because I understood that as a government functionary, it was his responsibility to maintain control of the event.
But it turns out that when I asked him for the letter he was reluctant and asked me to call the next day, and when I did he told me they can only give me a letter confirming that I was a writer belonging to the Writers Association because this would be sufficient. And, when I asked him whether they could add that I’d won the UNEAC prize, he told me, “No, only that”, which after all made me laugh, because I found it so ridiculous and alienating that I felt embarrassment and shame for them, and I told him not to bother, that I could go forward without this letter.
I never called again. And to be honest, when on my birthday they sent me a bottle of wine, I remembered that letter between Dulce Maria Loynaz and the Spanish writer and journalist Santiago Castelo where he commented that Fidel Castro had sent him a box of chocolates, adding, “and they weren’t poisoned”. I can say the same.
My son’s name is Eduardo in honor of Heras, who is also his Godfather. I can assure you, and you know that no teacher equals him, and I can add that no Godfather does either.
There was a time when we would discuss politics often and one time, to preserve our friendship, we decided not to touch any political topics. And so from then on we didn’t.
What happens is that life constantly summons us down a set of paths and we’re forced to decide which to take. And so, our paths diverged. He chose to stay with that archaic system that he realized was statist but that he was determined to defend. As I said, at times I understand; I’ll never question him because it may be too late for him to give up his position, which would be a kind of self-betrayal, because recognizing that so much sacrifice was in vain would not be an easy matter. He sees Fidel Castro as the man by his side when he risked his life at the Bay of Pigs. And I respect that. Everyone has his past and his conscience.
So when I opened the blog, which I did in the Cubaencuentro space, he sent me a message from Canada where he told me I had betrayed him. Since then, I’ve not have any more contact with him. And I’ve respected that decision, it’s what he wants, and I’ll always be grateful to him and keep that gratitude.
But the present doesn’t erase the past, right?
I noticed your saying that you gave Heras “a horrendous novel”, it’s understood that this was because it was the first you wrote without any kind of literary tool, but later you repeated that “it marked the beginning of the horrendous books that followed”. Do you actually consider your writing horrendous? Why?
My writing is not for people to savor, to enjoy. Without proposing it, it surged up inside me. From the first time I read in public, a lot of people came up to me to let me know that they didn’t like my stories because my writing depressed them, made them anxious, frustrated; it made them suffer. And I loved it when they confessed that. I suffer a lot in the creative process, and it seems I managed to convey this. Readers complained about the distress that my writing caused them and said that some times they threw the book at the wall, but that later they picked it up to continue reading.
My writing is about the pain of our people, their frustration. It’s the voice of those who would like to read their own experiences and see them reflected in some way. So that their problems will interest others. I feel that this is like a mission for me.
In one of my essays from a couple of years ago, I said that in Cuba the limits of marginality had faded so much that social, spiritual and moral marginality were a phenomenon visible everywhere. In your case, because of your humble beginnings, as we have seen, you were obliged to coexist with the marginal world in Havana almost from the time you opened your eyes, and I remember one day we were talking and you told me, and I quote from memory, that this world was “as ruthless as it was human and beautiful.” In what sense do those influences of marginality determine the person you are, on one hand, and on the other, the writer you are?
The marginal know what they are and do not hide it, they accept and internalize it. They have no pretensions. Friendship for them is an Omerta-style code, and they would die for you without giving it a second thought. They have their marginal ethics, and betrayal is unforgivable, which for me means everything I am. I tell my friends they are free to be whatever they choose, even belonging to the Communist Party if they are honest and they own it, since most of them I know do it to gain position in the system, they are opportunists, but when you speak with them they make you feel that they are the ones who are dissidents.
My friends can be marginal, professors or illiterates, gay or asexual. They can come with a human head under their arm and I will always seek to protect them and make them aware of their mistake, but above all I will never abandon or judge them. I will be among the first to visit them in prison. I was taught in my neighborhood that friendship means never abandoning someone, especially in their worst moment.
In my neighborhood, I was accepted as something strange and endearing. They saw me create frightening characters with respect. They looked at me with the same tension with which a physicist builds an atomic bomb. In 1992, when I got my first computer, a monochrome 286, while I was writing, one of them approached me hesitantly to ask whether I questioned the computer about the topic I planned to write and then the computer wrote the stories itself. I thought it was wildly cool that this idea occurred to him. And I said that in some ways yes and in some ways no. And that made him happy, because I made myself tangible, diminishing the difference between us, and he accepted this answer radiantly.
I remember another anecdote about our unforgettable Professor Salvador Redonet that you and I still ponder. He was also living in a poor neighborhood and at the ground level there was a vacant lot. But when guys were playing dominoes and drinking, if they noticed the light in the professor’s room was still on while he was preparing some class for his university students or some anthology in which he almost always included us, luckily and to our credit, they, his neighbors, poorly educated, would ask each other to lower their voices because “the prof is studying”. The marginalizeddid not envy the success of others; on the contrary, they felt they were their guardians, protecting and respecting them.
In your work, as in all the work we do, there is a strong presence of sensuality and eroticism, although in your case, as I wrote on one occasion,there is a “heartbreaking sensuality, with an aggressively cruel eroticism, almost bestial”. I know that much of your vision on the subject originated many years ago, in that strange love-hate relationship, the rejection and admiration you felt for your father, a libertine, a man who was macho and promiscuous, as you told me in those early years, like most men of the hard times in which he lived. What do you think about this or other possible influences of those years on the writer who creates those sexually violent, almost fiendish worlds, where sex is part of the psychology that typifies many of your characters?
My father… from him I inherited the need for a constant feminine presence. Nothing has been more important to me nor makes me feel better than making women happy, especially my mate but generally all the women who surround me: family, friends and even those I don’t know.
But I saw in prison the side of sensuality that was heartbreaking, aggressive and cruel. There were men who bit into the wall because of so many repressed desires. Who got excited with their own odors, their sweat, their own caresses. They spent all day excited and even though they knew masturbating made it worse, only a moment of relief that was followed by a level of frustration and an uncontrollable rage, some got angry against everybody, with a visceral hatred towards life, which meant their lack of discipline could bring on punishment in horrendous and ruthless cells, or even worse, add years of prison time to their sentences.
Today many of those friends who by misfortune (for nostalgia) or luck (for many of us) are scattered around the world. I know that you nourished yourself a lot with certain works of our sisters and that many of these experiences were vital for the maturity of your work. When I mention that word and that time, what do you think about?
I remember that time shared with that magical group we formed. It’s incredible that with all the differences that we human beings had in that group there was never a rift. We read others’ work as if it were our own. There was never envy; on the contrary, we encouraged each other to compete and we were happy if someone won a prize, as if we all achieved it together.
We had Guilllermito Vidal who taught us about life experiences and literary resources. Gume Pacheco was humor personified, Garrido pretended to be serious until we knew him well, Arzola was naive, you were always the hardest worker, Marcos Gonzales, as talented as alienated from his destiny.
We made ourselves into a family, so much so that we bypassed literature and our personal problems began to be treated in a group and solved. We worked for the promotion and publication of the group. This makes me remember that once I bought the journal, Alma Mater, from the University of Havana, and when I came to the part about writing I saw a name like mine and a story with my title, and that furthermore it belonged to the Tenth of October Writers Workshop, and the first thing I thought of was that there had been someone else in that workshop with a name like mine.
I never imagined it was you; as you knew I refused to publish. You took my story from my house and sent it to the journal editor. That surprise was very welcome. So historically I have to recognize that the person guilty of publishing my horrendous stories for the first time was you.
Speaking of the Tenth of October Workshop, remember Chachi Melo? I brought you and introduced you to her and then you were also taken with her happy and profound friendship. While we were reading her first text her beautiful child kept interrupting us. Today he’s the important writer Abel Gonzalez Melo.
Translated by Regina Anavy, AnonyGY, Rafael Gomez, and William Fitzhugh
“The responsibility of Cuban writers, more than ever, is to protest, to make their disagreements public.”
For more than a decade, starting with invisible struggles that happened during literary events that were taking place in Cuban literature in the 90’s, the name of Angel Santiesteban was mentioned several times, but always strangely linked to the condition of “promise”; none of the other writers being promoted (now converted into literary critics who were judging the new phenomenon that the so-called Promotion of the ’90’s or the Novisimos) had managed to write stories of the strength and significance as this — at that time — very young writer.
With barely a couple of years under the tutelage of Eduardo Heras Leon, in 1989, Santiesteban got an honorable mention for the prestigious and popular international Juan Rulfo short story award, convened each year by Radio France International, which has become the launching platform for the best writers of current literature in Latin America. That’s how the history of his myth begins. With this push he managed to finish his book Sur: Latitud 13 (South: Latitutde 13), which was sent twice to the Award of Casas de las Americas (1992-1994), where due to non-literary shameful circumstances, his book was discussed behind closed doors, and in spite of the quality of its stories it didn’t win the award, which was awarded to the two weakest books in the history of this short story contest.
But perseverance is one of the personal characteristics of Angel Santiesteban, and convinced that the book would be published some time, he changed the title and presented it for the UNEAC Award (given by the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba) in 1995, where it won. But because his point of view about the subject matter in the stories (the internationalist wars of Cuba in Africa) didn’t agree with the government’s, it wasn’t until 1998 (and excluding from the volume some stories considered “conflicting”) that it appeared under the title “Sueno de un Dia de Verano” (Dream of a Summer Day). It started a real commotion within Cuban story telling in the ’90’s, exactly at the time when the best books from the most outstanding authors of that year were being published on the island (Alejandro Álvarez Bernal, Alberto Garrido, Guillermo Vidal, Sindo Pacheco, Alberto Guerra, Raúl Aguiar, Alberto Garrandés, Jorge Luis Arzola, Anna Lidia Vega Serova, and José Miguel Sánchez, just to mention some), exactly when some of those writers began to have a regular presence in the large Spanish-speaking publications (Ena Lucía Portela, Karla Suárez, Ronaldo Menéndez, Alexis Díaz Pimienta, Andrés Jorge González), and just when a great number of the these writers were starting a drop-by-drop exodus (more than half of those kids today live off the island), and were leaving to enrich with the quality of their works the already solid Cuban literature written in exile during the last 50 years.
Barely two years later, in 2001, he won the Alejo Carpentier short story award, this time with his book Los Hijos que Nadie Quiso, The Children Nobody Wanted, a selection also uncomfortable for the ruling official system, since the topic of the war in Africa was incorporated (Los olvidados, The Forgotten),topics like escape on a raft into exile (Los Hijos que Nadie Quiso), the hard Cuban prison system (La Puerca and La Perra, The Pig and the Bitch), the illegal slaughter of cattle for the black market (Lobos en la Noche, Wolves in the Night) and the rebirth of prostitution due to the economic crisis (Los Aretes que le Faltan a La Luna, The Bones the Moon Missed). Many of us writers, critics and scholars of Cuban arts and letters still wonder how it’s possible that Cuban publishing houses waste time republishing books that aren’t sold by authors nobody reads; however, they don’t republish a book like this, which literally flew off the shelves in just two weeks.
Also, today many on the island wonder how they can get the book Dichosos los que Lloran, Blessed are Those Who Mourn, awarded the Casa de las Americas 2006 prize, which was sold in a really surreal way during the Havana International Book Fair this year.
It’s worth mentioning that besides a brotherhood forged in good and bad times, I shared with Angel the teachings of Eduardo Heras León, the hugs of friends of our generation, the joy over the first awards received by those friends, and many other things, including some girlfriends. And under that complicity, created in the middle of hugs and clashes, of agreements and disputes, this interview was born. It happened in a decisive, dangerous and (I know) traumatic moment in the life of this writer, considered by many Latin American critics and writers as the most important Cuban storyteller living today on the island.
Intimate Spaces
There are places in the personal life of a writer that, even when they are not generally known, are determining factors in understanding what his “mark” is, that unique take on life that many times may or may not coincide with that creative differentiation that some people call “his own style”.
Let’s talk about the three moments of your first years of life that, as we’ve talked about all these years, are essential to the writer you are today. But I want you to look at them from a distance and try to clarify what changes were made in the little person being formed that you were then, that could have influenced your point of view as a writer on a topic that’s in your case a recurring theme: “the voice of the losers”.
A) The family environment (your mother, the great Luis, your brothers)
My mother is the beginning of my creation, and almost was the end, because it took so much to be able to survive without her presence. She was my steadfast friend, my constant support. My writings passed by her eyes. I learned how to unfold her dreams and pains, and I wrote them down. Through her silence, an aversion to the system took hold in me. Mornings were spent listening to the short wave, Radio Marti, Radio Mambi, Camilo Cienfuegos. I listened to Huber Matos*, whom I deeply admired for all his suffering and the stoic way in which he sustained his 20 years of unjust imprisonment.
Even you, Amir, many times stayed by her side until dawn, because she wanted you to hear something important. Willy Chirino’s song, “They’re Already Coming,”** at times I thought she was the one who wrote the lyrics. She used to always say that with Castro in power, little was left to her. Through her, I found out that we have a Cardinal, and she told me that kind and ingenuous adage: “The Cardinal is higher than the Commandate” and expressed it with devotion.
Also through her I suffered when my older brother was taken away to the war in Africa, and all because they promised that when he returned to his labor organization, they would give him a new truck (when he returned, they had closed the factory). Because of her, I refused to go to Angola, telling her that I didn’t want to inflict upon her another round of suffering and because I was convinced that the Angolan people were not grateful for our being on their territory because they saw us as an occupation force.
Because of my mother also, I refused to attend Compulsory Military Service; I was put at the age of 17 in jails like the La Cabaña prison. That was enough of social studies to make me be what I wanted and defend what I needed. And the psychiatrists diagnosed claustrophobia, and finally I was able to avoid the army.
The eyes of my mother were the large screen that dictated literature to me.
After she divorced my father, she married Luis, the great Luis, as you say, a lovely and profound man whom you knew very well. He was my paternal patron. He had great contradictions: He was immense in size and at times was like a kid my age. He was tough and sentimental. A man without deep education but with a surprising philosophy of life. He took care of me, my brothers, my nephews, and friends like you, with an sickly fervor.
My brothers taught me that above all in any dispute we were a family, and for even the smallest of reasons we were united to give each other strength and cooperation. My sister Mary, who has lived in Miami for over 20 years, has always been my second mother; since she was a girl she took on that role; from my birth I was her plaything. And when there were no cell phones, at least in Cuba, we had a day and a time when we both observed the moon; that was the way we met, through moon-gazing.
Because I accompanied my sister to the shore when she wanted to leave the country, to see them leave, I was put for 14 months in the most aberrant and abusive prison of any book that I’ve read on the topic. Not even in the novels describing South African prisons during apartheid did they suffer the injustices and the hunger that existed in the Cuban prisons.
My brothers were caught in the deep sea, it was a boat from INDER, and when they were returned, in order to escape, they threw the engine off the boat into the sea. But that didn’t impede them from being pulled in by the Coast Guard. They were sentenced to 10 years in prison. Later, me, for the crime of “conspiracy”.
Soon my mother found all her children in prison, in different prisons, and she was exhausted going from one prison to another. I will never forget her stoic figure coming through the moldy doors. Her way of demanding that the guards respect the supposed rights they granted us, and also the way she endured their jokes when she was asked if she were a lawyer, to which she answered that she was a Mother and that was enough. What happens is that many didn’t remember this, she answered them, and I had to watch all those violations through the bars without being able to defend her.
When she was gone, I felt for hours the pain of the bars on my face due to the despair and impotence I felt, because I could not protect her from those abusers who had no soul. All that anxiety we made her suffer, we were never able to make it up to her. There would be no way. Although she never complained, that’s why I tried hard to be the writer she admired who would make her proud. I could take her to literary readings and dedicate a book to her, which she took in her hands to accompany her in that painful moment that reminded me of the same impotence I felt before in jail.
B) The period when you were “Camilito”
That was the period of naivety. Military life always appealed to me. I wanted to be the Officer in Chief of Tactical Troops. But God wanted the opposite, despite everything, even the painful punishment of my mother on seeing us in prison. I thank God for having interrupted that path, because that same year I was supposed to begin my higher studies in the Military Academy.
Thanks to prison, I matured rapidly, skipping all the stages. I learned, in part, to understand human beings. I saw, felt their punishments, tears, desires, frustrations, dreams, and they permeated me deeply, making me a Doctor of Sociology of the System, and since then I carry those wounds with me. When I write, the saddest faces of the recluses who accompanied me on that voyage to Hell peep out; also the agony of the mothers who had to leave us there. The suffering was such that my subconscious obliged me to write, to drain off that anxiety through words, because I sometimes felt that it would explode inside me. Writing was my salvation and the thing that allowed me to endure that year and so much more without becoming insane, and since that time writing has been my salvation, the practice that allows me to resist every hour of governmental injustice.
Before going to jail, I never imagined I would be a writer. I detested writing because to me it seemed the work of weak people. But I didn’t know then the power of words, I didn’t know that a sentence could have the same power and destructive reach as a howitzer, and even more so, because a missile is used only once, while a sentence continues in time and detonates with the same force or more every time it’s mentioned.
C) The Luyanó neighborhood and your youth
Luyanó was Paris. It had all the lights of the universe although there were often black-outs, as usual, which occurred more frequently in the Special Period. But that darkness was like a neon light. I couldn’t imagine my life without my neighborhood. There I had everything and felt like a king, in spite of being on the wrong side of the tracks, which I came to retrieve many years later, because those people seemed normal to me, good, unpredictable. I was happy, and I have pleasant memories of my past. The neighbors were like a large family. I still dream about my childhood and my friends’ grandparents. I always remember them in that time and space.
Now from a distance I wonder how I could stand it. Sometimes I visit the neighborhood. My daughter lives there and loves the place like I did, but when I go back the streets seem alien to me.
I give thanks for the advice of a friend’s father, who warned us that wasting time sitting around on the street was for losers. And I observed the men who remained for long hours in that place; I measured their lives and calculated their futures. The majority had prison tattoos, bullet and knife wounds from battles they had survived and for which they were respected.
Their messed-up lives frightened me so much that I didn’t even stop on the street when some friend called me. I kept walking on some pretext and hurriedly kept going. I was fleeing what I saw as my natural destiny, which terrified me. I escaped from those places as if they contained a virus that was just waiting for the right moment to invade and incubate in me.
Those I left there couldn’t emigrate, they passed their lives without leaving a trace, without contributing anything in their time, and what’s unfair or sad is that they never were aware of it, no one explained it to them. They assumed their destinies without complaining or having any higher ambition.
Translator’s notes:
*Huber Matos, a guerrilla chief, disagreed with the direction of the Revolution, was declared a traitor, and spent 20 years in jail (1959-1979).
**”They’re Already Coming ” is in the lyrics but the song is “Our Day is Coming“
PARTS 2, 3 AND 4 WILL BE POSTED SHORTLY
Translated by Regina Anavy, AnonyGY, Rafael Gomez, and William Fitzhugh
These days I have wandered with my lawyer through the “legal systems” of Cuba. The Castro brothers, who own the Birán estate that was previously their father’s, later extended the fence to the limit of the jurisdictional waters and converted the estate into Birania. They seized the rest of the nation and have “governed” it as if it were their personal fiefdom, by pure caprice and personal interest.
Back in 1994, they captured me for accompanying my sister to the coast to say goodbye to her. After 14 months in La Cabaña prison (hell). I was acquitted and they withdrew the charge of “concealment” because I heard at trial that among siblings and parents this offense does not apply. The fact is that I suffered for that year and two months, with its days, hours, minutes and seconds. I should thank them for making me do time, because I matured earlier than I would have by my nature, education and environment. I always say that if God exists he sent me there because thanks to him I was able to prove myself through poverty, the suffering of Cuban youth, and the many tears that I saw fall in those cell blocks. I discovered that my vocation was to be a writer.
I devoted myself to writing in body and soul, and with a literature that highlights the plight of Cubans through the manipulated image that the “revolution” has made us suffer. My characters appeared, shaped into stories and books. These volumes were awarded the most coveted prizes, in spite of officials who tried to see a way of containing my ascent as a writer. Of course I suffered in 1992, when they took away from me the Casa de las Americas prize, according to the testimony of the jurors themselves. In 1994 something similar happened, and finally to run no risk, they decided to remove my work from any contests where there were awards. They also removed my work from portfolios, anthologies and literary events. That was my punishment, the price I paid for writing a critical story that was aggressive according to the dogma of the dictatorship. Honestly I never cared, I was aware it was my duty, and it’s impossible to resist your own nature.
I was visited by several intellectuals who told me to stop.
I don’t hide that I always had the need to write my opinion, my point of view, on the environment, on people I knew, their frustrations, desires, dilemmas, fears, horizons and all that could happen to human beings. I dreamed of writing in a newspaper, on a corner of the last page, but I also knew that was impossible, that with the Cuban system I never could, since all the newspapers are administered by the government, and any attempt to create an independent one is punished with the toughest laws.
On a visit to the Book Fair in the Dominican Republic, I learned there was something called a blog, and it was the closest thing to that little corner of a newspaper, however unimportant it was. I dreamed about posting. On returning I opened my blog. Immediately I was visited by several intellectuals who told me to desist; that was my first warning. I persisted. So I was removed from the Cubarte email, which was paid monthly, to prevent my connection with the rest of the world. I resisted.
After two months I was assaulted by members of State Security, who broke my arm. They thought that this reprisal would be sufficient. They never were more wrong, because by then, with the cast on my arm, I needed to double my effort to write more on the blog and to go meet other Cuban bloggers who offered me support. They staged several repudiation rallies at my front door. Sometimes I went by and greeted them, thinking they were CDR (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution) meetings. Then I found out they were against me, and my neighbors found a way, without being seen, to tell me they were there but had nothing against me and supported me, and they always justified themselves by talking about family, retaliation, etc.
The Prosecutor asked for the laughable sentence of 54 years in prison.
When they realized that blows would not be the way to make me give up, they brought accusations. The first was when I started the paperwork to go to the Word Festival in Puerto Rico. They had to avoid my attending at all costs, and the only way to do this was to bring a civil lawsuit to hide that I was being punished for my point of view.
They began with detaining me, saying I had knocked down a child with my car and I would abscond. The child, as I have said several times, luckily never appeared, nor did the charges. But the time of arrest was on the record.
Finally they manipulated my ex, from whom I had been separated for over two years. They accused me, without any evidence or witnesses, of so many things as if they had happened that perhaps they thought at some point of torment I might ask for mercy and promise to surrender.
The truth is that adding up all those years in prison, according to the prosecutor’s request, amounted to the laughable sum of 54 years (without including the other charges that they brought and then dismissed).
The prosecutor, anticipating how ludicrous that would look to international opinion, decided to “combine” the charges and requested 15 years in prison. For this they invented a “witness” (with acute neurological problems, who was a career criminal with more than 30 convictions, including theft, fraud, harassment of foreigners, etc..), and thanks to a hidden camera the truth came out and he showed the clothing they gave him and other gifts he had been promised, and invitations to dinners and swimming pools, all in exchange for a declaration against me.
When they learned about the video, because I gave it to the prosecutor, they accused me of “attack” because they made him declare that he had been threatened into making the video. Finally an expert showed that the man in the video was telling the truth. I suppose the complaint was not eradicated since I was never summoned to make a statement.
They worked in a feverish manner to make me submit.
Since then I’ve been waiting for the trial. After three years of being summoned to the Picota station at 100 and Aldabó, I can understand they are tired, bored with waiting for my submission, my incorporation into the fold. There is no shortage of advice; I always warned them that it wouldn’t happen, but they have so little capacity to understand that they worked feverishly to make me submit. Finally, from my first statements to what they are today, there are differences, they changed them, but what they didn’t imagine is that the first time they delivered the file I photographed every page, and you can see the rough work of falsification they did to incriminate me. Now they settle for keeping me waiting. My case is in legal limbo.
When I turned up with my lawyer at the Provincial Prosecutor’s, which is in charge of bringing my case, they informed us that my file was sent to the General Prosecutor of the Republic. We went to this office, which is located in Miramar. We were told it was sent back to the Provincial Prosecutor. We left the building and to avoid the trip, as we suspected the answer, we telephoned and were assured that the file had not been returned. Fifteen minutes after my attorney returned to the same office requesting that they get their story straight, there was no choice but to inform him that my file had been delivered to Officer Ribeiro, at the Villa Marista (the seat of Cuban State Security).
Visit to Villa Marista.
After the information we headed towards Vibora. We stayed for two hours in the waiting room. They told us that the file couldn’t be found. And we had no choice but to return and continue to wait. In fact the “judicial laws” require that notice of any movement of the case file has to be given to the defense counsel. This step was never fulfilled.
In these three years I had to turn down 27 invitations from universities, festivals, book presentations and book fairs. Right now five of my books are being published in different countries. I think that’s the real punishment.
Anyway, I always say, we are the generation of children that nobody wanted, and if they gave me the opportunity to return to the time I opened the blog and caused myself so much trouble, without even thinking about it I would do it again, only with more emphasis.
During the mass in Santiago de Cuba, a young man who is desperate, like the rest of Cubans, shouted “Freedom”. Immediately, and quickly, some members of State Security, disguised as members of The Red Cross, threw themselves at him to beat and arrest him. Thanks to technology it was filmed and came to light publicly. Now we are waiting for him to be released, or to be tried for whatever reason occurs to them.
It is the duty of all Cubans that we denounce this and demand his release, to join together to demand he be released without charges. To scream in a supposedly “public place” is not a crime, of course, thinking of the rest of the world, not like it is under a dictatorship. In Cuba everything that goes against the tranquility and ideas of the Castro brothers, is a crime against humanity.
Unfortunately the Pope is still in Cuba and the story remains to be told. His Holiness came to review his troop of cadets of the cloth, who have shown little appreciation for him since he has been placed next to the dictator.
I, Angel Santiesteban-Prats, a common citizen who dreams of being a writer, would not accept being placed next to the Castros, unless by force. That would be the only way they could manage it. With Castro brothers, zero negotiation, that would be the best approach for Cuba.
We must sweep away their kind and all their followers who suck milk from such miserable cow.
The Pope has arrived today in Havana, tomorrow he will have his mass and then he will leave. And we Cubans will continue with the premise of resolving our problems with the dictatorship. As a friend would say “The Pope does not cut it or colorize it,” that is, he can do nothing.
Maybe tomorrow other people will shout the word “Freedom.” Each person has his own way of doing it, and it is his right, although many Cubans ignore it and others prefer to ignore it.
The truth is that there is a Cuban man who shouted “Freedom” and because of that he has been abused. All the power will fall upon his body. But what the dictators can not do is extinguish his shout of independence that is traveling the archipelago like the bird that awakens dreams. And nobody will be able to ignore it.
“A Miami-based Cuban journalist” is the same one who, a while ago, was complaining, as usual, because in Miami they permitted for only 24 hours a billboardshowing the five spies sentenced by the United States. We should thank him in some way for teaching us that there, in “enemy” territory, at least they can engage in political criticism and disagree with the government. By contrast, in Cuba you can’t even think differently. And I congratulated him for having fled with his family to a land, if not of absolute freedom, at least of limited freedom, as he wanted to explain in his column.
And now this man once again has the nerve to say in a Cuban newspaper, “Cuba is making progress, despite the doomsayers” (29-11-2011), without specifying which way is forward, it may be the abyss, and he states that “I had a friend in Miami who was a radio commentator; heconducted interviews and made comments on that city. He defended Cuba (meaning the dictatorship) to the hilt and attacked the extreme right-wing Cuban Americans with a sarcasm and intellectual ability that few can imagine.”
I wonder if the author hadone lobe of his brainremovedso that he doesn’t mindlooking ridiculous, clumsily trying to manipulate the Cuban opinion. Or ishe just another propagandist, supposedly a journalist, since the paper supports everything they put in it. In short, he is complying with the regime and continuing to receive benefits that are granted in return for the services he provides.
Howcan this guy play with the intelligence of Cubans in such aclumsy and inconsistent way? Or is he laughing cynically about the people of Cuba? I’ll never understandhow someone who left the countryto improvehis professional and private life now defends the cause that made him flee. Because it’s impossible to be an envoy of Castro in Miami, a member of another “Wasp Network” that operates without prejudice in the media there, and thatsurvives olympically under the noses of its enemies.
The fact that someone in Miami had a radio program where he judged, criticized and ridiculed the samepeople who aresuffering deeply fromthedistance from their land, without anyone shutting downhis program, or taking revengewith their own hands, seems to me an act of stoicism on the part of those who had to endure it.
I refuse to believe that Mr. Lazarus Fariña has forgotten the fierce repression and censorship that exists in Cuba,now for over50 years, where we never were permitted to havea personal, private and independent media that would provide free speech. Not even the ability to print something, nor the right to write reviews, newspaper articles, radio spots, not to mention accessing the Internet. How canhe defend a process that punishes, with years in prison, those who voice a thought critical of Fidel Castro?
Characters like Lazarus Fariñas are thosewe sadly see in a future democratic Cuba, also defending the politicians in power.
Later he continueshis contradictory writing, wanting to protect whathe criticizes. Since criticizing censorship in order to defend the Cuban government has put him in a bind. Mr. Fariña talks nonsense by saying that this radio commentator, now deceased, named Álvaro Sánchez Cifuentes, “belonged to the revolutionary militias at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion.” However, clearly his destiny became twisted, and he ended up living in Miami, with thosehe fought in order to avoid being forced to emigrate years later. And he survived in the city where his enemies live, thosehe provoked tirelessly, according to reports, when he asserts that”I let myself go,gave them nicknames and laughed at the stupidity of thesetragicomic characters of thelocal theater that make up the so-called Cuban exile community of Miami.”
Where Fariñas reaches new levels of cynicism is when he says “I’ve never liked participating in programs run by people who hold my own opinion. I prefer debate and discussion.” I infer that the place referred to is Cubadebate, the space of least possibility of discerningthat exists and in which the official, registered “journalists” publish, like Fariñahimself. Even more contradictory is the fact that his article is published in a country where not even a remote chance exists of challenging an official opinion, and in a newspaper where all opinions go in one direction.
Mr. Fariñas enjoys the benefits of being on both sides. He lives his “fierce” capitalism, which he doesn’t abandon, and he defends the system that doesn’t accompany it. From a short distance the story is different, and he knows it better than anyone. He survives in Miami andtakes his vacationsin Cuba. These peoplewho don’t knowthe meaning of the word”dignity” are the allies that the Cuban government deserves.
WhatI most wish for Mr. Fariñas is that his U.S. citizenship berevoked and he is returned to his Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, that they make him President of his block, and that he experience the stark reality of the Cuban people.
I’ll never forget when the news came from Radio Marti that we Cubans had a Cardinal. My mother, excited, let me know, and from her tearful eyes came her illusions about the Catholic Church, that had just added to its conclave a high church official. From her hopeless simplicity, my mother intended to convey to me that, hierarchically speaking, “a cardinal is more than Fidel,” as she decreed. I remember that I shook my head yes; I didn’t want to spoil her illusions.
Of course we know what a cardinal means, but those who should have believed it didn’t. ”President” Fidel Castro and his supporters ultimately never finished the work of mowing down the church of the Cuban people. That unfinished task has always been his frustration.
In my humble person Pope John Paul II had one of the faithful who most admired him. My love for him became worship. In addition to being the Holy Father, he was a born political leader. And I will always keep the thrill I felt when he greeted me, an unimportant bystander, when he expressed love from his motorcade.
I will always remember his visit with gratitude. But if I had been his advisor, I would have suggested that he not turn up in a Cuba without freedom, without progress and without the most basic respect for human rights: Freedom of Expression. Many Cubans placed their hopes in his visit, thinking they would gain significant social achievements, political freedoms, and even that it augured multiparty elections.
It’s healthy to remember the years of “politicking” that keep the Castro brothers in power, and needless to say, they wouldn’t accept any visit, not even of Jesus Christ in person, if it jeopardized their power. I always knew that with objective clarity.
After the Pope left, we still have hope, even if we have empty hands, because after all we keep them in our pockets, there’s no point in showing how empty they are.
What we Cubans have to achieve won’t come from anyone’s visit, nor from the “peace concert”, although it had good intentions, nor from the “U.S. blockade.” It will come the day we demand what belongs to us by our own right. Then, after participatory democracy wins and Cubans have the right to choose freely and consistently what they want for themselves, we will welcome the current Pope, and also, spiritually, we will receive the Vicar of God, now in heaven, Father John Paul II, the simple man and scholar who was Wojtyla.
But we know that the road to paradise is paved with good intentions, and so is the one that leads to freedom on the island of Cuba.
Emilio's Daughter (1974), by Servando Cabrera Moreno, one of the works being auctioned off by the Cuban government.
These days the Cuban nation should be crying and writhing in its own betrayal. It gives the sensation of a country winding down, that sells quickly, like someone trying to extract every possible benefit before leaving.
For years it has been auctioning off its cultural heritage on the Internet. Works by leading artists who are not even alive to replace them. Creations that would be difficult to return to our country. This year important works by Servando Cabrera Moreno have been auctioned off for more than 600,000 dollars: A 1957 painting, “Figure with Bird,” “Cocoon” (1945), “Emilio’s Daughter” (1974), and “Kisses” (1966). Also “Last Journey” (1979) by Wilfredo Lam. Among the 44 artists were Tomás Sánchez, Mario Carreño, René Portocarrero, Amelia Peláez and Raúl Martínez. In recent years we have lost an important part of the pictorial wealth of the nation.
In other countries, when private collectors decide to sell, government regulations to preserve the cultural heritage, which is untouchable, establish that the State has priority over cases of interest. Owners have to accept three propositions. They can keep the work but not sell it. They do not have the right to take it out of the country. Also, if they keep a work considered to be part of the nation’s heritage in their house, an annual tax must be paid to the State. This seems a laudable idea to me. I believe that the place for the best paintings of every nation is in its museums, so that they can be admired by both nationals and visiting foreigners.
Theft and demagoguery
Yet lately we hear denunciations from Cuban government spokespeople lamenting the “thefts in the museums by the Allied troops when they entered Iraq.” Also, the world still mourns for the cultural works destroyed and sacked by the Nazi hordes in the invaded countries, a great part of which remain hidden.
But in Cuba it’s like we don’t have the ability to look at ourselves. Education was required for the sake of protecting the supposed Revolution of 1959, and that was no more than a way of allowing Fidel Castro to commit his outrages without being criticized. I realize that to try to do so would have been a grievous mistake. Confronting him would have immediately led to a fierce punishment. Trying to criticize, even constructively and for “revolutionary” honesty, is seen as suicide.
Few of that generation, none of those who today live in the country and participate in the official social life, confronted the designs of Tsar Fidel Castro, and in cowardice they remained silent so they would not be considered eligible for punishment. They preferred to be slaves, silent accomplices, incapable of dissent. They considered this appropriate for survival, and they forgot their place before their own consciences and before history, which will remember them as they were and still are today.
And they tried to transmit that education to the three generations that followed them. And because we don’t accept it they brand us as traitors, saying that we are complicit with an enemy we don’t even know, one that hasn’t tried to “buy us,” “capture us,” or whatever other accusations the spokespeople make on that insufferable Round Table TV show. They don’t still believe in the consciousness of Marti. Later, in personal conversations, they acknowledge that there are problems with the system, and on occasion they even discover a certain admiration for the opposing positions that their fears, in moments of rebellion, don’t let them develop.
Beneficial Intellectuals
So what can remain of a cultural milieu whose Cuban Book Institute sent a group of intellectuals to a Book Fair in Mexico without guaranteeing them economic support? Especially since they were sent to represent Cuba, to obey the orders of the officials who sent them, and to attack whomever opposed the State. They looked like a “delegation of famine,” and as official writers they were willing to wave the little flags so they could continue being considered “trustworthy” by the regime and keep receiving handouts as mercenaries.
Outside Cuba I have attended the National Literature Awards, to beg from the organizers of international events, with the excuse that “Cuba is poor,” so they will assume that its people are as well, and they bury their pride and decorum. The “Revolution” asked so many to sacrifice; there were times when it made them grovel to ask for pardon for words or actions committed, and the politicians were not grateful and made them lose their shame. I would have to quote the Indian Hatuey, “If that is the revolution, then I’d rather not be a revolutionary.”
Intellectuals, despite not sharing political views, are immeasurably respected for their creative and spiritual work and, in many cases, for their social mission. But they assume an attitude of silence, despite having their souls wounded by seeing how the cultural riches of a nation are lost. The Historian of Old Havana himself, Eusebio Leal, who has returned to the historic center the pride and respect it deserves, is silent before the government’s robbery. The great poet, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Director of the House of the Americas, also remains silent before the depredation, and will leave this life with the blood on his soul of the young men shot for trying to escape in a boat. The President of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), the ethnologist and writer Miguel Barnet, also is silent, as he has always known how to be. They, among many who are respectable voices, should join together to defend the cultural treasures of the nation.
What shall we do with the yacht Granma? Sink it into the sea?
Why doesn’t the Government of Cuba sell the yacht Granma? I know some who would buy it, to destroy it or worship it – the fate of that barge would be their choice. Why not sell all the possessions of the Argentine Ché Guevara? He has many fans in the world who would buy his weapons and uniforms with economic generosity. Let them strip those heroic museums throughout the island, filled with their materials of war. They could be auctioned off! But the egoism of the regime and their lack of respect for the culture has been constant. They get rid of art because they underestimate it. It bothers them because it doesn’t reflect their epic or because its authors are homosexual. They see it only as a source of wealth, and before the economic crisis they prefer to lose the nation’s heritage rather than the symbols that support their ideology, its great farce and fraud. And all this happens before the cowardly silence of the voices called to guard this heritage.
