Colonel Mario Méndez, a high-ranking official from the Ministry of the Interior, who repeated on national television, blaming the United States for the Bahia Honda tragedy, “how many more deaths are needed.” (Capture)
Please, keep in mind that this post —as well as the entirety of Ideological Deviation, my weekly column— is considered a crime by the Cuban government.
COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
Demonstration in Havana in protest of the repression and in solidarity with Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. (Screen capture)
Alexis Romay, New Jersey, 27 May 2022
The Cuban people have spoken:
they have voted with their feet,
they gather on any street
to talk about what’s been broken
for so long that not a token from the government can quench
the thirst, the hunger, the stench
stemming from that institution
that some call “the Revolution,”
which digs its grave and its trench.
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Author’s note: This text is my recreation and condensation, in English, of my décimas published this week in the Spanish edition of 14ymedio. Remember, this post —part of Ideological Deviation, my weekly column— is considered a crime by the Cuban government.
COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
Screen capture of the 16-second video in which workers from state-owned Prodal company, in Havana, shout: “Long live the sausages!”
Alexis Romay, New Jersey, 30 April 2022
In Cuba, the Worker’s Union
is just a branch of the State.
It doesn’t allow debate.
It curtails any reunion
of people seeking communion
of ideas by themselves,
while there’s no food on the shelves,
and there’s widespread condemnation
of the Party as the indignation
of the Cuban people swells.
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Author’s note: This text is my recreation and condensation, in English, of my décimas published this week in the Spanish edition of 14ymedio. Remember, this post —part of Ideological Deviation, my weekly column— is considered a crime by the Cuban government.
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
Tweet from the Minister of the Economy that inspired the author. Bold text: “Competent socialist state company”
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Author’s note: This text is my recreation and condensation, in English, of my décimas published this week in the Spanish edition of 14ymedio. Remember, this post —part of Ideological Deviation, my weekly column— is considered a crime by the Cuban government.
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
Author’s note: This text is my recreation and condensation, in English, of my décimas published this week in the Spanish edition of 14ymedio. Remember, this post —part of Ideological Deviation, my weekly column— is considered a crime by the Cuban government.
____________
COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
Díaz-Canel has a wife
whose tackiness knows no bounds.
It’s not as cute as it sounds,
in the midst of Cuba’s strife,
when she says that, in her life,
he’s “The Dictator.” For sure!
(Lis Cuesta is done with demure.)
Cubans long to live in peace.
That regime is a disease,
and we are ready for the cure.
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Author’s note: This text is my recreation and condensation, in English, of my décimas published this week in the Spanish edition of 14ymedio. Remember, this post is considered a crime by the Cuban government.
____________
COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
Maykel Castillo ‘Osorbo’ is in prison for singing and being one of the authors of the song ‘Patria y Vida’. (Screen capture)
14ymedio, Alexis Romay, New Jersey, 9 April 2022
I will be brief. These terrifying words began many of the interminable speeches of the Mansplainer-in-Chief who, pistol in hand, took control of Cuba 62,000 millennia ago. With this introduction to my new column in 14ymedio, I propose to do exactly the same. (I’m referring to being brief, not to taking over the Island. I hope the results are not so devastating.)
The column will appear weekly under the banner Ideological Deviation, which in addition to being the title of my book of décimas, is a horrible legal concept with which the government frightened me in my childhood and youth in Havana, and for which any Cuban can still be imprisoned in the land I fled. The décima is a style of Spanish poetry created in the XVI century by Vicente Espinel. The format is 10 lines, eight-syllables each. It rhymes ABBAACCDDC. Jorge Drexler did a beautiful TEDx talk about it.
Does this mean that I am going to write an opinion column exclusively to the rhythm of the décima? Well, yes. The reason is simple: the meter and rhyme —and, hopefully, the content— will render them memorable. This will make it easier for them to be recited in morning assemblies at schools throughout the nation. From preschool to sixth grade! To infinity… and beyond! Pioneers for dropping bars, we will be like Espinel!
My octosyllables will come in a variety of tones and registers —lyrical, nostalgic, satirical, parodic, animal, vegetable, and mineral— which are my ways of thinking and feeling Cuba from a distance. Thinking and feeling are crimes in totalitarianism, and the Cuba that the Castros took for themselves is no exception. (Ah… and I aspired to write a presentation without mentioning that last name that produces gagging, nausea, hives).
I escaped in order to be, an action that in Spanish is split into two verbs: ser and estar. I fled in order to think and to feel. Beyond the seas and decades later, I admire those who are, who think, and who feel in Cuba. I could not imagine my life in my land, but I celebrate that there are those who can do it and do it every day, against the winds and the tides of an implacable regime. These verses, and those to come, are for you.
“The People,” “the Cuban Nation”
“The people,” “the Cuban nation”
is not the same as “the State.”
(No need for you to debate.
Go on. Have a revelation.)
The “Revolution,” that station
in Dante’s Hell, is a trap:
the government does kidnap
the Cubans who dare protest;
at Díaz-Canel’s request,
they get erased from the map.
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Author’s note: This text is my recreation and condensation, in English, of my décima(s) published this week in the Spanish edition of 14ymedio. Remember: this post is considered a crime by the Cuban government.
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
Alexis Romay, New Jersey, 4 November 2022
