Category: Jeovany J. Vega

The Ex-Militant Requests the Floor / Jeovany Jimenez Vega

The First National Conference of the Communist Party of Cuba, recently held on January 28th and 29th, left a permanent bittersweet taste. First Secretary Raul Castro said that one of its objectives was to, “promote greater democracy in our society, starting with an example within the ranks of the Party.” In this light, any person outside of the harsh reality that we Cubans live — not the virtual mysticism preached by the ruling party — could sigh hopefully. But millions on the island, hardened by the repetition of phrases like these, we claim the benefit of the doubt.

In my capacity as an ex-militant of that party, of which I was a member for 10 years until I was expelled in 2005 – without ever having committed any act of corruption, crime or treason, but only by this story that ended in the creation of this blog “Ciudadano Cero” (Citizen Zero) in Voces Cubanas — I ask to speak.

I think that if the Communist Party wants to be minimally tolerant in relation to society, it should begin to be so in relation to its own members. An anecdote to illustrate it will suffice: In mid 1999, I had the silly idea to ask, in my heart, how the recently issued Resolution 54, of the Ministry of Public Health, would be implemented in light of the Cuba-US migration agreements in place since 1994, after the Rafter Crisis, to prevent a worker who received a U.S. visa from leaving the country, perhaps for years, would not that contradict the letter of these agreements?

Well, this “mischief” cost this Cuban boy a year of tense meetings with officials of the Municipal Committees and Provincial Party to penalize me for trying “….to question the decisions made at the central level.” I did not back off, but such fuss over a simple little question – not even made public, but kept within the party – and eventually I opened my eyes to a reality: someone who uses his own judgement and he leaves, with his music, headed elsewhere, in the Communist Party of Cuba they do not join to think, but to obey orders without restrictions, without questions, but rather obey orders unrestricted, divine, unquestionable, dictates from the higher-ups who only listen when people applaud and never when they ask questions.

Then he concludes, if this mechanical operation of party members persists, in the face of such a psychology, would one expect a different attitude toward the rest of the people?

When reading in Raul Castro’s closing speech in the newspaper Granma, from the headlines and leads it is obviously an antagonistic contradiction: The party states the need to “…promote greater democracy…” yet refuses so resoundingly to officially recognise differing political positions.

“Ending the principle of a single party would be….to legalise the party or parties of imperialism on our native land…”. Most clearly, impossible: the question remains are you with me or against me!

Such an approach still admits the possibility that Cubans have different opinions, genuine patriots willing to safeguard the independence of their country. Thus the emphasis is on Fidel’s classic syllogism of leader-Revolution-nation, in which there is only one way to be a consistent patriot: by being an ardent admirer of the Revolutionary leader and obeying even his most absurd decisions.

In a discourse that emphasizes analogies historically used by the Cuban government to demonise various political schemes (plurality = demagoguery = commercial exploitation of politics = appeasement to the U.S.), our President criticizes “…the validity and usefulness of so-called representative democracy…” because “…has become invariably the concentration of power in the class that holds the economic hegemony…” and he says it as if in Cuba, even with specific nuances, the same thing didn’t happen.

Too often our people witness that the most notorious corrupt – Raul recognizes it – are the ardent activists who for decades maintained their status of stratospheric life before the impassive gaze of the Party and government authorities. If this is known, despite a press censorship comparable only, perhaps, to the one that governs North Korea, it is easy to imagine what would happen if in our own in a fit of ethics, difficult to conceive, unwrapped Pandora’s box. For all this we were married to the lie and they forced us to live with her.

I remain stunned by Raul Castro when he asked the party “…to foster a climate of maximum trust and the conditions….for the most comprehensive and frank exchange of views, both within the organization, its links with the workers and the population, encouraging disagreements to be taken with ease and respect, including the mass media… to be involved with the strictest accountability and accuracy in this endeavour… with proven objectively and without unnecessary secrecy.“

It turns out that over the last year and a half, I myself have gotten to Raul Castro four letters which clearly expounds our case, Raul himself here speaking completely ignores them and likewise it did reach the main Cuban periodicals without their ever having the courage to publish them.

Although my astonishment increased when I hear the President ensure: “You have to get used to telling us all the truths from the front, looking into his eyes, disagree and argue…when we consider that we are in the right…” however, finally awakened when displayed in fact, stating that everything will be “…of course, in the right place at the right time and in the right way…“

This blog is run by someone who dared to disagree and that is why he was expelled from the party, lost his specialty, Medicine, and was then barred from practicing his profession. It is a curious way of understanding the right to dissent and of “naturally and respectfully accepting differences“! In fact, I would advise the First Secretary a little “caution” when talking, for example, about the danger the corrupt assume, that it not end with he himself expelled from the Party for challenging them, as recently happened to Professor Esteban Morales.

But where this speech is worthy of “coven” award for the great Creole humor it distills, it is the point at which the First Secretary assures us “...that in the Party there must be a definitive end to the top down control — the ’boss-ism’ — its force is moral, not legal… it is the moral force!“

To listen to this in a country where the Communist Party arranges and controls everything – even the prosecution, forgive the repetition – is hilarious. It is no secret that while the Party says in public that it does not govern, not manage, and that its function is to “guide” that “…it demands all those responsible fulfill their, without interfering in the administration…” – I do not see how it is possible to do one thing without the other – however, the reality is that nothing of political or administrative importance is approved without the consent of the Communist Party, its leaders have unlimited powers, the Party gives and takes, according to its interest, officials from all levels of government, appointed and replaced at leisure managers, company directors, provincial directors, ministers, generals, trade union leaders and mass organizations, and it arranges which “NGOs” will be approved and which will have his profile.

It promotes and fires deputies of all levels, presidents of municipal and provincial assemblies of the Popular Power, in the end, it is the manager of the totality of life of this country without any type of limitation, with an attentive eye on these civil servants to be thrown out the window for minor slides.

In this way, the Cuban government – of which all the high officials are, incidentally, communist militants – reaches the audacity to proclaim to the four winds, when you want to question the Cuban electoral system, that it is not the Communist Party that postulates, that what happens “in theory”is for one simple reason: it doesn’t need it, because it is the lord and master of this country. If the party frowns; ministers, deputy ministers, colonels and generals grow pale. But if the party raises its voice and gives them a swipe, they defecate their pants.

So why shouldn’t we recognize that the party actually nominates them all?

In the end, this speech holds in abeyance some basic questions: Would the Cuban government dare to officially recognize the political opposition now that the Party says it is willing to “promote democracy”? Deciding to limit the stay in government positions to two terms of five years – after spending more than 50 years in it themselves – are they finally convinced that power intoxicates when exercised for too long?

Also in this speech – like those Fidel Castro used to make – starting from the atrocities perpetrated by the imperialist blocs, he tries to legitimize atrocities committed by our government against its own people, as if the one justifies the other. Yes, the world is screwed up, but in this little rock that suffers under the Caribbean sky, the civil rights of 11 million Cubans are finally slaughtered with the permission of the Communist Party.

Translated by: Hank Hardisty

February 26 2012

 

Dr. Jeovany Jimenez Vega Explains Why He Is Now on Hunger Strike / Jeovany J. Vega

Video 1 of 3 – Describes being barred from practicing medicine for circulating and submitting a petition signed by 300 healthcare workers requesting an increase in wages.

Video 2 of 3 – Describes his attempts to have his case heard by government institutions.

Video 3 of 3 – Describes the actions the authorities took against him.

6 March 2012

Country of Pixels / Jeovany Jimenez Vega

The night of Saturday, February 4, was celebrated at the home of Antonio G. Rodiles, precursor of the “Estado de SATS” project in the municipality of Playa, Havana, the award ceremony for the first edition of the Independent Social Photography Contest “Country of Pixels” initiative launched mid-2011 from the site of the same name by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, one of the most talented photographers of our generation. Once the call for entries was put out, every one brought their projects and their ideas, in the most heterogeneous way, in which everyone came, through the most different life experiences, to the doors of this always exciting art.

In my particular case, I came to Photography urged by necessity. It was a summer night in 2000, I enlisted to go to the local cinema to see the movie showing — “Sapphires, blue madness”, I remember — and poking around I didn’t find in my holy house one peso, the single peso needed for entrance. That night I held back my desires and while I undressed my mind was making plans about how to remedy this disaster. I reflected on the serious fact of living in a country where a doctor, with already 6 years of work experience behind him, didn’t have one miserable peso — I’m speaking literally — to go see a movie.

Then Photography came to my aid and over more than a decade fed the flesh and spirit. At the same time it saved daily life, Photography molded my vision of life to its code; it taught me never to go first, before any issue, before taking sides or judging look all around, probe each edge.

It taught me to always look twice, that every question, like every person, every context, is always too complex to attempt a synthesis at first glance. It reminded me that light has texture, its breezes, its unique smells and own spells; that life is perpetuated in its colors, but everything has light and shadows, even black and white includes a beautiful gamete of intermediate grays that enrich and will always be worth discovering.

I found that every matter, even the most elusive and hostile, has its human angle, kind and beautiful, when viewed from the exact point; that beauty lives in the most unsuspected corners, not only in the innocence of the flower — which touches you by its natural state of being — but also the human beauty-creation, which the sensitive lens arranges with patience from the pestilent ruin of the grotesque tenement.

It taught me that each scream, kiss, blow, jump, smile, wink, hand outstretched or in a fist, are unrepeatable miracles of life, in their unceasing flight, concatenates and can be loved in that one way: intense and ephemeral. It invited me to not lose my focus in human misery but to search for the source of every look, including from the meanest of men, the hidden spark of the divine being.

So it will always be worth the pain to fight to live “Country of Pixels”; because the images of a people are as good as their tears, their words or their innermost dreams. It will always be worth it, so that the children of tomorrow will know how much pain we had to pay to heal the hatred, to not swallow the poison they put to our lips, those who, dark and sinister, today we want confined to absolute poverty of the soul.

February 6 2012

 

All Roads Lead to Rome / Jeovany J. Vega

A sentence is never free, not when you live in Cuba. Here, the plan of absolute centralization is not only limited to economic relations but also, perhaps even to a greater extent, all reading material is given a pro-government hue. Undivided power in the essential condition for this to happen. Absolutism has made sure that all channels of social interaction move towards the central hub of decision making. Then, with military precision, the orders of the political-military duo, coming from the Communist Party-State Security pairing, will be executed. If oneestablishes a rigid manifesto, the other contributes the copious amounts of intelligence which, once analized in the only centre of power, means that the tactical or strategic decision most convenient for the establishmentis taken without any concern that this might directly contravene the written ‘law’. Nuestro caso (our case) is an excellent example of what I’m saying.

There are two moments in our history in which this modus operandi can be seen to be typically ignorant of the truth. The first in March 2008, aftertheattempted hunger strike mentioned here, we decided to restart negotiations with the State Departmentby conventional means. 10 days later the only response that we had received from the government in 5 years arrived. ‘…we have decided to inform the Ministry of Public Health, for your consideration and reply.’ That is to say, they sent us to the slaughterhouse one again, becoming both judge and part of the entity on which it called. A secondincident came three years later, last 15th August, when I wrote to the Granma newspaper– some days later I alsowrote to The Workers and Rebel Youth – only getting a couple of lines from Granma in reply. ‘Your letter has been sent to the Ministry of Public Health for your consideration and reply according to convention.’ Obviously, the uniformity of stylewarns that it is the same hand writing in both cases.

Last 3rd December, Latinamerican Medicine Day, Granma congratulated me with this succinct reply, this time sent by conventional post, for directing myself towards the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section once again, more than 3 months earlier. I’d already had a reply on the 10th October by email – that time must have been for my birthday – had begun, on 17th October, with an affectionate letter to its splendid editor Lazaro Barredo Medina. The stamped envelope, when it arrived at my door, reminded me that, in spite of the world having spun hundreds of thousands of times, whenever and wherever the emperors come to power, all paths, roads, boulevards, lanes, avenues, tracks and trails – even short cuts – lead ultimately to Rome.

Translated by Sian Creely

December 21 2011

 

Chronicle of Asclepius in Cuba (Part 2) / Jeovany J. Vega

Translator’s note: Asclepius is the ancient Greek god of Healing and Medicine

If you are moderately well-informed you know that we 11 million Cubans living in Cuba are subject to a ban on free travel abroad. In this case it’s not about a personal decision, but requires that you be invariably authorized by an arm of the Ministry of the Interior with discretionary power to say yes or not to your “permission to leave”; a privilege that becomes the stuff of blackmail, with perks awarded to those who remain “quiet” and refusals as punishment for the irreverent, to set an example to others. This general prohibition is contained in the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) Resolution 54, specifically designed for those who work in Public Health, and which presents a bleak picture.

But returning to our mental exercise, here we have our thoughtful doctor who is forbidden to travel abroad, who can’t support his family on his evanescent salary, who can’t go to work in another better paid sector because the Resolution prohibits it, with a purely decorative Union that bows to the orders of the Administration and the Party, through which he can’t channel any solution to these basic problems, nor will it acknowledge his starvation wages, nor the terrible conditions of hygiene and good, coupled with the lack of resources and medications which, save in happy exceptions, he passes his medical shifts in our polyclinics and hospitals; shifts for which our doctor, incidentally, does not receive even a penny.

Then our thoughtful physician has only one way out, and resignedly chooses the only door left open; he applies to be part of some medical mission that our supportive government sustains in some dozens of countries. He just has to fill out the rigorous documents, and spend a few months or years, and then our doctor leaves his office or hospital to care for the poor of the world.

I believe in human solidarity like I believe in the light of the sun, but in life you have the discern the luster of gold from the shine of the mirrors. When a doctor, dentist or other Cuban health professional leaves to work on a foreign mission, regardless of any moral valuation, he does it under indisputable circumstances. This worker, until now deprived of a decent wage, will from this moment forward receive 300 or 400 dollars a month, while his family in Cuba – which under no circumstances Is allowed to accompany him — will receive his full wages in Cuban pesos along with 50 convertible pesos every month.

Although under certain circumstances it can come to more depending on the destination country, it will never exceed 15% to 20% of what the host country is paying Cuba for his services. This is an estimate, as this information is practically inaccessible, but it’s true that around 80% of what our doctor generates in his contracted wages — not taking into account extras for additional tests, radiology studies, etc., which are generously covered — goes directly to the coffers of the Cuban state to be administered by human functionaries.

Meanwhile, the Cuban health workers abroad receive a wage that in many cases is less than the legal minimum wage for a native of the country they are working in. When the worker returns to Cuba on completing his mission, he is once again subject like any good Cuban to the travel ban. Any professional that abandons his mission is invariably treated like a traitor, and is never permitted to enter Cuba again and will not be able to see his children grow up; he will not even be authorized to come in the case of an illness or death of a loved one.

Now let’s look at a revealing fact: over the last decade contracting for medical services has brought the Cuban government tens of billions of dollars, and has become the country’s largest source of export earnings. The selfless medical missions which our government exports to the world’s poor, in the last decade, have generated between five and eight billion dollar annually; tourism is a distant second at two billion. This number accounts for the export of services only; our professionals in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries are third in line, surpassed only by the nickel industry and the petroleum products.

Note, first, the enormous economic dividend this implies, and secondly the obvious, and no less important, political benefit, that makes our leaders smell like Messiahs and garners votes for them in international forums. Add to that, thirdly, the escape valve it provides for the mood of the worker, who knows if he waits patiently for a mission abroad he can multiply his salary by 20 to 40 times during the two or three years, on condition he remain silent.

For the protestors, the outlaws, they will never join this mass of internationalists who now amount to about half of our practicing physicians who, clearly, resent the quality of medical care offered to the Cuban population.

Every human society is a complex system of relationships that require adjustments in their mechanisms and which should reward personal effort, because this will encourage respect for the value of honest labor. In this system, each one should have a well-defined place. While it is the role of the doctor to safeguard health and human life, that of the senior leaders of this country should be to guarantee the strategic design of a balanced and functional society and this, without a doubt, they have not managed to accomplish after 50 years of projects and conferences.

Not only did they fail in their design, but they did so resoundingly. The apologists talk about “free” education and health, but without attempting to complain of the sun for its spots, I suggest that this is relative, because the money they don’t charge me at school or at the hospital, bleeds from my fingers in the hard-currency stores with their absurd policy of extremely abusive prices, where things are marked up 500% or 1000% over their wholesale price.  Also, to guarantee an education and people’s health is not a gesture of goodwill, but an obligation of the State. We mustn’t forget that over his whole life a worker salary is cut by 33% to guarantee his Social Security. This gloomy subject is rarely spoken of in my country.

I have clean hands and I like to play it straight, so someone who’s playing a game can save the lectures on patriotism. I believe the necessary Revolution of 1959 was right and authentic, but I can’t applaud what it has condemned us to, because if there is no respect for the rights of man, there is nothing left to defend.

I am with the Revolution, but will never resign myself to its errors, nor with the acts of demagogues and opportunists. I am a doctor, a Cuban, I live in the real and difficult Cuba, not in the TV newscasts and I do not wish to emigrate. I graduated in 1994, and since 1998 have had a specialty in General Medicine. I was a third-year Resident in Internal Medicine until April 2006 when, in my last year, I was suspended from the study of this specialty and then disqualified from the practice of medicine in Cuba, for an indefinite time in October 2006, along with a colleague, Dr. Rodolfo Martinez Vigoa.

The ancestral intolerance to which we were already accustomed made the powers-that-be react as if we had thrown a Molotov cocktail. Terrified by that tiny consensus, they did what they do best: put down by force and show of dissent. They never responded, they were unscrupulous and brutal. The details of this injustice are fully known by all the relevant central agencies including the Attorney General’s Office, without anyone doing anything to fix it.

I am one more among tens of thousands of Cuban doctors who live every day under this outrageous reality. I live under a government that deprived me of the right to exercise my profession for political considerations, that systematically censored my opinions, that took away my right to travel freely, that doesn’t respect my right to receive information first hand and that denies me 21st century Internet access, all of which give an idea of how retrograde they are when topic is man’s right to think freely.

The government that commits this flagrant violation of the rights of millions of Cubans now occupies no less than the Vice Presidency of the Human Rights Council of the UN. If you had the patience to read this far, you already have a rough vision of what our professionals in Public Health experience. If you belong to the group of apologists or those with clenched fist, know that this is the Cuba that you applaud or condemn so fervently as your conscience dictates.

August 19 2011

Mariela Castro in the Red Light District / Jeovany J. Vega

Towards the end of October, sociologist Mariela Castro Espin, Director of the National Center of Sexual Education of Cuba (CENESEX), while on a visit to this country, expressed her admiration for the “dignified manner” with which prostitutes uphold the value of their work in Holland.

But in these latitudes, whose Revolution since its first steps eliminated prostitution and where the sending of thousands of Cubans to the camps of the notorious UMAP* became so naturally institutionalized under the ethereal category of “improper conduct”, this being expressed by the daughter of our President, seen quite suddenly, takes some work to digest.

It is indisputable that Cuban society – not exempt yet from discrimination based on this motive – has become, for the good of all, more tolerant in everything relating to sexuality, including the more permissive modality with which the phenomenon of prostitution is perceived after the upturn in values made acute with the arrival of the 90’s, but it would be well to ask … will we see in 2012 the Director of CENESEX propose the structuring of a “Red Light District” in Havana? Would the “profession” be institutionalized as one more job alternative for the million workers finding themselves furloughed in the last few months? Will our picturesque Jineteras (prostitutes) count on a labor union of their own to represent them? Would they have base leaders, their meetings of associates, their union halls across the whole country? Would this Union be a part of the Central de Trabajadores de Cuba (Cuba Workers Union) and as such be represented in their congresses? Would our government dare go so far?

Mariela Castro’s words, unsettling for some, surprising for others, are sufficiently eloquent: “I admire and respect the way in which [the prostitutes of the Red Light District] have found a dignified way of doing their sex work and made themselves worthy of respect. Really, it has been a pleasure to get to know directly how they do it … What I have enjoyed the most is seeing how they have known to create a process and dignify the way they make this work worthy, because it is a job. And, moreover, making their rights respected. That seems very important as much as the health care, protection from violence, protection from abuse in a broader sense.”

Though she doesn’t clarify how or how much “directly” she knows how the licensed prostitutes “do what they do,” it is indisputable that much of the evolution in the way in which some part of Cuban society projects with respect to homosexual persons and transsexuals, is due in good measure to the work sustained by the CENESEX. Now then, along with this forward step, a different treatment is urged regarding the topic of prostitution and all of this only forms a part of the strategy that seeks to export to the world the mirage of the opening being extended to civil rights, it is a polemic that enters speculative terrain, something many here see as certain.

Not withstanding, today my neighbor Eva, the jinetera, with much faith, did her ministrations to Oshun and to Elegua so they give her her aché (life force), so they sweeten life a little and so that they blaze the trails, a little bit at a time.

*Translator’s note: UMAP (translated into English) stands for Military Units to Aid Production. These were labor camps established in 1965 where undesirables such as homosexuals, “bourgeois,” “counterrevolutionaries,” Jehovah’s Witnesses and others were incarcerated.

Translated by: lapizcero

November 28 2011

To Be Or Not To Be / Jeovany J. Vega

Photograph by Orlando Luis Pardo

The eternal dilemma, to be or not to be, is the capital crossroad that became evident in the life of every Cuban since the 26th of July 1953. This date initiated the stage of struggle that placed into tension the Cuban society of that moment. The verticality that that generation imposed on the enterprise was conducive to the victory of 1959, gave culmination to an exploit that was supported by the majority of sectors of Cuban society of the time. The Revolution triumphed amidst absolute popular jubilation, with the unconditional support of more than 90% of the population. A contribution to this was the discontent engendered by the deep social and political crisis into which Fulgencio Batista and his horde of assassins and corrupts sank the country after their taking of power with the military coup of March of 1952. This, along with the tradition of struggle that spanned the first half of the last century, created the conditions for the overthrow of that dictatorship.

After the triumph, the official discourse, gradually more and more radical, led to, among other consequences, what I would call the great error of the Cuban Revolution: The “revolutionary offensive” of 1968 by which the government of Fidel Castro “intervened” – that is to say, confiscated – all the small enterprises and family businesses, all the way down to the shoe shine stands. This definitively deprived the political Leadership of the country of the support of that not insignificant sector of the population; but this is a matter that is more complex and merits its own post.

Precisely because of the traumatic nature of the history that occurred, I have always been grabbed by incredulity when I hear a Cuban of today expressing that he has no political opinions, as if this was possible in a society as polarized as ours, where there is practically nobody that doesn’t have a relative, a friend, or an acquaintance, that lost their small business, launched himself to the sea looking to escape, or suffered somehow from the lack of civil guarantees. I am of the opinion that the same gregarious and thinking nature of man, imposes on him having a perspective on our social issues, all according to his intellect, his cultural baggage and the degree of information he possesses. That this individual does not dare assume an active militancy or frontal critique, that is a matter for a different discussion, but it is almost always subject to its own judgement.

There will always be the estranged, those who sway to the flux of circumstances like kelp in the bottom of the ocean. In this bundle belong both the fanaticism of the communist militant, who refuses to accept evidence in front of his nose, as well as the “high religiosity” of the believer, that prevents him from involving himself in any matter related to “worldly things” since it contaminates his pure hands. To this we have to add those opportunists who know that by opening their mouths they would lose their slice of the pie, or those who simply see with indifference how this country declines, without moving a muscle unless it is to protect their pocketbooks or to look at the shine of their acrylics. All of them, nonetheless, protest in the intimacy of their kitchens, before the empty pots, or before the thousand faces that reflect misery, but are incapable of expressing themselves publicly, either from indolence or pure cowardice.

At this point, we enter the topic of this dual morality that sinks more than one Cuban up to his neck in manure. In this manner, those who question a physician for talking with sincerity about his honestly earned salary, can be the same ones who embezzle the finances of a state enterprise, or mishandle the people’s resources by appropriating merchandise from a store. In fact, a considerable part of administrators, at all levels of organization, are active Communist militants, and for this, everywhere that a corruption scandal erupts, there is always a “combative” nucleus of the Party and a Union that never saw the corrupts coming, but – such a paradox! – are scandalized if 300 workers sign a document and deliver it to their Ministry. But all those who embezzle, steal or mishandle, can be seen later waving flags and voicing slogans in the parades around the Plaza.

Thus, between the utopia of dreams and the disenchantment of reality, between the to be and the not to be, we see how the promise of the “New Man” dissipates. Maybe it is because this man – not Cuban, not Anglo-Saxon, not Communist or Christian, but a man sui generis – is still not ready to be emancipated from his egotism, to extend his hand in exchange for nothing except the joy of serving. Some day this spiritual hatching will come and this excellent creature, child of man and God, will be reborn, but in the meantime, we have to remember, with each step, the solemn declaration of our Martí, farsighted and sublime, when he said “… a nation is made from men as they are, not as they should be”.

Translated by: lapizcero

October 4 2011