Jorge I. Pérez – Translating Cuba

Castro’s ‘Ten Million Ton Harvest’ Comes to Miami Theater by the Hand of Nilo Cruz

Photograph by Arca Images of a scene from the play Un parque en mi casa (A Park in my Home) by Nilo Cruz. (EFE/Arca Images)

EFE (via 14ymedio), Jorge I. Pérez, Miami, November 9, 2023 — The so-called 10 Million Ton Harvest of 1970, one of Fidel Castro’s first megaprojects, served as a historical backdrop for the Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz to write and direct Un parque en mi casa (A Park in my Home), whose Spanish premiere will be this Thursday in Miami with a “very simple and symbolic scenery”: a prop house.

Cruz, the first Hispanic to win the Pulitzer Prize for theater with Anna in the Tropics (2002), says in an interview with EFE that “writing about 1970, a year that changed my life, was a way to rescue a moment that I didn’t fully understand at the time.”

In Un parque en mi casa, according to the promotional notes for the new play, five relatives of an improvised Cuban family are waiting for the arrival of a Russian who will live with them as part of an international exchange program.

Each character, he adds, must fight with a life “full of changes and uncertainties, a divided country and an uncertain future, while working to continue reading

meet the objectives of the ten million ton sugar harvest,” a production goal set by Castro in 1970 that ultimately was not achieved.

About the cast, the playwright points out that he has two veteran actors that he admires very much, Carlos Acosta Milián and Gretel Trujillo

Castro’s ambitious project, which mobilized almost the entire country, was not achieved but marked a spirit of possibility that Cruz has used from the point of view domestic intimacy.

“My father, a former political prisoner in several prisons in Cuba, including the Castle of San Severino and the Isle of Pines Prison, Puerto Boniato, was one of those victims forced to cut cane for the 10 Million Ton Harvest,” Cruz explains.

“In my house,” he explains, “we saw how he arrived despondent after doing his work in the cane fields. I remember that because of the brutal and extensive work he developed a chronic pain in his back.”

With four performances starting this Thursday in the Miami-Dade County Auditorium, Un parque en mi casa presents these characters “through a background of sadness and loss.”

They “carry in themselves a remarkable source of humor, healing and strength,” says the program notes of Arca Images, the company in charge of the editing and, according to its website, one of the main producers of bilingual Hispanic theater in South Florida.

I remember that due to the brutal and extensive work he developed a chronic pain in his back

About the cast, the playwright points out that he has two veteran actors that he admires very much, Carlos Acosta Milián and Gretel Trujillo.

Four actors who are working with him for the first time are also part of this production: Claudia Tomás, Daniel Romero, Guillermo Cabré and Ricky Saavedra.

Cruz, who in addition to the Pulitzer has received numerous awards, including those from the Kennedy Center Fund, the American Theatre Critics and the Humana Festival for New American Plays, wrote Un parque en mi casa, his original title, on a commission in 1995 by the McCarter Theater company, of Princeton, New Jersey.

“They invited me to participate in a festival of short plays based on the theme of the home. After having lived for many years in the United States, the subject made me travel through memory and write about my childhood in Cuba,” explains the playwright, who arrived in this country at the age of nine.

According to Cruz, the Russian who appears in the play “is a fictional character who functions as a detonator and at the same time a catalyst, who demystifies the revolutionary socialist romance of that time.” “He makes them all see a very different reality from what they imagined about the system,” he points out.

At the Miami showing, the public will see “a very simple scenery” that serves “to suggest an old house, underpinned by its poor condition. These wooden struts not only work to hold walls, but also as a symbol of sustaining the structure of a revolution that is crumbling.”

After having lived for many years in the United States, the subject made me travel through memory and write about my childhood in Cuba

According to Lillian Guerra’s Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971, the 10 Million Ton Harvest between 1969 and 1970 was “the government’s attempt to revive popular euphoria through massive mobilizations to cut sugar cane and produce a record harvest to defeat underdevelopment.”

But the massive 1970 harvest did not reach ten million tons and damaged the island’s global economy, which was neglected.

“I think many will possibly identify with the loves, dreams and disenchantments of these characters, and the double life they undergo to survive,” Cruz predicts shortly before the premiere.

“The disillusionment, the disappointment continues to be repeated in all parts of the world, but we continue to attach ourselves to the arrogance of hope. The only thing we can’t lose is faith in the good and exercise that power within us and in all our actions,” he said.

Translated by Regina Anavy

____________

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.

The War Over the Expropriated Brands in Cuba Extends to Beer

Born in Miami 56 years ago to Cuban parents, Portuondo considers himself to be the heir to the tradition and history of the Cuban brewery. (EFE)

EFE (via 14ymedio), Miami, Jorge I. Pérez, 29 March 2023 — Cuban-American businessman Manny Portuondo was missing something when he inaugurated La Tropical brewery in Miami two years ago, a replica of the one that existed in Cuba with the same name: its most popular beer, Cristal, which in April will begin to be sold as Tropi Crystal, La Auténtica.

“It’s the authentic one, and we put the history of the beer on the label: ‘Made in 1928 by La Tropical brewery in Havana and now in Miami by its founders’,” Portuondo tells EFE.

The businessman says this while holding a can of Tropi Crystal, which lost the Latin “i” in the middle of the “war” to recover the brands that existed before the Revolution, which began with rum.

Born in Miami 56 years ago to Cuban parents, Portuondo considers himself to be the heir to the tradition and the history of the Cuban brewery La Tropical, which dates back to 1888.

He is the great-great-grandson of Federico Kohly, who sold the land to the Blanco-Herrera family so that, in 1888, he could build a brewery on the banks of the Almendares River. continue reading

The brewery was constructed with colorful gardens, several party rooms, a baseball field and even a castle, at the same time as Park Güell in Barcelona,” according to historian Yaneli Leal del Ojo, author of the book Los Jardines de la Tropical [Tropical Gardens].

Two years ago and after 25 years of research, including a trip to the Island, Portuondo inaugurated La Tropical de Miami, in the bohemian neighborhood of Wynwood.

Then he launched the oldest brand in the portfolio, the Tropical La Original, but he did not have the clear and refreshing Cristal registered in the United States.

“I like to do things well, and legally,” says this “lover of history, gardening and brewing.”

The can of Tropi Crystal La Auténtica, which comes to the US market on April 4, says on its back label, “Enjoy the refreshing and authentic flavor of Miami’s favorite beer.”

“It says that because we are no longer in Cuba. So, this beer is for all the exiles, all the Cuban emigrants who have had to come here since 1959 to make a new life. This beer represents the pride of all of us,” he says.

The Cristal beer that is sold in Cuba is made by the Bucanero brewery, whose factory is in the province of Holguín, and for Portuondo, it is not the authentic one.

“It can only be authentic if it is in the hands of those who created it in 1928, our family and the Blanco-Herrera family, who founded La Tropical and were in charge of managing the brewery until 1960, when the Cuban government took it at gunpoint,” he said.

Portuondo constructed gardens in La Tropical de Miami that are full of symbolism, like the two murals: one represents a “free” tocororo (the Cuban Trogon, Cuba’s national bird) outside an iron roundabout that acts as a cage and another by the artist Rigo Leonart, dedicated to the 11 July 2021 (’11J’) protests on the Island.

“The historical portfolio of La Tropical in Cuba consisted of three main brands of beer and a brand of malt. The beers are La Tropical La Original, which is the brand we launched two years ago and can now be found in more than 700 points of sale in South Florida; the Tropical 50 La Negra, from 1938; and I was missing the Cristal, which was the most popular,” he says.

The Portuondo label has the three royal palms, the original typography and the green, red and white colors of the Cristal, but there is a notable change with the Greek Y.

“We won the Tropi Crystal registration in the United States, where the Cristal brand cannot be sold with an “i” (Latin) because that registration belongs to a Peruvian brewery. We keep the logo and the association with La Tropical, which was the one at the beginning.”

“The recipe is the same, made in a more modern way with automated equipment. In Cuba they call it ’the favorite of Cuba’ and we call it ’the favorite in Miami,’” he said.

Translated by Regina Anavy

____________

‘The Only Thing Taken to Cuba Were Che’s Hands,’ Says the Man Who Captured Him

Cuban-American Félix Rodríguez, the CIA agent who led the operation in Bolivia to capture Guevara. (EFE)

EFE (via 14ymedio), Jorge I. Pérez, Miami, 7 July 2022 –Cuban-American Félix Rodríguez, the CIA agent who led the operation in Bolivia to capture Ernesto Che Guevara that culminated in his execution in 1967, told Efe on Wednesday that “the only thing that could be buried in Cuba” are the hands of the guerrilla.

“The body was never where they say they found it,” he stresses in a telephone conversation. According to Rodríguez emphatically, the Argentine guerrilla “was not buried at the side of the runway with seven other bodies as Fidel (Castro) said; Che was buried at the head of the runway with two more corpses, there were only three.”

A few days before the 25th anniversary of the discovery of Che’s body at the Vallegrande airport (Bolivia), the 81-year-old former CIA agent, retired in Miami, denies the official version of what happened on 28 June 1997.

According to the official Cuban version, the body of the revolutionary leader was found that day in a mass grave at the Vallegrande airport and, after being identified in a hospital in Bolivia, his remains were sent to Cuba, where a mausoleum was erected in his honor in Santa Clara.

According to the media outlet Cubavisión Internacional, the remains of the Argentine guerrilla were found on an abandoned runway in Vallegrande. There, says the media, a group of Cuban experts found the grave where seven guerrilla men were buried, including their leader Ernesto Che Guevara.

“Obviously, if he (Fidel Castro) buried his hands, then there is a part of Che in the Santa Clara monument, because the hands were taken there by the (then) Minister of the Interior (Antonio) Arguedas,” along with a copy of the guerrilla’s diary in Bolivia, says Rodríguez.

According to the former CIA agent, “at dawn a Bolivian doctor went with my partner, (Gustavo) Villoldo, and then they cut off his hands, put them in formalin and put them in a volqueta (dump truck), as they call the pickups, they took Che to the end of the runway where there was a bulldozer that was widening the runway for larger planes to land. continue reading

“And there they buried him, at the end of the runway next to two corpses and Fidel says they found him to one side with seven more. That was not Che Guevara,” he says.

On how it became known that Che was in Bolivia, Rodríguez, whose mission was to save his life, although he now says that his execution was “the best thing that could happen,” recalls that it had to do with the French philosopher and writer Régis Debray.

“It was confirmed when they took (Argentine intellectual Ciro) Busto and Régis Debray prisoner; they went to visit Che and when they were taken prisoner they confirmed that the person was Che Guevara. If it wasn’t for them, it wouldn’t have been known that Che was in Bolivia,” he says.

On October 9, 1967, Rodríguez landed in Bolivia to capture Che and later saw him “tied hand and foot.”

“My mission was to save his life at the request of the US government. It was very important to keep him alive, killing him was a decision of the Bolivian president, General René Barrientos,” he said. It was the Bolivian sergeant Mario Terán who executed Guevara in La Higuera that same day.

According to Rodríguez, the burial of the body “was not a military secret, they simply did not tell anyone.”

“They took a driver that day and buried him at the end of the runway, and gave out the news that he had been cremated and that the ashes had been thrown from a helicopter into the air, which was not true,” he says.

And he adds: “That was the official news that was given to the Bolivian people: that (Che) was cremated and his ashes scattered over the Bolivian jungle, but the truth is that he was buried at the head of the runway, you can put it to bed,” he asserted.

____________

‘The Body Never Forgets’, an Essay on the Concentration Camps in Cuba

The official Cuban press extolling the work of the UMAP camps in the 1960s. Headline: Where work makes the man.

EFE (via 14ymedio), Jorge I. Pérez, Miami, 5 April 2022 — The forced labor camps in which, as in the Soviet gulag, dissidents, religious, homosexuals and artists were confined in the Cuba of the 1960s, left “a lot of pain and trauma” not yet healed, affirms the Cuban historian Abel Sierra Madero, who has just published an essay on this subject with the title El cuerpo nunca olvida [The body never forgets].

Subtitled Trabajo forzado, hombre nuevo y memoria en Cuba (1959-1980) [Forced work, new man and memory in Cuba (1959-1980)], the book brings together, for the first time, memorabilia, personal photos, testimonial sources and fictional literature on what was officially called Military Production Assistance Units (UMAP), “Because it must be said that I handle fiction as truth,” Sierra told Efe in an interview.

A specialist in studies of sexuality, concentration camps, the Cold War, memory and trauma, Sierra, who has lived in the US for years, interviewed more than 30 people or relatives of people who between 1965 and 1968 were in the UMAP. The interviews were conducted between Cuba, Miami, New Jersey and New York.

According to Sierra (1976) in the book’s introduction, “the UMAPs formed part of a more complex economic system within a broad project of social engineering.”

For this purpose, dozens of forced labor camps were created in the Camagüey plain, the Cuban province where sugar cane was best grown, and some 30,000 people passed through them between 1965 and 1968, according to data from the author. continue reading

“The UMAPs had a double meaning: re-educational, political and ideological, and also an economic one,” he comments.

“They were plantation enclaves. In the book I call it ’the development of the socialist plantation’, based on a colonial market which was that of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” he says.

“The implementation of these camps allowed the State to appropriate a large part of the workforce without having to compensate them financially,” he says.

“There is still a lot of pain and trauma. An interesting part in this book is the theme of silence; you can see how silences speak. I was interested in taking the witness to that place of remembrance and denunciation,” Sierra details.

The volume shows “how the notion of the ’New Man’, which was the fundamental term to establish the revolutionary ideological structure and architecture, also served to implement forced labor camps, to manage power and create control mechanisms.”

Retrieving “los escombros,” something he prefers to call, in English, “the debris,” processing the information and writing a 528-page essay took him about a decade, he confessed shortly before presenting his book this Saturday at the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, in Miami.

The cover is an image by Canadian photojournalist Paul Kidd taken at the entrance to one of the camps in 1966. It shows an armed soldier next to a fence of 21 strands of barbed wire.

Sierra comments that the photo is the product of Kidd’s audacity, who appeared there alone and without warning.

Hundreds of homosexuals were taken to these gulags to be “cured” according to the concept of the Cuban revolution that saw the nation as a sick body and the State as a medical benefactor, the book’s publisher, Rialta, said in a presentation on Facebook.

Benjamín de la Torre, “a boy who moved in art circles, committed suicide after that experience,” Sierra points out.

Singer-songwriter Pablo Milanés entered the UMAP at the age of 23, but according to Sierra his stay there “was an open secret until he considered it important for his career to unfreeze this issue.”

About the experience, Milanés wrote the song 14 pelos y un día, in which he invokes the wire fences, which were reduced from 21 strands to 14 when international criticism began to surface, according to 14ymedio.

Sierra was unable to interview Milanés after two attempts. “He was so traumatized that when everything was ready for the interview he canceled at the last minute,” he says.

The few available sources, beyond the official newspaper archives that “tell a different story from the UMAP,” were texts written by religious inmates of the camps “from a narrative of forgiveness.”

“Then I realized that I had to carry out a deep investigation that collected the before and after of the camps, the inside and the outside,” explains the author, who included a bonus track touching on the Mariel exodus in his essay (1980).

“An archive is created to be able to be destroyed, and that is the logic in which the Cuban regime has operated: Create a mystique around the archive, create a morbidity about its existence or disappearance to make believe reconstruction is an impossibility.”

“It has been shown how a history without an archive can be reconstructed, and that is what I have done, a history of the UMAP without an official archive. I have created my own,” says this professor at Florida International University (FIU).

____________

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: