José A. Adrián Torres – Translating Cuba

By Pretending, the Cuban Ended Up Not Really Knowing Who He Is

In Report Against Myself, Eliseo Alberto confesses to what many Cubans learned to do to survive: speak with two voices

In the Cuba of the report, blame is not settled: it is archived. / 14ymedio

14ymedio, Málaga, José A. Adrián Torres, November 15, 2025 — There are books that are neither written nor read: they confess. Informe contra mí mismo (Report Against Myself), by Eliseo Alberto, belongs to this rare category. It is the story of a man who writes a police report — not against the enemy, but against his own family — and discovers that the real informer is not the one who signs the paper, but the system that managed to make it possible.

The novel, written from Mexican exile and silenced in official Cuba, could be read as the Cuban version of The Lives of Others. In the German film, a Stasi agent spies on a playwright and ends up redeeming himself out of compassion. In Report against Myself, on the other hand, the narrator does not redeem himself: he undresses. He does not save anyone. He only tries to save his conscience. Surveillance does not come from above, but from within. The snitch becomes his own victim.

Both works share the same moral axis: the abolition of the individual by the totalitarian state. But Eliseo Alberto adds something that the film cannot offer: the warmth of betrayed affection. There is no cold basement or interrogation room. There is a house in Havana, a poet father, a mother who puts out a lit cigarette, a family that sings while the son — a soldier in the reserves — receives the order to spy on them. It is horror with the smell of rum and the sad light of the kerosene lamp.

Eliseo Alberto was the son of Eliseo Diego and nephew of Fina García Marruz, heirs to a poetic tradition that believed in the dignity of language. That is why his testimony hurts even more: because it shows how a regime that proclaimed itself the redeemer ended up destroying even faith in the word.

The Lives of Others ends with a redemption; Report Against Myself does not. In the Cuba of the report, the guilt is not expiated: it is archived. The author says it with bitter irony: “I am imprisoned in a file.” That bureaucratic file is the real Cuban prison: one that does not need bars, just a people educated to distrust themselves. And he adds on another page: “No one is entirely guilty of his fear.”

Eliseo Alberto was not a counter-revolutionary; he went from “red” to “pink.” He loved the Revolution as one loves a youth, and that makes it more painful. Because he understood that the great success of the process was not literacy or reform, but to perfect the art of depersonalization. The Revolution turned obedience into moral virtue, loyalty into a test of faith continue reading

and fear into a form of belonging. It taught how to give up the self without feeling that it was given up.

The Cuban speaks like a militant in the ration store, a skeptic at home and a victim with foreigners or in exile.

From that moral experiment emerged a phenomenon that still defines Cuba: the multifaceted self. It is not a psychological split, but a pragmatic identity that rotates according to the context without being dissociated: a strategy of moral and linguistic adaptation in an environment where personal coherence could be dangerous. It is the ability, or need, to change both face and language according to the context. The Cuban speaks like a militant in the ration store, a skeptic at home and a victim with foreigners or in exile. Each environment activates a code, a lexicon, a “way of thinking.” That verbal and moral plasticity, born of fear, ended up becoming — like jokes and humor — another survival strategy: learning to say the “right” thing where appropriate.

It is not hypocrisy, but adaptation. In a country where sincerity could cost at least a punishment, work or freedom, discourse was fragmented. This created a culture of interchangeable opinions, where words serve to protect, not to reveal. The result: a people who, by force of pretense, ended up not knowing at all who they are.

Report Against Myself is the autopsy of that loss. Eliseo Alberto does not accuse, he does not pontificate; he shows how the system managed to install a censor within each citizen. And although the author wrote from exile, his book is still relevant on the Island. Every time someone shuts up out of prudence or fear, disguises his thinking in order to survive or changes his vocabulary so as not to be out of tune, he himself rewrites that report.

“The Revolution has grown old, but its most enduring work is still alive: the Cuban divided between what he says, what he keeps silent -but thinks- and what he seems to say.” That depersonalization triumphed where the five-year plans and the harvest of ten million failed.

‘Report Against Myself’ is not a political allegation, but an inner atonement

Perhaps the only thing left to do, on behalf of all those who unknowingly signed it, is to write the reverse: a report in one’s own favor. A report in favor of freedom. Even so, lucidity and candor do not exonerate. Eliseo Alberto was a victim and participant at the same time, like many of the intellectuals of his generation. The problem — and here is something uncomfortable — is that many, for aesthetic, family or ideological fidelity, kept silent too long. Some did so out of fear; others, believing they could still save the project from within. But when the cultural and moral repression was already evident, staying was also a form of complicity, even if it was passive or sentimental.

This moral ambiguity should be recognized: not to judge it harshly, but to remember that the sensitivity and intelligence with which a pain of conscience is expressed in writing are not enough when a long past silence perpetuates the damage. Eliseo Alberto faced the monster, yes, but he did it late. And he paid for it with a chronic remorse, not with the personal and committed political action that would have been more redemptive. Report Against Myself is not a political allegation, but an inner atonement.

His friend Héctor Abad Faciolince, from Colombia, expressed it with the clarity of someone who did not share this servitude: he admired his talent, but could not forgive him for taking so long to break the “spell.” That remark, more fraternal than cruel, sums up the moral dilemma of a generation that believed that the word — poetry, essay, criticism from within — could redeem a Revolution that had already lost its soul, given itself to the same “devil” … that it itself had created.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Cuba: Voluntary Work, Compulsory Enthusiasm

How the ideal of the New Man turned into an empty rite that Cubans transformed with humor and resistance

As they used to say, now with resigned insight, voluntary work “builds character.”/ Victoria

14ymedio, Malaga, José A. Adrián Torres, October 25, 2025 — As a child in Spain, in the camps of the Catholic Scout Movement, I remember that there was also something called volunteer work. It was carried out on Saturdays and consisted of performing tasks, which although they appeared to be spontaneous, were actually assigned in advance. Everything had to be done “of its own accord” but under the eyes of the “pack leaders,” referring to the The Jungle Book that was a reference for the Cub Scouts movement.

That routine, a mixture of discipline and fervor, was clothed in a mystique: to serve others joyfully under the motto vale quien sirve, We Serve. Over the years I understood that beyond youthful idealism, it was also a form of directed moral learning, an obedience wrapped in enthusiasm.

In Cuba, that spirit of cheerful discipline and youthful symbolism had its own version: a kind of tropical Baden-Powell Scouts Association

The so-called “voluntary work” was never exactly a practice of solidarity, but rather an ideological tool designed to shape the new citizen: austere, loyal, cooperative, obedient. As a Cuban friend commented to me, “Its value was not productive but formative, to transform the young person into a collective being, to go from the self to the collective.” The goal was not the amount of cane cut, but the reformed soul with revolutionary spirit.

The rituals of the socialist utopia, copied from the Soviet model, met with an obstacle in the Caribbean that was impossible to overcome: the Creole and Hispanic idiosyncrasies of Cervantes

That moral training project also had its class bias: the intended to ‘proletarize’ the remnants of the bourgeoisie, discipline the professional and domesticate the peasant farmers, who were clinging to their land like the wealthy kulaks did to theirs, when Lenin wanted to make an example of them. But the dreamed-of New Man ended up wanting to be a foreigner–and many did–or he merely got old.

In a way, the system of pioneers with red bandanas — copied from the USSR and countries like Romania and East Germany — recalled the Scout movement, although under another banner and another creed: that of the Revolution.

But the result was different. The rituals of the socialist utopia, copied from the Soviet model, met with an obstacle in the Caribbean that was impossible to overcome: the Creole and Hispanic spirit of Cervantes.

The tropical culture did not fit with parades, uniforms or doctrinal solemnity. Where communism called for fervor and discipline, the Cuban responded with a story — a joke, a chiste, we would say in Spain. Where heroism was required, mockery was born.

Popular humor and passive resistance were disguised in Cuba as “revolutionary participation.” Volunteer work was thus transformed into a layperson’s mass in which the faithful feigned devotion while whispering jokes.

Jorge Mañach had accurately described it decades earlier, defining the joking as “a mockery of any non-imperative form of authority, the art of not taking anything seriously. The Spanish chiste had a close relative: the Andalusian guasa, banter, that sarcastic and corrosive irony that — like the choteo — disarms solemnity with a smile, especially in its most popular and festive form: the carnival, with its satirical chirigotas — limericks — and cuplés, couplets.

Voluntary work, conceived as an academy of socialist conscience, turned out to be a masquerade of appearances

Deep down, voluntary work was the apotheosis of that conflict between obedience and humor. It was a faithless liturgy, an obligatory sacrifice to demonstrate ideological purity. And the Cuban, who cannot stand inflated pomp without a nickname or a joke, turned the ideal of the New Man into a tragicomic character: a hero of the sugarcane harvest with a rogue soul of the Golden Age, apparently devoted but a master in the art of escaping with wit.

That attitude, so Cuban, has deeper roots: it is inherited from the Hispanic spirit, that mocking skepticism that runs through Lazarillo and Quixote, where laughter does not destroy but plays down dogma. Cervantes ridiculed chivalrous dreams with the same ingenuity that Cubans parodied revolutionary fervor: both made humor and sarcasm a form of lucidity.

When the communist ideal traveled from the Russian steppes to the Caribbean beaches, it changed its accent and temperature. The parades were filled with music, slogans were made into songs and collectivism became a pretext for excuses, so classic and “evocative” in more than one sense for Cubans in the so-called schools in the countryside.

Communism, when it arrived in Cuba, was tropicalized: it gained rhythm, but lost gravity. And the voluntary work, envisioned as an academy of socialist conscience, ended up being a masquerade of appearances, in which everyone complied so they wouldn’t be reported. They pretended to obey but laughed inside, in order to not surrender.

Perhaps that laugh was the most Cuban of all forms of resistance. It was not epic or head-on, but effective: an intimate resistance, intelligent, like Sancho Panza, against the pomp of power.

As many said — now with resigned lucidity — voluntary work “builds character,” or even that crueler joke, that you would get “a kick in the butt” as a stimulus. In these minimal phrases a whole philosophy was condensed: obey without believing; laugh without ceasing to survive. Voluntary work, in short, did not create the New Man. What it formed was the national vanguard joker, able to feign enthusiasm while mocking, in silence, the solemnity that oppressed him.

Humor has been, for Cubans, their manual of resistance to the bitter drink that the bartender of the country’s history served them… and which history itself will not absolve.

Acknowledmemts:
I would like to thank Jorge Mayor Ríos for his valuable contributions, comments and suggestions to this text, the result of long conversations that over the years helped me better understand the complex contemporary history of revolutionary Cuba and the peculiarities of the Cuban soul. It was also he who, for the first time, put in my hands the essays of Jorge Mañach, the starting point for many of the ideas developed here.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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‘To Resolve’, the Art of Survival in Cuba

The RAE dictionary does not yet recognize the meaning of the verb that defines life on the Island under real socialism.

Admiration does not fall on those who work hard, but on those who solve the best problems. / 14ymedio

14ymedio, José A. Adrián Torres, Malaga (Spain), 5 October 2025 — Cuba—like so many other nations—proudly displays its national symbols: the national bird, the tocororo; the national tree, the royal palm; the national flower, the white butterfly. And even a musical group, with the mordacity that comes with Creole humor, dared to add to the list what should be the national mammal: the pig.

But the island also has an emblem that no other country would dare proclaim and that doesn’t appear in civics manuals or on propaganda posters: its national verb. That verb, which isn’t conjugated in the dictionaries of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) with the precise meaning it has in Cuba, but which has explained daily life for more than three decades: To resolve.

Because if anything has characterized the average Cuban since the Special Period, it’s the need to solve problems. To resolve is not “solving a problem,” as the Academy in Madrid still insists. Solving problems, in Cuba, is finding what is missing, with ingenuity, connections, or cunning. Solving problems means putting food on the table when the state doesn’t guarantee it; it is getting gasoline in the shadow of the Cupet*; it is finding a spare part for the old Lada; it’s “inventing” whatever comes along. Solving problems isn’t a technique: it is an art of survival.

Before getting to that verb, it is worth remembering that Cuba has given the world much more than official symbols. Its music crosses borders: from Lecuona to Formell, from son to mambo, from danzón to bolero, leading to the omnipresent salsa and reggaeton that resonate on every corner today.

Its literature left universal names: Martí, Carpentier, Lezama, Padura. Even sports were patriotic: baseball, adopted on the island and transformed continue reading

into a continental passion—until the more recent arrival of soccer fans.

And in language, the island and its Caribbean neighbors added treasures that the RAE eventually accepted: huracán from Taíno; guateque for the campesina festival; maraca and bongó for instruments that are now universal; and ñángara, which already sounds like an ideological relic—although some will remain.

The verb crystallized in the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union left Cuba without subsidies, and with an economic black hole.

But alongside these established contributions, the most “essential” is missing, the most genuine, the one that encapsulates the experience of several generations: To resolve. This verb crystallized in the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union left Cuba without subsidies and with an economic black hole. Where there was scarcity, nothingness appeared. And with it, the obligation to invent, scrounge, and hustle. The Special Period transformed millions into acrobats of ingenuity and gave them a verb that governs their lives to this day.

An old Cuban friend, who endured those years with resignation and now lives in Miami, summed it up this way: “Cubans don’t steal, my friend; they take what’s coming to them. It’s just that they haven’t gotten it yet.” The phrase encapsulates a twisted but coherent ethic: the State promised, failed to deliver, and the citizen feels entitled to take what they need. They don’t steal: they resolve.

And among the middle-ranking “cadres,” those second-tier leaders and rank-and-file militants, another recurring justification circulated when it came to “interfering” in something: “Cadre, defense is allowed.” It was like saying: ” You can be unfaithful, but not disloyal.” My friend claims to have heard it thousands of times. Phrases like that shaped the socialist morality of the “New Man,” in which to resolve was articulated with egalitarianism and other supposed “values” of the Revolution.

This ethic has disrupted the scale of prestige. In Cuba, true prosperity lies not in a university diploma or an academic degree, but in access to the circuit of the resolvable. The social pyramid is inverted—although perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there is no pyramid, but rather that there are only those at the top and those at the bottom: doctors and engineers survive on symbolic salaries, while the hotel bartender, the taxi driver who charges in dollars, or the person who handles tourism contacts earn more than a doctor in Physics. Medicine is prestigious, but tourism—and remittances and other junk—resolve, at least until recently they did. And everyone knows that.

That’s why on the island the national verb is conjugated like a calling card: “How do you resolve it?”, “Did you resolve it?”, “That guy really resolved it.” The admiration falls not on the one who works hard, but on the one who resolves it the best. It becomes a national championship of cunning, where cheating ceases to be shameful and becomes a social virtue.

The cost, of course, is high. To resolve erodes any notion of legality, merit, or professional ethics. It normalizes living on the blurred borders of what is permissible, turning “invention” into a system and precariousness into a culture. To resolve is the verb of lack, but also the shield that justifies everyday deception.

The cost, of course, is high. To resolve erodes any notion of legality, merit, or professional ethics.

The paradox is that a country that enriched Spanish with musical and Taino voices, that contributed poetry, rhythms, and universal symbols, has been reduced to a verb that the Academy doesn’t recognize with the nuance that the Cuban street brings to it. It would be fair to add:

To resolve, in Cuba: refers to the art of surviving under real socialism.

That definition would say more than many official reports. After all, dictionaries capture what people use and experience. And Cubans have been conjugating that verb in the present tense for over thirty years: “I resolve, you resolve, he resolves.” In the plural, it sounds even clearer: “You all resolve.” And those who go into exile continue to carry it with them, as a mark of origin: they resolve in Miami, Madrid, or Cancún.

Meanwhile, the island continues to present its symbols: the tocororo, the royal palm, the white butterfly, the pig as an informal emblem. But more than any other symbol, what defines Cuba today is a verb. And that verb, ironic and sad, is not to sing, not to dance, not to dream: it is to resolve.

*Cupet – for more, see here.
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Electricity in Cuba Is a Prize and Life is Spent Waiting for It

People are grateful for the light bulb that turns on again, even if it goes out tomorrow.

Cubans are trapped in a cycle, veering between anxiety and hope. / 14ymedio

14ymedio, José A. Adrián Torres, Malaga, September 7, 2025 — When the lights come back on after an hours-long blackout, it is a cause for celebration in Cuba. The arrival of an oil tanker gives rise to rumors and headlines that provide some relief, if only for a few days. A package of frozen chicken at the corner store can become a neighborhood’s main topic of conversation. Now, there is even a rumor circulating about a supposed “Phase 10,” a ten-year promise that is more fantasy and metaphor than an actual plan. It feels like a sophisticated form of deferred gratification, a dangling carrot that never relieves the hunger of the present, keeping citizens trapped in an endless state of wait-and-see. The “terminal phase” of a spent regime with no exit strategy, disguised using the language of plans, stages, and that reliable catchphrase, “We are taking measures.”

The logic is simple. Complete deprivation leads to disaster but intermittent deprivation keeps hope alive. Cuba’s leaders know this. The behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner knew this when he discovered that pigeons, pecking at a disc without knowing when they would receive food, did so more insistently than when the reward was predictable. Parents who dole out treats in dribs and drabs to encourage desired behaviors know this. So does a regime that turns everyday life into an experiment in behavioral psychology, not giving you what you deserve but offering you — from time to time — a spark, a respite, a promise. Just enough to keep you docile and expectant, and to stave off rebellion

The Cuban people, trapped in this cycle, veer between anxiety and hope. The are grateful to be able to turn on lights again but realize they might not be able to do so tomorrow. They welcome the pound of rice but they still cannot get meat. They latch onto the news of a ten-year economic plan even though they know that none of the previous plans worked. continue reading

How many times do you have to peck at the disc to before you can feel the joy of turning on a lamp, eating regularly or living with a sense of predictability?

Inevitably, the question arises: How many times do you have to peck at the disc before you can feel the joy of turning on a lamp, eating regularly or living with a sense of predictability? I feel it personally while waiting for the next call to see my “foster” nephews — ages ten and three — whom I love as if they were my own. Every encounter with them is a gift to me. But that gift does not always come when I am looking for it. Their mother manages these visits like unexpected rewards. Sometimes she gives me a last-minute heads-up. “If you want to see them,” she warns, “come now because we’re about to leave.”

I recognize this routine from my academic training as a psychologist as an example of variable-contingency reinforcement. I do not know how many times I will have to follow its rules, or when I will be rewarded with a visit with the children. While this uncertainty causes anxiety, it also makes me eager as I await the next call.

My mother used to describe something similar during her childhood in Spain in the 1940s, when a system of rationing similar to that in Cuba was in force. She would be given a doll as a Christmas present but, after playing with it for awhile, it was put away until the following year “so it would not get damaged.” The gift did actually exist but it was a thing denied her, a mixture of fantasy and frustration.

This is what an entire country is feeling today, transformed into a laboratory of intermittent reinforcement, where life is reduced to waiting for the next “prize,” which is simply the desire to live with dignity.

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When the Cocktail Gets Cold: The Decline of the Art of Serving in a Cuba Without Tourism

Bartenders and maître d’s trained in schools such as the Hotel Sevilla or La Ferminia return to oblivion or exile, dragging with them the lost legacy of Cuban cocktail making and hospitality.

Constante Ribalaigua preparing his famous daiquiri frappé at El Floridita, circa 1935. / Historic photograph in the public domain

14ymedio, José A. Adrián Torres, Malaga (Spain), 21 June 2025 — In Cuba, there was a time when serving well was an art. Not a mechanical gesture or a hollow formula, but a form of dignity: serving with elegance, speaking with restraint, presenting a cocktail with precision and courtesy. That art was gradually lost after the 1959 Revolution, marginalized by ideological prejudices that associated professional hospitality with the bourgeois and the foreign.

Decades later, with the rise of tourism in the 1990s, the island attempted to recover this invisible heritage. Hospitality schools retrained service professionals, historic bars were restored, and, with discretion, many anonymous workers restored Cuba to an international standard of hospitality. But today, this rebirth is in danger: the crisis, the exodus, and the lack of succession once again jeopardize the art of serving.

This is a story of loss, recovery, and perhaps, new forgetting.

A shared history: from Ribalaigua and Chicote to the Creole soul of the cocktail

The art of serving—like the art of mixing rum and lime with precision—didn’t come to Cuba through tourism or foreign investment. It was part of its tradition. In the 1920s and 1930s, Havana was one of the world’s epicenters of cocktail making. At El Floridita, a Spanish immigrant with a Cuban heart named Constante Ribalaigua perfected the daiquiri as if it were a work of liquid engineering, creating the famous daiquiri frappé. In Madrid, Perico Chicote founded the bar that would bear his name and which would eventually be considered the world’s first “cocktail museum.”

The two met. They shared ideas, recipes, and even a trip to Varadero in the 1950s to visit the Arechabala distillery, the birthplace of Havana Club rum. The friendship between Chicote and Ribalaigua was more than a professional gesture: it symbolized a brotherhood between two mutually admired bartending cultures. In his recipe books — My 500 Cocktails and The Wet Law — Chicote included versions of the mojito and the daiquiri, helping to preserve Cuban recipes even when ingredients and bartenders — in plain English, or cantineros, in Spanish — became scarce on the island.

This hybrid tradition—Creole in its roots, Spanish in its method—survived for decades in manuals, in technical gestures, in the way of twisting a lemon peel or presenting a wine list. It was this imprint that inspired, in the 1990s, an attempt to recover lost excellence: recovering cocktails wasn’t about importing a foreign fad, but rather about rediscovering the best of themselves.

The rebirth of good service: Hotel Sevilla, La Ferminia, and the discreet masters

When tourism returned to Cuba in the 1990s, it wasn’t enough to restore facades and fill menus with rum and lobster. Something more difficult was needed: recovering the dignity of service, the art of providing good continue reading

service, lost after decades of neglect and official disdain. It was then that hospitality schools re-emerged—with state support, international agreements, and a great deal of individual commitment—especially those at the Sevilla Hotel and La Ferminia in Havana.

The Sevilla Hotel’s Tourism Training School (Formatur), active since 1969, had quietly survived, training generations of waiters and bartenders for formal events, embassies, and official events. Its classrooms taught much more than techniques: they taught a code of composure, precision, and courtesy that contrasted with the neglect prevailing in many sectors. There, service was spoken of as a culture, not as servitude.

Something similar happened at La Ferminia, a former mansion belonging to the wealthy Montalvo family, converted into a state culinary school under the name “Sergio Pérez.” It trained chefs, waiters, and maîtres d’s who would later work at the Council of State, the Convention Center, or in restaurants designated by the government to serve heads of state and distinguished visitors. The standard was high. Many former students still remember with respect the meticulousness of their instructors, their careful presentation, their mastery of languages, and their attention to detail.

From these centers emerged the professionals who would restore Cuba to an international standard of hospitality, especially in emblematic establishments such as El Floridita, La Bodeguita del Medio, the bar at the Hotel Nacional, and the now legendary Café del Oriente, a symbol of the restoration of Havana’s historic center.

And among all these professionals, maître d’ Dionisio Hernández holds a special place. Since arriving in Havana in the 1960s, he worked in numerous iconic restaurants and cabarets—from El Encanto and the Paradise Club to the 1830 and the Tropicana—where he rose from clerk to maître d’. In 1972, he joined the Sevilla Hotel School as a trainer and later joined La Ferminia, where he also served as assistant director of Gastronomic Services. A key figure in the Café del Oriente protocol team, he was responsible for serving state figures—including monarchs, such as the former King of Spain—with quiet, unpretentious elegance. He wasn’t celebrated, nor did he receive any revolutionary merit, but those who trained under his guidance remember him as a true master: for what he taught without raising his voice. Even after his retirement in 2005, he continued to teach at Café del Oriente until 2018.

Like him, many anonymous professionals silently maintained what the system failed to appreciate: the art of attention to detail, of the proper greeting, of a well-poured glass, of a well-explained dish or dessert, of respect for the customer as a guest. Without them, the rebirth of the 1990s would have been a mere facade.

A new blackout: apathy, exodus, and the loss of a legacy

That renaissance of the 1990s, so labored over by discreet figures and institutions that revived the tradition of good service, is beginning to fade again today, the victim of a bitter cocktail: the economic crisis, the collapse of tourism, and the disenchantment of those who professionally sustained it for decades.

It is enough to walk through the rooms of yesteryear to notice the difference. At Café del Oriente—once a beacon of elegance, impeccable service, and the setting for official receptions—today, both customers and trained professionals are scarce. The schools no longer retain the best. Iconic bars survive more out of nostalgia than excellence. And the bartenders and maîtres d’s who once learned to serve kings now wait in lines at consulates or dream of Yuma.

The term is popular on the island: to go to Yuma means to leave the country, to seek one’s fortune in the United States or any other place where the craft has value. Many self-employed workers in the restaurant sector, who once opened small private restaurants, signature bars, or cafes with carefully crafted cocktails, have had to close or reinvent themselves with the bare minimum. Others haven’t even had that option: they emigrated. The dignity of service cannot be eaten, especially when everything else is missing.

In Cuba, serving with care is no longer taught as it once was. Or it is taught, but with resignation, knowing that those who know how to do it well are probably already thinking of leaving. And what was once a symbol of national culture—the impeccable bartender, the elegant waiter, the invisible and efficient maître d’— is once again left out of the official narrative. As if it didn’t matter.

And yet, it matters. It matters because the art of serving is also a form of mutual respect, of civility, of memory. Because Cuba was great not only for its cocktails or its flavors, but for the way it presented them. Because attentive service is also a cultural heritage, and losing it—once again—is letting a country die that could still have proudly served its best drink.

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Cuba’s Embassy in Mexico Led the Fight Against Central American Dictatorships

Mexico has made public the 411 files on the espionage carried out of Fidel Castro by Mexican security forces. (Luz Escobar)

EFE (via 14ymedio), José Antonio Torres, Mexico City, 28 March2019 — In the 1960s Cuba used its embassy in Mexico to direct movements against those they considered dictatorships in Latin America, according to espionage archives declassified by the Mexican government.

In a version of 411 files Mexico has made public on the espionage carried out of Fidel Castro by Mexican security forces, both when he was in Mexico and in power in Cuba, it is noted that the Cuban embassy served as its focal point for these activities in the region.

“The Cuban Embassy in Mexico is in charge of directing in Latin America the various movements, both against the so-called Central American dictatorships and against the United States of America,” Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate (DFS) states in a report dated 1960 to which Efe had access. continue reading

In those years the first target of these activities was the Nicaraguan Government, when the Somoza clan was already in power, “and as a concrete case we can cite the armed incursion in the Segovias in the month of March in which nine people died,” the file emphasizes.

The reports about the activity that Cuban diplomats carried out from Mexico were always part Mexican intelligence’s surveillance of Castro, inlcuding when he was in power, as they considered him a factor of influence in social movements in Latin America.

“As a result of his coming to power, the various groups of political asylees distributed in Latin American countries tried to follow his example,” highlighted the offices of the DFS, an entity that disappeared in 1985 amid accusations of corruption.

However, the Mexican espionage noted in their reports, now housed in the National General Archive, that the Mexican communist groups had no links with the group headed by Fidel Castro, a situation that continued after his conquest of power and in the following years.

Mexican security prepared a detailed report of it first encounter with Castro, capturing him on June 21, 1956, in a car with license plates from Miami in the neighborhood of Polanco, after a year of following him through reports from Cuba that warned that he was preparing a coup against the Batista government.

Castro was arrested with several men, including his bodyguard identified as Universe Sanchez, by Mexican Captain Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, whom Fidel always treated as a friend, and who became Secretary of the Interior in the presidency of Carlos Salinas (1988- 1994).

Even then, Mexican spies warned of Castro’s links with “political exiles of different nationalities,” mainly those of Nicaragua and Costa Rica, led by Manuel Flores Gómez, and those of Peru, headed by César Pardo Acosta.

In another report, Gutiérrez Barrios affirms that Castro was last seen in Ciudad Victoria, in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, and confirms reports that he had already embarked on the yacht Granma.

The triumph of the Cuban Revolution, on January 1, 1959, revived the Mexico’s interest into maintaining espionage over Castro, with reports on the state of his health, his trip to the former Soviet Union, and a speech where he talked about the rumors related to the “disappearance” of Che Guevara.

The resignation of Castro from the position of prime minister to serve as Commander of the Armed Forces was highlighted in a report dated July 17, 1959, in which Mexican security already warns that an external aggression against the Cuban regime was being prepared (at a time when Castro was still in Mexico).

“There are three groups ready to attack Cuba,” the report in the Mexican archives detailed.

The first group was in the Dominican Republic with the Cuban general José Pedraza; another was in Miami with Rolando Masferrer, and the third was elsewhere in the United States with Batista’s brother-in-law, General Roberto Fernández.

Castro’s speech of 15 January 1966 at the close of the First Tricontinental Conference of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations, occupy a good part of the Mexican files on Castro.

The Mexican authorities determined in 2002 to allow the public disclosure of the confidential files of the Mexican espionage services from 1920 and 1985, and the new administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and has extended it to the documents of the Center of Investigation and National Security (Cisen).

The current archives of Mexican political espionage originated with the governments emanating from the Mexican Revolution (1910-1921) with organizations such as the First Section and the National Directorate of Intelligence, which were followed by the DFS and the CISEN, now replaced by a new entity in the current government.

In 1985, the AGN received 3,091 cases with files generated by the Office of Political and Social Research and the DFS in the period from 1920 to 1975; in 2002, it added 4,223 boxes with 58,302 Cisen files.

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