Category: Lilianne Ruiz

Socialist Legality / Lilianne Ruiz

Lourdes Esquivel, Lady in White, was also detained in the jails of the Santiago Station of Vegas last October 14.  When she left her house, 20 men — at least those whom she could count — threw themselves on her and told her:  “There is no mass; jail.”  She was conducted to the aforementioned Police Station and locked up with a woman with HIV, to whom one of the jailors said: “Do you want me to give you a knife?”

Thursday night we visited the home of Lourdes and her husband Jose Diaz Silva, who is president of the Opposition Movement for a New Republic, and is also a former political prisoner.

Earlier, last October 2nd, Jose Diaz Silva was detained near his house (located at 5th street Number 18406/184 and final. Apartment Complex Porvenir, Boyeros, La Habana)  At the time of his detention, he was in the company of Lourdes Esquivel, his wife, and they took him in a patrol car number 870 to the Station of Santiago de Las Vegas.  The cause, on this occasion, was his having occupied some several printed pages with the Citizen Demand For Another Cuba, which he has promoted since the Civil Society inside the Island, and which have been signed by a good number of Cubans, in order to urge the government (which we cannot elect via free elections) to ratify the Covenant of Political and Civil Rights, and the United Nations’ Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, signed by the Cuban Government February 28, 2008, in New York City without having ever been implemented, apparently because of not being forced to do so until ratified by a second signature which is what the Citizen Demand is asking for.

Silva was transported to the Santiago Station of Las Vegas, in the first place; but then he was transferred to another Station about which they gave no information to Lourdes until the moment in which he was freed.  Meanwhile, she did not stop seeking that information about his whereabouts, going to all the Police Stations in Havana, accompanied by one of her children.

In the interim, on October 3, the police returned to the house.  Lourdes’ younger son and his wife were alone, because Lourdes was searching, without finding an answer from the authorities, where her husband had been taken when they removed him from the Santiago Station of Las Vegas.

The police threatened to break down the door, they were accompanied by State Security, commanded by agent “Joan.”  The made a search and “appropriated” a series of the family’s articles and goods, whose list I reproduce here below, and that, starting now I will  begin to call by its name, given that the action carried out by the police and State Security is clearly and plainly a theft, stealing, justified by the political and social position of the police and State Security in Cuba.

The list of articles stolen by the police and State security is as follows:

1.  A laptop.

2.  An Amazon Kindle, electronic book, which forms part of the collection of the Independent Library that functions in the home.

3.  Two cameras,  one completely new.

4.  Cards of the said cameras.

5.  Flash drives.

6.  Mp4.

7.  A broken printer.

8.  Hundreds of photos, among them family photos.

9.  300 C.U.C. (convertible money)

10.  Playing cards, printed on the back with a promotion of Cambio and another with promotion for the release and memory of the 75 of the Black Spring of 2003, Cuba’s darkest spring.

11.  T-shirts used to promote Cambio, another one of Bacardi.

12.  Promotion caps for the Library and some 50 Cambio bracelets.

13.  Three thousand seven hundred cards with information about the members of the Opposition Movement for a New Republic.

14.  Two hundred accounts books bought in the Book Fair . . . of the Cabana.

15.  Hundreds of books:  literature, essays, religious, political, science fiction, youth.  Records and other documents belonging to the Library.

16.  1 Cuban flag.

17.  1 flag of the Movement.

18.  1 flag of the Resistance.

19.  Poster of the Library.

20.  The Poster of the Library that was placed on the Doorway and the stickers placed on the door.

21.  Passport and documents that were issued to the family members since 2007.

22.  A 64 GB iPod.

The closing of the story, as much as its middle and its beginning, serves to denounce the justice system between the citizens and the State in this dictatorship model, and to put in evidence the human and intellectual quality of those State Security agents that have been “improved,” by the ideological political chapter of the Cuban education system, and very especially in the formation of the political police which is the upper echelon of that moral ladder.

Agent “Joan” (persistent bully also of Sara Marta Fonseca, because she is in charge of repression of the Boyeros municipality) threatened Silva that:  “They’re not going to let the Opposition Movement for a New Republic rise.”  Every time Silva has a compendium of his members “they going to throw it out.”  And “Now that Silva has a full record, ’they’ could close it, sending him to prison and giving him 20 years.”

October 5 at 5 in the afternoon Silva was freed and before learning of the sacking of his house in his absence, agent “Joan” imposed a fine of 200 pesos for the crime of “Hoarding Books.”

I am not pulling your leg; in Socialism that is possible and the crime of the Tribunal’s “Moral Conviction” for which Silva was sentence fo 6 years in jail in 1994.  (And although this is material for another post, also on that occasion they evicted his wife from the house where she had lived for 7 years with her three children and made her live in a wooden room attached to the house that they had expropriated and in which today another family lives.  In spite the facts that all the lawyers and housing inspectors recognize that the property is still that of the Silva Esquivel family, the socialist legality permits these injustices that do not exist in an independent Tribunal that protects the citizen from the “omnipotent” State).

The members of the Opposition Movement for a New Republic have been visited and threatened equally by the “State Security.”

Which of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have not been violated in Cuba in these 53 years?

 Translated by: Boston College Cuban-American Student Association

October 23 2012

The Death of Oswaldo Payá / Lilianne Ruíz

In the Savior of the World Church in the Cerro neighborhood

Absurd and suspicious. No matter what the News says. He was a man threatened with death. The News emphasized the years of experience of the experts who established the responsibility for the accident, and I think they belong to the same Ministry where the order came from to threaten Oswaldo Payá and his family.

Not to mention other, earlier “accidents.” Assaults, road crashes, pure Department of State Security (DSE) style. Didn’t we see it in the movie I Am The Other Cuba? I think it was Voltaire who said: “Slander boldly, something always sticks.” If this time it was a political assassination ordered from some obscure department, executed by some soulless assassin in the service of power and ideology, we’ll never know, as the most impartial investigation is out of the hands of the mourners.

Nor is this our right as Cubans. For decades everything has been occupied by the Communist Party, they wash away and they spread filth. Paraphrasing Oedipus one could say: “Let us never be a toy in the hands of the Party.”

Monday they held a wake for him in the Church in Cerro and my daughter and I went. Too many omissions in my life to also miss this evening… wake. Nor could I greet Oswaldo Payá in life. In the years when the Varela Project surged, I was in my twenties, I did not want to be responsible for anything, nor take part, even though secretly I sympathized with the idea and wanted to revoke all the power that was running the government of the country.

And how brilliantly did Oswaldo Payá resolve the constitutional character with the Varela Project. And how many beatings did they suffer in those years, the Cubans who were verbally explaining to the people, as they had no other way, what the Varela Project was all about.

The signers knew what they were risking. At the least, social exclusion which is bad enough, but there are other levels of retaliation languishing in Cuba: prison and death. And indeed they collected 20,000 signatures and more as stipulated in the Constitution to legitimate the opposition to the leader of the Communist Party.

The tall man in the center is Guillermo Fariñas who was arrested shortly after this photo was taken.

But the Baal Fidel Castro, once again on the Platform, comparing the way things are resolved in Cuba made people sign without explaining much of the why of such a flippant request where the Constitution of Cuba would be changed to make Socialism and himself irrevocable, and then he undertook the manhunt that would reach its zenith in the Cuban Black Spring of 2003.

In the church many friends were waiting for the body. It’s hard for me to talk about it because I showed up yesterday so to speak. I felt such great respect for them that I doubt any description I can offer of the hours I spent there. In fact at half past four I still had not reached the coffin and had to return home with my daughter and only had news of the events when Agustín came; he had carefully documented the hours that followed, where important events occurred — like the arrests of Fariñas and Roldiles — in his blog Dekaisone, which I particularly recommend your reading.

July 30 2012

Laura Pollán Is With Me / Lilianne Ruíz

A photograph of Laura Pollán in her coffin.

The sun is still rising in Cuba. The natural cycle of birth and death never fails to mock ideology and power. It is the rag that will wipe away all the actors of this diabolic drama.

Recently I got to know through a friend who is a veteran of  the Ladies in White, that a few days before going into Calixto García hospital Laura Pollán was cut with a sharp utensil by a woman from one of the repudiation rally mobs that the State Security organizes against the Ladies in White.

Immediately after being wounded, Laura started to feel very ill. The mutual friend went to see her and told me that she found Laura weak and ill, and “she was not one of those who would let them (the state security mobs) intimidate her.”

It was not the first attack against Laura Pollán, the one that probably caused her death. There is a documentary titled I am the other Cuba, by the Italian filmmaker Pierantonio Maria Micciarelli, which shows in real time, during an interview with Laura Pollán, how the car in which Laura and he were riding was mysteriously hit by another car which pushed it out of its lane.

If the anti-Castro Cubans had 1% of the money that State Security attributes to them, I would vote to fund a massive media campaign, as big and expensive as that for the five agents from the Ministry of Interior — the so-called “Cuban Five” — demanding an international investigation into the mysterious death of Laura Pollán. A death probably organized by colleagues of the five Ministry of Interior spies. Of course, those in charge of the investigation of the crime would not be allowed into the country and the world would have to put it where the sun don’t shine, once again, before the arbitrariness of the government of this island. The bitchy world that makes so many mistakes so often and so badly.

By the way, imagine if any of us, we Cubans who inhabit this island, were to organize a Solidarity Club for Allan Gross, an American citizen imprisoned in Castro’s jails under the dubious charges of having bought, in the most ordinary technology shops of today’s world, equipment, instruments, and communication tools which, once in the country, had some destination independent of the Cuban State and its sacred control.

Would the Cuban political police be more respectful of my hypothetical Solidarity Club for Allan Gross, would they organize solidarity parades in the United States, even a parade of four people whom the political police would pay with the money that is not even enough to cover the basic needs of the Cuban people? Cubans’ basic needs that are administered by the paternalistic State according to whatever level of hunger people in Cuba can endure each day?

Anyone in the world, I repeat, can buy technological equipment like that involved in the sin committed by Allan Gross without being accused of high-profile espionage or being linked to weapons of mass destruction. You would think connection, communication, are crimes in Cuba, especially when these kind of crimes serve as good bait to get the five Ministry of Interior (MININT) agents out of trouble.

You know what? I recommend that these spies be returned — I say it with my deepest respect for the pain of the surviving brother from the organization “Brothers to the Rescue” which saved Cubans found in open waters, Cubans who threw themselves into the ocean running away from the rough life conditions on the island — because this has been another repugnant episode of the Castro regime, and Alan Gross does not deserve to be suffering in prison.

Now, how can I express that I started writing this post from the discomfort provoked by an article that I read in the El Nuevo Herald, on June 27, about Mariela Castro’s visit to the United States; Mariela whose name and entire family’s name I wish I didn’t remember, honestly. The social life of my country, occupied by such a clan, is a nightmare. Their cynicism, which seems hereditary, would scandalize anyone who gets to know the gruesome details of the truth about Cuba.

Mrs. Castro says she belongs to civil society by virtue of being the director of CENESEX. The real civil society in Cuba is chased down by the henchmen of the family to which the intolerable Mrs. Castro belongs. Civil society must be independent from the State power, an alternative to political power; therefore Mrs. Castro is anything but a representative of our civil society.

In Cuba, the men and women who celebrate Gay Pride Day do it under threats of detention and police beatings, because she — even when it seems unbelievable that everything continues to be in the hands of one person — only allows the celebration of the “International Day against Homophobia,” a parade organized by a State institution, CENESEX, not by civil society.

It seems easier to control how this rainbow flag can wave by isolating it from the rest of the representatives of this flag in the world, imposing a line of what is politically permitted. I have hopes that the LGBT community, after so many centuries of resistance, keeps being as rebellious as it has been forced to be because all of kinds of repression, and it continues to rebel against wearing a uniform.

The Director of CENESEX, the daughter and niece of bloody tyrants, always taking advantage of the historical sense of the moment, pretends to line up gays and gain the sympathy of this growing social group in Cuba and in the world. Perhaps Mrs. Castro is after the sympathy of LGBT groups at the international level because people here don’t buy her story at all.

It will be like the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), designed to consolidate and better control women in Cuba; it is a system that does not tolerate freedom.

Consequently, people should know, so that they can decide to sympathize with Mariela Castro or not, that she has been responsible for proposing the exchange of prisoners, ignoring the pain of Cubans oppressed by the claws of the complex apparatus of repression that works to ensure the power of her family and the pain of the Americans who follow the case of Allan Gross. In such a no man’s land we should all be heckling her.

The speech of the First Lady of the Castro regime where she declared that she, too, is a dissident, “a dissident against the global hegemonic power,” is the same as that of her family that has wanted to gain power from the aspirations of millions of people from around the world to be free from the powers that oppress them; gain power so they can throw over them the same net with which they hunted down Cubans, Cubans whose souls were stolen before being condemned to hunger and misery.

Translated by Chabeli

July 2 2012

Samsara / Lilianne Ruíz

I am writing in order to release my anger, because this morning Agustin has been attacked by a mob of people from that neighborhood “El Globo” –The Globe– in Calabazar, from where I was able to take him out by force with love and hot meals.

He doesn’t live there any more, now he lives with me. But he loves that paradise lost between trees of mango, cherimoya (custard apples), weeds of all sorts where the hummingbirds go to sip nectar. There we hope to spend our retirement days, listening to the circulation of the sap strengthen the beating of our blood, with the respiration cleaner, in every sense, than in the city, because there is there a bit of the eternity of the growing of leaves that mocks the unfailing, shattered ambitions of all dictators of Cuba.

Some days ago he had an unfortunate family problem with one of his nephews and a denaturalized son and he had to return, to face the situation. These two young men were being spurred on by the neighbor of the the next fence over, the son of the neighborhood’s latest president of that aberration in Cuba that is the CDRs — Committees for the Defense of the Revolution — who envies Agustin even the ground he steps on, and who covets that little piece of land that the State doesn’t even allow you to truly own. This morning the exemplary “cederista” (“CDR-ist”), who to accentuate his characterization, even though it may seem a cliché, earns a living making little stamps with images of Che, which he later sells to tourists (one day we’ll have to dig deep and work seriously to inform the very misinformed Cubans, and the world, how many, and for what reasons, were those executed by that dark Jacobin Guevara when officiating as delegate of death in La Cabaña)… has led a neighborhood throng to stand in the way of Agustin as he was leaving.

The mother of the “cederista”, who suffers from lupus, which adds extra considerations when dealing with her, whipped by the envy that she couldn’t eradicate from her prole, yelled “gusano” (worm!) and threw two rocks at the windshield of the car Agustin was driving and broke it. To which Agustin, logically, has been unable to respond, and as he pulled further away he could hear the lady’s son yelling, saying no one could expect his sick mother to be held accountable.

It has been a trap. A few seconds before the stones were thrown, Agustin had told the promoter that problems between men are resolved without so much boisterousness and that if he wanted to fight he was willing to do so at a distance from that crowd. To which the maker of stamps, cowardly and vile, refused.

The authorities won’t do the right thing, we’re already accustomed to that. In fact there was a police captain who made a racket about whether if, on Agustin’s little plot of land, there lived “a man of human rights” who had to be done away with. We laugh at such stupidity and we are not afraid.

One would have to fear them for how cowardly and stupid they are, but when one has hope and faith in that it is not possible to permit the dictatorship of the State in Cuba to continue intimidating you, belittling you, humiliating you, abusing those you come to recognize as your brothers, you put up a fight with hope in the laws of the Universe, and in the most profound ones of the human soul, which always have imposed themselves against those of the tyrants.

But we are also ashamed that in our country, everyday Cubans like ourselves, even if they are policemen, suffer such a level of ignorance that they destroy their own rights before the dictates of a single “species” to whom it is not convenient to recognize those Rights. But it is fair to say that on this occasion the problem has come up simply as in the whole of Revolutionary history: someone covets another’s space and sets in motion the already rusted and crumbling mechanisms of a society that is segregationist, ignorant, vile, incompetent, that provokes pity for being more like beasts the men and women faithful to their model. And that at some moment, as in every country led by a Communist party, aggravated by the ambition of a specimen possessing an ego such that he has tried to usurp the place of God (even as an archetype given that they weren’t nonbelievers), was able to legalize acts of repudiation against citizens, the pogrom organized by the State, the segregation, the arbitrariness, the ideology that biases the perception of the world, of rights, of duties, and turned into a social practice all that a healthy society would condemn: Where is he, in what prison, the Revolutionary Communist son of a bitch who attacked with a machete an oppositionist of the regime, over there in Oriente, last year? Those neighbors, the Security of State decorates (with honors); but the truth, before the civil law of the civilized world, is that he gravely injured with extreme violence another human being and should have gone to jail for that.

A sentiment of enormous revenge is born: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay”. A need to once more embrace hope: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.

And an overwhelming nostalgia for another Cuba, a Cuba where the law won’t be political, nor military, nor mafioso, nor tyrannical. Cuba turned into a civilized country, where there exists citizen security and the respect for Human Rights and a Civil Society, holding clear notions of what today forms the dark part of our vocabulary: civil rights. Liberty, liberty, liberty. Responsibility, decency, honesty, respect for the law, peace. There is none of that in Cuba, only the series of ideological artifices that have attempted to usurp the meaning of the most handsome words to be born after a painful birth in our mistreated humanity. Why must I continue crying over nostalgia for the truth?

Translated by: Maria Montoto

June 5 2012

The Testimony of Antunez / Lilianne Ruíz

Everything I am capable of writing, again makes me sound so naive until I translate this fury I hold onto. And this is what we can say is the real horror of the Cuban Revolution, outside the political prison, the sin of naivete. What happens when, in a society, it becomes widespread conduct to ignore responsibility, to convert the individual conscience into a collective conscience dictated by the figure of a leader with no fear of God and without respect for men.

This is the Revolution and the degrees of villainy increase from the most public spaces to the most “exclusive” which are the Cuban prisons. Jorge Luis García Pérez “Antúnez” has a book titled “Boitel Lives.” It is a testimony of his lengthy political imprisonment, of the beatings, the real hell of the Cuban prisons closed to the rapporteurs of the International Human Rights Commission, the Red Cross, and Amnesty International.

It is so easy to offer a moral discourse, as he has done all these years of the Cuban Revolution. It is so irresponsible that much of the world wants to confuse his protests against the wars of the Pentagon with support for this Revolution, which has imprisoned so many men and women… for the crime of persevering in their existential freedom, of conscience, and their responsibility for themselves and for others.

Cuba is not a good place to live. It’s terrifying in the sense of the insecurity of the individual faced with the ruthless machinery of the State that does not truly represent us and condemns us if we don’t serve the interests of keeping power in the hands of the worst plague in the history of Cuba. I can only commend myself to God, but I will not shut up. The darker this evil that plagues Cubans the more hope I have in Christ, the Son of God, Savior, who knows suffering and will always create a path of salvation for us.

May 16 2012

Living Among Lies / Lilianne Ruíz

Camilo Cienfuegos seen in an artwork installed in 2009 in the Plaza of the Revolution. The text says: "You're doing fine, Fidel."

Cuba looks like an anthill, and each one has contributed — as they say — a grain of sand. Believing that this grain of sand is so little that it means nothing because “nothing can change”. I am reading for the first time “El poder de los sin poder” (The Power of The Powerless), by Vaclav Havel, what he defines as autokenesis of the post totalitarian system I see it as this behavior of ants who sustain the commune that seems to be Cuba today. The secret life of this Commune, what does not appear, is not reflected in the official press.

On May 3rd, Press Freedom Day, the announcer of the Nightly News denounced the murder of Mexican journalists, and mentioned Honduras, denouncing these two countries as examples of places where repression against journalists is growing. It was not mentioned in the report, revised and corrected by the Editorial Board of the News, that Cuba was the third country on that list. Nor was the Cuban audience made aware that such a list, where the situation of press freedom is mentioned, was published by Amnesty International.

In Cuba there is repression against journalists, but the knowledge of such situation depends much on the media showing that situation from the moment in Cuba that no one learns about what is happening watching the News show. Then, in the consequences it has for a citizen conscious of what is right or wrong to start expressing himself and do journalism, independent of the interests of the State Dictatorship.

I saw the way in which Ariel Sigler Amaya left prison and it was not on the News. I never heard of the situation of Oscar Elías Bicet from the Cuban journalists who work for Cuban television but rather over Radio Martí. I did not not know well who Laura Pollan was, until I went to her house. Laura’s death occurred under unclear circumstances but it is impossible to open an investigation and that has not been mentioned in any News whatsoever.

In the cases of Ariel and Oscar there is clear evidence of psychological tortures and attempted murder, not to mention Zapata Tamayo who was slandered in Granma Newspaper and in the News after he was left to die on a hunger strike rather than recognize the demand Zapata took to an extreme because of his freedom and that of Cuba as well.

Today I write and also make public in my blog, I live with fear, but I know the regime has had some kind of defeat after the Black Spring of 2003, carried out by the group of 75 and the Ladies in White. I also know if I do not express myself, feeling as I do, I would be an accomplice.

It is increasingly promoted in Cuba that youth become part of the huge and expensive repressive system. The government, historically a oppressor, one day could not count anymore on “the compartmentalizing” of information and the obedience of the whole people before the threat, and it happened when groups of Human Rights defenders appeared, and also independent journalists.

It did not matter whether one had a degree or not, from the Faculty of revolutionary journalism; these are people who make an effort to write a piece of news and above all they really go for it, where the only thing that matters is to be objective and witness an abuse, an arrest, a beating, a humiliating social phenomenon, having no other translation for anyone’s conscience, as the so called revolutionary journalism attempts to make us believe.

Killing isn’t done in the streets like in Mexico, but the cost of being an activist for freedom, a journalist, or a blogger, may be slow death in one of the regime’s jails. Many times, the  detentions of activists are lengthened by the regime with accusations of noncompliance with police brutality. The Cuban reality is so treacherous that it needs the real access of journalists without gags.

Then I try to imagine whose brain would be behind all the propaganda that made poor people during the first years identify their greatest welfare with the socialist Revolution, which did not start as a socialist one. And I notice it was not only one brain, but maybe many people who either believed they were doing the right thing, or underestimated their small acts from the will to survive without going against the current. And 53 or 54 years have passed, I never count them any more.

There will be some, still within the anthill, who know all this is buried under the lie, and will kill, every time, the hope of rescue for this nation and therefore for us, the people who live here. Those people who every day support the lie of the regime on many occasions only aspire to pretend a little longer until they can leave the country.

The Communist Party uses a language that can not express human aspirations. It is an inhuman language. Why don’t people scream that it is not exactly what they want, that they have access to? They are terribly scared, and that generates obedience and immorality, when one has no faith not even in the innocent fairy tales.

Why did God let such phenomenon happen? But I still trust in Him. To find Him, still in the darkest valley, makes me fear no evil, as the psalm says. However, I have the hope He will make a miracle soon. During the time I have waited for Him, my God has never failed me. The lie will fall, what I can not foretell is where they will hide from their shame, those who have sustained it.

Translated by AnonyGy

May 7 2012

May Day / Lilianne Ruíz

“When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream…” (Psalm 126)

A friend of mine once wrote an article about the mania of totalitarian power for anniversaries, as we know it in Cuba. It seems that parceling out the calender in this way offers some security to our captors.

In the building where I live signs have started to appear to “invite” the neighbors to go to the Plaza on May Day. You can hear the music of the Communist Internationale on TV. Even some foreigners on the news say they’re happy to have come to Cuba expressly to march on Labor Day. In all the countries where they marched and are marching as an official celebration on May Day, they have also prohibited people from freely entering and leaving the country, among other miserable restrictions. But these Communists of the world don’t care.

So it is, there are still people who believe in this life. At the school they have already hung the sign in the doorway that says: “Defending Socialism.” It’s true that hanging this and other posters is a mechanical act, under higher guidance, and to not do it would be an act of rebellion which to many seems inconvenient, without knowing that they are wrong. I’m not saying that everyone is lying to themselves, but I am saying that most people are, and that is why there is so much surveillance, so much ideological campaigning, so sad.

But there is something new this May Day, although I still don’t know the security source (Ecuador, Venezuela, the Vatican?) that engenders such pride in the Castro dynasty’s dauphin, who according to the news threatens to do the same as with that “other May Day,” which was the Pope’s Mass in the Plaza: arrest, detain, prosecute and threaten the rebellious Cubans who remain in this country.

Much has been said about people in Cuba being reluctant to say what they think, what they like, what they desire. But I am going to have to say it one more time: with regards to May Day, when you hear the same bewhiskered speaker who decades ago gave the same speech about the success of the March, with the people supporting its caudillos, covered by the great press agencies of the world, I know I also noticed the falsity of every representation.

In the ’80s my parents took me to the Plaza, I remember the atmosphere and the sensation of being in compliance with orders and in consequence being approved and making others happy: doing what is expected of you. I did not see, then, the workplace lists where not attending could have unintended consequences. Or simply the pressure that Cubans saw themselves subjected to daily and that produced the inertia of the March.

Such that there was at least one year in which the government didn’t call “the people” to march, because perhaps that year people would have gone on strike by not attending May Day.

I’m sure that neither of my parents saw how unhealthy it was to take me to be one more component of this tide of not being. I think people fear, above all, losing something, their work, if they decide not to go and stay home and do what they want.

Also there are the old Communists, lovers of Picasso, intellectuals who continue to believe that to be a Communist is to belong to some vanguard, and that simplicity seems to me to be irresponsible, immoral.

Those who will later be accused of “corruption” also attend May Day. And in the cases I’ve heard of, not about the higher-ups but those about simple ordinary workers, they have more to do with the alleged diversion of food and sandwiches and soft drinks; but even though other proletariats see the fate of their colleagues and yet continue to gamble for food, they go to the marches to salute the owners of the country with their banners.

A strange thing, the exploited salute the exploiters, who have made them believe or demanded, under terror, that they pretend to believe, to themselves and to the whole world, in some grand ideas that do not serve real happiness, nor the feelings or identity of anyone.

I insist that if God wants, and prayer is a very powerful weapon, all this can change from one day to the next.

The only people who could be happy with the parade of renouncing the most authentic happiness, as every Cuban who goes there has done, are those to blame for this existential tragedy; and still it is possible they may not be entirely happy knowing that what beats in the heart on the other side, behind the bars where everyone has imprisoned their desires, is the end of this farce.

One more year we say the same thing, perhaps next year we can tell another story on May Day. For this I am asking a lot of God and I know we are going to have an answer. I know.

1 May 2012 (Note: The appearance of this post was delayed, on Lilianne’s blog, to 7 May)

Never Ever / Lilianne Ruíz

They were standing there, four employees responsible for cleaning, to guard the primary school bathroom and keep me from taking pictures. I thought of passing by, but they provoked me with their hateful glares. After all, they were just guarding a pile of urine and feces. And that’s exactly what I told them: “You are preventing me from taking photos of the primary school bathroom, you do not feel proud to display these details on the front door? Being service workers, you do not ensure that the toilets the children use during the 8 hours they spend here are clean. Instead of cleaning them until they are spotless, you just try to hide the urine and excrement. ”

The day before, I could no longer stand the dirt, the stench, and the stool-covered toilet the children must use while in school. I went to the Director to address the matter and find a way to resolve it. The first answer I found was worn on the assistant’s face, as if she knew, as if one could deny what even the stench betrays. I had to describe with the same words as before, the state of the bathrooms for which the school is responsible. After saying that parents were responsible, and she then tried to blame the teacher. I said to her that when she was the assistant director (the Director had had to delegate some responsibilities for personal problems) she was responsible for addressing all the details that made possible the optimal performance of the institution.

I think I can claim a solution for the problem of the hygiene of the school. Not to detract from my previous claim, months ago, that my little daughter was to be educated not ideologically imprinted. And if this is not possible, because the class schedule does not permit, at least defend my right as a mother and her right as child to not participate in extracurricular activities with political overtones.

But it seemed that I had had this conversation two months ago with the assistant director and I have also had it with the methodologist of the preschool, since Kindergarten, when I realized that in addition to their patriotic symbols, my little girl was having their government iconography projected onto her innocent and childish feelings — and at that I called them out for trying to engage the children with the political future of the nation at a stage when they should just be learning universal and truly immutable values. Thus I had predisposed the deputy director of the school, who tried to disrespect me and deny the problem.

I thought I’d done nothing more than demand the fulfillment of our rights. Not the rights the State lets me have, but those that my condition as a human being with a conscience, and a mother, demand, because they belong to me and as such are proclaimed in the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They do not have a relative or subjective value as they say here. They are universal and guarantee peace, security and justice. They belong to us and we must defend them, if they have taken them from us we can’t give them up!

I don’t know if it was because of this antecedent that when I asked for a solution to the problem of the unhealthiness of the bathrooms, the deputy director of the school looked at me with a face full of hatred. Or if, in addition, she wanted to swaddle me with the help of the cleaner and the teacher herself, or if she made the problem worse rather than solving it.

And the next day, when I had the idea of also relating, as part of my blog, this experience in urgent need of a solution — of the bathrooms in the sense of managing the conditions that guarantee the security of the children, and before that of freeing the children consciences of the burden that, on being born in Cuba, they have to continue carrying the ideology of the old generations, which in addition to being old, deforms the thinking and the ethical sense of individual existence — I appeared at the school to take photos to accompany my post.

As they started to tell me it was impossible, the service workers stationed at the doors didn’t allow it and one of the employees came to threaten me.The only good that came out of this is the hope that from now, knowing they are being observed, perhaps they will clean the bathrooms and also deign to recognize our rights with respect to deciding who will be the educators of our children and in what values they will be educated.

Translated by: Hillarie T.

April 16 2012

They Have Lost the Ruler / Lilianne Ruíz

Sometimes one has the crazy idea that if the little soldiers of power were reading us, even they would understand us. That is, even if they didn’t agree with us, they would understand that in the world we dream of, there would be room for everyone, and only crime would be penalized, of course. Crime is anything that threatens the integrity of any human being. But one has to start by observing, understanding, stating as close to the truth as possible the meaning of this mystery that is our humanity.

Even when I am aware I am the person behind my eyes, I don’t know if my name is really Lilianne. Culture, religion, philosophy exist. But pain, death, suffering exist. And none of these should be inflicted on anyone. Maybe if I didn’t have in front of me the obstacle and the war of the State Security against the Cubans, I would condemn the Pentagon’s war.

From here, knowing the essence of totalitarianism, out of step with ethics that better agrees with the happiness of humans, without preferring one bad thing to another, it worries me a thousandth of a second less that it is the West with the weapons of mass destruction and not the religious sultanates, or Korea, or Venezuela, or Cuba.

Because in those “left” countries, the “socialist” ones, the law dictates a leader protected by thousands of subjects, and that law, when the leader has already fixed it to imprison our liberty and our rights, is broken from one day to the next. And this means that if those socialist leaders had weapons of mass destruction, not only would dissidents be exterminated, as were the Jews at Auschwitz, but nuclear weapons would be used more quickly. Because the mutation has been worse in those countries.

We have never been good in history, but there was an ideology behind Hitler and Stalin, and there was doctrine behind the Inquisition; the pain of human beings was not contemplated by any of the institutions that exterminated people accused of dissent or of being racially inferior or ideologically marginal. In Cuba, those youths who like Pope Benedict XVI have been educated in an ideology that at some moment meant to position the Cuban Revolution as a Universal Paradigm of virtue and justice. The General President of Cuba still says “all the justice.” When people say “all the truth” or “all the justice,” they are lying.

But the idea is that the paradigm that our parents believed in, already distanced from the values of our grandparents, which were still those of the Republic, cracked completely when Soviet subsidies ended. And then the dollar appeared, both loved and hated by the Cuban family. Today, most Cuban youths have neither a spiritual inheritance connecting them to the spiritual development of humanity nor the ethics of the left that the intellectuals of the 1970s made fashionable; they have nothing more than a desire to have money and the desire to have power by serving power.

Because of this, the new generation of security guards is not going to read what we write, as if one day, when they detain us by force, they could sit and talk with us. In these days during the Pope’s visit, my friends were detained and obliged to talk with State Security. Threatened, or simply tricked, they were interrogated, and the principal accusation was that they wanted to attend the Papal mass in the square.

Such a thing did not even interest many but at the very least, when and how did seeking an audience with the Pope become an offense? But this did not happen either, and the terror felt by “those who govern” and its Nomenklatura of losing the immense satisfaction of governing us, controlling us, subjugating us, and threatening the entire world above us, envying world power, made the political police try to terrorize us.

Does human nature suffer a mutation in the cauldron of totalitarian violence? Yes. And it is worse than cancer and HIV because it is a condition of the soul and not just the body. The mutants are not interested if power is just or unjust; they like power.

They have been educated without others, without a needle on the balance that was universal, international. If they have something, it is the ideology of the “Revolution,” that deals with all persons as if they were not human beings, conscious souls with real desires, with human rights. I am referring to the fact that there is no scale of universal values, higher than a party, that can be compared to.

They are alone in front of us, but they are armed. They are not interested in the search for truth; those are aristocratic values and they have left the “people,” condemned for being poor, inferior to the power and nomenclature of the politburo.

A neighbor told me that one has to apply the politics of conviction and after, if the person is not convinced, apply the politics of defeat. This man studied and graduated with an honors degree in history from the University of Havana. This is the training that they all pass through, with professors that are not humanities chairs, but rather take part in perverting the value of human beings. Its brutality and barbary attack us spiritually and physically because they cannot really communicate; they are not interested in the truth. They are programmed to impose themselves, to “defeat,” to lie if necessary. It is the most frightening anthropological vacuum.

They are like dry trunks without vital sap that could have accomplished a number of things before dying, but which are cut instead, so their destiny is condemned by the historical chronicles and by God.

They are mutants; their ethics is to obey and earn “money” and privileges according to national standards. Later, when delegations of foreign students or people on the left come to visit, they show them what we have been taught since childhood: to simulate a country better than theirs, because they are capitalists and have to pay for school, and sometimes those foreigners leave with this idea.

Everyone in the world with a conscience, directly affected or not, we should fight against totalitarianism, because they are not going to agree to being alone in their countries. They want all the power that even Western countries have today, in spite of any shortcoming preferable to this.

It is possible that there is a crisis of faith in the entire world. I learned to live in pure faith by suffering the result of a society that changed by not believing in prior values into an ideology that taught them to be bad, to lie with out scruples of conscience, to be sadistic, overbearing, forceful, greedy, mimicking. The security guards are mutants; there is no human behind them and nevertheless, some day, God willing, although they apparently already do not serve any other purpose, we will have to respect their rights in order to not be like them.

Translated by: M. Ouellette

April 2 2012

Apologetic / Lilianne Ruíz

The presence of the voice of a priest on television during the celebration of Mass, the opening words of the Pope, rendering thanks to his welcome, “the Church must earn a place in the public space”, the presence of the faithful, in the streets, in recent months to venerate the image of the Patroness of Cuba, suggests that the negotiation of the Catholic Church with the Castro State already has a purpose.

To allow the Catholic Church to open schools, at all educational levels, is a dream for a mother like me. I would prefer, a thousand times, the puritanical and elitist education of the Church, of our children and youth, rather than their being educated in the revolutionary pantheon doctrine. But any negotiations require concessions and these seem to be, as we have been told by the priests in advance, the removal of believers from public political life.

There can only be the Communist Party, to be in the opposition is still a crime, is based on human rights not from the perspective of another party. This is a betrayal, but the Pope is not Christ. What seems to be the commitment of the Catholic Church in Cuba, in 2012, is not the love of John Paul II for the Spring.

Let us assume that Benedict XVI is betting on the proclamation of the Gospel. What will young people do with the Gospel, with inner freedom, when they come out of the Temples? It could happen as it did in the ’50s, when it was easy for Cubans to relinquish their religious school training, because they believed that priests were hypocrites.

The Catholic Church in Cuba was more credible when it was the Church of resistance to the materialism of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.

I believe in Jesus Christ in the style of the Apostle Paul. So I could not object to the Pope’s homily, the only time of license for the priest because the rest are wanting to watch the liturgical prayer and that is really all, speaking strictly of the Incarnation of the Word, that is all to which I would listen, but in order to live in ecstasy and be like Christ in recognising that even after an arbitrary prison sentence of twelve years, the police are still holding Oscar Elias Bicet and his wife Elsa incommunicado by cutting off their cell phones during these days.

The Ladies in White, Gladiators, arbitrarily arrested, threatened and besieged. All hounded by the political police. I do not know about UNPACU (Foundation of Human Rights in Cuba), because they are in Santiago, but we clearly saw the actions of State Security which we all know were to prevent an opponent of the regime from reaching the Vicar of Rome. Perhaps His Holiness knew that fact and did not want that to affect the negotiations.

Ignoring these people that are now being denied and crushed by the state is — if not to condemn them to be abused by the political power — to underestimate them, to abandon them for reasons of business.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but all seems to indicate that this visit has a purpose but not a Universal purpose, but coming from an Inquisitor only considering the imposition of a doctrine of life as if it were an ideology. Since this doctrine is the only one, which I believe in more than in life, I justified Mr. Ratzinger not saying in his homily that to obey God before men is the road to liberty.

It would be absurd to suppose that he spoke of obedience to encourage the people to acquiesce to the dictatorship. All due to the “greater good”, the Church’s presence in public spaces, is not bad, but it is not enough.

Finally, I saw the image of the Crucifixion, now the symbol, and I happened to think of Christ as Judge, who alone can open the seals on the beautiful images of the last book of the Bible. God the Saviour, Son of the Father, genitum, non factum, consustansiabilis Patri, came to this world, became incarnate in the womb of the Virgin.

He became like us without what is called sin in the Bible, which among other things allows us to relate to God. He suffered the same as us, temptations, helplessness, but did not lose faith in the Father. Until Jesus Christ has made us the gift of being children in faith and the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, that relationship was not entirely real or written on the heart.

For Nirvana and other higher state of consciousness seem mute and lonely before the eloquence of the Word. Even though, in fact, they express wisdom, they are impersonal. I know I sound inquisitive, but I will never be the police of someone who thinks differently from me. And I dare say that is completely unprecedented in the world of Christian revelation, because without indicting the pictures that have been made of God in different religions, the Incarnation of God is the heritage of Christian doctrine only.

The other founders of religions have participated in a higher deity, has been made corporal in the conscience of the ascetic, but God Incarnate was born only in the manger of Bethlehem. In heaven there is but the Trinity of one God, is the testimony of Christ and the contemplative tradition of the best Christian mysticism, it is not, as the atheists say, a heritage of Hindu trinities. Assuming the lineage of David, earthly parentage has given us a heavenly and indestructible life, resurrection, the knowledge of God through faith and one day by the Spirit. And being the only innocent, and the source of all the gifts of those who could participate, he was killed, tortured by the violence that we are capable of. That cross is our judgment and incredibly our forgiveness. Tertullian, apologist, coined the phrase: Credo quia absurdum.

There is in fact an exclusion in the apostolic doctrine, but such a faith would assume tolerance and respect, although from the inquisitorial behavior of the Church, over the centuries, is the model that has been copied by the totalitarianisms.

There is a point that consternation produces in me, as a believer, and it is the alliance of the Communist totalitarianism with Catholic inquisitorial doctrine. It would be a travesty that human beings more advanced than the “Aryan” and the “New Man”, would endanger the Christian doctrine of salvation. I hope that I am wrong in my assumptions and that my blog, Jeronimo, is not heckled for not being right. I do not know if the Pope knows what he has done.

Everything was much simpler in the apostles, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and I miss him very much, although we know calmly that everything will pass except for the Easter victory.

Therefore permit me to repeat the disillusionment that Ratzinger causes us with the same words used by Teresa of Avila: God alone suffices. The cause of the Spring for Cuba should not be abandoned by Him.

Translated by: Hank Hardisty

March 27 2012

Resident Evil / Lilianne Ruíz

Abominable things happen in Cuba that no longer scandalize anyone. Although when scientific achievements are celebrated (like in the USSR when it went to the Cosmos, in a competition without a happy ending), the ghosts walking the street are more obvious, as are the henchmen carrying cell phones and worshiping those products of the capitalist market while fighting for the little mission in Venezuela and feeling lust for their masters and being willing to be organized to commit an act of repudiation against other Cubans who are not aligned with them.

Or, the height of aberrations, they try to hide their political fundamentalism assuming languages created in the free world. They want to copy everything but their coldness is obvious. This attitude of camouflage without getting to be who they are continues, always taking the pulse of the historical moment. Sidereal time is forbidden to them. The knowledge of breathing.

March 18 2012

Defend Yourself / Lilianne Ruíz

Maybe the ideal State of Law of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be the only form of a noninvasive State. We human beings are like butterflies, we can’t be manipulated too much.  Even the land in Cuba appears to be sad, because it has been tampered with and destroyed. Rebellion consists of not allowing them to destroy what you most love, not letting anyone touch the unicorn or the butterfly of your soul. Now I remember the Parable about talents.  Nobody can demand of us that we hide our talent.

Translated by: Megan Jantsch
March 17 2012

God Will Provide Me a Legal Defender / Lilianne Ruíz

The majority of things that I afterwards write about, occur to me while cooking, washing dishes. Thus in a sense I have the logic of a housewife. Two plus two has to add up to four, even if the military men say the contrary. If the laws of the police are not just for the citizens, it is a priority to change the law. The laws are not relative; there are centuries of culture behind us, teaching us about the good and the evil. When the law identifies itself with the evil, you have to blame the law.

In these years there have been people that in of spite the repression, of the threats, and of the State Security’s dirty war against citizens, have persevered in denunciation and protest. I know from experience that the pain of others matters to few people, one has to feel close to the pain in order to feel any solidarity with the victims. I myself ignore the sufferings of a North Korean although I can imagine them on account of my own. The only hope of being supported in order to struggle against the bad laws, the bad politics that governs Cuba, is we Cubans in any place in the world where we are. I see them as coming from the outside.

In the building that I live in, many families live separated from their children. Those children have gotten on with their lives and forgotten. They can’t really be blamed for that. They are perhaps exhausted and dulled and I know that they can’t be counted on. I know too that since “Castro-ism”, families have  dispersed to all parts of the world with the purpose of supporting from outside, “La Revolucion”.

Who is it then that feels the pain of political prisoners? I don’t know if I deserve their pardon but “Voices Behind the Bars” came into my possession fifteen days ago. Fortunately they are already free but no-one knows for certain how many political prisoners remain in jail in Cuba or when the disastrous hand of the regime will put into play a new process of death, suffering, incarceration, for dissent, for protesting, for opposing as is their human right, a political party, in power by virtue of the violent powers of state that puts into effect laws of pure wickedness.

If here in Cuba there is little we can do to set this right, then I need something like a champion in the media age, like in the novel Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. I want to believe that for me, this champion is God but God has always wanted to translate Himself in our hands, in the will of our hearts. I would like to say more, to dare myself to ask more, reading “Voices Behind the Bars”. Fear doesn’t paralyze me but why is it that I don’t feel terror ? Because of that, for certain, I’m going to denounce, I denounce it, because of the same terror that causes me to spend the next minute in Cuba without rights and without liberty.

Translate by: William Fitzhugh

March 11 2012

Guinness Record / Lilianne Ruíz

The socialist State does not provide the luxury of silence, because it is in silence that our desires speak to us. Such that the State doesn’t cease the liturgy of remembering all the successive years and the heroes of the past, nor does it cease with the maddening and repressive ideological discourse: a discourse intended to hide us from our own selves, to block access to our own personal realm. This discourse is incapable of naming that which brings happiness to humankind. They are discourses that stone to death happiness. Happiness which perseveres in the silence of our homes, and that we are going to marginalize until we believe we have forgotten the songs that move our hearts and suddenly we remember why we’re so miserable.

Translator: Boston College CASA

March 13 2012

The Sunday of Lent / Lilianne Ruz

I climb the hill drawn by the magnetism of the chapel, by the theology school of the Dominican friars ( in spite of the torches of the Inquisition ) by the alpha and the omega, the cloistered life of the monks confer to my church a special something. “What is it to love thy neighbor? If we love everyone, we make no distinctions. On this morning, I feel a crazy love for Gorki, for El Sexto, for Ferrer, and for the Patriotic Union of Cuba.

Today I was thinking in my heart that it’s very easy to put a Christian to the test by obliging him literally to love his neighbor while in the gelatinous conscience, victims can be forgotten, that is the same as forgetting ourselves or even giving ourselves the luxury of not knowing them, which is equal to not knowing ourselves.

This is the moment of the performance, of not going off to fill our stomachs, to corner ourselves as if we were already at the margin because there are others who are suffering for us while we still have food and an enormous ego to pray only for ourselves. What shit is the conscience that can go to sleep so quickly. Because it’s known that even murderers love their families, they have cats and dogs, little fish and cry at the opera or some other trivial crap.

But they’re still bad and if the conscience turns to jello, it forms common cause with the bad. To have faith is to become an arrow of steel. For that, it’s been a while now that I don’t want to give the greeting of peace to the poor of Augustine and today I’m almost not able to look at her. She’s served me as a reference in order to say to God: “the brothers of this saint are guilty. Save us from the brothers of this saint who comes here and I don’t want to join in her prayers.

Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the hunger strike of Coco Fariñas, the perseverance of the Ladies in White took many years to obtain the freedom of the 75.* As a Catholic, I remember also that it was the Bishop of Santiago de Cuba who appeased his heart in order to intercede on behalf of that ¨Lord of the Flies¨ and in a very short time, managed to free him. That brevity with which the previous dictator** pardoned the armed attackers of a military barracks did not serve the decrepit rebels in avoiding the death of Zapata Tamayo, and distort the denunciation he made before dying that “El Jefe” of that armed assault was cooking spaghetti in his cell while the prisoners of Castro-ism were dying in cells blocked from any light. The whores of the regime were saying on television during those days that Zapata was crazy, that he was wanting to turn his cell into a suite and that’s why he was on a hunger strike.***

Is the fist of some brutish thug incapable of dialogue and of speaking the truth also waiting for me? But I keep saying that life without Christ is short and pray to my Lord and Savior that hell be closed around those responsible for this nightmare, in that death without resurrection, definitive, and without compassion. I know that Christ died for all but he also left open a path that the dictators of the Revolution have wanted to ignore. Now I plead to God to in turn ignore those who Him, that they be left unnamed and in this moment there will be light in this land (a Word from You will suffice).

And that you forgive me for not being able to forgive. I have no other strength nor hope other than God. Why is it that we have to surrender the idea that this world could be more than a vale of tears ? Here they’ve tried to spread the idea that this is a problem of Cubans and they don’t consider Cubans those who have emigrated, so that here on the island disarmed Cubans facing the knives of the regime are not even respected! If we plead for help, they accuse us of being mercenaries; why do they keep believing this story? They don’t see that this problem is everyone’s problem?

And above all, why is that what we had called the “invisible border” (this is what a wonderful Cuban blog called it ) they have invented “International Committees” of the left of the world to threaten even our great grandchildren, spreading their filthy doctrine that conceals such violence under the banner of the dispossessed and forgotten. There has to be another alternative which I would say is the Gospel but not to be forcibly imposed because that would be a crime against the soul, a treacherous one.

The Gospel is a an individual sacrament, a narrow road, a transformation of the conscience that many have called a “conversion” only with which one can achieve freedom. Perhaps our egoism should be cured by organizing networks of rescue for those less favored in life, to return the favor and not in order to condemn them to eternal poverty and lack of opportunity, to give to each and every one of them the dignity of the person, without killing anyone nor imposing on anyone neither ideology nor religion. But this is something the state can’t do and neither can a political party do because this would require condemning a society to a dictatorship.

Castro-ism is hypocritically speaking, worse, a false doctrine of the worst kind and if it is not stopped now, it might trap everyone. Above all, because in Castro-ism the poor and the forgotten will always be poor and forgotten and there will emerge as always, a Pharisee sect within the “Revolutionaries” that will not pardon any poor and forgotten family whatsoever if they incite indignation against them. This is a problem for the entire world. No-one should sleep any longer. No-one knows where the stone that is thrown today will fall.

Translator’s notes:

*”The 75″ are seventy-five individuals arrested in the “Black Spring” crackdown on political dissent which took place from March 18 to the 21st, 2003.  They were accused of being on the payroll of the United States and given sentences ranging from 13 to 27 years. By 2010, many were exiled to Spain. 

**A reference to Fulgencio Batista who pardoned the attackers of the Moncada Barracks after their attack. Among the attackers was a young attorney named Fidel Castro whose candidacy as a member of parliament ended when Batista cancelled the elections.

***Zapata Tamayo died while on a hunger strike in prison on February 23, 2010 at the age of 42. He denounced the conditions of prisoners in Cuban jails among other denunciations, stating that prisoners deserved the same conditions that Fidel Castro enjoyed while he was imprisoned for his abortive 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago. The Cuban government stated that his hunger strike was for a TV, a stove, and a phone in his prison cell.

Translated by: William Fitzhugh

March 1 2012