Category: Luis Felipe Rojas

Yoandris Veranes, a citizen journalist and activist with the Cuban Patriotic Union, sent me a hastily written note from Contramestre in Santiago de Cuba telling me that the police were preventing him from going to public internet bureaus. They did not want him showing tourists a Contramaestre different from the one they were showing tourists.

Serafín Morán, a freelance journalist who does daring reporting without a playbook, has been taken several times to police headquarters in Havana. The last time he was detained was a few days after foreign media had covered a public protest by pedicab drivers in the Cuban capital.

Morán had taken up a collection from donors around the world to buy a house for an adolescent, Abraham, who had written on social media that he had never had access to sanitary facilities to take care of physiological needs. This caused a stir and Morán found himself set upon by thugs dressed in police uniforms.

Recently, on the Radio Martí program Contacto Cuba, Rolando Rodriguez Lobaina stated that twenty photo and video cameras were seized from his production company, Palenque Vision, that its reporters been arrested and beaten, and that others had left the profession due to disruptions, attacks and acts of repudiation organized by Cuban State Security forces.

Something similar happened to Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez of Hablemos Press. Agency property was confiscated, arrests were made and its citizen journalists fined and/or imprisoned.

The regime, in the person of Raul Castro and his lackeys, want to shut you up.

The Revolution’s bigwigs want to sip mojitos while watching cruise ships docked in Havana Bay to the sound of maracas and do not want anyone interrupting their Guantanamera, which few remember… or care about.

Muzzling the dissenting voices of Castroism amounts to merely shoveling dirt on that idyll that was once a military revolution and is now nothing more than a disguise, a fashion show catwalk, a mockery of decent people.

On the morning of Monday, May 2, it went like this: the Cuban Daniel Llorente challenged the partisan crowd and called them hypocrites to their faces. The day before the young black man had screamed anti-imperialist slogans and this morning he received with cheers the first cruise ship to come from Miami in 56 years of the walled-off island. After a discussion in which a fidelista — a party faithful — made gestures referring to the color of his skin, the police came and carried him off.

Nobody flinched.

Every year Cuban jurists discuss the squares on every little worksheet in the sea of bureaucracy, every comma in the most futile paragraphs, and end up ratifying Fidel Castro as the best exponent of Cuban law. In the face of the mojitos and ham croquettes they are incapable of discussion about the most striking legal aberration among those that cramp their legal degrees: the Law of Pre-Criminal Dangerousness, a tool used to send thousands of young Cubans to prison for looking cross-eyed at a police officer.

The Castro press is a black hole into which the history of the country has fallen. Infamy knocks on its doors and it prefers to write about the butterfly migration in the Valley of Viñales. The scribblers of the government libelers have never taken to task an official of the Interior Order of a prison and they don’t want to investigate a beating delivered by the MINIT’s feared Special Troops.

When plainclothes agents shove the young Llorente into a patrol car so as not to spoil the party of the Adonia cruise ship’s arrival in Cuba this Monday, it was the voice a young woman that was heard above the national shame shouting, “Throw him overboard.” And Havana erupted in applause.

The country is sliding backwards, for almost sixty years, but the boys want reggaeton and a fistful of money to pay for wifi, and nobody is going to distract them.

These big-eyed beings sent the imprisoned writer a message of encouragement to speak in front of Raul Castro. I met her through my colleague Amir Valle and since then I go to her Facebook wall and to her blog Elisa Tabakman Metal y Piedra. There I see that the blows and the dungeons haven’t left my friend and brother Angel Santiesteban all alone.

Tell me about your background, how did you come to this mixture of techniques.

I’m a fire artist, all, or almost all, the techniques of my work are covered in what is known as the fire arts: ceramics, glass, iron, jewelry. All the materials involved pass through fire, because even in my mosaics fire is involved, whether it’s stained glass or figures in iron or silver. You could almost say that if you pass through the path of the fire it is inevitable you will involve yourselves in all of its arts and possible techniques.

Fire is magic, fire purifies, fire transforms. Fire is what converts things in alchemy techniques. When you trap fire, you can never abandon it. In fact, I was 8 when I started studying ceramics, later, starting at 14, I trained for long years at the National Ceramics Schools, and I had some experience in stained glass at that time, until come years ago I went to direct fire with a torch, making contemporary jewelry, and then returned to the path of glass but researching and experimenting and sculptural techniques and in fused glass.

And again I embraced the techniques because the jewelry I was making with silver and precious stones asked me… and this is my current work, parallel to the works I continue doing and displaying. The training of an artist never ends, either through taking specialized seminars or experimenting, but it is an endless process.

Why are animals the central motif? What moves you to engage in artistic creation?

I love animals especially, I don’t understand life without animals. They are the best thing that could happen to us and ironically, we are the worst thing that can happen to them. The love and communication with animals humanizes us. We learn from the to respect others, their vital space, their times and needs. But especially, we learn from animals that unconditional love exists, they loyalty exists and that there is a true relationship that lasts for life.

In animals we don’t expect evil, self-interest or selfishness. We can fail the animals because we tend to be with them like we are with our fellow human beings, but they never will do that to us. And I have a very idealized perspective of human beings, I represent the values I would like for us with animals. Even with the most terrible issues I have a positive and optimistic vision, a vision of real life that flies in the face of reality.

But art tries to express feelings, ideals, create awareness… so it is not my intention to construct my messages with them, they just emerge from me. And I feel like I recognize them. If you look carefully, the most horrendous dramas that humanity suffers, the animals suffer, because we have them living with us and they also die of hunger, bombings, floods, on rafts or in wars… in those in their natural environments are victims of human cruelty, either because we destroy their habitat or because we hunt them without mercy.

Animals are so marvelous that I also owe to them having found my want to express what I feel or am trying to express.

The use of glass and metal make you go back to the origins, especially when your motives are figurative. Do you not call the art conceptual and abstract, which has become every more “fashionable.”

Honestly, I believe that art is abstract; art is always a representation, more or less ties to the real image of what it represents. There is no art without abstraction, and at the same time there is always an intellectual or emotional elaboration. In my case, “abstract” art doesn’t work for me as an expressive language, I don’t see how to represent the drama of a concentration camp, or the drama of the refugees, or whatever it is, it is not with “figurative” elements or high symbolic value.

And it is not just ab out how one uses this language to express it; I believe that it is fundamental that works that have a strong social commitment be “accessible” to the readings of the “spectators”; if not we have more or less beautiful “objects” (taste is always relative) but we are not doing what I understand as art. The rest, of course, is always respectable, if it doesn’t allows a dialog with the viewer and it doesn’t spark feelings, and it only awakes a great aesthetic appreciation, it is “decorative art,” which I would always flee from.

It’s very difficult for me to make utilitarian objects, it horrifies me, working them technically and designing them with no expression; so I know that is not my way although from the economic point of view, clearly I should choose that option.

Your work is halfway between literary editing and Human Rights activist. What do you do to combine this?

I came to the world of editing because I was always a fanatic reader and devoted to books and the worship of the “object” of the book led me to pursue a graduate degree and editing and worked for many years in the most important publishers. There is no work more gratifying than that which allows us to enjoy what we do, and this is true in my case.

Reading is a key trigger in artistic creation, there is nothing like reading to awaken our imagination. The same thing happens to a writer who can never stop reading the work of others to enrich their own production. What in the intellectual world is called “intertextuality” also exists in the world of plastic arts; we are a product even of the genetic memory of our species.

In every artist there is a germ of those who painted the caves of Altamira, the artistic expressions of all peoples of the world, and more recently, individual artists. Throughout history we have had the same need to express, to ask, to thank; it started in the walls of the caves, and we continue it today with many techniques and materials, but the human need was, is and will be the same.

In my case, for multiple reasons and personal experiences, my expressive needs landed on the issue of human rights, of human dignity. But it was not reduced to that but to the feedback with a strong commitment to it and that’s what I spent years doing, not without problems, sacrifices, injustices and misunderstandings. but, aware of being on the right side of History, I resisted everything, not without pain, but I have resisted it.

I always thought I was in a privileged place, to be fighting for those who need help not being one who needs it. So every time I thought I would collapse, I thought about those who needed me, and the conclusion was always the same: if there are those bearing the unbearable and I owe my commitment to them, how can I not bear insults, insults and threats?

Each time I felt I couldn’t do it any more, I thought about the reality of facing prison, torture, persecution and the complete lack of freedom and legal guarantees. And I grew with each disagreeable episode, and curiously, in every moment of these I did my best work.

I feel privileged to be able to do committed art but even more to accompany it with a real commitment to the victims of what I am denouncing. My only regret is not being able to do more; these years of struggle have also make me aware of how limited we are no matter how infinite our effort. But as the Talmud says, “He who saves a life, saves humanity.”

And this is the guiding principle of my life. In the case of Angel Santiesteban, I also help humanity to continue to have an excellent writer, who is so committed to his art, he paid with his freedom, and worse still, he could pay with his life. Caring for Angel, caring for a human being and a great artist.

Travieso calls out. “The objective is to be in solidarity with the Ladies in White and the oppnents who are in Cuba demanding human rights for Cuba. It’s a way of reminding those who are watching us that in Cuba, people are being suppressed for marching peacefully for their rights.”

Bárbara Travieso, a human rights activist who has been out of Cuba for 27 years, says that her hope is that those who go out to march in Cuba know that “they are not alone, we are watching everything that happens and we support them.” It was the time at which, in the Havana church of Santa Rita, the Ladies in White were being beaten.

Jorge Ross, who has supported various causes promoting democracy in Cuba, states that the important part is that people know that there are Cubans “who want a different life”, and immediately assures that “we should support the people who are marching in Cuba and who are suffering harassment, bullying, blows, and jail from the Cuban regime”.

I asked some French people, secluded over a dozen fish fritters, and they said that while looking for information about Miami, they found out that “there are protests on the corner of Versailles Restaurant”, and that until now, they had thought that there wasn’t anyone imprisoned in Cuba because of their opinions; they thanked me for a pair of books that I gave them.

Southwest 8th Street at 11am is like a calm ocean. Cars pass every ten minutes. But despite this, we still heard on several occasions people yelling “Viva Fidel!” without stopping to ask about the activists’ motivations.

Finally, I met up with Karel Becerra, “infoactivist”, “cyberdissident”, and defender of the cause of those who want to have rights. Becerra has worked closely with the Independent and Democratic Cuba Party, lived in Argentina for 15 years, and is now in Miami.

We were 10 decent Cubans under the Miami sun, at that time when the summer is ending. Horns were blowing, and many people lowered their car windows and yelled “Freedom for the political prisoners! Long live free Cuba! Down with the dictatorship!”

It’s Versailles Restaurant. It’s Miami.

It’s Cuba.

The story takes place in a bar where the two have met up with an elderly man, Guidry. After a few beers, Guidry initiates a conversation:

“Did I tell you how I made the cop on the beat? He’s the vigilante, the watchman out there where I live. Every time he sees the light on in my room, he comes in for a shot of rum. Well, about five nights ago he caught me when I was drunk and horny, and one thing led to another and I ended up showing him how the cow ate the cabbage.”

A character narrates without an intended audience. A “pesky reporter” trying be a wise-ass casts doubt on Oriental wisdom by asking an old man in a trance — colored smoke streaming out of his nose — who has made cosmic contact: “Will there be war with Russia, Mahatma? Will Communism destroy the civilized world? Is the soul immortal? Does God exist?”

The response is priceless and Burroughs delineates it in his cool, agile prose: “The Mahatma opens his eyes and compresses his lips and spits two long, red streams of betel nut juice out through his nose holes. It runs down over his mouth and he licks it back in with a long, coated tongue and says, ‘How in the fuck should I know?’ The acolyte says, ‘You heard the man. Now cut. The Swami wants to be alone with his medications.’ Come to think of it, that is the wisdom of the East. The Westerner thinks there is some secret he can discover. The East says, ‘How the fuck should I know?'”

Upon its release, the British novelist Martin Amis said that Burroughs had “written a thoughtful and sensitive study of unrequited love.” Recently the Spanish newspaper El País published an article, “The House Where Burroughs Killed,” a story about an apartment in Mexico where the writer shot his wife. It describes a site which has become a place of pilgrimage for Burroughs’ fans and other oddballs who make up the human species.

The author of Naked Lunch was charged with murder and sent to jail in Lecumberri, a place where years later the Colombian writer Alvaro Mutis would also be imprisoned. Here a key protagonist, the Mexican attorney Bernabé Jurado (“the Jack of All Trades, clever corrupter of judges,” according to Garcia Robles) appears on the scene. After only 13 days in prison the shyster lawyer manages to get his client released by “proving” it was an accident. That was the version Burroughs offered while still behind bars to La Prensa, a tabloid newspaper that thought it was interviewing just another crackpot.

“My wife had had a few drinks. I took the gun to show it to my friends. The gun slipped and fell, hit a table and discharged. Everything was purely accidental,” said Burroughs, as reported in the excellent article by Juan Diego Quesada for the Madrid newspaper.

Sixty-four years later, residents of the Mexico City building — two little old ladies — are besieged by curious visitors, sticking their noses in, hoping to learn ever more about a troubled writer who shocked so many in the latter half of the twentieth century.

“There are those who believe he was a vile murderer crowned with a halo of romanticism but they are a minority,” concludes the El País reporter. “Bernardo Fernández is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Uncle Bill, which is based on Burroughs adventures in Mexico City. Upon leaving the office of his psychoanalyst one Monday, Fernández peered through the entry to the building but it was too dark to go for a stroll inside. He fantasized entering the apartment, having coffee with its tenants and taking some photos. But he did not dare because he knew that the response of the sisters and their five dogs would be the same as always: ‘Get out of here.’ The mystery of Burroughs remains hidden behind that door.”

*Translator’s note: English-language title of a novella by William S. Burroughs. Written in 1951 and 1852, it was not published until 1985. The complete work is currently available for free online:

https://colectivotijeras.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/burroughs-william-s-queer.pdf