Category: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

THE LATEST FROM OMNI ZONA FRANCA / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

http://omnifestivalpoesiasinfin.blogspot.com/2010/09/protesto-todos-unidos-26-flow-de-los.html

Exclusively in the most recent issue of PROTEST of Omni Zona Franca and 26 underground Cuban rappers ALL UNITED against censorship and official lies.

Since last Thursday, September 3, the audio is distributed free inside the island and will be collected in several albums of Cuban alternative groups, to say loud and clear to the Ministry of Culture Omni Zona Franca Cuban culture is that all resolutions and subsidies together.

Since last Thursday, September 3, the audio has been distributed free within the island and will be collected in several albums of Cuban alternative groups, to say loud and clear to the Ministry of Culture that Omni Zona Franca is more culturally Cuban than all their resolutions and subsidies put together.

September 4, 2010

NIGHTERATURA FOR SANDRA / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

NIGHT OF THIS NIGHT WITHOUT NIGHT

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Night in Cuba can be as claustrophobic as the sunny days. You sweat. You stink. You’re exhausted. Desire disappears. It is better to die than to be depressed by the national nightmares on top of the tedium of your coming day.

But the summer is over, however unlikely. October blows its mysteries of a bad month for mediocrity. It’s even cold. The direction of the air changes, the atmosphere is open to the sky. The stars rotate counterclockwise. The moon doesn’t show itself too much. Everything is noble grey. The nights shrink, there is no distance between objects. Lightness is synonymous with Freedom. There is no government nor resistance. There is only Cuba, the only one. The one of truth. Cuba unrecognizable, or at least unknown.

And then we breathe. That. For the first time in this year we Cubans her breath. O2: oxygen, orlando… Click Play.

I go outside. I record in mp3 syllables what Havana dictates to me. I am privileged, I recognize it, I am a tiny imitation of god. I wish the entire world was under my skin, shivering under my sternum. So much reality still virgin. So much luxury and so much splendor. All of a sudden visible, soft, hyper-real. An unexpected city. Suicide.

Down below the Ceguera hospital looking for the midnight music of the sea. I go alone, as appropriate to all limited experience. Unlimited. Seventieth street has preserved its decorated trees. Subversive roots that cracked the solemnity of the concrete. Also granite benches. A desolate funeral. A bookstore without illusion. State cafeterias that deserved to be bombarded by a multinational force. Riotous semaphores for anyone. I crossed on the red, the green and the yellow. No one saw me, not even me. I’m a ghost, of course, but the ghost of a real citizen who is leaving our performance of a country.

On 19th the P-10 bus crosses in front of me, very long, bright and colossal, empty of people, driven automatically, perhaps, from the general headquarters of the Yutong company that made the bus, pure material imported from the future Caribbean that never was. What loneliness so healthy. Where are the Cubans at this time without time? Who will wish me luck and not assassinate me, a shadowy zombie exiting socialism? When will the asphalt end and I will finally tread the dogtooth that is our most faithful border? Why did I not fall asleep forever in one of those plastic cans with signs in Catalan?

It should not dawn. They should not dawn. We should not dawn.

The Russian embassy is a quadratic syringe. I’m sorry, it always seemed precise to me in its deformity. It’s a lizard, a symptom, simply sensational. I imagine it full of spies and satellite dishes, maybe micro-satellites and isotopes and some sad girl with a handkerchief of icons on her head, cut out of one of those colored magazines from the eighties.

I don’t know what I am listing. I am in ecstasy. I speak alone, like the locos, all the fault is the mp3’s.

An estate. The pines still uncut. Democracy will enter Cuba by this avenue, I know. The architecture predisposed. Beauty calls. Even if dawn never breaks, Havana may be saved.

The sea. Next to the Dutch or Hispanic or Swiss hotel, or what I know of the H’s H-Europeans H-invoked now. Little waves. Foam. Salt on my myopic lips. Fear of not being afraid and going with my clothes and boots into this sea. Hiding myself with humility. Under that immaculate odor of cosmic milk from above. Constellations, galaxies, high points of light that never blink. The sense of this place escapes me. I would undress, touch my body, explode. Orlandoisms that don’t fit in the prudish country that persistently kicks us. As a teenager I was like this, pleased with the outside world. Without penalty. Without asking pardon, but with dread. A patrol approaches me from the alley that bites the reefs of the sea.

ID card, of course. We un-inhabit the Island of Identification. My hair makes them nervous. My height. My mannerisms. My clothes. My voice on the mp3. Distilled truth. I am, for an instant, immortal. Immoral.

Two hours later I’m back on 70th Street. The intermezzo doesn’t matter, does not fit in the fragility of this narration. Nothing happened. Decrepit dialogs of authority. Winks of the author. Official fiction. Tonight we were unstoppable, Cuba, me and those who right now follow with the view my voice (just in that ungrammatical order). It is the kind of anecdote that turns exclusively in me. I have told it in Sad Tiger and Decalogue of the Year Zero. A mistake. Horror always is.

Seventieth street above is just exquisite. It never reaches 31st. Snoring mansions illuminated, with their dead owners in the cemeteries of some other country. Roofs slender, curved, futuristic, classic. There were men living in this story. Their mistake was not to leave too early, but to abandon us parting from here (to the papyrus here). A Cuba of mute memories pressing on our retinas, throats and heart. Click Stop.

I turn to home. I hear it. I type, I tremble. I am in an invented winter. Some cats are disemboweled on the other side of my wide open window. The red sky. Drizzle. Hoot. I p[ray that the night does not end now. I pray never to find a line that accommodates the final period without violence.

October 7, 2010

AND WHAT ABOUT MY CUBA…? / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

2010 — Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru

2009 — Herta Mueller, Romania and Germany

2008 — Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, France and Mauritius

2007 — Doris Lessing, United Kingdom

2006 — Orhan Pamuk, Turkey

2005 — Harold Pinter, United Kingdom

2004 — Elfriede Jelinek, Austria

2003 — J. M. Coetzee, South Africa

2002 — Imre Kertesz, Hungary

2001 — V. S. Naipaul, United Kingdom

2000 — Gao Xingjian, France

1999 — Gunter Grass, Germany

1998 — Jose Saramago, Portugal

1997 — Dario Fo, Italy

1996 — Wislawa Szymborska, Poland

1995 — Seamus Heaney, Ireland

1994 — Kenzaburo Oe, Japan

1993 — Toni Morrison, United States

1992 — Derek Walcott, Saint Lucia

1991 — Nadine Gordimer, South Africa

1990 — Octavio Paz, Mexico

1989 — Camilo Jose Cela, Spain

1988 — Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt

1987 — Joseph Brodsky, United States

1986 — Wole Soyinka, Nigeria

1985 — Claude Simon, France

1984 — Jaroslav Seifert, Czechoslovakia

1983 — William Golding, United Kingdom

1982 — Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia

1981 — Elias Canetti, United Kingdom

1980 — Czeslaw Milosz, Poland and United States

1979 — Odysseus Elytis, Greece

1978 — Isaac Bashevis Singer, United States

1977 — Vicente Aleixandre, Spain

1976 — Saul Bellow, United States

1975 — Eugenio Montale, Italy

1974 — Eyvind Johnson, Sweden; Harry Martinson, Sweden

1973 — Patrick White, Australia

1972 — Heinrich Boll, Germany

1971 — Pablo Neruda, Chile

1970 — Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Soviet Union

1969 — Samuel Beckett, Ireland

1968 — Yasunari Kawabata, Japan

1967 — Miguel Angel Asturias, Guatemala

1966 — Shmuel Agnon, Israel; Nelly Sachs, Sweden

1965 — Mikhail Sholokhov, Soviet Union

1964 — Jean-Paul Sartre, France

1963 — Giorgos Seferis, Greece

1962 — John Steinbeck, United States

1961 — Ivo Andric, Yugoslavia

1960 — Saint-John Perse, France

1959 — Salvatore Quasimodo, Italy

1958 — Boris Pasternak, Soviet Union

1957 — Albert Camus, France

1956 — Juan Ramon Jimenez, Spain

1955 — Halldor Laxness, Iceland

1954 — Ernest Hemingway, United States

1953 — Winston Churchill, United Kingdom

1952 — Francois Mauriac, France

1951 — Par Lagerkvist, Sweden

1950 — Bertrand Russell, United Kingdom

1949 — William Faulkner, United States

1948 — T.S. Eliot, United Kingdom

1947 — Andre Gide, France

1946 — Hermann Hesse, Switzerland

1945 — Gabriela Mistral, Chile

1944 — Johannes V. Jensen, Denmark

1943 — No prize awarded

1942 — No prize awarded

1941 — No prize awarded

1940 — No prize awarded

1939 — Frans Eemil Sillanpaa, Finland

1938 — Pearl Buck, United States

1937 — Roger Martin du Gard, France

1936 — Eugene O’Neill, United States

1935 — No prize awarded

1934 — Luigi Pirandello, Italy

1933 — Ivan Bunin, stateless domicile in France

1932 — John Galsworthy, United Kingdom

1931 — Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Sweden

1930 — Sinclair Lewis, United States

1929 — Thomas Mann, Germany

1928 — Sigrid Undset, Norway

1927 — Henri Bergson, France

1926 — Grazia Deledda, Italy

1925 — George Bernard Shaw, United Kingdom

1924 — Wladyslaw Reymont, Poland

1923 — William Butler Yeats, Ireland

1922 — Jacinto Benavente, Spain

1921 — Anatole France, France

1920 — Knut Hamsun, Norway

1919 — Carl Spitteler, Switzerland

1918 — No prize awarded

1917 — Karl Gjellerup, Denmark; Henrik Pontoppidan, Denmark

1916 — Verner von Heidenstam, Sweden

1915 — Romain Rolland, France

1914 — No prize awarded

1913 — Rabindranath Tagore, India

1912 — Gerhart Hauptmann, Germany

1911 — Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgium

1910 — Paul Heyse, Germany

1909 — Selma Lagerlof, Sweden

1908 — Rudolf Eucken, Germany

1907 — Rudyard Kipling, United Kingdom

1906 — Giosue Carducci, Italy

1905 — Henryk Sienkiewicz, Poland

1904 — Frederic Mistral, France; Jose Echegaray, Spain

1903 — Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Norway

1902 — Theodor Mommsen, Germany

1901 — Sully Prudhomme, France

And not one of them from Cuba!

October 10, 2010

EATING THE CABLE / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

PULL YOUR GROUND WIRE

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Once again, like every few months, they were in the neighborhood collecting cables. Lawton dawned shifting into reverse. Vans from the telephone company, ETECSA, or the Ministry of the Interior (MINIT) or both. Cooperation from the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) along with the National Revolutionary Police (PNR). Running around at the last minute on the roofs and in the corridors to be avoid being caught in flagrante. Throwing the anonymous cables into the middle of a lot or a yard. Fines of thousands of pesos to the providers of clandestine signals. And here nothing has happened, ladies and gentleman, but to put the cables back and wait for Papa State’s next raid; apparently he doesn’t like foreign television: it seems that only the top officials (and also Amaury Pérez Vidal) are authorized to watch anything other than Cuban TV (TVC).

María Elvira y Oscar Haza, go home…!

It’s funny how the Havana government likes to wear itself out money. It’s possible that the Cuban establishment is just that: the cunning art of ruining the economy of a nation.

Everyone knows that the illegal market for cable TV has stabilized at a relatively cheap 10 CUC a month (about $12 U.S.). So it’s not unusual to find buildings with dozens of clients, nor blocks where there are more than a hundred (it’s rumored that in Bauta and its surrounding towns there are thousands). The Ministry in charge, perhaps the Ministry of Community Common Sense, should have normalized the situation long ago, not repressing it by force but assuming that the Cuban people are a part of the planet. And they want to see. Will they finally learn, the towering leaders of the Revolution? In addition to living, we shall see what we shall see!

Until recently no cell phone in Cuba actually belonged to a Cuban citizen. How long with they stay immersed in the stupidity of not allowing us to independently connect cables that free us from the four educational channels and allow us to mass-mediocresize ourselves in peace?

Everyone knows that the average Cuban spends his time consuming audiovisual junk. Soap operas, shows by who knows who, reality TV, comic caricatures that go back to the 1950s, and even media crisis news of the worst Latino channels. All in Spanish or, worse, dubbed. All at the speed limit. Ephemeral. Amnesia producing, after the tapestry of instantaneous super-information, Futile future. I know I look like an evangelist for the Round-table show on Cuban TV, but I feel bad about the consumption statistics of our tired culture even before the start of whatever will change.

Of course, the dozens and dozens of viewers affected by the State in Lawton yesterday, tolerated it all with their usual indecency. Not a single protest, not one hard stare, head held high, not a whispering little voice wondering what was going on or how long so much arbitrary randomness would last (right now Amaury Perez Vidal and the rest of Havananothing are going to enjoy their illegal satellite TV).

In truth, when I think about it now, it’s possible they may not deserve any other kind of television ever. Every people has the imbecile box it deserves. Bon appetit, Cubavision.

October 8, 2010

A VENEZUELAN IN VOICES 2 / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Havana Impressions of a Yuma Adrift

Leo Felipe Campos

To JJ and Adin

MUSIC is intermittent and also intemperate when the sun sets, almost always in the nine days I have been walking all over Havana.

Across its entire waterfront, its 17th, 21st and 23rd; its G and its J; if O and its streets with noble names and people hanging over the railings of their balconies. San Lázaro, Infanta, bicycles and taxis at hand.

Its center and its old side, more wrinkled and touristy. Its Marianao in two double buses, buses with an accordion belly and a lot of people, talking, its typical Central Park with Jose Mari again in the center; the splendor lost in dreams diluted by hunger, injustice and time.

Havana has the brightness of rust and the salty smile. You can smoke anywhere and everyone looks for the shade.

When you pass a couple of foreigners, who are multiplying like flies, the eyes of the Cubans seem to sail back and forth, constantly, and then I think they have all been mariners, or will be someday.

It is the city with its gaze lost on the horizon and its head set in its memories, it moves and moves well, with so many lives, and dances slowly until silence comes and it settles.

It’s not like this in Havana, like a question, but not a desperation, an outburst, a prank that wets its customs in the transparency of white rum, while living its forgetfulness with the rumor of the waves in the background.

If Havana has no money it is because it has taken the hard way, the dignity of its heroes and the resistance of its rocks and enormous arms, ancient and sinewy, embracing the possibility of a striking contradiction: Sad happiness.
For example, the city yields to the Milanese of pork between two widowed slices of bread, and fish wrapped in a slice of ham and another of cheese, but long ago it forgot beef, who knows if it is out of fear of losing milk, because in Cuba, I am told, one of the achievements is that every child up to age seven is assured a serving of milk.

Havana talks of what was and what could be, but rarely of what is, its laughter is eloquent escapism, its composure remarkable. It comes with resignation and stoicism to a common place reserved by the tourists, the re-vindication of the authentic as a weapon in the form of a postcard: A cool-night of red-European restaurants with photographic flashes in the black man’s house, a kind man, on the point of devouring in one sitting what the majority of its citizens have dreamed for some decades, rather than years, is measured in faith. It must be said that in this place the owners of the house eat standing.

In the champion boxing match that in the world’s imagination never ends, Havana assumes the place of David without stones, palm open and unthreatening to tell the foreigner: here we need just a little of what you have plenty to spare, but we, let no one doubt it, we will win.

I have seen thousands of people here, although I know few. All I spoke with for more than two or three continuous hours, or four or five days time, have the tattooed virtue, are respectful and charming, very intelligent. The street fills with people and they don’t seem to notice it, walking there, resolving their days as best they can.

Havana, safer than the other capitals I’ve known on the rest of the continent, is a kaleidoscope of confronted faces, a necessary burst of impossible responses. The heat is staggering, a past that never goes away, the loneliness that gives fame, and the ruins, the debris. It is a tastefully sung lament. A beautiful dress pierced by the light that overwhelms the seams.

I still haven’t had time to see its bare chest, leaving its clothes on the floor, and I still haven’t looked, but I have been watching closely, as closely as I could, and now I think I am sure of one thing: I would have preferred to find it naked.

September 29, 2010