Category: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Cubans, damn it! / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Total, infinite pity and shame! The teacher Odali has written Maceo (Antonio Maceo, hero of the Cuban War of Independence) with an “s” on my primary school blackboard, and I started crying. I couldn’t help it. That’s what happened. She wrote “Maseo” with her chalk and I started to cry in the middle of the classroom.

Those times were terrible and loving. The world was blue: Havana was white. My parents were living and that was a permanent certainty. Nobody got ill unless they deserved it. People laughed. Their eyes were shining, perhaps caused by tears. The Revolution still had not become fact. continue reading

I am talking about a house on the outskirts of a city on the outskirts of a country on the outskirts of a history with no outside, a history which is purely internal. Private, intimidating, and insular. There was nothing out in the open.

The week had days which were totally unconnected. Mondays, for example, were miles away from Fridays. April and October never occurred in the same year. Do you know what I’m saying? I am talking about happiness.

The looks on the faces of the dogs I had on my dirt backyard. The odour of resin which oozed out of mangas*, which I always knew were a fruit which had nothing to do with mangos. The smell given off by the tar when the sun beat on the roofs of the houses in Lawton. Neighbourhood buzz. In the US there are one-off sounds, whispers or screams, but no buzz. The counties don’t sound like that. It has something to do with the sea, with the possibility of flooding and flight. Havana sounds like seashells And seashells make that sound because they are echoing the blood circulating round in our heads.

We weren’t bothered about anything. We were immortal. So sensitive. We had marvellous music which was strictly North American. The United States, in the forbidden distance, was the homeland which was waiting for us. It is still waiting for us, far away over there, in an unimaginable memory. Because it would mean less if it were so close. In effect, now, with our US eagle passports in our hands, we are outcasts in all the world. While we seem more free, we are more condemned to float in a slave’s nothingness. We have lost our impossibility.

The sidewalks in Havana were highways. The roots of the almond trees pushed them up. The concrete they used in the fifties had a different density, they laid it with a sense of style and every section had its own personality. I knew that those sidewalks would outlive life on earth.

And then the flamboyants. And the pine trees. They were the first ones to experience the cruelty. They were dying. They cut the pines for two or three decades. The flamboyants fell sick. When the ones in the Parque de la Asunción died, I decided that if I was ever able to leave Cuba, I would never return.

I still walk in Manhattan and I am walking over a map which reflects Havana. Not like Miami, because Miami has no map, it is a whole. In Manhattan every corner has its opposite number in Havana and it’s very easy to work out where you are. Two island cities in two countries which don’t belong to them.

It’s four thirty in the morning in Rhode Island, a mobile island. There’s a new moon which doesn’t let me sleep. I’m sure I am going to spend many days without sleeping from here on out. And then I will fall over, like a pine or flamboyant, exhausted. Laid out.

“Maseo” seems much more human written with an “s” on the blackboard. But no word can make me want to cry. It’s just that I don’t see them as words. I have forgotten the instinctive reflex of reading. It’s all information here, and so you have to read it. Information is innate and it doesn’t speak to you, but to your capital.

We Cubans don’t have contemporaries. We are the only group of people who don’t have any common inclination at all. That’s our salvation. To be an ungroupable group.

I still love them. I still don’t know how to love anyone born in other perfect impersonal groups. This affection is our prison sentence. To keep loving in the Cuban way.

I love you. Do you love me?

*OLPL-provided note for the translation: Manga is a fruit similar to mango, smaller and with a lot of loose thread in its pulp. 

Translated by GH

31 October 2014

Macho Che / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Che’s Beatle Girlfriend

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

No doubt her name was Una. Or Agatha. Or Lil. Or Ide. O Brighid. Or Sinead. Or Nora. Or Tilde. Or perhaps Alaidh or Hilde. Any one of those Irish names reminiscent of other names whose etymology is tirelessly, anxiously, apocryphally Anglo.

For a native of civilized America—meaning, uncultured—her name, her names, is, are no more than hieroglyphics without an etymology, all just sounds twisted up in Barbie’s chin and the proper palate of the Irish girl named: Una, Agatha, Lil, Ide, Brighid, Sinead, Nora, Tilde or perhaps Alaidh or Hilde or all of them in one.

In any case, she’s always wearing that inert object over her head, which on camera rivaled a wet beret like his, like Che’s, in 1964. And since Ernesto Guevara is missing his emblematic beret during an interview translated by an interpreter—she literally interpreted, as in performed, his role—we can assume that Che had just placed his beret on her, like a bonnet on her hair, a colonel’s crown, the aura of a magical capture in order to allure her with his New Man smile, his big Cantinflas*-style mustache, the comically tender answers of a magnanimous conquistador. Such is the complicit tenderness of assassins and suicide victims. continue reading

Una, Agatha, Lil, Ide, Brighid, Sinead, Nora, Tilde or perhaps Alaidhilde, sometimes looks like a pioneer. If Che laughs, she is happy and confuses that laughter with her own. The professional journalist that hired her is suddenly a nuisance in this scene of seduction.  That’s why the introverted Irishman is, in fact, treated like an idiot by Che and the girl: both answer his professional questions with mutual, intimate irony; they elude high politics and exchange practically pornographic codes on the fringes of power.

The UN, for example, is much less important here than Una, Agatha, Lil, Ide, Brighid, Sinead, Nora, Tilde or perhaps Alaidhilde. The girl addresses Che with feminine adjectives: she plays with tongue twisters perhaps to provoke him in his manliness. She pretends that she doesn’t know how to pronounce properly, that she will need to be punished in private for having behaved so badly in public.  And who better to castigate her than a castigator. And who better to violate her golden vagina than an executioner dressed in olive green.

It’s obvious that the end of this interview will be an irresistible, ridiculous, anti-biographical and extra-diegetic scene like all fornication between strangers, where Ernesto Guevara (the lighthouse of America back then), wielding his phallus of dubious hygiene in the warm air of the furnace; and in his English (which is better than he lets on), he invites Una, Agatha, Lil, Ide, Brighid, Sinead, Nora, Tilde or perhaps Alaidhilde to do the splits in a hotel room paid for by some Cuban administration in Revolution.

It’s also obvious that Una, Agatha, Lil, Ide, Brighid, Sinead, Nora, Tilde or perhaps Alaidhilde will go and she will open her pelvis and, without removing her clothes, sit atop the hero of horror. She’s not even 20 years old. She is—was—a virgin, although during her nights of childish terrorism she dreamed about being a guerrilla fighter, a decade before this phase of guerrillas and electric guitars. Now she prefers to dance to the Beatles, in spite of herself.  And that music inspires this adventure of bleeding to the point of concern between her first world thighs; and, of course, that female smell of iron is the only thing that actually excites the star commander with asthma: the blood inspires and saves this executioner, who in turn will be executed almost as young as he was in that 1964 interview in an Ireland that is unrecognizable and irreconcilable from an Irish woman’s crotch.

There’s a word she’s trying to say, but it trips on her tongue. The “twist and shout” rich girl shakes while straddling and scratches her vocal chords between her paycheck and her illusion of freedom slogans. Then Che corrects her. It’s one of those words that, from being repeated so many times, have not one but infinite etymologies: and one absolute, totalitarian meaning. The interviewer says, “government.” The interpreter stutters: “govermiento.” The interviewed censures: “gobierno.”

It’s a kind of tournament trio of word-zap, of war-zap. And the video is cut off immediately after.

Today there is no other visible trace of this interview anywhere on the Internet. It’s possible that it was never published in any newspaper or on T.V. It’s even possible that the whole thing is a montage from before or after the digital age. There was no dialogue, but rather delirium: desire that always tidies up. There is also no historical evidence that Ernesto Guevara ever loved another human being the same way—and one can tell from his homicidal, homagno** eyes on camera (more than in bed)—that he loved his Beatles maniac interpreter.

So this unmarred image must have been the only one presentable not long after that, in Che’s interview with God.

Translator’s notes:
*Cantinflas (1911-1993) was a comedic film actor (writer and producer) from Mexico who usually sported a unique mustache.
 **Homagno, a neologism, is the name of a poem and a “character” representing “man’s greatness” (homo/man + magno/magnitude) in this and at least two other poems by José Martí.

 Translated by: Kathy Fox 

Without Cuba / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

mi amor

When did we disappear while a nation? When did Cuba stop being one? Or perhaps it never fully was one?

Nations are human inventions, impulses of our historical imagination. Cuba was the story that we told ourselves. A chronic story and, therefore, unbelievably believable.

We never had any democrats. The Republic’s great milestones are nothing more than frauds, ruses of worldwide communism in order to gain time and corrupt the remains of the social fabric in our country.

Bullets, bills, the opportunist who lives off of the fool, anything is worth more in Cuba than ballots. We are compulsive demagogues, even if we’ve had saints and sages and virtue. But we were lacking fascism, that experience which Cuba might have joined in on if it hadn’t been aborted by the leftist Revolution of 1933. Then it was necessary to wait until 1959 to be able to consummate our congenital totalitarian defect: a fascism from the right with a popular narrative. continue reading

Now Fidel Castro has died. His remains have been cremated before being presented in public. And his ashes will be dispersed from the Rio Bravo to Patagonia, assuring along the way that they are not vandalized out of revenge or as a malicious amulet. Writing without Fidel in the world and knowing this is, for me, a defining, prophetic experience, something millions of Cubans no longer planned to live to tell.

January 28th or February 24th or April 17th: the liberating announcement that we Cubans will never again hear the soap opera-like voice of Fidel Castro has the regime of his illegitimate brother, Raul, terrified. Like all assassins, Castroism is a state of cowardice in the midst of his insulting impunity. Families readjust. They know blood is the way out. And they are making sure it will not be theirs that flows. In this sense, they have promoted a modest pacifism of opposition that will keep them in power.

They will probably never announce that the Commander in Chief is a cadaver. This insolent silence will probably be stretched out to the end of time by Island authorities as the only source of governance. North American newspapers are also updating their obituary notes from 10 and 15 years ago. But it will be the least read text in the world, the least current. Because we Cubans are ahead of the world in the craft of leaving Fidel Castro’s imprint behind, just as in the heart of each of us a decrepit dictator has evolved, amounting to millions of miniature fidelcastros no less lethal than the original.

When did the nation disappear? When did Cuba stop being Cuba? Or perhaps it never completely stopped being Cuba?

We only know that, while we are Cubans, we have to distance ourselves from Cubans to the maximum. We are a universe in expansion, we repulse one another. The proximity to ourselves brings out the worst in the populace. The island can’t be reforested. The desert of the soul made a desert of the landscape. I come from there: I can swear to you that today none of you will survive even half a day of “Havanity” [Havana reality]. And tomorrow will be much worse.

Getting lost is beautiful. The amnesic memory is beautiful. What we loved and what loved us emigrated with us. Let’s be worthy of that love that will not be repeated. Let’s be different in the lives of other nations. And, in some of the early hours of the universal moon, let’s allow that love or sorrow to assassinate us completely, hopefully before the state assassin on duty does so.

Cuba will never be free. Maybe Cubans still can be.

Translated by: Kathy Fox

5 January 2015

Open Letter to the European Union About Free Cuba / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

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Please send this text to: christian.leffler@eeas.europa.eu and add your signature to mine if you wish. Thank you!

Friday 9 January 2015

Your Excellency Mr. Christian Leffler, Managing Director for the Americas of the European External Action Service
christian.leffler@eeas.europa.eu

After the meetings held in Havana (29-30 April 2014) and Brussels (27-28 August 2014), Raul Castro’s government unilaterally suspended the third round of negotiations for Agreement on Political Dialogue and Cooperation between the European Union and Cuba that were to take place on 8-9 January 2015, in Cuba.

The previous rounds were described by you as “fruitful and construction,” where both parties worked to “advance the confidence, respect and mutual understanding.” Just when the theme of human, political and institutional rights was to be addressed, the Havana government postponed the dialog, without taking the Cuban people into consideration in this disappointing decision. continue reading

By way of this letter we would like to let you know that Cuban civil society is more than ready to continue these discussions, now that the ministers and armed forces of the Cuban government have not taken continued responsibility, after the abrupt death of Fidel Castro and the restoration of diplomatic relations with the United States.

As Cubans committed to democracy and the development of our country, we formally invite you, on whatever date and at whatever location most convenient for the European Union’s negotiators, to follow up on the agenda of including my country in the free world, which to be legitimate from the beginning cannot exclude the voices and will of Cuban citizens.

Yours faithfully,
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
orlandoluispardolazo@gmail.com

Entropy of Eliecer Jimenez at Brown University / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

THE COPY-PASTE OF REVOLUTIOPHRENIA

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Before Facebook, I met Eliécer Jiménez only once, in an alternative cultural debate in Camagüey, three years ago. He was somewhat shy, but resolute in his urge to be creative in cinematographic terms. No money, no contacts, no political pedigree. A dreamer in a province that looked so asleep. Hope in Cuba today usually depends precisely on awakening in the middle of hopelessness.

We were in the house of Henry Constantín, a common friend and social activist that holds the record of being expelled from different Cuban universities three times, from Santiago de Cuba to La Habana, as despotism is quite equitable throughout the Island. Those public meetings in private are still being held there, with the name of Hora Cero / Zero Hour, a concept that connects with the notion of starting from zero in a society so afraid of citizen initiatives. Zero Hour is in fact an independent space with a lot of communicating vessels with my literary generation called Year Zero, of which I have recently compiled a narrative anthology translated into English by O/R Books in New York. continue reading

During some time I confess that I forgot completely about Eliécer Jiménez. His first films, short and sharp, reached me before I had the chance to remember that he was the same brilliant young man of the autumn of 2011, coincidentally around this date.

I still do not know whether I liked or not his bold visual improvisations. “Free cinema” (or maybe freak cinema, just one minute of a version of our own wall of wails); “Usufruct” (about the limitations in the once solvent Camagüey of the reforms imposed by Raul Castro, also known as Raulforms), “Ice Age” (a naturalistic estrangement filmed inside a domestic freezer), “The face of water” (reflecting on the reflections caused by waste waters running or stagnated on the asphalt), “Wet feet, dry feet” (another documented-in-detail minute focused on floors and social inertia), “Ideological deviation” (a close-up to a rather erotic pair of lips chewing a most likely American gum), “Verdadero Beach, the people’s beach” (not the touristic Varadero but “verdadero”, which means “the real thing” and immediately remits to “vertedero”, that is: a rubbish dump where pigs and humans share a happy bath in the Caribbean), and, of course, the climactic confusion that we are going to sufferenjoy today, Entropy, where the script-writer and director and editor, all in one in the conception of Eliécer Jiménez, decide not to film at all, but to bring provocatively together one hour of fragmentary light and sound from our audiovisual memory, in a virtual cut-up or unpredictable patching of pixels and collage of clicks, among other anachronistic notions in a nation without internet.

Eliécer Jiménez has an underground personal producer that is identified as Ikaik, with two uncommon K’s, in a Kafkaesque allegory to ICAIC, with two Cuban C’s, and this could perfectly be the only one producer in the planet without other budget than his own pockets full of illusion. Nevertheless, many of his documentaries have obtained national awards, like those granted by the Cine Plaza in Havana, by the Sur Imagen film festival in Cienfuegos, by SIGNIS the World Catholic Association for Communication, by the extinct Poor Cinema Festival in Gibara (province of Holguín), and by the quasi-extinct International of School of Cinema and TV in San Antonio de los Baños (Havana province), gone with García-Márquez as one of the tokens of the Castrozoic Era.

Graduated from that school, but much in the style of the Renaissance film-maker named Miguel Coyula (the director of Memories of Overdevelopment, which will join us on November 12th to present his -in my opinion- masterpiece), Eliécer Jiménez is what we call in Cuba “un hombre orquesta” or a do-it-all-by-yourself. The alternative that has frustrated many of my colleagues would be: do-nothing. But luckily Eliécer Jiménez refused to see no entropy, hear no entropy, speak no entropy. And today we will pay the consequences.

His esthetics establishes an obvious dialogue with another Cuban documentary by Armando Capó Ramos entitled “The Revolution is…”. Although we must recognize that, in general terms, younger generations in Cuba are fascinated by a past that it was sacred to their predecessors in art (usually their censors at the same time), but that for them now it’s only useful as raw material for deconstruction (including destruction) and to expose a history that began epical to end up ridiculous. It really seems that no one knows the past that waits for us.

Eliécer Jiménez worked for several boring Cuban radio and TV stations. He published in several not so boring intellectual magazines, like Cuban Cinema. And he is member of some obsolete cultural organizations, like the Saíz Brothers Association and the Cuban Audiovisual Association. All of them are not only State-run, but dependent of the Communist Party, the only one legal in the Island of Liberty. He was tolerated until a point, fortunately. And next year 2015 he will be able to travel abroad to look for some opportunities in the United States, in this unavoidable invasion of asphyxiated Cubans artists and activists than threatens to saturate this country from coast to coast.

Some of his documentaries have been shown in France, Spain, Argentine, Venezuela, Perú, and last April in New York, thanks to the Cuban Cultural Center, and now here at Brown University, thanks to the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

I will not say much about the 66 minutes of Entropy, that thermodynamic symptom of the degree of disorder of a system (and, please, this is not a political definition). The promotional note refers to Entropy as a docu/mental about a disantropological country, or maybe a clowntry. A remix with no copyrights that goes beyond our backyard tradition of Titón and Tabíos, and Elpidio Valdés and Nicolasito Guillén Landrián, just to vibrate with the Brownian motion of a mass media molecule, from Vertov to Tarkovsky, from Orson Welles to Eisenstein, from Chaplin to Fritz Lang, from Coppola to Spielberg, from Scorsese to Tarantino, in an schizoid cycle from delirium to paranoia.

Cuban cosmogony of the Big Crunch. Youtubrevolution. Counter-clockwork orange designed by an apocryphal Stanley Cubic. In the beginning, it was the Beast. 66 as an apocopation of 666: Cubapocalypse now.

So, one more warning in order to avoid anaphylaxis and that’s all folks. Attention: Castro is a constitutional customary character of our Entropy, his Rolex fluttering in his hand in order to demand from us silence and subjection to his time to talk. Because, time is running out not only for him, but for we the audience that applauded him during endearing and decadent decades. This is why Fidel’s initial invitation echoes like a farewell to the fidelity we professed to ourTyrannosaurus Rev, when he whispers as a phantom father:

“Distinguidos invitados, queridos compatriotas.”*

*Translator’s note: With the exception of this phrase — Distinguished guests, beloved compatriots — the remainder of the post is in English in the original.

1 November 2014

Fideless / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Last Christmas with Fidel Castro

-Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

December is a sad month, precious, blue-lit and dreamily silent. I was born in this month. And in this month, in a year not so distant as it now appears, I shall return to Cuba with a Nobel Prize in Literature, the first of the Cuban Nobels, which I will rub in the face of the dictatorship that we will still have in Cuba by that date, and of which prize money I will use unto my ruination to hasten our liberty.

December is over before it barely starts. It is an atemporal month, achronological, almost uchronic [imaginary], outside the calendar, at the border of that mystery which is the changing year.

We are others, and we die piece by piece every December. In fact, almost never do all of us who started out the year reach the end of it. We who gather together this month do not know if we will get to the next month a year from now. Death reaps the best among us. Every December there are fewer and fewer Cubans left. We survivors are the worst, we are the one discarded, even by the gods.

This Christmas 2014 is also our first Death Celebration* without the dictator, who died on us without ever facing justice. With Fidel deceased ** (1926-2014), all now seems easy, expeditious, unnecessary. The Revolution was a nightmare had by a few million. The memory is renewed at a vertiginous velocity. In a little while, the new Cubans will not know or be able to spell the unnameable name of Fidel Castro – which in a few months will barely resonate in the curriculum for the Prehistory of the Nation, dissolved by the virtue of apathy and the amnesia of new generations.

The death of the hegemonic one has surprised us all. He didn’t even say goodbye, the jerk, just as he didn’t announce his arrival but rather imposed it by death blows, lies and evil. Fidel Castro has gone forever from our nation and he has left us incredulous and distrustful, to the point that we prefer to pay attention to this historic milestone. We still do not believe ourselves to be alone, without the delirious despot. We will not believe it, either, when his brother Raúl Castro announces it to us, surrounded by his octogenarian military elite — perhaps on January 28, 2015, to make Fidel’s death coincide with the birth of José Martí.

But today once again is Christmas. Part of the lost country will gather together the best of its spirit on this date. Hope will cease to be a congenital illness, and the blue light of the child-god will warm our home-mangers, making them less awful, making us less perverse in being human zeroes who aspire to be human beings,*** after a half-century or half- millennium of multitudinarially murdering each other over nothing.

It is Christmas once again, my soul brothers and sisters, and in 2015 will shine the words that for centuries should have been spoken among Cuban, but which have remained buried by the string of tyrants that have brought about our unnecessary independence. Perhaps it is the season to grow closer to being a civilization of free cosmopolitans and move ourselves away from Slaveamerican barbarity.

It is Christmas, and I love you all.

Translator’s Notes:

*The author is making a play on words in Spanish, using the common name for Christmas, “Navidades” (Nativity) to contrast with the quasi-rhyming word for morbidity, “Morbilidades.” 

**An alliterative play on words – deceased in Spanish is “fallecido.” 

*** A play on words in Spanish – the word for “zeroes” sounds very similar to the word for “beings”

25 December 2014

MONEY MONEY MONEY / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo and Clive Rudd

How to Raise Funds: A Manual for Cuban Democrats  

Clive Rudd, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The successive “investigations” (or filtrations of intelligence) of the Associated Press (AP) and other media, that try to demonize the material support of Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and governments in solidarity with the democratic cause in Cuba, is not a new phenomenon nor is it exclusive to the free world.

The Cuban government has known how to utilize the attacks on the funding for democracy. This has been at the expense of committing historic malapropisms that defy any comparison with the fundraising done by José Martí and his Cuban Revolutionary Party, or even by Fidel Castro in his insatiable quest for dollars in Mexico, Costa Rica and Venezuela (which was then not to fund anti-government propaganda but to buy weapons and train armies and, in short, impose violence for life on our society).

The new form of expression of this demonizing campaign (which essentially plagiarizes the methods employed by the Havana government) is led by the AP and The New York Times (NYT). There are many other “useful idiots” but their voices don’t resonate as much. Since the time of the Sierra Maestra and the bad reporting by Herbert Matthews, Castroism has been a series of blows to maudlin effect on North American public (shameless) opinion.

It is obvious that the message of these hegemonic media cannot be so clumsy as that of the Havana dictatorship, being that they convey between the lines a subliminal message to the Good Capitalist of the North: “The donation of funds by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other organizations to support democracy in Cuba, far from achieving the desired objectives, is counterproductive and useless.”

This message is more than well-known. It is the same argument employed with impunity to lobby for the lifting of the embargo: “The embargo doesn’t work and therefore should be lifted immediately and unconditionally.”

All right, then. In the name of the Cuban and North American peoples, thank you. However, the problem lies in that to defend this argument of inefficiency, there need to be firm proofs, not opinions. Also, the most solid proofs are achieved by comparing the initial objectives of a program with its final results. Here is where things get tough because, for a serious news medium to say that a program was “amateurish and profoundly unsuccessful,” there must be access to documents that have gone cold and are now obsolete (which the AP has been able to gain) but there also must be investigative reporting done that includes access to all or the major parties involved in the matter, including the Cuban people.

As has been known from responses of certain parties included in the AP’s last crusade, all indications are that there have been lies or results have been fabricated to rate these USAID programs as “profoundly unsuccessful.”

According to his interview in the El Nuevo Herald newspaper, Aldo Rodríguez, leader of the musical group Los Aldeanos, did not receive one cent from USAID, he did not compose his songs at the request of this agency, nor did he receive a laptop from subversive foreign elements — three assertions made in an “objective” piece by AP.

These campaigns of the AP, in symbiosis with the Cuban government, to demonize fundraising in support of pro-human rights projects on the Island, have media reach precisely because the national public is a captive audience under the monopoly of the State, and also because it is not common for us Cubans to do public fundraisers, as occurs in any democratic country of the world.

In countries where there are free elections and institutions, fundraising rules and regulations have been created and there are even specialists trained in the technique of quickly and effectively raising monies for political campaigns and the propagation of ideas. This is a subject yet to be included in the curriculum for Cuban democrats and any other social actor who will not want to submit himself to a despotic governmental dictum.

It would be most useful for our civil society, inside and outside Cuba, if we would create a sort of manual for raising funds legally and efficiently to support the alternative projects on the Island. Thus, we Cubans would be the ones to judge which citizen initiatives have been successful and which ones not so much, as we learn from their results to improve those methods of collecting, distributing and utilizing funds for democracy in Cuba. The ends justify the means.

Cuba’s solvency was always handicapped by Castroism. Only a poverty-stricken people is vulnerable to enslavement. At the beginning, it was accomplished through ideological class hatred. Currently, in Castroism’s latter days, it is done through paranoia about a foreign conspiracy (even though Havana has received funding from the United Nations as well as from Qaddafi’s criminal regime).

Therefore, People, perhaps it is time for us to behave less as secret victims and more as modern members of a global economy, transparent in its accounts and convinced of the legitimacy of its anti-totalitarian mission, beyond the laws of Castroism and the media campaigns that prop it up.

Enmeshed in the Raul regime make-believe reforms, we Cubans should not lose our focus to a Fidel who is as much fossil as fatal. Despite the pathetic AP and the NYT, our radical redemption still goes by this watchword: “Within the dictatorship, nothing; against the dictatorship, everything.”*

*Translator’s note: This last line is a riff on Fidel’s famous/infamous statement, “Within the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing,” from his so-called “Speech to the Intellectuals” delivered in June 1961.

 Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

26 December 2014

Plebiscite not only for Cuba, but by the Cuban people / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The American President, Barack Obama, decided on behalf of Cubans. His holiness the Pope decided on behalf of Cubans. The Army General Raul Castro decided on behalf of the Cubans. Everyone, except the Cubans , decided on behalf of Cubans.

After more than six decades without any consulting of the popular will in free and competitive elections, it’s finally time for Cuba to decide for Cuba with everyone participating and for the good of all. It’s finally time for Cubans to decide for Cubans.

Any international solidarity will be useless if Cubans don’t have a say. Any dissent and national opposition would lack a legal framework as long as there is no referendum by Cubans. There is no legitimate government without the effective participation of the governed. No consensus will be credible as long as Cuba does not decide for Cuba.

One learns in the open exercise of freedom, how to live in freedom. The American President and His Holiness, and the General of the Army and all authorities of good faith in the world are invited not to decide but instead to accompany Cubans in this decision, in a historic meeting where the transit from totalitarianism towards an open society or another controlling regimen is defined.

The demand for a national referendum is already in motion. May no one speak for the Cuban people but rather support  the Cuban people so that they may recover their voice.

Translator’s note: The graphic is a “suggested design” by El Sexto for a new Cuban flag.

Translated by William Fitzhugh 

23 December 2014

The Port of Mariel Has Gone to Shit / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The underwater rocks of the Cuban island platform are also gusanos (worms), as if in tribute to the 135,000 free Cubans who were saved from the Castros via the stampede through Mariel Harbor: Friends of the Castro regime, with all due respect and utmost distinction, it happens now that the super-freighters do not fit through the mouth of the Bay of Mariel, they simply cannot enter the autistic, isolated bay, so all the millions of dollars of corrupt investments from Venezuela, Brazil, China and Russia were in vain. The super-port of Mariel will only be a super-ghost. As fossil Fidel himself is. Thank you parasite rocks: on these stones we shall build a Cuba without Castro. Amen!

Translated by Yoly from Oly

7 December 2014

December 10 in the Cuban Key of Castro / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

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Requiem for the 10th of December

When democracy comes to Cuba tomorrow in 56 years — it will come in spite of the international left — when the men and women of my country regain the life in truth that the dictatorship reduced to the filthy game of socialism, when the Castro regime is finally an era in the past and its perpetrators have been condemned to never again enthrone Communism on the Island (which will include not only the division of powers under the rule of law, but the prohibition of anti-democratic parties), then December 10 will be a date of sad remembering for my contemporaries.

This day, for generations and generations, will also be the day of the supreme impunity of the Council of State: an exercise in the color of silence that applauds or assassinates without consequences, that fights Ebola in Africa while incubating the virus of violence at home, that creates scenarios in favor or against according to the convenience of its dismal theater.

On this day the Castro regime’s hatred of Cubans will not be forgotten, nor will our historic humiliation under the love of our masters: a day that opens the heart to the necessary reconciliation still will not be easy.

Tenths of December hurt, far beyond the double funeral that is coming, with no one and for the good of no one. Tenths of December know nothing of the notion of forgetting: there is no victim that is not waiting for his victimizer if, at some time, we are to live in truth. The Cuban fight against the Castro regime is the fight of memory against memory.

10 December 2014

OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA from Rosa Maria Paya Acevedo

See below for translation

OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

from Rosa Maria Paya Acevedo
Rosa María Payá Acevedo is a member of the Cuban Christian Liberation Movement.

Mr. Barack Obama
President of the United States of America

I am writing to you because I assume that goodwill inspired your decision to change U.S. policy toward my country.

I appeal to this goodwill, notwithstanding your decision to review Cuba’s place on the list of countries that sponsor terrorism despite the Cuban government’s attempt, just a year ago, to smuggle tons of weapons in a North Korean ship through the Panama Canal. And despite Cuban state security provoking the 2012 car crash that took the life of my father,Oswaldo Payá, one of Cuba’s best-known dissidents who represented the alternative to the regime, and his young associate Harold Cepero. And even though the Cuban government refuses to allow an investigation and has not given even a copy of the autopsy report to my family.

The Cuban regime has decided it needs to change its image, so it will relax its grip in some areas while it remains in power. It has discovered that it can allow more Cubans to enter and leave the country and that some people can create a timbiriche (a very small business), but the Cuban government still decides who can travel and who can open a small business. Mr. President, your laws are not what is preventing the free market and access to information in Cuba; it is the Cuban government’s legislation and its constant censorship.

We agree, Mr. President, that you cannot “keep doing the same thing for over five decades and expect different results.”

But there is nothing new in treating as “normal” the illegitimate government in Havana, which has never been elected by its citizens and has been practicing state murder with impunity. That strategy already has been done by all the other governments without positive consequences for democracy in my country.

What would be new would be a real commitment to the Cuban people, with concrete actions supporting citizens’ demands. We don’t need interventionist tactics but rather backing for solutions that we Cubans have created ourselves.

For 55 years, the only free, legal and popular demand from Cubans has been a call for a referendum on self-government, the Varela Project. We want changes in the law that will guarantee freedom of expression and association, the release of political prisoners, the right to own private enterprises, and free and plural elections.

You asked in your historic speech : How can we uphold that commitment, the commitment to freedom?

I take you at your word, Mr. President. The answer to you and to all the world’s democratic governments is: Support the implementation of a plebiscite for free and pluralistic elections in Cuba; and support citizen participation in the democratic process, the only thing that will guarantee the end of totalitarianism in Cuba.

My father used to say, “Dialogues between the elites are not the space of the people.” The totalitarianism of the 21st century — which interferes in the internal affairs of many countries in the region and promotes undemocratic practices in countries such as Venezuela — will sit at the table next to the hemisphere’s democracies. I hope censorship doesn’t come to that table as well and that we Cubans, whom you so far have excluded from this process, can have a place in future negotiations.

We expect your administration, the Vatican and Canada to support our demands with the same intensity and goodwill with which you supported this process of rapprochement with the Cuban government. Human rights are the foundation of democracy, and we expect you to support the right of Cubans to decide their future.

We ask you to support an independent investigation into the attack that caused the deaths of Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero.

We do not want symbolic solidarity. We do not want to participate only in the parallel forum to the next Summit of the Americas. The chair that will be occupied by the Cuban government is not the chair of the people, because the Cuban government does not represent Cuba’s citizens. That’s why we need to be present at the main summit, so that the demands of Cuban citizens are heard and empowered by the regional democracies.

Mr. President, dare now, after quoting our José Martí, to put into practice the honesty that a free Cuba deserves, “with all and for the good of all.”

God bless our countries.

Merry Christmas to you and your family,

Rosa María Payá Acevedo

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Posted in the blog of Orlando Luis Pardo Laz0
19 December 2014

Translation of posters:

First poster: The hand is making an “L” for Libertad: Freedom

Second poster:

For life, for truth, for the future.

Rosa MaríaPayá and her family are at risk for demanding of the Cuban State an independent investigation to clarify the circumstances of the violent deaths of Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepera. We will not abandon this Cuban family now, in the face of the lies of a fifty-year government accustomed to working in secrecy and with total impunity.

A government without a future detests that its citizens have a future.

Fidel Died / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Cuban democracy has taken so long that now it seems we Cubans can wait for a little longer. President Obama, with his historical Cuban speech, is indeed recognizing the future rights of a leftist dictatorship that in turn never recognized the rights of Cuban citizens.

Yet, his Cuban counterpart, General Raul Castro, dressed in military uniform instead of his much more accustomed expensive suits, delivered a simultaneous speech so solemn that he sounded like in a funeral. It was obvious that this was his fraternal farewell to Fidel Castro, who cannot be part anymore of the Cuban equation in the new era opened today. I dare say that Fidel Castro has died and that the apocalyptic announcement may take place in the 56th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, on January 1st.

Next, we’ll see in Cuba the masquerade of new investments and markets and local licenses for business and more access to internet and even an electoral reform, but private property will remain a myth and no fundamental freedoms are conceivable for Cubans while only one Communist Party keeps monopolizing all political life, with the State Security from the Ministry of the Interior as the real source of governance of a model based on secrecy and, of course, impunity to repression. continue reading

After decades of fostering terrorism, the Caribbean dictatorship is paving the path to a dynastic “dictatorcracy”, with second and third generation Castros perpetuated in position to lead this process without ever worrying about consulting the popular will. Thus, the Cuban self-transition from totalitarianism to State capitalism is under way with a new geopolitical ally: the United States of America. As such, Cuban democrats must re-schedule their expectations to live in a normal Cuba. This is the main consequence of the “normalization” of relations between the gerontocracy of the Revolution Square and a White House pushed both by the corporations and by the pro-Castro bias of the free press.

As for the Cuban exiles, thank you very much for what you’ve done for this great nation, yes, but your President Obama has just mentioned that effective Cubans are only the 11 million still under Castro’s rule on the Island. So, our world-wide free diaspora will remain excluded of their own nationality, at most invited to collaborate by sending their billions of dollars every year in remittances. What’s more, the Cuban Adjustment Act from 1966 is likely to be ineffective soon, so that the Cuban immigration will lose its special status in USA and the first deportations of illegal Cuban newcomers are conceivable to stop the stampede.

Last but not least, Cuban “civil society”, as Obama stated, seems no more interested in political opposition to the government and ultimately, in peacefully struggling to legally attain power. Reduced to the field of dissidence, their pro-democracy actions are limited to a digital catharsis that is perfectly tolerable for the new status quo of post-Castroism.

So, welcome to the real thing. Cuban democracy, like heaven, can wait. Like hell.

(Original in English)

17 December 2014

Requiem for the 10th of December (International Day of Human Rights) / by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Raul Castro with his son Alejandro and his grandson-bodyguard Raúl Guillermo. (MARTINOTICIAS)
Raul Castro with his son Alejandro and his grandson-bodyguard Raúl Guillermo. (MARTINOTICIAS)

The 10th of December is one of the saddest days. That day the political police – the only source of governance in our island – brings out all of its henchmen to suppress dissent. Many are dressed with their olive-green monkey-like Ministry of the Interior uniforms – most are in plain clothes. And you never really know which is worse, because street clothing in Cuba is inherently cruel. This is how the violence of our State Security disguises itself as a “counterrevolutionary rapid response” by the loyal and “uniformed people.” Plebeian and power are two words that become one in our own tropical brand of nationalistic despotism.

This mafia-like behavior is the real engine that drives the Revolution of the Castros; firing squads and faith in a better future; jail for non-conformists and ration-books for the faithful; repression of private life and exile for those who escape. This is how the Communist Party has hijacked our nation, whose sovereignty has been a myth since 1959, when the island fell into the hands of a group of populist militants. In this respect, it is important to note that neither a domestic rebellion nor the so-long-awaited Yankee invasion would ever be a violation of sovereignty when the very essence of the Castros’ rule has been to ignore the will of the Cuban people.

Meanwhile, notwithstanding the continuing existence of the family’s octogenarian hegemonic brothers, the heirs of the family clan – the pentarchy of Alejandro, Mariela, Antonio, Raul Guillermo and Deborah – prepare themselves for a fake transition of power that ignores the more than 25,000 signatures of the Varela Project (an independent civic-democratic movement within Cuba) that clamors for democracy.

The success of this fake transition depends on the complicity of the democratic governments of the European Union and of certain opportunistic groups within American society, pressured by big-money interests, that wish to obtain their share of the spoils derived from a Cuban workforce with no rights, all while paying off and manipulating American media, where it is proclaimed that our country is a proletarian paradise where “fatherland” is pronounced as “gallows.” Never has the annexationist tradition in our island had such success as it does in the current context; Cuba’s present neither includes nor involves ordinary Cubans; our future is molded from Strasbourg, Brussels, Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and Caracas in a much worse manner than in 1898, because this time our government is being invited as the guest of honor.

Many leaders in Cuba’s civil society have been threatened, harassed, subjected to acts of repudiation, beaten, and even jailed without cause on the 10th of December. On this day, independent artists are impeded from working on their projects – in my case, for being a blogger independent from any official institutions, a police detachment at my doorstep prevented me from leaving without being arrested – or even receiving visits. All of this on the 10th of December… a day that happens to also be my birthday.

This 10th of December, the rapper Angel Yunier Remon aka “El Critico,” remains sentenced to five years for his independent and libertarian brand of music. The novelist Angel Santiesteban suffers a similar sentence since the beginning of last year. Various human rights activists are not allowed to travel freely within or without the island. Government-controlled mobs continue their aggressive harassment of dissidents, among many other abuses that include spying on the private lives of activists.

These are the exemplary results of “Raulpolitiks”, our very own brand of Putinism of a reactionary type that hurts no one buts its victims. We are alone, and Cubans abroad are unwilling to raise a single cent for the cause of liberty. In fact, our exile community donates billions of dollars each year simply so that we can be treated as worse than traitors by our own government.

When democracy one day reaches Cuba, either tomorrow or in another 56 years – it will arrive in spite of the international leftist movement– when the men and women of my country recover the life in liberty and truth that our dictatorship reduced to a mere ideological battleground for Socialism – when Castroism finally becomes a thing of the past and its perpetrators are finally condemned so that they never bring back Communism in our island (an occasion that will include not only the enshrinement of the separation of powers, but also the banning of anti-democratic parties) – still the 10th of December will be a sad day of remembrance for my countrymen.

This day, for generations and generations will continue to remind us of the impunity with which our State Security treated us; an army dressed in the color of silence that applauded and assassinated without consequences; that was willing to combat Ebola in Africa while it nurtured the virus of violence at home; that created false and imagined enemies for purposes of its creepy theatrics. This day shall be for us to never forget the hate that Castroism engendered for its fellow countrymen, and for us to never forget the historic humiliation we suffered under the watchful eye of our very own Big Brother; a day in which for us to open our hearts for the needed reconciliation will be even less easy.

These December 10ths hurt, more than the ever-faster approaching double funeral (of the Castro brothers) ever will. The 10th of December ignores all notions of oblivion. There is no victim who is not expecting to face his abuser if we are to live in truth one day. The fight of the Cuban people against Castroism is the fight of memory against memory.

– OLPL

Originally published in Spanish in Diario de Cuba

Translated by Roberto Alba-Bustamante