Category: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Blacks, What For? / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

FREEDOM FOR SONIA Y RAMÓN ALEJANDRO…!!!

FREEDOM FOR SONIA Y RAMÓN ALEJANDRO…!!!

Today, Thursday, 18 September 2014, it has been two-and-a-half years since a black Cuban married couple have been in prison. This hasn’t the least importance, of course. They have never been brought to trial, nor have charges been filed against either of them. What’s the difference. Surely they’re two neighborhood thieves. I’m going to mention their names purely as Cuban gossip, well, as a curiosity in times of barbarity: Sonia Garro and Ramon Alejandro Muñoz.

That poor, black, Catholic and pro-democracy couple, are still today in a legal limbo as atrocious as Gitmo, continue to be separated in regimes that are technically torture, and no one remembers. Blacks, what for? Neither the Pope nor the Cuban bishops have ever asked, from beyond the Malecon. One of them–who knows if he will soon be named our next Cardinal-Minister–was personally presented with the Garro-Muñoz family case, thanks to the prelate coming to Washington DC to collect the indulgent money from exiles to repair who knows what church on the island (as if a temple is worth more than the parishioners). And nothing, obviously. Nothing has happened here. The blacks to the hole and the whites to the chicken.

FREEDOM FOR SONIA Y RAMÓN ALEJANDRO…!!!

18 September 2014

Leave a comment in Diario de Cuba after being silent for so long / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

We are Castro, as long as we Cubans continue being interviewed by G-2 (State Security) without publicly denouncing this coercion.

Leave me a comment here and now with your name and when-where-how Castro’s State Security bothered you.

HERE IS THE TEXT in English, and HERE IS WHERE YOU CAN LEAVE A COMMENT.

Because you know better than I do.

In private, we confess everything, proud of being annoying to the regime.

In public, we make ourselves crazy so as not to politicize this topic for the worse.

To continue traveling outside Cuba without problems.

To continue visiting Cuba without major complications.

I dare you, damn it.

Talk to me.

HERE IS THE TEXT in English, and HERE IS WHERE YOU CAN LEAVE A COMMENT.

Talk to yourself.

Let’s also talk to ourselves and not only to the anonymous agents of the political police of your supposed country, Cuban coward on the verge of complicity.

Save me.

Save yourself.

Save us.

For the death that already was.

For the life that will come.

HERE IS THE TEXT in English, and HERE IS WHERE YOU CAN LEAVE A COMMENT.
4 September 2014

Castro Versus Castro / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

"Que Ché, Que Pinga!" "When I grow up I want to be Fidel Castro!" Alen Lauzán. (ALEN-LAUZAN.BLOGSPOT)
“Fuck Che! When I grow up I am going to be Fidel Castro!*” Alen Lauzán. (ALEN-LAUZAN.BLOGSPOT)

As long as the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) exists in Cuba, this secret and murderous organization, but in its turn legitimized by all the secret and murderous organizations in the world, regardless of ideologies or political rivalry in public (in private power always supports power); as long as the life of every Cuban depends on the vile will of another anonymous Cuban; as long as nobody questions this complicity by a returning and cheerful exile, businessmen avid to be ministers tomorrow, clergy blackmailed by their own flesh, and even by an opposition without pressure platforms and much less urge for power; as long as we just continue denouncing these clandestine citations from G-2, instead of recognizing that it is an incessant civil war of the State against its citizens, the Cuban nation has no chance of regenerating itself.

The Transition Program, agreed by the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL in Spanish) chaired by Oswaldo Payá, touched on the issue very early on. There would be no decent dialog as long as they didn’t open the archives of Evil and its agents confessed their crimes before the democratic justice that should come. As a consequence, State Security, by an order that could have only come from the Castro family, touched Oswaldo Payá, probably summarily processed in a Cuban place and executed in situ parajudicially.

All Cuban workers and unemployed Cubans, when they show themselves to be intelligent people, with desires for an active biography, have been, are, and will be interviewed by the political police of my country. It seems an exaggeration. Pardo’s paranoia. But you in your cowardly heart know well it’s not so. You know well that you were also called by them (whether you live on the Island or in its antipodes).

During my year and a half visiting the United States, I’ve been in contact with all the generations of exiles or emigrants or whatever they want to call themselves. A captive people that is no longer Cuban, since they can’t reside or participate in the social life of their previous country. Recognized stars of the stage and visual arts have confessed it to me. Geniuses of science have confessed it to me. Athletes or, to be exact, high-performance ex-athletes, have confessed it to me. The signature names of our music and literature also confessed it to me. G-2 frequents them all.

In principle, none of them has had any problem in Cuba. I knew many of them from Cuba and none told me anything about this facet of interlocutors of a Castroism of the catacombs, underground. My friends live there (perhaps they’ve ceased to be so from now on), happy to be almost protestors, while giving dozens of controversial interviews outside, provided they accept the annual interview with the official who looks after them, provided they follow the suggestions of their respective agents. Low profile perverse Fidel-ity, that ranges from threats thrown just as jokes, to the donation of a leg of mutton on the part of the authority when one of our loved ones fall into bed and is declared (gratis) as a terminal patient.

It’s much worse than this. In a single family I have found vedettes and executioners, poets and political experts, essayists and abusers. And beware of naming us, you asshole, because I could even kill when it comes to keep my family at peace. Castroism constitutes us today, is ubiquitous and for that very reason, it’s impossible to be located. Castroism concerns us all, except for the original Castros, who are about to die and their descendants will run away with their millions elsewhere.

In these blackmails we are all the complicit of all. It’s happening right now. They tell me new examples through the social networks from Havana. They ask me for advice and to remain silent. It’d be worse if I ever mention their names and situations. Moreover, those who reside abroad would sue me and put me to jail for moral damages and defamation if I dare to speak.

We are infamous up to this point. We have lived our whole lives in the times of Castro. We shall die, then, with the honors which correspond to the horror of being us (and not the Castros) the true Castro’s decrepit but yet demonic clan.

*Translator’s note: A reference to the chant children must repeat during school morning assembly: “Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Ché!”

From Diario de Cuba

4 September 2014

 

THE TRANSITION THAT IS ABOUT NOT TO COME / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

THE TRANSITION THAT IS ABOUT NOT TO COME

The power of Castro’s dictatorship couldn’t rely only in the annihilation of all kind of opposition, despite the fact that, since January 1959, its governability depended on fear (out of pure terror) to reduce a plural society to military obedience, ideological hatred, and apartheid, whether geographical (in the case of the exiled for life) or uncivil (for those resisting as pariah on an Island turned into a labor camp behind The Iron Curtain). Detaching our homeland from its hemispheric context put us into orbit as a satellite of the totalitarian axis of the Cold War: the best alternative for the new class —now a gerontocracy elite in their eighties— to keep control in perpetuity, or at least for over a dozen of White House administrations.

The power of Castro’s dictatorship necessarily had to rely also on violence and, for so many —let’s say— people of good-will in the world, the beauty implicit in the narrative of The Revolution, with its ritual of burying a decadent past in order to resurrect it in a fertile future, as all revolutionary rhetorics promotes itself. To the image and likeness of those historical guerrillas, nowadays only octogenarians inside Cuba remember what presidential elections are all about. Such a legacy leaves a discouraging anthropological damage if we are ever to move forward from the Castrozoic Era.

Our citizenship was homogenized as soldiership, under the vertical rule of a personality cult, as a justification to survive against a foreign foe meant to last forever: nothing less than the first economy and war potency of the First World, an anthological archenemy called Imperialism. But nobody believes in this Fidelity fable anymore. And, after half a century of officially sequestering the sovereign will of our nation, it’s about time for Cubans to recover their own voice, since the Castros’ long-lasting regime is the one who should retire in silence.

continue reading

Our historical circumstances are critical today for those determined to restore democracy in what was once called the Switzerland of The Americas. The long-sought transition is finally on its way, 25 years too late after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The demands of a peaceful civil society are being dealt with by the Cuban government not as inherent to human dignity, but as privileges and concessions for those who keep quiet, fostering even more the hypocrisy of our culture of simulation, without really respecting the fundamental rights of which Cubans remained deprived, while selectively targeting our truest leaders, those who wouldn’t compromise with the despotism of fraudulent changes, subjecting them to the abusive force of an intact intelligence apparatus based on private surveillance and social stigmatization, concealed coercion and cooption, and ultimately extra-judiciary execution, disguised as a sudden disease or a car-crash, as it criminally occurred to the winners of the European Parliament’s Andrei Sakharov Award for Freedom of Thought: Laura Pollán in October 2011 (founder of the Ladies In White) and to Oswaldo Payá in July 2012 (founder of the Christian Liberation Movement).

In the twilight of the first-generation Castros, everything is changing in Cuba so that nothing changes in the end, in a desperately slow transition from Power to Power, instead of from the Rule of Law to Rule of Law, as was constitutionally requested by more than 25,000 Cuban citizens, who publicly subscribed to the Varela Project, and who are still waiting for the answer due from the National Assembly of People’s Power; although it’s sadly known that the authorities’ response was silence in the mass media, a phony plebiscite in 2002, the massive trials of the Black Spring of 2003 and the deportations of 2010 (involving an insulting Catholic hierarchy), plus the barbaric bonus of the assassination not only of the reputation but of the precious lives of those who wouldn’t abide by our 21st century absolutism.

On one hand, a biological succession is underway in Cuba to a neo-Castroism without Castros, or given the case, with second-generation Castros, which are kindly invited to visit US: LGBT deputy Mariela Castro and baseball dandy Antonio Castro. Emphasized in their hardliner discourse of revolutionary intolerance, a State Capitalism is being implemented in Cuba, one that combines the worse lack of freedom from Communism with the worse corruption and captive markets of the underdeveloped democracies.

On the other hand, tired of waiting for an opening in the Island, complicit in today’s crimes with the promise that profits will prevent tomorrow’s crimes, the international community is already turning their backs on the remains of Cuban civil society, while compassionately patting them on their shoulders, and sometimes even supporting them with a petty percent of their investments with the State tycoons of Havana. The EU is making an approach, so US should hasten and hesitate no more. If Cuba is already doomed not to become a democracy, at least let it be a dictocracy, is the ridiculous rationale of such not so “hard choices”.

Consequently, the presidents of all chambers of commerce are ready to act, since their legitimate jobs are to trade no matters what, with no matters who. Many Cuban exiles are indolently or interestedly prêt-à-porter too, as conveniently-funded push-polls seem to prove, and as the age composition of Cuban emigration is radically renovated, especially after the 2013 migratory reform in the Island, that constitutes not only an escape valve for inner tensions, but also a coup de grâce to the once emblematic —now barely residual— Cuban Adjustment Act.

The overall impression is that the further from the Castros, the easier it is to become and behave pro-Castros, while anti-Castroism abroad is now practically considered “harassment” by the academics and the NGO’s from that once-despicable capitalism that deserved humiliation first and then inhumation from the proletarians of all over the world, united!

Many of the said universities and NGO’s (some located in the US capital) travel several times a year to Cuba only to accept blackmail from State Security agents, behaving according a Castro agenda that they would denounce as intolerable were it dictated by, for example, their own State Department or Congress. I have met them in person. In unfortunate cases, they have again labeled me with that pathetic epithet of “mercenary” (as if there were good dollars and bad dollars from the American tax-payer). In other cases, they have just advised me to repent, since even I can still be a useful variable in this Cuban equation with zero ethics.

If we are to lose the challenges imposed by global Castroism, or if we have already lost this struggle for redemption and haven’t realized it, I’m still proud of having had the unique opportunity of being in touch with so many Cubans of good will —as well as with foreigners’ solidarity— who keep alive the notion of being born with inalienable rights, and that still believe that only Life in Truth is worthy of being called human.

As with other biblical peoples, maybe we Cubans have lost Cuba, or are not going to recognize it any longer when we return there once the last of the Castros is gone, since Castroites will be waiting for us to make our lives much more miserable. But this doesn’t imply at all that Freedom was on the wrong side of History. Freedom will always be our right on the right side of History. Even if it’s a faithful failure over and over.

We Cubans are at risk that Evil might have prevailed too long among us for our Nation to reconcile with itself. The Government and the People of the United States of America, as in the 19th and 20th centuries, in 2014 have a debt with Cuban democrats and republicans and liberals and conservatives and the rest of our non-totalitarian subjects trapped in such an obsolete model: a debt not economical nor political nor military but of a moral nature.

It’s for the best interests of US not to abandon Cuban citizens in their Caribbean backyard under a rogue State, since the supposed stability of our region is only a time compass for the rogues to counterattack America, where a normalized climate will only allow the abnormality that Castroism represents to have a free hand to undermine —with felonies— the foundations of the United States.

Original in English

27 August 2014

Letter to Pope Francis from the Christian Liberation Movement Youth

“But Cubans are tired, Cubans want changes. More than ten years ago more than 25,000 Cubans supported a legal reform project. Called the Varela Project, it called for a plebiscite to ask the people, yes or no, did they want free elections. The Cuban Constitution establishes that if more than 10,000 people support a legal proposal than the government is constitutionally required to respond.” Rosa Maria Paya. Poster by Rolando Pulido.

Havana, May 5th 2014

“Fear is ridiculous and it provides ammunition to the enemies of liberty.”- The Venerable Father Felix Varela

Your Holiness, Pope Francis:

We would like to thank you with utmost respect and kindness for taking time to read this letter.

We are Cuban Catholic youth who everyday are intent to fortify ourselves to the clamors that burst forth and splatter our conscience from the brutal reality of our beloved Cuba. From the dawn of our youth we have occupied the rows of the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL), a pacifist-civic movement which, inspired  by Christian humanism and the principles of the Social Doctrine of the Church, has yearned for the freedom that Cuba has wanted and needed for more than 25 years.

We love the church, and we have grown under her auspices with the influence of her Ignatian spirituality. Because of this, we turn to you to voice our pain and concern with several Cuban Bishops who, surrounded by pro-government Cuban laity and other figures of privilege, pronounce and act in the name of the Church before the unfolding drama that we Cubans have lived in for more than half a century.

Increasingly, ecclesial offices are shunted into a caricature of the masses, to be only the bottom substrate in the background and a common denominator legitimizing the government, asking for more votes of confidence for the politico-military junta who govern as dictators and awaiting a new “leader” to succeed the dynasty of the Castro Brothers and amend the “justified errors” of 55 years of governmental mismanagement that devastated a country whilst omitting the daily violations of human rights and the repressive despotic and unpunished actions of State Security personnel against nonviolent opposition and begging for weak reforms which lack transparency and in so doing be able to navigate comfortably in all waters through the use of ambiguous and confusing language that decorate and embellish the harsh realities, foregoing calling them by name, and thus presenting themselves as authentic rhetoricians and builders of bridges. continue reading

Perhaps we should remind our pastors how both dialogue and mediation necessitate a clear sense of identity and an indispensable autonomy to be able to express it, without circumlocution, in the collegial search for truth amongst peers and the commencement and recognition of all the parts, with an adequate dose of moderation, but while maintaining transparency, rigor, and respect for the truth. And this, in a cystic dictatorship with more than five decades of authoritarianism, carries a price and only those who have overcome, from a detachment of having nothing to protect and nothing to aspire,the fears that have impeded their inner liberty strive for progress.

Those of us who know from within the realities of the Church of Cuba understand that the courts of Havana’s Apostolic Palace is an interplay of political factors and that the exclusionary practices of the Church, whose byzantine politics are without morals and constancy, stretching and pulling, consisting of ambiguities and flatteries, and, in the worst form of diplomacy, sacrificing the integrity of the simple and naked truth expressed with the sole presupposition of due respect to substitute it in favor of strained praise, finally allowing itself a shallow criticism and in doing so maintaining the status quo, has the seal of the illustrious cardinal that occupies its halls. This shackle to the same apprehensions, pressures, blackmail, compromises, limitations, protection of self-interest and tacit or explicit agreements, that mark it’s actual relation to the State, and who for decades has been its helmsman, is Cardinal Ortega.

Subjugated to the fluctuations of this complex relationship, the precarious autonomy of Catholic publications and centers for the formation of laity and the devoted, has exceeded the bounds and good-willed intentions of its founders and has shifted into the propaganda of, no longer the Archbishop, but whomever holds the upper hand in said relationships; those who allow them to continue to exist and in circulation so long as they don’t overstep the threshold of tolerance or who ultimately fail to serve their vile purposes. The choice is clear: either they alienate themselves from reality marking socio-political themes as taboo, in a country where nothing is apolitical, on the contrary everything is profoundly politicized and ideologized, or claim the input of a fraud-exchange thrusted by the government.

What do they try to convince us of now? It was Raul Castro himself who speaks of his own reforms claiming that they are for more Socialism; we Cubans know all too well what that means. Regardless, has someone asked us, like citizens, if what we want in today’s age is more Socialism? And what Socialism? How do they want to convince us, the Cubans who live both here and abroad suffering exclusions and disadvantages,that they are advancing towards the implementation of laws that will permit us to reencounter ourselves with how we wish to be? That this framework of oppression, without rights or transparency, is the path of transition? What does this transition consist of?

Graduality only makes sense if there is a transparent perspective for our liberties and rights. Don’t continue to speak on our behalf; we would have our own voice raised and heard. It’s not enough for Cuba to open herself to the world and the world unto Cuba: first Cuba must open herself to Cubans. To come to accords with our own officials, like several democratic governments and institutions have done without caring that they don’t represent the Cuban people, is to perpetuate oppression.

Enough of deciding and thinking on my behalf and imposing an ideology of the State that doesn’t represent me. Enough of obligating me to collaborate in a political farce that overshadows my principles and the conditions of a free man, under the threat of losing it all: education, job, sometimes family and friends, liberty also and even life itself. That is why fear is the guiding principle of this society, fear and lies, sustaining a society of masks and simulations during decades of weak men, evasive, possessing only half-truths, incapable of facing and naming that evil which corrodes us within. That is how we Cubans live.

We wish that the Church, a pilgrim in Cuba, would dare to throw out the merchants from the temple, those who in the virtue of secret pacts do away with the worth of a human before the importance of abstract numbers. We yearn for a church who would not accept as privilege that which is her rightly due in exchange for her silence.

A church, with whose prophetic voice and testimony of life in truth in a society rotting with fear and lies, can share the cross of the ineffable, solitude, humility, deprivation, calumny and persecution that we suffer, we who have broken with the vice of self-deception that has become our collective dementia.

A church that does not please itself with having its pew saturated with comfortable mediocrity, dragging the multitudes behind images that don’t save and only awaken shallow devotions while the most precious component of her identity is diluted and watered down in a pseudo-religion of the masses, recovering spaces and buildings for the mission, and then relying heavily on human means to, with God and the splendor of His message being considered too subversive against the established order, advertise a private pseudo-gospel of moral and social content more “enlightening” for our people.

A church that stirs those consciences paralyzed by fear and custom before the face of irrationality, disfunctionality, and the absurd demands of a long-lived absolute and arbitrary regime by inviting each man and woman to contemplate themselves in the reflection of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. A church, who once again noting the worth of the poor, the few, the small, the gradual, the weak, the anonymous, offers in her small but Christian and arduous communities something incredibly different and powerfully captivating, and no longer the swarms of vitiated environments.

That church, incarnated and undivided, has been present for years in the figures of brave and exceptional bishops, innumerable priest, religious and missionaries many of whom we have seen depart in pain: banished, dismissed by bishops and superiors, or voluntarily resigning before submitting to perverted or perverting regulations.

It is that diminishing church constantly in danger of becoming extinct, that has produced genuine miracles thanks to the those youth and families who everyday make the conscious decision to remain, assuming upon themselves the dangers and hardships, every day resisting the temptation to join the mass exodus of a people who stampedes fleeing to whichever place where they can construct a more dignified life, hold an honorable job, know the taste of liberty, fight for their dreams, aspire to prosperity and happiness.

That church revealed with her very life and not only through discourse, the profound realities of our faith: the Incarnation, Calvary, Easter, the Resurrection. In her, we cautiously aimed to really be priests, prophets and kings. Because it is in that church that we learned to search and wish for the will of God as our most precious treasure, today we still dare to swim upstream, muting the warnings of close friends occasionally whispered in the temples and sacristy from those who speak in the name of God, and even the anguished cries of our mothers who implore us to renounce, run, escape and forever occupy ourselves with our own well-being and our families with thousands of unanswerable arguments from plain pragmatism of calculated deeds and force or consisting of acrobatic tricks with alleged reasons of faith that end fading away at the feet of the Crucified.

Because that church has taught us to believe against all the evidence and to hope against all hope, our lives today continue to be an answer to the questions and call of God: Where are those responsible? Strengthening us to continue being a voice in the desert, a light in the darkness and an omen of hope in the midst of the apparent sterility in spite of the burdens and fatigue.  Because Cubans need the help of Jesus on the Cross to be able to look with love upon these last 50 years that has oppressed physically and psychologically and to dare to shout NO MORE!

We Cubans need a church that will aid us in overcoming fear. Fear is the origin of lethargy and hopelessness that overwhelms youths and society as a whole. We need a church that will help us in these first steps toward Liberation, the first steps that always start with an individual and en as a roaring shout, stronger than oneself and that must be shared.

An advocate church must be a place of liberty, where reconciliation does not convert itself to historic amnesia disguised as the goodness of the righteous. It has to be a place of freedom of expression, not in attempts politicizing the temple, but instead to create the language which will be able to articulate our story from the bottom up, omitting the “victorious” figures who attempt to reconstruct history. We need a Mother Church, who works for the truth without ambiguities, who doesn’t confuse love for one’s neighbor with political opportunism. A church that will help us name this unnameable pain so that we may offer it up and act, without our voice being silenced.

Count on us Holy Father! God bless you and keep you!

A big hug from the Caribbean,

Erick Alvarez Gil, age 28, Telecommunications and Electrical Engineer, San Francisco de Paula Parish.

Anabel Alpizar Ravelo, age 29, Bachelor’s in Social Communication, dismissed from her job, Chapel Jesus Maria

Luis Alberto Mariño Fernández, age 27, Bachelor’s in Music Composition, Salvador del Mundo Parish.

Maria de Lourdes Mariño Fernández, age 29, Bachelor’s in Art History, Salvador del Mundo Parish.

Manuel Robles Villamarin, age 24, Information Tech, expelled from University, Siervas de Maria Parish.

 Translated by: Joel Olguin

3 August 2014

Investment in Cuba? What for? / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Investment in Cuba? What for?
ASCE XXIV / 2014 Annual Conference, Miami Hilton Downtown Hotel, Florida, USA
Panel 12. Concerto Ballrom B – Friday, August 1st, 2:45-4:15pm

1.

In Cuba during the 1970s, historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals challenged poet Jose Lezama Lima with his trendy scientific notions about the laws of objectivity and the transition to a colonial/pseudo republic/revolution from the slave mills to the Slavic sugarcane cutters; the now forgotten Soviet KTP. Exhaling an asthmatic counterpoint through his cigar, Lezama Lima responded to Moreno Fraginals without foregoing the Marxist irony of a convenient Catholic: “Ah… But when will we have a history that is qualitative?”

Are we Cubans lacking the type of analysis that at the margins of academic exactitude and author-centered erudition would also require ethicality? Is a qualitative economy that can escape the comparisons of percents and profits and the tendency to always side with the expounder at all conceivable? Is a qualitative political system that rises above the lowbrow politics practiced in our country unthinkable? How about a qualitative sociology without ideological determinism and infallible founders? When all is said and done, is the anthropology of a quality Cuban one that is multidimensional, subjective, and liberated from the consensus imposed upon on us with the rhythm of a conga drumbeat?

No wonder the Professor did not answer the Master’s question. Today, when it comes to Raul Castro’s reforms that in an ever-changing and capricious landscape that hides a clan’s control while a new image of legitimacy is created, would Moreno Fraginals rely on the laws of objectivity in a transition from communism to capitalism? And would Lezama Lima respond to him with an “Ah… And when we will Cuba have a history of qualitative capitalism?” Poetry asks impossible questions that history can answer, though it finds it inconvenient to do so. continue reading

2.

Today, by either vocation or duty, Cubanologists discuss their theories about the island. They have placed their bets for quantitative changes on the seat of power, avoiding any consultation with the will of the Cuban people. For many of them the Revolution is a victim, not the victimizer, and as such is granted the right to not disappear. Because of this, throughout all of American academia, an anti-Castro stance is practically considered intellectual harassment.

Therefore, Cubans are supposed to have no other alternative than to collaborate with the government in the construction of controllable capitalism that is already irreversible while the country’s socialistic constitution remains “irrevocable.” In this scam of a transition, borne of short memories where horrors become simply errors, liberty becomes an encumbrance threatening to make everything end in a debacle. And it is this astute death threat that forces us to be loyal as a post-socialist substitute for legality.

“A country is not run like a campsite,” another poet once told to another general. But those who once dressed in olive-green uniforms and now as the new generation wear business suits, have turned the country into a campsite so as not to fully contradict Jose Marti’s words to Maximo Gomez. Citizens are abundant, but soldiers are saviors: the disinterest of the former is secondary to the discipline of the latter. The year 2018 is being called the new 1958. After 60 years of solitary power, biology finally brings us a calendar without the Castros. But after waiting for so long, we Cubans can now wait a little more. We have become accustomed to the family legacy that leaves us the choice between a parliamentarian sexologist and a colonel –like Putin– from the Ministry of the Interior. One is in charge of reproduction and the other of repression; she is in charge of pleasure, he of power; academia and military; diplomacy and impertinence; masquerade and malice.

The inverted logic behind investing in such a Cuba is that after the profits, it would precipitate a multi-party political system: vouchers that will promote voting; underdevelopment erased by cash flowing through banks; from Che to checks. Like dissidents without God, layman Lenier Gonzalez might call them “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” because the nation teeters on collapse between a war of economic action from the outside and peaceful resistance from the inside.

Perhaps to sidestep such suspicions, foreign investors avoid showing off the profit gained from a captive and insular market. They seem to invest with almost-humanitarian intentions, although their “good deed” will be repaid by having their property seized and not a few of them will end up deported, imprisoned, or dead from a heart attack during interrogations performed by State Security. As for Cuban exiles, they are not even given the right to live in their own country. And the illusion of investing in the island — out of nostalgia or some kind of labor therapy — is justified by the notion that money can make a dictatorship dynamic much more effectively than dynamite. If we cannot live in a democracy, at least we will be able to live in a dictocracy. One-party companies and a tinsel opposition. Like a person who draws a North Korean doodle and ends up with an exquisite Chinese calligram. Or like in those childhood cartoons where a tyrant is defeated by a golden antelope that drowns the villain by throwing gold coins at him and when he can no longer take the weight screams “enough!”

3.

When I hear the word “economy,” I reach for my gun.

First-world paradoxes: The possible Democrat party candidate for the White House mumbles something to President Obama in the latest of her hard choices: “Lift the embargo on Cuba because it’s holding back our broader agenda across Latin America”. And from the Chamber of Commerce, its president travels to a country that is presided over by a general that for decades has denigrated chambers of commerce, and tells him: Yes, you can.

The economy is too important to be left in the hands of economists.

Executives from the goliath Google land in David’s kingdom of ruins and are received at the University of Computer Sciences, a bunker of digital censorship, the cradle of Operation Truth, where there is daily smearing of those Cubans convinced that it is still possible to live a life of truth. How do you google a government that like the dog in the manger will not allow us to connect to the internet or allow anyone else to connect us?

 Within the economy, everything.

The president of a hemispheric organization who since 2009 has been begging Cuba to rejoin the international community goes to Havana and does not dare to ask the reason behind Cuba’s snub of the world. He is accompanied by a Secretary General who gets a haircut there but does not question why there were dozens of illegal detentions taking place during his visit.

Outside the economy, nothing.

Former brigadier generals of the military and intelligence agencies, ambassadors to NATO, the OAS, and the Interests Section in Havana (in their heyday categorized by Castro propaganda as torturers, coup instigators, agents of the anti-Cuban dirty war, and other extremists etc.). Hawks now clothed in sheep feathers who advocate an ultimatum not to their archenemy in the continent, but to the President who extended his open hand and in return received a closed fist, including weapons smuggling, the kidnapping of an American to trade as a hostage for Cuban Talibans, agreements with enemies of democracy and the free market, and the State-run attempts on our Sakharov Prize winners for Freedom of Thought: Laura Pollan and Oswaldo Paya.

Economy or death; we will sell.

Contrary to the stampede of Cubans mentioned in Wendy Guerra’s novel Everyone Leaves, everyone is going to Cuba, everyone is investing in the first opportunity that presents itself. No one wants to miss out on their slice of the despotic pie that is on the brink of transition.

4.

Investment is critical for the material development of the country, but investment should not come regardless of the political price. It would be a shame to fall into an economy that would leave us dependent on foreigners and no less vulnerable to domestic impunity. Under those conditions, sovereignty is nothing more than a joke.

Foreign capital has not brought democratization to the island, but neither has denying investment been a fountain of political liberty. Although they are opposite concepts, investments are just like the commercial embargo the United States has against Cuba: they have had no influence on the blockade imposed by the Castro regime on Cuban citizens. Oswaldo Paya believed in a human personal redemption that would transcend the State as well as the market. And that simple but ethical vision proved to be qualitatively impracticable for a perpetual seat of power that relies on complicity by the majority of the nation. Because if a people elect a single leader and a single party, that single leader and single party have a moral obligation to downplay that quantitative blindness, not enthrone themselves upon it. Along with the Anglicism of a “loyal opposition,” Cubans deserve a government faithful to the people that will step down according to logical legislation, even if it goes against the popular will of the people.

For now, the private investment initiative in Cuba does nothing to obtain or guarantee rights to association, property, participation, expression, or the means of production. Self-employed Cubans exhibit their implausibility even in Washington D.C., but in the Plaza of the Revolution, they can only march en masse with their propaganda banners. For that very reason they are not invited to invest in Cuba and their self-employment licenses are nothing more than economic privileges. As soon as they achieve some type of cash liquidity, they will escape without much noise or fuss, as our population pyramid tends to do since that is always preferable in a transient nation: post-totalitarianism is the same as post-trampolinism. That plebiscite with one’s feet is unstoppable, with investments or sanctions, with lack of solidarity or interference. After spending so much time exporting guerillas and wars, we learned to make our living at the expense of someone else, allowing ourselves to be exploited by taxes rather than enjoying state security (or suffering it if the words are capitalized).

At the start of the Revolution, throughout the paternalistic lying during the march to power, Fidel Castro strictly applied his repetitive slogans: “Elections? What for?”; “Guns? What for?”; Amnesty? What for?” These were among the other “What for?” slogans that emptied out all the common sense that previously existed in our nationality. The Revolution not only installed itself by decree as the source of all rights, it also made itself the arbiter of reason. Everything else became an afterthought: money, for example. We should then publicly confront that same philanthropic octogenarian before senility turns him into ashes and ask him: “Investment? What for?”

And maybe he will respond with that European fascist plagiarism of himself in 1953: Invest in Cuba, it does not matter, history will confiscate you.

Translated by Alberto de la Cruz from Babalu blog.
1 August 2014

Remembering the Tugboat Massacre of 1994 / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Castro sign

During the summer of 1994, death ruled with impunity in my country. During that period, Cuba, which had been a civilian graveyard for decades, more closely resembled the gallows.

In the early hours of July 13, the whirlwind of violence to which the Cuban state was subjecting its citizens came to its criminal climax. The Revolution needed to prevail over the people through blood and fire. Raúl Castro summed it up in a televised speech from the Colon Cemetery: “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”

We were in the middle of the so-called Special Period in the Time of Peace. The repression was ferocious, but so too was the people’s resistance. So too was the corruption of public servants. So too was the vandalism. There were robberies and grisly killings on every block. Family men went mad and wound up murdering their loved ones. Electricity was a luxury that we enjoyed for just a few hours a day. It was vox populi that the police had been ordered to shoot to kill. So too had the paramilitaries of the Rapid Response Brigades who wielded clubs rather than firearms.

On the early morning of July 13 a stolen tugboatfull of civilians attempted to escape the Bay of Havana. The boat was named the March 13. It was a state-owned boat, but no violence took place during the theft. In fact, it was the port workers themselves who took the boat and headed for the US. continue reading

Just a few miles off the coast, the March 13 was rammed by four other boats that had pursued it out of the harbor. Both civilians and the crew were swept off the decks by jets of water fired from the other boats. Once the March 13 was sunk, the survivors weren’t offered any immediate aid. The perpetrators wanted as few witnesses as possible. Only when a Greek boat arrived did they proceed to rescue those who were still afloat in the water. Out of a total of 72 people on board, 37 died, including a dozen children and babies.

As usual, the state press placed the blame for the tragedy on the victims. Thesurvivors were pressured by State Security forces, several were put on trial, all were stigmatized, and in the end they were ostracized and forced into exile. Since then some claim that they’ve been attacked by motor vehicles or that they have been subjected to medical torture in an attempt to wipe their memories. Fidel Castro himself decreed that the workers had the right to defend their means of production. It was a warning to anyone else in Cuba who had any intention of running away from him. In fact, a month later more than 30,000 Cubans escaped en masse when the government stopped patrolling the coastline, thus opening a pressure valve which would avoid the impending social unrest.

Twenty years have passed since the massacre. The men who rammed the March 13 have never been brought to justice. Nobody ever tried to recover the bodies (or else they did it in secret and later destroyed them). At least let me pull those 37 names out of the macabre anonymity to which Castroism has condemned them in Cuba.

1. Hellen Martínez Enríquez, 5 months

2. Cindy Rodríguez Fernández, 2

3. Ángel René Abreu Ruiz, 3

4. José Carlos Nicole Anaya, 3

5. Giselle Borges Álvarez, 4

6. Caridad Leyva Tacoronte, 5

7. Juan Mario Gutiérrez García, 10

8. Yasser Perodín Almanza, 11

9. Yousell Eugenio Pérez Tacoronte, 11

10. Eliecer Suárez Plasencia, 12

11. Mayulis Menéndez Tacoronte, 17

12. Miladys Sanabria Cabrera, 19

13. Joel García Suárez, 20

14. Odalys Muñoz García, 21

15. Yaltamira Anaya Carrasco, 22

16. Yuliana Enríquez Carrazana, 22

17. Lissett María Álvarez Guerra, 24

18. Jorge Gregorio Balmaseda Castillo, 24

19. Ernesto Alfonso Loureiro, 25

20. María Miralis Fernández Rodríguez, 27

21. Jorge Arquímedes Levrígio Flores, 28

22. Leonardo Notario Góngora, 28

23. Pilar Almanza Romero, 31

24. Rigoberto Feu González, 31

25. Omar Rodríguez Suárez, 33

26. Lázaro Enrique Borges Briel, 34

27. Martha Caridad Tacoronte Vega, 35

28. Julia Caridad Ruiz Blanco, 35

29. Eduardo Suárez Esquivel, 38

30. Martha M. Carrasco Sanabria, 45

31. Augusto Guillermo Guerra Martínez, 45

32. Rosa María Alcalde Puig, 47

33. Estrella Suárez Esquivel, 48

34. Reynaldo Joaquín Marrero Álamo, 48

35. Amado González Raíces, 50

36. Fidencio Ramel Prieto Hernández, 51 años.

37. Manuel Sánchez Callol, 50 años

From Sampsonia Way  — Original in English

21 July 2014

Wendy War

 

Grown in Exercises of Death, Wendy Guerra (Taken from her blog HABÁNAME) (Reposted by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo in his blog)

I have death as white and truth far away… – Don’t give me your fresh roses; I am terrible for roses. Give me the ocean…Dulce María Loynaz

Death, solicitous and vigilant followed me until my fall. It was my companion – solicitous and loving – Rafaela Chacón Nardi

Dreadful voice in funeral I mourn, that flies from the seas of my homeland to the beaches of Iberia; sadly confused the wind delays it; the sweet song in my throat freezes and shadows of pain cover my mind. Ah, that suffering voice, that America denotes with its pity and on these beaches the ocean casts, “He died,” is uttered, “the ardent patriot…” “He died”, repeated “the Cuban troubador.” And a sad echo moans in the distance, “the sublime singer from Niagara died!” – Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda

I carry the subject of death very badly. I bow before death with too much grief. Just by peering at a roof I can fall overwhelmed by fear.

This week I wake with the memory of those who have passed on. My parents, my friends, my poets, my personal saints.

The soul, the body, the emptiness, the abandonment or slipstream that our most beloved dead leave, fight within me with severe injuries.

This week the world’s newspapers talk about death, confinement, the hunger strikes in my country. My head and my body are trapped in a bird cage that is the act of dying.

For many cultures it is a cycle that is closed to open other cycles that are clear and bright. This is the way I should see it, as death to me appears to be the end of everything. But death weighs me down and casts me toward a powerful darkness.

It always appeared normal to me that someone would decide to die rather that live indefinitely with an incurable illness. Always, even when the dilemma of euthanasia touched me closely. I looked at the still living body of my mother, looked at her face and closed myself off from any possibility other than finding a miracle or unearthing a hope. I convinced myself that in the care of the body that still flutters before us, hope lives.

The cage of life opens.

I mishandle death but one must confront it. Six Marches back, I had surrendered before my mother on the day of her death. continue reading

Between wreaths of flowers, ritual lamenting, condolences or visits to the terminally ill I am rendered defenseless.

I do not support the death penalty. I regret each day of a hunger strike.

In my adolescence I dreamed of the same firing squad. I could not see the faces. I heard the gun shot and saw the gray walls full of bullet holes. The nightmare recurred for years.

I am well aware. We have called it so much that we should not be surprised when it appears. Every day, from a very young age, we repeated that phrase in which we had to choose between homeland or death. We swore to be like a man who had already died, and in that death we placed all of the energy of our growth. “Pioneers for communism, we will be like El Che.”

The busts, the hymns, the patriots, the names of long lost heroes and martyrs that our schools had. Every October the flowers in the ocean for Camilo.

We made long lines to see coffins of the dead arriving from wars distant to the island.

We are a culture that has not prepared itself for death, but which names it easily. We do not celebrate the day of the dead as a Mexican could, but we mention it daily like a mantra, staring it in the face like a permanent possibility.

In the 80s, during the events that took place in Granada, we listened to the official narrative of a false sacrifice. Its protagonists, lost in a place far away from the homeland, died fighting wrapped in an enormous Cuban flag. Such a strong image that still overwhelms us. Even though life and the homeland are for me a very real presence, luminous, fertile, continuous and above all everlasting, they are imposed upon us constantly in contrast with death.

Many slogans have a context, but our emphasis on suffocation, in the “no exit,” has welded us to an immobility that leads to DEATH.

“Homeland or death, we will overcome.”

“Whoever attempts to take over Cuba will collect the dust of its soil drenched in blood if they do not perish in the struggle.”

“Our dead lifting up their arms will still know how to defend it.”

“Even after death we are useful”

“Everyone will cry,’”it will be better to drown at sea than to betray the glory that has been lived.’”

At nine years old I imagined “drowning at sea” as the action of pulling a lever that would trigger a huge whirlpool that would drag us to the very bottom of the ocean. My mother would explain that this was a metaphor, but I kept on seeing myself at the bottom, with everything and homeland.

At the Malecon, between the U.S Interests Section in Cuba and our everyday lives, waves a sea of black flags.

A number of our friends lost their parents in the wars in Africa.

The family farewells on the shore, those goodbyes that guaranteed the possibiity of a voyage, marked the 90s during the exodus of the balseros [rafters].

Headlines from my childhood: attacks, sabotages, threats, epidemics. Our parents were paying eternally for a day to come for the Militias of Territorial Troops that would defend us.

The popular tunnels, the rifle ranges, the war reserves. Special Period in Times of Peace. Evacuation plan. Trenches. Air Sirens. “Every Cuban should learn to shoot and to shoot well.” Military preparation as a subject and a military concentration at the end of our university years were essential for being able to earn your degree. In short, the daily possibility of a war, of death. The speeches partially revealed its imminence, which at the time we felt to be very close, at our side. Death has been a small sheet that unites us or separates us.

A guaguanco permeates the air and says that death is calling us. Some torn boleros prefer death in their endings. How many marvelous songs, classics that we will not forget even in death, speak of death.

I ask myself why the hell I just can’t get used to its presence.

In the news and analysis these days death is mentioned as a possible solution. Is it over death that we should constuct the fullness of life? Hunger becomes death and death is part of a hunger that brings about in us emptiness, weakness, mourning.

I want to learn how to transform life from life itself.

I just can’t get used to death. In the cemeteries, where I can go visit a majority of my loved ones, I seek and take communion with life which opens before me underneath the angels and marble cracks. I should greet death normally, but I cannot remain calm in front of it. I love the manner in which Tomas Gutierrez Alea recreated death, relating it with our everyday life, traversing around with her presence.

Today I think of my mother Oya, so attached to Iku, divinity of death. I look toward the street. I keep thinking that Oya fosters the seasons, the strong winds and hurricanes, the lightning strikes and sparks. She symbolizes a violent and rash temperament and lives at the door of the cemeteries. She represents the intensity of gloomy sentiments, the world of the dead. She is the complete reincarnation of ancestors, the lack of memory and feeling of regret in women. The flag, the skirts, and the cloths of Oya are a combination of all the colors…except black.

I ask Oya to help me understand death, because it stalks us, and now runs at our pace. We have invoked it many times, named it, have alluded to it, and now that it is before us and presents itself, what to do? Those who have called it should receive it.

Now, what face are we going to put on death?

 Translated by: Marlena Papavaritis and anonymous.

Fury and Delirium / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The Books on the Cuban Death by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

There is a literary genre more popular than the rest of Cuban literature, which, by the way, has become a dying phenomenon since a few decades ago.

That genre is the “books on death,” the books written by the serial killers in the island (who spread to Latin America), as if they were perverse characters from an ideological thriller called the Revolution.

Today, 15 years late, I felt the spontaneous urge to read one of the vital and monumental works on Cuban deaths: “The Fury and the Delirium” (Tusquets, 1999), by the killer son of killers and earning wages from killers Jorge Masetti, whose destiny to become a depressing or best-selling star I ignore, but whose prose I will always admire for its morbid monstrosity. continue reading

This grotesque genre has no limits, which is why it is superior to all those who can publish the self-censured Cuban writers. It combines an odd Oedipus with the Macho-Chief (or the Mafia in Chief) with a frigidity that, so as not to be recognized as suicidal, becomes criminal.

On the one hand, the horror (more than fury) of failing the totalitarian state. On the other hand, the disaster (more than delirium) in which the narrator’s life is summed up, turning in circles like a shark thirsty for blood, in exchange for some kind of feeling for his sterile and devalued life. Without worth or meaning. Death as a moral.

In this line of reasoning, whoever is capable of killing, is good and beautiful and was right. Those who let themselves be killed are fragile and ugly and out of place and because of that they left the world.

These serial killers act out of a solipsistic atrocity, but not for a moment do they cease having contact with the rest of the world. And this is where the vulgar genre shines for its sinister sincerity: there are no politics, or art, or sport, or disease, or accident, or fame, or frontiers, or nations, or history, or memory, or identity, or anything that isn’t agreed upon a priori by the heroes of pure action, by the pre-political slaughters in this case the international Castroism (whatever the sign is: Castroism is the pluribus unum of our time).

Jorge Masetti thus narrates from the dark holes that we Cubans, like a lost nation, never suspect that without works like these. In this book we endlessly hear the idle chatter of power. We spy the parliamentary halls of the evil ministries, who voluntarily administer mass murder. We intuit the insidious intelligence, that traces the puppet show that is our biography of citizens who serve as props, as grim. We realize unspeakable things in “The Fury and the Delirium” and its agonizing analyses. Things that are literally unspeakable.

In this book, finally, is the nation’s inner voice, its unlivable novel, its intimate and intimidating corpse-like groan. And thanks to this genre we understand, much more than the author (who only thinks he created catharsis), that we Cubans who are still alive are always complicit or at fault, because at some dead point in our lives we have been forgiven by State Security.

On more than one level, and of this Jorge Masetti is perfectly aware, he who survives is a traitor. His options are now simple (perhaps he already chose in these 15 years of delay in my re-reading): insanity or holiness.

After the Cuban Revolution, death will again become meaningless. Castroism has, well, a role to endlessly fulfill: dose the evil that men freely do unto other men, and if possible, precipitate the evil hand of God, his fury is brittle for those who are still alive with so many enemies intermixed.

Translated by: Bianca Martinez

7 July 2014

Street Sense / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

COWBOY POET Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

It’s called  Street Sense,  which is sort of like El Sentido de la Calle in Spanish, which is a much better title than any Cuban magazine or newspaper has got; and that obviously includes the ones published abroad.

It comes out fortnightly in Washington D.C., which isn’t just the capital of the empire, but it’s also North America’s Homelessness Central. I have never seen so many homeless as I have here. Mostly, they are in the subway stations, where they take up residence according to some kind of timetable, and where, according to Wikipedia,  they have the world’s longest escalators. But I also see them out in the open, exposed to the dreadfully cold springtime rain. And, before that, out in the worst of this city’s infinite winter.

You never come across the same homeless people, not even if you pass by the same place two thousand times. They have either moved, or they have died. No other possibility.

Many of these humble homeless guys get published in Street Sense. Those of them who have not been eaten up by hate, crime or illness. Those who have retained enough mental clarity and nobility of spirit. Those who are trying, as best they can, to get back into the machine that once vomited them out, or who were crushed by it, possibly because they tried to resist the hypocritical mediocrity which comes with any kind of success. continue reading

I have kept one of those newspapers dating from the month of March 2013. That was the month and year in which I arrived, stunned by the sleepless early mornings of Washington D.C., in the mercenary luxury of the Hotel Dupont. I had just got off a Megabus when I bought it from a street vendor who turned out to be an author published on page 9. A roofless poet, like me. Who had nothing else apart from his words. Like me. A shabby-looking old boy, who had a proud and absolutely not despondent appearance. The opposite of me. He was outside Union Station. He thought I looked like a friend, and he came over to me. He said:

“I’m published here. Wanna buy it?”

It was true. It turned out his name, or literary pseudonym, was Chris Shaw, The Cowboy Poet. My colleague’s poem, which was illustrated with ice crystals, was called The End of Winter. And that’s what it’s still called, I presume. My poet and promoter was afraid of winter. In barely 11 single word verses, and in spite of the opinions of the global warming experts, Shaw complained alas I fear it will be back!

A very terrible poem, which was appropriate, just as awful as the return of another winter at the end of the following year, 2013, although DC didn’t experience then the murky version it had gone through in 2012.  The one I largely missed. When I had to put up overnight in a homeless shelter, I was able to feel in my bones the sense of the street in Shaw’s poetry. Or next to the unbearably thick walls of a subway station, it’s possible to cover yourself with the newspapers you couldn’t sell. Apart from me, nobody bought one, while we were both waiting for them to come and collect just me (because in March 2013 I was a Cuban counter-revolutionary from Cuba and I qualified for a visa and a temporary resident permit).

I paid the two dollars which is the amount recommended on the first page. I then discovered that the majority of the contributors to Street Sense sign their articles as Vendors. They are vendors of these desperate printed sheets. They sell their poor words, printed in a newspaper, just as others do at every level all over the United States, but these people sell them for a negligible ridiculous amount: the amount which is their hope, which nearly got a second chance. Nearly.

Now I am someone without a home. And, more than that, without a country. I know that one day I am going to decide to sell these sheets to strangers going into or out of railway stations. El sentido de la calle in the United States of Nothing America.

I came from Cuba without wanting to, swept away by too many people being bumped off while the world looked on, and consumed, in secret, by love. The academy of the left filled me with friendly disgust. I was bored by earning money. The right wing is a delusion of the academy. But I am never going to go back to my island, the island that we love, which is intact in our most personal and most aggressive imagination.

My dear Cubans, I am not going to return, even in the event of God or Google restoring democracy there, whether it is with or without the destruction of the corpses of the dictators. I would find it impossible to see my home without me in it, or my mother left to die alone on the hundred year old boards of 125 Fonts and Beales, or my loves dying of my indifference and desperation, although never because I have forgotten, to realise back in Cuba that the United States was an acceptable nightmare and that Cuban exile is an evanescent eternity, and to then live in my ever-present homelessness, in my arrogant foolishness as a free healthy man in the only city I understood while I was alive, and also after that, when I died spitting fuck-words in the face of the tyranny in power: Havana.

Because that’s all totalitarianism is: a sick relay race. And, you know what? I am going to hold onto the baton, because it suits my hatred, or my crime, or my sickness. I am not going to pass it on to any other Cuban. I’m sorry, but you people and me are no longer contemporaries.

Translated by GH

2 July 2014

My Father, Jennifer and Me / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

We both fell in love at the same time with the same girl, who wasn’t my mother, in front of an Elektron-216 black-and-white TV, on an afternoon in the seventies in Lawton, another of those lost words that no one in the world would think are Cuba, except Cubans.

She died on screen, Jennifer. But before, she ran with him, Oliver, through the unknown streets of a miracle called The United States. And they both were beautiful and free like love, and so tender and irascible, immortals.  And they ate snow and threw snowballs at each other’s heads. And neither of them had ever heard of Fidel or the Revolution.

My father had just retired. He’s been a gray bureaucrat in a nationalized industry dealing with the importing of polymers. Of the Lili Dolls of Havana Plastics. His successive offices, like his checked shirts, smelled of nicotine and that salvific smile that didn’t belong for a single minute to his environment. continue reading

I’ve said before that he was called Dionisio Manuel, but if now and again I don’t repeat his double name, we run the risk that it will disappear before its time from my memory of late exile, of fugitive props, gossiping in the face of totalitarianism itself only to take refuge in sight of those snowy mansions and hockey stadiums and phrases Made in English, in a country that wasn’t so much a homeland, but rather an open space in which to die meekly in front of strangers without the least fuss.

American movies were our consolation against Communism. Our rope made of sheets to climb down from heaven. I was the son of his old age (when I was born he was 53). He saved for me, intact, his collection from the fifties of Life, National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, and a huge maze of pocket-books which my father apparently stole, one by one, from the Jose Marti National Library (picket-books).

These books and magazines, this dead language called English, were our secret promise that there would be a survival, a future without fidelities, a history without hypocrisy, a no-place where we would both fall in love with the same girl, who wasn’t my mother, but nor was she inside the Elektron-216 black-and-white TV, but rather in an illusion of the phonetic fossil called The United States.

Well, I came here now. I have run among the hockey stadiums. I have laughed along the rivers. I have eaten snow (another way to eat the white, the trash, the emptiness). I have, I as well, a love to run with toward the abyss, with political death stepping on our heels and our parents.

For Dionisio Manuel time ran out long before B2 5-year multiple-entry visas to the USA, which now are not denied to anyone in Havana, except my mother, who in any event at age 78 will no longer have much of a girl for someone to fall in love with.

It’s Father’s Day and I am doubly orphaned. And happy. Fundamentally happy.

Even Sundays, bit by bit, begin to resemble the Sundays of our indigent infant imaginations. Hopefully, soon we’ll both be free and beautiful and tender and irascible and immortal and never will have heard of Fidel or the Revolution.

15 June 2014