Category: Rosa Maria Rodriguez

It is nobody’s secret that we Cubans are comiendo el cable (“eating the cable”).  This is an expression of the popular argot in Cuba used to allude to a person or group that is going through a hard time, that feels itself to be a victim of neglect and that accumulates many unresolved needs.  Many cannot visualize a horizon where satisfying their needs doesn’t entail moving beyond our borders; others, have the luck of belonging, maybe even from a seminal accident, to the olive-green royalty, and enjoy the benefits that their relatives or contacts trained in the ideology of the chat in time and the public and opportune praises for the historical leader can allow them.

They are the children and grandchildren of the so called Revolution, the paragon of “those who don’t traffic in influences” nor do they stoop to oligarchic behaviors to establish their own — because it would be immoral to practice that which led them to armed struggle first and then to power; those who are models of loyalty and its problems, as long as they haven’t committed a disloyalty or problem of principles, who minimize themselves through a thoughtful gift and stereotype it as an antic, never as corruption.

They are the descendents and unconditionals of the sharks who fear freedom of information, those called to work side-by-side with the foreign investors, those enabled to occupy a position that results in juicy returns with “enemy money” in the accounts that they probably have overseas providing for the inevitable change, while Cuban workers are exploited with symbolic salaries and a currency turned evil.

Despite the official excessive secrecy that they have turned into tradition, by different means the comments of a new scandal of corruption reach them, associated with the higher echelons and reliable businessmen installed by the nomenklatura in mixed enterprises and foreign corporations.

The fiber optic conduit that left Venezuela, arrived in our territory in February this year, and should have been operational in July, but it was a disaster because those chosen by the authorities were so busy planting dollars in their own financial grove, that they bought the cheapest technological cable, one without the shielding required to protect against bites from sharks that inhabit the Caribbean.

Hasn’t it been a policy directed by the caste of the country that products be acquired elsewhere so we can save our currency reserves? There is also talk about the abduction of funds destined for the cable’s activation, that have frozen its implementation.  I don’t know if this is real or if it’s an information cocktail that they allowed to filter to continue violating  Cubans’ rights to the internet.

In any event, any skullduggery by the state elites and their partisans is credible when they train their chosen in the practice of their capitalism.  It is also rumored in Havana that the media grave weighing in this matter is due to the lineage of those involved and their hangers-on, and that soon they will get the blow required in such cases.

To simple citizens, we who know of unripe and ripe, we get spoiled and it looks as if we continue to be witnesses to the crumbling of this deja vu dictatorship and the immobility they hold on to, like the chrysalis of rock discordant with the modern world’s democratic symphony

Our anguish to scream sticks in our throats; but the death rattles of the model are so evident that the opportunists of the upper class leadership risk exchanging their Communist party red cards for green paper money, and we wonder how many more of these are hidden, still shouting out empty slogans in exchange for favors, which is to sin against ideology. While these hindrances of a discredited system fatten their personal fortunes with their influences and their false doctrine, we ordinary Cubans the true sharks that for these last few decades eat the cable of hope, and of undelivered promises that, in a model like this, will never come.

Translated by: lapizcero

October 4 2011

Proyecto Demócrata Cubano  (“Cuban Democratic Project”) is an opposition association in Cuba that was founded in 1996 and is a member of the Organización Demócrata Cristiana de América (“Christian Democrat Organization of the Americas”), ODCA, since 1998.  Now that the Cuban government brought back the fashion of permits for nationals to erect their own micro or medium enterprise, I ask myself why they don’t authorize as well the peaceful opposition organizations based in Cuba, as an initial step to recognize the democratic rights of all Cubans.  It is fair and necessary that they grant license to these kinds of institutions of the emergent and independent civil society, so that from them they can try out openly and legally – under the rule of law – the democratic values that our foundational forebears bequeathed us, to exercise and savor democracy and give ourselves the banquet of working with political diversity based on ethics and “with all and for the good of all”, for the present and the future of our nation.

Translated by: lapizcero

October 27 2011

I heard it when I was in the patio taking in some clothes I had washed because it looked like rain.  I don’t know who shouted to someone on the block that there were potatoes with police. I perked my ears because, like the smartest of the bunch, I was intrigued by this pronouncement.  The person addressed asked and got an explanation that there were potatoes in the store, but they were only giving ten pounds of potatoes per person, and that the queue and order were being controlled by the police.  In Cuba, the same way that what the authorities call liberty and democracy aren’t, ten pounds aren’t ten, because the scales are damaged by the corruption that gangrenes at almost every level.

We Cubans are accustomed to persuading our young children of the importance of eating “la papa” — potatoes — to grow strong. For the Cuban adult population, not only has this staple disappeared for five decades, they have been weakened by being made to run from one place to another in our country in the search for food,but their time and energy has been diverted to prevent them from using it to think about other topics.

If a product is scarce for many years, as has been the case with this root vegetable – and for most everything in Cuba – it’s natural that people want to buy the largest quantity permitted by their budgets, so as to guarantee variety in the diet of their family for a greatest number of days.  Others, perhaps, place it on the table as the only option, but we would all like it to be on sale all the time, accessible to whomever wishes to consume it, in the amount desired and not when the authorities want or direct it.  But we are a country blocked by inefficiency, incompetence and lack of order.  These, among others, are some of the prejudicial signs that cause the necrosis of our economy.

I started fantasizing during my domestic chores and imagined how my city should be in this 2011; without piles of garbage in the corners, without rats and other disease-carrying vectors running through it, with houses with a coat of paint (not only the facades), with gutters also dressed up and with well executed ramps to prevent handicapped people from encountering architectural barriers; children reciting childhood texts and not poetry about a soldier who died firing his weapon for the politicized morning school assembly; a press that is free and truthful  – reliable rather than “realigned” – unions equally free, trade associations, political pluralism, a civil society that is independent from the state, monitoring and observance of human rights and fundamental liberties, where people aren’t jailed for wanting to promote democratic change by peaceful means, where all Cubans can enter and exit our country freely, independent executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, a mixed economy, etc.

I was also of a mind to solve, also in my imagination, Cuba’s food problems when the strident voice of a street vendor – not mindful of grammar – returned me to my routine:  “Sponge mops, sticks to hang clothes, floor mopppps …!”

Translated by: lapizcero

October 27 2011

(diagram)  Closing of sugar mills >> reduces direct employment of workers in the sugar agro-industry >> diminishes planting of sugarcane >> reduces production of derivatives of sugarcane >> depresses services and production related to the sector >>  impoverishes the quality of life of communities of farm workers >> affects in general sugar production >> hurts the country’s economy.  (end diagram)

As if we were dealing with an erotic passage, each day, the arbitrary and improvised nature of the system or policy of prices in Cuba gets undressed.  Like the policy itself – being designed by the pyramid of power, we find it capricious and illogical sometimes – permeates all societal strata and impacts the actions and speech of diverse aspects of our reality, including household finances.  Like a well established culture of sultanístico volunteerism, many prices seem to be determined from the fly of the pants of some leaders, independent of the law of supply and demand; even more, after a process as long as the Cuban, January 1 of 2012 will mark fifty-three years of doing and undoing at the whim of the original “guides”.

I say this because after “digesting”and concatenating certain news offered in different occasions by the newspaper Granma, mouthpiece of the Communist Party, regarding the sugar cane agro-industry, sugar cane itself, the mills and the equipment required for its exploitation, I reflect on this important sector which for centuries was the fundamental industry of our country.

The problem is not simple, happening first because a bad decision to close two thirds of the sugar mills in Cuba with the consequent decapitation of the economic activity of the sugar mill communities and the whole infrastructure created around the mills, affecting other rural communities that exist around these agro-industrial centers; which led to a reduction in the number of jobs in planting and harvesting of the cane, depressed production of syrups, electric energy and other derivatives of sugarcane such as alcohol, animal feed, waste for furniture making, etc.

It may be central to the economy to diversify agricultural production, but fighting the monoculture should not be accomplished by destroying the sugar industry, but rather through the creation of other productive sectors or agro-industrial bases so as to avoid dependency on a single product.  The bad decision to close sugar mills occurred in the very moment when it was booming and expansion of ethanol in an international scope was occurring; which suggests a lack of foresight and resulted in the lack of one important source of income for the country.

The economic determinations of a state should be subject to satisfying the needs of citizens and always oriented towards that purpose, it is not fair or smart to subject them to the irresponsible or irrational whims of one person or group of them in detriment to the well-being and quality of life of the majority.  Another element of importance is evidenced by the potential loss of sugar traditions by reducing the number of employees involved in agricultural industry; moreover, the waste of the resources invested in developing intangibles over the centuries to foment sugar culture.  Equally it seems they forgot or ignored the importance of multiple sugar mills to insure sugar culture areas that are as near as possible to the mills.

In the newspaper they also pointed out the reduction in price for inputs and the doubling in what independent producers are paid for a ton of sugarcane. Here I go back to the old proverb “better late than never”, but why did we wait this long?  It would be good if the population knew who sets the prices for plows and other agricultural implements.  The extinction of the Sugar Ministry transpired as well and the creation in its stead of an Entrepreneurial Group of the Sugar Agro-industry.

In the same way, they mentioned the deficiency in diverse aspects in the Ministry of Agriculture and “(…) the approval of instructions from the President of the State Council and the Ministers to shed light on the general policies and work plans of the entities, Organisms of the Central Administration of the State, other national entities and the Local Administrations of Popular Power.”  Isn’t it the excessive centralization that has damaged ostensibly their development and prevented the positive functioning of Cuban society in the economic, political and social realms?  So many contradictions persuade us that we cannot advance with the controlling way of thinking of the mega-proprietors of a country.

Production is stimulated precisely by decentralizing and interesting workers in a common project, and in the results of their labor, the opposite of what they have done for more than 50 years and apparently intend to continue doing.  If they are unwilling to institute the foundation so society grows and develops healthy in support of better individual and collective productive yields, it is time for a real liberation of mindsets and a transition towards more just and efficient models for the development of Cuba.

Translated by: lapizcero

October 4 2011

It is true that José Martí founded a political organization, the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Cuban Revolutionary Party), Fidel Castro founded the Partido Comunista de Cuba (Cuban Communist Party), and many people in our country and the world, just like them, have maintained their membership in the different institutions that they have erected so that from them they can work towards and develop their respective proposals. Notwithstanding, they disrespect or do not know the rights of the rest of their compatriots to legally create organizations and launch them towards their Motherland’s paths of history for the benefit of the nation and the interests of all her children wherever they might be.

The justification so often bandied about by the Cuban government and its mouthpieces — that in Cuba we have a single party system because Martí founded only one party — is ridiculous. If we depart from that weak argument, then we must answer that we should have refounded Martí’s party a few years ago – we owe it to him – as a political alternative to the existing Communist party.  Or is it that this is a right that only pertains to descendants of the Movimiento 26 de Julio (26 July Movement)?  That they respect everybody’s rights – not only a part of them – and legalize Cuban organizations, is the best way to honor Marti, the Apostle.  Let us unfurl one of the mottoes of his profound political thinking, collaborating with all and for the benefit of all which is the best way to  truly fulfill his dream, and restore, based on ethics, the inalienable right for all times of creating new parties.

Translated by: lapizcero

October 18 2011