Category: Translating Cuba

The hospitable accommodations were built on land where pre-fabricated parts were once assembled to create a city for the New Man. As this chimeric individual never emerged, nor were there resources to build new housing, the site remained vacant for decades. When the so-called Battle of Ideas unfolded, they began to lay the foundations here for a hotel with more than a hundred rooms. The cranes and trucks arrived at an astonishing speed for construction in Cuba, and in barely two years they had raised the walls, installed the aluminum windows, and opened the place up. With the resources stolen from that project, many area families painted their facades, installed air conditioning in bedrooms, and remodeled bathrooms.

Known as the Little Tulip Hotel, it was intended as a shelter for Latin American patients who came to our Island for a cure. During the heights of the so-called “Operation Miracle,” its wide entrance was packed with buses discharging dozens of patients every week. Later, when the number who came for health reasons was shrinking, other groups came to receive political-ideological preparation to implement the “Socialism of the 21st Century” in their respective countries. The neighbors — from beyond the wall — were curious about the transformations taking place in those accommodations and ventured various hypotheses about what its final use would be. Some even placed bets on whether it would be given to the military, or if victims of the last hurricane would be brought to live in it.

However, a few days ago, a poster appeared with an offer of a “Christmas dinner” in the formerly exclusive dining room of the small hotel. A few weeks earlier, neighborhood youth had been invited to watch the match between Barcelona and Real Madrid from the plush lobby seating, for a two convertible peso entry fee. Now, the employees in reception say that anyone can rent a room and it’s no longer necessary to be a foreigner to enter the beautiful central courtyard. Undoubtedly, a clear sign that the Battle of Ideas has been laid to rest once and for all and that the real “miracle” proposed by the government, now, is to raise some foreign currency to earn enough profits to cover the costs. To see if the country does not sink into the abyss, as Raul Castro feared in his last speech.

An anecdote not often shared relates that, at the end of a meeting between Fidel Castro and Cuban artists in 1969, where he pronounced his polysemic “Words to the Intellectuals,” a discordant — and unexpected — voice spoke up.

It was Virgilio Piñera, perhaps the most immortal and lacerated playwright our Island has given birth to. A frail man who, facing the Commander in olive-green with his six feet and more and his gun in his belt, must have seemed like an insignificant blade of grass.

They say that, once in front of the microphone, pale due to his natural color and because of his nerves, the interjection of the effeminate Virgilio took less than ten seconds.

“The only thing I can say is that I feel very frightened,” he said. “Only that. I don’t know why, but I am afraid…”

His tortured life didn’t allow him to know that he wasn’t wrong that time, that fear would be his destiny.

I think of Virgilio when I hear from the mouth of another intellectual, and friend, very similar words. The only difference is that this teacher, this young writer knows perfectly well why he is afraid.

His name is Francis Sánchez and, like me, he lives in a little provincial city, Ciego de Ávila, where exercising individuality implies more risk than in the cosmopolitan capital. For a long time his name has been known among professionals of letters for his literary laurels, and his publications in the country’s diverse magazines.

Anyone who sees him, with his nicely fleshed-out body and his well-trimmed mustache, would think he was the most complacent and docile of citizens. A perfect pater familias who, like any ordinary Cuban, deals with the shortages and dissatisfaction. And shuts up.

But Francis Sánchez bears a cross of ashes on his forehead: he has never consigned himself to renouncing his condition as a free man, his condition as a non-conformist Cuban who doesn’t know how to close his eyes against the reality he doesn’t like, that doesn’t suit him.

Like a good man of letters, knowing the absolute impossibility of publishing his questioning articles in any institutional media, the personal chronicles about the country that he longs to have and doesn’t, he decided, like many of us, to open his personal blog. If I remember rightly, he just opened it with the excellent name: Man in the Clouds.

But Francis Sánchez is afraid, and doesn’t hide it. He tells me:

“You are a single boy, Ernesto. We are four. It’s not the same.”

And suddenly I feel very small, devoid of reasons before a circumstance like this: an honest Cuban has decided, knowing the risk, to endanger the stability of three people other than himself: his wife and their two children. And he has decided not how we choose one option ahead of another, or how we shuffle the possibilities on the negotiating table. No. Rather, he is someone who cannot contradict his abiding spirit, and who knows that it may cost him very dearly, and be very hard, but still he crosses the thin line.

One of his phrases has left me trembling like a leaf. He told me, with subtle indignation:

“I feel very afraid, not for myself, but about what could happen in the future to my family. And this fear only irritates me more. Because the fear is the most incontrovertible evidence that I must confront the country in which I live: I don’t want to feel afraid! I shouldn’t be afraid if the only thing I am trying to do is to express what I think!”

His rationale is scathing. Absolutely no one should fear for his integrity, social stability, if what he wants to do is done everywhere in the world of free people: raise his voice against the imperfect, the deformed, what he considers unacceptable. We should fear terrorists, pedophiles, those who corrupt. But men with their own voice, never.

But, that is the daily life of Cubans.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard, from the mouth of one person or another, “I would love to do what you are doing, but I can’t.” And then, a long or short list of reasons that sweeten a painful reality: fear is stronger than the need for expression.

And so the mask never fails to hide the unpleasant features of our personality, and to camouflage the fear that takes hold in the most varied pretexts.

What are the most frequent arguments I hear in this regard? In the first place, the impossibility of survival without the employment offered by the State. Some say, “If, like you, I had at least one family member outside this country who could help me economically, I’m sure that I would have founded a Party, I would no longer go to the polls, I would say what I think in the assemblies at work, I would have opened a blog.”

Others say, “If I didn’t have a family to support, I would have exploded long ago and would have screamed at the officials everything I think of them.”

There is something undeniable, beyond ethical and moral judgment, that these words prove: There has never been a better partner for totalitarianism than naked fear. If this century’s technology has been the worst enemy of those who would like to control the minds of men, since ancient time it has been fear that has provided the fuel to sustain the machinery of the dictatorships.

What do people really fear in my socialist Cuba? It’s worth asking. It’s not the fear of death or disappearance, as used by tropical dictators like Trujillo or Somoza. The Cuban people’s fear is more ethereal: the fear of disintegration as a social being.

Losing a job without any possibility of finding another livelihood; the constant defamation surrounding a person; the exclusion from spaces and organizations that you used to frequent, and as may be the case, being refused admittance even to public cultural institutions. Add to that suffering constant harassment not only against yourself, but worse still, against your loved ones and your friends. And, depending on the strength of your positions and your consequent activism, physical repression and prison.

So the more I think about cases like that of Francis Sánchez, and so many others who once broke their chains and decided to play according to their own rules, I remember the vibrant words I heard from the mouth of Father José Conrado: “We are all afraid. The essence of the totalitarian system is precisely to provoke a response of paralyzing terror. The problem is when one has to conquer it in the name of a great responsibility.” And there are many more examples, dignified, beautiful, which make me believe more and more that to rely on presumed accommodating arguments is an irresponsibility that is even more costly, in terms of the eternal weight on one’s conscience.

After listening to Pedro Luis Ferrer quote his favorite phrase — “Nobody knows the past that awaits him” — I discovered what is in truth the greatest of my fears, the supreme terror I could not face: the fear of facing, in the future, my children and my grandchildren, and having to explain to them where I was and what I was doing when my country was suffering so much fear.

Now that President Raul Castro has said, with regards to the 6th Communist Party Congress, that from this point forward the only necessity is that each Cuban speaks the truth, whatever that might be, and that everyone must do so without fear (his exact words, confirming an open secret: Cubans have a sense of raging panic around expressing their truest opinions), I think it is the perfect time for all of us to dedicate five minutes to self-examination, and of taking the President-General at his word, lest we soon repent our failure to do so.

December 21, 2010

On December 10, Human Rights Day, my 15-year-old son came home from school and said he had been summoned to go to park centrally located in Havana, exactly the same place where, each year, a group of dissidents and non-conformists demonstrate for improvements for Cuba’s citizens and political prisoners. The students of all the high schools in Havana were called to make up one of those painful repudiation rallies against people who peacefully protest, exercising their power as citizens to complain.

It was the director of the school himself who told Teo and his classmates to come dressed in civilian clothes so people would not know that they were students, called to defend their homeland against the provocations of their enemies. Several teachers announced that if it was necessary to beat up the Ladies in White, or other opponents, they must do it “in the name of Cuba.”

When Teo told me about this it was as if I were transported back to 1980, witnessing the shouts, insults and eggs thrown at those people who chose to leave the country during the Mariel Boatlift. I remember one day 30 years ago, as the excitement spread through the halls of my tenement, while I, barely 5, looked on in terror at the aggression against a neighbor whose two sons had decided to emigrate.

My grandmother gestured furiously for me to get back inside, with no explanation of why the mob was shouting phrases like, “The scum wants to go, let them go!” We were never the same after witnessing such an act of militant fanaticism; the mistrust settled deep under the skin of the residents of that humble place.

So when they called my son to make up the shock troops I was as horrified as I was three decades ago, when I first witnessed that intolerance through the eyes of a child.

This post appeared originally in The Huffington Post

December 22, 2010

When I read or hear the opinions of citizens who worked in radio, television or publicity before 1959, earning great salaries that allowed them to own their homes and cars, travel and live comfortably, railing against the hands that fed them, and criticizing everything done, as if something that was against the state and the people had been manipulated, I feel embarrassed for them.

If there is something that ennobles a person it is knowing to be grateful. Also, and much more important, not to lie. To write and say silly things and to use their past like floor mats, doesn’t seem to worry these characters, as they reaffirm their political legitimacy and stay afloat, despite the vagaries of life and the passing years.

They remind me of some acquaintances who, having been brought up in wealthy families, studied in good private schools and enjoyed a pleasant childhood and youth, present themselves in their memoirs for popular or institutional consumption, as poor from birth, almost the children of beggars, uneducated, and having to work from childhood to survive in an exploitative society, where their families were the most exploited and miserable.

Some other cases seem to come back into fashion. In hard times it is like a return to roots, and also like a closing at the end of life. It seems as they intended to leave a palatable vision for other generations, filing and polishing here and there, looking for a false perfection.

Writing this depressed me, but I see it repeat itself so much in our media, that more than a personal catharsis, it seems to me like a collective insanity. Who was rich was rich and who was poor was poor, and neither one nor the other should be ashamed, as it determines neither the good nor bad feelings.

November 11 2010

According to the Small Larousse Illustrated Dictionary: A a deer is a ruminant mammal of the cervidae family equipped with shovel-shaped horns.

In the Pocket Guide for Nature Lovers Jeanette Harris says: Deer 86-110 cm. height at the withers. Tail with black tip, which contrasts with the surrounding white spot, which also has the black border. The summer coat is brownish orange with white spots, in winter more gray. Usually in herds. Forests and parks.

This is the information I can provide about the deer. However, I will not talk about these deer, I am going to tell you about the white deer, yes, immaculately white, which originate in childhood and only leave with death. Mine, which has accompanied me since I was six, appeared one night in December before Christmas. I think it was fifteen or sixteen, I don’t remember clearly, it being so many years ago! Well, that night of the year of 1944, my white deer came with seven bells ringing, galloping through the clouds and entering through the bars of my window lattice. I awoke with a grunt and opened my eyes, I found before me eyes blacker and brighter than I had seen in my short life.

“I have come for forever,” he told me. “From today forward I am a part of you.”

His words surprised me. I never thought having a deer! I don’t know if it was that I was half asleep or because I loved the idea of having a white deer, the truth is that I accepted. Since that night, he has come in December each year, more or less on the fifteenth, and at the end of the first week of January he leaves. I never knew why, nor did I dare to ask. It was enough that he came. I knew he belonged to me, even if he was only with me twenty days each year. When I talked to my friends about my white buck some laughed. Who has seen a white deer! It will be gray or brown! “White deer don’t exist,” they said.

Others looked at me with complicity and a smile on their faces. Then I realized that there were those who knew the white deer and those who did not. Years passed and I grew up to become an adult, which is how to stop dreaming, but my white buck came back each year and accompanied me. As I learned more I realized that the white deer were different: they were not worried about eating grass and tender shoots, they were not in herds, and their feet did not leave visible traces, even in dusty or muddy path. Over time I learned that their favorite foods were love, tenderness and truth. Hate makes them sick and lies put them on the brink of insanity. Then they kick like wild horses and nobody can get close.

Remember, I saw mine only in that situation once or twice, fortunately not because of something I did, but for something he had seen or that had happened when he trotted to our annual meeting. He never wanted to talk about it. He always said, “In our bit of the year we only talk about happy things.” This was real, his presence filled me with joy and gave me enough energy to live until his next visit. My white buck and I continued with our meetings until the seventies.

Then, for reasons I’d rather not remember, the extinction of the white deer was decreed. Those who only had brown or gray deer turned to look for the owners of white deer. The white deer was found slaughtered. I decided to protect my white buck when he arrived that year with seven bells ringing, I asked him to be very quiet and hid him in my pillow. This was repeated the following year and another and so on until last year. That year, upon arrival, I asked him to ring his seven bells. He looked at me surprised but said nothing. In recent times he had learned to keep quiet. We took a walk, something we hadn’t done for many years, and I didn’t hide him from anyone as we toured the city. Some could see him and some could not. Those who could not see him were saying, “What a fool this man is talking to himself!” Those who saw him exclaimed, “What an incredibly beautiful white deer!” Then I knew that many had not forgotten the existence of the white deer.

In these days of the year, I began to behave as it did when I was a child and young. After the first week of January, as always, he left. He seemed happy and his black eyes glowed. I accompanied him with my eyes until he disappeared between two white clouds. Since then I keep thinking about him. This year, when December arrives, I will anxiously await the return of my white deer. I’m sure he will come with seven bells ringing. It is important to have a white deer!

November 25 2010

Ciro in his uniform as Lt. “Telaplico” with Hebert to the left, behind.

This weekend La Babosa Azul and Porno para Ricardo played a concert in the distant suburbs of Havana. The concert was outstanding, my legs hurt from dancing so much and I’m hoarse from singing “El Comandante.”

I’m going to upload a video and then take a seasonal vacation.

Setting up the concert

I remember well the day of the Havana Biennial when Tania Bruguera, in her performance titled Tatlin’s Whisper, installed a pair of microphones so that anyone could enjoy one minute of freedom from the podium. Shortly afterward, this irreverent and universal artist went to Columbia and shocked everyone when — as a performance — she distributed cocaine to the audience. In Cuba, her gift to us was an intense dose of opinion without any gags; in Bogota she confronted them with evidence that drugs are the beginning and the end of many problems in that nation. The Colombian authorities were scandalized, but ultimately accepted that art is inherently a transgressor. But some of us who participated in Tatlin’s Whisper here, continue to be barred from entering movie theaters, theaters and concerts.

A week ago I learned that Tania — our Tania — has decided to found the Migrant Peoples Party based in New York and Berlin. This new party will defend those who were taken to the United States as children and now feel themselves in danger of being deported. She will also focus on undocumented Yugoslavs in Madrid, Nigerians who hide from the police in Paris, and Tamils who falsify their passports to stay in Zurich. Her new work of art/politics is grounded in those who, driven by personal dreams, economic hardship, war, family reunification or the unequal conditions of the world, have settled — without papers — in another country.

I admit I have the impulse to join this immigrant party, give than we eleven million Cubans are segregated in our own nation. There are pieces of our own territory we cannot access, cruise ships plying our waters that we are barred from by our national passports, land given in usufruct for 99 years only to people who can prove they weren’t born here, and joint venture companies for people who say “Madame et Monsieur” or speak in the cadences of Spain. Not to mention the severe restrictions they impose on us to enter and leave our own borders, restrictions that evoke the airport checkpoints where they detain illegals. There are times when we feel our nationality is like an expired visa, a canceled residence card, permission to be here that they can take from us at any time.

December 21, 2010

At the end of the eighties, my son Alfredo, who had recently taken up photography, got a camera. He walked through the whole city, observing and pressing the shutter without stopping.

This is one of the many images he took then, in Reina Street, and to me it seems prophetic.

These are images I have taken recently in the same street.

Everything indicates that they’ve improved their aim.

December 20 2010

The Orlando Zapata Tamayo National Civic Resistance and Civil Disobedience Front marches on September 28th, 2010.

October 2 2010

I still remember my first encounter with Lezama. In 1973, a bookshelf in my first office called my attention (another bookshelf, not one I already I mentioned) packed with a single book. The same book from the collection Cuban Letters filled three shelves. In the time I worked there, no one took a single one of those books, not even me, who knew nothing of Lezama beyond the fact that he was a writer who “wasn’t clear,” along with Virgilio Piñera, what remained of Origins, and others, almost all, today, glories of official culture. Lezama died surrounded by silence and only three or four of those who knew dared to go to his funeral. Most learned of his death the day after his burial from the little note appeared on an inside page of the newspaper.

Today a CSI team with Grissom at the head of it, just landed in Havana to follow the Master’s prints, discovered on a glass display case in Manzana de Gómez. These are prints of the ring, middle and index fingers of the right hand. Presumably these prints will be sold for a high bid in some curiosities auction, or even an art auction, considering they belong to the immortal hand that wrote Paradise. But that’s not all.

The National Jubilee which ends today includes the reopening of the restored house-museum, the publication of his Complete Works, a photo exhibition of his portraits, with associated honors for the photographer, Chinolope; the issuing of a commemorative coin and a postage stamp, and even the recreation of the the Death of Narcissus in a ballet.

One can only imagine that in his afterlife, Lezama is laughing enigmatically, enveloped in a cloud of smoke.

December 19, 2010

1. When driving a vehicle you should look ahead, but also use the rearview and side mirrors. This prevents accidents. It is the same when it comes to finding possible solutions to problems: we must look to the front (the new), but also take into account what is behind (the past) and what happens to our side (the experience of others).
2. If you fail to do so, you can make big mistakes, believing you have discovered something new, when it has already been in use for hundreds of years. In all areas this is very important, but economically, that is what concerns me, as it constitutes one of our major bottlenecks, it is more important.
3. For over fifty years (I’m looking back through the rearview mirror), our economy has been a failure. We have survived at the expense of huge infusions, first from the former Soviet Union and now Venezuela. This is a truth that only a very deluded do not accept. There are, as evidence, dozens of plans with no results and, as the culmination, the current chaotic situation.
4. There are many experiences in different countries (I am looking to the sides, side mirrors). Some more liberal than others, but none, so far, is akin to the conceptions of our official economists. For one reason or another they are rejected. It is not good to copy but, They could at least be taken into account when seeking solutions.
5. The road to an economic solution must pass through the elimination of political and ideological ties that imprison us (I’m looking straight ahead), go through the authorization of the small and medium privately owned cooperative in the beginning, and capital investment, Cuban first, and then abroad. It also entails the relevant legislation, to ensure security rights to these processes. There are many other issues to consider, but I think that these, for now, can serve to get us moving.

December 18 2010

A recent revelation from Wikileaks has exposed conversations among diplomats accredited to Cuba in which they made gloomy predictions about the future of the Island, particularly because of the expected economic setbacks. These speculations are not new; I dare say they are cyclical in nature and never correct in their conclusions, although they start from known budgets.

I will not pretend to describe here “how the water gets into the coconut” nor to give the definitive explanation of why the current social model prevailing in Cuba endures against all odds. I am going to limit myself to mentioning one of the sources of error in the analyses that set a fixed date for “the twilight of the Castro regime.”

I offer a parable: A tobacco farmer in Pinar de Rio showed up on my balcony one day and, looking at the tomato seedling a neighbor had in his patio, said to me, “Tell the gentleman that in these conditions he won’t get results. The tomatoes there won’t grow big enough for even a tube of puree.” Based on his deep knowledge and extensive experience, the tobacco farmer explained many things to me about the consequences of irrigating vegetables with chlorinated city water, the urgent need to protect the crop from insects, and many more details I’ll omit so as not to overwhelm my readers. More than two years have passed and my neighbor Felipe continues to cultivate and sell tomatoes to the people of the neighborhood, indifferent to the advice of the man who grows the best tobacco in the world for the richest people on the planet.

The lesson that can be derived from this example is that those who set a very high standard in calculating the demands of their customers are not capable of understanding what happens when the recipient of what is produced is the kind of person who has never eaten a decent tomato, nor smoked export-quality tobacco.

When we analyze Cuba we do so within an environment where the government calculations used to plan for production and services begin with an extra-economic factor which, in metaphoric terms, can be expressed as “the people’s infinite capacity for sacrifice.” Because of this, until today, socialist companies do not declare bankruptcy. Because of this Cuba was until very recently a world power in sports, even though boxers who left the training center with yogurt for their children in their bags were punished. Because of this we are one of the countries that sends the most doctors to the third world, although the waiting list for a gallbladder operation has become an agony and service has been suspended in a dental clinic because there is no paper to wrap the instruments in the sterilizer.

Those diplomats who calculate the imminent disaster come mostly from nations where the workers go on strike against extending the retirement age, and students burn buses because public transport fares go up a few cents. They can never understand how it is possible, after the layoffs of half a million workers, the plaza is full on May Day with people singing an anthem that says, in one of its verses, “What does the worker care about the sacrifice? United we will overcome any aggressor.”

This article originally appeared in Diario de Cuba, December 13, 2010.