Category: Xavier Carbonell

What is his duty against this insignificant dictatorship, completely ignored by 13 administrations, from Eisenhower to Biden?

To see a Cuban rave about him, celebrate his victory, throw a pathetic little party, a pathetic little cake with blue, white and red meringue, is to re-enact that orgasmic militancy that he once felt for Fidel Castro. Another “The Man”? Another “The Horse”? Another “My Commander”? Again “This is your house, Fidel”? No, thank you, whoever it is. A politician is an administrator, not a messiah.

I arrived in Europe without knowing what I was going to eat for the next month. I was assigned a number. I know what it is like to be a number or an illegible card, and I am not remotely alone. This country welcomed me, life made its way through mountains of bureaucracy, regulations, paperwork and uncertainty. What kind of human being would I be if I approved – or worse, if I voted! – for a policy that gives the green light to the hunt for migrants, hundreds of them my fellow citizens.

No, Biden’s immigration policies have not solved anything, but that does not justify thousands, perhaps millions of people living in total uncertainty since January 20. Not uncertainty, but fear. That is not the America we believed in. That is not freedom.

But Cubans are never afraid. Cubans, who do not live in a country but in a bubble of exceptionality, do not take it personally. Trump, my friend, the people are with you. One of the lowest hours of Cuban exile was traveling to Washington, to the doors of the White House, and asking for absolutely everything – some already saw themselves in a B-1 Lancer dropping bombs on Point Zero, with the Ride of the Valkyries in the background – except clemency for migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Haiti, three countries as screwed as we are, perhaps more so. And the Afghans? And the Ukrainians? And the others?

Many pro-Trump friends, who are now beginning to moderate their enthusiasm, have told me: “I never imagined it would turn out like this.” I reply that there was nothing to imagine, because Trump may be a cruel, authoritarian guy and a compulsive liar in almost everything, but that when it came to migrants he was more transparent and sincere than the Virgin Mary. You like Trump, but he doesn’t like you.

I don’t like the fact that any Cuban who expresses the slightest displeasure with Trump – which ultimately is not just hating that ugly, orange-haired old man, but the values ​​he proposes – is met by a school of patriotic piranhas on social media. One leaves Cuba to speak, think and defend whatever one wants. Be a Trumpist, I respect that right. But cancelling and censoring, putting all the nuances in the same bag, simplifying, insulting, defaming, those are Villa Marista tactics that we have assimilated by dint of suffering them.

Trump will not help us build a country. No one is going to fix it for us or gift it to us.

Trump will not help us build a country. Nobody is going to fix it for us or gift it to us. For Trump, there is only one country, and I am not even sure it is the United States. The politicians who accompany him, whom the press calls Cuban-Americans, are Americans even if they have Latin surnames. They are concerned about a nation, their own, not that of their parents, and with good reason. Cuba – Kiuba – is a word that must sound very exotic in Washington.

I cannot speak about the end of aid to the independent Cuban press, because I have run out of space. To understand the impact of this news, one only has to take a look at the happiness that is felt in Cubadebate, Granma, the Party and the Foreign Ministry.

Well, Donnie, we’re done (I’ll leave Musk for another day). These are my dislikes, with zero likes because I don’t have Facebook or X. Brain and stomach and an arsenal of patience for the future. I feel free, freer than ever, as every Cuban migrant should feel, and the rest is literature. “Let Trump cook,” one wrote recently. Let him cook, the Kingdom is his. But with what ingredients, with whose sweat, at the cost of what values, with what allies, the Cubans? Like in Woody Allen’s joke, I no longer dare to belong to any club where there are people from my country.

At the end of this tunnel of tension that is about to become a roller coaster, we are ants trying to live our lives in the age of Trump, extras in an episode of House of Cards or Succession, a poorly drawn drawing in the background of the comic strip. Gray and forgettable people. But tell me, at the end of the day, isn’t that a little comforting?

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From Einstein Waldo Balart learned that time can be a substance, and that as a substance it can be represented

In the oppressive Victorian society where the popular – but not physical – concept of the fourth dimension was born, the idea that there are worlds that our senses cannot grasp was a symbol of freedom. Flatland , a mathematical novel published in 1884 by Edwin Abbott, narrated the adventures of a square who discovers the existence of spheres.

In “flatland” there are only two-dimensional forms, and the appearance of this other being upsets everything. The sphere, on the other hand, does not conceive the possibility of a fourth, a fifth or an nth dimension. The idea was so attractive that it won thousands of followers, such as the bigamist writer Charles Hinton, who invented the tesseract – a hypercube with 24 faces and 32 edges, later painted by Dalí – and the theosophist Claude Bragdon, who aspired to redecorate New York following magical and numerical patterns.

For Waldo Balart, only abstraction – specifically Suprematism and Constructivism – had succeeded, after several failed attempts, in representing these new conceptions of time and space. This required a great deal of inner purification, similar to that of a saint or a hermit.

Pure color, pure form, mathematics and illumination together. A song to freedom that never ceases to have a profound resonance in history.

The Cuban’s affinity with these movements led him to shape his work according to the same search for purity. Pure color, pure form, mathematics and illumination together. A song to freedom that never ceases to have a deep resonance in history – and in his own history – a rebellion against politics and reality that seems to reach its climax in the photo that Rialta published in 2024 of his empty wheelchair. Clean lines, a scarf, paint stains on the floor, the absent body. It is the Heart Sutra of Buddhism: emptiness is form, form is emptiness.

“The needs for freedom and solidarity are born from an internal struggle within the creator,” writes Waldo Balart, “which drives him to become self-absorbed and thus be able to channel his energy from a personal perspective.” This idea is expressed much more clearly in his letter to the poet Gonzalo Rojas, where the painter claims to have succeeded in translating onto canvas the feeling of emptiness of Saint John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic.

The perfect representation of the dispossesion was a black square like Kubrick’s – “it can’t be a circle, because then it would be a black hole” – because it was at the same time the absence of color and all colors, delimited by a solid form. “I consider it as nothingness, which is the only way to achieve communion with the Universe.”

‘Essays on Art‘ does not contain only essays on art. Waldo Balart foresaw the pressure of the Internet as early as 1987, when he attended an exhibition by the technological giant IBM in the Egyptian temple of Debod, transplanted in Madrid. He was shown the making of a chip and the future of computing. The situation was like walking through a labyrinth with an unlikely tour guide: the Minotaur. The artist saw in all this a danger for those who wish to lead “a marginal existence as the last bastion of personal freedom.” A prophecy fulfilled.

One of the most delicious texts in the anthology is ’Revolution’, the “outline of a history of the Cuban tribe, descendants of the Goths and the Lucumíes”

One of the most delicious texts in the anthology is ’Revolution’, the “outline of a history of the Cuban tribe, descendants of the Goths and the Lucumíes.” This comedy, which begins in 1492 and goes through the wars of independence and the Revolution of 1930 until reaching 1959, is his particular reading of the island’s past.

With Castro – his former-brother-in-law – a Russian flag is placed on the stage and “all the actors get into geometric-military formations, and begin to march like automatons repeating slogans in unison that the judges have ordered them: “blah burun gru puraca achán.” Waldo Balart senses the Cuban apocalypse, and after a season of “fights, killings and hangings” comes the great dispossession of all symbols. Only emptiness and a song by The Beatles remain.

What I like about Waldo Balart is not only his paintings, always with beautiful titles – Structure of Light, Axiomatic Orde, Longitudinal Knot Genesi, Proposition – but also that essential Cubanness that Castroism has always wanted to exterminate. The Island as a synthesis of the universal, as the zero coordinate to search for the rest of the universe. The Island, not as a closed-off state, but as a starting point.

The artist knew himself to be the custodian of this memory, which had “considerable weight” for him. That is why he liked to point out that the Revolution was only an accident – ​​with all the implications of that word – in a larger story. “Everything has been said,” he insisted with Gide, “but since no one listens, it must be repeated.”

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Patron saint of hippies and other outcasts under the Castro regime, Haydée was the tsarina of Casa de las Américas until her death

Patron saint of hippies and other outcasts under the Castro regime, Haydée was the tsarina of Casa de las Américas until her death. Her responsibility was the “revolutionary education” of young Latin American writers. She claimed to have made that generation famous, something she admitted in numerous documents, but never with greater elation than in a letter she sent to Mario Vargas Llosa on May 14, 1971.

The document is famous, having been cited by the likes of Jorge Fornet and Rafael Rojas. I myself discovered it between pages 66 and 67 in a 1971 issue of the journal “Casa.” The whole magazine is one long artillery barrage. It starts off with a speech by Fidel. The main course follows, with instructions on cultural “parameterization.”* And for dessert, the self-incrimination of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla.

The letter to Vargas Llosa shows up on a little slip of paper, folded like the message in a fortune cookie, to aid the reader’s digestion. As the note itself explains, it is presented this way because of the urgent need to respond the Peruvian writer’s resignation from the magazine’s editorial board. Fortunately, I was able to steal that issue of “Casa” from a dusty bookshelf at Central University before the termites could get to it. I now have it in front of me along with the letter.

By the time Haydée adds her signature to the letter’s four long pages, she was addressing a man who had already written some of the Spanish language’s most acclaimed novels: The City and the Dogs, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral. She freely reveals the author’s address –Via Augusta 211, Ático 2.o, Barcelona. Like Beethoven, she knows how to create a big bang.

Haydée lurches between totalitarian coldness and revolutionary coarseness, the two rhetorical styles of Cuban strongmen

She addresses him as “sir,” not “comrade,” as Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén liked to do, because Vargas Llosa is no longer her colleague. First, the formalities. He cannot resign from the board because the board no longer exists. It was abolished “because having a divergence of opinions among committee members was unacceptable.” Surgical castration to treat the cancer of free expression. “We thought this action was preferable to simply excluding people like you from the board,” she explains. Haydée lurches between totalitarian coldness and revolutionary coarseness, the two rhetorical styles of Cuban strongmen.

What a shame, the midwife mentions in an aside. “A young man like you,” someone who could have done so much for Fidel, like García Márquez, who would go on to enjoy a personal friendship with the Cuban leader, something Haydée denies to Vargas Llosa. He is exiled from the communist firmament, dragging dozens of intellectuals with him. The Peruvian writer had to add his voice — “a voice that we helped get heard” — to the unanimous chorus.

The talent of the Revolution’s old aristocrats to turn a statement into a judicial weapon is also employed here. She mentions Padilla, a writer “who has acknowledged his counterrevolutionary activities” and has never been tortured. “It is clear that you have never faced terror,” Haydée says. It is clear that the ghost of her brother still haunts her. If the regime does not defend itself, it would really be like “letting Abel die.”

The trial continues. Vargas Llosa acceptance of Venezuela’s Rómulo Gallegos prize in 1967, which the Chavez government later rescinded, was an insult. He should have given the money to Che Guevara and his guerrilla fighters, as Havana suggested. “Buying a house was more important to him than showing solidarity with Che’s military efforts at a decisive moment.” Thus, Vargas Llosa is responsible for Guevara’s death later that same year.

At the end, Haydée asks that her death be viewed as a sacrifice – like Che, like the Vietnamese, like Abel – and that is what she will get, but not from Vargas Llosa

The tone of the letter becomes more strident. His opinions on Fidel’s position regarding the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia are “ridiculous.” Appearing at an American university is a sin. Not going to Havana when he is invited is also a sin. Vargas Llosa can only “regret” being “the living image of the colonized writer, contemptuous of our people, vain, confident that writing well not only makes one forgive bad actions but also allows one to pass judgement on a great movement like the Cuban Revolution.”

At the end, Haydée asks that her death be viewed as a sacrifice – like Che, like the Vietnamese, like Abel – and that is what she will get, but not from Vargas Llosa. After a lifetime “of fuses and cannon fire all around”, she kills herself in a conventional way, by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, like Eduardo Chibás and Osvaldo Dorticós before her. Abel and Celia, her children with Armando Hart, will also die prematurely, in an accident that occurred in 2008. Fidel Castro will outlive them all. As will Vargas Llosa.

*Translator’s note: a process of establishing “parameters” and categorizing anyone who falls outside of them as misfits.

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Melones has shown how cruel we Cubans – humans – can be when it comes to choosing between the living and the dead. We have cared more about the messianic Donald Trump, who snatches away millions of Cubans even though he has made it very clear what migrants mean to him: worms, criminals and pariahs, just like for Castro. We have cared more about parole, CBP One, credible fear, asylum, the White House, Melania’s hat, tea with the Bidens. We have cared more about the 553, and how could we not care, if – at least the political prisoners – should not have spent a single day behind bars. Life weighs more.

But who cares about the “heroes,” the “combatants,” those who “died fulfilling their duty,” the sweet Cuban warriors?

But who cares about the “heroes,” the “combatants,” those who “died in the line of duty,” the sweet Cuban warriors? The regime knows well what it does and what it says: a soldier’s job is to die for the Revolution. It is not the same to say that nine children died – they were children: look at their social networks – because children have families; soldiers do not. It is not the same to pronounce a name as to list four officers, with their ranks. We have learned that when a man dies wearing the stinking olive green shirt, his life is lighter. One more casualty in the great struggle against an imaginary enemy – Revolution is fiction – it is not a man who dies, a number dies.

Now I see the photos of the Student Bastion all over Cuba, of Díaz-Canel smiling while the idiot on duty disassembles a Kalashnikov, of a crowd of university students taking photos – in Holguín, the day after the funeral tribute to the 13 of Melones! – of a fire-eater handling a machine gun, posing like a Power Ranger. Here, instead of life, what weighs more is the moral impudence of the Cuban. Does no one feel guilty about Melones? Nor for the Supertankers? Nor for Angola and so many other wars?

Too much blood stains the battered shirts of the Army. Blood spilled by mistake or bad luck.

Too much blood stains the battered shirts of the Army. Blood spilled by mistake or bad luck, by order of an imbecile – we already know that the Armed Forces collect them – or to please the Dracula-like Commander. That blood stains the hands of Díaz-Canel and of every high official, of the deputies of Parliament, who have not had the courage to raise a debate about the service, and of the entire Cuban military ranks, from Álvaro López Miera to the hundreds of drunken sergeants in every municipality.

I will not say goodbye to the boys from Melones with a martial salute or with funeral paraphernalia. I will say goodbye to them as the otaku , the future chef, the football fan, the one who had a girlfriend waiting for him, a friend with whom he wandered the streets, parents. More than ten years ago, when I looked like them and wore the same shirt they wore, we sang songs in English in that dark square of the Santa Clara Defense School.

It was the “music of the pre,” Evanescence, Gotye, Nickelback, Gorillaz, AC/DC, Aerosmith and especially Green Day, which I now play to remember. To remember them. “I walk this empty street / On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams / Where the city sleeps / And I’m the only one, and I walk alone.”

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Our historic moment was a desperate attempt to abandon history, encapsulated in the voice of the dictator

In school, when hordes of students were forced to swear loyalty to “il duce,” those who came from anti-Fascist families always found ways to make fun of the oath. One of Ecco’s classmates would jokingly shout “Arturo!” instead of “Lo giuro!” (“I swear!”). How many times did we ourselves purposely mangle slogans during military preparation marches? One, two, three, four, eating shit and ruining shoes. First of May, horses’ day. April 1st, it’s the worst. No, the fun never ends, Carlos Puebla.

Revolution is a sense of the historical moment. Our historical moment was a desperate attempt to abandon history, encapsulated in the voice of the dictator. Díaz-Canel not only has no balls, he has no voice. His stutter, his inability to speak other languages, his fear of crowds, all disqualify him as a true leader. Neither did Raúl, who speaks with the nasal voice of a Cuban drunkard, a boozer, the family e’er-do-well. Raúl Modesto reminds us of Francisco Franco in some ways: the mustache, the low volume, the annoying, almost telephone-like ring. They all compensated for this by being relentlessly aggressive. Blood will calm any neurosis.

A sonorous museum of cruelty might include the the staccato voice of Hugo Chavez (“Ah, Mr. Danger, you messed with me, little bird.”); the cretinous voice of Nicolás Maduro (“Sometimes I realize that it is me when I look in the mirror.”); the fawning voice of Evo Morales (“Fidel has not fallen ill, he is just being repaired.”); the guttural voice of Adolf Hitler (“People have never been liberated with humanity and democracy”); the ranting voice of Kim (“Nuclear power is a symbol of sovereignty.”); the monotonous voice of Stalin (“I became a socialist in the seminary”); the tense voice of Putin (“Ukraine is an artificial state that Stalin willed into being.”); the pathetic voice of Ceausescu (“This morning we decided to increase the minimum wage.”).

And, of course, the voice of Fifo. (“I have never been nor am I now a communist… I am not a communist… I am a Marxist-Lenist and I will be a Marxist-Leninist till the day I die… I always admired Christ because he was the first communist… I apologize for having fallen.”)

Anyone who thinks that there are no believers left, that no one cries when a dictator dies, that no one sighs at his absence, is very wrong. Fidel has his mourners, perhaps thousands of them. On November 25, while I was celebrating these eight wonderful years of silence, a couple of “Granma” journalists reached the climax with a disturbing article about the leader.

“Fidel, whose umbilical chord was cut from two wombs — that of Lina, his biological mother — and Cuba, forged with his nation an alliance founded on love. He loved it like a father loves his children… Fidel literally opened his heart to danger and, in the midst of the rain, the mud and the roads destroyed by the combined power of the wind and the water, he was with his people in those distressing moments… The Commander’s love for his people is reborn in our president, [Miguel] Díaz-Canel.”

Honestly, who writes this stuff? And what psychiatrist are they seeing?

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A member of Randy Alonso’s dream team – those boys from Cubadebate who seduce Ana de Armas and write a pamphlet against the blockade – had the naivety to do his job well and survey 658,771 students and 6,993 teachers. Only 41% of the children and 51% of their teachers know how to play chess. They play “to kill boredom,” say the brave pioneers interviewed. They play very little because there are no pieces or boards. They play badly, under the effects of the “lack of implements” – the Chinese have not sent “pieces” since the pandemic – of the ministerial trick, of scarcity, of mental poverty, of unleavened masses.

In the Third Improvement, chess will not be a subject, as Fidel and Che and other photogenic assassins dreamed.

Things are not going to improve, little Capablancas. In the umpteenth indoctrination plan of the Ministry of Education – what in Mordor they call the Third Improvement – ​​chess will no longer be a subject, as Fidel and Che and other photogenic assassins, who loved to pose in front of the chessboard, dreamed of. It will be, says the national methodologist of Physical Education, a mere “complementary activity.” And every pioneer knows what that means: dancing and enjoying the extracurricular symphony.

The methodologist has ideas whose brilliance should not be wasted by the Electric Union. Possessed of a calm desperation, she calls on teachers “with knowledge” of the game to “facilitate this practice.” She intends to “assess with the National Chess Commissioner to see if he has some support that we could put on computers or on the same phones so that children can play.” There is so much Cubanness, so much revolution in that “let’s see if he has” that it should be the title of our next national anthem.

Like any boy educated under the Battle of Ideas, I learned to play chess as a child. I was taught – by my grandparents, not by my teachers – to be proud of Capablanca, The Machine, and I grew up with the conviction that he was the best chess player in the world. Americans could say the same about Bobby Fischer and the Russians about Spassky or Karpov. But Fischer was a madman and Karpov is Putin’s man – although he criticized him about Ukraine – as he was before the Central Committee. Capablanca was a gentleman. You only have to look at his photos, his classic serenity in front of the board. Always attentive to the pieces, always with a Buddhist smile, to the dismay of his adversaries.

Metaphors need food and electricity, decency and life, and without that there is no head, and therefore no chess.

There has never been another, and the one who came closest – Leinier Domínguez – does not even appear in the newspapers of his country. The country that has no boards or pieces, and where people used to play in the middle of a blackout, sitting on the curb of the sidewalk, illuminated by a small flashlight. Those night games were a metaphor for something, but metaphors also need food and electricity, decency and life, and without that there is no head, and therefore no chess.

You’ll find it hard to believe, Leontxo, that there was so much deterioration in Capablanca’s country, where Fischer and Korchnoi and Tal and Petrosian played. However, those of us who left have some consolation. It’s the same consolation that Nabokov felt when he escaped from Sebastopol on a Greek ship, with the Soviet firefight in the background. There, in front of him and with his back to the horror, were his father and a broken chess board. The bishop had lost his head, the rook was a poker chip. The game was unforgettable. He who flees always tries to do so with a nervous smile, with memory, with a little hope. Let’s see if he has any.

See also: chess 

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.