One of the Authors of the Grammy Winning Cuban Protest Anthem ‘Homeland and Life’ Receives a Deportation Order From the US

“My life is in danger in Cuba,” says Eliexer Márquez “El Funky.”

“I have 30 days to leave the country or I’ll be deported,” El Funky wrote on social media. / Facebook/El Funky.

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Luz Escobar / Yaiza Santos, Madrid, 9 May 2025 — Eliexer Márquez “El Funky,” one of the authors of Patria y Vida, the anthem of the 11 July 2021 protests, winner of two Grammy Awards, persecuted in Cuba for his dissenting songs, and exiled in the United States for three and a half years, has a deportation order. He announced it himself on Thursday, with three lines posted on his Facebook wall

“I have 30 days to leave the country or I will be deported,” the rapper wrote, while asking for support “from all my Cuban brothers and sisters who know about my anti-communist history and from the members of Congress of this country.” As he explained to 14ymedio by phone, the US denied him residency due to the one-year-and-three-month prison sentence he served on the island for marijuana possession more than eight years ago.

He never concealed this background from the US authorities, and they requested more details about it while he was processing his permanent residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act. This, he admits, was a mistake. “I should have requested political asylum upon arrival, but I trusted the lawyer they assigned me,” says El Funky about the lawyer recommended to him by his colleague and co-author of Patria y Vida, Yotuel Romero. The man was a well-established professional, he says, but he always disagreed with him.

“I always told him: Brother, my case is for political asylum, but he insisted on the Adjustment Act.”

“I always told him: ‘Brother, my case is for political asylum,’ but he insisted on the Adjustment Act.” The lawyer’s decision was not without logic. Since its passage in 1996, this law has been the fastest way for Cubans to obtain permanent residency in the United States—between 10 and 35 months, compared to the several years it can take to be granted asylum. With an added advantage: it allows them to return to Cuba, something that is prohibited for political asylum seekers, under penalty of losing their status and, therefore, their residency.

But traveling to the island isn’t something El Funky can contemplate. “It would be suicide to return; my life is worthless in Cuba, everyone who continue reading

knows my career knows that,” says the musician, who arrived in the United States in November 2021 with a special invitation to the Latin Grammy Awards, where Patria y Vida was crowned Best Song of the Year and Best Urban Song.

“There were two six-month visas, one for me and one for Maykel. They didn’t let Maykel out, but they did let me out,” he says, referring to his friend Maykel Castillo ‘Osorbo’, who at that time had already been in prison for six months and who would end up being sentenced to nine years in prison, a sentence he is still serving in Pinar del Río.

“My departure was practically an exile; those people took me to the airport.”

El Funky continues, alluding to State Security: “My departure was practically an exile; those people took me to the airport.” With threats disguised as congratulations: “Have a good trip, but don’t come back just yet. You know we can give you a sentence that you can serve for up to 20 years.”

After Patria y Vida was released in February 2021 and immediately became a social phenomenon, the regime’s siege against El Funky and Osorbo, the authors who lived on the island – and also Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, leader of the San Isidro Movement, who also appeared in the video clip – intensified. El Funky, in particular, was arrested on several occasions, and on one of them, precautionary measures were imposed on him to restrict his freedom of movement .

For all these reasons, he sees the regime’s hand in denying his residency: “I’m absolutely sure.” The reason he gives is that the criminal record that arrived from the island, with the sentence completed in 2017, no longer stated “possession” but “drug trafficking.” The sentence, El Funky points out, “makes it very clear: it was for half a marijuana cigarette. I served one year and three months, and trafficking in Cuba is punishable by five to ten years. You realize that a crime was fabricated there, especially in a case like mine.”

The rapper asserts that this was also fabricated. “In 2016, I was already making protest music with Maykel,” he recalls. “Maykel had already been imprisoned because he had made a song against Fidel [Por ti, señor]. In the sentence, you can read the neighbors’ opinions: my good behavior, that I wasn’t a criminal, that I’d never had any problems in the neighborhood, but nothing. They had to find a way to get me out of line.”

He is confident that his new lawyer can resolve his case so that he won’t be deported.

He understands, of course, that the United States, based on his drug convictions, treats him “like a criminal,” but he is confident his new lawyer can resolve his case so he won’t be deported. “They’re taking away a case I served in Cuba, and it’s known that that dictatorship expelled me for all my actions and activism. You have to realize that this is something fabricated by the dictatorship,” he insists. “My life is in danger in Cuba.”

The artist claims he never delayed completing any immigration procedures in the United States to update his status. “Since I arrived, I started working with that lawyer, but everything kept getting delayed.” That same year, he says, they conducted the interview and began asking for more documents.

He also details his life in Miami, more as Eliexer Márquez than El Funky, working as a maintenance man at an elementary school ten minutes from his home. “I’m the head of a family, married to an American citizen who has a daughter. I have a work permit, social security, a driver’s license, all my papers are up to date, none of them expired. I have no criminal record here, I’ve never committed a single offense, not a traffic violation or anything, I’m clean. In fact, for my job at the school, with children, which is extremely sensitive, they had to conduct an in-depth investigation to find out who I was.”

Caught between a dictatorship that would immediately imprison him and a legalistic society more xenophobic than ever, Márquez’s case is reminiscent of the “Scum of the Earth” of 1940s Europe, as defined by Arthur Koestler: persecuted in Germany by Jews and in France for missing a role. Far from music or the stage, however, his lyrics in Patria y Vida continue to resonate: “You are no longer necessary, you have nothing left, you are already going down, the people are tired of enduring, we are waiting for a new dawn.”
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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.

Despite the Deportations, Many Cubans Continue To Trust Trump To Regularize Their Situation

“Biden left the White House without solving our problem,” complains Pedro, who arrived three years ago

Migrants in line at a Social Security office in Florida / 14ymedio

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Alejandro Mena Ortiz / Yaiza Santos, Miami/Madrid, 12 February 2025 — Pedro, from Havana, arrived in the United States almost three years ago by the “route of the volcanoes,” from Nicaragua, and does not yet have legal residence. But if he could, he would have voted for Donald Trump. The tightening of the new president’s immigration policies, which include increased surveillance, the power granted to agents to detain foreigners in any city in the country and the mass deportations that are already taking place, do not frighten him.

“I identify much more with right-wing policies than with left-wing policies,” says the young man, 35, who worked as a chef on the Island and now, in Florida, has a job in a kitchen, in addition to driving trucks. Beyond his political opinions, he explains that Trump has not disappointed him, while the Democrats, with former President Joe Biden at the head, have. “Greatly,” he says.

“The Biden Administration indiscriminately gave some Cubans [Humanitarian] Parole at the southern border. Other Cubans were given I-220A and even I-220B, which is worse,” he says, referring to the different types of documents that Cubans could receive when arriving on foot at the border; in his case, through McAllen, Texas. “It was practically a game of chance, depending on where and what day you entered. I fell into the I-220A group.”

“At first the lawyers gave us a lot of hope but not now. They say that everything depends on the judge we get in court, on the particular case”

Although it has allowed Pedro to stay in the country and request a hearing in the Immigration Court, the I-220A, a “provisional release order,” does not guarantee a ruling in his favor. He, in fact, has been waiting for his court date since he arrived in April 2022. “I never understood why Biden had those guidelines for Cubans, because the Cuban Adjustment Act protects us, and we can legally obtain our residence in the US after a year and a day,” he says. “Three years after I entered, Biden left the White House without adjusting our situation, which he could have done with a stroke of the pen. He didn’t, he wasn’t interested.”

“Maybe,” he ventures, “it’s a kind of punishment, because most Cubans support Donald Trump.” When Trump took office, all their hopes were reborn. “I think the day when I can be a resident will not be very far off, and above all I trust that we have a Secretary of State who identifies himself as Cuban,” he says referring to Marco Rubio, an American born to parents originally from the Island. “That, for me, causes tremendous pride, to know that a Cuban has come so far in the most powerful country in the world.” continue reading

In the same case as Pedro, but with an appearance date in the Immigration Court – in September 2025 – is Liliana, who entered the United States with her boyfriend in July 2022, having spent, like the thousands of Cubans who take the route through Nicaragua, about 10,000 dollars per head. She is also disappointed with the Biden Administration. Why? “For letting us pass irregularly and then, once here, never regularizing our cases and continuing to let so many people pass, giving so many Paroles, while those of us who have been here for so many years are in migratory limbo.” Thus, she is a supporter of Trump and hopes that the current Administration will regularize her situation.

Liliana is convinced that the Trump Government will do “the right thing for us”

Liliana, who, like her partner, was a doctor on the Island and was sanctioned in Cuba for having deserted her mission in Venezuela, is convinced that the Trump Government will do “the right thing for us, those of us who are working, those of us who declare taxes, those of us who have not committed a crime and those of us who also received political asylum.”

Their legal representatives, however, are prudent. “At the beginning, lawyers did give us a lot of hope, but now they don’t. They say that everything depends on the judge we get in court, on the particular case.”

A crack, in any case, is felt among the Cubans who arrived in the United States in the exodus of the last four years. Although they all express very similar reasons for having left the Island – lack of freedom and the desire to prosper – they are divided by their way of seeing things according to how they arrived and the document they received to to stay on US territory. Some irregularly and others legally; some, in the hands of mafias that transported them by land, crossing four countries in several weeks, and others, without that suffering; some spending an average of 10,000 dollars, some one tenth as much.

The fact that through Biden’s measures, known repressors of the Cuban regime have been able to establish themselves in US territory – 135 according to the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba – only increases the resentment towards the previous US Administration about their I-220A status.

“We made the difficult decision to leave Cuba after constant threats, harassment, persecution and fear”

Dayana arrived in the United States in January 2022 with her husband and has an I-220A court date. “We made the difficult decision to leave Cuba after constant threats, harassment, persecution and fear,” says this woman, about 40 years old, who participated in the demonstration of 11 July 2021 in Havana.

“We went out into the streets to protest, to demand freedom, democracy, free elections, to shout down communism, and we had to run and hide, because there was a huge deployment of the police, of the repressive apparatus. We saw many people get hit, many arrests, just for peacefully protesting and asking for freedom,” she recalls. “They went to look for me at my house; they interrogated me all night, and since they could not find witnesses or evidence and there was no recording in which I was present, they released us – after threatening us, of course.”

Until then, both she, an economist by training, and her husband lived by being mules, selling merchandise that they bought in Panama. But those days marked a turning point in their lives. “They have a mechanism created so that at any time, whenever they decide, they can invent a reason for you, crimes that you have not committed and make you look like a criminal, like scum, and they can arrest you whenever they want, and that’s why we left. After all the fines and harassment, the next step would have been prison.”

Dayana recounts the hardships she suffered: “We crossed Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, risking our lives, putting ourselves in the hands of unknown people, with much fear, a lot of stress, with many worries, crossing land, rivers, seas, deserts, but with much, much desire to be free.”

In addition to expressing her gratitude to the United States for welcoming them, she is forceful in her opinion about the current president. “We value this country immensely, and that is why we are supporters of Trump’s policies. I consider the decisions he is making regarding migration to be correct. All the people who do not behave well in this country, who do not value the great opportunity given to us migrants, I think they do not deserve to be here,” she says. “The people who want to act for the good of the country, who want to behave, study, progress, offer the best for this country, like me. So yes, we hope that Trump will legalize our status.”

“The Cuban Adjustment Act does not specify anything about the type of ’parole’ you must have to be in the country, and, as is already known, the I-220A is a conditional ’parole’.”

Christian Benítez, in the United States since February 2022 and with a court date, thinks the Trump Administration has a solution to the I-220A. “The Cuban Adjustment Act does not specify anything about the type of specific permit, the parole, that you need to be in the country, and, as is already known, the I-220A is a conditional parole,” he says. “The people who have come to this country are against the dictatorship, and we should be able to take advantage of a law that has been in existence for many years and from which so many Cubans who have escaped from that dictatorship have benefited, because nothing has really changed in Cuba. Everything remains the same; the dictatorship is the same and continues with the same plans as at the beginning: to massacre, humiliate and destroy society.”

Ariam is more skeptical. He also has an I-220A, but he arrived in December 2021 from Mexico, not by way of Nicaragua, thanks to a Schengen visa he had for being married to a Spanish citizen. His journey, then, cost a little less, although not that little: 7,000 dollars. “I was convinced that the Trump Government would mark a decisive moment towards Cuba and that I could change my status. However, since the beginning of his mandate, the news for migrants is not pleasant at all,” he says. “There was talk of mass deportations for criminals and people with a criminal record, but many people have been arrested for no apparent reason, just for not having a case of political asylum or for not having enough money to hire lawyers, which are so expensive in this country.”

Even so, he is optimistic about his court appearance next month. “The lawyers who represent us tell us to wait, not to be afraid of the measures taken so far, that sooner or later the Government must implement a law to gradually favor migrants with the I-220A status, and that the first thing I must do is defend my asylum case in Immigration Court.”

“The lawyers who represent us tell us to wait, not to be afraid of the measures taken so far”

Compared to those who fled Cuba through the path opened by the regime through Nicaragua at the end of 2021, the year of the massive protests on the Island, the panorama is very different for those who entered the US through the CBP One application, established by the Biden Government in January 2023, along with other measures such as Humanitarian Parole, in order to curb the migration crisis. Although most of them have already been able to take advantage of the Cuban Adjustment Act, having resided in the United States for a year and a day, others have recently arrived in the country. These are the ones who suffer the greatest fear about the new administration: a document leaked to the American press in January established Trump’s desire to deport all migrants with humanitarian parole or CBP One, even if they have accessed the country legally.

For example, Rolando, a 31-year-old from Holguín, entered the US last December from Colombia under the Safe Mobility refugee program. Although he is part of the last Cubans who managed to enter under the Biden Administration, he says he feels confident in his migration process so far. “I requested it from Bogotá, and they confirmed in a few months that I had been selected for the program. But I know other Cubans who were left waiting to be called, and when Trump came to power, everything fell apart,” he says. “On the same day, January 20, they eliminated everything.”

The young man hurried to get his work permit and his identity documents before the current president took power. Rolando’s driver’s license and work permit are valid for five years, but as soon as he passes one year and a day in the US, he will take advantage of the Cuban Adjustment Act and apply for residence.

“I have heard my mother and my aunt telling my brother in Cuba that there is a very big possibility that Trump will deport them”

Efrén, who entered Mexico with CBP One just three months ago, is in a similar situation. “Yes, I’m a little worried,” he acknowledges. “I already managed to have all the documents I’m entitled to through the program – work permit, driver’s license and all that – but anyway, with all the madness that there is with migrants, one always worries. The Government says it is focusing on illegals, to begin with, but we know that they have even arrested citizens. Until you confirm that you’re legal, you can have a bad time. People are afraid.”

Even those who have already applied for residence are afraid. Marlon entered the United States in December 2023 and planned to apply for it under the Cuban Adjustment Act if he could raise the necessary money. Seeing the aggressiveness of the current Administration toward migrants, he chose to borrow 3,000 dollars to complete the legal process. He did it a week after Trump arrived at the White House: “I had not been able to raise all the money because a family issue prevented me, but a friend was able to help me with a loan, and it’s better to be safe rather than living with the anxiety that you can be arrested,” says the 28-year-old.

Despite the confidence in immigration privileges for being Cuban, there is fear in the community, “even among people who should not have it,” says Pedro. “I heard my mother and my aunt telling my brother in Cuba that there is a very big possibility that Trump will deport them, even though I have told them a thousand times that they will not be deported, since they applied for residency months ago and will receive it once they arrive.”

Not to mention the non-Cuban migrants. The fear is palpable as soon as you step into the street. Pedro himself says that all the handymen who offered themselves at the doors of Home Depot to help in any home repair or construction activity have disappeared. An employee of the establishment was clear with him last Saturday: “I’m not even going to find them,” he told me, and not only in this Home Depot, but in all of them. They have left because they are afraid that Immigration will come and take them away.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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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.

Chaotic Hiring of Cuban Doctors by the Controversial University ‘For The Poor’ in Mexico

The University of Wellbeing asks Havana for more specialists, despite the academic failure of a previous experience

Students of the Benito Juárez García University for Wellbeing, Mexico / Prensa Libre

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Ángel Salinas / Yaiza Santos, Mexico / Madrid, 11 February 2025 — The governor of the State of Mexico, Delfina Gómez, has requested doctors from Cuba to teach classes at the Texcoco headquarters of the Benito Juárez García University for Wellbeing, the controversial educational project established by the previous Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, for low-income students. The curriculum in medicine cannot begin in January due to a lack of teachers, a knowledgeable source who asks for anonymity reveals to 14ymedio.

Gómez made the request publicly last Saturday, taking advantage of a meeting with the Cuban ambassador to Mexico, Marcos Rodríguez Costa, which aimed to “strengthen cooperation in education and health.”

It is not the first time that Mexico has requested health workers from Cuba for the purpose of teaching, says the source. In August 2023, 100 professors from several Cuban educational centers were hired for that same university. Specialists in oncology, nephrology, neurology, cardiology, rheumatology, gastroenterology, otorhinolaryngology, angiology and vascular surgery arrived in the country and were distributed in 55 headquarters of the University for Wellbeing.

Of these, however, only 23 had medical specialties: 20 in Integral Medicine and Community Health, and three in Nursing and Obstetrics. continue reading

The project was led by Cuban doctors without having a space to teach classes

Alonso, a teacher at the University of Wellbeing in Mexico City, confirmed to this newspaper that a first group of Cubans had been part of the institution’s staff since 2023. “I don’t know exactly how many there were, but they were located in the state of Veracruz and informed us that they were specialists in the career of medicine.”

This newspaper confirmed that in the community of Coatzintla (Veracruz), the Cubans Romaira Irene Ramírez Santisteban and Mario López Bueno were part of the faculty of the university headquarters in that city.

The degree of medicine at Texcoco was included as part of the curriculum of the University of Wellbeing last year. The project was led by Cuban doctors without having a space to teach, so teachers and students were temporarily located in the Civil Engineering facilities.

The medical students were given a two-week preparatory course, but given the lack of space, the Cuban doctors demanded classrooms somewhere else.

Even more unusual, it was the National Water Commission (Conagua) of the State of Mexico – an entity that has nothing to do with Education – that provided medical students with a space in its facilities, in addition to providing them with transportation. However, “in July 2024 they were warned that they could no longer support them with transportation, so they had to move elsewhere,” says the anonymous source.

“The students were then offered online classes with interns who had received their degrees. Of course they refused, and the project was suspended until further notice.”

The students had to return to the Civil Engineering campus in Texcoco, where they took classes in an auditorium. In that same month, the Cuban doctors ended their contract, and no more staff were hired to take charge of the curriculum.

“No one took responsibility for this. So much irresponsibility is not possible. Students were invited to take online classes with career interns. Of course they refused, and the project was suspended until further notice,” the source says.

In the State of Mexico, specifically in the Lago de Texcoco Ecological Park, there is a plan for the construction of another headquarters of the University of Wellbeing, but without a start date.

The chaos and opacity of the University of Wellbeing does not only concern the hired Cubans but also the general tone of the project. Created by López Obrador by presidential decree on July 30, 2019, with the aim of “proving alternatives in free and quality higher education services to young people,” this university “for the poor” has received numerous criticisms.

One of them is the amount of money spent by the State for these centers compared to the brutal cuts in funds for other public institutions of accredited prestige, such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) and the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM).

According to research published in the Mexican press, it is not very well known how the billions of pesos allocated to the University of Wellbeing have been spent

According to research published in the Mexican press, it is not very well known how the billions of pesos allocated to the operation of the University of Wellbeing have been spent, or how many of the 203 promised centers were actually built.

According to the general director of the University herself, Raquel Sosa Elízaga, until 2022 the Mexican Government had allocated 4 billion pesos (almost 195 million dollars) for the installation, equipment and operation of those institutions, which in 2023 had a budget of 1,476 million pesos and a year later, 71 million more: 1,547 million pesos.

The project planned to train a total of 300,000 students, all scholarship holders, in six years, 96,000 of them in the first generation. However, at the end of 2024, only 57,000 students had enrolled. In five years, 6,372 students finished their studies, but only 1,918 of them received a degree.

In addition to some exaggerated figures for students and an invented number of teachers (more than 700), there are half-built facilities and vacant lots in addresses where several of those centers are supposed to be located. In the few locations that operate, says a recent report, “disappointment prevails for students and teachers due to the multiple deficiencies with which they have to operate.”

José Narro, former rector of UNAM, described the University of Wellbeing in November last year, directly, as “an educational fraud.” The academic also regretted that the current Government under President Claudia Sheinbaum “continues the strategy of monetary transfers as a social development policy that has only shown its effectiveness as a political instrument but doesn’t solve the problem of poverty.” The president, for her part, defended the model, saying “it was a different educational program.”*

*Translator’s note:  The University of Wellbeing is not an accredited institution.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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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.

‘No Matter How Long the Night, the Day Must Come, and It Will Come to Cuba Too’

  • Adam Michnik, protagonist of the Polish transition to democracy, presented his book ‘Praise of Disobedience’ in Madrid
  • “In Spain and Poland there were reformist sectors within the dictatorship”
Adam Michnik, at the Madrid hotel where the interview with ’14ymedio’ took place. / 14ymedio

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yaiza Santos, Madrid, 16 November 2024 — When he was just 15, Adam Michnik (b. Warsaw, 1946) founded the “Club of Contradiction Hunters.” The communist regime prided itself on defending equality and freedom – in which he himself was educated by his family, Polish Jews who survived the Nazi extermination – but the reality in post-war Poland was very different. That early milestone inaugurated a whole life as a dissident.

A journalist and historian, the winner of the Princess of Asturias Award in 2022, the transition to democracy in his country cannot be understood without him. An advisor to the Solidarity trade union and its leader, Lech Walesa, he took part in the Round Table Talks between the military in power and the opposition forces, which led his country to be the first in the Soviet orbit to leave the dictatorship behind. A trace of those years is embedded in the name of the newspaper he founded, Gazeta Wyborcza (“The Electoral Gazette”), which soon became a media independent of politics and to this day is the most important in Poland.

Taking advantage of his stay in Madrid to present Elogio de la desobediencia (Praise of Disobedience) – a selection of articles and essays prepared specifically for the Spanish publishing house Ladera Norte – he generously responded to 14ymedio, with the help of his anthologist and Spanish translator, Maciej Stasiński.

14ymedio: Like all communist countries that had a peaceful transition to democracy, the Polish case is being watched with great interest in Cuba. For you, as you said in your speech accepting the Princess of Asturias Award, the Spanish Transition was a model (with a beautiful phrase: “making the force of arguments replace the argument of force”). Do you see this model also in force for Cuba?

Michnik: First of all, I would like to say that I am honoured to be able to speak to the newspaper that Yoani Sánchez has been running for many years. Our newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, awarded her the Person of the Year award some time ago [in 2013]. Her work in favour of democracy inspires more and more respect and admiration in us every day.

I don’t know if the Spanish or Polish path can be repeated exactly in Cuba. What I do know, with absolute certainty, is that it is our duty to help Cuban democrats replace the dictatorship with a democracy. It would be extremely important for the entire Latin American continent, because Cuba has been a model for the entire Latin American left for too long and it is a disastrous continue reading

model. I believe that there is a democratic potential in Cuban society that will allow it to overcome this crisis, but it will not be easy.

I am very afraid that now, after Trump’s victory in the United States, the external constellation around Cuba is not going to be very favorable to the cause.

14ymedio: What can be done from outside to help Cuban democrats, as you said? Because when it comes to creating democracy in Cuba, it is often said that “it is the Cubans who must do it, no one can help them.” Was this the case in your country?

Michnik: The idea that it is the Cubans themselves who must bring democracy to themselves is fair and correct. This was also the case in Poland, because it was the Poles who brought democracy. It is true that in the case of Poland there was a constellation of international forces that was very favorable to that happening. I am very afraid that now, after Trump’s victory in the United States, the external constellation around Cuba is not going to be very favorable to the cause. But then, when the coup d’état was declared in Poland in 1982, the constellation was not very favorable either. We always repeated one thing to ourselves: no matter how long the night is, the day must come. And it will come to Cuba as well.

14ymedio: There is a whole generation that believed that with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Castroism would also fall, and that did not happen. Of course, at the end of the 1990s, Hugo Chavez took power in Venezuela and came to play the supporting role that the Soviet Union had played until 1989, but before that there was almost a decade in which the dictatorship did not fall. What happened or what should have happened and did not happen? Why was this?

Michnik: I think there is an important factor to take into account. In both Spain and Poland, one of the factors that helped the democratic transition was that within the forces of the dictatorial regime there were reformist sectors, which, although they did not understand democracy in the same way as we do, did help in some way. This happened with the late Franco regime and with the communists in Poland. In the case of Cuba, there was no such sector at any time.

14ymedio: It was also thought that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “history was over,” as Fukuyama put it: there would be no more conflicts because liberal democracy had prevailed by the majority. This was blown to smithereens first by the Islamist attacks of 9/11, and then by Putin’s attitude of recovering the idea of ​​“Great Russia.” There is a tendency to view the world, with the war in Ukraine, with what is happening in Israel, with pessimism, and from what I read and hear from you, you are an optimist. How do you see it?

Michnik: I’ll start with Fukuyama. Fukuyama’s curse was the title [The End of History and the Last Man], but not the content, because the book is interesting. He’s a smart guy, but the title killed him. It was absolutely clear to me from the beginning that there was not going to be any end of history. Fukuyama’s central idea, that is, that nobody had invented anything better than a liberal democracy, human rights, a market economy and a pluralistic society, is true. Nobody has ever invented anything better. Everything that has been invented since then by Putin, the president of China, the president of Turkey, Erdogan, or Hamas, everything, is much worse.

The optimist has the fuel to keep thinking and above all behaving as if he were a free man even when he lives in a dictatorship.

And I’m going to my optimism. Where do I get the strength to be optimistic? In Poland, the easiest thing in the world is to be a pessimist, because it always happens, so pessimists are not interesting. When you are an optimist, you come and arouse curiosity, especially in women, and they look at you with different eyes: “It’s worth having a relationship with that guy.” The optimist has the fuel to keep thinking and above all to behave as if he were a free man even when he lives in a dictatorship. If someone wants to live like a slave, a pessimist, let him live, that’s his business, I’m not going to do it. The optimist’s idea is that even the thickest net has holes, and you have to put your finger, foot or head in them to open the mesh.

14ymedio: In Praise of Disobedience, in the interview with Maciej Stasiński, speaking of his “anti-Soviet Russophilia,” you have a phrase that seems very pertinent to me: “There are no peoples, nations or countries condemned by nature to live in slavery.” I don’t know if you can expand on that, because it is also a commonplace to say, for example, that the Russians get what they deserve, or the Cubans get what they deserve.

Michnik: Fine, then the Americans have Trump because they deserved it, the French had the Jacobin terror because they deserved it, and much later they had the Vichy Republic because they deserved it, is that right? The Italians had Mussolini and the Germans had Hitler. All peoples and nations have black pages in their history that they prefer to forget. We are here with the mission of reminding these peoples of the black chapters of their history. Russia is going through an absolutely dramatic moment today, but blaming an entire people for having a criminal as their ruler is a rather frivolous diagnosis. In 1989, everything that was happening in the Soviet Union was a hope for the whole world. We must remember that if it had not been for the transformations in the USSR and perestroika in Gorbachev’s time, the peaceful transition in Poland would not have been possible.

It is clear that Putin is a disgrace to the world and a curse to Russia. It is a sad and tragic moment in the history of Russia that we are living through, but there is no enthusiasm for this war in Russia. What there is, first of all, is fear and also pessimism, a collective resignation, and a great exile, of people who do not know what to do with this situation and leave Russia. This, of course, can last for some time yet, but it is clear to me that Putin is leading Russia to a debacle. I cannot predict what form this debacle will take, but my prophecy is that Putin will end up very badly. I do not rule out that they will hang him from a lamppost like Mussolini. This is not so clear right now: for him it is a good moment, because Trump has won.

What I could advise Cuban democrats is, despite these moments of demoralization or despair, not to waste time.

14ymedio: One of the most moving moments of the articles collected in Praise of Disobedience is undoubtedly the Letter from the Prisoner to the Jailer, which you wrote in 1983 to the Minister of the Interior, Czesław Kiszczak, refusing a golden exile in exchange for getting out of prison. It is the letter of a hero. Do you recognize yourself as a hero?

Michnik: I assure you that when people get to know me better, I lose a lot of my charm. The author of the letter to the minister was furious at the offer that had been made to him.

14ymedio: Did you, the opponents of the communist regime, see the light in the midst of despair? You could not read the future, you could not know that a few years later the dictatorship would fall. What did you think in the darkest moments?

Michnik: I can repeat a little of what I told Yoani Sánchez when she was in Warsaw receiving the award from our newspaper: you, Yoani, could repeat the same thing that Fidel Castro said before the Tribunal. Why? Because history will prove you right. In the midst of the pessimism that reigned, I had one thing very clear: that the truth, what was just, what was right was on our side.

14ymedio: The last moment of hope in Cuba was the demonstrations of 11 July 2021, to which the regime reacted with repression. More than 600 people are still in prison, some with long sentences. Later, in November of that year, there was another attempt, also repressed, and after that, there has only been exile and despair. And that is the saddest thing about Cuba, more than the misery and the blackouts: the demoralization. What words of encouragement would you give to Cubans?

Michnik: Things do not happen once and forever. At times when it seems that it is not possible to change the world, we must at least try to understand the world. When I was in prison – I was there many times – I used the time in my cell to read a lot, to try to understand and to write, because I could not go out into the street and try to change the world. What I could advise Cuban democrats to do, despite these moments of demoralization or despair, is to not waste time, and to start thinking about what they want the Cuba of the future to be like.

If the Round Table in Poland had been decided by the exile, it would never have taken place

14ymedio: One of the tools that the Cuban regime continues to use against dissidents is precisely that: exile or prison. Should dissidents be required to resist? Should the existence of heroes be required?

Michnik: It is not legitimate to demand that Cuban democrats stay and reject exile. That is something that each person must decide; this demand cannot be imposed on them. One cannot be a hero at someone else’s expense.

14ymedio: In the Cuban exile community in Miami, the majority position is not to give in on anything, not to make a pact with the regime. They even call a possible agreed-upon arrival of democracy a “fraudulent change.” They fear, of course, that in reality nothing will change, and that perhaps, as in Russia, the military will keep all the economic power. Both the cases of Poland and Spain show that pacts are necessary. How can this help reconciliation?

Michnik: If the Round Table in Poland had been decided by the exiles, it would never have taken place. The starting point for a compromise and a democratic transition has to come from the Cubans in Cuba, not from the exiles. That does not mean that everything that happens in Cuba has to repeat the model of Spain or Poland, but if we want to repeat that model of an agreed, peaceful, democratic transition, the Cubans cannot be subordinated to the dictates of the exiles. The exiles can help, but they cannot replace the Cubans on the Island. That was the case in Poland. In 1989, when we started the Round Table, the Polish democratic exiles supported the negotiation, but they could not replace it, and I think that should be more or less the case in Cuba.

Now, the fear of a “fraudulent transition,” that Cubans will be deceived by the regime, is perfectly natural. Such a transition is an undertaking that requires new, bold and often risky decisions. The paradoxes, traps and twists of a transition are masterfully reflected by Javier Cercas in The Anatomy of a Moment. On the other hand, shaking hands with the executioner, convincing someone to do it, is very difficult, and often impossible, because the victim refuses. For me, the lesson of Chile was very important, where the victims had to accept that they were going to have to live in the country with their jailers and their executioners. If one wants to establish a democracy for one’s country after a dictatorship, there is no other way. Human suffering cannot be an instrument to destroy solutions of agreement and coexistence.

The political police files are a repository of poison, they have done no good to the democratic cause

14ymedio: A very important point when democracy comes to countries is the opening of the political police files. What is done with this? Should we dig or not dig in these files, where one can find that a neighbor was turning one in or that one’s own brother was an informant? Any advice for Cubans in this regard, for the Cuba of the future?

Michnik: There are no easy answers to this. Although archives are an absolutely essential source of historical knowledge, it is knowledge that must be learned. Archives must be read well. If these archives are used as an instrument of political struggle against my adversaries, those who do not agree with me, they become an absolute disgrace. Because these files, ultimately, say much more about their authors, about those who were keeping them, than about the supposed or real informants recruited, or the victims who were being watched by the police. To this day I have not looked at my archive, I have not wanted to look at it.

14ymedio: Why?

Michnik: Because I am convinced that my knowledge of myself and of the communist dictatorship of which we were victims will not be expanded by reading it. It will not provide me with any valuable knowledge, for example, to know that a girl who was my lover or my girlfriend was later an informer or recruited as an informant. It does not provide me with any additional knowledge to read in the files that at some point I had been cowardly or brave. I know what I was like. Moreover, the authors of these archives, of these files, could not tell the truth, or even more: deliberately lie. What am I going to do with that? What is the use? What I do know is that in no country where the police files have been scrutinized – Stasi, in Germany, or any other – in none of them has it served to improve the atmosphere of coexistence and tolerance in society, and in no country has this scrutiny and its results represented an effective shield against threats to democracy. It has not served, I know that for a fact. In fact, the files of the political police are a repository of poison. It is like watching pornography. This matter has not done any good service to the democratic cause in any country. These files were drawn up not to establish the truth, but to oppress, to enslave people.

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORKThe 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.

Cuba: ‘The Only Eastern Country in the Heart of the West’

Jorge Ferrer presents ‘Between Russia and Cuba’ in Barcelona. Against memory and oblivion.

Jorge Ferrer and Iván de la Nuez, at the presentation of ‘Between Russia and Cuba. Against memory and oblivion’, in La Central de Barcelona / 14ymedio

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yaiza Santos, Barcelona, 17 May 2024 — The history of the link between Cuba and the Soviet Union, and what this meant for the world in the years of the Cold War, is well known. However, until now no one had related the intimate implications it had for several generations of Cubans. Especially those young people who, sent to study in Moscow, witnessed glasnost and Perestroika, waited for the change to be echoed in their country and ended up exiled.

The task of explaining this “very strange link,” between a Caribbean island and the icy lands of the USSR, in the words of Ricardo Cayuela, director of the Ladera Norte publishing house, was far surpassed by Jorge Ferrer in Between Russia and Cuba, Against Memory and Oblivion, which he presented this Thursday at the La Central bookstore in Barcelona.

The essayist and art critic Iván de la Nuez, resident in Spain for more than 30 years and presenter of the event, described the book as “huge, tremendous, extraordinary,” going beyond narrating the “life that every Cuban could have had.” The three lives – related in the three parts that make up the volume, are that of the grandfather Federico, a police officer under Batista exiled in the United States in 1968, when Jorge Ferrer was a baby; that of the father Jorge, a preeminent apparatchik at the National Bank of Cuba; and that of himself. In reality, says De la Nuez, the three lives are “at least 21”: seven, like cats, for each one. continue reading

But this is not, as it might seem, a memoir – and hence the subtitle – but rather an unclassifiable hybrid, as the author claims he likes to consider himself. “There is a memory gap in the world we live in,” he said at one point during the presentation. De la Nuez elaborated on the same idea, saying that “memory is often made of lies, and this is a book that seeks the truth.”

This is not, as it might seem, a memoir – and hence the subtitle – but rather an unclassifiable hybrid, as the author claims he likes to consider himself

For this purpose he undertook arduous research about his grandfather, his father and his own life in Moscow, where he arrived with his father as a teenager. It is in that part where he hit a wall, Iván de la Nuez emphasized: he wanted to get his file from the psychiatric hospital where his father forcibly confined him at the age of 16 for drug problems, but, in post-Soviet Russia he found that “that file is not open.” In that building, larger than the Kremlin, not only the mentally ill but also dissidents, like the poet Joseph Brodsky himself, were punished.

Both Cubans spoke about the term hypernormalization, from the Russian Alexei Yurchak, to refer to that moment in the USSR before its fall, and what it meant to live the socialist “experiment.” That “life without intimacy or seclusion” left room, however, for secrets, just like those that Ferrer tries to bring to light from his family.

Between Russia and Cuba is also, De la Nuez said, the book “by a translator” – as Ferrer is for authors such as Vasili Grossman, Svetlana Aleksievich, Iván Bunin or María Stepanova – “a book that translates the world for us” and aims for an impact. The experience of the Cuban in exile, like them, cannot be, in the opinion of the art critic, subordinated to the past. “If we spent all the time saying where we came from and denouncing it, we would have no way out.”

Faced with the idea of ​​Cuba that is usually held outside its borders, of a certain multiculturalism and folklore, De la Nuez indicates, in short, that Ferrer is right in finding the true uniqueness of the Island, “which no other country in the world has”: to be “the only Eastern country in the heart of the West.”

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORKThe 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.

The Sister of the Former Cuban Minister of Economy Denies That He Is Detained: ‘He Is Incommunicado’

Caption – Vicky Gil, during her interview with Canary Island television, in Spain (TVC/Capture)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yaiza Santos, Madrid, 20 March 2024 — María Victoria Gil Fernández spoke publicly again about her brother, the former Minister of Economy. In a statement this Monday to Canary Islands television in Spain, where she resides, she said that Alejandro Gil has not been arrested: “My brother is incommunicado.” She also blamed Raúl Castro for the so-called Ordering Task,* which plunged the country “into absolute misery.”

In conversation with 14ymedio, this Tuesday, the former presenter of Televisión Cubana, who was in Havana between March 3 and 10, just when the “investigation” that the regime undertook against her brother was announced, corroborates everything she said about the former deputy and right-hand man of President Miguel Díaz-Canel.

María Victoria Gil Fernández: “He is not detained as such; he is incommunicado somewhere, maybe in Villa Marista, if it is a detention house of the Ministry of the Interior. From the legal point of view, detention means he is in prison, and he has not been charged with a crime. I couldn’t talk to him, I couldn’t contact him, because he is totally incommunicado.”

14ymedio: But he isn’t at home, neither he nor his wife?

A: No, no, no. Neither of them. Laura María Gil González is in the house, with her husband, Álvaro Iglesias, and my grandniece, who I wanted to meet, who is a year and a half old. But I understand that my niece is working [in the Caudal group, which is charged with the  custody and transfer of securities and belongs to the Ministry of Finance]. She goes to work and everything, but she doesn’t have a cell phone. continue reading

Until the Prosecutor’s Office charges him with a crime, one cannot say that he is corrupt. That’s why I said that I will file a complaint against the Con Filo television program, because the presumption of innocence is mandatory

Q: He is not detained, but if he is somewhere similar to Villa Marista, we know what that means.

A: I imagine that given my brother’s former position, he would not be in Villa Marista. In Cuba there are some special state security houses, very nice houses, in Miramar and in Nuevo Vedado, where high-level, “high-ranking” people are taken,  who are being investigated. It was the case of Carlos Lage and many others. They have all the luxuries and comfort; they are not given bad treatment either, far from it. He must be in one of those houses; I don’t know where.

Q: Who told you that he was incomunicado?

A: My nephew, who is not involved, Alejandro Arnaldo Gil González. He has always been apart from the whole family. He is a very quiet person, very reserved. He is a computer engineer, a professor, and he lives at his wife’s house in Playa. I communicate with my nephew every day. He tells me: “Auntie, this is going to happen, I’m sure.” He must really be suffering, because you can imagine a boy with his personality, his father being accused, as they say, of corruption, which is a term that has been used even by the Cuban press, but the prosecutor’s office has not charged him with any crime.

Q: Didn’t the public statement say “serious errors in the performance of his duties”?

A: “Serious mistakes in the performance of his duties,” and then there is a tagline, which has always been added since I was a little girl, born and raised with the Revolution: “The Government will never tolerate corruption, insensitivity or simulation (fraud).” That doesn’t mean that he is being accused of corruption. Until the Prosecutor’s Office charges him with a crime, one cannot say that he is corrupt. That’s why I said that I will sue the Con Filo television program, because the presumption of innocence is mandatory. It is described in the laws of criminal procedure, which are the same in Spain as in Cuba, Uruguay and Argentina, because they all come from the same root, which is Roman Law. If you are talking about charging a crime without respecting the presumption of innocence, you are committing the crime of slander.

Q: Con Filo is not an independent news program. It is actually the way the Government talks about your brother.

A. Exactly.

Q: In the interview with Canary Islands television, you blame Raúl Castro for the situation that Cuba is experiencing, and you also point out that Díaz-Canel congratulated your brother on his birthday on February 2, the same day that he was dismissed as minister.

A: The biggest contradiction that exists is that the president of the Republic of Cuba dismisses my brother on February 2 and congratulates him for his achievements, and my brother replies: “Thank you, Díaz-Canel, we continue with you,” and then on March 7 they announce that they are investigating him. How can the president of Cuba not know what is happening?

Q: Hence the question: To what extent did Díaz-Canel know what was happening on February 2? Your brother was his right-hand man.

A: They were “nail and flesh” (really close), as we say in Cuba.

“If Díaz-Canel had something to do with that decision and made it without knowing about the crimes, in quotation marks, which are supposedly imputed to my brother, how can he congratulate him on his good work?”

Q: Does Díaz-Canel have something to do with this decision?

A: Of course he has something to do with this decision. But if he does and he made it without knowing the crimes, in quotation marks, which are supposedly imputed to my brother, how can he congratulate him on his good work? It’s contradictory.

Q: How can you legally file a lawsuit against the Cuban Government, as you said yesterday?

A: I’m a lawyer by profession; I graduated in Cuba in 1982 wth high honors. I have four specializations, in forensic medicine, for example. I was advanced in judicial science. I will attend the proceedings. My son [Daniel Trujillo Gil] says that he is going to tie me to a tree, that he is going to tear up my Cuban and Spanish passports, but I’m going to do it.

If there is a trial, as was done with Ochoa, when the State cleared itself of all its crimes with one person, I was enraged knowing that behind Ochoa there was really State corruption. I will attend personally and make a private accusation. And if they show that my brother really was corrupt, then the others were also corrupt, and all the criminals involved will fall along with him. Even if my son wants to tie me to a tree. Now that I’m back, he hid my passport. He didn’t want me going to Cuba because he said that I was going to be detained, since I had made some very strong statements against the Government, and that they have arrested political prisoners in Cuba for less. But I went to Cuba, and no one bothered me.

Q: How do you interpret that arbitrariness?

A: I don’t know. My son sat with me two days ago and said, “Mamá, I’m going to be honest with you, and I have to tell you the truth. Today I am sure that you are a member of the Cuban State Security, because only and exclusively does it explain how after the statements you have made, the posts on Facebook and the interviews you have given, you have been able to enter Cuba without any problems.”

Q: And how did you respond?

A: What am I going to tell him? If he believes it, what can I do? If it had happened to him, I would believe it too. Because it is a miracle that I have really entered and left Cuba without anyone bothering me. There have been people who have done one-fifth of what I did, and they wouldn’t even let them get off the plane. It’s very strange and has no explanation, but that’s the way it is, and I am not a member of State Security.

*Translator’s note: The Ordering Task was a collection of measures that included eliminating the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC), leaving the Cuban peso (CUP) as the only national currency, raising prices, raising salaries (but not as much as prices), opening stores that take payment only in hard currency, which must be in the form of specially issued pre-paid debit cards, and a broad range of other measures targeted to different elements of the Cuban economy.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORKThe 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.

The Long Arm of Cuba’s Political Police Reaches Amelia Calzadilla in Spain

Amelia Calzadilla, in the house where she lives with her husband and three children in Spain. (14ymedio)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yaiza Santos, Madrid, 24 December 2023 — Intending to violate the 7,500 kilometers of distance between Havana and Madrid, a message from State Security arrived last week for Amelia Calzadilla and her husband, Antonio Díaz. Both are regulated — the regime’s term of choice to mean ’forbidden to travel’ — and will not be able to return to Cuba. The communication did not arrive by regular mail or by e-mail, nor on letterhead, with an official seal and firm signature. It was a simple WhatsApp from Major Luis, the political police agent who attended to the couple until they left the Island, she with her three children last month, he in September.

Amelia tells 14ymedio almost at the end of a conversation that takes place between her house and a walk, in the quiet town on the outskirts of Madrid where the family now lives, and, for the first time, her eyes glaze over: “They know that it is a very harsh punishment, because I don’t have anyone in Spain, my whole family is in Cuba.” But she immediately recovers: “It’s hard, but nothing, it’s a punishment for telling the truth.”

For her, the decision of the political police was the direct result of the network broadcast she made on December 10, in which, once again, she expressed solidarity with other mothers on the Island who do not have a way to feed their children and denounced not only the economic management that has plunged the island into disaster but also the lies of the regime “that no one believes anymore.”

“They know that it is a very harsh punishment, because I don’t have anyone in Spain, my whole family is in Cuba”

“I was talking to the mothers, and to them that empathetic speech that we women manage to have, especially when we are mothers, that sensitivity that exists in the word when you are a mother and another mother understands you and you can put yourself in her place, it terrifies them, and continue reading

then they take these types of measures,” she explains.

Serene and calm, Amelia Calzadilla differed greatly in that video from that other one, in June 2022, from her home in the municipality of Cerro, a video ignited with indignation and the hope of a new citizen protest in Cuba. Almost a year had passed since the massive demonstrations of 11 July 2021, and unease had settled on the Island after the repression and the open mass exodus via Nicaragua as an escape valve. And there was this mother of three small children, raised in the middle of the Special Period — after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its subsidies to Cuba — a woman who graduated in the English Language, beside herself, giving the highest government officials a shout-out for not delivering for the people they had so promised to serve.

She immediately became a target of State Security, which tried to discredit her through the official press. “In the space of 72 hours, with all the discredit campaign they created in my name, I was forced to do a second direct to vindicate my image, because what was happening didn’t make any sense.”

After that, she was summoned to the municipal government of Cerro by the authorities. When leaving the meeting, at that time, she said that they simply promised to solve her problems with the gas supply. Now, in this exile that they did not seek but that they are grateful for, both Amelia Calzadilla and Antonio Díaz, sitting in the dining room of their house, tell what really happened that day. “There they talked about everything except gas,” Antonio begins. “It was, by the book, an intelligence interrogation. There was a representative from the Ministry of Energy and Mines and all the others were military dressed as civilians.”

“They were not careful to show me that they were there, because they needed to intimidate me,” continues Amelia, who, as the daughter of a soldier, attended high school at an Army academy and “recognized the pattern.”

“It was, by the book, an intelligence interrogation. There was a representative from the Ministry of Energy and Mines and all the others were military dressed as civilians”

Before reaching the municipal government building, where they were surprised by the number of foreign journalists stationed in front, they already noticed something strange. In the populous neighborhood where they live, there was not a soul that morning. “They had a police force, the streets were closed,” says Antonio, who also remembers “a truck of special troops and a chain of police officers on the avenue.”

That “conversation” was, Antonio asserts, “to do a psychological profile.” As Cubans who have been subjected to harassment and repression within the Island know, those first approaches pass calmly, and with those mentioned they play at being good police officers. “What you are is confused,” Amelia repeats about what they told her. “Your problem is an ideological confusion, but obviously you are not against the Revolution.” It was, she repeats, “by the book”: “There is never a recognition of the problems that the country has, because it would be succumbing to the idea that socialism does not solve the social problems of a nation.”

As clear as the outlook was, Amelia, however, confesses that she was not prepared for the role that, unintentionally, she already played. “They automatically considered me as an opponent and I didn’t see myself that way, but as a person dissatisfied with the economic and social reality that the country was experiencing,” she says. “Also because of a maturity problem in terms of politics. Nobody starts out like I started, like that, sitting in front of the phone, screaming.”

That intimidation, whatever it was, achieved its objective, and Amelia did not broadcast again for several months. The following October, she was at it again, claiming that authorities were trying to falsely frame her for stealing some neighbors’ electricity. That reason was just the last straw. In the time that she was “silent,” there were what she calls “unfortunate actions,” which were “nothing in particular” but which “could not be coincidences.”

During the time she was “silent,” there were what she calls “unfortunate actions,” which were “nothing in particular” but which “could not be coincidences”

After the interrogation in Cerro’s government, the entire family fell ill with Covid-19. The couple is convinced that among those who attended the meeting, there were people with the virus there on purpose. As a result, Amelia developed pneumonia. Later, in a neighborhood where there were no cases of dengue, she and two children suffered from it. Amelia, with the hemorrhagic variant, which left her with an inflamed liver for half a year. “Every time there was a government visit, we got sick,” says Antonio. “And the last thing was the contamination of the cistern water,” continues Amelia, who saw how the children came down with gastroenteritis. “While I was recovering from hepatitis, the electric company workers came to the house to accuse me of stealing some neighbors’ electricity and I said: this is enough.”

In that direct message in which she resumed the complaints, she also said that they were trying to hinder her from traveling to the Spanish city of Salamanca, to pursue a master’s degree in translation for which she had obtained a scholarship. “That was one of the unfortunate events that I think they had something to do with,” Amelia narrates. She had been examined for those studies before taking any direct action.

A week after publishing her first video, the results were published: she had been selected. As she presented all the documentation, the problems arose: “First, the Spanish Consulate did not send me credentials to be able to apply for the visa, it took about two months, and when I received the credentials to go to the visa appointment, with all the paperwork, family roots, the letter from the university, everything, they denied my visa. Very strange.”

Likewise, for both Antonio and her, job doors were closing. “I had the possibility of continuing to work with individuals, but neither of us were hired, both of us being professionals – he has a degree in Economics, I as a translator. No one wanted to give us work because they were very afraid of pointing themselves out to the Security of the State.” They said it explicitly, hse specifies: “We prefer to give you money directly than to give you work, because they already came to knock on our door and ask us why you come here so much, why you come here.”

At this point, Amelia becomes indignant again: “If they really did surveillance work, they would know that people are involved in nothing, that they are not associated with anything, that they are simply disenchanted, that they are disappointed, that they can’t take it anymore, that there comes a time when they say this is unsustainable and it must be changed, inevitably.”

  If they really did surveillance work, they would know that people are involved in nothing, that they are not associated with anything, that they are simply disenchanted, that they are disappointed, that they can’t take it anymore

At the same time, the young mother began to be strongly attacked by the most strident part of the exile in Miami, especially the influencer Alexander Otaola, she still does not know why. “Criticism is very affecting when it is unfair,” she says sincerely. “There were opponents who attacked me saying I had to take a position, saying either you are with me or you are against me,” which, in her opinion, “is a mistake.” However, it was not her intention to confront the activist. “It was unintentional. It wasn’t my intention to attack him, but well, it’s over. He had messed with me on other occasions. And look, if I wasn’t going to put up with Díaz-Canel’s nonsense, who could put me behind bars, am I going to put up with Otaola?”

She wasn’t willing to shut up. Direct to direct, her position “was already beginning to be a little clearer.” And she was losing her fear, until she published a video in which she expressed solidarity with Nelva Ortega, wife of José Daniel Ferrer, and asked for proof of life of the leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, imprisoned since the 11J protests.

“I didn’t even know about the situation of political prisoners the day I made my first statement,” she confesses. “I began to learn about the human rights problems associated with ideology within Cuba later.”

And she explains: “The same social and economic climate prevents you from being able to connect with another type of mentality, from being able to analyze all the legal problems we have, the problems of human rights, freedoms, commercial freedom. You can’t think about it because you are all time thinking ’I have to buy chicken, I have to buy chicken, I have to buy chicken’. This is also a mechanism to entertain yourself. That absolute misery is a mechanism to keep you in control, because you are in the basics. You can’t think beyond it.”

  “That absolute misery is a mechanism to keep you in check, because you are in the basics. You can’t think beyond it”

Weren’t there people who approached Calzadilla after her first broadcasts to join some opposition cause? “There were people, yes, but in a personal capacity, not organizations,” she responds. “My private mailbox was jammed for a long time, with messages of all kinds. From people who wanted to help me, send me money. I immediately refused to let anyone give me a peso because I didn’t know where that money came from. Furthermore, I wasn’t asking for money. It was a message that I also tried to convey to the people of Cuba: the problem of our society is not related to the purchasing power.”

Before that video showing solidarity with Nelva Tamayo, she says, she was surprised that they never went looking for her: “I think it was a very intelligent game. On the one hand, to show the opponents that I could be playing at two ends and that it discredited me in front of the opposition. On the other hand, it had the objective of disproving the image that they attack those who oppose them.”

But Ferrer is a huge issue for the regime, which put an end to Amelia Calzadilla. They didn’t stop her at first, but they stopped Antonio on the street for an alleged irregularity with the car he was driving. While Major Luis was holding him in the fourth unit of Cerro, she, who had already warned online that she was going to look for her husband, was detained two blocks from her house. “They throw me into the boat like that, literally, a patrol car, an operation, wow, of Osama bin Laden.” Amelia takes it with humor, but her story does not hide the violence.

“When they detained me, my mother insisted on going with me. There were many stories of people who said that relatives disappeared and that terrified her. In fact, it was that in my case. Everyone knew that I was going to the fourth unit from Cerro, but my family called all the police stations, all of them, and in all of them they told them that they had no arrest report on me. They took me to a unit as far away as they could find. If they could have to take me to Matanzas, they would have taken me there. They spent the world’s fuel and more going around all over Havana.”

I wasn’t asking for money. It was a message that I also tried to convey to the people of Cuba: the problem of our society is not related to the purchasing power

After all this, her father showed up at the unit where Antonio was. The old soldier, “an 82-year-old oak,” as Amelia describes him, was told the truth, although only half: “She is detained. We had to move her from here because she thought of posting on social media that she was already coming over here.” Nothing to do with what had happened because she never arrived at the Cerro unit.

Where they were holding her, they locked her in a cell while they entertained her mother. “They didn’t tell me anything, neither the reason for which I was detained, nor if I was arrested. Of course, they couldn’t put me in jail because they didn’t have an arrest warrant against me. They put me in a very unpleasant cell, because it was a corridor that had cells with men. In my cell I was alone, but in front of me I had a man who was masturbating. You always have that thing that it can’t be coincidence.”

When it seemed like enough confinement, they took her to an office, where they began what they do not call a conversation or an interrogation, but rather an “intimidation process.”

She tried to maintain a phlegmatic attitude, but inside she was sick. “I told myself, my God, if I don’t get out of here today, what are they going to say to my children? If I end up in prison, I’m going to scar my children for life, because in Cuba the prisoner’s family is banned. “How to demand that they be good human beings and at the same time explain that because I am a good human being I am imprisoned. Those things go through one’s mind.”

 In my cell I was alone, but in front of me was a man who was masturbating. You always have that thing that cannot be coincidental

In the office, with all the detours and circumlocutions to which they are prone, they gave her to understand that with her public speech she was “calling on people for a national strike,” which could imply a crime of “inciting to commit a crime.” That is, if she continued with her broadcasts, she would end up in prison. Before leaving, they forced her to sign a document putting in her own handwriting what she agreed to.

“I didn’t want to be sarcastic, but that’s what language is for. I told them that I was committed to maintaining the same social behavior that I had had all my life. They are very frustrated by ambiguity. I know that it kills them, because it is the room that intelligence gives you to make fun of them, and that really upsets them.”

They let her out at six in the afternoon and took her home. “In a military car. I imagine that they also did it with the objective of sowing doubt in others about who I worked for. After that came a sequence of calls that supposedly had the objective of demonstrating that they were fully prepared to help me with any problem I had, but it was something very grotesque, because I knew it was a mechanism of control, of siege. And that’s how it was until I left.”

The arrest was the point of no return. “Somehow, you start to feel a little small and you start to feel a bit alone too. You get disappointed, because you feel like only you are putting yourself at risk.”

Antonio had just obtained Spanish nationality under the new Democratic Memory Law and the whole family began to pressure them to leave, especially for the children. “Before, with the issue that I couldn’t work, we had thought about it, but I didn’t want to leave Cuba. In fact, I have suffered a lot leaving Cuba, a lot. There are days when I get up, look at the ceiling and say “What am I doing here? It gives me back the certainty that I had to emigrate to see my daughters, who love this country, who are happy.”

Amelia sees her children frolicking in the park: “I think they still can’t understand that this is for life, that it is not a walk.” (14ymedio)

At the door of the children’s new school, a large enclosure, with several doors and buildings, and music to encourage the children to leave, another Cuban father approaches to greet them. And if they came to this town, small and far from the center of the capital, surrounded by vineyards and olive trees, with a Renaissance church, it was because of a compatriot friend of Antonio’s, who had been living here for more than ten years. As usually happens with migratory movements, there is a large community of citizens of the Island in the place. “When I arrived here, to my surprise, the Cubans at school knew me from the networks,” Amelia says with a smile. “They saw me and immediately told me ’mija, but what are you doing here, we’re going to help you’, and they helped me with everything, to get settled.”

There are things about Spain that she is “perplexed” about, such as the school her children, almost 10, 7 and 4 years old, go to. “It is a public school where there is no blackmail for being public,” she explains, because in her country “there is a process of imposing ideology.” In this regard, she gives a beautiful example, the day that her first-born daughter, studying history, asked her: “But mami, who came to Cuba first, Christopher Columbus or Fidel Castro?”

Safety is another of the fundamental elements why she is glad to have left. She comments on it happily while a local agent walks in front of her: “The Police here are something else. Besides, for me they are selected in a modeling casting call.” And Christmas! “It’s so beautiful how people live it and decorate everything, regardless of whether they believe or not.”

“I think that they still cannot understand that this is for life, that it is not just a trip, because sometimes they say ’oh, mami, this is something to take with me to my room in Cuba’.”

After school, on the days that Antonio is free from work – he is a clerk at a tobacco and cigarette store in the center of Madrid – the five of them go to the park before eating. Amelia sees them frolicking: “I think they still can’t understand that this is for life, that it’s not just a trip, because sometimes they say ’oh, mommy, I’ll take this to my room in Cuba’.”

It is a beautiful day. “The day I arrived there was a sun like that, so beautiful, but at the same time it was cold,” and she repeats what she told her mother on the phone: “Mami, in Spain the sun is a yellow light bulb: it shines but warmth, it warms up, nothing.” When Amelia talks about her mother, her expression saddens. “I miss her a lot and she misses me too. I am an only child and my mother is a very devoted mother. It’s not that I don’t have the possibility of bringing her, it’s that at the moment I can’t, including because of the economic factor.”

I think on many occasions that despite any intellectual capacity I may have, I am going to end up cleaning floors and windows. They make you doubt your ability”

Amelia, in all seriousness, speaks of the psychological damage that a dictatorship causes, a damage that “few people talk about, which is even more cruel than any other type of damage that is done to you,” and which is responsible for an almost anthropological insecurity.

“It has affected me. I am a professional, in a non-English speaking country, where I have opportunities, because not many people speak English, and even so, it is difficult for me to believe that I can function in this society as a professional. I think on many occasions that despite any intellectual capacity I may have, I am going to end up cleaning floors and windows. They make you doubt your ability. And then they keep you ignorant in so many ways, that going out into the world is like walking for the first time, alone. That’s how I feel, like I’m learning to walk alone.”

Amelia, in all seriousness, speaks of the psychological damage that a dictatorship causes, a damage that “few people talk about, which is even more cruel than any other type of damage that is done to you”, and which is responsible for an almost anthropological insecurity. “It has affected me. I am a professional, in a non-English speaking country, where I have opportunities, because not many people speak English, and even so, it is difficult for me to believe that I can function in this society as a professional. I think on many occasions that despite any intellectual capacity I may have, I am going to end up cleaning floors and windows. They make you doubt your ability. And then they keep you ignorant in so many ways, that going out into the world is like walking alone for the first time. That’s how I feel, like I’m learning to walk alone.

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORKThe 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.

Cuban Writer Xavier Carbonell Presents His Novel ‘Time’s Castaway’ in Madrid

The writer Xavier Carbonell and editor Luis Rafael Hernández in the Juan Rulfo bookshop in Madrid this Tuesday. (14ymedio)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yaiza Santos, Madrid, 8 March 2023 – Xavier Carbonell (born in Camajuaní, Villa Clara, Cuba in 1995) is spurred on by the desire to distance himself from the most common themes of other living Cuban writers (the pain of being exiled from a place, the misery of being in another place) and aims, above all, for excellence in the use of language. And it’s precisely this which his second novel, Time’s Castaway (published in Spain by Verbum), has in common with his first, The End of the Game (del Viento; winner of the City of Salamanca prize) — although they are very different novels (one a detective novel, the other an adventure).

The author introduced the new book on Tuesday, at a presentation in Madrid in the Juan Rulfo bookshop. “The castaway never knows where he’s going but he’s very keen to survive or live as best he can. He doesn’t live with anxiety. The castaway’s attitude is the opposite of an exile’s because the castaway continually adapts to circumstances”.

Carbonell didn’t refer only to this novel, but he does define it as “a journey from the present into the island’s past”. In it, the protagonist, effectively a castaway, travels the Island geographically, but also historically”, towards the East, ironically emulating the journey of Fidel Castro’s ashes, which in its time was the inverse of the “Caravan of Liberty” of 1959.

He also talked about life. The image of a castaway is agreeable to him and it’s not by chance that his column in 14ymedio is called Castaways.

The novels that he writes, and the process of writing them, are, he confessed at the event, “little refuges” from circumstances: “a way of expressing oneself in code about the present”.

Actually, he first conceived of Time’s Castaway three years ago in India, where he’d travelled to spend six months studying, thanks to his work with the association Signis de comunicadores católicosBut at the end of the programme the sudden arrival of the pandemic left him stranded there. “What could I write about Cuba that didn’t just repeat either the usual creative option of exile nor the insular obsession with misery?”, he asked himself. The result was this novel, which, he assures us, was written in one great surge — inside a week. continue reading

The book’s editor Luis Rafael Hernández, there on the platform with the author, praised the “linguistic achievement” of the novel, which, in his words, “without being avant-garde, pays much homage to the avant-garde”, and he mentioned Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima, in that regard.

When they received the novel at Verbum, he explained, “it felt to us like we needed to go for an author who was ambitious and who was doing something different and well crafted”.

The writer and literary critic Roberto González Echevarría undoubtedly agrees with him. From Yale University he has written a lavish prologue whose initial statements offer a strong foretaste for the reader: “The short novel that the reader has in their hands is the result of a flight of imagination of such high originality as has rarely been seen in Cuban literature, either recently, or indeed ever. This may sound overblown but I want to prepare the reader for a surprise as enjoyable as it is unexpected, a true aesthetic pleasure. Nothing of what has been published recently by Cuban or Latin American writers predisposes us for the dazzling originality of Time’s Castaway, the work of a young writer whom we are only just beginning to get to know”.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORKThe 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.

Wombs for Rent or Surrogacy: Cuba Signs Up

Very few countries allow this practice, which is also called surrogacy, surrogate gestation, or surrogate motherhood. (Radio Chain Agramonte)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yaiza Santos, Madrid, 22 October 2022 — One of the main doubts raised by the so-called “solidarity gestation” included in the Family Code, approved in a referendum on Sunday, September 25, is whether it will become another tool of the Cuban government to attract medical tourism.

There are very few countries in the world that allow this practice, which is also called surrogate gestation, surrogacy, or – by its detractors – wombs for rent, consisting in one or two people (from a different or same sex), who want to become parents agree with a woman for her to be the baby’s surrogate. For this reason, some of these nations are the destination of all those who want to be parents who otherwise cannot (infertile heterosexual couples and homosexual men couples, mainly).

The list includes several US states (California, Illinois and Utah), Canada, Portugal, Greece, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, India, Nepal, Thailand, two Mexican states (Tabasco and Sinaloa) and, since The Family Code entered in force, Cuba.

The ethical and legal debate is intense. For some, it supposes the commercialization of the woman’s body (such as, for example, prostitution); for others, it is the woman’s prerogative to do what she wants with her body, as long as it is consensual. continue reading

Two things are clear. First, gestation by substitution would not exist without the development of assisted reproduction techniques, which allow an egg to be fertilized in vitro and implanted in any uterus, so that whoever gives birth is no longer necessarily a biological mother. And second, that if it is allowed, it must be protected by very clear legislation (the law, specifically, must recognize the affiliation of the baby with the biological parents, not with the surrogate mother).

Given the lack of transparency of the laws, there has been no shortage of cases of fraud against couples and, even worse, of abuse of gestational surrogates or the neglect of newborns

 Thailand and Tabasco, for example, took advantage of legal loopholes for years – and many women’s extreme poverty situation – so that a myriad of intermediary agencies and an entire business serving foreigners proliferated, among other things, they paid less than in places where the regulation was very clear, such as California or Canada.

Given the lack of transparency of the laws, there has been no shortage of cases of fraud against couples and, even worse, abuse of gestational surrogates or neglect of newborns, and the scandals brought about changes. Thus, in Thailand and Tabasco, as in Sinaloa and India, today, surrogacy is not allowed for foreigners.

This is not the case in Cuba, where the recent Family Code does not mention possible restrictions based on nationality. Is this a new call for tourism, which has not raised its head since the Covid pandemic began, based on the vaunted fame of medical power?

In principle, this could not be the case, from the very name: gestation is considered “solidarity” because, as stated in the rule in its article 130, “any type of remuneration, gift or other benefit is prohibited, except for the legal obligation to give food in favor of the conceived and the compensation of the expenses that are generated by the pregnancy and childbirth.”

However, no limits are set for those “expenses generated by pregnancy and childbirth” and, on the other hand, foreigners in Cuba know that free healthcare – unlike capitalist countries like the United Kingdom or Spain – does not does not cover the expenses in any way and that, on the contrary, the prices of services in hospitals in Cuba are prohibitive.

Foreigners in Cuba know that free healthcare does not cover expenses in any way and that, on the contrary, the prices of services in hospitals in Cuba are prohibitive

For now, in any case, the Family Code is attracting the attention of the main experts on the subject.

The Argentine María Mercedes Albornoz, a specialist in Private International Law and a professor at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico, published a recently approved post of the regulation in which she analyzed this “innovative” aspect of the new Code, to which she concedes that “the recognition that there is not a single family model but a plurality of family structures accepted by the legislation constitutes a milestone in Cuban family law.”

However, she predicts that “it will still be necessary to modify other laws or enact new regulations in specific areas in order to be in a position to put the innovations of the Family Code into practice” and that “the greatest challenge” of the regulation will be “that of implementation.”

Albornoz, who has spent years studying the legal details involved in surrogacy and the problems it has raised in the international arena, since there is no worldwide unanimity in the criterion of filiation, observes that, in the Cuban Family Code “some issues either have are not yet made sufficiently clear or they give rise to doubts of interpretation”.

To begin with, she highlights that “it has been decided not to provide a definition of joint gestation, which may generate doubts about its legal nature and the formal validity requirements of the agreement.”

Similarly, she draws attention to “the silence on the maximum age and the country of domicile or habitual residence and the nationality of the person who wishes to be a mother or father through solidarity gestation.”

“It has been decided not to provide a definition of joint gestation, which may generate doubts about its legal nature and the formal validity requirements of the agreement”

This, she predicts, “would open the doors to reproductive tourism in Cuba for relatives or people who have emotional closeness with residents in Cuba, with the characteristic that pregnant women will not be able to receive financial compensation for the pregnancy.”

It is also striking for Albornoz, with respect to the surrogate mother, that the age requirement is to be 25 years old, but a maximum limit is not established beyond indicating “being of an age that allows ‘successfully carrying the pregnancy to term’ (article 132, d),” nor is the surrogate required to have gestated at least once before (which would be an indication that her body is suitable for the procedure).

Here, Albornoz detects confusion in the Code: “It is required that the future pregnant woman does not provide her ovum (article 132, f). Regarding this point, there seems to be a contradiction with what is established about multi parenthood in article 57, 1, a, which would allow the surrogate mother a choice to provide her egg or not to do so.”

On the doubts raised by the norm, she insists, throwing the question out there (taking into account the Cuban reality, almost rhetorically): “How will affective closeness be proven? How much friendship length, prior to solidarity gestation, is required? Though access to health care is free for those residing in Cuba, would the Cuban State collect medical expenses in cross-border cases? Would it obtain economic benefits? If so, how would it avoid discriminating against those residing in Cuba versus against those residing abroad? Would Cubans residing abroad have free access in Cuba to the medical services necessary to fulfill a solidarity gestation agreement?

Perhaps the Tourism and Welfare Fair, which was held in Havana this week, provided some answers, although until now it has not transpired in the official media if there was talk of including reproduction techniques within Cuba’s “offer” for foreigners, or at what prices.

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORKThe 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.

Roberto Batista, Author of a Book that Vindicates the Memory of His Father Fulgencio, Dies in Madrid

Roberto Batista is the author of the book ‘Son of Batista’ (Verbum). (Courtesy)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yaiza Santos, Madrid, 12 January 2022 — Roberto Batista Fernández will not be able to fulfill his desire to return to a democratic Cuba, where human rights are respected and there is a Constitution based on the division of powers. The lawyer, the son of Fulgencio Batista and his second wife, Marta Fernández, died this Wednesday in Madrid at the age of 74 as a result of pancreatic cancer.

“They cannot operate on the tumor at the moment. While waiting they will administer chemo and in three months there will be a revaluation,” he had written to his friends in September, on the eve of the presentation of Hijo de Batista (Son of Batista) at the Madrid Book Fair, leaving, at the same time, a halo of good humor: “I’m in good spirits.”

This newspaper witnessed his spirit when it interviewed him on the occasion of the publication of his memoirs, which caused no little controversy. In them, he reported on the mixed feelings towards his father, who staged a coup in Cuba in 1952 and was in power until he was overthrown by the Castro Revolution on January 1, 1959. continue reading

‘Bobby’, as Roberto insisted on being called, described Fulgencio Batista as an extraordinary father who breached the constitutional mandate and that mistake “took a heavy toll,” but even worse was releasing Fidel Castro from jail in 1955, acquitting him, months after the assault on the Moncada Barracks.

Born in New York, Roberto Batista returned to that same city at the age of 11, together with his younger brother Carlos Manuel, two days before los barbudos [the bearded ones] entered Havana, and he practiced there for many years as a lawyer.

In his book, he vividly describes the shock of exile and of having that surname. That experience was for him, he repeated insistently, “a wound that never healed and will remain there until I die.”

There will be a wake for him this Thursday from 7:45 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. in the funeral home of the San Isidro Cemetery in Madrid. He will be buried there, in the family pantheon, where the remains of his parents and his brother Carlos Manuel lie.
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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.

‘I Was Desperate to Get Off That Island, Which to Me Seemed Like a Disaster Ruled by a Demon’

Writer and actor Jorge Luis Camacho during an interview last May with Radio France International. (Capture)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yaiza Santos, Madrid, August 15, 2021 — Jorge Luis Camacho was born in 1956 in Cardenas, Matanzas province.  As he recalls, the Cuban flag — “an annexationist flag” which incorporated a star from the flag of the United States —was raised there for the first time. For forty years he has been a resident of Paris, where he has worked mainly as an actor and screenwriter.

Now he has written his second novel, the saga Cuban Symphony, composed in three parts: Allegro ma non troppo, Tempo Marziale and Da Capo. He tells 14ymedio that he was trying to examine the odd phenomenon of Castroism: “A dictatorship that took over in less than two years but which cannot be dislodged, even today.” The overriding desire to write it, he says, came from an organic necessity that forced him to imagine, in a diffuse and subtle way, the end of the regime.

In this interview he reads some passages from the ending: “Some predict that a popular uprising will sweep away everything in Cuba, others that the economic disaster will force the regime to negotiate with the opposition. What nobody imagines is that Cuba will stay the same.”

Yaiza Santos. Writing Allegro ma non troppo relies on a lot of historical documentation, which is cited at the end. For the story of the main family, who lost their sugar refinery after the Revolution, were you inspired by someone you knew, by some personal experience?

Jorge Luis Camacho. No. the history of Cuba is filled with such people. It isn’t necessary to listen to someone who has lived through it. When I wrote Symphony, I found someone, Nicolas Gutierrez, whom I thank in the book. His story is virtually the same as Julio’s. But I didn’t want to have direct contact with a family that would expect me to respect certain rules. I wanted to invent the characters, which gave me the freedom to do what I wanted. If history is very present, it’s because there was a moment when it seemed to me that reality was so rich that fiction alone could not continue reading

reflect it. History and fiction complement each other.

Yaiza Santos. One of the most remarkable things about the first volume, which coincides precisely with first year after the triumph of the Revolution, are those historical asides at the end of each chapter. Seeing them together is impressive: the restoration of the death penalty, the executions, the abolition of the separation of powers, the nationalizations… It was all very obvious from the beginning and yet many were enthralled with Cuban Revolution, a phenomenon that to some extent exists to this day. How do you explain this?

Jorge Luis Camacho. Frankly, I have no explanation for this. I think one of the things driving it, for example, is that some Europeans have a kind of love-hate relationship with the United States for reasons that I don’t quite understand but which are real. But I don’t think that explains the whole phenomenon. I like to say that communism, or the communist left, is a non-theistic religion. The left is waiting for a messiah and every time one comes along, they say, “Ah, this is the one.” First it was Lenin, then Stalin, followed by Mao, then Fidel came, then Chavez… then they all failed.

But the messianic left doesn’t care. They will love the next one just the same. I think it has something to do with Christianity. Even though very few communist leftists would believe me if I said they were religious, they are. Look at what just happened in Peru. It’s surprising that, just at the moment when Venezuela is a disaster, when Cuba is a disaster, people voted for a communist, who is open about it. And in six months we will see everything that he has destroyed.

Look at what just happened in Peru. It’s surprising that, just at the moment when Venezuela is a disaster, when Cuba is a disaster, people voted for communist.

Yaiza Santos. It seems metaphorical that you have a character in the book named Libertad [meaning liberty, or freedom], for Libertad Lamarque, who suffers from cancer.

Jorge Luis Camacho. Libertad’s cancer is the cancer of liberty in Cuba, with Batista and the rest. Even though Cuba had a constitution that outlawed capital punishment, it still had a lot of problems. Libertad’s illness worsens as liberty in Cuba gradually disappears.

Yaiza Santos. I was referring to a broader metaphor. Freedom is very fragile and contains within it a dark well capable of generating its own destruction. There is another character named Cohen, who says: “It is typical for autocracies to promise things that society has not achieved by itself, and only tyrannies can create the illusion of obtaining them.”

Jorge Luis Camacho. It’s not an accident that his name is Cohen. Getting back to Libertad and what she represents, if you notice in the first scene there is a crazy lady who throws herself in front of the car and says, “Liberty, liberty, don’t abandon me!” This could also be the response of uneducated people, who don’t have a compass and who throw themselves at anything, as has now happened now with the Peruvians.

Yaiza Santos. Part I manages to be suspenseful even though we know how it ends. What does the reader find in the other two volumes?

Jorge Luis Camacho. Part II takes place during the 1960s, after the new regime comes to power. That’s why it’s called Tempo Marziale. All three parts have Italian titles because they’re musical. And it’s called Cuban Symphony because it’s also a story about frustration.

Julio had wanted to be a musician but couldn’t because he’s the only one left in the family capable of getting its sugar refinery back. What’s beautiful in the end is that his son, who is a musician, wrote a short symphony when was 12 years old for his father and uncle when they were at Playa Girón, at the Bay of Pigs. [By the way] it’s not not called that because it has something to do with pigs; it’s because there are some very cute little tricolor fish that live in those waters. His son becomes a professional musician, expands the symphony and performs it on the day Julio is giving a speech at the family’s rebuilt factory, which obviously represents the country.

I don’t describe how freedom comes about but rather imply that it happens due to a social disaster that everyone could foresee. What’s curious is that the book was published in June and, less than a month later, the protests of July 11 occurred. The main character in my story is called Julio [July] and the chant that was repeated most often during those protests — “Libertad” — is the name of his mother. I feel like a magician [laughs].

If I made that joke, I’d end up prison for ten years. Now he’s saying this in front of me because we’re all together

Yaiza Santos. How did you leave Cuba for France? Had you already rejected the Revolution or did that come later?

Jorge Luis Camacho. I was always against the Revolution. I never had any appreciation for that system, despite the fact that I was raised by my older sister — my mother, like Julio’s, died of cancer when I was six years old — whose husband admired the Revolution and even became a party member. I had already been expelled from the Higher Institute of the Arts in Havana, allegedly for political reasons.

I was desperate to get off that island, which to me seemed like a disaster ruled by a demon. I didn’t believe anything he said. I have an anecdote about that. I was participating in a series sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When I got to the theater, I realized it was an event in honor of the army. The theater looked like a field of beans, everyone dressed in green, a horror.

Raul Castro was there and I heard him telling counterrevolutionary stories about how he explained to his mother what communism was. He told her, “Mama, we now own a banana orchard because this is socialism. When we no longer own a banana orchard, that will be communism.”

I thought, “These people must be kidding me. And taking my life away.” I thought that if I made a joke, I’d end up prison for ten years. Now he’s saying this in front of me because we’re all together, eating things that I had never seen in my life except in the movies. That confirmed my intuitions. I left Cuba with a lot of… I don’t like to use the word hate but, yes, I hated them.

I also left for love. I was hopelessly in love with a woman who was half French. She was the daughter of an impoverished baroness who had become a dancer at the Moulin Rouge and had married a Cuban dancer.

Yaiza Santos. How is your relationship with other Cubans living in Paris? Do you feel part of the Cuban exile community in France?

Jorge Luis Camacho. Yes and no. Because I lived and work as though I were French. I am clearly the only founder of the French screenwriter’s guild whose native language is not French. I knew Cubans in France but I was not actively involved in that world. I was also not very politically active at that time.

French governments, both of the left and the right, have a kind of admiration, no matter how ridiculous that might seem, for Fidel Castro.

Yaiza Santos. What attitudes have you found among the French towards Cuba?

Jorge Luis Camacho. Well, I’ve known some French people who were as anti-Castro as I, to the point that I thought that they were working for the French secret service. For the most part, French governments of both the left and the right have a kind of admiration, no matter how ridiculous that might seem, for Fidel Castro.

It’s surprising but right here in Paris, in the gay district, you see guys wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. Here was a homophobe, an absolute murderer, and yet there are people who believe he’s a symbol of freedom. France, both the people and the government, is not anti-Castro. Fidel Castro was welcomed with great fanfare by Mitterrand. Then Hollande welcomed the lesser but no less diabolical tyrant Raul, and many intellectuals attended the banquet that the president gave for the dictator.

Yaiza Santos. Would you go back to Cuba?

Today, for being lucky enough to have written this novel at this historic, consequential moment — because we’re all waiting to see liberty fully realized — I think so. I think I can play a role. I don’t know what but I will have a roll to play. Even though I have an eighteen-year-old son in France whom I don’t want to be away from, going to Cuba, acting on Cuban television or in Cuban movies… all these are things I dream about. Working for Cuba from France for a new Cuban government would also be something I’d like very much to do. Of course, all of us who live overseas think we have a role to play. I think it’s up to Cuba to decide whether to give us that role or not.

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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.

The Change in Cuba Has No Turning Back

Cuban musician Pavel Urkiza. (Screen capture)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yaiza Santos, Madrid, July 31, 2021 — The singer, composer and music producer Pavel Urkiza was born in Kiev (Ukraine), but right away, when he was three months old, he was taken to Havana where he grew up. His parents, both engineers, were part of the first Cuban student brigade in the Soviet Union. You glimpse the pain when he says that he met his mother when he was five years old: his mother’s family took over caring for the child and sent the woman back to the USSR, to “fulfill the mission of the Revolution.” Urkiza, over time, learned to forgive her: “She melted down, she had a mental disorder.”

This conversation reached his familial twists and turns unintentionally, because what 14ymedio wanted to talk about with Urkiza – a complete musician, founder of Gema and Pavel, the cult duo that put to music the harsh early 90s in Cuba with its opposites of the New Trova and the slogans – was his latest song release, Todo Por Ti (Everything for You), which he sings along with Daymé Arocena and which extols the historic July 11 demonstrations.

Yaiza Santos:  Did you have any of “Todo Por Ti” composed before July 11, or did it come to you at that moment?

Pavel Urkiza: I composed it the following day. I had already done two things in November: the first, “A Drop of Truth,” in homage to the San Isidro Movement and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara; and the second, “The National Whistle,” as a result of the call they sent out to whistle every day at nine at night. This was inspired by a film of Fernando Pérez titled “Life is to Whistle” (1998), in which, curiously, a character decrees the happiness of all Cubans for 2020. And that is very strong, because things really did begin to move a little more in 2020, with people like Luis Manuel Otero and Maykel Osorbo, people for whom, as Carlos Manuel Álvarez says, the Revolution was made and whom the Revolution abandoned, relegated, and marginalized.

On July 12 I spoke with Eliécer Jiménez-Almeida, a tremendously talented brother, and we said “we have to do something.” I composed the song and decided to write to Daymé Arocena, who lives in Toronto now, and she answered me almost crying, very emotional. Her husband, Pablo Dewin, also a visual artist, filmed Daymé, and Eliécer did the editing. He had the idea of doing it in a square format, so that it would be easier to watch on cell phones. The mixing and mastering of the song was done by my Madrid brother Javier Monteverde in the studio where I worked when I lived in Spain. And that’s how the theme arose. On July 21st at 7 in the morning it was already launched on the social networks.

Yaiza Santos:  And it was immediately answered by Abel Prieto . . .

Pavel Urkiza: More than that, he posted it on Casa de las Américas. That’s strong! That means it hurt. He begins like this [reads]: “Yesterday the song Todo Por Ti by Pavel Urquiza and Daymé Arocena was released on YouTube. Insignificant as a work of art, they want it to work as political propaganda. They used images of ’the people’ for the video clip when they attack a patrol car and policemen who, most of the time, retreat from aggressions by the people.” The guy is lost, he is ridiculous. I read it and continue reading

decided to reply to him on Facebook as well.
Yaiza Santos: If something exposes these reactions in the regime, it’s because the music has made them very nervous …

Pavel Urkiza: From Patria y Vida [Homeland and Life]. That was the first and it is an indisputable theme. It simply changed the motto, and showed that “homeland or death” has become obsolete and forgotten . . . Later many things have come out, but they seem to me rude, very aggressive — “Díaz-Canel singao” [motherfucker] and such. And the message that I want is another, more sophisticated one, you understand? In addition, Daymé Arocena right now is one of the Cuban artists with the most reach — young, with light, but she also comes from that place that Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Osorbo come from, persons of the people who will no longer give more. That’s also why it hurt them, because this song is on another level.

If you read Abel Prieto’s reasoning, everything is with questions. In my answer I say to him: “I find it curious that you — I am treating you as ’usted’ [using the formal ’you’ in Spanish] — question the song with questions. Do you doubt its arguments?” Yotuel Romero has been called “hustler” and “mercenary,” but Abel Prieto knows that he can’t say “mercenary” or “hustler” to me, because I know very well how the leaders in Cuba live. So I tell him: “I know that you go to Cimeq [the Surgical Medical Research Center], to the 43 clinic [the Kohly Clinic, only for high-ranking State officials] . . . I’ll tell you about things I know, because I come from a powerful family in Cuba, my mother’s family.”

My uncle replaced Che Guevara when he stepped down as Minister of Industry, my other uncle was head of Fidel Castro’s bodyguard at the beginning of the Revolution, my aunt was a colonel in the Ministry of the Interior . . . People I have nothing in common with and they stayed at my house in Cuba, anyway . . . Abel Prieto knew my grandmother well, the actress Raquel Revuelta, who became Vice Minister of Culture.

Yaiza Santos: Music is such an important factor in the change in Cuba, and nobody saw it coming.

Pavel Urkiza: As I said in my message to Abel Prieto, freedom also conquers with the cutting edge of ideas, and that is what the songs are doing.

Yaiza Santos: You’ve brought up your family history.

Pavel Urkiza: I come from privilege. My maternal family was from the old communists. My maternal grandmother, the one who raised me, was born in 1903 and did not baptize her children. And my grandfather, Fidel Domenech, who did not know the Revolution, was also an old communist [from the Communist Party of Cuba, founded in 1925]. Many of them were linked to the Revolution, but they came into conflict with the process, and there are many communists whom Fidel himself removed from political life.

Yaiza Santos:  When did you become aware and how did you decide to say: “I don’t want this, I’m leaving Cuba”?

Pavel Urkiza: At 17 years old, when the Mariel thing happened, I had already begun to question many things. The acts of repudiation that were carried out in Cuba against those who wanted to leave . . . People died there, it was a fascist thing. But I didn’t know the world, I hadn’t gone out. The first time I left Cuba was in 1985, to Czechoslovakia. Later, when you enter university [he studied Industrial Economics in Havana], you begin to see another world, to have a more critical sense.

My own grandmother Raquel was a very critical person, and she had a great communist friend, with whom she had many conversations that I listened to. They said they were corrupt, that this was not socialism. In fact, in 1987 my grandmother directed a play, Public Opinion, written by a Romanian [Aurel Baranga], which was a complete questioning of the socialist system. She was a highly respected woman in Cuba and she could do it. When homosexuals were persecuted, she took many out of UMAP [the labor camps called Military Production Aid Units] and put them in her theater group. I owe a lot to her in the sense of looking at reality with a critical eye and with an artistic eye as well.

Yaiza Santos:  What about the rest of your relatives, did you question them?

Pavel Urkiza: With my aunt the colonel, above all, that she raised me and that she was blind. One day I went out to the street naked and began to write on the wall “down with the dictatorship,” and my aunt, imagine this, followed after me, erasing what I had written . . . In the 80s I also began to read Milan Kundera, for example, covered with brown paper, hidden, and when perestroika came, they got out of hand. Those Novedades de Moscow and Sputnik magazines, which nobody was interested in because they were the same crap, continued to arrive in Cuba and with perestroika we began to read them and we began to understand, to question a pile of things and to realize that what we were experiencing was a total failure.

I also had an episode of repression. One day I went with the pianist Omar Sosa to a hotel to visit a musician who played, and the police arrived, put us in a patrol car and locked us in a cell. That’s nothing, of course. There are people who have suffered really deep, really harsh repression, like María Elena Cruz Varela. As I say, I’ve been privileged; I was gradually realizing through my friends, through people who were visiting their homes, seeing how they lived, and I began to really ask myself whether this revolution was a great sham. By ’92 I was already ’green’.

Yaiza Santos:  In that year, you left for Spain — also thanks to your grandmother Raquel — not to return.

Pavel Urkiza: I went out with the group Teatro Estudio de Cuba, to the celebrations of the fifth centennial of the discovery of America. The theater group also helpd me a lot, because artists tend to be more critical of reality and have access to certain reading and other types of music, things that begin to open your mind to realize that you’re living in a bubble, deceived by a system that makes you believe that this is the best thing in the world. And I came to the Spain of ’92, which was great.

Yaiza Santos:  What impression did the Spanish opinion of Cuba make on you at that time?

Pavel Urkiza: They were super defenders of the Revolution, and we somehow tried to make them see what the reality was like. In fact, I think that many began to see it differently, decided to travel to Cuba and realized that there really is something wrong there. Many were disappointed and others were not, among them great friends of mine. But that’s fine with me, everything is tolerable. That’s the great thing about a democracy: you can think what you want and so can I and we can debate and respect each other. All well and good, and the one more people vote for wins the election, that’s the way it is. As the U.S. Constitution says, “We the people,” we are the ones who tell the Government what to do, the Government doesn’t tell us.

Yaiza Santos:  And why did you go to the United States?

Pavel Urkiza: Well, I married an American, a love story that didn’t work out in the end, but here I stayed. After living in Washington, I came to Miami because it has social capital and it has a good climate. It’s a place where we Cubans feel at home, and it is really a very cosmopolitan city. The world’s view of Miami is quite stigmatized: the mafia thing and all that is something that belongs to the past. In fact, in the city of Miami the Democrats win.

I think the United States in general is a stigmatized country. Even living in Spain you despise it a little. Because you grow up with that! When you start to live the experience, you say, “Wait, I have to think for myself.” And I believe that the United States has many virtues. It is a country of laws, there is greatness here.

And I’ll tell you something: I always had leftist tendencies, obviously, and when I was in Spain I already began to say that I was a humanist, but now I feel that I’m an anarchist-humanist-libertarian. The left has disappointed me a lot. There is a whole strategy there that has nothing to do with real desire to change for the good of the people. I already wrote a song about it in La Ruta de las almas (The Route of Souls) — Resurrection – which says “free me from everything I have learned, return me to the point of nothingness, to the total absence of accumulated life.” I’ve had to rebuild myself, but from my own vision, not from the one they put in me there.

Yaiza Santos:  How do you see Cuba from now on, after July 11? Is change coming?

Pavel Urkiza: This has no turning back, it has no turning back. It may take another five years, but it will come about. People are not going to stay calm anymore. As that woman said in one of the videos of the protests, that she is also an old woman, do you think that this old woman is a criminal? This is how I will remember July 11 all my life: the moment when the people of Cuba took off the cloak of silence.

Translated by Tomás A.

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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.

‘In Cuba Your Mind Cannot Advance Because You Are Focused on Your Survival’

Journalist Náyare Menoyo, director of the documentary ‘Leonardo Padura, a Squalid and Moving Story’, which won her the King of Spain International Journalism Award. (EFE / Zipi)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yaiza Santos, Madrid, 20 June 2021 — Náyare Menoyo (Baracoa, 1995) created Leonardo Padura, A Squalid and Moving Story as a graduation project from the University of Havana, where she studied Journalism. She did it, she tells this newspaper, “alone, alone, alone,” with a camera her faculty lent her and the help of her cameraman friend, who did the work for free.

The documentary, premiered out of competition at the Havana Film Festival in 2019, has just received one of the King of Spain International Journalism Awards, the Television Award, among whose recipients is also Don Quixote, won by another Cuban, Carlos Manuel Álvarez, director of the independent magazine El Estornudo.

“It has the value of being a television piece presented by the Havana School of Communication in which things are said that cannot be said in Cuba,” the jury said in its ruling. “It is a work with limitations that reflects remarkable height and elegance.”

Menoyo, who lives in Madrid and will be starting a Master’s degree at the Complutense University in the fall, spoke with 14ymedio about the award and her projects.

14ymedio. How did you approach Padura to make the documentary?

Menoyo. I first encountered Padura as a writer, because I started reading his books, and the more I read, the more I liked them. Later, studying journalism, despite the fact that he is a writer who has little visibility within the Cuban State media, the professors always set him as an example, not of a good writer but of a good journalist, and recommended many of his texts.

About halfway through the run, we put together a magazine as a final project on emigration, the subject and the issue we were presenting, and it occurred to me that we could interview Padura, because the film Return to Ithaca was being aired, for which he was a screenwriter. That was my first personal approach.

Padura is not on television. If it is announced that an interview is going to be broadcast, ultimately on the day that it is going to be shown it is not aired. They state there were technical difficulties, the show was lost… continue reading

I searched the Etecsa phone listings and called him. I apologized for calling him at home but I had no other way to contact him. With tremendous Cubanness, he responded that I should not worry, that it was OK, that he worked at home, where he met with people and that I should come over. He was granting me the interview.

From there, my career continued and I discovered that I really liked television, so I said: I’m going to graduate with a documentary and it’s going to be about Padura, because this is the only time I would be able to do a documentary about this writer and decide as many things as possible I want to say about him. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to do it at any other time in Cuba, much less when I finished at the university, when I would have to do my social service commitment. I was not going to be able to.

It also made me very angry that a sector of the people who direct Cuban culture were so unsympathetic towards him. Despite there being the Padura National Prize for Literature, and despite his being a world-renowned writer, his books are rarely taken to the Book Fair, his presentations are not scheduled, and it is almost impossible to find any of his books in bookstores. Padura is not on television. If it is announced that an interview is going to be broadcast, ultimately the day that it is going to be shown it is not aired. They state there were technical difficulties or that the show was lost… Fifty thousand stories. My contribution was to make his work visible.

I also wanted, more than presenting the award-winning writer, to make a documentary with a biographical cut, to bring him closer to those readers who know him and who know who he is but who are not able to see him anywhere.

Obviously, it is not a documentary that attacks the Government, it is not a documentary that speaks directly about anything political

14ymedio. You complained bitterly a few days ago that no representative of the Cuban Embassy was present at the awards ceremony and that no official media has sought you out about the award. However, the documentary does not talk about politics at all and, if there is any reference, it is veiled. What explanation can you find for the officials to ignore the documentary and the award?

Menoyo. What can I tell you. It’s nonsense. The stubbornness of some people who run Cuba and that is why things that are so bad and it is difficult for them to change. Obviously, it is not a documentary that attacks the Government, it is not a documentary that speaks directly about anything political. It’s not that I wanted to make the things he says subtle for any reason, but that they came out that way. My goal was not to make a political memorandum, but a personal portrait of Leonardo Padura.

In the Communication Faculty they have a program, transmitted through the Havana Channel, to publish the students’ work when they graduate so it doesn’t remain mere university work, and it includes a prior interview with the director. They interviewed me, we commented on the documentary, everything was good, and it was going to be broadcast to coincide with the news of the award. They announced that it was going to be put on, everyone was waiting, but the documentary did not air. Did anyone call me to explain why the documentary was not shown? No one. Has the documentary been played after three months? It has not. A friend, who was not the person assigned to call me, told me that it had technical failures. A lie, it had no technical flaw, it is pure and hard censorship.

Now, with the award, there are those who say that it may be because Carlos Manuel Álvarez was first, who is a very talented journalist but “has a discourse against the Cuban regime,” but that is also an excuse, that is also a lie. Because when the documentary was mentioned at the Trieste Festival, it didn’t appear in any media either, nor did anyone call me to interview me.

A friend who was not the person assigned to call me, told me that it had technical failures. A lie, it had no technical flaw, it is pure and hard censorship

14ymedio. And what was the reaction when it premiered at the Havana Festival?

Menoyo. Supposedly the documentary was going to be shown only once, not in a competition but at the exhibition. But at the premiere it was full, people had to sit on the floor, there were people who were left outside, and they put it on again. The second time there was Padura and, the same, the room was full, full. In the end we ended up doing three projections. I was very happy. From what I expected when I made the documentary, with the resources that I had, versus what happened, it has been fabulous.

14ymedio. Why did you decide to come to Spain, what are you doing in Madrid, what are your dreams from now on?

Menoyo. It is a complicated question. I am in Spain because the economic situation in Cuba did not satisfy me. In Cuba, one can spend a lifetime working, honestly and hard, and never have a home. Or have five or six jobs and, in the end, have the money, but there is no chicken or oil [to buy]. Wages had risen when I left Cuba, and mine was the equivalent of about 180 euros. But the State paid me in one currency and the food and basic necessities stores only accepted MLC (freely convertible currency). Though I worked on television and had a salary, I could not buy things because the State paid me in Cuban pesos and I did not have relatives living abroad who could send me foreign money.

In Cuba, it is not that you die of hunger, but you do not eat what you need to live and you do not even eat what you want to eat and what you like; it’s what you can. A survival. I didn’t want to live my whole life like that. I used to say: “Well, now my parents are young, but when they get old, how will I support them? How do I give them what they need to live? And professionally, you can always do things that you feel proud of, but those things are accomplished through a lot, a lot of work, a lot of wear and tear, and in the end, you are so tired that you take the wheel and you do the same thing you said you were never going to do again. Because if you have to have five jobs but you are full of worries, that you don’t have the money to pay the rent, that the house is in bad shape, how can you buy a pair of shoes. If you have that in your head, you cannot think. Your mind cannot advance, you cannot focus on a project, because you are focused on your survival.

It seemed to me that Spain was a good country to go because of the culture, because of the language, because if I could do journalism somewhere, it would be here, because of the cultural similarities. I want to work on Spanish Television! [laughs] I want to do the whole migration thing. I don’t want to be in Spain writing for a Cuban medium because it is like being there in the middle of the Atlantic. I want to do journalism but I want to do it in a Spanish medium. That’s where I am.

Translated by Norma Whiting

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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.

‘My Father’s Two Great Mistakes: The 1952 Coup d’état and Freeing Fidel Castro in 1956’

14ymedio biggerRoberto Batista, one of the sons of Fulgencio Batista and author of ‘Son of Batista’ (Verbum). (Courtesy)14ymedio, Yaiza Santos, Madrid, 25 April2021 — Lawyer Roberto Batista (b. New York, 1947) did not pay much attention to his friends at first, when they told him that he had to write a book. “I, who had not written since high school, would say: but write what and about what? Who would be interested in my life?” he tells 14ymedio. His friends replied: “Your last name is part of Cuban history and your testimony is necessary for future generations; you have to do it out of historic duty.” Sometime later, his book, which ended up being called Son of Batista (Verbum), developed by itself, “with a lot of pain and a lot of grief.”

In it, he faces, with unresolved doubts, the figure of Fulgencio Batista, for whom he asks a fair trial. “My father, a politician, had his virtues and his mistakes,” writes his son in a passage. “He came out of nowhere and, with enormous efforts, knew how to excel to reach unsuspected heights and, without a doubt, had to make decisions and execute debatable and disputed actions.”

For this reason, he reflects, “there is no choice but to obey the constitutional writings. This is where the political maturity of the peoples is demonstrated. My father failed to fulfill this purpose and his error took a heavy toll.”

Batista’s Son shows, he acknowledges, “an open wound.”

Yaiza Santos: Far from being your father’s exoneration, you critically question him in the book. At some point you refer to “his Greek tragedy”: having before him “an extraordinary father figure confronted with the public man who, from the highest acknowledgements, at any given point, he damaged by seizing power unlawfully.” Where was Batista’s mistake?

Roberto Batista:  I can tell you the two great mistakes, the only ones that matter to the history of Cuba: the first, the 10 March 1952 coup d’état, and the second, freeing Fidel Castro from the Isla de Pinos prison in 1956. continue reading

My father’s government, in its last stages, turned Cuba into the third economic power in America at that time, that must be acknowledged

Yaiza Santos: Regarding these issues, you make it clear in the book, you did not discuss them with your father, despite the fact that he died when you were already a 26-year-old adult.

Roberto Batista: Since I left Cuba on that fateful night of 30 December 1958, which I describe in the book, I suffered a shock that prevented me from talking about Cuban issues until 1998. And I remember this date: it was a night I stayed working until very late, and it came to me as an inspiration: why can’t I talk about Cuba, why can’t I learn about my country, why can’t I review the history of those turbulent years? My father did try to tell me things frequently, but I did not respond to his desire to continue the conversation.

He did tell us one thing very clearly: that he had written the books he wrote in exile for a reason, because those books pick up truths and historical facts, many of them based on international statistics. My father’s government, in its last stages, turned Cuba into the third economic power in America at that time, that must be acknowledged.

In my eyes, my father’s government had two stages: from 1952 to 1954, after the coup, he was a dictator with absolute power. However, in 1954 they elected him president, and although it is true that the opposition did not participate in the elections, there were senators and representatives of the opposition in the Cuban Chambers, and he reestablished the Constitution of 1940 with all the necessary guarantees. That is acknowledged. It was in this very fruitful period that he launched Cuba into its greatest known prosperity.

Yaiza Santos: You do not shy away from controversy. For example, regarding Batista’s alleged corruption, you concede: “Did he abuse power so much, embezzle public money? Corrupt, tyrant? My son’s heart makes me think that, at home, he was a great father, understanding, home-loving and very tender.  However, his inner strength could have played a trick on him and he perhaps went beyond the limits of what was constitutionally allowed.”

Roberto Batista: My father was a born entrepreneur, a man of great inner strength, and this led him to commit that coup. Sometimes the boundaries were crossed, but it must be taken into account that, in that Cuba, there were very disturbing elements, sabotage in the cities, attacks, an opposition that continuously advocated against the Government, so a completely desperate public order was created. In a Cuba that had practically already entered a civil war, outrages were committed on both sides. But it was never true, as Bohemia magazine went on to say and later denied, that my father had caused 20,000 deaths. Between one side and the other, no more than a thousand deaths were caused, and that too is proven.

The public figure of my father has been 80% or more a product of Castro’s propaganda. Therefore, there are lots of lies

Yaiza Santos: You are also very emphatic about the accusations of collusion with the mafia. You say: “There is no evidence.” But of course, there is the image installed in the collective imagination, to a great extent by films like The Godfather.

Roberto Batista: My father’s public figure has been 80% or more a product of Castro’s propaganda. Therefore, there are lots of lies. What’s more, there is academic work by a history professor at a New Jersey university that proves that Batista had nothing to do with the mafia. This Hollywood fiction gave rise to interpreting my father in a way that suited them, because Castro’s propaganda was very good at creating the image of Batista the mobster. It is another fallacy of the many that have been alleged about my father.

And you see, I am not a son who says “my father was perfect”; he was a president, a politician, a military man who had lights and shadows, and who, in his family environment was a didactic, noble, affectionate, sweet father, and who also knew how to command. He would look at you and you already knew perfectly well what you had to do; he didn’t need to raise his voice or wave his hands or anything like that. Quietly, one look, and everyone at peace.

Yaiza Santos: You tell of a happy childhood until the night you had to leave Cuba. From that point, it is very well described, it was a shock for an 11-year-old boy to receive attacks that he did not know how to interpret very well. The deterioration is reflected very well in this phrase: “We must remember that, at that time, people were not speaking to us.” How long did you have this feeling in exile?

Roberto Batista: Quite a long time. In the confusion that was that departure from Cuba, which my father had planned only two or three days before but that very few knew about, people turned against us, and many, who were our supporters or friends, even very close friends, turned their backs on us. Those who previously organized banquets or tributes to my father as good friends, would later meet my mother in the elevator of a New York hotel and not greet her. That anguish stayed with me in my late teens and youth for many, many years. About ten years after leaving Cuba, things began to soften and people treated us differently. For example, when we arrived in Spain in the sixties, although I suffered a lot, we could enjoy a more acceptable life. But it is a wound that never healed and will remain there until I die.

Those who previously organized banquets or tributes to my father as good friends would later meet my mother in the elevator of a New York hotel and not greet her

Yaiza Santos: The trauma affected your most intimate life. Exposing that masculine frailty, the way you do in the book, is not typical of men, in general.

Roberto Batista: It is very painful for me to have to verbalize what you are mentioning. I better refer you to Son of Batista, where it is well described.

Yaiza Santos: Going back to your life in Madrid, it will shock people that even in Franco’s Spain you suffered from finding hostility towards your surname, especially at the university, where you even avoided certain professors who were communist sympathizers.

Roberto Batista: I was not a run-of-the-mill student: I had a political surname, in addition, adulterated, well-worn and threadbare, exposed to all kinds of lies. I also have to say that, at the Law School [of the Complutense University] I made great friends, and also at the Pre-university before then, and they had the sensitivity and respect not to mention the subject of Cuba. Because any Cuban accent on the street, any question about Cuba, threw me into a state of mind and physicality that sometimes even made me shake. For the rest, I have many anecdotes from that time. A very curious one that no one knows and I did not include in the book is the one when we were just onlookers at a university protest, in the second year of my degree studies, a friend and I ended up being arrested by The Grays (Franco’s police) and were held in the dungeons of La Puerta del Sol*.

 Yaiza Santos: And how did you get out of there?

Roberto Batista: It so happens that my friend had relatives at that time who were close to the ministerial leadership – I am saying it as best I can so as not to compromise anyone – who showed up and took us out after midnight. We had been there since one in the afternoon.

 It was very painful for him to ponder how that country, which could host so many people of ideology contrary to American democracy, would not grant him the respect he deserved

Yaiza Santos: Another funny anecdote is that you had to renounce your American citizenship to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam in 1966.

Roberto Batista: It wasn’t remotely funny, but very painful for me. After that, I was stateless for many years, something that differentiates you from ordinary mortals.

Yaiza Santos: How many years were you in that condition?

Roberto Batista: Until 1975, when I acquired Cuban citizenship for a few years. Later, I became a Spanish citizen in 1985.

Yaiza Santos: It is often said that “Fulgencio Batista was a puppet of the United States,” but he died without the United States granting him a visa.

Roberto Batista: A person who not once, but twice, was received by President Roosevelt, in ’38 and ’42, and who, throughout his entire political career, sided with the United States, without allowing, however, for them to have interference in Cuba… It was very painful for him to ponder how that country, which could host so many people of ideology contrary to American democracy, would not grant him the respect he deserved.

Yaiza Santos: What would the Cuban exile have to do to help Cuba to have democracy?

Roberto Batista: You ask me a political question and I am not a political scientist, although I try with all my might to follow Cuban news as frequently as possible. It is already known that the exile today is not the exile of 1959 or that of the 70’s, 80’s or 90’s. It is a very different exile, with very conflicting tendencies, and I do not see that it is a political force important enough to achieve change in Cuba.

I believe in the new Cuban generations, and I hope that those who have remained after this “geriatric” congress, as Yoani Sánchez aptly named it, will be brave enough to lead Cuba to a reform

I believe in the new Cuban generations, and I hope that those who have remained after this “geriatric” congress, as Yoani Sánchez aptly named it, will be brave enough to lead Cuba to a reform. The new generations have bravely faced power, and the power ignores them, but at least they have had no choice but to listen to them.

Yaiza Santos: You refer to the San Isidro Movement, to the 27N

Roberto Batista: Of course, of course. I have great faith in the new generations, and I believe that the San Isidro Movement is very important, just like the Patriotic Union of Cuba, with its hunger strikes. They all deserve my highest respect, my sympathy and my support for the great heroic work they are doing.

Yaiza Santos: Why is communism still being respected?

Roberto Batista: That is believed by fools. After seeing the horror of Cuba, 62 years of a totalitarian, repressive and cruel dictatorship, plus Maduro’s Bolivarian Bolsheviks, who can believe that communism can be something beneficial for a country, since the only thing it brings is misery and lack of respect for others? As much as they camouflage things, at the moment of truth they are regimes called to the most absolute failure.

 Yaiza Santos: Would you go back to Cuba?

Roberto Batista: Only when the time comes, when human rights are respected and there is a liberal Constitution based on democratic principles, with its separation of powers, executive, legislative and judicial. If there are guarantees to return, I would return with great pleasure. I am looking forward to doing it, and so are my children.

*Translator’s note: La Puerta del Sol (Gate of the Sun) is a public square in Madrid, one of the best known and busiest places in the city, Kilometer 0 of the radial network of Spanish roads.

Translated by Norma Whiting

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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.

“Cuba has Helped to Bleed Dry Venezuela, the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg”

Hugo Chávez with Fidel Castro in Havana, in 1994. (Prensa Latina)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yaiza Santos, Madrid | 27 February 2021– Throughout the past five years journalists, behind the pseudonym Diego G. Maldonado, documented in detail, with direct sources, newspaper archives and cross-public data, to what extent Cuba has blood-sucked Venezuela dried, stretching to the recesses of the Armed Forces and intelligence services. The result of this research is La Invasión Consentida (Debate) [The Authorized Invasion (Debate)], published at the end of 2019 in Mexico, and currently in Spain. Its authors answer, via e-mail to maintain safety, 14ymedio’s questions.

14ymedio. When did you think it was time to write this book?

Maldonado. The issue always caught our attention and the attention of so many people because of its political implications, and because we have never before seen Venezuelan Government’s attachment to another country, and so much deference from a president to another government. But we began to think about thoroughly investigating the relationship between Venezuela and Cuba in 2013, after the death of Hugo Chávez. The fact that the president had decided to receive treatment in Cuba rather than in his own country and that he agonized there, was quite revealing of the dynamics he had established with the Government of Cuba.

14ymedio. The book begins in 2009, “Year 10” of the Bolivarian revolution, and ends a decade later. What are the main data that show that in this time everything had gotten worse in Venezuela?

Maldonado. All socioeconomic indicators show that the situation has worsened. Venezuela is today one of the poorest countries in the region. We have had years with the highest inflation in the world, the national currency has practically disappeared, public services have collapsed, monthly salaries, which in 2019 were equivalent to about 8 dollars, today are less than one dollar a month, and more than five million people have left the country. Venezuela was one of the main oil exporters, and today the industry is ruined. You live through the unimaginable: in a country used to having the cheapest gasoline in the world – it cost less than water – there is a shortage of gasoline, and it’s now dollarized. The book details the crash of the economy. continue reading

During that decade, the political field circle was closed. For students of the process, it was clear that fraud and imposition would come by force once the popularity of Chavismo ended. Chavismo summed it up in the slogan “they will not return.” During a decade, we went from the 2009 approval of the indefinite reelection to Maduro’s great fraud in the electoral farce of 2018. In 2015, we saw the last free elections, when the opposition won the qualified majority in Parliament. From then on, with unbeknownst to the Assembly, the Government permanently removed its mask.

14ymedio. In the first pages, we see Chávez say: “Cuba is part of this homeland, of this union […] the infinite Cuba we love. For Cuba we cry, for Cuba we fight, and for Cuba we are willing to die fighting…”, but that outburst did not always exist. The Chávez of the first hour was the one who said: “I am not a Marxist but I am not an anti-Marxist. I am not a communist but I am not an anti-communist.” What was the beginning of Hugo Chávez’s idyll with Cuba?

Maldonado.There may have been a romantic idea of the Cuban Revolution since his youth, but it is very likely that the idyll, as such, began in 1994, when the Cuban Government invited him to the Island, receiving him as a celebrity. It was reinforced from 2002, after the coup, when Chávez decided to entrust Cubans with intelligence tasks to protect themselves against future military conspiracies. The Chávez of the first hour was a presidential candidate and a rookie in power, aware that the Cuban dictatorship was frowned upon among Venezuelans and, strategically, he navigated in ambiguity during the 1998 election campaign and in his two first years of government, when he presented himself as a politician with no other ideology than Bolivarian jingoism.

14ymedio. And vice versa? It is clear in the book that Fidel’s appetite for Venezuela – or Venezuelan oil – coincides with the beginning of the Revolution. The rivalry between Rómulo Betancourt and Castro as two opposing Latin American figures is very interesting: both liberated their countries from dictatorships, but one was a democrat who consolidated his country, and the other, a dictator who destroyed his. When does Castro discover that Chávez can be useful to him?

Maldonado. Everything indicates that it would have been starting in 1994, when Castro received him at Havana airport with State honors, and with greater security in 2000, when he signed the first major bilateral cooperation agreement, which guaranteed Cuba an oil supply under favorable terms and opened the door for all kinds of business.

14ymedio. The substance of the book, from its title, is that the Cuban regime entered Venezuela but not vice versa. Cuba has everything, oil, armed forces within the Venezuelan intelligence apparatus, and Venezuela?

Maldonado. If truth be told, Venezuela has never had any kind of influence on the Cuban government or its decisions. Maduro could not even prevent them from confiscating his participation in the Cienfuegos refinery, reactivated with Venezuelan funds during Chávez’s time. Nor in the Cuban Armed Forces. No Cuban officer is suitable for a Venezuelan one. Venezuela’s role against Cuba is completely passive.

14ymedio. It is known about the medical missions and the oil, but not the entire network of interference. What were you most surprised to discover?

Maldonado. It is a difficult question. Throughout the investigation, many things surprised us, but there were some that struck us in particular. For example, the Chávez government paid Cuban instructors, who had never left Cuba, to come to teach Venezuelan culture and to work on a supposed program to strengthen national identity. The Culture mission, designed in Cuba and bought by Chávez, was one of the grossest political indoctrination operations in poor neighborhoods. It was surprising to hear a Cuban say that he had taken a 15-day course to teach our traditions here as if it were a course in origami.

It was also shocking to discover that in a country with unemployment and underemployment problems, the Government was paying Cuban drivers and tractor operators to carry out land work, or that it imported workers, administrators and secretaries, and even clowns from Cuba, or that Fidel would personally take charge of the purchase of medical equipment for Venezuela and when spare parts could not be bought due to the embargo on Cuba, or that Venezuela would buy old dismantled sugar mills from Cuba as if they were new. There are many more things, but the saddest thing was discovering the scope of Cuban penetration in the Armed Forces and the submission of Venezuelan officers.

14ymedio. María Werlau’s book Cuba’s Intervention in Venezuela: A Strategic Occupation with Global Implications has the same purpose as yours, with the difference that your sources are not only bibliographic, but direct. Where did you find it most difficult to find these people?

Maldonado. There were many difficulties due to the fear that exists to speak about the subject on the part of Venezuelans and Cubans. It is understandable, but the investigation took five years, a long time. Many Cubans who worked in Venezuela and who escaped to other countries refused to give us their testimony for fear that we were agents of the Venezuelan or Cuban governments. Many Venezuelan public employees had great reservations against speaking and did not tell everything. The phone was blocked many times. The biggest difficulty was overcoming fear. Fortunately, some trusted that we would not reveal their identity and offered us valuable clues, information and testimonies to put the puzzle together.

14ymedio. Another thing that is not discussed so much is the working conditions of Cubans in Venezuela. Could you elaborate on this from your experience with the sources?

Maldonado. Certainly, this is not discussed a lot, and it is regrettable because, with the open complicity of the Venezuelan Government and those of other countries, Cuban workers are exploited by Havana, monitored and subjected to a semi-slavery regime. The book dedicates a chapter to explain their situation. They earn a tiny fraction of what Venezuela pays the Cuban government for their work. Out of $10,000 a month, they will only see $300, and the Cuban Government keeps the rest. The case of computer scientists is disgraceful, because Cuba charges for an hour or two what it pays them in a month. They accept it because it is ten times more than what they would earn in Cuba. It is unfortunate for a country to obtain its principal source of hard currency from the exploitation of its citizens’ work, in what Havana denominates “exportation of professional services”, which the world perceives as a legitimate and very normal activity.

14ymedio. In the book, you also show that the history of Cuban meddling in Venezuela is also a history of corruption.

Maldonado. Clearly. All agreements – there are thousands – are confidential, and there is no way to subject them to public control or scrutiny. Neither Cuba nor Venezuela are accountable. Many transactions have been made through companies in tax havens. In fact, some things have become known through document leaks like the Panama Papers. It has been possible to document the losses in some failed joint ventures for the amount that was allocated in the budget, but so far, it is impossible to have a global idea.

14ymedio. Despite the shortage in Venezuela, denounced by the opposition and international organizations, the Maduro regime continues to send fuel to Cuba. Why?

Maldonado. It is unusual that a country that subsidized Cuba, its greatest benefactor in recent years, ended up owing the Island. A government that is not capable of guaranteeing food for its own population, or public services or medicines, and that no longer even manages to produce gasoline to satisfy domestic demand, despite having the largest oil reserves in the world, has gone so far as to import gasoline to send fuel to Cuba.

What is Venezuela paying Havana? We can speculate, but there is no way to see the bill, to know what Cuba is charging, because both governments hide it with zeal. The only thing that is clear is Maduro’s relationship of dependence and vassalage towards the Cuban government. Chavismo turned Venezuela into a satellite of Havana.

14ymedio. Sometimes alarm voices are heard in other countries (such as Mexico, with López Obrador, or in Spain, with the Podemos party of Vice President Pablo Iglesias), who say “could this become Venezuela”? Do you think they are founded?

Maldonado. Each country has its specificities. They are fears that are latent but that we would have to document thoroughly in order to be able to give a proper opinion on whether they are founded or not. There are populist attitudes everywhere.

14ymedio. What are the red flags? How does a prosperous and democratic society start to rot?

Maldonado. I would say that the crisis of political representation, such as apathy or lack of confidence is a warning sign for anyone. Why do the citizens of a certain country stop believing in its institutions, in justice, why does part of the population begin to hear mermaid songs? In the case of Venezuela, the traditional parties took democracy for granted, they did not know how to renew themselves, they stopped meeting the demands of the majority, and they also engaged in personal political revenge. That, not counting the tremendous damage inflicted by corruption. It is not easy to notice the precise moment when the snowball begins to roll downhill.

14ymedio. “Well, Venezuela is not Cuba.” Do you agree with this statement?

Maldonado. Each time, there are fewer and fewer people who say that. In fact, we haven’t heard it in a long time. Venezuela is not Cuba – let’s say that technically there is one difference or another – but it is quite similar. Both countries share a lack of liberties and economic precariousness. And their peoples also share a lack of hope. That, perhaps, is the worst. The Venezuelan government has gone to great lengths to destroy what was once the richest country in South America, and the Cuban government has helped to bleed the goose that laid the golden egg.

14ymedio. Did Hugo Chávez die in Venezuela?

Maldonado. Due to the opacity with which everything was handled, Venezuelans have no certainty as to where his physical death occurred. We do not know if he took his last breath at Havana’s Cimeq or at Caracas Military Hospital, as the Venezuelan Government swore in March 2013. But, for all intents and purposes, the Hugo Chávez we knew died in Cuba. We saw him alive there for the last time. On that island, to which he gave everything, he disappeared forever.

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Editing Clarification: María Werlau, author of Cuba’s Intervention in Venezuela tells us that “it is incorrect” to say that her book is based “only on bibliographic sources.” “[My] book cites numerous direct sources as well as other publications of my authorship that were developed with direct sources”, she adds in an email sent to the Web.

Translated by Norma Whiting

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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.