Virgilisms / Regina Coyula

I’ve been reading Virgelio Piñera a lot in this, his centenary year, and I’ve even written a couple of works about him. But Virgilio “might have given himself a banquet” with national absurdity. We have signs of this through tall tales and gossip, and also through Granma, which despite cherry-picking his works and the letters they receive, they have regaled us with this Virgilian story that adorns the Letters to the Editor section of this past Friday.

Unknown registrations continue in my house

Before I start, my sincere thanks for having published my letter this past August 3, 2012. In that letter, I denounced my situation about having two people registered in my house who’ve never lived in it, at the same time they appear as “transients” in their mother’s house, with whom they’ve lived since birth.

Following the publication of my letter, inspectors from MININT [Ministry of the Interior] investigated the truth of my claim, but nothing has come of it. The prosecutor’s office, after declaring that I’m in a “legal limbo”, has left me submerged in it.

The order that has the CIRP — the ID card — only under willing and express request of the person involved, is the equivalent in my view, of arguing that the thieves will only be caught if they willing present themselves to a unit of the National Revolutionary Police. When a person acts in bad faith, as in the case of those enrolled in my house, of course they will not give themselves up spontaneously.

It’s really inconceivable that such a simple and obvious case hasn’t found a solution after two years of all levels of effort.

A. Marín Rodríguez

After things like that, and as a tribute, we could rephrase that to say, If Kafka had been Cuban, he would have written of local customs to say:If Kafka had been Cuban, he would have written Virgilisms.

Translated by: JT

October 17 2012

Cuban Baseball: Open the Gate / Ivan Garcia

As a result of the next baseball season, the State press and fans have unleashed a debate, looking to raise the level of ball played on the island. There were more than 170 proposals to design a new competitive structure.

In a meeting with the national press, the Cuban Federation let it be known how the next tournament will be structured. The league will open on 25 November in José Ramón Cepero Stadium with a matchup between the present champions, Ciego de Ávila and the runner-up Industriales. Sixteen sides will participate, one for each province plus the special municipality Isla de la Juventud. The Metropolitanos team is eliminated, with their 38 years of history in the local classic.

The schedule will consist of two stages. In the first, 45 games will be played in a round-robin to find the best 8 teams. The sides that go on to the next round will be able to draft up to five players from the teams that didn’t qualify. This phase will be of 42 games. In two playoffs of the best of seven, the four winners will play for the national championship.

It might be that the old structure of 4 divisions and two zones, East and West, was already inadequate. In the last twelve years, the level of baseball has declined a lot. The problem isn’t about a team. Many remain. The keys to elevating the quality of play happens to have a new structure. But the worst evil isn’t that of structure.

The design of the Cuban baseball system used to work. It was a pyramid of skills that included little league, Pony leagues, Youths, and provincial series, culminating in the national classic.

Sports schools perfected and trained the best talent nominated by coaches. Afterwards the harvest was brought in. Until 2006, Cuba won most of the International Baseball Federation’s organized tournaments in every one of its categories.

Now we barely win championships. And that worries fans and specialists. In world tournaments of Pony or Youth Leagues, it’s understandable. The best talents of Asia and the United States take part. But at the highest level, except for the Classics, those authentic discards with skills of little caliber enroll for their respective countries.

In my opinion, there’s a glaring error on the Federation’s part. And it is to implement changes thinking only about the national team. The series on the island cannot be a satellite that circulates outside that orbit. It must be independent. When the season has more quality, the higher the level that will be achieved by the Cuban team.

What we’re talking about is how to really raise the level of ball played. The options are many. But all will happen by opening the gate and allowing the best ball players to compete in foreign leagues. The ideal would be to arrive at an agreement with the Major Leagues such that Cuban players can sign contracts without having to abandon their country.

But current laws complicate the proceedings. As such, other destinations would have to be chosen. Japan and South Korea, due to the high level of their leagues, would be the best.

Another step that can’t be overlooked is pay and material conditions for the players. It’s a failed subject. Local idols who were sometimes Olympic champions got 300 convertible pesos — about 340 dollars — a ridiculous amount for a first-rank sportsman; although in the difficult economic conditions this country lives in, it’s a ’fortune’.

An effort should be made so that players in the national series can earn salaries greater than 3000 pesos ($130). The solution might be to raise the price of tickets to stadiums from one peso to five, with part of the proceeds distributed between players. Not equally. The regulars would earn more. The extra class, much more. Local and foreign companies based in Cuba, with its productions, could be sponsors.

It should not be possible that a national champion, as in the case of the Industriales in 2010, should motivate its players through gifts of cement shingles to repair the roofs of their houses, or microwave ovens, defective on top of it.

The majority of Cuban ball players live in precarious conditions. Only a handful of stars live in good houses or have cars. When they look at their colleagues who’ve left the country, they know that playing in a mediocre league they will earn enough to help their own and live decently.

Then they decide to leave. It’s true that few reach the Big Leagues. But they try to integrate themselves in whatever Caribbean, European, or Asian league. Another big problem is the little attention paid by the Federation to the farm systems that feed the national series.

Provincial tournaments of the big leagues are very short. Many games are suspended for lack of balls, bats, and transportation. Ball players are playing out of uniform and don’t even have a snack. You have to love baseball a lot to play in 92 (Fahrenheit) degree heat under these conditions. To this, add that the official press barely covers them — they’re almost clandestine.

In the lower categories, the evil is worse. The fields are true potato fields. The quality of the balls and equipment is terrible. In the stands we’ll find parents, loaded down with lunches and snacks for their kids. When a boy decides to play baseball, his parents have to buy his equipment in hard currency. Cash must also be paid for the making of uniforms.

On a radio sports show called Sports Tribune, on the capital’s COCO station, every night official honest journalists such as Yasser Porto, Daniel Demala or Ivan Alonso go at it bare-knuckled, attacking the evils that afflict Cuban baseball. And they offer solutions.

It’s obvious that their claims have fallen on deaf ears. The COCO journalists weren’t invited to the last meeting where the announcement was made about the structure of the next season.

The Federation is walking a tightrope. It doesn’t wish, want or cannot, address the theme with all of its artists. The solution offered is pure makeup. Cuban baseball’s difficulties won’t be resolved in this manner, nor will the ceiling of competence be raised, because it’s not only a problem of structure. There are many others.

Photo: Taken from The Cuban History. René Arocha, first ball player to desert, 18 July 1991. Since then, more than 150 baseball players have left Cuba and with major or minor success have managed to compete (or still compete) in professional leagues in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Caribbean countries, Europe and Asia, such as Rey Ordóñez, Liván Hernández, José Ariel Contreras, Rolando Arrojo, Orlando “El Duque” Hernández, Kendry Morales, Aroldis Chapman, Osvaldo Fernández, Ariel Prieto, Alex Sánchez, Vladimir Núñez, Danny Báez, Michael Tejera, Yuniesky Betancourt and Yoenis Céspedes, among others.

Translated by: JT

October 7 2012

Idle Human Capital / Fernando Damaso

Photo by Rebeca

In Cuba there are a ton of professionals and technicians who have graduated from universities and who are not directly linked to profitable enterprises, but to political, administrative and bureaucratic tasks. In addition, due to recent drastic cuts in state employment, there are thousands of them who are not working in their professions. Since professional private practice is prohibited, in order to survive, they have taken jobs as artisans, taxi drivers, cooks, peddlers, vegetable vendors, lighting repairmen, etcetera. The government’s low salaries and poor working conditions are a disincentive. That is how many well-educated and experienced citizens have been lost, falling through the cracks, as though they were expendable.

We can, without any doubt, assert that there is a large amount of human capital that is being underutilized and that has no chance of professional or self-realization in this country. Add to this the new graduates who every year try to enter the labor force but cannot find a job commensurate with their education, making the situation even more tense and difficult.

For this reason, the travel restrictions in the new immigration law that apply to this section of the population, and that according to the government are necessary in order to combat brain drain, are not at all understood. It would be as if a potato farmer, having had a good harvest, did not consume his potatoes or let others buy them, leaving them in the open to spoil.

Our authorities have a dog-in-the-manger attitude. Only in this case we are not talking about potatoes or dogs, but people, whose lives are now curtailed due to the enforcement of a feudal state mentality. Instead of providing a solution to the emigration problem, the newly approved measures add fuel to the fire through the accumulation of idle human capital that will escape, one way or another, in an attempt to achieve self-realization.

Since those who will have less of a hard time leaving or travelling are retired people and the less educated – citizens who are the least attractive to host countries – Cuban authorities will be able to say that, while they issue thousands of passports, the ones who do not issue visas are other countries, making it seem as if the they are not the ones obstructing emigration, but others. Another manipulative twist, one of many to which we have become accustomed. Give it time!

Translated by Eduardo Alemán

October 26 2012

An Injurious Trial / Rosa Maria Rodriguez Torrado

Downloaded from elnuevoherald.com

Cuba’s partisan newspaper, Granma, announced that at nine in the morning on October 5 in the city of Bayamo, Granma province, a public trial would be held of a Spanish citizen, Ángel Francisco Carromero Barrios,accused of homicide while driving a car on a public road. Ángel Francisco, 27 years of age and director of the youth organization of the Spanish People’s Party, New Generations,drove a rented vehicle that on July 22 crashed into a tree in Bayamo. Also travelling in the car were Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Harold Cepero Escalante, both of whom died. It was not a coincidence but a strategy that they chose a Friday for the court hearing because press agencies logically would be closed on the weekend and that would lessen the repercussion and impact of the news. Also—fundamentally—because two days later, Sunday the 7th, the Venezuelan elections would be held, and events before, during and after those elections would detract from the political relevance of the event, which incites great interest and is under the global magnifying glass the same day as the accident.

But it seems that the Cuban laws have their concept or definition of when a legal proceeding is “public.” If we stick to the letter—not the spirit, of course—of the announcement, it is presumed that the relatives of those killed in the accident and other people interested in the case could be present in the room where Carromero Barrios would be judged, but this was not to be. Yoani Sanchez and her husband, Reinaldo Escobar, left for the event to report on it, but were intercepted and detained upon their arrival in Bayamo.

Dictatorships only know how to behave as such. That is why they also stopped the children of the late Payá Sardiñas when they were a few meters from the city’s provincial courthouse. Why did they impede the grieving offspring from attending if they had announced that the trial would be public? Some news agencies noted that the big police presence around the courthouse suggested that the person being tried was a criminal confined to a maximum security prison.

The abused and musty pretext of Cuban authorities and their spokesmen seems to me stale—as old as the vulgar Stalinist insult used through the years against opponents and independent journalists—that Reinaldo and Yoani had been instructed by the United States Interest Section in order to influence the legal proceedings against the Spanish politician and create a provocative show.

That is something as hackneyed and worn out as it is speculative,and if it did not concern our liberty, or maybe even our own lives, it would be laughable. Governmental propaganda always publicly mistreats its political adversaries within and outside of Cuba and accuses us of being amoral, traitorous or even terrorists.

The objective is to hang on us a placard of misdeeds in order to discredit us. It is a villainy so recurrent that only their naive followers, their poorly paid militants—those with stable jobs, material possessions and trips around the world—and their overseas supporters who perform “gestures of solidarity” whenever there is some setback, hoping for their gratitude, are the ones who still believe it.

The Cuban authorities have taken great care in this process, because of the fatal human injuries that the crash caused and the damages that on top of the participation and responsibility of another unidentified car, exist. The final judgement should confirm if they will use the Spanish citizen as political detergent to wash away suspicions about the government, and try to leave our image of it untainted. Surely they will take advantage of this opportunity to send the message—nothing subliminal—that revolutionary ethics and justice make no distinctions in the application of the law.They want no doubts to remain about governmental innocence and that it was the high speed, the highway disasters and misfortune that sabotaged the pedals and the steering wheel of the car driven by Angel Carromero on that fateful day.

Translated by mlk and unstated

October 16 2012

Public Opinion? / Fernando Damaso

Photo: Rebeca

Public opinion is a term that often appears in the print, radio and television reports whenever the authorities approve some measure to benefit, or not, the population. Our agile reporters, microphones and cameras in hand, go about the task of interviewing citizens—preferably in schools or workplaces, and at sites where people congregate, such as bus stops, checkout lines, etc.—by being where the double standard comes into play and few people dare to say what they really think. If an incorrect opinion happens to be expressed, however, it gets suppressed in the editing.

This means that all opinions that get reported, one way or another, are unanimous in their support for or rejection of—depending on the desires of the authorities—the approved measure. This bit of theater serves to promote the idea that all citizens are in full agreement with the authorities, that these same authorities are capable of addressing our concerns, and that we live in the best of all democracies—one that lately has been described as “indigenous.” This is somewhat of a replacement for the former term “socialist,” which has perhaps lost a bit of its luster.

Now, with emigration reform and the elections underway, something else has occurred. Certain politically chosen opinions—they range from the infantile to the ridiculous, and include the usual gripes and criticisms of “the Empire,”the source of all our past, present and future problems—are now brandished as “the opinion of the people.”

Translated by mlk and unstated

October 23 2012

Tempering News, Absorbing Shocks / Rosa Maria Rodriguez Torrado

Downloaded from Cubadebate.cu

The case of Angel Carromero Barrios rapidly lost relevance because of the “atmospheric pressure” of the State. Like a tropical meteorological event, its great intensity dissipated in the mediating and officializing Cuban waters. Many know that in Cuba the State is the owner, the editorialist, journalist, reporter, photographer, and censor of all daily newspapers and journals that exist in the country, which pretty much means that we only have one newspaper in the whole archipelago.

The news of the sentence against Carromero Barrios, whose judgement became conclusive on October 5, was published on the night of October 15 in the news, and at dawn the next day (October 16th), the people were surprised with the flexibilization of the law on immigration and travel. For a dictatorship that had stepped on immigration, emigration and travel rights–among other rights–of its citizenry, it was only logical that the latter news trumped the first in the consciousness of the Cuban people and the world.

Just like the date of the oral and public trial of Carromero–which was programmed for a weekend (Friday), two days before the elections in Venezuela–the master manipulators of this country’s information, without freedom of press, didn’t wait even 24 hours to dictate a law-decree which took about two years to come up with. Why didn’t they wait a few days? Let’s remember that they similarly took advantage of the beginning of the war with Iraq to begin the wave of arrests in March of 2003; despite this, the world saw, repudiated and denounced this abominable official strategy. Even if this results in speculation, there is a chance that the new immigration/travel law was devised with this purpose in mind–in the period understood between accident and sanction–but for others, it was much more important to wait.

Anyway, they spend so many years in power repeating the same — or similar — course of action, that most of the world guesses the move before it is made. It is true that they are astute and have several master’s degree in the selection of time, place and the opportune moment — it is a 50-year-old specialization — but they are not good poker players. The feeble and recently debuted migratory modification does not vindicate the Cuban diaspora as part of our people, their rights violated for decades.

Nevertheless, once more they stimulate the rich foreign investors to obtain real estate here, encourage investors generally and tourist visitors from the United States particularly, to focus their binoculars and bring part of their capital to our soil. It is very likely that the fateful economic situation of Cuban totalitarianism, and the claims of continuity on the dynastic throne will make them hurry and commit errors. In their economic hardships and customary refusals to “call a spade a spade” in order to really resolve the country’s problems, they expose the effort to show anew image of the Cuban government in the face of the closeness of the elections in the United States, probably to lobby for a possible redesign of the politics of that government towards ours. With the pretext they are trying to break the blockade, they take years blocking the legitimate exercise of the rights of their citizens, which is the same as flogging us because others hit them and they also punish us for the same reason.

The “political tricks” propaganda, of making anorexic changes to draconian laws, will have no credit or real impact on most of the population,as long as they do not restore the rights that they have violated and postponed, respecting the fundamental liberties of all Cubans — from within and without Cuba — and democratize this society. Such dirty tricks are bluffs that trick no one, and give less light. Until now the proposed reforms are condemned to failure because of the abusive and prolonged rigor of their own laws. They will have no success, because many think that it has to do with the classic maneuver of stalling for time.

It seems that they have bet on the United States’ economic serum to resolve the national disasters in which they have sunk us, like the obligatory transfusion in the veins of the ruling class and its prosperous family and stalwarts; not in those of the whole nation. I do not know if the highest Cuban authorities really want to reestablish relations with the US.; rather it seems that they want to normalize the efforts to protect their interests and above all to guarantee their continuity. Once more “they uncorked” an oblique tactical move– a crab move — to fool the people of their own backyard and “enchant” the hungry fish of other latitudes. But they don’t catch big fish with small hooks, much less, with worthless and petty baits.

Translated by: Boston College Cuban-American Student Association (BC CASA)

October 18 2012

The Blue Card / Rebeca Monzo

There is not much that is new in the new immigration law. Nonetheless, it has raised expectations among a wide swath of the population: retirees, homemakers, students who have not gotten past the ninth grade, the unemployed and the elderly, to cite a few.

In one paragraph, the much-publicized law mentions that medical technicians are also subject to the burden of having to wait three years from the date of a passport request or the extension of an existing passport without regard for the time they have been out of the workforce. This measure not only discourages the prospects for travel, but—and to me this is the greater danger—it also discourages the desire of people to continue with their studies. Once they have completed the ninth grade, many abandon the classroom for good.

This has been going on for many years with respect to university careers. Many quit before graduating, or simply never begin their studies in the hope of being able to travel someday. The same thing is happening is less specialized fields of study. This is leading and will continue to lead to an even greater lowering of the country’s educational and technical standards, which have already been significantly eroded.

Logically speaking, it remains to be seen whether or not those fortunate enough to be granted a long-awaited passport will be approved for a visa by the countries they hope to visit. In this way the Cuban government, like Pontius Pilate, can wash its hands of the matter, placing the blame on others as usual.

Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake. This new emigration law seems more like a new, more-sophisticated Mariel, but one that is organized and controlled by the state.

Translated by BW and Unstated

October 25 2012

Traveling on Astro on the Kaftro Route / Rebeca Monzo

About a month ago, my friend, Mariana, her husband and her mom decided to go on a trip to Trinity through a tourist bus company called Astro. They were very excited about the trip and expected it to go very well since they had paid 132.00 CUP (Cuban pesos) for each person both going and returning. They were anticipating a very comfortable ride with amenities such as air conditioning.

The first stop was at the Mulles de la Coubre. At this stop, which was not part of the schedule, five people got on the bus and paid the bus driver directly. However, all the seats in the bus were already full so the extra passengers were forced to accommodate themselves in the aisle of the bus. The luxurious image that they had envisioned had already been disrupted. They were not sitting in comfort, but were cramped in the bus unable to recline their chairs.

My friends also noted that the bus driver would stop to pick up anyone on the side of the road who offered him money, because of this the bus began to fill up little by little. In front of Mariana there was a woman who was holding a huge bag against her body and she had nowhere to move. As they were arriving at Aguada de Pasajeros, the bus driver recognized someone he knows. He starts yelling and signaling for the acquaintance to notice him almost throwing himself out of the window. All of the sudden, he hits the breaks, parks, and gets out of the car. He was there for about half an hour conversing with his friend, while the passengers waited patiently inside the bus. Then the bus driver returned and the journey continued until they stopped at a Terminal, where they were serving pork sandwiches without any attention to hygiene; there were flies and abandoned dogs peeing on the table where the merchandise was kept. All the passengers who desired this meal got down to satisfy their appetites. Trucks pulled by horses and trucks from the 1950s waited for possible clients.

Exhausted and tired and after traveling for five hours they finally arrived in Trindad. The three of them swore not to return through Astro and for that matter never again. After enjoying themselves for a couple of days in this colonial city, they had to negotiate their return trip to Havana through a taxi driver who had driven some people to Trinidad. They were able to bargain for a fair price under the table. Their ride back was much more enjoyable and peaceful.

Translated by: BC CASA

October 11 2012

Discovery or Invention? / Fernando Damaso

Painting by Abela

It’s a widely accepted truth that America was discovered by Christopher Columbus, but there are still a few who confer that honor on Vikings, a Chinese sailor or Americo Vespucio. The question is: Was America indeed discovered or isn’t it more of a European invention? First things first. America as such did not exist before the discovery. Therefore, it could not have been discovered because it was something that did not really exist. What was then called the East Indies, New Spain, the New World and in the end America, was simply a geographic space occupied (or unoccupied) by different ethnic groups that were fighting among themselves for survival. The more developed cultures (Aztec, Mayan and Incan) were occupying only parts of this territory, and usually made raids to their neighbor’s region looking for food and slaves with which they could solve their problems and extend their dominance. It was a spectrum of towns without a common denominator.The Europeans who came after Columbus, astonished by the unknown, could not help but to make classifications based on their concepts and knowledge, and described it orally and in writing in a comprehensible way for their peers. They gave a name to this amalgam of lands and peoples, putting everything in one bag and avoiding the larger differences. After that, but not before, this geographic piece of the world became known as America and was a benchmark in the same way,for example,that Asia and Africapreviouslywere.

This newly invented geographical entity needed some attributes to distinguish it from the Old World, and so it naturally was described as being savage, exuberant, rich, sensual, violent, etc. America dazzled Europe and the hungry and needy, the adventurers, attended America as the wasp to the honeycomb, and with sword and musket shots, they molded it to the form and likeness of those who invented it. The more advanced culture, as always, crushed the more backward ones and even though they also took nourishment from them they finally did away with them as determinant entities in aparticular historical epoch. From this process the invented entity (America) was nourished to become through the time in a reality.

The same happened with every single one of its peoples, including the Cuban people, which previously did not exist either. It was composed of a handful of Arauco Indians, who had arrived from different areas and were simply living a piece of earth, which no one knew for certain what to call. Most of the credit for inventing Cuba belongsmainlyto José Martí, although Europeans and other individuals first spread the seeds. He was the one who, putting together the rubble spread along the years, gave form and content to this nationality establishing, in the same way his ancestors had done with America, its attributes.

Martí, an enormous idealist, invented a country from a few men and based his dream of an ideal republic which was inaccessible to common mortals, since there the traumatic frustration that always went and still goes with Cubans for not attaining the high goals set by the Apostle — as Cubans call Marti. To Martí’s pretensions, Cuba should be a country of supermen and heroes, and not one of citizens. This is easy to prove if we go through our past and recent history: Hatuey, Guamá, Céspedes, Agramonte, Maceo, Martí, Gómez, Mella, Villena, Chibás, Echeverría, Frank País, Camilo and others, Cuba’s fate was to become a lighthouse to America and the world. A hard task continued, and that without knowing took us to really believe we were something more important than what we truly are: an elongated drop of land with spots on the map of the world.

There are substantial differences between being discovered and being invented: what already exists is discovered, has content and shape, a breathing body living by itself; what doesn’t exist is invented. To our common misfortune, America and Cuba are simple inventions, with the burden that means: to believe ourselves the center of the world and the main cause of its movement. This shared lie was and still is used by our leaders, wherever they are, to support their political career and to be eternally in the power, representing our genetic disease.

Translated by: @Hachhe and Unstated

October 14 2012

Estado de Sats Enveloped in Venemous Spines / Anddy Sierra Alvarez

Like every other citizen, the invitation to the Estado de Sats is taken with enthusiasm, in order to take part in a work of illumination dealing with human development, both spiritual and socially.

This brings up the understandable work schedule for those who work for the Estado. The positive culture projects help offer tranquility and happiness to an island with little room to breathe.The project helps break the silence of those who are in fear and oppresed.

The repressive regime is felt stronger after every encounter, fitting perfectly with the motto and hymn of the enforcers of the state: “What will you do, retire… or be retired?”

Words so simple make you reflect; and for the most part, people do retire. There’s no need to seek physical punishment if your objectives are set aside by the desperation of those who are your superiors, who in fact fear losing their power in a not too distant future.

Translated by: Carlos Andrés Garcia, BC CASA

October 22 2012

Fiftieth Anniversary of the Missile Crisis / Rafael Leon Rodriguez

Image from “http://www.bbc.co.uk”

The final days of that October were grim. At the beach, the rough seas spilled over the sand blowing in the wind. The militia dug trenches, so close to the coast, that their walls caved in. Guanabo was desolate, more so than normal for that time of year, and the locals who stayed after the evacuation of the last few hours did not understand the magnitude of the drama that was evolving in our archipelago. The Cuban rRevolution, the one that claimed to the world that it was so pure, independent and mighty like the palm trees, had just been undressed by the spy planes from North America. The photos of soviet specialists secretly installing the nuclear missiles around the island were seen by the entire world.Fifty years have passed since that monumetal blunder that placed humanity in the fringes of a nuclear hell. Now that there is only a handful of the principle actors of that crisis left, we ask ourselves who really gained anything, and who lost. The answer, coincidentally, is in the published text from Fidel Castro on October 21, 2012 at 10:12a.m. “When Kruschev proposed to install mid range projectile missiles similar to those installed in Turkey by the United States — in the need for solidarity, Cuba did not hesitate to take the risk. Our conduct was pure and ethical. We will never ask for forgiveness from anyone for what we did. It is true that half a century has passed, and we are still here holding our heads up high.”

It was not important then that Cuba was not at all consulted in the dialogue between the United States and the USSR which resolved the conflict. Nor that the Cuban authorities, which are the same as today, found out via the shortwave transmission in Radio Moscow the decisions that had been made. It did seem to bother some when the newspaper Revolución, the official  paper predecessor of the Granma, published the headers: “The USSR orders the removal of missiles from Cuba”. Today the world around us is different, it has changed: the Soviet Union no longer exists. The cold war ended. The missile crisis is history. But, for Cuba there are still remnants of those days; because, lamentable but true, after half a century of economic, political and social disaster, they are still here.

 Translated by: Marina Villa

October 24 2012

The Cuba I’m Leaving Behind / Luis Felipe Rojas

Today, my family and I are leaving for exile in the United States. After many years of penury, mistreatment, arbitrary detentions and police harassment — in fact, even against those who make up my home, as well — I am leaving. I know that leaving constitutes a calamity from which few ever recover from, but I can’t find another solution, at the moment, for the problems and sufferings my two children and my loving wife Exilda are facing.

Before leaving, I want to thank all those who, from different parts of the world, have expressed concern for me. To all my readers and all those who have left comments on my posts — Thank you! Without those messages of solidarity, it would have been impossible for me to continue onward.

Since I had little — or no — internet connectivity, I usually received the comments on my posts months after they were published, when someone would dedicate a few minutes to “download” them onto a USB drive, then read them to me as messages, as true letters mailed to me, and that would convert me into a privileged person who is loved and who often received messages.

In other words, my sincere thanks from this side of the transparent frontier. This time, no more words. I just want everyone to see the Cuba I’m leaving behind today.

October 25, 2012

Genesis of Today / Rosa Maria Rodriguez Torrado

They say that God created the world in six days, but the truth was that to have a palpable vision of his creation, he created a first draft. I don’t know how someone could have let this occur because God almighty was an improvisor; and more with the world that he left us, that despite the unequal disribution of natural resources, his creation was pretty good. The problem is our free will, in men and women, in our jealousy, our selfishness and our ambitions; the leaders, the struggles for power, the patronage and the justification and–of course–conveniently legalized, the underworld of et cetera.

Boston College Cuban-American Student Association (BC CASA)

October 17 2012

Voting / Regina Coyula

Only when I heard unusual noises next to my house, still before daybreak, did I remember that yesterday they were holding elections for delegates to the People’s Power. The doorway of the house next to mine was restored as a school in order to open from seven in the morning. Without need of knowing the votes, I knew it would turn out that the same delegate was re-elected, who I think is going for her third or fourth term. She is a single mother who adds this additional burden to her work and raising a teenage son, because no one else wants the post.

The nomination assemblies around here were meteoric;hardly any took longerin search of an impressive alternative candidate. My attention was drawn also to the fact that from my neighborhood, in all the places whereIsaw candidate photos, there were two, in contrast with previous years where there appeared a sizeable group of pictures with their corresponding political biographies, but — and this ischaracteristic nationally — no candidatereveals a plan, outlines a job, displays a concrete programon being elected.

As I stopped believing in the project of the government years ago, I do not vote. Yesterday, my neighborsfrom the polling station will have detested us a little (a little more?) because through our fault they kept the college open until the closing deadline. I am one step beyond those who void their ballots orleave them blank, but this year, my son for the first time, was of the requisite age to choose. He has just entered the university as you already know, that’s why I thought he would feel compelled to vote. It was treated as a very personal decision that we did not influence. He decided not to do it, but not for the civic reasons of his mom and dad: As it is a right and not a duty, it does not interest me.

At some point that indifference will stop. That will be when he feels represented, or feels that his vote can make a difference.

Translated by mlk.

October 22 2012