Translator: Ricardo Recluso – Page 7

The Arrival of Potatoes Disrupts a Havana District During Easter Week

The first thing to avoid is the ditch that cuts through the queue. If you’re wearing flip flops or leaky shoes you’re going to get filthy water between your toes. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 8 April 2023 – The potatoes have arrived. This sentence, written on a notice and pinned up in a food store or shouted aloud in a yard, is enough to set Cubans onto a war footing. Hunger, shortages, and the possibility of arriving at the back of an interminable queue are enough to drive anyone crazy. Nevertheless, with potatoes there’s an additional stress: you have to actually watch out for the truck and follow the prized tuber even faster than your other neighbours can.

Whoever has to confront the queue knows the routine: a bag or a shopping trolley, a fully charged phone, water and some kind of pill to calm the nerves – although this latter is already almost impossible to get hold of. Already there’s a considerable number of customers in Calle Arango, in Luyanó. Now it’s just a question of luck and a lot of patience.

When your eyes have adapted to the sunlight and your body has found a place in the shade — all without losing your place, always in dispute from “confused” people who try to push their way in — you can better appreciate the view of run-down Calle Arango, the many times patched-up sunshades and the peeling walls.

The first thing to avoid is the ditch that cuts through the queue. If you’re wearing flip flops or leaky shoes you’re going to get filthy water between your toes. The people who are already approaching the counter — predominantly older people and people who queue-up by profession — comment indignantly that the price “on the street” is already exceeding 250 pesos a pound.

Rationed potatoes, sold by the State at 11 pesos a pound, are of very poor quality. An elderly woman sniffed one of them in the impassible gaze of the seller and couldn’t hide her disgust. “How bad they smell”, she blurted out, putting the wrinkled and dirty potato back in its place. continue reading

In Calle San Miguel / San Nicolás / Manrique where they’re also selling potatoes, the workers took advantage of the Good Friday holiday and announced that they were only going to stay open until midday. “We’re only going to serve 50 people!” they shouted, “And not a single one more”.

The majority of customers dream of cooking chips (fries) — one of the “impossible feasts” of Cuban cuisine — but only if they can get hold of the cooking oil required. Others intend to boil them, to use in some other recipe. Still others, however, intend to resell, at a much higher price, the quantity they’ve managed to obtain.

As the relentless Central Havana sunshine begins to recede, one of the lucky ones heads for home almost dancing, a modest little shopping bagful in his hands, and sings in an improvised reguetón: “Potatoes! Let’s go eat mashed potatoes!”

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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A New Type of Business Springs Up in Cuba

On Monday, in the same place, the same guy and the same sign. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, 11 April 2023 — The writing, in capitals and painted in green on the wall at 464 Calle Belascoaín / Zaina in Central Havana, caught the eye. “I buy women in poor condition”, read the astonished passers-by.

With all the security about, that wouldn’t last long, we thought, here at the 14ymedio office when we saw it for the first time last Thursday — given the speed with which the authorities get rid of spontaneous signs on the streets. Nevertheless, three days later it was still there. On Sunday, an old man was sitting on the ledge just underneath the writing — on a wall belonging to a hardware store, and covered in carpenter’s marks. He seemed to be just resting there, whilst, just further up, the street vendors were spreading out their wares under the arcades.

“I buy women in poor condition”, read the astonished passers-by. (14ymedio)

On Monday, in the same place, the same guy and the same sign. The old man was dressed just the same — in light blue teeshirt and jeans, with the same bag he’d carried days earlier. Is he selling something? Is he some kind of link with another seller ’por la izquierda’*? Building materials? Or, quite the opposite, does he have something to do with the actual sign? Is he guarding it? Is he waiting for its “author” to turn up?

“Is he the one who buys women in poor condition?”, commented a young girl sarcastically, to what appeared to be her mother, as they passed by. “I don’t know, my girl, but he ain’t gonna find them here. It’s him that’s in poor condition, along with the whole country”.

On Sunday, underneath the writing, an old man was sitting on the ledge which formed part of the wall. (14ymedio)

Despite the misogyny of the sign, neither the Federation of Cuban Women nor Mariela Castro — official champion of the cause of equality — have commented on the matter. Apart from that, clearly the capital’s government itself hasn’t seen the necessity of removing it. Obviously because it doesn’t say: “No to the Communist Party“, “Down with the dictatorship“, “homeland and life“, or “Diaz-Canel motherfucker“.

*Translator’s note: ’Por la izquierda’, literally ’on the left’, is the equivalent of the English ’under the counter’.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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People Who Fall in Love With Their Typewriters

Guillermo Cabrero Infante, with his cat, Offenbach, and his typewriter. In the background, the headless swordsman that the writer brought with him from Havana (Pinterest)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, March 26, 2023 – A trade or a profession leaves its marks on the body. A scar, a cut, bags under the eyes behind the spectacles or broken ribs. A language of pain, written into the skin and bones, and also into the memory. Many carpenters have damaged thumbs, a builder never gets the cement dust off his hands; so a writer finds himself bent over, sitting silently at his desk when he can’t find the right words.

Everything eventually becomes eclipsed, and decays, apart from the eyes, which remain undefeated — as Hemingway said of his fisherman — but not sight itself, to which blindness does come sooner or later. This slow transformation which comes from facing up to life, from overcoming it and owning it, does not come to one without some sense of pride. Along with the wounds and markings of any profession come experience, skill, and, finally, mastery of the job. If one is awake enough and not too clumsy, perhaps one can quit, having left behind — whether faintly or profoundly, it doesn’t matter — a footprint, a sign of having been there.

One notices one’s own wearing out, the tiredness and age of one’s own body, but rarely does one feel sorry for the machine that enabled the work. What one achieves is usually the result of a tension between man and instrument. The saw in the hand, the back under the bales, eye against the language.

I’m interested in the ‘sentimental relationship’, shall we say, between machine and operator. The affection one can feel for the tools in a workshop or even a shaving razor. The esteem in which the soldier holds his rifle — which he oils, cleans and looks after — and the photographer his camera. This relationship surpasses the merely instrumental and reaches the point in which a ballpoint pen, a fishing net or a cobbler’s knife becomes the very requirement for success. continue reading

I remember how Carlos Fuentes’ fingers were completely crooked — later I discovered this trait in other novelists — through the pressure required to type on a typewriter. His joints, overworked over long sentences, looked like half moons, commas. The typing had deformed them — a fate which modern keyboards have saved us from.

Nevertheless, along with this sophistication we lose a universe of metaphors and mutual understandings. I think I read that Cabrera Infante hung on until the last moment to his diligent Smith-Corona. This fondness for the shiny tooth-levered machine had its equivalent in the plunging-necklined, seductive, Vivian Smith-Corona in Three Sad Tigers — the woman who was “the very embodiment of a typewriter — but one of those kept behind glass with a sign saying ‘do not touch’. It’s not for sale, no one’ll buy them, no one uses them. They’re just for show”.

The relationship that Reinaldo Arenas had with his typewriter was a turbulent one, almost erotic. “She was just an old iron Underwood but for me she was a magical instrument”. He describes how he would sit in front of her like a performer, a pianist who brought together “gigantic waves that covered pages and pages without a single full-stop, and which were very special”. He had to weld the machine to a desk to stop resentful spies and lovers from stealing it. Thanks to this he managed to maintain the rhythm of his writing over several years, although later he had to use notebooks and loose sheets of paper — written with difficulty, before night set in — which were later either confiscated or destroyed.

Far away from the roughness of Havana, where Arenas hid himself, and based in a Paris office, Severo Sarduy took his Olivetti Lettera 32 to get it modified: he desperately needed the letter “ñ”. Also, he bought the blackest ribbon he could find in the stationery shops – ones that left the most stains. “I have this obsession”, he said, “my hands end up looking like a motor mechanic’s – and I love it”.

(Perhaps from off the roller of this very same Olivetti came the letter which Sarduy sent to Arenas, on behalf of Editions du Seuil, to tell him that the publisher had no room for new works and that they were rejecting his manuscript for A Celestine Monk Before the Dawn.)

For my part, although I have always liked the typewriter as an artifact, I only used a child’s one, a badly-oiled Royal, with a green case, on which my grandfather used to type his pharmacist’s prescriptions. I wrote my first short stories on it, almost by chance, like the proverbial chimpanzee. It delivered for me a fascination for the artifact and I learned its language — tab key, lever, bell, space bar, rods and frame — before it was condemned in the house as obsolete, and it disappeared.

That sentiment, the pain of misplacing those distant objects that had fascinated me for the first time, the impossibility of forgetting images and conversations, are perhaps the hallmarks of my profession — hallmarks which time is leaving me, in order for me to work. Now I work with a smooth and bright keyboard, on what people call [in Spanish] an ordenador [computer] but which I, stubbornly, will always call a computadora – in feminine gender.

But nostalgia is unforgiving. A few weeks ago, in an antique shop, I stumbled upon a shiny Smith-Corona (chrome-plated and with a white cover). Whilst I counted my money I remembered the wonderful Vivian, and the jibe made by Caín: “Who falls in love with a typewriter?” Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough money.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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‘No to the PCC’, a New Protest Sign Against the Cuban Regime Appears in Havana

The protest sign against the Cuban Communist Party on a wall in Aguirre Park, in the Havana district of Revolution Square. (Screen capture)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 23 March 2023 – A new protest sign against the dictatorship caused surprise among Havana residents on Thursday. This time it had the words “No to the PCC” (Cuban Communist Party), written in giant capitals on the wall at the back of Aguirre Park, in the Revolution Square district.

The action took place in the early hours, judging by videos posted on social media by an organisation calling itself The New Governing Body, which alludes to the University Student Governing Body (DEU) which confronted Gerardo Machado in the Cuban republic of the 1930’s.

During the morning, 14ymedio confirmed that the protest sign was still there, as there was no means of instantly cleaning it off, like there had been on previous occasions. What was present though was an enormous State Security operation, with dozens of Interior Ministry motorcycles visible or concealed between the bushes.

“They must be on the lookout for anyone taking pictures”, said a local woman through clenched teeth, as she passed by, surprised. “Don’t get your phone out, not even to make a call, because they’re everywhere”.

A new protest sign against the dictatorship caused surprise among Havana residents on Thursday.

Un nuevo #cartel contra la #dictadura ha sorprendido este jueves a los habitantes de La Habana? https://t.co/l3IMxZ7meK La acción tuvo lugar de madrugada, a juzgar por videos difundidos en redes por una organización anónima que se hace llamar El Nuevo Directorio @NuevoDirectorio pic.twitter.com/dPgYTyrorm

— 14ymedio (@14ymedio) March 23, 2023

On 14 March, in broad daylight, the slogan “Down with the dictatorship, murdering Castros” was written in sand in the middle of Calle Crespo / Trocadero, in central Havana. On that occasion it was removed very quickly, as reported by this newspaper. continue reading

This kind of action, unprecedented in the history of the dictatorship, became frequent after the mass protests of 11 July 2021. In February 2022 an enormous sign appeared in Calle Gervasio / Enrique Barnet (Estrella) — also in central Havana — which read “Patria y vida” (Homeland and Life). That one also appeared during nighttime hours and was removed in the midst of a massive police presence.

A few weeks earlier, another sign of considerable size, on a wall on Calle General Serrano / Via Blanca (Santos Suárez), mobilised a whole mob of police, military and agents on Suzuki motorbikes and in a forensics vehicle. It read: “Down with motherfucker Canel”.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Nightmare of a Cuban-Russian Couple, Pursued in Both Countries For Their Rejection of The War in Ukraine

Cuban citizen Carlos Jiménez, and his Russian wife Daria, pictured in a Havana street. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, 24 March 2023 — Before being forced to escape from Russia because of the threat of his being recruited to fight in the war in Ukraine, the Cuban Carlos Jiménez was living a quiet life with his wife Daria in Kushelevskaya Doroga, St Petersburg.

They met whilst studying philology at the hydrometeorological University in Russia which, although it sounds odd, has a prestigious program of language and literature studies. Carlos already spoke the language because as a child he lived in Moscow for five years when his father worked at the Cuban Embassy.

These days he is an admirer of Russian culture, amongst other things Russian, because of the influence of his wife. Through her he got to know the writer Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita), the works of Dimitri Yemets, a children’s writer whose books are the most Russian that he has ever read in his life, he says. Through Daria he got to know the Russian rock group bi-2, which has become his favourite, and he has seen the best of Russian theatre and cinema and also Soviet cinema.

The young couple are currently in Havana. She is very scared of what could happen to him. He is very scared of what could happen to her. The nightmare began in Russia and has kept going for them all the way to Cuba.

One afternoon, two armed men banged heavily on the young couple’s door in St.Petersburg, looking for men to fight in the Ukraine war. “At that moment we knew we couldn’t stay in Russia”, says Carlos. We took out all of our savings, sold everything that we owned, which wasn’t much, and set off towards Armenia. We couldn’t ask for help from my wife’s family because being a foreigner I wasn’t well received there”. continue reading

It wasn’t a matter of choice, Armenia was just the first destination possible for them because Russia had already cancelled almost all flights to other countries. There they found that the cost of accommodation rose massively because of the sheer numbers of Russians that were emigrating and because of this there was no other option for them than to travel to Havana — at the beginning of January of this year. Havana is where Carlos is officially allowed to stay, in his parent’s house. He knew that staying there would be difficult because of their differences in ideology, but he had no other option. Daria was also not well received by Carlos’s parents.

“On the morning of the 8th of March a uniformed guy came into our room, accompanied by my father. He didn’t even bother to knock this time. He was an ’immigration official’. He said that my wife had been in the country longer than was allowed for foreigners, but this was a lie because we had only been there for 55 days and you are allowed 90 days. He was very strange and aggressive. He couldn’t explain the actual objectives of his visit and kept changing his story, saying that there had been complaints about noise, but without explaining who had made the complaints. Finally he set a date for a meeting for a different day at the immigration office in East Havana. For the whole time he refused to even speak directly to my wife”.

One hour after this supposed immigration official left the house, Carlos got a telephone call commanding him to turn up at the police station.

“At this station, where we had to wait for more than two hours, they took me to an office where the presence of my wife was ’not allowed’. There, three armed men lectured me about my poor conduct, and the most surprising thing was that they said they had witnesses! The door opened and then in came my parents, who lied! — so much about me and about Daria. But they could not even look me in the eyes”.

The couple still have to attend a meeting of the 9th of March, presumably to clarify Davina’s status as a migrant.

“That was not an immigration office nor even a police one. There, they shouted at us they insulted us, they threw chairs and banged on the table and did everything to intimidate us and humiliate us. They tried to frighten us in every way possible. They interrogated me about our motives for leaving Russia and about my contacts — about friends I have here in Cuba who they take to be troublemakers”.

“They also even argued that our marriage was not legal because we didn’t get married in Cuba and because of this my wife could not live here with me. They wouldn’t even allow me to interpret for her, and she hardly knows any Spanish. When I tried to explain to her what was happening they told me to shut up, saying that only they had the right to speak”.

After hours of interrogation they gave us another meeting arrangement, this time at the central immigration office, and they left us with the threat that we would ’pay’ for our insolence.

The first thing that occurred to Daria was to contact the Russian Consulate in Havana to ask for help. Because she’d always heard that Cuba and Russia were friends and brothers, she supposed that everything would be okay, that it had all been a misunderstanding.

With the help of Carlos as a translator Daria told this newspaper “We called the consulate and explained my situation, then a man told me that there was another number that I should call. When I dialled this number a few moments later the same voice came back at me not even trying to hide his laughter; this made me realise that here they would not help us so-called ’traitors’”.

When finally they got to speak to the actual Immigration Office they were spun yet another tale: they were told that the real problem was Daria’s economic insolvency. Also a complete lie.

“They told us we have to leave the country immediately. But we don’t have any ticket to travel anywhere, because we don’t know where we can go! We are in a terrible situation. We can’t stay in Cuba because the secret police are after us and neither can we go back to Russia because there’s no security for us there either”.

She says something in Russian which Carlos doesn’t translate straightaway. They take each other by the hand, and at length he says: “We’re so scared that something terrible could happen to us”.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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A One-Eyed Eusebio Leal Watches Over Old Havana’s Decline

The mural of Eusebio Leal, which decorates the wall of a collapsed building in Calle Teniente Rey, has deteriorated in a very short time. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 16 March 2023 – The mural which has decorated for years the empty space left by a building collapse in Calle Teniente Rey (almost on the corner of Monserrate and next to the paladar [private restaurant] Kilómetro Cero) has deteriorated in a very short time. The portrait of the ’Historian of the City’, Eusebio Leal — with its caption “My footsteps still look after your streets, Havana my heart, because I have not left you. I will live with you forever” — was still bright and colourful barely only a year ago.

These days, a one-eyed Leal — one-eyed because of the peeling paint — appears to give passers-by a grimace of disgust.

Eusebio Leal was the grand author of the restoration of Old Havana — in large part with the help of public funds from other countries such as Spain — and he continued the work of Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, as head of the Office of Historiography.

Under his command, that state organisation became a powerful instrument for the promotion of culture and tourism. In his charge, for example, he had the company Habaguanex, which managed some 300 tourist sites, including restaurants, shops, markets, cafes and accommodation (totalling 546 rooms). Among these, of course, was the unfortunate Hotel Saratoga, destroyed by an explosion on 6 May 2022.

All the glory ended in 2016, when the Ministry for Armed Forces put Habaguanex under the charge of the Gaviota group, which belongs to the all-powerful Grupo de Administración Empersarial (Gaesa) [Management Administration Group], at that time led by Raúl Castro’s ex son-in-law, the late Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja.

From that moment on, everything in the historic centre of the capital went into decline — a district where many inhabitants have felt themselves orphaned by the death, on 31 July 2020, of the historian who delivered to them, and on time, a number of benefits, such as improved primary school meals.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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The Havana Law: The Authentic Face of the Cuban Tourist Paradise

It is important that a book like this is published in Europe, where some newspapers are still promoting the Island as a paradise of communist nostalgia. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 15 March 2023 – In the film The Lives of Others, the writer Georg Dreyman encapsulates his break with the regime in a report about suicides in communist countries. He writes it in red ink on a secret typewriter and under the vigilance of secret agent Wiesler, alias HGW XX/7. When I had just finished reading The Secret Island, by Abraham Jiménez Enoa (born in Havana in 1988), it seemed to me to be the reverse kind of book — almost tropical, although no less dramatic or oppressive.

The book doesn’t hide its scars. It talks of a nervous people, hungry, people who want to escape or kill themselves. Every page was written as the polar opposite of the official tourist guide to Cuba. It is important that a book like this is published in Europe, where some newspapers are still promoting the Island as a paradise of communist nostalgia, with cheap hotels, cigars and mulatas.

Jiménez Enoa goes further even, than just describing the “real and the incredible” poverty of Havana, ‘invention of foreign correspondents’. His interviewees, who come from a wide variety of provinces and dangerous neighbourhoods, live for la bolita — a lottery-type betting game prohibited by Castro — and they cure their illnesses using only water; they have two religions (“yoruba culture and football [soccer]”); they build portable houses out of cardboard and go out chasing French or Italian women, “the uglier and fatter the better, because those are the ones who need affection the most”. continue reading

Up until half way through the book the stories are pretty harmless. He goes out in search of the unusual but stops short of crossing the line into risky political areas. This is the natural condition of the independent journalists in Cuba — they are the marginalised, stuck in their tribe. But from this point on, things begin to change in the book, the voices move forward, and the language — earlier, varied and ambiguous — becomes a machete blow. Whereas before he used the word ’government’, now it becomes ’dictatorship’; where before he spoke of anonymous swindlers, later he alludes to the imprisoned artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara or to the dissident Ariel Ruiz Urquiola. He directly questions the president and the generals, describes his “walks” around Villa Marista, the general headquarters of the State Security secret police. Now he has nothing more to lose.

Jiménez Enoa’s works have a strange predilection for the law. With some well calculated pauses between paragraphs he points out which article of the Penal Code his interviewee is violating, and how to use this fact to challenge the police. He has read between the lines of the constitution, of Castro’s speeches, and even of the threats made by the torturers. Everything has a legislative or authoritative value, everything practiced in Cuba is criminal and if there’s a cover-up it is there once again in the language: to resolve, means to steal.

Money is another obsession in the book. How does one manage to eat or to live in a country where wages are not enough to cover the basics. A gigolo gives him the key: in real life “there are no tariffs, only cushy jobs”. He fights against everyone and against history like those people who built their ramshackle huts on the edge of Che Guevara’s mortuary square in Santa Clara, visited by tourists and government leaders. It’s the tension between the desire to live and the ghost of Castro and his guerillas. But if you can’t escape from the country, there’s always a metaphysical escape: suicide.

Whilst reading The Secret Island, another force becomes apparent, one which doesn’t often show its face and which couldn’t be more decisive: the battalion of spies, confidantes, patrol cars, informers and sympathisers of the regime. One can fight against them up to a certain point but their skill lies in their persistence and in their talent for destroying lives. In a final self-portrait, Jiménez Enoa offers up the creed of an escapologist from time and space: “Escaping from Cuba is not the same thing as escaping from any other country for the first time. To escape from Cuba is to fall into the world, to realize that Cuba is an island that has been hijacked by a political system which ensures that the country remains locked inside the twentieth century”.

I suppose that Jiménez Enoa will ask himself the same question as all of the other artists and intellectuals who have become exiled from Cuba in recent months: After his book-exorcism, his testament-report, his page-frontier, what next? Hopefully not too many years will pass before he’ll be able to dedicate a ’Sonata for a good man’ to those who watched over him, like the one that Dreyman wrote for HGW XX/7.

Exile, as the only way out

As a result of his publication, Jiménez Enoa was arrested, interrogated, tortured, and finally regulado [regulated], a method used by the Castristas by which a citizen is prevented from leaving the country freely. After he did finally escape however, and was living in a place as peaceful as Amsterdam, one of the regime’s agents actually turned up at one of his conferences and aggressively shouted out at him like a maniac that everything he was saying was a lie.

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Publisher’s note: This article was first published by the Spanish daily El Mundo, in their cultural magazine La Lectura.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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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, 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 católicos. But 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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Traffic Light Power Failure Causes Accident in Havana

Both drivers – each over sixty years old – emerged unhurt but extremely nervous. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 7 March 2023 – A traffic accident in Havana on Tuesday left two people with light injuries: the drivers of cars which collided at the intersection of Calle 17 and Avenida de los Presidentes (Calle G) on El Vedado.

During a power cut — and consequent loss of traffic light functionality — one of the drivers, travelling on Calle G in a white VW hit an orange Fiat 126 travelling towards calle 17 and ended up on its side in the middle of the road. Both drivers – each over sixty years old — emerged unhurt but extremely nervous.

As reported to this paper the driver of the orange vehicle was bleeding as he hung onto his spectacles and the other driver of the white car was limping. The former was helped by a nurse — a friend of the family. The other — from Ciego de Ávila — was just on his way back from the nearby Heart Surgery and Cardiology institute — from a meeting where they had reviewed his recent open heart surgery.

The little orange Fiat 126 which was travelling on Calle 17 and ended up on its side. (14ymedio)

Both parties had additional problems though: The Fiat driver, faces the problem of getting replacement parts for a car that was first imported to the island in times of business with Eastern European communist countries. The driver from Ciego de Ávila couldn’t even get home because of the lack of available public transport.

“It was the power-cut’s fault”, said one of the rubberneckers at the scene. “But the drivers themselves were a bit negligent — one of them for not respecting the right of way on Calle G and the other for not driving slowly enough and stopping”.

“The main cause was the power cut”, said one of the rubberneckers at the scene, “but the drivers themselves were also to blame”. (14ymedio)

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Unstable Wall Threatens Passers-by in Calle Zapata, Havana

Several years ago, the now disappeared Pyramids Kiosk stood on this spot, where they sold goods in CUC (convertible pesos) before the Tarea Ordenamiento law came into force. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 6 March 2023 — The outer wall of an old building on Calle Zapata, between calles Infanta and Basarrate, is just one of countless structures in the capital which is threatening to collapse. Each day local residents nervously check on its dangerous angle of inclination.

“Does anyone think that these old wooden poles they’ve put up are going to keep this wall standing upright?”, murmured a passer-by this morning. “It’s tremendously irresponsible. They should just demolish it as soon as possible”, a bread vendor replied. “In Monte a wall just like this one collapsed and killed a colleague of mine”.

Zapata, which starts in the middle of Calle Infanta, is a mainly circulatory route, and although some while ago the line/queue outside the H. Upmann store disappeared on this street, there are still cars and pedestrians travelling through here daily, unaware of the danger.

Several years ago, the now disappeared Pyramids Kiosk stood on this spot, where they sold goods in CUC (convertible pesos) before the Tarea Ordenamiento* law came into force.

Today all that remains is this troubling facade, which seems certain to cause an accident. It’s yet another one in a city whose buildings keep falling down without the authorities doing anything about it.

*Translator’s note: The “Ordering Task” [Tarea Ordenamiento] is a collection of measures that include eliminating the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC), leaving the Cuban peso 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 Ricardo Recluso

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‘In Supporting Russia, the Cuban Regime is Violating its Own Constitution’ – D Frente

The Secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, met with the Cuban Minister of the Interior, General Lázaro Alberto Álvarez Casas, along with current president Miguel Díaz-Canel and his predecessor Raúl Castro. (Screen capture)

14ymedio, Madrid, 3 March 2023 – The platform D Frente [D Front] has lashed out at the growing close relationship between the Cuban government and Russia, after the visit to Havana this Wednesday of General Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council.

“This ostentatious public exhibition of Putrachev in all the news media is so obvious”, they say in their Friday news release. “Their conduct never stops being an offence against the dignity of a people [the Ukrainians] who have fought and sacrificed so much through their resistance and their independence in the face of all this [Russian] imperialism.

The Russian met with the Cuban Interior Minister, General Lazaro Alberto Albarez Casas, as well as the current president Miguel Diaz-Canel and his predecessor Raúl Castro.

In this, D Frente considers that one is now witnessing a “slow motion collapse of everything that signifies or assumes the ’project’ of the Cuban nation to be”. “Whilst the Cuban state and government openly opt to support an obviously aggressive war of expansion, even more destructive than strategic”, D Frente continues, referring to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine which has just passed its first anniversary, “the Cuban people choose to flee from the country in the opposite direction from the spurious alliances of its government”. continue reading

That is, for the opposition platform, “an increasingly clear sign” of the regime’s incapacity “to represent the genuine interests and values of the country and the nation”.

“We Cubans do not support wars of aggression, selective murder, kidnap and trafficking of children or the rape of women, nor mercenary groups which destroy whole cities, as in the besieged city of Bakhmut”, says D Frente. “Nor do we support crimes against humanity or against a nation’s cultural heritage. We unwaveringly support the United Nations Charter in upholding the peace and in defending nations without an imperial past from the territorial appetites of future imperialists.

And they warn the government: “By supporting Russia in its genocide against Ukraine you are violating your own Constitution as much as international law”.

Patrushev arrived on the island from Venezuela where he was received by Nicolás Maduro, little more than a month after Díaz-Canel expressed his desire to carry Cuban-Russian relations to “a higher level”.

Days later, Russian media revealed that one of the agreements reached was for the creation of a “Centre of Economic Transformation”, with the objective of preparing “economic transformations in Cuba based on the development of private companies”.

Russian presence in the country is already a thing. For example, they are at the helm of one of the largest sugar producers on the island, the so-called Jatibonico colossus in Sancti Spíritus.

On the other hand, the fear of some organisations in exile, that this will lead to a “Russian style” opening of the market is also justified by the flourishing of new “private” businesses, created in a strange alliance with the state sector.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Cuba Sells ‘Most Expensive Cigar in the World’, at 400 Dollars Each

Collectors participating voraciously at the Habano Festival during the auctioning of cigar boxes, whose prices reach absurd levels if they carry Fidel Castro’s signature.

14ymedio, Havana, 2 March 2023 — Cohiba Behike cigars, flagship product of the Habanos SA company and self-proclaimed “most expensive cigars in the world”, are priced at 400 dollars a piece. The Island’s authorities are boasting about this fact in a frenetic campaign, launched this week in the official press to attract foreign clients to the twenty-third Habano Festival, which is being held until next Friday in the Cuban capital.

Behike, which has been the most expensive of all Cohiba cigars since 2010, was created in 1966 for Fidel Castro to lavish upon international visitors and diplomats. It encapsulates the vitolas — varieties — of BHK 52, BHK 54 and BHK 56, made in the Havana cigar factory El Laguito, using superior quality tobacco leaves from the villages of San Juan y Martínez and San Luis, in Pinar del Río — in an area known as Vueltabajo in the vernacular of the local tobacco farmers.

The particular mixture of leaves for acquiring the unique Behike taste and aroma is the El Laguito cigar makers’ “best kept secret”, which, along with the air of mystery that Castro tried to create around its fabrication, boosts this cigar’s price in both international stores and national shops — a fact which horrifies Cuban people.

As well as the usual presentation in lacquered boxes of ten cigars, Cuba makes Behike cigars with special wrapping which has an impact on the price, which the “aficionados with higher solvency” — a euphemism which the Prensa Latina news agency uses to describe the millionaires who attend the Festival — are able to pay.

During the week of the Festival at the Havana Conference Centre — the same space as used by the government for important meetings — the official press has even offered lists of the “best cigars” or the “best selling” ones. continue reading

Prensa Latina publishes a top ten which includes the various makes: Montecristo, Romeo y Julieta, Partagás and Cohiba – the latter of which continues to be the most prestigious on international markets. According to this list, the three best habanos in the world are: the Montecristo Number 4, the Romeo y Julieta Churchill and Cohiba’s Lancero. These three varieties are very well known and frequently appear in films, magazines and international catalogues.

At the Habano Festival, collectors participate voraciously in the auctioning of humidores — the cedar-wood boxes which regulate the humidity of the cigars, whose prices reach absurd levels if they carry Fidel Castro’s signature (he left behind hundreds of signed ones) or that of any celebrity.

As part of the sales campaign the official press associates the act of smoking habanos with historical figures such as Ernesto (’Che’) Guevara and Winston Churchill, scientists such as Albert Einstein, actors such as Robert DeNiro and Arnold Swarzenegger — “who, a few years ago visited Cuba practically in secret in order to smoke genuine habanos“, they claim — and even American presidents, including John Quincy Adams, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.

Some 2,000 participants from 110 countries will spend their money in Havana in the week leading up to Friday — including millionaires and collectors (above all, Europeans and Arabs), leading cigar aficionados and politicians from all over the world. The important thing, affirms Prensa Latina, is to present all the visitors not only as aficionados of cigar culture, but as “a kind of army of Cuba lovers”.

The Cuban government invested five hundred and forty-five million dollars in the cigar industry in 2022, but the outlook for its producers, whose tobacco crop was destroyed by the passage of Hurricane Ian, does not auger well, in a sector which depends, above all, on the excellence of its premium raw materials.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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The Building Next to Hotel Saratoga, Abandoned to its Fate

The residential building next door to the Saratoga continues to look like an empty dolls’ house. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez/Juan Izquierdo, Havana, 23 February 2023 — The members of the Cuban Parliament who are elected on 26 March will not be able to avoid the sight of the ruin of the Hotel Saratoga, right opposite the Capitolio Nacional building. Habaneros, however, are already well accustomed to seeing the state of the building, which exploded on 6 May 2022, killing 47 people, and which today evokes a sickly-looking house of cards.

The top floor is the only one which remains intact, like a grotesque reminder of what the Saratoga used to be, surrounded as it is today by sheets of red zinc. But the hotel is barely the centre of gravity of the collapse: its neighbouring residential building, which features in some of the most dramatic photos of the disaster, continues to look like an empty dolls’ house.

A comparison between the first photographs of the building, taken just after the explosion, and the scene which is presented to any pedestrian today, shows that the building has been systematically ransacked, not only by its former residents but by criminals and random passers-by. Where there used to be a mounted picture frame, a piece of furniture or a kitchen appliance, now there is only a stark bare wall. continue reading

Various parts of the structure which survived the explosion have been removed by the construction workers, or have collapsed under their own weight. Nevertheless, the aura is not one of a reconstruction site, rather one of just another building which has been abandoned to its own fate.

The people who lived at Prado 609, an annex of the hotel, were rehoused in the precarious Havana street of Vives, between Carmen and Figuras. It’s been a double tragedy for them: not only have they lost their homes but the new ones given to them by the government not only lack any charm but were constructed from cast concrete in one of the most “troubled” areas of the capital.

“They have no plans yet about what they’re going to do with the Saratoga. They’re not going to demolish it completely, only what’s necessary to stabilise the structure. The timetable is for 8 to 10 months”, a resident of the area told 14ymedio in December.

The company that the government commissioned for the work is Almest, a property developer linked to the Armed Forces, and a hitherto unknown French company, although evidence suggests that it’s the construction company Bouygues, which has worked on the construction of 22 luxury hotels on the island.

If one thing is clear it is that the fate of the Saratoga is bound up with that of the neighbouring buildings, among which there is also a baptist church. It would seem that the Cuban government has not yet decided on the move that will resolve the problem of one of the most central blocks of Havana.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Internet and Mobile Signal Cut Off After a Mass Gathering at a Cuban Hotel

Reports are still coming in from the Cuban capital to the editorial desk of this newspaper, confirming that the mobile telephone service is still not operating. (Perioódico Cubano)

14ymedio, Havana, 16 February 2023 – An outage of internet and mobile data was reported in Cuba this Thursday afternoon at 6.45pm, according to reports to 14ymedio from various parts of the country, after a mass gathering at the Grand Packard Hotel in Old Havana, where the American rapper ’Tekashi 6ix9ine’ was staying.

“Only landlines were working, and, in some places Nauta Hogar (Cuban telecoms company), but there was no data or mobile signal”, a phone user from Sancti Spíritus told this newspaper at 7.40pm when the signal returned to his phone.

“We inform our customers that at the present moment there is a problem with mobile services. We are working as fast as we can to identify and fix the problem”, said the Cuban Telecommunication Company (Etecsa) after the service had been down for an hour.

Reports are still coming in from the Cuban capital to the editorial desk of this newspaper confirming that the mobile telephone service is still not operating. continue reading

Before the regime cut off the service, there were reports on social media of a mass gathering in front of the Grand Packard Hotel, mostly of young Cubans who had heard about Tekashi’s arrival there.

Several sources reported the moment when dollar bills were thrown from the hotel and this was video’d by a number of people.

Tekashi has gone viral on several occasions for throwing dollar bills to his fans or for giving large sums of money to poor families.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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A Review of Books by Cuban Authors Published this January

After consulting with a number of publishers and reviewers, 14ymedio offers here a selection of the new editions of 2023. (Collage)

14ymedio, Madrid, 1 February 2023 — Spanish and Latin American bookshops have already taken delivery of the latest titles by Cuban authors — writers such as Armando Lucas Correa, Abraham Jiménez Enoa and Joel Franz Rosell. Reissues of earlier editions and books by new young writers have also appeared this January. After consulting with a number of publishers and reviewers, 14ymedio offers here a selection of the new editions of 2023.

The Morro lighthouse that overlooks Havana’s port features on the cover of La viajera nocturna (The Night Traveller) (Ediciones B), Armando Lucas Correa’s most recent novel. The book is an emotive exploration of the connections between the individual and history, through the eyes of four women in constant displacement during the twentieth century.

From 1930s Nazi Germany to Batista’s Havana, Correa tells of human beings’ will to survive, and how family memories play a part in the decisions of his protagonists.

The journalist Abraham Jiménez Enoa, who has just won the Michael Jacobs Scholarship for Travel Writing with a project about his first year in exile, publishes La isla oculta (The Hidden Island) (Libros del K.O) – a collection of articles with the subtitle Historias de Cuba (Cuban Stories). Jiménez Enoa follows the trail of some of the characters who remain part of Havana life, like the gigolo who’s main aspiration is to leave both his country and his profession, or the suicide who tries to recover a sense of meaning in a harsh city.

Speaking about The Hidden Island, in an interview with Jorge Ramos the author said “What I’m trying to show is the subterranean Cuba, that everyday Cuba which everyone knows, where scarcity happens for a reason, shortages, lack of medicine and lack of human rights — all happen for a reason. After having put together this ’compendium’, it’s obvious to me why people are leaving Cuba”.

Joel Franz Rosell, already known as an author of classic children’s literature in Cuba, won the French Ville de Cherbourg prize in 2000 with his novel Mi tesoro te espera en Cuba (My Treasure Awaits You in Cuba), re-published this month by Verbum. A little girl’s trip to Cuba has the secret motive of searching for a supposed treasure which her great grand uncle hid on the island before escaping from Castro in 1959. The publisher presents it as a story of “adventure, mystery, complicated romance and a variety of challenges to the bonds of friendship”.

This month the same publisher revived the historical and perceptive Memoria sobre la vagancia en la Isla de Cuba (A Report on Vagrancy on the Island of Cuba), by José Antonio Saco. This book, one of the most brutal nineteenth century analyses of Cuban society, discussed the vices, customs and interests of the Creole people, and proposed a way of better organising the country.

With the collection of poetry Los dias (The Days) (Homagno), the Camagüeyan writer Mario Ramírez continues the work he began in 2019 with his book Corolarios (Corollaries). “Romantic experience, all of the plans made over time that go on to trip us up, our resources of faith or of intelligence, this or that truth or doubt — all these, according to Rafael Almanza, are Ramírez’s themes, whose conclusions are that, in the middle of a dismal-seeming reality, there will still be, nevertheless, “a lyre” (musical instrument).

The novel Náufrago del tiempo (Time’s Castaway) (Verbum), by the writer and 14ymedio columnist Xavier Carbonell, is a meditation on the Island’s destiny, a “fable” — according to literary critic Roberto González Echevarría — whose protagonist encounters “a labyrinth of symbols, lost paradises, monasteries, pirate ships and ruined cities”.

Since the pandemic the Island has suffered a publishing crisis, and, although a recovery might be signalled by the 31st Havana International Book Fair (the Cuban Book Institute promised to market 4,000 titles), it’s unlikely that the work of Cuban publishers will be in the forefront of the event.

Dedicated to Colombia this year, as an invitee country, and to the theme of “inclusive reading”, the fair will be held during the period 9-19 February in its regular settings: in San Carlos de la Cabaña castle and its surroundings, and in Havana’s Historic Centre.

Among the hundred-year-old writers who will be celebrated at the event are Fina García Marruz – who died in 2022 aged 99 — and the geographer and explorer Antonio Núñez Jiménez. Homage will also be paid to Julio Travieso Serrano, recipient of the 2021 National Literature Prize, and the librarian Araceli García Carranza.

During the fair, the winners of the 2023 Alejo Carpentier Prize and the 2023 Nicolás Guillen Prize will be presented. The 2022 storytelling winners were Rogelio Riverón, for Cuarenta vasos de vodka (Forty Glasses of Vodka); Francisco López Sácha, for the novel Voy a escribir la eternidad (I’m Going to Write Eternity); and Joaquín Borges Triana, author of the essay Socorro, no soy subversivo (Help! I’m Not a Subversive). The winner of the Nicolás Guillén Prize was Carlos Esquivel, author of the poetry collection La guagua de Babel (The Babel Bus).

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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