Category: Translator: Tomás A.

El Calvario (Calvary) is a dusty and steep village, with many half-paved streets. It is located south of Havana, in the municipality of Arroyo Naranjo, the poorest and the one with the greatest number of imprisoned men in the entire city.

It was once a major town. When it was founded in 1753 by a family of Canary Islanders it had pretensions of being a middle-class neighborhood. There were three sugar mills, a municipal park, a church and a cemetery.

It is even said that the Cuban national hero José Martí had a girlfriend in the village. This is a typical claim of inhabitants of lost villages, inventing fables to add prestige to the soil of their birth.

In this January of 2010 in the 21st century, the village is a collection of sad one-story houses. Some have roofs of palm fronds and dirt floors. At the local cemetery a sallow, mentally-challenged guy acts as gatekeeper and gravedigger. Like something out of a horror movie.

In the space between graves, he grows squash, which he offers to the mourners and the curious who visit the rundown cemetery. The fool, which is what he really is, takes advantage of the ground and its possibilities.

A few days ago, between swigs of cheap rum, filtered with molasses and the smell of pork barbecued over charcoal on the grill, in the squalid old town they held the Assembly of Accountability.

What kind of assembly is that? It’s a review of what has been done by the delegate (a kind of council member) before the people who elected him. That night the atmosphere was warm. At the meeting, under the stars and surrounded by marabou weed and banana plants, the rotund president of the People’s Power in the municipality of Arroyo Naranjo and his deputy were present.

The People’s Power emerged in 1974. It is a poor imitation of a Western parliament, where they play at practicing democracy. People go and raise a long list of complaints, which are very rarely solved.

That night, someone tape-recorded the Calvary Assembly. The local chiefs expressed themselves so badly,  mixing lies with the prepared government speech and partisan jargon, that it seemed like it was taken from a film script by Berlanga. They appear to propose ideas. The reality is that they impose them. They discussed issues such as lack of doctors, the possibility of having a market, and what to do to get a phone.

If it were not for the poor audio, it would have been worth listening to. It is a sample of Cuban democracy. The best in the world. According to Fidel Castro.

Iván García y Laritza Diversent.

Translated by: Tomás A.

Julia Romero, a 20-year-old university student, will never forget the day she lost her virginity. Forget the fairy tale of a magical night, surrounded by a pleasant environment.

“My first night of love was terrible. It was in the middle of spring, we left a mediocre disco and had sex in a pitch-black park, surrounded by onlookers and in a heavy downpour that surprised us. The only pleasurable thing was that we were two people in love.”

And so it is that to make love in decent conditions in 21st century Havana is a luxury. Before 1989, there was an extensive network of motels, known in Cuba as posadas or inns. They were discrete, inexpensive, and air conditioned. They offered sandwiches and alcoholic beverages. They were open 24 hours. And for young couples, unfaithful spouses, and others who lived in overcrowded conditions and enjoyed no privacy, the only option they had to engage in sexual relations was to go to these motels.

But in 1990, with the arrival of the special period, a crisis that has lasted 21 years, among many other things, the inns quietly disappeared. The most common situation on the island is for up to four generations to live together under one roof. Having a single room is a convenience that few enjoy. Even young couples, when they have children, tend to sleep with them in the same room.

Ask the married couple Jose Ramirez and Delia Iznaga, about the problems they face when having sex. And with a frown, they will give you a long list of calamities. The Ramirez marriage produced two sons, 8 and 11 years old.

“They sleep in the same room. We barely have time for married life, it’s been a month since we had sex. And although we’re both 35, when we go out at night, my wife and I look like a couple of teenagers. We’ll make love in a staircase, the courtyard of a school, or a vacant lot. Several times we have surprised the custodians of the place or the police. We were shamefaced when we had to go pay a fine for ‘obscene acts in public.'”

With the legalization of the dollar and self-employment, private houses proliferated that rented to couples. They are comfortable and offer a wide assortment of food and beverages. But they are very expensive for the average Cuban.

Rudy Ramos, 43, owns one of these “tryst houses.” “The business is not going badly. I have expanded to 9 rooms, air conditioning, television, refrigerator, and shower with hot and cold water. The charge is 5 Cuban convertible pesos (CUC) for two hours. And 10 CUC for the entire night. My papers are in order.

It happens that 10 CUC (250 Cuban pesos) is the minimum monthly wage in Cuba. These kind of houses for rent by the hour arose with foreigners in mind. It is well-known that one of the attractions of the island is sex tourism. But Cubans who work in hotels, or in cafes for CUCs, or who receive remittances from abroad, can with some frequency lie on a good mattress with a girlfriend, while drinking Crystal beer, and can shower with warm water after making love.

But they are the minority. Most, such as the Ramirez couple, or the college student Julia Romero, have sex without spending a dime, in a park under the stars or on any staircase of some building in the city. And believe me, in Havana there are many of these places.

Iván García

Photo: la imagen, Flickr

Translated by: Tomás A.

It’s like a casino.  Pure gambling.  Cuban government economists don’t have to envy the financial wizard George Soros. Since October 25, 2004, when Fidel Castro levied an 18 percent tax on the U.S. dollar and 8 percent on other currencies, from this source alone Cuba has banked more than 600 million dollars a year in hard currency.

Let me explain. There is no trick whatsoever. Of the one billion dollars in remittances sent every year by Cuban exiles in Florida, the government pocketed 200 million. Without investing a dime.

If we accept as valid that two million visitors enter the island every year — naive northern Europeans, horny Spaniards hunting dark-skinned girls, relaxed Canadians fleeing the cold, and thousands of Cuban-Americans who come to visit their families — to all without exception, when they exchange money, the government applies the revolutionary tax.

As good Galician descendants, the Castros are reluctant to give figures, especially when it comes to money. So one has to keep accounts on paper. To the 600 million dollars, add 200 million for the tax applied to tourists, assuming that each of them, on average, exchanges 3 thousand U.S. dollars or euros.

And to complete Operation Robin Hood as implemented in Cuba, let’s add another 200 million dollars from high prices charged in establishments that sell goods or offer services for foreign exchange. Since 2004, commodities like oil, soaps, detergents and garments are sold exclusively for Cuban convertible pesos or CUC, the straw currency that hides the Yankee dollar.

$100 in 2002 translates to $60 in the newly released 2010. It’s simple arithmetic. You lose $20 when you change money in the state banks and another twenty when they mercilessly suck your taxes, sometimes in excess of 240 percent, when you go shopping at hard-currency stores.

At the time, the Comandante only justified that kind of abusive tax because the U.S. Department of Treasury, with its regulations resulting from the embargo, had made it impossible to trade with Yankee money. It was really because the Americans discovered four billion U.S. dollars deposited in the Swiss bank UBS from transactions with Cuba, which the Havana government claimed came from sales in hard-currency stores.

I’ve always wondered why they saved so much. Then came the plucking operation. Including Castro’s “good one”; one sunny morning in 2005, told the foreign press that this money was paying for the vaunted “energy revolution”, as he called the replacing of millions of electric appliances from the prehistoric era in most Cuban homes.

Forty-year-old American refrigerators, home cooling fans with industrial motors that made as much noise as an airplane taking off, and Russian television screens in black and white. He distributed poor-quality Chinese rice cookers, televisions and refrigerators. In addition to paying for the new equipment, people had to surrender the old. And the best of it was that the operation to save fuel and to replace archaic appliances was paid for by Cuban exiles, as well as tourists and foreign visitors, with the government tax on foreign exchange. Business full-circle.

Alan Greenspan had to be green with envy. With a government that does not take money from the rich, as did the hero of Sherwood Forest. No. It punishes the Cuban emigre who has to work two jobs in Miami and live in a cheap apartment and make sacrifices to send money to his family in Cuba.

The government always makes a monumental miscalculation, when it supposes that by having a second-hand car, an Apple Computer, a Motorola phone, air conditioning and a satellite dish, a Cuban is a rich guy. Maybe they should look in the mirror. Because they usually have all that paraphernalia and the rest of the people don’t, they presume that the “worms” in Miami are rolling in greenbacks.

It is not new to impose a revolutionary tax that the people don’t want. The Basque terrorist group ETA, made it fashionable for entrepreneurs and bankers to pay large sums of money, as one of the ways to maintain their terror campaign against the Spanish government. Leftist groups have also robbed banks and kidnapped wealthy people, and then demanded a lot of money. Anything goes in pursuit of the conquest of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Of the many omissions that the Castro brothers are silent about, the revolutionary tax on foreign exchange is one of them. As it is also obvious that for 16 years the exiles and their relatives in Cuba have to a large extent maintained the stunted island’s economy.

It is well-known that the Cuban economy is in bankruptcy. And with these reprehensible practices they keep it afloat. The least that the Castros should do, as fond of museums and statues as they are, is to erect a great monument in the heart of Havana to those Cubans in the diaspora who give oxygen to their economy.

Iván García

Translated by: Tomás A.

When winter comes, Ruben Soriano, 42, is hoping more than anything for the arrival of a cold front. He takes his straw hat off, looks up at the sky and exclaims: “It’s not going to rain again today.” That’s bad for his business. Ruben works hard on a not-very-fertile field on the outskirts of Havana, where he plants tomatoes and vegetables in season. High temperatures and prolonged drought have decreased his crops. With a simple and compelling logic he says:

“If I harvest little, I earn little. And if I don’t get good money I live badly, and I will not have much money to buy seeds and farming tools for the next year. So I pray that the weather will help me.”

Soriano was one of those who benefitted when in 2008 the government of General Raúl Castro gave out rights to farm vacant land. He, his wife and three children were full of hope.

The only thing that Ruben Soriano has done and has done well in his whole life is to work the land. He complains about the low prices that the State collection centers pay for his crops. In theory, he must sell the state about 70 percent of what he grows.

In practice, that’s not what happens. He is forced to under-report the true figures, so that he can sell to private buyers who pay triple the price for his products. “But if the heat and lack of rain continue, I’ll have to do something else,” he worries. And he admits that all he watches on TV are the weather forecasts.

Oscar Suarez, 56, couldn’t care less if it rains, or is cold or hot. He is a private taxi driver, licensed to drive for hire since 2006. Each December, he has to report his earnings to the Treasury and pay the bank between 2,000 and 3,500 pesos.

“It’s always the same. When the last month of the year comes, I have to work like a mule to get that money. For me the important thing is not how much time I have to work, it’s whether there are people needing to go from one place to another who have the ten Cuban pesos to pay the fare.

Suarez is a taxi driver with an elevated cultural level. He doesn’t have to envy his counterparts in Buenos Aires, where according to what he has read, they talk about opera, the stock market, the Boca Juniors, an Argentine soccer team, and the situation in Iraq. “I am like them,” he boasts.

“I am not like the taxi drivers in Argentina, or anywhere on the planet, in that I drive an ancient Chevrolet, a real Frankenstein.” And laughing, he says: “It’s an old lady with rouge. I’ve painted it seven times, and done body work as many times. It’s a mechanical monstrosity; it has the engine of a Volga (Russian car) and parts from so many countries that it seems like a product of the United Nations.”

But it runs and makes money, which is all that’s important to him.  Nor does he worry about whether it pollutes the environment.

“This old Chevy is part of the family. My grandfather, my father, and now me and my children have all driven it. I am more grateful to it than I would be to a watchdog. I often say that in my house, before dinner, instead of praying to the Lord, we pray to General Motors.”

For 2010, Oscar Suarez wants peace and harmony throughout the world, and that Cuba’s economic situation improves. “I have wanted this since 1989, but I’m getting tired of keeping my hopes up. Although it would be good if those above” –and he makes a gesture with his hand indicating the beard of Fidel Castro — “would change direction and be guided by the market economy, but who knows what’s best for the coming year …”

Diego Ramirez, a 34-year old engineer, does not expect great things from 2010. Quite the contrary.

“More likely we’ll have to punch another hole in our belt. In my company there are rumors of pay cuts in hard currency. They took away our lunch and give us 15 pesos a day for food. The outlook is gray and getting darker.”

Diego is a textbook skeptic. “The only ones who see where the country is headed are the people leading us.” And he shows a copy of the daily newspaper Granma, with a grinning Hugo Chávez, and a headline in black letters with the good news: 13 billion dollars invested between Cuba and Venezuela.

Guys like Diego Ramirez long ago stopped believing in the exaggerated triumphalism of the official media. Every day he hopes for a different kind of news.  “Deaths, changes of power, political and economic changes …” And dreams of learning from foreign media. “The Cuban press won’t report anything until everything is under control. So it’s possible that by next year, something really good will happen. ”

– Deaths, firings, political and economic changes…

And he dreams of what he’s learned through the foreign media.  “The Cuban press wouldn’t report anything until everything is under control.  So it’s possible that in the coming year, something good could happen.

According to Diego, many Cubans want the same thing.

Iván García

Translated by: Tomás A.

Sonia Garro at her sewing machine

It all started one sunless noon, on the 24th of February, 2007. “Up here,” said Sonia, a laboratory technician, who sews on a 50-year-old machine on the porch of her home, from where she often saw accidents involving children playing without the watchful eyes of their parents. And her large eyes filled with tears on nights when she saw girls 12 years old, with emaciated bodies, like that of her daughter, prostitute themselves for trinkets.

And it was decided. That day Sonia established an independent community project that would help poor children in her neighborhood, regardless of the ideology of their parents.

We introduce to you Sonia Garro Alfonso, 34, a black woman, somewhat overweight, who lives on Avenida 47 No. 11,638 between 116 and 118, in the populous and humble district of Marianao, at the north end of the City of Havana. If anyone can talk about poverty, prejudice, and setbacks in life, she can.

“I can count the happy moments of my childhood on the fingers of one hand. I am the tenth child in a family of twelve children, desperately poor. Forget Christmas presents. We always wore second-hand clothes given out of charity to my mother by a neighbor. I went to school with my old, broken-down shoes, but with an immense desire, always thinking that studying and outdoing myself could change my fate,” Sonia tells us in the narrow room, panelled with mustard-colored wood, in her precarious two-story house.

Unfortunately for Sonia, her luck did not change in her early youth. On her own, and against obvious shades of racism, during the years when she studied to become a laboratory technician, to climb the hill and leave poverty behind, choking down bread to ward off hunger and be a person who is solvent, it was almost a mission impossible.

“I lived racism firsthand. I remember one day I wanted to make a complaint at the school and the assistant director, with hatred, told me “Go wherever you want, who’s going to listen to the case of a black woman?”  When I graduated from the technical school in laboratory science with a first class degree, they had a ceremony in the Astral theater in the middle of Havana.  The Minister of Public Health was to hand out the diplomas to the most outstanding, and another person from the minister’s circle approached me and said someone else would receive my diploma for me, because to have someone with such black skin in the photo wouldn’t look good. “No offense, it’s not because of racism, but with skin that dark you’ll spoil the photo,” recalls Sonia in her calm voice.

That night, which should have been the happiest of her life, she had to swallow the bitter pill that another person, of the white race, had taken her diploma. She was so humiliated that she left the theater. “I never got that diploma,” she confesses. But as the saying goes, on a skinny dog, all that falls are fleas.

Then, when she was employed in a clinic in her neighborhood, in an “emergency” meeting, she was expelled from the health center for having a husband who was a political opponent. “‘You can do one of two things,’ they told me, ‘either separate from him, or you have to leave the clinic.'” Sonya left.

If anyone has pushed this woman to dissent, and to set her own standards, it is the government itself, with its absurd way of acting. Until for her the light went on. After spending hours sitting on her porch, watching children get hurt, getting stuck between trash dumpsters, playing barefoot and squabbling among themselves, Sonia knew she had to do something.

Then with the help of her husband, she founded the Independent Cultural Recreation Center, on February 24, 2007.  In their house, every afternoon after school, scores of children between 7 and 15 years old meet on the porch and in the living room of their modest home.

The children

“The first rule I have is not to talk about politics at all. I organize activities of drawing and cutting and sewing. My husband, Ramon Alejandro Muñoz, a musician by profession, is in charge of preparing dance choreography and teaching them to play musical instruments. When we can, on weekends we have parties and distribute children’s books and toys. Some foreign non-governmental organizations have helped us with materials and medicines. Also embassies of European Union countries, and individual people, who give us what they can. Because this is not a work of one person,” says Sonia, while showing us many photos of activities with clowns, where the common denominator is the bright smile on the faces of those children.

After that initial experience, Garro decided to go for more. She opened another community center in the El Palenque slum, in the borough of Marianao. If you want to know how El Palenque is, look at photos of a sordid favela of Rio de Janeiro or a shantytown of Port au Prince before the earthquake. It is almost the same. There, Sonia and her partners serve between 16 and 18 children.

What looks like a healthy activity of civilized society, which brings more benefits than problems, has unleashed a small hurricane from the State Security forces of the Cuban state. Accustomed for 51 years that any good idea always starts at the desk of a senior official of the Communist Party, it always raises suspicions and makes a person suspect when a citizen, on her own, creates a project without the support of Father State. And Sonia Garro has had to pay a price for her humanitarian work.

“The government’s response to my social work has been three acts of repudiation and a couple of beatings. The last act of repudiation they tried to give me did not work, because nobody on the block went to support them, they had to march with empty hands,” she says, without animosity or emotion.

Most of the children who attend the project live in little hells at home. Almost all come from dysfunctional families where the father is in jail or his children do not know him. At the very least, revolutionary neighbors, supposedly integrated into the system, “congratulate the Garro Muñoz couple.”

“There are even police who welcome and encourage us for what we do,” says Sonia’s husband.

Sonia Garro is far from being a sociologist or expert, dedicated to studying just why in Cuba, a paradigm of a happy childhood, cases like this occur in her neighborhood. Neither does she want to emulate Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Nor Zilda Arns, the Brazilian doctor who died in Port au Prince as a result of the Haitian earthquake, and left a legacy of thousands of children rescued from poverty and marginalization.

The task of this Cuban is simple. Seeing the children laugh and grow in a healthy environment, free from violence. If in the future these children become professionals, educated in civic values, and not locked up in jail, she will be satisfied. She does not ask for anything more. And that is why she doesn’t understand why her work arouses such resentment among the authorities.

By other pathways, Sonia Alfonso Garro assumed that the State wished to accomplish the same thing. But the government does not think like she does. On the contrary.

Iván García and Laritza Diversent

Translated by: Tomás A.

Beginning at Prado street and ending at Galiano, there is a five-block long pedestrian mall in the heart of Havana, replete with stores that take hard-currency or national pesos. Cafes, barber shops, ice cream parlors, markets, a cinema for children and a jewelry store in decline.

Throughout the year the boulevard is very busy. December, the month of summing up and hospitality, causes city dwellers to shop compulsively. It’s possible that in some of its businesses they can get what they want or need.

At the Belinda store, a group of ladies enter, looking for a set of sheets for their home. Their mouths drop open and they remain speechless when they learn the prices in inflated currency.

Nearby, some guys who are drunk, accompanied by cheerful black girls in the same condition, look both ways and surreptitiously enter by a rusty iron gate what were once the Duplex and Rex theaters. They empty their bladders full of beer, consumed in a nightclub called Palermo, where they usually will hook up with the old, cheap whores who don’t have the option of hooking up with a foreigner.

At the National Cabaret, where the boulevard starts at Prado Street, are a line of men in their fifties and a group of young mestizo girls, with the typical body language of females seeking pleasure, trying to find some “Temba” (men in their fifties) to pay the entry fee to the nightclub. The Disco Temba, as it is known, opens at 4 pm.

A stone’s throw away at the gates of the Hotel Inglaterra, Nordic ‘Vikings’ and fat ‘Iberians’ drink daiquiris, accompanied by tapas of ham, cheese, and olives. They listen raptly to a bad version of Chan-Chan by Compay Segundo. Inside the hotel, a Japanese girl with teenage acne complains in English to a clerk about how expensive Internet service is: a card costs 6 CUC per hour. What shall we Cubans say?

Evening falls and the comings and goings of hurrying people increase. To alleviate the thirst caused by the heat from this end-of-year fire, people drink bottled soft drinks, locally produced, at 5 pesos a bottle. In a kiosk they sell unwrapped bread, exposed to the air, with the appropriate dose of microbes; bread with either pork, ham, or a cheese with a terrible smell.

Wherever you sit, to take a drink, or eat a serving of fried rice or a piece of smoked chicken, you are approached by dirty, mangy dogs, which with pitiful faces beg you to give them your leftovers. They are part of the army of hungry dogs that roam around the entire city.

Beggars also do their part in the streets of downtown Havana. Some shamelessly and even aggressively ask you for money.  Others, with the picture of a saint, usually St. Lazarus, ask you for alms, “preferably in hard currency.”

If you look like you have a foolish face, a crook will try to separate you from your money. You can find everything in the Boulevard of San Rafael. Schemes are constantly hatched and if you don’t look like a cop in civilian clothes, you can buy a gram of coke for 35 CUC or a Creole marijuana cigarette for 25 pesos.

The cobblestone streets are painted with large white squares, surrounded by pots with withered plants that the state gardeners do not look after, disgusted by their low pay.

Now at the far end, at the corner of Galiano and San Rafael, a park is a reminder that in this place once stood El Encanto, one of the most chic department stores in Havana. It was devoured by fire on April 13, 1961, as part of the sabotage before the Bay of Pigs invasion. There were 18 injuries and one fatality, Fe del Valle, the head of the El Encanto’s children’s department.

This story is not known to the children, whites, blacks and mestizos who play soccer with a deflated balloon. A black boy pulls off feints incredible for his age, barefoot and with a faded Kaká T-shirt. His fans, sitting on a wall, applaud the small Cuban Pelé.

Maybe the Boulevard San Rafael does not have the charm of Paris or Barcelona. But it is the only one in Havana: meeting point for Havanans, nostalgia for exiles, and headquarters of private guest houses for outsiders. If you pass through Havana, be sure to visit.

Ivan Garcia

Translated by: Tomás A.

At times I have recurring dreams. One of them is a nightmare. There’s a loud knock at the door, and when I open it a couple of huge burly guys lift me up and without even touching down on the stairway, they throw me into the backseat of a Russian-made Lada 2107.

They put a hood over my face and order me by menacing gestures to put my head between my knees. The last thing I remember before I wake with a start, are the hands of my captors, deformed by an excess of martial arts.

Other dreams are more pleasant. Two hands, warm and soft, waken me. It’s my daughter Melany, age 6, who comes to give me good news. “Grandma Tania, Aunt Tamila, and Cousin Yania, are coming this afternoon from Havana,” the girl tells me happily and rapidly.

Margarita, my wife, explains to my amazement, “The radio is breaking the news. Raúl Castro resigned and established a transitional government.  The first measure taken is that Cuba belongs to all Cubans, and the exiles who want to can return,” says my wife.

I have never seen her so happy.

More than a few times, in the solitude of my room, I have wondered which of these dreams will come true first.

Translated by: Tomás A.

In the bureaucratic and political jargon of my country it’s called Vibora People’s Council. It’s my neighborhood. A piece of geography, extending from Avenida de Acosta to Santa Catalina, and from the Causeway on 10th of October – once called Jesus del Monte, which the poet Eliseo Diego Rodriguez immortalized – to Mayia Rodriguez.

They form a quadrilateral seven blocks long and ten wide. There are many schools like the Institute of Vibora, now a technical and business school, the “Thomas Alva Edison” primary school and “Enrique José Varona” secondary school, once prestigious colleges. Other schools, such as “Pedro Maria”, are now dirty warehouses, and the ancient college of the “Marist Brothers” is the headquarters of the shadowy political police.

When night falls, the Calzada de 10 de Octubre, becomes a catwalk. Repressed gays hunting for a partner. Lesbians with military haircuts, who after drinks kiss desperately at the door of Pain de Paris, an exclusive cafe that takes only convertible currency. Cordova Park is perhaps the largest open-air “hotel” in Havana. Cheap sex in foreign or domestic currency, whichever. You choose your sexual preference.

Later in the morning, old men with sad faces and worn clothes form a line at the Metropolitan Bank — opposite the former home of the Counts of Parraga, today a cultural center — to collect their meager pensions. Also under the cover of darkness, thieves, robbers and voyeurs practice their misdeeds.

When the sun heats up, the nightcrawlers go to bed. And the street is colored yellow, red and brown, the colors of uniforms for secondary, primary and high school. Rushing people gather at bus stops to board lines P-6, P-8, P-9 and P-10, and to try to get to work on time.

The old men who in were line at the bank at dawn are now the first to buy the solitary 80-gram roll that the ration book allows us.

These seven by ten blocks make up the Vibora neighborhood. My home town.

Iván García

Translated by: Tomás A.