Translating Cuba

Eighteen of the 21 articles that make up the contents of the 16th edition of the digital magazine Cuban Voices, presented on Friday, September 7, at the site of the Cuban Blogger Academy, evoke the loss of Oswaldo Paya Sardinas, leader and founder of the Christian Liberation Movement, an emblematic figure of the peaceful opposition in Cuba.

The other articles are two poems from the East, by Daniel H. Palao; Chapters 0 and 1 of the book Memoirs of 100 and Aldabo, by the exiled writer Andy P. Villa; and the critical review Exit Under the Earth, by Jorge E. Lage, who approaches readers with one of the stories of Region, an Anthology of Latin American Politics.

With the funeral on the cover and thirty images inside, accentuate the poignant farewell of the great fighter for human rights on the island, Voices 16 offers a mixture of writings that range from the intimate and poignant evocations from his daughter and his wife, the chronicle of some friends attending the funeral, reflections on the legacy of Paya Sardinas, two discussions about the Swede, Aron Modig, and another on the Spaniard, Angel Carromero, who accompanied the civic leader on his last tour of Cuba, plus the document “The Space of the People,” signed by O. Paya and the Christian Liberation Movement last June.

Emotional, deep and poetic are the offerings by Rosa Maria Paya Acevedo Paya, “In the Last Days, and “Love will not pass and Today makes a month,” by Ofelia Acevedo, the daughter and wife of Paya; followed by the story, “My encounter with Paya,” by the Baptist minister Mario F. Lleonart; “The Nights of St. John Lateran,” by Jorge I. Domínguez; and the testimonial chronology, “The solution is in Cuba and among Cubans,” by the American Tracey Eaton.

Of great analytical quality and equal expository value are brief essays by Yoani Sánchez (Oswaldo Paya and the eternal widowhood Cuba), Rafael Rojas (When an opponent dies), Manuel Cuesta Morua (Reasonable certainty), Mikhail Bonito (The predictable chance) Dagoberto Valdés (Oswaldo Paya: example and legacy), Miriam Celaya (Lights and Shadows from a death), Carlos M. Stephanie (Modig: a “subversive” servant of totalitarianism), Enrique del Risco (Another silent Swede) and Armando de Armas (Notes on the death of Oswaldo Paya Sardinas).

From the narrator Orlando L. Pardo, editor of Voices, is the bittersweet Praise on Carromero, of enormous lucidity, allegorical meaning and scriptural beauty.

The issue of Voices dedicated to the opposition leader partially offsets the disinformation campaign denigrating woven by the Cuban press and other media of the international Left, clinging to the discourse of violence and the exclusionary narrative of the Castro regime. Distributed in PDF format and posted on http://vocescuba.com/, the Journal Voices has been published for two years with newspaper articles, essays, poems, stories, book reviews, interviews and reports. Its pages host thematic reports, tributes and controversies, as well as graphic images with new meaning and at times playful.

September 11 2012

In the blink of an eye the voltage at the symmetrical hour of the prime time news, 8:08 on a Sunday evening, as boring as slitting your wrists, or walking naked in the street with a pacifist placard, or some other symptom of insanity. A blink of an eye and then black silence, deathly. The light goes out, as usual, as if in perverse nostalgia for the ‘90s. A Time Machine, but this time without Fidel.

So paranoid, the mind begins to plot. The cell phones ring. There is no light anywhere in Havana. Sabotage. A bombing. A coup d’etat, the Army against State Security. A trick to transport the Great One’s Casket to the Obelisk and hold the news until early Monday morning. Eternity was, indeed, a Monday. The death of Oswaldo Payá, as his executioners promised in life, announces the fall of the regime. Perhaps a military tactic so the Yankee spy planes won’t detect the troop movements or perhaps the trucks with nuclear missiles camouflaged with sugar cane or moringa leaves or the invasive marabou weed (as happened in the fall of 1962). Soon they will knock on my door and take me, under arrest, to the National Stadium, a concentration camp for the duration of the State of Emergency. The Final Solution of the Fucked. A curfew for the construction of State capitalism. Raúlpolitik. Tihavanamin Square.

The cellphones continue to ring. The batteries run out in the first hour of stars and candles. There is no light anywhere in Cuba. It’s the terror. Rául Castro has fled the country, leaving behind the chaos of an island in its feudal dawn. We are alone. We will be invaded. The sound of an airplane in the abyss of heavens sends us to our knees and my mother starts to pray.

Then come the details by text message. Santiago de Cuba, inhospitable and horrible, has electricity. Also that bottled mess of Camaguey. In Ciego de Avila it went out but came back quickly, village by village and neighborhood by neighborhood. The satellite photos should show a Cuba divided. An Island in high-contrast black and white, extreme expressionism. The liberal and internet-loving West will be punished. The anachronistic East will survive the repression. Black September. I call my loved ones and say goodbye without their noticing. In the midst of the dark ink of the blackout, I realize that I have loved. That I went blind. That I won’t live with them in a future of freedom. That it’s the end of of the Revolution according to Saramago, topped off with a hashtag: #Apagonazo. Number-sign-blackout.

The light of hope is that the cellphones are still working. I am not cut off, although other activists are, like @HablamosPress, and they even received threats from their secret agents not to Tweet even one more character. According to secret colleagues, the www dial-up service isn’t cut either. Some neighbors mobilized to transport fuel to the hospitals, it seems to be a long crisis, but not in the terminal phase. Are there wholesale wounded? At the beginning there was no TV or radio signal, but after a while the Chinese battery-powered receptors picked up it. At worse it was a fake recording from Venezuela, who knows. Or Chavez moved here in a panic with his ALBA treasure to co-govern from here. The truth is they put on transition music, instrumental blinds, debates about the Five Heroes with electricity in their U.S. prison cells, like an overdose, and the most suspicious: Radio Reloj — Clock Radio — doesn’t even mention the blackout, at midnight they are broadcasting recipes and curious “World Knowledge” tidbits, it’s obvious that on Day F their announcers will be forced to talk at gunpoint, like in the incipient spring of 1957. History is a cycle. A circus.

Then it was a part of the War of the Ministry of Basic Industries: just a simple 220,000 volt accident on the central region’s prairies. A relief. I went to bed. Naked. The windows open to a godless cosmos. I composed myself. Stopped typing. Remembered an out-of-phase thermoelectric motor and then an ex-presidential broken kneecap, countless summers ago, in the pre-history of the years zero or two thousand. I breathe. I am perfectly healthy, as Nietzsche said after decades of decadent disease. It passes and with a little luck they forgot about me. At worst it passes and I also survived. Please, don’t wake me up until it’s all over. No one deserves to die more than once.

11 September 2012

 

We are now celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Youth Computer Club (JCC). The initiative itself is positive, because it allows everyone from a housewife to a grandpa to learn about a discipline essential to everyday life.

Beyond these good intentions, the JCC hasn’t escaped the deterioration and corruption that characterizes the country. All the buildings constructed for this purposes are falling into a state of neglect: lack of paint, broken toilets, leaks, neglected gardens and surroundings. They are frequently closed because the air conditioning is broken. The essence of these centers, the computers, for the most part are out of service without replacements, having been “cannibalized” as doubtful but certain alternatives to improve the salaries of the computer teachers. The stoic computers that still work, are blocked or they frequently break.

In theory, at a JCC you can choose a basic computer course, courses in Photoshop, or specialized courses about Microsoft programs; they are still committed, there, to Bill Gates’s programs. Despite having announced two years ago that they were migrating to Nova-Linux, at the JCC where I asked, they didn’t have any courses on Linux nor did they use it as their operating system, nor did any of the young people, much less the young people working there, care about it, not even as additional knowledge.

Reluctantly, you can surf EcuRed, a version of Wikipedia controlled by the government. With all my heart I hope Cubans continue using the portable Wiki which covers everything, and not that monster that confuses and lies. You can also ask for an antivirus and with a little money under the table you can get an only slightly outdated version of Kaspersky anti-virus software.

The internet connection slows down the machines, and for that reason only one (the teacher’s) has access to it. Internet? No, I’m not exaggerating.

September 10 2012

To get freedom we must escape from what oppresses us.

To leave the ranks, dissent, desert what we haven’t even been consulted on. What we have been forced into by necessity. The first reaction is to accept, to resolve, to wait. Until one day you discover that no one is going to do it for you, and you die as a person.

The great conflict of totalitarianism is with the individual. The desire of the system to dissolve you, and the personal decision is not allowed.

The government clan is disposed to make some concession to continue dominating souls which is the ultimate meaning of this class of politics.

Some steal, others have a good job where they can travel abroad and keep their mouths shut and sing hymns to Socialism before the world’s Leftists who should move over here.

There is definitely a gap between those who abhor their freedom and those who know the happiness, light, creation, prosperity, that comes not from any entity outside ourselves and that we must be free and not stand as before a master with police, jails, soldiers and disgusting discourse: ideology. Abiding by the system that demoralizes you, annuls you as a person.

I’m going to give you an example of what happened to me yesterday walking along a street in the neighborhood. There was an old woman sitting in the doorway to the platform of the Tulipan train station. The lady is very old and she sells avocados. If she didn’t need to she wouldn’t be sitting there all day with a box of avocados. She looks like what we Cubans call a “diver” (as in “dumpster diver), or in Europe a “tramp.” Even if she doesn’t collect garbage, the reality is she’s very dirty and poor. Two inspectors pass in front of me and warn her that this is the fourth time today they’ve told her she has to leave and they’re going to fine her 1200 pesos for selling without a license.

The old lady started to cry, she doesn’t have anything to eat and she starts to rant, saying that a subject whose name I don’t want to remember and who is part of the government of this Island had given her permission. The inspectors look at me embarrassed when I tell them just don’t look at the phenomenon they have before them. They can’t invoke the issue of selling unhygienic goods, because avocados come in a package naturally sealed by mother nature.

The inspectors begin to explain to me what it would mean for them to lose their jobs and the bonus of 135 Cuban pesos (about $5 U.S.) more than their miserable salaries. They are afraid of the other inspectors who pass by on motorbikes and take photos of all the “trash” that they have failed to sweep up. They say they’re not happy with their work and because of that, understanding the sensitivity of the case, they’re not going to fine the old lady.

You have to abandon the ranks, explore other fields, dissent. All of us in Cuba have this incredibly serious conflict that reveals the nature of submission. There are limits that must be tested. Not the existential limits, those that mean never renouncing your own self. Jose Lezama Lima said something along the lines of we have to remain in our own night, in the very shadow of our inner self that many times we barter for various forms of dependence.

I’m definitely left with the possibility, as far as work and subsistence are concerned, of knocking on a door that seems to lead to the abyss and in reality it could be the door to freedom. I heard of the case of a person who was interrogated by investigators of the Secret Police at Villa Marista and one of the questions was: How do you live?

Well they know that leaving the ranks also means losing your job and that keeping a job in Cuban inevitably means losing your freedom, taking part, not dissenting, not being an exception.

I am out of work and it’s also demoralizing. In a totalitarian State the individual must renounce being a person and become part of the mass, a sheep, who eats and defecates and grows old watching how evil and unhappiness occupy the space of the light that lives in every person.

Man does not live by bread alone although he lives on bread.

September 10 2012

Information is, without a doubt, one of the primary necessities in the world, especially at this time, when one can find out almost instantaneously what is happening anywhere in the world. When nearly six million people are affected by a cut in the flow of electricity in the middle of the night, the first thing they need is an explanation, so as not to panic.

The “information black out” we suffered in Cuba from Ciego de Avila to Pinar del Rio, left us doubly in the dark, evidence of the enormous fragility of our society. To the extent that people learned of the enormous proportions of the phenomenon and faced with the growing absence of information, rumors ran riot. “What’s happening?” many asked and what a Cuban is left wondering, the first thing that occurs to them is to think that the government is falling, or that someone died and the bombardment is about to begin.

This is what we have come to. The secrecy, lack of transparency, that is the weapon of totalitarianism, can become a boomerang. Who knows if one fine day a blackout will be the sign that there is going to be more light.

10 September 2012

In a country where power cuts have been an inseparable part of our lives, we should not be surprised when the lights go out. But yesterday, at 8:08 pm, something happened that raised the alarms. First we lost our television signal, during the very first minutes of the prime time news. Then, Havana blacked out entirely, to an extent and over an area we can’t remember happening, even during the worst of the hurricanes. Reports then started to come in from the various provinces confirming that from Pinar del Rio (90 miles to the west of us) to Camaguey (300 miles to the east of us) the Island was in darkness. More than five million Cubans in the shadows, wondering what was happening.

Five hours later the electricity began to flow again in the neighborhood where I live. I ventured to scribble on paper some of the peculiarities of what happened. I transcribe them here:

• The electrical blackout was accompanied by an information blackout. Over the more than four hours, the official media said nothing about what was happening. With our battery radios, many of us turned the dial in search of an explanation, but the national broadcasters maintained silence. Radio Reloj (Clock Radio), which should have been giving us up-to-the-minute details of national and international events, talked about everything but the most important thing. So we heard a recipe for fish medallions, the benefits of having a mammogram, beautiful Brazilian legends about water… and the discovery of “prehistoric shoes” at archeological sites. Everything, except what we wanted to know: What has happened that half the country can’t see their hands in front of their faces?
• People began to despair. The police patrol cars ran their sirens in the streets and now and then we heard a fire engine pass by. Trucks with their “state of siege” lights patrolled the area along the Malecon. This increased people’s fear, and together with the news blackout generated apprehension and a great deal of speculation.
• The incident demonstrated the lack of foresight on the part of the Electric Company with regards to situations like this. A few places managed to run their generators and in outlying neighborhoods they asked their own neighbors if they had any oil reserves they could have to jump start these electric plants.
• That this blackout happened on a windless day caused particular concern; there was no cyclone deluging us with rain, no solar storm particularly focused on the largest of the Antilles. What then was the cause of a failure of such proportions?
• The Twitter social network again proved its informational effectiveness. An hour after the darkness descended, the Internet was already offering alternative reports on its geographic dimensions. It was not long before we had a hashtag for the situation: #Apagonazo. While the official media made it clear that they can only inform to the extent they are authorized to do so, the alternative news networks demonstrated their importance, not only when it comes time to denounce an outrage or an arrest, but also during natural disasters, weather hazards, and accidents of any kind.
• The much-trumpeted Energy Revolution, among whose “conquests” was to prevent this kind of monumental blackout, demonstrated its failure once again. Even the emblematic Morro Castle in Havana Bay lost its lighthouse lamp, which some associate ironically with the joke: “Will the last person leaving Cuba please turn off el Morro…”
• More than half of those who called me in alarm during the time of darkness associated the event with some government problem. Phrases in the style of, “it’s broken…” were repeated from all sides. The media disinformation strengthened this impression. Which is a sign of the political and social fragility of a nation, when a several hour blackout can lead its citizen to think that the whole system has imploded. Significant, right?
• Someone commented to me that the General-President “was demanding the blood” of the directors of the Ministry of Basic Industry… I limited myself to responding better he should ask for electricity, because it’s very easy to demand that others be held accountable when we all know who makes the nation’s major decisions about energy.
• After a long silence, at midnight a brief note was read on TV, so cryptic that it generated still more speculations. They attributed the incident to a break in the 220,000 volt line near Ciego de Avila. So far they haven’t added any details.
• Gradually, over the course of the night, electricity was restored in the capital and in most other affected areas. There are no reports of any damages caused, although surely there must be many.
• In the end we are left with the conviction that the country is in such a precarious material state that an incident like this could happen again. And, what’s worse, that the national media will maintain its habitual secrecy.

Translator’s note: “Apagone” is the word for blackout, and the suffix “azo” means, more or less, “a blow or a strike.” Protests are often named using the suffix “azo”; so the 1994 riots on the Malecon were dubbed the “Maleconazo,” while Gorki Aguila called his protest against surveillance cameras, carried out on his balcony, a “balconazo.”

10 September 2012

The Rosa Parks Women’s Movement for Civil Rights announces that on Thursday it held its second weekly march in honor of the fallen despite the brutal arrests the members were subject to during the first march on 30 August; so we put out a wake-up call to national and international public opinion urging them to closely follow our march and that we fear for our lives.

These marches, which are called the weekly Rosa Parks Movement Marches to Honor the Fallen replace the earlier marches that were held by the women on the first of each month and will begin at the national headquarters of this movement which is located on Seventh Street South, No. 5, between Paseo Marti and Primera del Este in the municipality of Villa Clara, Placetas. The path of the march will be from Paseo to Primera del Norte, where it will turn left, returning to Park Cazayas to the Catholic church of St. Athanasius at this location.

These marches will be extended to the length and breadth of the island as above. The activists of the Movement chose Thursdays unanimously to hold the march, as the Day of the Orlando Zapata Tamayo National Civic Resistance Front and Civil Disobedience to which we are affiliated, and our dress will remain our usual black clothes of mourning, as we reflect on those who fell defending the homeland, praying the Our Father for each arrest caused by the repressive forces.

St. Athanasius Catholic Church, where the women of the Rosa Parks attend Mass every Thursday, is located on West Second Street and the corner of North First Street in the municipality Placetas, Villa Clara province.

Submitted in Placetas on September 5, 2012.

September 5 2012

At home, illuminated by the will-o’-the-wisp of a country

September 1 2012

As in many other places, in Cuba in recent years TV series about forensic science and documentaries about criminal investigations have become very popular. Crime reconstructions and programs with police experts have become favorites of many people. Where DVDs are sold, these themes are among the most demanded by buyers. Thus, the lists of offerings from self-employed video sellers never fail to include combos with programs such as CSI, Dr G: Medical Examiner, Criminal Investigation, The FBI Files… among many others. It’s not that we’ve become morbid, or maybe we have, but that the quality of these materials has improved significantly in the last decade. They mix science, police work, a pinch of emotional entanglement and some rather didactic explanations about the workings of the human body. In short, an irresistible compendium to relax after the daily tedium. Beyond their low artistic value, the truth is that they posses an audience that other TV offerings — with an excess of ideology and a creative anemia — envy.

But today I do not want to reflect on the fictional pathologist who exposes the murderer, nor the actor who plays a modern detective in an impeccably clean laboratory. No, those are just a part of a script meant to entertain and you can take it or leave it. My concern, rather, is something else: the constant leaks of forensic material — real and raw — to the alternative information networks, systematically produced from the offices of Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior. Autopsy photos, videos of crime reconstructions, photos taken by the police at the crime scene, statements made by the accused in front of the cameras. Hardly a month goes by that we don’t see, circulating on cellphones and flash memories, parts of crime files that should be guarded with discretion and anonymity. And it’s not about photos taken by some intruder who invades the scene, or some paparazzi, but rather evidence contained in police archives. So, one day you lose a relative in some tragic event and — horrors! — the next thing you see is that the moment they cut a “Y” incision on the autopsy table has become an incredibly popular snuff movie.

It’s odd that the Ministry of the Interior, which works with such great secrecy on political issues or espionage, administers its common crime archives with so little zeal. It’s true that due to this negligence we sometimes learn about events that we wouldn’t otherwise know about, such as the deaths of dozens of patients at the Havana Psychiatric Hospital. But in the vast majority of cases, the indiscretion is not tied to a revelation, but rather to a deep intrusion into the life — or death — of an individual. With the consequent additional pain for his family, who are forced to see the viscera of their father or their brother cross the screens of thousands of computers all over the country. It saddens me that someone knocks on my door to show me a body in a morgue on the screen of their Nokia, and I realize the photo was taken by those who should ensure privacy, including that of the dead. I’m frightened by this most recent manifestation our of prolonged disrespect for citizen privacy which our society is suffering. It seems abominable to me that someone from the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution betrays her neighbors, that a teacher reports on the political ideas of his own students, that a doctor speaks on television about a consultation with a patient; and now is added a flippancy with forensics as a final piece of this mechanism of indiscretion.

This is not a fictional series, nor an episode where Grissom caught the murderer after investigating the stomach contents of a larva. This is reality, the concrete pain of the family of the victim, the respect that every human being deserves, even though they’ve stopped breathing. Their nakedness, their wounds, their rigor mortis, their helplessness in the chill of the morgue, no one has the right to leak that. Much less the people who are there to ensure that this terribly sad moment is not converted into a piece of exhibitionism.

10 September 2012