In less than a year the Cuban opposition has lost two of its most important leaders. On October 14 of last year life of Laura Pollán, the principal coordinator of the Ladies in White and the key figure in the release of the Black Spring prisoners, was cut short. A week ago a car crash, yet to be fully explained, claimed the life of Oswaldo Payá, founder of the Christian Liberation Movement.
These activists had great national and international recognition and their physical absence comes at a time when the dissidence is seeking new horizons. Hence, the need to analyze the scenario in which these deaths have occurred, and their potential impact on the immediate future.
On thing about which there is no doubt, is that the Cuban opposition on the Island is characterized by its peaceful nature and its renunciation of armed violence. It prefers to base its actions in political programs, documents demanding respect for Human Rights, street demonstrations, signs painted on facades, or simply open door meetings.
It behaves and manifests a much more democratic behavior than the government installed in the Plaza of the Revolution. Within the ranks of the dissidence there is a great variety of opinions with respect to possible paths and outcomes of the transition. Although some of these routes diverge, there are numerous points on which all converge. The urgent need for political, social and economic changes is the common thread that runs through civil society.
Calls to end the harassment of dissidents, arbitrary arrests and politically motivated prison sentences, form a part of this common agenda. In addition, everyone agrees that Raúl Castro’s government has exhausted its solutions to pressing national problems.
To talk or to overthrow
Although many schemes have been offered to classify the Cuban opposition, most of the studies have focused on the political leanings of the groups within it. Some analysts have established generational breaks, between the historical opposition and much younger actors. In practice, however, it is not political colors or age that differentiate most markedly the dissimilarities between dissident organizations. A key point is the legitimacy they assign to Raúl Castro’s government in their agendas and their proposals for change.
Some maintain that dialog with the authorities could possibly lead to a non-violent transition. Within this line of thinking are distinguished figures such as José Daniel Ferrer, president of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, who believes that “dialog is possible, but from a position of strength within civil society.”
Others dismiss any attempt to deal with the regime, basing their posture on the fact that it was not chosen by a vote of the people in free and direct elections. They see the Communist Party as a kidnapper of hostages with whom there should be no negotiations under any circumstances. To negotiate or to overthrow seem to be the two poles around which current opposition forces are defined.
The United States embargo also constitutes a parting of the ways that defines postures and platforms. Within the Island, many dissidents argue that economic restrictions must be maintained to strangle the government. They believe that allowing fluid trade with the United States or allowing Americans to travel to Cuba would be a source of fresh air that would strengthen the General-President. José Luis García (known as Antúnez), an opposition leader from the center of the Island is one of the main champions of this position.
The great challenge of the people
The Cuban dissidence is denied any opportunity to access the mass media. This significantly limits its ability to broadcast its proposals and political programs. Instead of allowing them even one minute in front of the microphone, Raúl Castro’s government uses television and the official press to accuse them of being “mercenaries in the pay of the Empire,” or “tiny groups of no importance.”
Human rights activist Elizardo Sánchez, opposition leader Martha Beatriz Roque, Catholic layperson Dagoberto Valdés, and the Ladies in White group have all been frequent targets of these media stonings. From different perspectives, these social actors could be key in the years to come, along with several socio-cultural projects such as Estado de Sats, directed by Antonio Rodiles, which even attracts people involved in State institutions. To support these activities with a constant dissemination of information becomes vital, hence the importance of independent journalists and alternative bloggers.
In the current scenario, Oswaldo Payá’s death raises the question of the future of the Christian Liberation Movement, which has many members throughout the Island. That this political force manages to survive the death of its founder will demonstrate the maturity of the entire Cuban opposition.
On the other hand, Raúl Castro has co-opted some of the points that made up the agenda of his political opponents. The aperture for small private businesses, the ability to buy and sell houses and cars, and the leasing of vacant land in usufruct, are all part of the measures implemented by the government in the last four years. Such a scenario obliges the opposition groups to chart new horizons and to redefine their proposals.
Rosa María Payá speaking at her father’s wake (O.L. Pardo Lazo)
The trashed cityscape reaches all the way to the gate of the parish, in the arid Cerro neighborhood. “The Savior of the World,” says the sign, so distant from the desert outside, beyond the gates. And one thinks, sleepwalking before sunrise: how poor any form of expression is in this country.
Dawn lingers on the park benches. The wake is supposed to start at 8:00 am, but there are only the little workers brigades, trying, on this Monday, to make up for decades of decadence: mowers, sprayers, trash collectors which, like the cop cars, pass and pass again without picking up anything. Everyone pretends it’s normal. It’s July 23rd and since yesterday Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas is dead.
They had promised it to him by word and with attacks, which he survived without even realizing it. It doesn’t matter with whom or how they fulfilled their promise. The idea is that there will be no Nobel Peace Prize in Cuba if Fidel Castro doesn’t win it first.
In a nightmarish sequence, Payá’s body, with his 60 years and thousands of signatures collected to reestablish our nation, fell so far away, a province whose name didn’t exist before the Revolution: Granma… An accident among strangers, Europeans with presidential ambitions who now will be anything but witnesses to the truth. A catastrophe without the protection of his brave and beautiful family, near this deadly Bayamo of the National Anthem.
It was the end of an era of a deceptive balancing act between the dissidence and the torturers: a declaration of war, although it seems exaggerated. And before so much horror, to the first curious we can only speculate what not even the Christ of the Democrats would dare to type here now: if it was carelessness or a paid assassin, if he died without suffering in the act, or perhaps looked with terror at the paramedics or the paramilitary or both, if he repented and assumed his martyrdom without the final temptation to betray himself.
The hearse traveled from the Oriente to Havana under an insulting sun without optimal conservation measures (or came secretly by air and the delay was only a ploy to pressure his family: living in Cuba is a lot like a police procedural). In the text messages we received and resent like automatons, the funeral was postponed until 11 am, and then to the secret hour permitted by State Security, already mid-afternoon when, amid the cellphones and tears, Oswaldo’s box made its entrance flush with the crowd.
Mass for Oswaldo Paya Sardinas. (O.L.PARDO)
By then the church sheltered almost a whole spontaneous congress of the Cuban opposition, from its media stars to the anonymous infiltrating agents of the last generation. The operation of control this time would play at not interfering with the ceremony and conceded everything his widow asked for (except the resuscitation of her love of 26 years). The irrepressible applause burst forth as the coffin advanced, in an unsuspected consensus from minutes earlier, erasing rancor and caudillos, displaying everyone’s best side before the memory of a good man who saw like no one else the promised land and, not to disprove the Bible, never managed to inhabit it.
It was not a private wake, but every time they felt invaded, the church’s young strongmen limited the labor of the cameras, cautioning us not to disturb “the suffering of the family.” A most dignified pain and more real than any other sentiment I remember in my life. But pain in public and not behind closed doors. That is, a pain that needed to be captured in all its beauty and brutality, in all its strength and fragility, in all its decency and denunciation, until it infected our sleepiest fibers, so that the world would understand the debacle that just occurred on the Island: another death the naturalness of which not even death itself trusts.
When the cries of “Freedom! Freedom” startled the pastor, with a nervous gesture implored the wife to calm the flock. And Ofelia complied in the name of Oswaldo, taking the microphone for the first time, and was instantly obeyed.
But perhaps her husband would have preferred that the music of throats and hands was never quelled, that explosion of sympathy that went from the intimate to the social, that instant plebiscite between indignation and revolutionary: it lacked nothing then to rip out the roots of resignation and appropriate the august corpse to take the Plaza by assault.
Perhaps the Christian Liberation Movement had never counted on such a quorum and this posthumously late, between grief and fear, compelled to say goodbye to their leader with more than incense and rosaries. An instant later, silence, it was obvious that we thousands gathered there will never play a leading role among the people, and the death of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas will be diluted in the government statistics of the Traffic Division.
Foreign broadcasters crowded in line hoping for my cell phone, while I chronicled tweet by tweet trying to be the eyes and the heart of an ever more desperate diaspora. In exhaustive detail, exhausted. I took eleven million photos and video clips, approach the main altar where the coffin rested with wreaths of flowers and a flag, but I never joined the infinite line expressing condolences to his family for hours.
Perched dangerously above Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, I saw his bruised face reminiscent of a fight, a trickle of blood without a biography flowing from his mind, his chest sunken under his Cuban shirt, his smile disappeared, his eyelids stoned, and I trembled before the remains whom I had admired from my ignorance and whom I defrauded before reading it by not signing the most virtuous Varela Project and in exchange, indeed, the socialist mummification of our Constitution, an anti-constitutional outburst with which Fidel Castro took his personal revenge on him.
His daughter Rosa María, whom I had heard on the underground radio like a miracle of courage and faith in human justice, emphatically imposed on me without knowing me, “I don’t want photos of my father’s face.” But I treasured much more than that. I had managed to cry softly, moved by so much helplessness among my contemporaries, infinitesimal beings when not infantilized, at the intemperance of a State incapable of communicating a single word to us, except those of our stigmatization by decree (and at this same time they humiliated the Payá Acevedo family with vicious vermin on the web, without a note of protest coming from the Catholic Church nor from any other denomination).
With the setting of the sun came the Eucharist and then followed the deepest midnight. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything. I was tired and my clothes were drenched by the vile summer. My Nokia and Canon batteries had given out. I went home and looked at my mother, who still suspected nothing, and gave her a hug as if suddenly it was me who would never come home again. I don’t want my accident to catch me without having said I love you to those I love.
But totalitarianism is exactly that surprise, you can always be removed from their spaces: from the cradle to school to high school to the brigade to the hut to the desk to the prison cell to the firing squad wall to the ambulance to the chapel to exile to heaven to the pantheon.
I returned to The Savior of the World church and lay down on the Plaza Galicia’s benches, amid the sacred snores of some Ladies in White. Inside the temple a few crestfallen mourners slept. I felt unpunished, indolent, and wanted to take the flag off the coffin, this heroic rag shared by saints and soldiers. Cuba tired. Outside was the most beautiful morning. The ceiba trees, a fingernail moon, the damp chill misting the pale streetlights and my eyelashes: this time there were tears without crying, a salt trickle flowing from my backward mind. Why do I stay in this citizenless cenotaph? They make you want to flee and not be killed. But, as long as I am free of so much hopelessness, I was enamored of those few words dictated despotically be despair, and now I came back for more photos of her father’s soul.
Tuesday dawned, and not having breakfast or perhaps the Cardinal’s weather made me want to vomit. Jaime Ortega y Alamino demagogued that “the aspiration to participate in the political life of the nation is a right and a duty of a lay Christian,” and even dared to quote Pope Benedict XVI who, when in Havana, had time to greet tyrannical atheists but not a lay Christian democrat with the last name of Payá: “let no one be impeded from joining this enthralling work by the limitation of their fundamental freedoms.” I had already heard this quoted on the jail TV, in His Holy Manipulated Mass of the month of March, and with hundreds of Cubans jailed on a prophylactically Catholic basis, with the consent of his spokesman Orlando Márquez in the Communist Party newspaper named with the same six letter word of accidental death as that unfortunate province: Granma…
Funeral of Oswaldo Paya Sardinas. (O.L. PARDO LAZO)
All ritual is reiteration. Botched, yawn. But at the end of the funeral liturgy she returned to speak, there, a sliver of unspeakable Cuban truth. Rosa María Payá spoke with more spirit than a half century of erudite fakers. She accused without panic, although she was preparing her own gallows. She left hatred outside her discourse like the testament of a twenty something in terminal danger. From the elementary particle, the divine word, wherein is incarnated the mute honor — the prostituted honor — of this nation. The bishops stared at the infinite, faceless, masks of glass of those who couldn’t throw even the final stone. And then her mother Ofelia Acevedo, with a manifesto that claimed the right to fight from the peaceful opposition to be free beings in Cuba and not to die in the attempt.
Minutes later, a few yards away, the rapid response mobs and the police beat dozens of those present who, for trying to accompany the coffin on foot, never made it to the cemetery. Nor to their homes.
Rather than narrating the standing ovation goodbye at the cemetery, I would like to end with the horror still coagulating over the surviving witnesses from the rental car where Payá and his young collaborator Harold Cepero died. From promising European politicians, Ángel Carromero and Jens Aron Modig have become victims of verisimilitude for life. Whatever they say at this time of mystery and misery, their declarations will now echo with intrigue, traps, torture. I affirm it with the sarcasm of my own involuntary sacrifice: if both of them were to agree now that a flying saucer with the initials INRI* bombarded them on leaving Bayamo, their alibi would sound more sincere and less vulturous.
We Cubans do ourselves in. Cuba buries us. I haven’t slept a wink since then. Insomnia is a very persistent thing. Rest in peace if you can, first president of the country who wasn’t. What’s wrong with us.
At last week’s celebration of the 26th of July something happened I didn’t quite understand. The program stated that Machado Ventura was going to speak, but then the General/President also spoke. It seems someone asked him to and people went along with it. After a speech by Machado Ventura — his oratory is unmistakeable, saying what everyone expects and in the most boring possible way — anything is welcome. And Raúl, when he improvises, has the virtue of using Cuban slang and relating trifling events, which is relaxing. And after a tirade from Machado one needs to relax.
Raúl dropped some interesting tidbits. One of them referred to the issue of wages. Given a population that spends the month — as my friend Henry says — “smoking under water” (that is making silk purses out of sows’ ears), the General/President declared that there will be no increases in salaries until there is an increase in production, especially in food. Which is very confusing in so many ways, but particularly in the fact that the reforms come to a halt right at the heart of things: the immense and dilapidated State economy. And in the lack of effective policies to jump start the agricultural economy.
And the responsibility for all this is primarily the orator’s, who has spent his six years in power playing around the edges, rummaging through other people’s pockets, with an economy that grows only in the government statistics. That is, inevitably, the General/President has to say as Sor Juana Inés said to the men of her day: you pay for the sins you condemn.
He then noted that doctors earn very little, but so, he said “do we all.” Another vulgarity because as it happens, and the whole world knows it, everyone, as he said everyone, obviously, does not have to count pennies. The overwhelming majority do, yes, but not all. And what puts some on one side of the line where very little is earned, and others on the side where a great deal is earned, is not a gamble or bad luck, but the result of the very politics and practices that animate the system commanded by the General.
And this is interesting for the following reason. The functionaries, intellectuals and academics faithful to the system, including the half-asleep journalists and badly-paid official bloggers frequently mention “the losers,” that is the people who will inevitably lose with an economic adjustment, needed, they say, for the economy to take off. There are a lot of dark corners here, because they are the same people who have been the preferred victims of belt-tightening: teachers, State employees, retirees, slum dwellers, women, young people entering the labor market, etc. etc.
Only our economists — who celebrate the Chinese model while condemning the Chilean — never clarify that these people are sacrificed, helpless to defend themselves or negotiate, because in an authoritarian regime like Cuba’s — as happened in Chile and is happening in China — there are no independent labor unions or social associations who represent the interest of the helpless “losers.”
But nobody — certainly not the anguished General/President — speaks about the winners. That is the tiny minority of people who better their economic and social situations and eventually become the dominant class in the emerging capitalism. This elite is already visible, and there are places in the principal Cuban cites, and especially in Havana, that serve as the seat for a kind of consumption and behavior that has nothing to do with the discourse of Machado Ventura. But everything to do with the descendants of people like Machado Ventura.
So while it is true that in this group of elite consumers there are many people who have arrived through a combination of talent and market opportunities — artists, writers, small entrepreneurs — these reasons have very little to do with the recruitment of the other chosen ones of the new Cuban capitalism. The most important group of the new elite are made up of those who appropriated the best houses in the best places to rent rooms (or even to run small hotels with very sophisticated services) or to open restaurants; or those who have the best higher-up contacts for joint-ventures, or those who run the best businesses to partner with foreign capital.
In short, those who had relations, political protections, information, and the cunning and astuteness to slide through the intricacies of an infernally corrupt system, all the while swearing allegiance to socialism.
These people, needless to say, do not have the low incomes that, according the General/President, are suffered by all Cubans. They are the winners of a divvying up of the spoils from the work of others, the frustrated expectations, and the dangerous resentments of millions of people of several generations.
People whom our economists call — simply — the losers.
Again, Cuba’s general-president has offered his gastronomic policy to the American president. “The table is set…” said a Raúl Castro who appeared erratic and inconsistent at the podium this 26th of July, as if a touch of rum had been added to his morning coffee. He laughed at his own bad jokes like some street corner drunk, alternating with pathetic bravado. The public appearances of the Cuban leaders are a real embarrassment to the nation. Unfortunately for him, despite his antics the government to the north doesn’t seem interested in the love feast, perhaps because it’s unworthy of democratic governments to negotiate with dictators.
Most contradictory is that in the same address just minutes before, Castro II had accused the “empire” of trying to subvert order in Cuba and of hoping that the same thing would happen here as in Libya or Syria, using for this the internal dissent (mercenary, annexationist, submissive). It is at least paradoxical that a government resists dialog with its own opposition and with all representatives of alternative civil society and, instead, tries to sit down at the negotiating table with a foreign government and, what’s more, with one distinguished with the official epithet of “enemy.” The general insists on declaring that Cuba is sovereign but calls into question such sovereignty by wanting to resolve the internal conflicts of a nation with the power that supposedly provokes them. The apotheosis of absurdity.
On the other hand, it is the Cuban authorities and not the dissidents who are leading the violence within Cuba, which reinforces the thesis that official fear becomes hatred and repression. For many years opposition sectors have tried to establish a path for dialog with the government, without success. The world is a witness to the fact that the Cuban dissidence, contrary to that of other countries, uses peaceful methods to promote its demands and is not armed, so it does not constitute a danger to national security.
The government, however, is a powder keg that threatens internal peace and it is increasing the pressure on a conflict with unpredictable consequences. Far from recognizing the legitimate right of citizens to dissent and propose alternatives, given the acute structural crisis of the system, the military caste has chosen to increase the persecution and harassment against all demonstrations of civic dissent. Furthermore, it appears to have a strategy directed at assassinating selected leaders of the opposition and of independent civil society.
In October 2011 it was Laura Pollán, this time they got rid of Oswaldo Payá, an opponent who fought for democratic changes in Cuba for more than 20 years and who put the government in a straitjacket with his Varela Project, forcing them to unmask themselves with the farce of a plebiscite on “eternal socialism.” Events show that they didn’t forgive him.
It must be made clear that the Island’s authorities are directly responsible for the turn of events in Cuba. A nation is not governed based on terror and force, nor on negotiating with foreign powers. The government, incapable of overcoming the internal crisis and recognizing citizens’ rights, increasingly loses any semblance of legitimacy before Cubans.
A peaceful solution to Cuba’s problem is becoming ever more elusive, thanks the stubbornness of an olive-green gerontocracy; but in any case, it is not ethical to dialog with assassins. Perhaps when some come to understand that a negotiated solution is preferable, they will find themselves at an empty table.
Note: I could not find a picture on official government websites of R. Castro standing on the podium on July 26, 2012.
“The enemies of the Revolution, both those within and those without — under the umbrella of criticizing the supposed slowness or lack of boldness of the adopted measures — hide their true intentions of restoring the shameful regime existing in Cuba until 1959.”
The above quote is one of the pearls shed by José Ramón Machado Ventura, second to the General-President, in his statement at the event for the 59th anniversary of the 26th of July. His boss later took the podium where, in an improvised speech, he announced that the table was set for talks with the Americans, but this has already been talked about too much and I won’t add fuel to the fire.
It turns out, according to the guidelines emanating from the highest levels, that accelerating the speed or imparting boldness to the adopted measures is a sign of counter-revolutionary conduct. Because, according to what we are told, the ideologically correct thing is to advance little by little, without haste, but without pause, as the Revolutionary gradualist Raúl Castro frequently repeats.
On more than one occasion I have said “the adopted measures” go in the right direction but lack the necessary depth and adequate velocity. And I think they go in the right direction because they don’t dictate the closure of private businesses, nor the suspension of self-employment, as happened in the notorious Revolutionary Offensive of March 1968. It is not a nationalizing but a “cooperativizing” and in some ways privatizing, although slowly and superficially.
Those of us who think it should be accelerated are now accused of wanting to return to the past. When in reality the only thing the leaders of this process would be delighted to return to are the earlier times when the Soviet Union existed. They would return with pleasure to those decades when Cuba was a subsidized satellite that sent troops to Africa to indulge the geopolitical appetites of one of the contenders of the Cold War. In return we barely received technological junk, so that the government could buy our loyalty with an Aurika washing machine, a Krim TV or, in the best of cases, a Lada car. This is not velocity, my dear Machado, but a direction that leads to a destination. The slowness only serves to buy time before the inevitable.
“You don’t understand — my son told me — that gentleman believes in the time machine, pure Theory of Relativity: if you go very fast, you could get to the past.”
In the Savior of the World Church in the Cerro neighborhood
Absurd and suspicious. No matter what the News says. He was a man threatened with death. The News emphasized the years of experience of the experts who established the responsibility for the accident, and I think they belong to the same Ministry where the order came from to threaten Oswaldo Payá and his family.
Not to mention other, earlier “accidents.” Assaults, road crashes, pure Department of State Security (DSE) style. Didn’t we see it in the movie I Am The Other Cuba? I think it was Voltaire who said: “Slander boldly, something always sticks.” If this time it was a political assassination ordered from some obscure department, executed by some soulless assassin in the service of power and ideology, we’ll never know, as the most impartial investigation is out of the hands of the mourners.
Nor is this our right as Cubans. For decades everything has been occupied by the Communist Party, they wash away and they spread filth. Paraphrasing Oedipus one could say: “Let us never be a toy in the hands of the Party.”
Monday they held a wake for him in the Church in Cerro and my daughter and I went. Too many omissions in my life to also miss this evening… wake. Nor could I greet Oswaldo Payá in life. In the years when the Varela Project surged, I was in my twenties, I did not want to be responsible for anything, nor take part, even though secretly I sympathized with the idea and wanted to revoke all the power that was running the government of the country.
And how brilliantly did Oswaldo Payá resolve the constitutional character with the Varela Project. And how many beatings did they suffer in those years, the Cubans who were verbally explaining to the people, as they had no other way, what the Varela Project was all about.
The signers knew what they were risking. At the least, social exclusion which is bad enough, but there are other levels of retaliation languishing in Cuba: prison and death. And indeed they collected 20,000 signatures and more as stipulated in the Constitution to legitimate the opposition to the leader of the Communist Party.
The tall man in the center is Guillermo Fariñas who was arrested shortly after this photo was taken.
But the Baal Fidel Castro, once again on the Platform, comparing the way things are resolved in Cuba made people sign without explaining much of the why of such a flippant request where the Constitution of Cuba would be changed to make Socialism and himself irrevocable, and then he undertook the manhunt that would reach its zenith in the Cuban Black Spring of 2003.
In the church many friends were waiting for the body. It’s hard for me to talk about it because I showed up yesterday so to speak. I felt such great respect for them that I doubt any description I can offer of the hours I spent there. In fact at half past four I still had not reached the coffin and had to return home with my daughter and only had news of the events when Agustín came; he had carefully documented the hours that followed, where important events occurred — like the arrests of Fariñas and Roldiles — in his blog Dekaisone, which I particularly recommend your reading.
Miguel Coyula (a jury member for the exhibition) on the resignation of Fernando Pérez from the presidency of ICAIC* Young Filmmakers Exhibition:
RESIGNATION
I understand and respect Fernando’s decision. Beyond whether it was artistically accomplished or not, the short-film Despertar [Awaken] deserved to be shared with the public.
Enough already.
I hope that Exhibition continues to move forward, but it won’t be the same after having been stomped on. I believe in resigning. I have been antisocial since I was a child; it’s a question of my personality. But I have not resigned from making films, from creating. It is the only thing over which I can have absolute control in life. Political systems, religions, structures of power, movements, leaders, they all end up disappointing us because those at the top always make decisions that leave us disappointed and helpless, especially when our interests are distant from those of the majority.
Sacrifice? No. Not for anything other than creation.
I also believe in individuals, in friends, but never in the masses because they have always been manipulated throughout the history of humanity. In my case, there is nothing new to be said. I am not going to wrap it up with a lot of verbiage to soften the message: of course that I am fed up with the censorship in my country. This is the result of a political structure that is rotten to the core, which IS NOT GOING TO IMPROVE, NOR WILL IT BE REPLACED BY A BETTER ONE because the mutilation suffered will last for several generations, and nor does there exist in the rest of the world, another humanist alternative implemented with an effectiveness that seduces me.
I know I am apocalyptic.
That is why I make films and not politics. I have no vocation for the second, and if I had, I would surely be a dictator. I prefer to be an apathetic in the physical world, instead of screwing over people’s lives. Experimenting only within a screen of images and motion. Living closer to the hermit, creating an inner world of imperfect universes with freedom of a totalitarian subjectivity. An improbable mix of cynicism and romanticism but, at least for me, it has been the only way to sleep peacefully.
Ailer Gonzalez (left), Raudel Collazo (center) — the subject of the film — and Ricardo Figueredo (right) — the filmmaker. Photo: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
The tree against which, according to the official version, the car of Oswaldo Payá and his companions crashedThe death of Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero, occurred according to the official version by accident while traveling in a rental car, driven by a Spanish citizen with a tourist visa, and it could take as many years as the regime endures to know the reality of what happened.
According to the authorities the accident was caused by the driver of the vehicle traveling at excessive speed and without due attention to his control.
Those imputations involve violations of Articles 102 and 126 of the Highway Safety Code. According to the glossary of terms and definitions of the code, a traffic accident is defined as the incident occurring on the road on which a moving vehicle is operated and, as a result, death, injury to persons or property damage occurs.
Therefore, given the facts in the official version, technically the driver of the vehicle in which Oswaldo Payá and his companion were killed has committed a crime. And, under Article 177 of the Penal Code, the driver of a vehicle violating the traffic laws or regulations that causes the death of a person, shall be punished by imprisonment of one to ten years.
According to Article 183 of the code itself, the courts can adjust the penalty, taking into account, the degree of seriousness of the offense that caused the accident, according to the classification in the Highway Safety Code and, in the case of offenses with whose major or minor seriousness has not been determined specifically for traffic law, the court will use its judgment, taking into account the greater or lesser probability of creating the accidents incurred.
As for the term of the trial, in accordance with Article 479 of the Criminal Procedure Act, in the case where exceptional circumstances so warrant, the Attorney General of the Republic may appeal to the Chief Justice, and he may decide through a summary process the offenses within the jurisdiction of any court of justice, thus reducing the terms prior to trial. This could be done in a very short time, rather than taking months.
Sentencing of foreigners is provided for in Article 7.1 of the Criminal Code and foreigners sentenced to imprisonment by the Cuban courts may be delivered to complete their sentences in the the countries of which they are citizens.
Knowing the interrogation procedures, the prospect of a season in Cuban prisons and the natural survival instinct of man, and noting that there are two dead through alleged violations of the Highway Safety Code, they are now looking at ten years in prison, and one wonders if there is a reality other than the official version, and what other statement the driver of the car in which Payá and his Swedish comrade were traveling might have made.
On one side of the balance is a summary trial and a minimum sentence with a prompt execution of sentence in his country of origin, while on the other side is a long process and who knows how many years in prison.
Hopefully Payá and Harold were not victims of a crime. A new crime in a country where mistrust and hatred grow every day as a result of political segregation, not convenient to anyone.
Hopefully the pain of these deaths will not be joined by that of murder. Sadly, only time will have the last word.
Cuban Science Fiction Feature shot guerrilla style, mixing documentary and fiction through heavy use of digital manipulation. Currently seeking funds for its completion.
Synopsis:
After the boom in Human Genetic Engineering, octogenarian leader Fidel Castro sets out to build a superior New Man that will transform the crumbling Cuban Socialist system into a model society. A few years later Cuba is ravaged by pollution and acid rains, becoming economically dependent on Chinese off-shore drilling. Inheriting the worse of communism and capitalism, the country has become a corrupt dystopia on permanent crisis mode. The New Men turned out to be powerful but uncontrollable. Outcasts of the very system that created them, they are out to destroy the very fabric of society with devastating consequences.
In tradition with my style of filmmaking this is being shot guerrilla style as a one man crew, mixing documentary with fiction through heavy manipulation of the images in postproduction. I Expect to complete Principal Photography with a budget of 25,000 Euros.
If you decide to invest 10,000 dollars you’ll get Executive Producer credit as well as a percentage of the profits if the film gets distributed. For more details you can contact me to discuss further.
Miguel lives in Havana and is celebrated for his feature length film: Memories of Overdevelopment, winner of 20 international prizes (see subtitled trailer below).
Those who read what was published in the official press, on the recently concluded Ninth Regular Session of the Seventh Legislature of the National Assembly of People’s Power (the name gets it done), may have noticed that the most word used is “experiment“: it approved a policy to create experimental cooperatives in non-agricultural activities; it authorized the application of leasing to food service establishments that employ up to five workers (which is already being experimented with in barber shops, beauty salons, shoe repairs and other places); it selected a group of business organizations to undertake experiments aimed at providing them autonomy; and addressed… experimental policies for the commercialization of agricultural products in the provinces of Havana, Artemisa and Mayabeque; experimental formulas for the production of food; continued the experiment in the provinces of Artemis and Mayabeque to delineate functions between the assembly and provincial councils and municipal administration.
To deny the importance of experimentation before applying it in some generalized form, would be a mistake. However, we can not spend our lives experimenting. If someone suggested these experiments were a government about to come to power, without experience, perhaps one could concede a vote of confidence, but not for the same government to experiment for more than fifty-three years (most of which failed) and, for the sake of them sacrifice almost four generations of Cuba.
A country is not a laboratory or a research center to test formulas that are supposed to solve long-term national problems.Too much time has been lost in experiments, which, incidentally, have always been applied widely throughout the country since the inception of this government, with devastating effects.
There is no need to invent warm water, without using experience and known formulas, which have been proven over the years and which still demonstrate their effectiveness. We have Brazil, Chile, India, South Korea, Japan, South Africa, China, Vietnam, Russia and most of the countries that were part of the former socialist camp, as examples.
We must not forget either that fifty years ago most Latin American countries were more backward than Cuba, and today it is the opposite: the foremost in leading economic indicators and even in some social indicators. To bet yet again on the so-called socialist economy (failed everywhere) and the socialist enterprise (also failed), is to insist on backing a losing horse.
Many meetings could be organized, hundreds of speeches delivered and dozens of experiments performed, and until our authorities leave behind their ancestral atavism, more ideological than rational, there will be no solution to the crisis, no solution to existing problems, nor will the country go down the right path towards progress and satisfaction of the always growing needs of its citizens.
A friend who works in a place where it is very well-known told me that he along with his co-workers, are puzzled because there are Immigration Offices, where only black people work there, and that calling attention to this and looking into it, they could only learn that by resolution, the order was given, because the rate of Afro-Cubans in these offices was very low. Now this happened some years ago with the Communist Party.
As Maximo Gomez said well, referring to us Cubans: we fall short or we go too far. This is not just a new form of racism. This time, affecting whites, Chinese and mixed race, who are also important members of our society.
How long will we keep repeating the same mistakes? To get a job or not should depend on the ability to do the work implied, not the skin color of the aspirant. It’s shameful that with more than half a century of proclaiming “equality” we still mark this type of difference which only serves to further deepen inequality.
An Interview with the director of Memories of Overdevelopment
In the same way that good collectors poke around in tiny stores with an expert eye, lovers of the art of the cinema chase down Miguel Coyula. With numerous awards for a rigorous and always growing work, Miguel dazzles us now with Memories of Overdevelopment. To conduct a formal interview, I have searched in the extensive bibliography Miguel’s work has already accumulated, with reference to the prizes he has received. But I do not put myself on the plane of the specialists, and here the protagonist is a cousin, who in his 33 years exhibits a solid career. And the best is yet to come. Being related is pure coincidence.
Regina Coyula: As a child you had a great predisposition to literature. Do you think you’ve reconciled this obsession with the development of your scripts, or do you see it as two independent expressions?
Miguel Coyula: Yes, I think that literature was for lack of anything else, I think if I had had a camera from the beginning perhaps I would have turned to that directly. But I do think that any literary work is adaptable in one way or another to the cinema. If you know the tools of the cinematographic language well and are willing to experiment with them, any adaptation is possible. That is, I have always seen all artistic expression through the view of cinema. And I like writing very much, in fact if I suddenly went blind and couldn’t film any more, I’m sure I would write again.
RC: You started making films informally in early adolescence. Did you already know then that this is what you wanted to do?
MC: It was after my first short film Pyramid (1996) that I knew I couldn’t do anything that would give me more pleasure. From that moment I had no doubts. It was my only chance to build a different universe, entirely as I pleased.
RC: What project do you consider your “coming of age”?
MC: That’s a difficult question. For example, before going to the Film School I made two shorts, Pyramid and Light Valve, which despite their imperfections I consider much better than everything I did in school. When I made them I was in a state of pure intuition. In school, no matter how much you resist it, you involuntarily tend to structure everything, and the films it interests me to make could be described as a subconscious vomiting.
Fortunately, after leaving school I recovered quickly and perhaps that’s why I make movies outside of any institution. My first feature film, Red Cockroaches, is — at the performance level — the first movie where I managed the desired atmosphere, controlling the tools of the language to achieve it. My visual language is undoubtedly already formed there, however the structure of the story is too linear for my taste. It is in Memories of Overdevelopment where I now have a language much more akin to the way I think, in fact the language of the movie is like putting yourself in the character’s head, where every kind of idea, memories, fiction, dreams, documentary, animation all come together, all linked with a montage of associations.
RC: The International School of Cinema of San Antonio de los Baños: what is the positive and negative balance that school left in you?
MC: I learned to use a lot of equipment that I otherwise could not have accessed. And I learned, above all, that I’m not particularly interested in working as a team, that I have no other option than to do the filming and editing of my movies to be able to control every detail to the maximum extent, that I don’t ever want to shoot in 35mm, and that I never want to study in another institution. Of course I’m speaking only for myself and for those who think like me. However, I think that for a great share of the students EICTV is very useful.
RC: Director, screenwriter, director of photography, editor, music director … Are you compelled by the budget or is it a decision to maintain control over the production?
MC: Both, or perhaps if I had money I would have more assistants, but the photography, editing, sound design, I could never give those away. Of course you can’t have assistants if you can’t pay them, maybe that’s a good thing… maybe if I had more money I would be a complete dictator with my team, because when everything’s said and done I’m Cuban and we know how that works. It’s a lucky thing I didn’t go into politics.
RC: What collaboration have you received from ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Arts and Industry) in your career?
MC: Apart from showing my films in their Young Filmmakers Exhibition, I’ve never worked at ICAIC, nor have they ever financed any of my movies.
RC: Memories of Overdevelopment: Don’t you fear being left in the limbo of having made a very “foreign” film for the Cuban public, and a very Cuban film for foreigners?
MC: It’s very true, this, but inevitable. There are filmmakers who make movies to make money and others who do it to show their films at the festivals. I do it because I have no choice, I have to get out what’s inside me. Before “Memories”… all my movies could have been set in any part of the world, they weren’t tied to a reality or a political or social context. With “Memories”… I had the opportunity and the need to talk a little bit about my origins, because it’s the only movie where I was probably going to have the chance to do so.
In fact the movie may be Cuban for a foreign audience, but it’s not the Cuba of the Tropicana, mojitos, jokes, the beach and Cohibas that they want to see. It’s not entertainment. It’s a serious analysis of the effects of a political regime on an individual in the last 50 years, and a lot of people aren’t interested in that. It’s a politically incorrect movie for anyone, regardless of their political position, against all flags, against politics (of the left and the right), religion and consumerism. And people have very little tolerance for this kind of film today.
RC: Memories of Underdevelopment: What are the opportunities to participate in Festivals and to get it in the distribution chain?
MC: There are some festivals, I am going to be traveling a lot this year. There is still no distribution, but I don’t have great expectations. From the beginning I knew it wasn’t an easy film, and we’ll see how that evolves.
RC: What would be the movie you’d like to do?
MC: A film without borders, I’m interested in stories about individuals who don’t fit into society, but with universal conflicts. Mystery interests me greatly, to me it’s essential that a movie have “loose ends,” because as a creator I need to have doubts about the universe I’m creating; if not, I lose interest, and the cinema that interests me to make is the cinema that will continue even after the movie is over. I believe that to be a truly independent filmmaker is a responsibility to make something distinct without any interference from anyone.
RC: Would you accept working on a commercial project?
MC: I would accept work on a project where I had a green light to change everything at will. Which is practically impossible within a traditional structure.
RC: What is your next project?
MC: Blue Heart, a movie on the subject of cloning, and the second part of the trilogy that begins with Red Cockroaches. With it I return back to the subject of taboos, of science fiction, to build an alternative reality.
[Translator’s note: the official government version with OLPL commentary.]
In 140 yards of gravel [invisible to the driver until he was already on it?] and a steady braking without pumping the brake [why not simply leave his foot on the accelerator, what instinct of conservation made him stomp on the brake if in the gravel itself there was no immediate danger?] and sliding freely [and rapid loss of speed] without any supposed external impact etc. etc. [couldn’t the rear passengers escape during the controlled maneuver? Why didn’t they move to the right by instinct, and even open the right door and jump out — at least the young man seated there — just before hitting the tree of death?].
P.S. The Spaniard is marked for incineration; the Payá Acevedo family shouldn’t make any formal accusation against him, they should withdraw any charges against him so he can travel abroad freely to see if he is resuscitated.
P.S. The Swede who aspires to be president: was asleep, he woke up not with the sliding on the gravel but only with the braking, he gave the exact testimony necessary to fit, and lost consciousness so that he can return to Sweden to nominate himself when he grows up.
