Translating Cuba

Seven years after the massive injection of new equipment for urban transport, the familiar scene repeats itself: seeing the buses pass without stopping at full stops where you can wait for more than an hour.

It was expected that the massive replacement of the fleet required, in turn, the spare parts and equipment to replace what was broken or worn out over time, as happens with battery and tires. That passenger transport hasn’t ceased to be overcrowded and in bad condition. The same thing happens with shock absorbers, suspensions.

The reality has been to rob Peter to pay Paul. Today the buses pile up in the bus terminals, out of service for lack of parts. Once again it has to reach a crisis point to take emergency measures.

The Minister of Transport, very serious, has provided the solution: Old Soviet-era trucks, experts in wasting fuel and polluting the air, will be equipped with a container for passengers. Semi-bus, semi-solution to semi-transport passengers. This is the summer we have ahead.

I found this little gem (I’m not saying if the Internet is considered a threat). The bold is mine.

Transport in the future tense

By Nuria Barbosa Leon, journalist of Radio Progreso and Radio Havana Cuba

In December 2006, Transport Minister Jorge Luis Sierra, presented critically to Parliament the major causes in the deterioration of the available public transport. The blockade was number one, and then the deficiencies in the organization of the sector’s leadership; an inadequate technical assurance system for vehicle maintenance; lack of spare parts; labor indiscipline and incompetent officials; high labor turnover; decapitalization of buses; deterioration of infrastructure in the workshops; little financial assurance to meet the costs of replacement and maintenance, and inability to organize and plan accordingly.

There was surprise in the Cuban population when he mentioned as a recuperative measure the purchase of 200 articulated buses manufactured in China, 50 Mercedes Benz made purchased second hand, and another 344 for school buses.

With regards to investments he spoke over 150 million dollars used in the recovery of locomotives, more than 80 million for the repair of railways, more than one billion dedicated to the repair of over 300 bridges, highways and roads.

Many were skeptical and did not believe in the commitment of senior management of the country to solve the problems. But by March 2007 in the annual accounting, the Ministry reported the acquisition of over a thousand Yutong buses, 12 Chinese locomotives, the construction of two catamarans in Santiago de Cuba with capacity for 237 passengers; 123 tractor trailers, and 130 cargo cranes.

On that date they had already repaired 500 trucks, 96 locomotives, 2,847 rail cars, 12 tugboats, seven barges, six dry cargo bulk carriers and three grain carries; they had purchased 2,100 tonnes of long welded rail and restarted the production of sleepers in Villa Clara.

Still, at this time, what has been implemented is insufficient and there is not a sense of visible changes.

In October of 2007 the steps taken by the Ministry of Transport were explained to the people one more time. There it was mentioned that more than 1,500 buses went into operation, and others were purchased second hand, and circulating in the streets of the capital were 343 new Yutong buses, of which 285 were in Havana and 40 in Santiago de Cuba.

Some $ 3.2 million was spent to restore rail cars. They also acquired 200 new rail coaches for domestic trains and 19 locomotives, which would come into circulation in the second half of 2008 up to 2010, at a cost of $ 150 million.

They also said on the television show that in 2007 they received containers, 100 new locomotives, 100 silos, 100 general cargo containers, 1,900 trucks and 200 fuel tanks. Also planned and executed was the acquisition of over 100 locomotives, 3,000 freight cars, barges, coasters, trailers and trucks.

Given that in March 2008 the price of oil already exceeded $100 a barrel, recovery in the transport sector in Cuba can only be possible with a correct policy of saving and maximizing cargo capacities. Work is also needed in internal reorganization, the retaining personnel and improvements in efficiency through effective control, discipline and the attention of workers.

Today traveling the streets of the capital are new bus routes — including empty seats — comfortable, well ventilated, piped in radio or recorded music, a microphone for the drivers, and wait times of no more than 10 minutes at the stops, and although it all seems like science fiction, the fares have not been increased.

It is important to educate the public and the crews on every bus to take care of the equipment, and greater penalties, judicial and moral, should be applied to everything that threatens the survival of this equipment.

The full recovery of transport is not yet complete, but the winds are favorable, only socialism is capable of dealing with a problem, no matter how critical it is, and bringing together the unity of its forces to fix it. There was no need for privatization, or handing over the resources of the people to the monopolies. Instead, a state strategy, designed and well formulated, that can be the light for the advancement of society.

To conclude, a moral: Many hands make light work.

The journalist Nuria stumbled in her work: It was just a science fiction story.

July 19 2012

Yesterday, after nearly a month, I finally resolved the mysterious business of my cell phone account having been recharged which, it seems, had caused great anxiety for a certain commercial enterprise which really seems more like a bureau of investigation.

You might recall my telling you that one fine day I received a small gift on my mobile in a tone as threatening as it was puzzling.

In this message, which in the end was sent to me eighteen times at half hour intervals, I was told that I had to call a certain number in order to activate the above mentioned credit. As I said before, when I called, they put me through an interrogation in which I had to give my first and last names, home address, cell phone number (the same one to which they had been sending the message), the number on my identity card and, best of all, the name of the person who had recharged the account – something which, as I mentioned, I ignored. The young woman assisting me the first time did not want to tell me the amount of the credit or who had recharged the account. She would only tell me that it was a man. Playing along, I gave her the names of my sons but she said it was someone else. She added that not only would the credit be put on hold until I provided this information but that the money that had been added to the account would have to refunded.

As I had no desire to lose this money, I called back the next day and fortunately got operator #_ (who was much more pleasant than the one without a name). To help me, she told me the account had been recharged by someone in Miami and that the name of the person started with the letter B. I told her that I had no idea who that could be and that those messages were annoying me. Then, very politely, she told me she would refund the money and that I would no longer receive those little messages that were annoying me so.

Time passed and “the eagle crossed over the sea.” As I do not have internet and can only go online when they do me the favor of giving me a few hours, it took some time to access my account to find the pertinent information so that I could receive this prize.

On Monday I finally found out who Mr. B was. I called the mysterious number and proceeded to give them the information. They advised me, however, that the gentleman had paid with a credit card, that they would have to investigate and that, if there had been fraud, I would have to return the money. As you can see, they lied to me for almost a month when they told me that they would return the funds to Mr. B.

It is clear that, at no point, were they going to refund the gentleman his money. It was all just a threat. Please tell me if this modus operandi is appropriate for a commercial enterprise whose primary objective is generating hard currency.

July 19 2012

Note: This translation was prepared by TranslatingCuba.com

Background on Heberto Padilla abounds on-line. His obituary in the New York Times refers to the document translated here:

In April 1971 Mr. Padilla was released after a month of brutal interrogation during which he was forced to make a humiliating 4,000-word public confession.

This document was released by Norberto Fuentes on his blog, earlier this month, apparently the first time it has been made public.

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Havana, April 26 [1971] (PL). The poet Heberto Padilla, recently detained for his counterrevolutionary activities, has addressed a letter to the Revolutionary Government in which he renounces these activities and asks that he be given the opportunity in a public appearance to explain his conduct.

Below is the text of the document.

To the Revolutionary Government:

I have meditated deeply on the decision to write this letter. It is not dictated by the fear of the inevitable and just consequences of my embarrassing attitudes, well known and demonstrated far beyond what I myself could have imagined. I am moved by a sincere desire to rectify, to make up for the damage I have caused the Revolution and to make up to myself spiritually. I can avoid that others stupidly lose their way.

But I anxiously desire to be believed and that this not be seen as cowardice, although I feel myself to be cowardly in my own acts. Morally, I would feel worse if this were not so and I am confident that the following analysis will demonstrate the frankness and sincerity of my words.

For many days I fought with myself over the decision to tell the whole truth. I did not want my truth to be that which it truly is. I preferred my disguise, my appearance, my justifications, my evasions. I had gotten used to living a deceitful and cunning game. I didn’t dare to confess how ignoble, how unjust, how degrading my position was. I truly lacked the courage to do it, but in the end I managed to pull myself together and to set out with absolute harshness the true motives of my conduct, the falsity of my critical displays and my own life in the Revolution.

I have acted, I have assumed positions, I have developed certain activities against our Revolution. But my literary vanity, my intellectual and political conceit, have much to do with this.

Under the disguise of a rebel writer in a socialist society, I have hidden opposition to the Revolution. Behind the displays of a critical poet showing off his morbid irony, the only thing I was really seeking was to express my counterrevolutionary hostility. To Cubans and foreigners, I unjustly accused the Revolution of the worst things.

I defamed each one of the initiatives of the Revolution to Cubans and to foreigners. I tried to appear to be an intellectual expert on problems about which I had no information, things I knew absolutely nothing about, and in this way I came to commit grave faults against the morals of the true intellectual and, what it worse, against the revolution itself.

My return from Europe in 1966 was marked by resentment. Months after arriving in Cuba the first thing I did was take advantage of an opportunity offered to me by the literary supplement el Caimán Barbudo [the Bearded Caiman],with regards to the appearance of Lisandro Otero’s novel, “Pasion de Urbino” to unjustly attack a friend of many years as was Lisandro. To defend a declared traitor, a CIA agent, like Guillermo Cabrera Infante, to attack the Writers Union, because it didn’t share my position, the Minister of Foreign Relations for having dispensed with the services of a declared counterrevolutionary such as Cabrera Infante, and to also attack a State Security comrade who had informed on his enemy activities.

I said all this with the greatest cunning, but with the desire to create a controversial environment that would favor my name, that would give me an opportunity to open a political debate where the only “brave one” was Heberto Padilla and the rest were a bunch of reluctant and cowardly officials. If my first note was concise in its venom and provocation, the last one I wrote, and that was published in el Caimán Barbudo, had pretensions of an allegation against the politics of the Revolution, and made me into an incredible prosecutor, as the magazine Verde Olive (Olive Green) later described me. I who possess no revolutionary merit at all, who have only benefitted from a revolution that has allowed me to travel, lead its businesses, officially represent one of its Ministries in different European countries. I, who thanks to the Revolution have published my literary work in Cuba, who from the beginning was recognized by our critics as a young talent of our letters. I, who have every reason to be thankful and proud, the first time I returned to Cuba I was defending a traitor and defamer of the Revolution. I use the verb defame because it exactly defines my own attitude. The infamous article responding to el Caiman contained all my initial petulance and most clearly my counterrevolutionary activity. That I tried to write that response, if not to distinguish myself, to stand out, to give the impression of a “revolutionary writer” is to rebel against an intolerable situation of illegality that allowed another “revolutionary writer” like Cabrera Infante to get off the plane that brought him back from his position as Cultural Attache in Brussels, a position he held for three years and that allowed him to establish ties with the imperialist enemies of our Revolution? What interested me was to call attention to myself, to benefit from the scandal. I wanted to be the only writer in Cuba with a political mentality, the only writer capable of confronting the revolutionary process and imposing his ideas. I hypocritically and derogatorily repeated the old theory that politics is too serious to be left to the politicians.

I, who had not earned any credit either before or after the Revolution, wanted credit and sought it by a path that could only lead to counterrevolution. And so I was also distancing myself from my old friends. If before they had been Lisandro Otero, Roberto Fernádez Retamar, Ambrosio Fornet or Edmundo Desnoes — to name just a few — now they were the foreign visitors who sought me out and who encouraged even more my powerful vanity. What were these foreign journalists looking for? These sociologists, these pseudo poets? Why were they interested? Because of the greatness of the Revolution? Because of its extraordinary work? Because of the admirable strength of its people? No. They were interested in the disaffected Heberto Padilla, in his marginal resentment, in the dissident intellectual, in the counterrevolutionary — to put it in a few words. These foreigners, who later have gone on record in writing about their counterrevolutionary positions, covering me with praise, publishing my photographs, interviews, adorable profiles. For them I was the nonconformist revolutionary, the rebel poet. Clearly they knew their game perfectly and I benefitted from that game. My name was in circulation. I was very conscience of it.

So, for some time, I maintained an astute duplicity. On the one hand making declarations where I reaffirmed an indisputable militancy for the Revolution, and on the other where I never let an opportunity go by to spew my venom against it. It was an almost demented activity but it was bearing fruit. My disaffection was feeding all this.

A French-Polish journalist, K.S. Karol, proposed an analysis of the Cuban political reality. I talked to him insidiously about all aspects of the Revolution, judgements that of course were those he wanted to hear, I interviewed with professor René Dumont as well. The old counterrevolutionary agronomist happily collected my critique of the Writers Union. I defamed our Institution as much as I could, I also told him that writers didn’t count in Cuba, that they’re nobodies, that [the magazine] Verde Olivo had attacked me unjustly and always with police arguments. And old Dumont immediately published my resentment. The same with Karol, unquestionably CIA agents, writing libels against our Revolution in both articles — Heberto Padilla is one of the few revolutionary and sympathetic people.

I had numerous conversations with the German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzenberger — who later wrote a long essay against our Party — that could be a compendium of my constantly acrid and aggressive thinking against the Revolution. All my supposed “analysis” presented a defeatist image of the Cuban revolutionary process. All of it predicted its failure. They were coldly negative, objective, counterrevolutionary analyses. From these longer conversations arose an unjust essay, with bad intentions, from the German Enzenberger. And I was interested in his personal friendship because there was an influential editor who could disseminate my work in his country — as he did. I cultivated his friendship and must declare that I contributed to deforming even more his vision of our Revolution, which was never very enthusiastic.

Meanwhile, my egocentrism was being fed hand over fist. The London BBC did a long interview with me in color for a special program dedicated to Education and Culture in Cuba. A station from Canada asked me for new interviews. My photo appeared in the book of the American journalist Lee Lockwood, adopting a pose that corresponded to the caption the book author added: Poet and political enfant terrible. I was quoted in articles about Cuba as an intransigent and rebel poet. And I know that each blow I launched against any aspect of the Revolution increased my popularity among journalists and writers, so-called liberals or democrats who worried more about the intellectual conflict than about the imperialist bombs and Vietnam.

As my vanity knew no limits, I brought my politically disaffected positions where I never should have brought them: to poetry. I was convinced that a poem that incorporated a supposed critique of the Revolution would appeal to certain international interests: The areas of skepticism and hatred for Revolutions. And so it was that I wrote insidious and provocative poems that under the skillful appearance of anguish over the problems and demands of history, did not express anything other than the temperament of a disbeliever, a cynic, a versifier trapped by his own moral and intellectual limitations. I refer, of course, to Fuera del Juego [Out of the Game] which won the National Poetry Prize from the Writers and Artists Union [UNEAC] in 1968. And I mention it because this book marks the culmination of my political tactics, the moment in which my vanity reached its highest point. The moment when I believed myself a conqueror, in which I believed I had obtained a decisive victory against the Revolution. I thought I had placed myself definitively on the two most important planes of Cuban life: the intellectual and the political. On the intellectual because a jury composed of first class poets and essayists had unanimously awarded me the National Poetry Prize, and on the political because this prize supported my positions. It didn’t matter that the Executive Board of UNEAC attached a long critique. What matters is that the book had been published and that alongside the UNEAC attack appeared a passionate defense from the five members of the Jury, and in particular the vote of the British critic J.M. Cohen, who stated that my book “would have won the prize in any country in the western world.”

In his geographic and political specification alone, “The Western World,” Cohen was expressing a great truth. Only in the western capitalist world, or in juries marked by its influence, without training in revolutionary theory, could Fuera del Juego win a prize of a country in Revolution and much less one from the Writers Union which is supposed to be the most revolutionary of all prizes. I remember that at a certain point I came to be frightened by the negative resonance that book was having, and before it appeared the Book Institute tried to modify some lines but such changes were not permitted. The Revolution did not want to reconcile with me. I had the obligation to assume all the responsibility myself.

Abroad, the Cuban scandal produced a fuss typical of bourgeois intellectuals. “The Padilla case” filled the magazines. Paris, London, the United States, Italy, the Scandinavian countries reproduced my poems and opened debates about freedom in Socialism. In France — where the culture had an extraordinary dynamism and where they tried to attach scandal to any work as a way to generate interest among buyers — the publisher De Seuil translated my fifty-some poems in less than a month and working flat out launched the book with an insidious band saying “One can be a poet in Cuba,” and presented me as a rebel, as a poet of those classified as controversial, that is intransigent challengers, rebels.

I continued to benefit from the scandal. French culture acclaimed me twice: they translated me into French and they praised me. My intellectual and political success was assured.

As one of my purposes was to get the attention of our leaders and demonstrate to them that I was a writer acclaimed abroad whom they had to consult and pay attention to, I began to feel greatly spiteful as the months passed and they didn’t pay any attention to me.

That was why, after a year of fruitless waiting for them to call me and give me a position appropriate to what I supposed was my intellectual range, I decided to write a brief letter to the Prime Minister, Commander Fidel Castro, explaining to him that I was unemployed and needed work. Almost immediately I received a reply from the Prime Minister through the Rector of the University of Havana, agreeing to my request for a job, which consisted of: preliminary analysis of my aptitudes and desires in translating work for the University itself, from my knowledge of languages.

In fact my request received respectful and rapid treatment. But I was, at bottom, so infatuated, resentful and blind that I considered it as a proof that my intellectual value and my foreign prestige was recognized and even feared by the Revolution and that from now on I could enjoy complete immunity to rant and rave against everything that occurred to me, to make fun of whatever I wanted, to spew venom all over the place without fear, to meet with other disaffected intellectuals, especially foreigners, and give free rein to our sick and counterrevolutionary spirits, to undertake the constant work, customary of conspiracies against all the initiatives of the revolution, accusing it unjustly and constantly defaming it.

On all questions I offered my opinions in bad faith. I still got a job at the University of Havana, acting as a permanent enemy of the Revolution.

I have been tremendously ungrateful, unjust to Fidel, and profoundly repenting that I have acted in this way I am impelled to rectify my cowardly and counterrevolutionary virulence.

Clearly my hostility and my constant counterrevolutionary activities forced me to watch myself with State Security, while on the other hand I was strengthening my relations with foreigners who came at my request, offering them all the information possible without concerning myself and yet suspecting they could be agents of imperialism. This was the case of a supposed German sociologist Kisler, whom I met days before he planned to leave Cuba, he approached me saying he was a friend of the poet Enzensberger and that he had asked that I see him. It was unusual, however, that he didn’t bring some letter from Enzensberger. I had two or three conversations with him. He was planning a thesis for his University about developing countries, he said. Very subtly, he asked me about the structure of power in Cuba and many other questions in the same style and I responded obsequiously. Through me he met other Cubans with positions similar to mine and I suppose he tried to get information in the same way. He took notes — of what I said — about all these things for a supposed postgraduate thesis and told me he wanted to return to Cuba the following year. Immediately I warned him not to let these notes fall into the hands of State Security.

Now, this young man, in apparent innocence, who talked all the time about Che, who went around with a recording of the interview of [General] Ovando [of the Bolivian Army] from when Che died, this young German who said (he told me passionately) that all the ideas of Ernest Bloch in his book “El principio esperanza” [The Principal of Hope] embodied the great example of Commander Ernesto Guevara, this person was nothing less than, as I came to know later, an agent of the enemy. And I, far from being on guard against him and against everyone of this type who visited us, what I did — moved as always by my counterrevolutionary spirit — was to alert him not to leave his notes in a visible place and to take measures and precautions. I could not commit acts more worthy of condemnation in my life. I confided in a surreptitious enemy and warned him against an organism of the Revolution, when I should have defended it against the innumerable enemies who accost us. I will never tire, as long as I live, of repenting of such unspeakable and shameful acts.

My name was already known abroad. I could become one of those writers who live in socialist countries and whose work is published clandestinely outside and who becomes a kind of authority that no state can touch.

I tried to consider myself among the untouchables also. My position had to be respected. The Union Quarterly published three of my poems and later the Gaceta de Cuba published an article in praise of Lezama. Meanwhile my work was being disseminated abroad. The propaganda launched by the unscrupulous French publisher had had a great effect. The controversy over Fuera del Juego occupied more than six pages of the Parisian weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. Julio Cortázar took on what the newspaper called the defense. Cortázar tried to prevent, in some way, the campaign against Cuba from having more resonance and my being considered a martyr. But in essence he defended me. Neither traitor nor martyr, Cortázar said. And he recognized that my bitter and pessimistic poems were the product of a man caught between two eras, not the ideal man that revolutions desired, etc. Cortázar’s defense benefitted me extraordinarily. I could capitalize on it internally and externally. The controversy itself over the events increased the sales of my book. The publisher Du Seuil — with complete shrewdness — continued its propaganda building on the rebel writer. They wrote me two letters which I, astutely, did not answer.

In Argentina a publisher called Aditor also put out the book. They exploited the political scandal, but not the author — it was more a pretext to support a massive sale on the base, as always, of the political scandal, for me, of course what interested me was the spreading of my name.

I wanted to write a subtle novel that reflected my opinions against the Cuban Revolution. The anti-hero of the novel was also deriding the revolutionary work. It is inconceivable to me that I could have thought this sick tome — where I put all my bitterness — could have any intellectual or human value. Not only was it politically negative and convoluted, not only did it reflect my ideological and counterrevolutionary vacillations, but it also expressed a profound disenchantment with life, in the hope and poetry of life. The man who wrote those pages was a man on the path of his own moral and physical destruction.

I pitched the idea of the novel to an English publisher — Deutchs — and they talked with José Agustín Goytisolo who communicated immediately with Barral, the Spanish publisher. Covering the same theme, the negative aspects of my book of poems, I was convinced that the dissemination would be very wide, because it would be published under my name, which, internationally, was a controversial name.

I received several requests from Barral, over more than a year ago, to send him the novel.

I wrote a letter to Cortázar where I explained I was trying to send it to him with some trusted traveler among those who were going to be on the jury that year for the Casa de las Americas. But it wasn’t finished. I only had some chapters and I told him in my letter that it wasn’t an opportune time. My principal interest was to keep the door open to the Spanish publisher and have the publication of the novel coincide with that of my poems in other languages. My wish was, of course, that the novel would be published everywhere to obtain international notoriety and political importance. I was looking to assert my personality abroad, to make myself widely known and to definitively make myself an intellectual who would have political influence in Cuba.

Only the vanity and petulance of thinking myself worthy of all these honors could make me conceive a plan like this, as always, tied to foreign countries, to realize my prestige through magazines, publishers and with the foreign public. And among my most unspeakable mistakes was precisely this: thinking I could — as a Cuban — live a double life: on one side vegetate as a parasite in the shadow of the Revolution, and on the other cultivate my literary popularity abroad at the cost of the Revolution and helping its enemies.

Only a man without the least hint of the ethics of a revolutionary combatant could feel satisfaction with a situation like this, especially if this man has children in the fatherland, no longer so young, and they could come to wonder some day what kind of strange father do they have who lives at the margin, indifferent to his people.

The dazzling light from abroad, from the great capitals, from foreign cultures, from international popularity, the maneuvers to gain the attention of publishers, promising books that don’t exist — that haven’t even been finished — all this constitutes the base of my falseness and all my activities during the latest years.

I can refer to these gross errors with complete clarity, totally openly, because I could measure to what degree of deterioration I have come and with strength and vehemence I want to rectify all this.

This is and will always be an irreplaceable experience that has divided my life in two: that from before, and what I want to be today.

I pray the Revolutionary Government will offer me the occasion to carry this out.

If I desperately ask that they permit me this opportunity, it is from the profound conviction that I have that my experience can have value not only for me but far beyond my person, that my experience can be extraordinarily useful for other Cuban writers, because a great part of the vices of my character, a great part of the hateful activities that have characterized my lifestyle and social conduct, that I have maintained up until now, have been and I would say are, also those of a considerable number of our writers.

Many of them, as I did, and for motives more or less similar, in which literary vanity and the ridiculous search for international fame are the core, take advantage of relationships, defame the Revolution and consciously and unconsciously cooperate with some sly enemy wearing the mask of the intellectual who comes to Cuba looking for information in the name of the enemy to act against the Revolution.

I ask that I be permitted to explain these events publicly, to discuss and debate with those who are incurring or are going to incur such serious errors and errors even more serious than mine. I am sure that my personal experience in this, and my words will be unimpeachable and some good talents will be freed from the crude traps of the enemy and perhaps can come to be useful to the Revolutionary cause.

Respectfully,

H. Padilla
Havana, 5 April 1971

For some time two journalists – one, a Cuban based in Miami, and the other, a French Canadian based in Havana, each appearing in one of the national publications with a daily circulation – dedicate themselves to reviling Miami and the Cubans who live there. They refer to the city as an enclave of anti-Cuban mafia terrorism and its inhabitants as mafiosi and terrorists. The arguments put forth in their articles, which more closely resemble broadsides, are puerile and primitive, mixing a few accepted facts with fantasy, fiction, gossip and mental lucubration, all in the unfiltered prose of yellow journalism.

Let’s consider the Miami-based journalist, who never fails to delight us with one of his profound and illuminating articles. These days he unleashes attacks on the market economy, freedom of the press and multi-party government. His justifications seem to have been borrowed from one of those manuals on economics and politicsby the Sovietsthat proliferated so widely in the era when they were our older brothers. Perhaps it was an article intended for the recent Aquelarre Humor Festival but was mistakenly delivered to the wrong address.

I should point out that this Miami based journalist has decided not to be report from Havana but makes the sacrifice of residing in enemy territory where, because of the daily violence, he must arm himself, travel with a bodyguard and seek out psychiatric care in order to be able to deal with the stress of feeling he could be attacked an any given moment. Faced with this horrible situation,I imagine that, in addition to the fee he receives for the articles he writes, he must also receive some sort of hazardous duty pay. Having to risk one’s life every day is no easy thing.

Since he has decided not to reside here and continues to make the sacrifice of living over there, it would be desirable if, at least at some point, he took a lookin situ at how difficult life is for people who live without a market economy, freedom of the press or multi-party government. I believe that it is only in Cuba and North Korea where none of these three things exist, and only China and Vietnam that do not have the last two. In the world’s other countries all three exist to a greater or lesser degree. To try to lecture Cubans over here while enjoying the benefits ofa market economy, freedom of the press or multi-party government over there is, as we say,not very ethical.

July 17 2012

Nostalgia for the life lived or maybe not so much.

Nostalgia for the people who slipped like water through our fingers with the change of the century and the millennium. All magnificent, all beautiful human beings, memory erases the landmarks or makes them desperately breathable.

Nostalgia for the limits we then imagine, as an antidote to our big fear and our not small mediocrity. We were never us.

Nostalgia for a biography that no one fully has yet, in Havana as in the exile.

Nostalgia for the biology that is already betraying the bodies and minds of our generation, orphaned by revolution and aborted by capitalism

Nostalgia, in the ultimate instance, for the Biology Faculty, splendid mass of the morning classrooms in one of the most unforgettable streets of the world: Number 25 in the foothills of El Vedado.

Nostalgia for the Republican desks where we met Biochemistry in 1989, when Cuban generals died and the survivors censored Soviet publications, while the civil collaterals emigrated en masse after being expelled from their jobs for saying out loud what the repressors were thinking.

Nostalgia for a time of harsh light but not as extreme as the vacuum that swallowed the years zero to two thousand.

Nostalgia for a major that, before entering the university, sounded to us the most complicated on planet Earth: Biochemistry.

Biostalgia.

We had everything Geniuses imported from vocational schools, today promptly exported to the First World. Stalinists that became democrats. Homeopaths. Mystics. One writer who even fell into the webs of the savior Redonet. Most noble peasants. Scramblers for scholarships. Solemn brutes. Congolese of princely lineage. And other unpronounceable nationalities. Returnees from nuclear careers in a disintegrating socialist camp. Closeted gays. The most apathetic (and sympathetic) militant Communists from Carlos Marx. Also potential suicides (someone who took the dogma of toxicology too seriously: there were no toxic substances only toxic ways of using them…) People who broke their sanity (someone who wiped away tears, on saying goodbye on the grand steps, with a psychiatric certificate that looked like a doctoral thesis). And also unpaid murderers (someone who killed his partner very early while in vacation in the province).

The Biology Faculty was like a cubist apple. A drawer full of sharp art-deco corners. Shade. With a family home not evicted right in the parking lot. With the scent of solutions received in apothecary jars from the colonial era. With magisterial professors, especially in the right wing of the fourth floor. A prodigy of enthusiastic speakers with eons of experience and textbooks donated by students who deserted, discretely, every time they got a scholarship abroad.

Two decadent decades have passed since then. All, in our peculiar way, we have triumphed here or there. We have all run incredible risks that with the passing of time sound ridiculous. We all love a puzzle of hearts that in the end, clearly, returns us home alone. I could pronounce their names, but they’re stuck in my throat. What’s more, almost all have children with perfect strangers. The others, the sterile, we won’t have even time.

Today we never communicate. What is known, is not said. The truth is totalitarian. Back, inside or outside, a decrepit youth was left in Cuba. We had to look further down to avoid dying of sadness, in the generations that followed us ten or fifteen years difference, little people who arrives as infants in the Special Period and who never hear Fidel speak live.

We are in the summer of 2012. Everything remains just below the DNA, as secret as a deadly gene waiting to detonate. Everything remains soft, intangible, like the looks of the boys and girls that we embarrass then before the table of vital amino acids, in a plagiarized book whose prologue accused him of having ideological problems.

But nothing returns.. We are dull. We are going to die without anybody to count on, without even crossing our e-mail. Without specifying the price of bread with orange paste at the cafeteria in the basement, where the smell of corpses from the Calixto Garcia Hospital was not enough of a symptom for us to wake up. Without reviving the morning guards, between the drinking of the neighbors where the name of Isolina Carillo was shouted in the building next door, down to the silence of the end of an era in which Havana dawned in those years of the nineties (there were no others). Without I don’t know what.

Nostalgia for life unlivable or maybe not.

Nostalgia for people we won’t get back, not with the thought (the hope is that death is a dream more generous than the restless dozing that we butchered between the stock of jobs in perpetual exile and the perpetual political police here. All resplendent, impeccable, making us want to jump naked on the mass of angels and ask them not to move from there: so emaciated and exceptional.

Nostalgia for what we imitate rather instead of implement in our imagination (like universities, we never had a common cause to defend in the face of society: that is what the Latin American left do not understand unworthy or indigenously of Cuba).

Nostalgia for nostalgia that since then we uninhabit, animals outside of an inopportune state.

Nostalgia for the biology that ran out or filled with untranslatable mutations.

Nostalgia, in the first instance, for the Faculty of Biology and it cloisters of granite and their antediluvian librarian.

Nostalgia for certain colors and steps from where we launched the world in 1989, when Panama fell on its ass toward freedom and the next Cuban foreign minister gave his first spins on the asphalt because “what doesn’t jump is a Yankee” (clowning around as governance).

Nostalgia for a period in which they killed and died “by iron”, as the current Premier said in the cemetery (hemoglobin iron, it is understood).

Nostalgia for the career that, after leaving the university, still sounds to us like the most loving of Planet Earth: Biochemistry.

July 17 2012

For years it has been the practice of totalitarianism to try to divert attention from the complicated situation that exists in Cuba by showing the problems that exist in other countries, often exaggerating them to make people believe our own are not that serious. This is done by taking advantage of the disinformation possible through a strict monopoly on the media.

Recently, with increasing economic, social, environmental and demographic hardships, and the loss of human values, this misleading conduct has increased. It’s an unusual day when the newspapers, TV and radio don’t emphasize the problems elsewhere such as high levels of unemployment in Europe and other places and the size of the prison population in the United States, when the misery and marginality in Cuba are much higher and this island is one of the six places in the world with the highest number of prisoners per capita, consisting mainly of young people — the famous New Man! — those of mixed race and blacks, who face the greatest socio-economic problems and so are forced into crime.

With the greatest desire for misrepresentation, on July 2 the newspaper Granma had a front page article highlighting the increase of 350 cases of hate crimes in Sweden in 2011 over 2010. Most of these crimes were verbal threats and physical violence against homosexuals, the newspaper said. Swedish law is very severe with regards to these acts of racial and gender discrimination, which are classified as hate crimes.

In this country there are many abuses committed against people of certain social groups, races, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, nationality or political affiliation.

In Cuba no information is provided about such crimes, although just for having different political preferences from the Government makes a person a third-class citizen, and they are discriminated against socially, monitored and constantly harassed by the political police, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, and informers, and can even become victims of “acts of repudiation” with insults and even physical aggression, with no consequences for those who commit these despicable actions.

It is really alarming, therefore, that the Cuban press, instead of reporting on these outrages, lends itself to defaming Sweden, the country with the highest level of equality on the planet, with a Gini index of 25.0 for 2000-2011, according to the 2011 Human Development Report prepared by the United Nations Development Program.

Similarly, the other Northern European nations — Norway, Holland, Denmark, Finland — enjoy the world’s highest living standards, combining a broad political democracy with measures of social protection — the social safety net — recognized as the highest and most humane, providing a reference point for all governments and people in the world.

Of course the government does not publish Cuba’s Gini index, as several Latin American nations do. But it’s obvious that income differences are considerable and do not respond to the labor output of the citizens, but the luck of having family and friends abroad, political ties that lead to work abroad, and to the results of semi-legal or illegal activities.

Moreover, the policy of concealing the terrible conditions of life exists in Cuba’s allies, such as North Korea and Iran, where all the rights of the population are violated, particularly those of women; in Iran for example women can be sentenced to be stoned to death for marital infidelity.

The government also hides issues like the terrible personal safety situation in Venezuela, which with Hugo Chavez’s policies has become one of the most dangerous countries on the planet. In 1998, just before Chavez came to power, that South American nation had 19 homicides for every 100,000 people, an index that rose to 75 in 2009, according to the report on Observed Violence in Venezuela, and consistent with the 2007-2008 Human Development Report, a situation that hasn’t changed.

Instead of looking for the speck in its neighbors’ eyes, the Cuban media should recommend solutions to serious national problems, which deepen and diversify along with the growing multifaceted crisis prevailing in the country.

From Diario de Cuba.

11 July 2012

I found out from national press and radio reports that the government of Namibia will send to “my planet” nothing more and nothing less than one hundred fifty animals for the national zoo, which is located on the outskirts of our capital city. These include elephants, lions, tigers, panthers, great apes and many other species which will be shipped by land and sea at the end of October.

Lately the newspaper Juventud Rebelde has been printing in the Letters to the Editor section a lot of letters from citizens expressing their dismay and disgust over the serious state of neglect in which the animals and facilities of the emblematic Avenida 26 Zoo in Nuevo Vedado have been left. I myself have also written about this in my blog.

This is happening in a park that is the city’s most central and accessible thanks to the favorable location it enjoys. Hundreds of visitors come here daily not so much to see the tired and hungry animals but to purchase the candies for sale in its well-stocked kiosks.

If this is happening in a such a centrally located facility, seen by so much of the public, what is going on in that other gigantic park on the outskirts of the city where access is increasingly more difficult as a result of the almost non-existent mass transit system and the very expensive (from the standpoint of the average citizen’s pocket book) alternative transit system made up of old cars – rechristened “almendrones” by the public – whose fare is twenty pesos per person?

With all due respect I would advise the government of Namibia and the organizations dedicated to the protection of animals in captivity such as www.tarongafoundation.com to carefully assess the conditions in which these animals will be living before sending them off to a cruel destiny, where the majority will be condemned to die of hunger, given the country’s current inability to care for those it already has due to the scarce supplies of food and medicine in these facilities.

It would be better to keep them in their places of origin and, if it were possible to arrange with Cuban authorities, to try to grant asylum to those still alive in our two parks.

July 17 2012

Otilio’s house is a museum of artifacts from behind the Iron Curtain. Retired for 21 years, the single, childless octogenarian lives surrounded by anachronistic objects and starving cats.

On one wall once the color of ivory, hanging sideways is an award for 45 years as the head of a gang of plumbers. As a reward for his labor exploits and for have been an exemplary revolutionary the also awarded him bronze medals and various articles that, three decades later, refuse to die.

In his collection of objects from the Soviet area there is a chrome Poljot clock, an Aurika washer lying in a room full of obsolete junk, a two-speed Karpaty scooter which is only a skeleton, and old Selena radio which, after he hits it, will tune in to the baseball game.

“It was another era. The State gave you everything from a house on the beach to a Russian fan. I don’t know if these changes now are better or worse. What’s happening is that a lot of people aren’t prepared. From depending totally on the State to doing it however you want. Lucky for me, I’m past that,” commented Otilio, seated in the doorway of his house with a cat on his lap.

At that stage it was essential to be pro-Fidel to be bomb proof. Otherwise, you had to go 90 miles north and know that the recognition and the opportunity to acquire certain goods was denied you.

It’s been more than three decades since those years, when candy for your birthday and beer for weddings was free on the ration book. For a lot of workers and officials they still live anchored in the mentality of waiting for orders and rules from Daddy State. It’s been learned over 53 years. Personal initiative was always seen badly and considered dangerous.

Although rationed and of poor quality, the State guaranteed the minimum necessary to live. But if yo applauded Fidel Castro’s speeches, went to the rallies at the Plaza of the Revolution, and to the Marches of the Fighting People and participated in Red Sundays, you could win a coupon to buy some Soviet article.

It was a kind of social contract based on blind faith and redemption. The Golden Age of Castro, who ruled in an almost absolute way and with few brave crazies who dared to dissent.

They should put up a monument to the first peaceful opponents who, loudly and openly, criticized the state of things in Cuba.

In 2012, while retirees like Otilio, who gave everything for the construction of a luminous socialism that never rose above the foundations, wait to die, General Raúl Castro and his pals with three stars on their epaulets talk about updating the economic model and criticize the benefactor State.

The worst part of the new discourse is blaming the people for their stagnant mentality and laziness in production. And that disgusts many. Ernesto, an engineer with 30 years experience, is insulted when, in meetings at this workplace to reduce the workforce, the bosses criticize the lack of creativity and the dependence of so many on the State.

“They sit there with a straight face. They blame the people for not working much and being used to living off the ration book. I remember one night, it was five years ago, Fidel mocked people who had fans and home appliances because they were high consumers of electricity. As if we had chosen to be poor and had all this shit in our homes. Now they throw you out of work and tell you to start a business and figure it out for yourself. It’s cynicism in its pure state,” says Ernesto.

The fashion now is to work for yourself. In whatever. Taking the fleas off dogs, covering buttons, or dealing cards. But there’s a problem. Those who work for a salary of 20 dollars a month don’t have any capital to start a small business if they don’t have family abroad. The most they can do is refill lighters, fix shoes or paint houses.

They don’t have hard currency to open a snack bar or to buy an old American car from the50s to use as a taxi, nor does their house have the conditions to rent to tourists for $35 a night.

For the unemployed from the State sector, used to waiting for manna from heaven and robbed of their jobs, the options aren’t many.

Cuba is decapitalized, The government doesn’t want to hear about subsidies. Save yourself however you can. In the private sector, competition is tough and the consumers’ wallets are thin.

One example: on 600 years of October 10 Avenue, from Santa Catalina Avenue to Gertrudis Street, there are 6 pizzerias, 8 snack bars, and 2 private hamburger stands. Half of them are doing well. The other half are planning to give back their licenses. To open a decent snack bar costs at least 1,500 CUCs (about $1,700), over six years salary for a worker.

Also, you have to know the unwritten rules. Know the guys who sell flour, pork, or stolen mayonnaise, at prices lower than in the official market. You have to give the corrupt inspectors something under the table. And perform financial tricks to pay the least possible annual taxes.

According to Albert, a Havana taxi driver, this new version of the olive green revolution is “they kick you out on the street without a latchkey. You have to look for pesos however you can, but cautiously, like walking a tightrope. If they catch you at something considered a crime, which is almost everything according to Cuban law, then you won’t only lose your license, you’ll go to jail,” he says while driving.

The Government already spoke loud and clear: Look for a few pesos but don’t even think about trying to amass a fortune because we’ll come and get you. Private work, says the State, should be just enough to survive.

If in the 70s men like Otilio shows pride in an award earned by participating in volunteer work, a coupon that allow them to buy a two-speed Russian scooter after having cut thousands of tons of cane, now the likes of Alberto know that the State won’t even give them the time of day/Its mission is to collect taxes and watch them so they don’t cross the line.

The most optimistic think that it’s a good way to train for the day when the worst version of savage capitalism comes to Cuba. Which is where we’re going.

From Diario de Cuba

16 July 2012