English Translations of Cubans Writing From the Island
One hot summer afternoon, back in the ’90s, several friends were getting together in the shade of an old sea grape at the beach in Guanabo. One of them said that in his house had lost a small turtle and that after three months, without food or drink, it appeared alive and well.
Shhh…! gestured one present, and rubbing his chin he said, “Speak softly, lest that the Commander decides to put us all a shell.”
July 17 2012
Unhappiness can also lead to the renunciation of freedom.
I confess that I felt like giving up. To become something like the manager of my building. Happy. Pleased with the security offered by this state of affairs. I saw myself looking for work. I supposed it would be what a friend offered to arrange for me. With “access to hard currency” — according to her own words, so sanitized that they refuse to say: money. I saw myself in a uniform, getting up early for nothing… to make a little money for the month and buy a substitute for happiness.
Quiet, not looking for trouble, in one of those privileged jobs like my friend promised to try to get me without hearing either a yes or no from me, then I would begin to get old. Still navigating this nightmare without the power to respond. At those times I thought everything had moved, the whole planet, and I wandered through the vacuum unable to get a foothold anywhere.
To augment the dose of surrealism while walking I passed a place where there was an immense banner reading “The FAR (Revolutionary Armed Forces) image of the people.” And I died laughing. Now I felt myself beseiged from all sides: on one side the horrible feeling of loss I was suffering and on the other the promise of happiness in Socialism. Where all that matters is not looking for trouble, buying everything you can buy. (It’s only because of this they want to lift the economic embargo, to consume while doubling down on the discourse.)
This would be the other extreme of the post I titled Vigil of the Scales, where I thought I was happy and this also could lead me to renunciation. I came to think that if I had to go back to get inside the voice, it would mean ceasing to exist again. Because only emerging from the socialist cosmovision of the world — I’ve always said — can you knock on the real door of destiny. What is the Beast of the Apocalypse with the image of totalitarianism: “And no one could buy or sell if he didn’t have the mark of the beast.”
Why not abandon my blog, “The Blog of Jerome,” and look for a job keeping my mouth shut. Then I remember John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons and I assume that to answer from the testimony from my blog, “It’s beyond my control.” Can the horrible situation I subjectively feel myself to be in make me cry: “To hell with the Blog of Jerome!” mimicking that of Rimbaud, “To hell with poetry!”?
Bathed in your languors, o waves, I can no longer
wash away the wake of ships bearing cotton,
nor penetrate the arrogance of pennants and flags,
nor swim past the dreadful eyes of slave ships.*
Of course I also want to have a job, but I don’t need to return to servitude. Nor do I like being at home without hours, doing whatever I want with the time, writing at times, reading, waiting for I don’t know what. At best they might even accept me in a government job, or a snack bar belonging to the “National Union of Self-Employed Workers,” but if that were possible it would inevitably lead to the double life, which is what almost everyone does in Cuba.
I want to be employed in opposing the falsifiers of happiness, the sadists who threaten to put us in prison if given a favorable world situation — sheltered by the indolence of the rest of the world that doesn’t anything about Cubans — they have no clear limits on political or religious power before the image and likeness of God…
To not to have to think any more that security consists of the only kind of happiness possible in Cuba today, that which happens through the uniform and the calm fingerprinting whose ink later stains the mouth; and that, of course, ends up with me dying of laughter.
*English translation of Rimbaud’s poem, The Drunken Boat, by Rebecca Seiferle.
July 16 2012
I don’t feel sorry for the fallen bourgeois.
And when I think they will make me feel sorry,
I clench my teeth and close my eyes.
Nicolás Guillén
I hadn’t seen him for years. Almost five years. We had gone to the movies together when I was seventeen and they were showing the film “JFK” on the big screen at the Yara. The first notes from his guitar sounded in the living room of our house, on a day I still remember. He evoked, also, collecting cigarette butts off the floor in those hard years to make a cigarettes wrapped in the fine paper from the phone book. We laughed, because even though those were times of scarcity – great scarcity – we had the luxury of forming part of an incredible group of friends, all creative, supportive… rebels. Later our roads diverged, as so often happens. His father was well placed in the power structure, and the family didn’t want anything to do with those “crazy protestors on the 14th floor.” The last time we met he was driving a new model car and was already living in Vedado.
A few days ago he called. Affable and affectionate as ever, he tried to approach, with words, a friendship that distance and lack of contact had weakened. He said his father had been ousted in one of the anti-corruption purges. They didn’t put him in jail, but they made him retire early before ending up in court. The whole network of favors, influence and relationships cultivated over years of rubbing shoulders with officials and ambassadors, collapsed. Someone who had been a confident man fell into an emotional crisis, some neighbors stopped greeting him, and his colleagues at the Ministry turned their backs. He went from being the star on his Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, to being a target of control by its chief of surveillance.
As if that wasn’t enough disgrace, our old friend told us that in this midst of all this turmoil his father had been diagnosed with cancer. Now he’s in treatment and “has to stand in line for chemotherapy like any other patient… no privileges now,” the voice on the phone confirmed. He barely has enough money for gas and his wife has all of a sudden grown old. I felt badly for his family, sad, but I reflected that now they themselves are experiencing – and for very different reasons – what those “crazies on the 14th floor” have suffered for years. The stigmatization, the look over the shoulder, the caustic laugh of the informers, the helplessness. All that aside, I confess that I pity the fallen bureaucrats.
17 July 2012
A few days from the announced celebration of that mournful date, July 26th, in the province of Guantánamo, rumors continue to be increasingly stronger that there are several cases of cholera in eastern Cuba, plus it is even being said that there have been several deaths due to the disease. Since the situation was reported in the independent press, the official press is maintaining its usual silence on matters that may damage the image of the system and affect foreign tourism on the Island. The presence of the disease in Cuban territory is not officially confirmed or denied, nor is its impact and potential expansion, except for a brief report in the media on Tuesday. The lack of information and misinformation, though they might seem the same, are not, and are also a kind of permanent epidemic among us.
Earlier today, just in case, I turned on my TV to listen to the morning news, but reports from eastern Cuba were only about street activities to entertain children during vacation, that is, the news they were showing were of kids in parks before the cameras, doing the same thing that they do every day in neighborhoods without any group organizing them: riding home-made scooters, running and playing. There was also news about the awards received by the “paintings” by the Communist Party leadership and other government officials in the region, now graduates and employers, and that a company received special recognition for having met the economic indicators: more diplomas, kisses and smiles. Nothing about cholera.
Meanwhile, some who became aware of the rumor continue to worry, and there are signs that evidence that something is fishy. A neighbor told me that bus transportation to the eastern region had been curtailed, and she was told that her ticket to travel to Santiago de Cuba in late July would be canceled, though they did not give explanations about the causes of such termination. A doctor friend, who knows my aversion to boiled water, called me to warn me emphatically that I should not drink water directly from the faucet “for anything in the world”, as I usually do, while, on television, commercial spots are being aired warning of the need to wash hands frequently, “rub your palms thoroughly with soap and water, rub between your fingers and under nails …” as if your lives depended on it. Do you think our lives really depend on washing our hands?
And, as often happens among us, the rumor is growing in exponential proportion to the lack of official information about the case, and some say that there are cholera cases in Havana, in tandem with our ever-popular and endemic dengue fever, which is alarming in a particularly dirty city, with thousands of leaks in its outdated water and sewage systems, its plethora of landfills and slums, where over two million people live, amid the wettest summer on record in the last decade.
It would not be surprising, however, that this new exaggeration, greatly publicized by one or another “enemy of the Cuban people” at the service of foreign interests, might be confirmed in the course of the next few weeks if things get out of control. After all, there are thousands of Cuban doctors who have traveled to Haiti to assist the campaign against the cholera epidemic in that country, who have returned to Cuba, reinstating themselves in family and social life without even going through the isolation of quarantine. Under such circumstances, one could say that cholera took its time in making its presence known in Cuba. For now, many of us have begun to take extreme hygienic measures, while some others shrug their shoulders carelessly and in disbelief: what’s not announced, won’t really happen, at least, not unless we are the ones to die in the process.
At the time of this post, I found out that at least 6 deaths have been attributed to the dengue fever in Havana, and there are several cholera cases.
Translated by Norma Whiting
July 9 2012
Will a change bring us democracy? Change is a process, although some people don’t even see a leaf move. But where that change will take us is unknown, and when I see our General-President visiting Vietnam, China and Russia, I feel an involuntary shudder.
The only thing left of socialist Asians is the name. There’s a lot of rough capitalism, you never hear about the dictatorship of the proletariat there; the dictatorship is of the only party, quite pragmatic, that tells its citizens: Enrich yourself if you can, let me take care of politics. They reprimand their dissidents in a low profile way and everyone’s content.
The Russians “took off the mask” a while ago, but as they are now anxious to regain hegemony and oppose the United States and, commonly, the enemies of my enemies are my friends. Or my allies, but perhaps it’s best not to exaggerate.
And meanwhile, what’s happening at home? It’s like The Silent Comedy: the Keystone Cops watch the front door while the thieves slip away with the loot out the back. Here Marino Murillo with his economy of stunting the bonsai of private enterprise so it doesn’t grow, while the managers, directors and all the diverse fauna collect all the wealth for the “day after,” and the most impatient for right now, but they keep it elsewhere.
“Our working people” as the official propaganda loves to say, are conditioned by the manipulation of information. They’ve been inculcated with a fear of change, in that their situation always worsens. Lately when I travel by bus, in taxis, hitchhiking, I’ve talked with doctors, nurses, technicians, patients and their attendants, legal and illegal vendors; I’ve felt the exhaustion before an emergency situation that for most of them is their whole life, but I have also felt a caution bordering on fear to name who is responsible, or to verbalize the desire for change. No one had what used to be known as “a combative attitude,” nor did I ever stumble on some believer in Raul’s reforms, those who would, with the enthusiasm of the first days, say the same things now.
It seems I’m getting away from the theme of democracy, but democracy is not created by spontaneous generation. People will not have the capacity to make a spontaneous social demand their own, people who will believe any mobilization to be sterile, people who will feel disposed to break the law for economic advantages but not for political improvements.
I don’t like it but that’s what I see. Therefore, the stronghold of values that may exist in the family, in civil society, in certain schools or work places, is frankly a disadvantage with this morality of survival more suitable for the postwar period, than for building a better society.
I return to my original preoccupation. In China or Russia there will be change, but not democracy. But there’s always the imponderable.
July 16 2012
Havana – Once again the international media talks about the shipment of 146 animals from Namibia to Cuba. The act will fulfill the agreements signed by both governments a few moths ago.
Just to cite some examples, there are elephants, black rhinos, lions, leopards, cheetahs and antelopes on the list of species. These animals will be removed of their natural habitat and will have as their final destination one of the two Zoos of Havana, God only knows.
To this date, it has been said that the shipment of these 23 species of animals will be carried out by plane and will take place in October of this year. The shipment has been named “Noah’s Ark II.”
It is embarrassing for the Cuban people that these animals are being removed from their natural habitats to be put in captivity or, in the best case, to be taken to the new Zoo, which is located on the outskirts of the city and is currently undergoing restoration.
For years we have been deprived from seeing in our Zoos animals like those that soon will be landing in the capital. What is really sad for us and, calls all of those who may be concerned about this issue to reflect, is the treatment that these animals will receive on the island.
In recent years the parks for animal exhibitions throughout the entire country have suffered a high decay. In many of the cases, they lack the required diet to feed these animals, or when they have it, it is scarce. The sanitation of the facilities where the animals will live does not even have the slightest similarities to their natural habitat.
With the pictures that we are publishing today, taken at the Zoo on 26th Street in the Cuban capital, I make a warning call to all the international organizations for animal protection to reflect on the shipment of these animals to Havana.
If the animals are sent as scheduled, they are at risk of living in the same conditions the animals we already have live under.
It is important to point out that the Namibians are the ones financing this shipment. The Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism, currently headed by Minister Netumbo Nandi Ndaitwah, must be warned. There is no doubt that prior to the signing of the agreements with Cuba, those in charge of the Havana Zoo did not show the images of the facilities that the animals will soon inhabit to the Namibians who with good will are giving this gift to the Cuban people.
We must never allow that the new animals continue to be bruised from beatings to gain their obedience, as one of the lions in one of our pictures which shows scars from beatings on his face. Neither we must allow that the animals starve to death due to lack of food or that they contract diseases because of the lack of hygiene in the facilities they inhabit.
We want the animals in our country, no matter what habitat they live in, to become long lasting memories, instead of the sad images of lanky, hungry, thirsty, and ill animals.
Havana, Cuba more than being ready to receive new animals, must be ready to shout out loud to all people of goodwill: S. O. S. for the Zoo.
Translated by Chabeli
July 16 2012
This family is occupying an empty apartment in Alamar, a housing development east of Havana.
From OmniZonaFranca website:
We never received any intention from housing officials trying to resolve our case, we know that the State Security is aware of this situation. The traditional discourse of humanity and protection of the family are ever further from the real body of work of the State. The notice of the eviction by force of the family of Amaury demonstrates this in a practical sense. This …can not be happening without the knowledge of the highest levels of government of the country, because local officials do not dare to take such a step without direction from what Cubans call “from above.”
16 July 2012
On Tuesday, July 10, I joined the club of the third age, having crossed the frontier of 65 years. As usual in these commemorations, I dedicated myself to taking stock of my life, what I learned, what I gained and what I lost. In this the country appeared and the question of whether it belongs to me to the degree that warrants prefixing it with the possessive adjective my.
I have the presumption that Taína blood runs through my veins, my grandfather fought in the War of Independence, but I don’t identify myself with the image Cuba has in the rest of the world. Some day this will be a country that I can speak of with pride. Today it is not, but it continues to be my country, my pain, my guilt, my responsibility. It remains, then, in the inventory, dispersed between the debts and the tasks remaining.
16 July 2012
As I watched the baseball games between the Cuban team (made up of professionals) and the American college students, I felt embarrassed. How exactly is it possible that our novice Cuban baseball players were not in on this game so that they could gain some experience?
On top of that, the stadium was nearly empty. There were a few young people with shirts of the same colors (possibly taken from a school), plus some older people with the faces of Party stalwarts, perhaps a Cuban family member or two, and a very small number of little American faces occupying just few seats. How is it possible that these events, which have aroused so much enthusiasm among our fans, did not fill the Latin American Stadium? It all seems to indicate that admission is selective.
How long will we go on deceiving ourselves, pitting complete professionals against boys who, for the most part, are minors. Nevertheless, in spite of having used our best pitchers, the boys gave them a run for their money.
The press quietly mentioned in passing that the second game, which had been tied six to six, was won by our team almost by accident since the young Americans, in point of fact, had played much better. They go on to justify pitting them against seasoned professionals rather than fellow amateurs because the Americans are much more experienced, having been playing since childhood. Why is this the case?
Among other reasons there are hardly any fields left on which to practice. The former Bohemia lots have been planted with banana trees and closed off because of their proximity to the Ministry of Defense (MINFAR) and the Central Committee, and a multi-family micro-brigade housing complex is being built in the ball field near the Orbay y Cerrato lumber company, to cite just a few reasons. It is also worth noting that previously – before 1959 to be exact – a professional Wilson baseball cost 1.50 pesos in the currency in which salaries are paid. It now costs several times that in hard currency (CUC) virtually out of reach for most Cubans. It is the same with gloves and bats, which makes it impossible for any boy to practice this sport.
But what in my judgement is even more unfortunate is to see how, on my planet,a sporting event is turned, through sleight of hand,into a political game.
July 8 2012
It stands to reason that to beat the information monopoly prevailing in Cuba, it is imperative to overthrow the monopolists, which does not seem easy, and in fact it is not, but above all we must believe strongly that it is possible to overturn the giant with feet of clay.
Only in the recently concluded first decade of the century has the struggle against the dictatorship advanced further than in the previous four decades of. There are now new ways to deal with dictators and all stem from the benefits of the Web and the new cellular technology. The lack of communication that worked years ago as the strongest shield of the system, and the disinformation or manipulation of the media imposed especially by totalitarian and undemocratic societies like Cuba, are threatened by an alternative and increasingly intertwined world that progresses at a fast pace of connectivity. Hence the sick terror of the monopolists of the World Wide Web, but — oh paradox of destiny — the country’s owners cannot live with the Internet, but they can’t live without it.
On the other hand the state of technology, cell phones, and coupled with it, the unlimited creativity of Cubans like the pioneer Yoani Sanchez said: if we can invent chopped meat without meat, we can have the Internet without the Internet.
This technology offers the oppressors the great dilemma: cell phones or no cell phones, because on one hand it guarantees large profits and on the other weakens the armor of disinformation and isolation that they have created for years. The speed and relevance of social networks like twitter, converted into instruments of constant complaint and transmitting the true social, political and cultural Cuban events, but mainly as an instrument of free expression independent of the ruling party, are another toothache for the large crumbling monopoly.
So the recipe for killing monopolies like our own, must have as its main ingredient, an alternative. Besides taking advantage of all gaps that can provide web and mobile phones it is important to create separate spaces and here, too, there has been progress in the passing of the first years of this century: several alternative publications such as Voices, Coexistence, Nacán and many others that will arise along the way. Television programs such as Estado de Sats and the growing number of independent bloggers and twitterers make us believe that the day of positive free expression and press freedom is already arriving.
Finally in the task of overthrowing the giant monopoly that is the Cuban government, we must engage islanders of goodwill who love the nation that brought us to the world, be they inside or outside the country. So I encourage everyone to join the blogosphere and Twittersphere for the good of Cuba and Cubans; I encourage stations like the legendary Radio Marti to continue bombarding the interior of the island, because those are the only bombs that shake the muddy feet of the giant.
Economic cooperation is elementary because any alternative project can only be possible if it can count on funds because otherwise it would only be a utopia.
The fact remains that the most important barrier we must break is the internal disinformation, most of the inhabitants of the island never access the Internet and get their information from the official media provided, but in this respect, the regime has begun to commit suicide slowly, its television is increasingly boring and mono-thematic, newscasts and news formats and not attractive or truthful, with obvious manipulation; radio languishes responding only to orders; and better not to mention the newspapers after the gruesome mask of Granma and Juventud Rebelde, names which by the way are left too far behind in history. All this has made thousands of Cubans turn off the TV and turn on their DVD’s to watch the news from Univision or any other channel not belonging to the Castros.
Then there is no doubt that we will gradually move forward with the help of the unstoppable advance of technology, which incredibly, has smiled broadly on the freedom of Cuba.
July 13 2012
During the month of June and the first days of of July The Cuban League Against AIDS has monitored the rise of protests in Cuban jails for inmates with HIV / AIDS.
The protests show the dissatisfaction by the Cuban prison population affected by this disease. The affected prison population at the time of writing this note exceeds the number of 700 inmates in six prisons scattered to carry out their sentences.
For those unfamiliar with the Cuban issue of Prisons for Inmates with HIV / AIDS, we recall that in the mid 90’s there was only a prison on the island for this purpose located in the city of Santa Clara. Subsequently the Department of Corrections was forced to increase that due to the steady increase of the disease in the Cuban prison population, and so opened new prisons, to date a total of six.
Recent protests have taken place in prisons in Santiago de Cuba, Holguin, Santa Clara and San Jose in the former province of Havana. The incidents reported in many cases by the people themselves, which reflects the uneasiness of those who in spite of what they live through await an improvement in these prison by the Cuban regime.
Hunger strikes, self-harm, attempted escapes, prison disorder, failure to return from passes, negativity toward wearing the uniform, are some of the actions carried out by those seeking to end the existing deficit in these prisons of drugs, food, and the constant violations of human rights, to put an end to cruel inhuman and degrading treatment of the doubly confined in punishment cells, and the very little required to make these prisoners the objects of constant beatings by their jailers.
Accordingly the Cuban League Against AIDS has been able to show, recently, that such incidents have increased in the Prison of San Jose where a prisoner was unexpectedly submerged unclothed in an elevated tank of water. Carrying a sign asking for food, medicines, and demanding the release of prisoners with HIV / AIDS. The name of the prisoner who performed this act of disobedience in unknown, but we are aware that remained protesting all day until the evening after having been made to drink a bottle of soda with sedative tablets caused him to fell asleep on the heights of which was lowered with military aid and a crane.
The most recent incident was staged in the same prison by a dozen females, who rejected all kinds of food for more than three consecutive days, demanding to spend an hour in the sun with their husbands or fiancés adding to this demand the necessary improvements in the prison system.
The Cuban penal population affected by this disease most commonly is serving sentences for common causes such as theft, burglary, theft and slaughter of cattle, being in a state of dangerousness, and for the alleged crime of spreading an epidemic which in many cases is unproven.
For over 75% of the Cuban prison population with HIV / AIDS the main route of infection is self-administered injections. This mode of transmission is not recognized by government agencies trying to hide one of the realities which has been known for years.
The Cuban League Against AIDS organization monitors the island and calls for respect for human rights applied to the carriers of this disease. It sends a warning call to all international organizations to demand that Havana:
– Improve the prison system for inmates sick with HIV / AIDS.
– Immediately release those prisoners with terminal illness.
– Suspend of the use of solitary confinement in punishment cells.
– Medical Improvements and Maintenance.
– A thorough investigation to clarify the use of self-injection as a means of infection.
The Cuban League Against AIDS from this note is beginning a new campaign for the Cuban prison population with HIV / AIDS which will end on December 1st of this year as part of commemoration of World Day of Solidarity with Persons with HIV / AIDS.
The campaign will be taken to each province for the sole purpose of not stopping the right to health at the doors of Cuban jails.
Accompanying this note is the original poster of this campaign.
Ignacio Estrada Cepero
July 9 2012
It is interesting to read abut the lives and ideas of the of the philosophers from Antiquity to our own time.
They are deep thinkers who, from their perspective and personal appreciation, try to to give us an interpretation of what the universe is and respond to the great questions of all times: Who are we? Where are we going? What can we expect in the future? How should we live our lives?
One of these great men was Aristotle (384-322 BC) of Stageira, Greece. He had been a disciple of another great of these affairs, Aristotle of Athens, more commonly known as Plato, and later worked as a professor in his teacher’s Academy.
Aristotle is famous for many things, but for me the most innovative and extraordinary thing he left us was the concept he called “entelechy.”
To explain what the Stagirite wanted to say with this, I am going to offer an example that could be illustrative and and from which we can take a seed of some fruit.
A seed has the potential to become a fruit sometime. It will first become a germinating seed, then a bush, later a flowering tree and, finally, fruits, although it’s not absolutely sure to happen in this way.
But the potential and probability are latent in it for the fact of being a seed. Whether it becomes was it was conceived for by mother nature will depend on the environments, the external conditions that surround it.
Aristotle located this same probability and potential in the human being. Man (speaking in a generic sense) is born with the characteristics that belong to him by the sole fact of being a man and than can turn him into what he was destined to be: everything is dependent whether his environment supports the conditions for his development.
This environment that allows the full development of the individual in all his potential, should be guaranteed by the group the individual belongs to, by his society and, particularly, by the State, what was created by citizens through the Social Pact precisely for this purpose.
This idea will be taken up again by Pico della Mirandola when he writes his “De dignitate hominis” in 1486, with other words and in a dialog he recreated between God and Man, the same philosophical essence of Aristotle:
I have not given you a specified place, nor your own face, nor a special gift, O Adam, so that you desire and conquer and possess your place and your gift for yourself. Nature contains other species in some laws set by me.
But you, you have no limits, you define yourself according to your own freedom, in whose hands I have place it. I have not made you celestial, nor earthly, nor immortal, so that you will be sovereign over yourself, freely shape your own form, like a painter or sculptor.
Many years later this conception will be returned to by the great thinking Immanuel Kant, German philosopher (1724-1804), born and died in Königsberg, a city in eastern Prussia.
For Kant, entelechy (which he called “human dignity”) consists of understanding that we can never treat nor be treated as a means, but always as an end and act accordingly, so that no one can use others for his own interests, in that all exploitation (whatever it may be) is illegitimate and immoral and no man is more human than another.
This is precisely the basic fundamental idea that informs the entire Declaration of Universal Human Rights, our inalienable Rights which, however much they want to hide in their reality, will end up imposing themselves, because as another Great Thinker said, this one a Cuban like ourselves:
A good rider should not let go the reins of his horse, nor a free man his rights. It is true that it is easier to be led than to lead, but it is also more dangerous. And his own exercise of them is very bright, very animating, very invigorating and very ennobling.
May 21 2012
When a government’s finances are in the red, everything’s a big rush. So they usually rush to grab the scissors. And butcher public expenditures. Or raise taxes.
Which is what the government of General Raúl Castro is doing. With the difference that the Cuban citizens have miserable salaries, and so they resort to charging fees for money or packages sent by relatives living in other countries, particularly in the U.S..
They do so for several reasons. One, the system designed by Fidel Castro was never able to generate wealth. Another, their deep hatred for emigrants. They see them as traitors. Guys who did not believe in the “Little Father of the Nation” and fled on a raft or plane, to take refuge in the land of their number one enemy.
Fidel Castro, the great culprit of Cuba, borrowed the future of the nation with wars in Africa and preposterous economic plans. So many that it would take more than anthology to compile them.
His brother Raul came in as a relief pitcher. With a financial and economic situation on the brink of decapitalization. Perhaps not the most advisable to rule.
But that’s another story. You already know we live in a real autocracy. In Cuba, the decisions are made by the usual suspects. And those of us down below, as a consolation, we only must accept and applaud.
As anti-American discourse produces no money, no food, no housing and no higher wages, the olive green regime has mounted a full throttle industry around the dollars sent by the “worms” of Florida.
The companies that control the malls or stores in hard currency are all run by the military. It’s the same for the hotels and resorts where Cubans will happily spend the allowance that comes from relatives abroad.
And at what cost. To fill those stores, a closed circuit has been created within the national economy that at the price of gold supplies basic items such as oil, milk powder and tomato puree.
Clearly the intention of the regime is to milk the exiles, because the taxes on these items exceed 240%.
In the fall of 2005, very angry that the Americans caught him swapping old dollar bills in one of his accounts in Switzerland (leading the Swiss bank UBS to end its operations with Cuba in 2007, after paying a huge fine to the United States), Fidel Castro placed a revolutionary tax on 20% on the U.S. dollar.
One morning, during those years, before casting their vote in the shadowy popular elections shadowing put on by the regime, he told foreign reporters that this was one of the ways that his government had to fund the energy revolution and to help poorest.
The Robin Hood theory. That if you really help the poorest, it is welcome. But no. It was another bluff by Castro No. 1. The tax on foreign exchange and sales at shopping malls has not served to fix the streets or repair the 60% of homes in poor conditions in the capital.
Nor has served to make agriculture more efficient. Or raise wages. No one knows exactly where that money ends up. That if we do the shopkeeper’s accounts, roughly, we see that since the dollar was legalized in 1993, in remittances and profits from high prices of the items in the shops for hard currency alone, the figure could reach 35 billion dollars in 19 years.
In this time, they have been created a series of businesses, led by military entrepreneurs financed by the capital from exile. Proceeds rise to the order of two billion annually.
For a poor country like Cuba it’s a lot of money. Concerned, I called the head of TRD Caribe, a corporation that capitalizes most of the shops on the island. I wanted to investigate what is done with the money.
No answer. Attempts to frighten.
“Who are you?” said a guy with the voice of a political commissar.
“Someone who contributes hundreds of dollars monthly to the public purse. I live in Cuba, I’m Cuban and I have a right to know how the money is used that my family sends or that I get for my work as a journalist,” I replied.
A thud, dropping the phone on the other side, they hung up.
Is usual. No answer, no accountability. With this procedure they will only get suspicious. In what suitcases are those earnings stores? Or in what ghost bank accounts have they been deposited?
When a government is not transparent about the income and expenditure of money, you can not think positively about their management. You can throw in the wastebasket everything the Marxists say about capitalist surplus value.
The Cuban state is more voracious than the heartless capitalist entrepreneur. And the party continues. In their eagerness to put dollars in the State’s coffers, they impose a new taxes on packages and goods from abroad.
They don’t care at all about family reunification or alleviating the shortages of many Cuban families through the packages sent by relatives from abroad. They only care about their business. Due to the thousands of individual stalls where they sell all kinds of cheap goods all over the island, sales in state hard currency stores have plummeted.
The reasons, among others, are the high prices and poor quality of the clothing. To curb private sales by the self-employed of goods that are cheaper and better made, they resort to the tax stick.
It is the language they dominate best. They don’t stop to think about making a large reduction in prices of scarce items in the hard currency stores. For example, an obsolete Chinese television, which should already be gone in the world market, sells in the malls for 300 CUC. That’s two year’s pay for an ordinary worker.
If you want to buy a plasma TV you’re going to have to pay between 700 and 1,000 CUC (about $800 to $1200), depending on the inches of your screen. A modern plasma does not exceed $300 in Miami. So, being cheaper, Cubans living in Florida, the vast majority of whom are not rich, choose to send one to their family from there.
Across the pond, the regime responds to this movement of goods with new tax measures that really hurt ordinary Cubans. You should see the tantrums when hard-line Cuban-American politicians or a president like George W. Bush tighten the embargo.
Then they rehearse a speech in defense of the Cuban immigrants who can not travel or send money to their grandmother or their cousins in Cuba. After Carter, no American president has been more flexible with Castro than Barack Obama.
If they thought reasonably, the ideal would be to respond with gestures of goodwill. Not with chimeric demands. Not by applying the blade of tariffs.
Finally, in this diplomatic beat of the Cuban regime with the White House, those who have the greatest interest in keeping the embargo and a state of constant confrontation are the Castro brothers. It is the fuel that sustains them politically. Their only trump card.
From Diario de Cuba.
7 July 2012
