Translating Cuba

The road that led to jail began with a project for poor children in Marianao.

A gray afternoon in 2010, Sonia Garro told me her reasons for creating a community project with poor children in her neighborhood Los Quemodos, in the Havana municipality of Marianao.

She recalled that while sitting at her 1950s sewing machine from the U.S., she frequently observed accidents to children playing in the street without the oversight of their parents. From the doorway of her house, at night, she saw emaciated teenagers prostituting their bodies for a few pesos or trinkets. At that time, Sonia worked in a clinic as a laboratory technician.

In a few months she made a decision that would change her life. She created in her neighborhood an independent center for children of low income parents. No matter their political affiliation. The idea was that in their spare time the kids wouldn’t expose themselves to danger playing in the streets.

The project grew. And in its prime had more than 20 kids. She even thought of opening other branches in the slums of Pogolotti and Palo Cagao. It never occurred to Sonia Garro that the special services police would roughly harass her. But yes, the tough guys were annoyed by her work.

And often at her house on Avenida 47 between 116 and 118 acts of repudiation were launched against her. You already know what these are. Pure verbal lynching. In addition to crude insults, with sticks and iron rods in hand, a band of retired fighters threw stones and tomatoes.

After failing in her attempt to create a space offering activities for children and teens, Sonia decided to raise the stakes. Along with other women like herself, the “Ladies in Support” of the Ladies in White, she went to protest in downtown streets. The reasons were varied. It could be in memory of the dissident Orlando Zapata, shouting until her veins popped for freedom and respect for human rights.

It was her personal commitment. It is precisely in the streets and against public activities that the great fear of Raúl Castro’s government uses all the weapons in its arsenal to exercise control. So, in addition to frequent beatings, high official from State Security let Sonia know that they would not permit any more street protest.  And so it was.

In March of this year, a week before the visit of the Pope, in a spectacular operation, riot police arrested her and her husband Ramon Alejandro Muñoz. Now she is awaiting sentencing in the maximum security prison for women known as Manto Negro — Black Robe.

She could be sentenced to many years. The government is charging her with “attempted murder” and “public disorder.” Sonia does not know for sure why she is accused of “attempted murder.” Never has the idea of killing anyone crossed her mind.

At times, Sonia Garro sends me little notes from jail. In a letter written on a piece of notebook paper she says: “Since I have been in prison they have denied me all contact with my husband. They take the women here with imprisoned husbands to see them at Combinado del Este prison. They said I was not on the list.”

In another note she tells me that on May 30 had an accident while traveling in a paddy wagon. Shee has had many problems trying to see a doctor.

Her sister Yamile, brings a weekly bag of 10 kilos to bring food and toiletries to Sonia and her brother-in-law Ramon. She told me that after a thorough search conducted by the State Security in the couple’s  modest house in Marianao, looting of alleged vandals has left them with no belongings.

In addition to expecting a very severe prison sentence, and leaving behind a daughter of 15 who will grow up without the affection and teachings of her parents, Sonia Garro is suffering reprisals from the authorities. The message sent by General Raul Castro to the dissidents on the barricades is loud and clear: there is a tenuous border that should not be crossed.

Although nobody knows for sure what is the thin line between what is allowed and what the Government considers a crime. Garro Sonia does not know. She is convinced that she only demanded her rights.

From Diario de Cuba / 28 June 2012

#MUA(H)

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

What do the kisses of Communists taste like? Is despotism a clinical cause of halitosis? Does fidelity cause tartar build up? Is demagoguery a healthy source of sociopositive saliva? Is gingivitis a hygienic problem or perhaps a historical one?

Anyway, I’m going to tell you a story, my hetero-raggedy-readers.

Some ten years ago, one of the worst Cuban journalists (something hard to determine on the Island, given the predatory competition among the official guild), Guillermo Cabrera Álvarez, then afflicted by the childishness of the left, with his aggravating poetics of “The Dark Side of the Heart” (a kind of Benedettian uprising worthy of our dead poet Mario Benedetti) launched a full court press in the imprisoned Cuban press for a Kiss-in in the somewhat sinister shadow of the Plaza of the Revolution.

And off would go his typists with their halos of goblin-y readers even believing themselves free beings at least in a little news-paper (worse-paper) column in Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth (!)).

Ah, but 2004 (I think it was) was a time of imperialist war and the couldn’t-be-postponed danger of an Island invasion, as usual, and the political police their-very-own-selves had to surround and contain our naughty Guillermo Cabrera, to explain to him: we’re all among comrades here; and that such a spontaneous demonstration would be fine in cruel capitalism, to overthrow the exploitative establishment, but that in Cuba-of-forced-happiness it made no sense to show such affection in public, much less on Valentine’s Day, the Day of Love (that bourgeois remnant that should be displaced in favor of the Day of the Proletarian Wolf-Whistle, May 17th, for just one example).

And while you’re at it Guillermo (or may we call you Willy, you cunt), you aren’t new at this game, there could be provocations from the internal enemy, daddy, particularly from the independent journalists who weren’t already in prison since March 2003 (it’s just one more example).

The truth is that young committed Cubans were left with their lips in the air. Never knowing what hit them. They still don’t know. Cabrerapumpkin, Pumpkinalvarez (and all sorts of other untranslatable wordgames), the each go kiss in their own house, the sons of bitches. Or in fucking Caracas, but let them go slobber well away from the public space in my country.

Ah, but the truth is, what pulls a pair of divine lips more than a tank carrier from the war between MINFAR and MININT — the Army versus the Secret Police — so here we go again this afternoon of queer pride, sapphic, angelic, crude, whatever, beak-to-beak freely with devotion, with the anointing of knock-knock-who’s-there, open this Marxialistic wall of shit, man. Here we come to kiss whoever we like just looking at him, at her, or both, to laugh and hug in the first non-totalitarian territory of Cuba (the “Ramón Fonst” (fencer of great renown) Multipurposefullyhot Room, in front of the shabby National Bus Station, 5 pm), this time luckily without the tutelage of the faithful deceased Cabrera Álvarez, nor the spies of any press organ flattened by the martial boot of power.

Today, among the thousand and one little Geely make cars of the ascetic political police agents, among their Chinese linen shirts and their useless cellphones, ready for mid-kiss repression, under the June rains with tongues outstretched or sucked dry by the sub-socialist sun of today’s post-Revolution Cuba, today I swear that the call of the Rainbow Project will reach its climax after having circled the Cuban blogosphere in 80 hits.

Today we will be one for all: even anti-capitalists, if you ask these LGBT activists. Because even though they insist on ignoring it, even anti-capitalism in Cuba is irreverently counterrevolutionary, such that the gardens of mouth-to-mouth will be fodder for desire and tension, for panic and tolerance, for wanting to kill each other pour out all our venom (and some other lies, of course: lie to me again, my heaven, behold thy wickedness today makes me happy), to look at each other face to ass, with faith and with phalluses, without evasion and without anxiety, and also to flee a bit, and hopefully also to play, and to wipe away the tears of feeling ourselves to be true citizens for the first time in five decadent decades of a city kidnapped by a pathetically sad set of puppeteers.

I have smoking hot keys, I know. Better I should shut up.

Just to warn you that I love you all, male and female, and both equally. That I will not stop loving you even though you turn your back on my, your back employed by the youth union. We’re better than them, and you know it, and you don’t act like men and women from another era. We’re alive and we are living life without inhabiting it. How boring and humiliating such a cold biography that we are dissolving in a retro and warped rhetoric that was screwed up from the start.

Muah! Kisses for you. I like you, you know. I like you a lot. You delight me. You’re communist but I love you. You’ll be an asshole, but I love you. I’m proud to be your contemporary, to be here with you, him, her, both.

Lind@, Genial, Bob@, Yours, always, Orlando Luis…

June 28 2012

June 27 2012

June 27 2012

A colorfully painted presidential plane landed at José Marti airport last Sunday, and by Monday afternoon was already taking off again, headed to Venezuela. Alexander Lukashenko’s visit to Cuba, part of a brief tour of Latin America that included Ecuador, lasted just over 24 hours.

To commemorate twenty years of diplomatic relations between Havana and Minsk, Raúl Castro received the man who is considered “the last dictator in Europe” at the Palace of the Revolution. The laying of a wreath at the statue of our national hero, the exchange of hugs between host and guest, a triumphant photo at the foot of the stairs. In short, the protocol of official sympathy upheld in all its glory.

With this meeting an alliance was consolidated between two governments who have become especially close in the last five years. Both leaders are trying to survive increased social unrest within their borders, as well as increased international pressure challenging the legitimacy of their mandates. Hence, they consider their mutual relationship “strategic,” especially at a time when they are suffering growing diplomatic isolation. Both are examples of the solitude that surrounds autocrats.

Trade between Cuba and Belarus now exceeds 50 million dollars, and includes technology, transport and agricultural machinery. This commerce received a new impetus during Lukashenko’s stay on the Island, with the signing of two agreements and three memorandums of cooperation in agriculture, technology, science and health.

Many of the buses that travel the streets of Havana are successive purchases from this former Socialist Soviet Republic. After years of over-use and few repairs many of these vehicles urgently await spare parts. The newly initialed agreements could help in this direction, specifically to reduce the long lines that form at bus stops on the Island.

Also encouraging is the commitment of the Belarus delegation to modernize refineries and repair the national energy system, as well as their interest in our biotechnology research. But the economic bonanza is just a small part of the ties that bind what was once called “White Russia” with the largest of the Antilles.

There is speculation that this has been a visit characterized more by ideology than by economics. Raúl Castro’s government has been supporting Lukashenko and has aligned itself with him on repeated occasions before the Human Rights Council at the United Nations. In 2010, elections in Belarus sparked heavy criticism among the opposition sector, victimized by strong electoral irregularities. The Cuba partisan press, however, reported the issue entirely from the point of view of its counterpart.

On the other hand, the discourse of both leaders is fraught with that anti-imperialist diatribe that tries so hard to hide the fundamental contradictions of their regimes: that between the government and the governed. They have shaken hands in Havana just as the reforms undertaken by the General President, beginning in 2008, have reached a point of stagnation, with people now waiting for other relaxations, most importantly in the area of travel and immigration restrictions.

The well-worn argument that “Raúl Castro wants to implement more changes but the bureaucrats won’t let him,” is less convincing to Cubans every day. Also lacking is any gesture to demonstrate that there are changes afoot in the political and diplomatic order. In this context, the open-arm welcome of Lukashenko seems to signal a direction completely contrary to that which people are hoping to see.

Another important variable in the relationship between Havana and Minsk is, undoubtedly, the presence of Hugo Chavez as the main guarantor of this particular friendship. For Belarus, Caracas stands as the gateway to Latin America, with more than 200 cooperation agreements including 25 recently signed in the areas of oil, gas, petrochemicals, industry and housing construction. Without the third leg represented by Miraflores, the bilateral stool would face too many difficulties to stand alone, and the relationship would likely be more distant.

An association marked by affinities, a pact based on the common character of two totalitarian regimes, are some of the motivations that lie behind this meeting full of smiles and pats on the back. Lukashenko has now ruled his nation with an iron fist for 18 years, and Raúl Castro inherited the presidential chair through blood-ties from his brother in 2006.

They both know they have a great deal to lose were they to allow certain freedoms of expression and association in their respective countries. They sense that their time is passing and that their people could react at any moment. Being together makes them believe they are strong, invincible.

28 June 2012

The Latin America ICAIC (Cuban Institute of the Art and Industry of Cinematography) Newsreel will be recovered. If I’m not mistaken, it is considered a part of Cuba’s and the world’s heritage of documentary news by UNESCO and will be treated with all the technological marvels that restore the old audiovisuals almost for eternity.

Going to the movies was once important, when we looked through the papers to catch the news of the premieres: Do you remember the theater circuits such as Infanta-Acapulco-Lido-Santa Catalina and Payret-Trianon-Ambassador-Alameda? The Metropolitan circuit escapes me, and I’ve forgotten which circuit the Yara theater was on, what to this day continues to be called Radiocentro.

But when there was a movie premiere, or a second run in the neighborhood theaters, the program included the inevitable Weekly ICAIC Newsreel. The great memories of a different visuality, with music that sounded wonderful to my eager ears. Pello el Afrokán may have shared the soundtrack with Rick Wakeman, Bourke with Aretha Franklin, Hendrix with Tata Guines.

These people were “the latest,” they even wore jeans! No one told me, I saw it myself as I studied very close to the ICAIC and went for an afternoon snack for what remained of sodas at the TenCent on 23rd, directly facing the Atlantic building, the film institute headquarters. Those gods with their great manes of hair (by the standards of the time) snacking there too and I alternately dazzled with Adriano, Tito, Livio. Beautiful and impossible with their royal names and their “swing”.

Those were the golden years of the news, where Santiago Alvarez did whatever he wanted, and Sundays I always went to the movies and waited for the news with and I really enjoyed it (a bad habit I never lost) and without knowing it, but intuiting it, because the news created a new artistic jewel every week.

They covered the most important events in the world, but especially, they documented those years in Cuba. Parades, the latest plan, the hijacking of planes (they called them “diversions” when they came from there to here), all with the unmistakable voice of Julio Batista as corporate branding.

When Cubans saw a Jumbo jet for the first time in their lives, thanks to the black-and-white ICAIC Newsreel, I had been hanging out with my brothers at the airport and from the terrace of the original building in Boyeros the imposing nose cone of that giant “diversion” seemed to me a symbol of modernity; in the end, like a chronicle of the past, of that heroic part I felt we were living in those years, there is also a sentiment of loss, preserved in the testimony that will now be “re-mastered,” digitalized and treated with other technological tenderness; the testimony of the cane we cut, the soil we carried in sacks, the coffee we harvested, the anthems we chanted, and the guns we wielded, the uniquely grey clothes in which we believed we were heading along the path toward a perfect place.

June 27 2012

One more stop against discrimination and prejudice against women

The Click Festival 2012, organized by the Blogger Academy, Spanish Blog Event and State of SATS — http://festivalclick.com — was a complete success. It generated much exchange of knowledge about twitter, blogs and variegated technologies. An air of enthusiasm characterized the event in spite of threatsof imprisonment and seizure of property of participants (http://www.cubadebate.cu).

Among the attendees a friendly andflamboyant musician stood out, who used a hat, better said a pot, with writing in Spanish and English that explained: “This is not a pot, it’s a hat.“

The rest of his companions were a group of at least two women, children of both sexes and musicians of the alternative group OMNI-ZONA FRANCA.

Dr. Flores, a lawyer from the NGO CUBAN LAWYER ASSOCIATION, and independent journalist, during one of the festival recesses,introduced Iris Ruiz, a young women with six boys and baby girls. Immediately the warning signal that any teacher possesses lights up: I wonder if the little ones are well cared for, if they are happy.

Although the observer’s impression may be favorable, some of the subjective causes can be predicted for why it is hard for the institutions of her residential zone and of the township where she lives (East Havana) to considerIris Ruiz, a single mother,”a high priority social case.”

In reality, Iris Ruiz, without intending it, is a transgressor of the values that prevail in today’s Cuba.

Cuban women generally have fewer than two children. Having more is interpreted from several angles. For many it means:

Craziness or mental disorders.

Little academic training.

It is synonymous with poverty.

Being Christian or peasant.

Iris Ruiz confronts other prejudices, too.

She is a white woman who “gives birth” to a black child.

She openly expresses pride in having a large family.

She is a single mother, which in the social imagination places her at a disadvantage.

Her current companion and the father of four of her children is Amaury Pacheco del Monte, coordinator of the alternative cultural project OMNI-ZONA FRANCA, a community project considered extravagant for it artistic projection and a particular spirituality. This heterogeneous group, which with its technique proposes to the world another artist’s view, also has participated in the Havana Bienneal, a very important cultural event. They recently toured the United States.

Thelimited solidarity of the neighbors on refusing to provide them water service in a country where dailyillegality shows, probably, not only a reaction of bewilderment before his legal status, but also reproach for his “unusual” conduct.

Each day grows the number of mothers who confronta housingsituationsuch asIris Ruiz is going through, whose case was published February 16 this year in www.cubanet.org under the title The ’squatters’ in Havana increase. She resides illegally in apartment 1 of Building E-83, Alamar zone 9, in Havana, where currently they live without water service or electricity. Her family was declared illegal squatters by Resolution 1608/2011, which records that “in 2004 the housing was confiscated, after definitively leaving their property,” for the United States. That is to say that for more than seven years the place was inhabited.

Jeers and insults, and especially, the little or zero social or governmental support to mothers with several children are an insidious form of violencewhere the helplessness of women in different spheres of society creates an unusual atmosphere.

In the midst of campaigns and efforts to hide the calamity of the gender violence, other ruthless acts of physical violence against women continue to happen, derived from the pure machismo and disdain for feminine dignity.

Being a woman is being mother. A mom would love one single child as much as she would love six of them. Even without the official figures of the women maimed or beaten, every day we hear of stories about such lamentable events of contemporary Cuba.

It is about time for civil society and women, in particular, to take action in an independent way.If Iris Ruiz creates conflict, the Cuban woman who is not to blame, should throw the first stone.

June 26 2012

In its June 22 edition the newspaper Granma published an article from Prensa Latina (Latin Press) entitled “UN Commends Cuba for Freedom of Assembly” in which it expresses “its satisfaction with having been mentioned as an example of good practices in the area of freedom of peaceful assembly and association in the report by the UN Rapporteur for Human Rights in this area, Maina Kivi.” According to Granma the Cuban delegate,Juan Antonio Quintanilla, added that “in our country there are many opportunities for the exercise of this right as exemplified by the existence of more than 2,200 non-governmental organizations in the widest variety of fields possible.”

That the rapporteur stated this, that she might have written her report in a comfortable office in Geneva or in a shady spot in Central Park, is understandable. We are by now accustomed to such slip-ups by the UN. Such a report or some similar resolution, dictated from one of the organization’s sterile platforms, deserves to be treated no better than a piece of toilet paper. It is not surprising that a UN rapporteur would babble on as much as he or she wishes on the subject of Cuba’s freedom of association, but to hear the same thing coming from the mouth of a Cuban always leaves one quite astonished.

To be fair, it must be pointed out that the life of an official from our emblematic MINREX (Ministry of Foreign Relations) is full of trips and diplomatic missions.Señor Quintanillacould be so busy that it is possible he has not been informed about the misfortune befalling a Cuban opposition figure when he wishes to take full advantage of his right to free association. Or perhaps he has not heard about the mobs who attack women who defend themselves with fragile gladiolas*. Or about the scandalous repudiation demonstrations organized by the Communist Party and State Security which take place outside – and even inside – the homes of many dissidents.

There certainly is no visible movement of indignados (outraged people) here, as the Cuban delegate mentions when he refers to the protestors on Wall Street or throughout Europe, who have been the focus of repressive waves, which, incidentally, we know about thanks to press reports from those countries themselves. But what the Cuban delegate knows very well yet fails to mention is that here the matter is resolved in a much simpler and more pragmatic way: If you try to cause similar troubles, you will simply be detained in the very doorway of your house. You will not be allowed to go out into the street and, to top it off, you will have to put up with them telling you that this is being done to protect you from the anger of an “enraged people.”

As for the thousands of NGOs mentioned in Quintanilla remarks, one need only take a quick glance to realize that they all have one element in common. Not one has a political profile. None have the slightest intention of questioning in any way the current system of government in Cuba. At this stage only a crazy person would dare to deny that real civil society exists only in a semi-clandestine form. It is not even officially recognized by our government, which refuses to establish any sort of dialog. The profile of each and every one of these “NGOs” has been knowingly designed and approved under the watchful eye of the Communist Party to reject any inconvenient proposals. To put it simply, anyone talking about freedom of association and of an authentic civil society which enjoys “ample freedoms for the exercise of this right” in this one-party state is hallucinating.

*Translator’s note: The writer is referring to the Ladies in White,a Cuban opposition movement consisting of the female relatives of jailed dissidents who protest the imprisonments by attending Mass each Sunday wearing white clothes and carrying gladiolas.

June 26 2012