No Punishment for Police Brutality Against a Young Holguin Man / Yaremis Flores

By Yaremis Flores

The fate of Alberto Lairot Castro changed on August 28, 2007, when he was just 28 years old. Two soldiers, Hector Luis Osorio and Frank Ochoa Pérez Angulo, applied a technique not allowed in the self-defense programs of the Ministry of the Interior. It caused irreversible consequences.

The young man was celebrating that day at the Calixto Garcia Baseball Stadium in his native Holguin. He had drunk some alcoholic beverages, but had no weapons and hadn’t bothered anyone. He had a confrontation with some police officers and was taken to the city jail for an alleged crime of resistance.

At the station, the policemen took Lairot Castro to the holding area. Alberto refused to enter the cell. His large size necessitatedaction by several guards. Second Lieutenant Frank grabbed him from behind and immobilized him with a “Double Nelson” hold. Hector, the captain, took him by the feet. Both placed the prisoner in the call.

Llave Doble Nelson aplicada a Alberto

“I felt my neck snap. After a few minutes I started to scream because I didn’t feel my legs,” admitted Alberto, who had surgery immediately.

Medical terminology does not adequately convey the seriousness of the matter. It might be more understandable if I said that Alberto has a spinal cord injury and cannot move his legs. His muscles have atrophied. Immobilityhas predictably resulted in the appearance of bedsores.

The Military Prosecutor considered sufficient a sentence of 2 years in prison -conditionally suspended – as punishment for the police officersfor the crime of Serious Injury. At the hearing, doctors Jaime Oliveros and Frank Fernández concluded that the injury was caused by the use of the “Double Nelson” and the subsequent transfer to the jail cell.

But these statements were dismissed. The judges of the Military Court of Holguinnoted in their decision “the police applied the technique in a timely and professional manner.” They added that Lairot Castro caused his own injury bystruggling and resisting placement into the cell.

The defense attorneys invoked the innocence of the officers. They took refuge in the argument that “causing injury in the line of duty does not carry criminal responsibility.” That is the moment when any lawyer can be ashamed of their profession.

There was no shortage of praise for the accused. Referring to Perez Osorio the judges state “he fulfilled his duties as Deputy Chief of Police ofHolguín, has been a disciplined soldier, and is not violent.” As for Ochoa Angulo, “he enjoys prestige and authority, outstanding in the struggle against crime.” The opinion of the judges about Lairot Castro was different. “He was aggressive, well-known in the neighborhood for his physical strength, and wearing tight clothes to show off his muscles.”

The court acquitted the policemen. Nearly five years later, Alberto Lairot is still not well. His strength is deteriorating day after day, under the pained gaze of his mother, who remains with him in the hospital. His days as an athletic youth are past. But the deed remains unpunished.

May 14 2012

Hoes / Francis Sánchez


Photos: Francis Sanchez

I went shopping in search of a hoe.

Perhaps it was suddenly suggested to me by the partisan propaganda which always lays a guilt trip on the will of the majority — yeah, the runaway slaves who can’t be allowed to govern themselves — while the saving ideas inevitably fall from above, from that select club of the intransitive neurons.

Perhaps proving the burden of remorse like that state of deep coma that socialist agriculture crosses being only the fault of those who are closest to the earth, those below — as the great novelist Mariano Azuela would say — in this social pyramid where the bureaucracy gives orders.

At best I was beating my conscience, living as I had always lived in the midst of an extraordinarily fertile savannah, for not having ceded to the State my part in this social contract — not of work, but of simulation — that is summarized by a useful and popular saying in Cuba, symptom of the post-classical era or of eternal bankruptcy: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

I definitely had never employed many hours of my life even in that metaphysical wage relation, comparable to the poetry by which the “beautiful pretense” marks the count of Salinas. I could repent suddenly for not have participated either in many voluntary working days under the precepts of Che Guevara, in search of the New Man throwing to the ground all the molds, those “Red Sundays” in which the united proletariat dispersed the fossil fuel and marched from the city to the field to get the harvest from the scrubland using the happy method of the gods Orpheus and Bacchus together: singing, dancing and drumming with agricultural instruments.

The truth is that, one morning, desiring to see what kind of means of production, specifically hoes, the governmental apparatus had put within reach of the people to make more realistic the new act of contrition to which it called the masses, after labeling them as stupid masses, whose support cost two eyes from the face: you get sick of vagrancy, indiscipline, unproductivity, and finally, being like “pigeons” with beaks always open. . . I went through the stores to see what hoe we had within reach of our wallet for ridicule our yearning for leisure.

I walked through the city with the suspicion that my search would be in vain. But, by luck, I had been mistaken. In the last establishment on my list, a little hardware store, I finally located the service of sale of hoes to the people, or better,to beexact: the sale of one hoe. There it waited, alone, abandoned. With the digits of the price it was enough to explain to me its marginal status among the merchandise, because it could barely be seen placed in a corner. It cost $22.45! Without doubt that seemed more like the number that identifies the photo of an assassin behind bars. With reason my hoe had its head down.

As is logical, I deduced that the exposed sample in the pillory of the ridiculous prices did not gather all the responsibility, it would be treated only as a sample, representing the shame of many more tools of its kind that would wait neatly inside of boxes for the return of the collective faith in agricultural work. But that clerk caught me in my error. There existed no more in the warehouse. This was the only one, or maybe, a Platonic archetype and, at the same time, its concrete manifestations: the Hoe. I wanted to make myself the discovering fool, apparently upset, if the scarcity was due to high demand, and the sharp clerk got me from my disguise with a crafty smile, telling me the price in case I had not seen it: “$22.45!” We laughed together.

No one remembered when it had arrived there, even if it was in the way among the other products, like a dead animal that would not decay, nobody claimed it but neither did the administration send it to the other world. Obviously, neither did I make a sign of paying for its rescue, because I was dissuaded by that prohibitive figure, the equivalent of more than an average monthly salary.

Hereinafter I inevitably became accustomed to visiting it each time I passed nearby, to see how it was doing. One day I asked if the price was an exclusive karma or if the ones that came later would cost the same. Of course, still no employee of that establishment could know it, first one had to begin to come out of there. One afternoon I found that they had reduced the sentence from $22.45 to $14.20. I had the slight impression that curiosity ended up acting on its destiny.

Some days and weeks have passed, the Hoe is still hanging there. Some other time I will come closer to the counter to look at it from top to bottom.

The documentary images of the great Agrarian Reform show the happy faces of those farmers with almost no teeth, almost with no speech, that raised for the first time, thanks to the Revolution (1959), a property title to the land they worked. Nevertheless, in those rural pictures of multitudes that shook awake the memory of Robin Hood, there is missinga figure just as good-natured. If the epic camera man could repeat a portrait of the same group through the years,registering the morphological changes, we would see him come out of anonymity and overshadow, each time more, the poor people who apparently disappear behind his embrace, growing fat and at the same time polishing their manners, meanwhile decking himself out with the highest technology of the bureaucracy itself, including demagoguery.He is the most favored figured with the great share, because since then it would grow indefinitely at the cost of its advantages as alegal person: the State. The Commander-in-Chief already said it then: “If they question us, what are the earthly limits of the State? We answer them: They extend from the Punta de Maisi to the Cabo de San Antonio, and they embrace the lands included between the north and south coasts of our island.”

In the end, one must ask oneself: Will there not be something working in a twisted way under the very same earth? Will there be a curse that the Utopia will return to the ideal of the primitive community as far as making the excess production rain the same over everyone, not catching, just sprouting on this coral island? In a country where the need for progress always encouraged the cultivation of the noble crust, after consummating the seizure of the map on the part of the supreme will to uphold the common good, supposedly, above all every individual interest, increasing the literacy rates, education levels and hygiene, with the result that everywhere this same social control rises to the surface in the form of a chronic ruin.

At the same time it slowed and frustrated the access of natural people, that is, of flesh and bone, the control over the means of production — with this, so individual and difficult to collectivize: a real hoe, handy, truly serviceable — and its direct benefits, the omnipresent State channeled the maximum instruments of its institutions in stimulating, rewarding, socializing other types of “hoes.” We ourselves found in a very illustrative dictionary, Popular Cuban Speech Today1 , that “hoe” is an adjective and common substantive with the meaning “sycophant” and many synonyms: asskisser, minion, bootlicker, brownnoser, groveler, flunky, doormat. There are “multiple intellectual servants” making “the protective ring of power and carrying out its orders”2 , weapons of pleasure for the autocracy, with an effect much more illusory and indigestible, parasitic, sterilizing in the long run.

These other “tools”, belonging to the sector better “read and written,” they give to themselves by the ton at every crossroad of a society whose roads all lead to State ownership and, through it, to a centralized bureaucracy. They satisfy only the high demand for luster in the social superstructure, while the economic base continues being the unpromised wasteland.

1 Argelio Santiesteban: El habla popular cubana de hoy, Ed. de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, 1985, p. 243.

2 Ángel Rama: La ciudad letrada, Ed. Arca, Montevideo, 1998, p. 32.

Translated by mlk

March 31 2011

The Country of Posters / Eliécer Ávila

Everyone who lives in Cuba or has ever visited it knows that from one end of the country to the other, wherever you go, you will be accompanied by an army of peculiar posters. They are useless in a practical sense, because they don’t offer any information. They have a distinctly ideological character and what you read on them is often mediocre and absurd.

They come in every possible size and form. And they are made of different materials, ranging from a piece of a cardboard box, to a cafeteria tray, to a huge concrete and steel structure. They are found in the doorways of a house, in any institution, on the street, or on the side of a hill written in colored stones. The one sure thing is that they are everywhere.

Who posts them?

Most of these posters are the work of the Department of Propaganda of the Cuban Communist Party (PPC) at all levels. To accomplish it they need material resources, brigades of men, allocations of fuel, budgets, etc…

Also working in their favor is that mass and political organizations working for the Party itself, as well as the nuclei of the PCC and the Young Communist League (UJC), are present in every workplace in the country.

Thus, it can be affirmed that, in one way or another, the Communist Party is behind every sign.

What do the signs say?

Generally, they are the same everywhere. There is a basic and recurring harangue that is repeated ad nauseum. Phrases about Fidel, Raul, Che, and another collection of old and new slogans that occur to those at Headquarters and spread like a virus to every corner:”YES WE CAN,” “UNITED WE CONQUER,” “VICTORY IN VICTORY,” “THE PRINCIPAL DUTY: PERFECTING SOCIALISM,” etc…

What are those responsible for the signs trying to accomplish?

They seem to believe in the influence this form of propaganda can have on people at a psychic level. They also want to give the impression to Cubans and to visitors that there is the same “Revolutionary fervor” alive everywhere. Apparently, “the people speak” through these banners, but everyone knows that no Cuban has the resources, time or desire to keep on making them.

Another obvious purpose is that the authorities at the base of the political organization want to remain on the good side of their superiors: commonly it is more important to have enough colorful posters than to produce quality goods and services. The more billboards erected, papers printed, and walls converted into newspapers “important visitors” find in their path, the better opinion they will have of those responsible for the “directed tasks.”

Is it working?

It’s difficult to determine. But it’s clear that is created certain reflexes that are accentuated and complemented using the same discourse in the media. Millions of Cubans can not count on keeping themselves well informed, and day after day they have right before their eyes a flood of posters that transmit pieces of the government’s version of the world and of what “we have” in Cuba. There must be some effect, and I don’t think it favors the individual. What clearly is noticeable is that using these messages for such a long time causes overload, stress, boredom and rejection.

Can anyone else, outside the PCC, put up a poster?

No. Not even in their own home. Only the Communist Party, which about 7% of Cubans belong to, can post this overwhelming amount of propaganda. No citizen of the other 93% can put up any sign with their own ideas, proposals or complaints without falling victim to the most important apparatus of the system, that which ensures its perpetuation: State Security.

How much is spent to fill Cuba with these political signs?

We have to take into account that this country does not undertake studies nor publish statistics that would clarify, in particular, the costs of any political material. But it’s clear they are spending millions. If you were to take a trip from Havana to Guantanamo and count, one by one, the largest signs, you could see the hundreds of tons of steel, construction materials of all kinds, painters, human capital, salaries and time that have been used up over the more than 50 years of this practice.

On one occasion I personally was present at the entrance to a farm that was going to be visited in a few days by members of the Politburo. They had built some 30 concrete structures with concrete panels to describe, almost syllable by syllable, Fidel Castro’s “concept of the Revolution,” so the delegation would be reading it as their cars advanced along the road to the place. These initiatives have innumerable copies appearing in every town.

All these resources create a huge need given the critical situation of the country with regards to building and repairing houses, roads and other infrastructure of real and rational need, for which there is almost never any “possibilities” of a solution.

Have no doubt, when this and many other things are analyzed, it is as Manolite Simonet says in a popular song: “In Havana there are loads of locos.”


Originally published in Spanish in Diario de Cuba

15 May 2012

Obligatory Walk / Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado

Copied from: “spanish.alibaba.com”

Rafa and I go out many times in order to shop for provisions, which in Cuba must be daily. It is not that we like to walk, it is that because of the instability of the scarce supplies in the state stores; the offers grow scarce, and there is little variety. So although the foods we eat generally are average and nationally produced, we must “stomp them” as if we were epicures of the palate and pay exorbitant prices for them.

Many of us in Cuba have listened to sales clerks from some state shops say that “in a few days” products will arrive and assure that they are “expecting the boat;” and we shrug our shoulders because we don’t know if it’s a joke or irony concerning the boat that each day tires our patience more.

Anyway, although my husband and I are transparent and publicly say what we think and write it, too, we acquired years ago the habit of going out to walk — basically at night — in order to “dispatch” some matters concerning our way of thinking and activities. Because it is good to walk but not to facilitate the “omnipresent ones” who harass and listen to us in their job of conveniently transferring our talks to their respective headquarters. May they sweat their salaries and “stomp” the information like Rafa and I with the food. I think.

Translated by mlk

May 14 2012

Critical Observers? / Miriam Celaya

The organizers of the Critical Observers at Karl Marx Park. Photo courtesy of Reinaldo Escobar

At 2 P.M. last Saturday, May 12th, I started out to participate in a rally organized by members of “The Critical Observers Protagonist Web”, whose declared objective was to support the outraged group movements of the capitalist world – referring to foreign capitalism, of course — that was due to take place at a park on Belascoaín and Carlos III Streets, just three blocks from my house. Since we have so many reasons for being angry in our own country, and there are a growing number of the unemployed here who can’t decide whether they should be angry or open a chips stand, I thought that something must be up the sleeves of self-proclaimed protagonists and anyone who believes they are the defenders of the rights of the proletariat. I would not miss this for the world, I thought.

So I decided to stroll down to see what “true” socialists might be up to this time. They have, on occasion, criticized the government from their website, and have suggested some proposals even more reforming than those of the General, at least in theory. To be truthful, I confess that on my way to the park my curiosity was beginning to stir at the prospect of seeing a group of young people brandishing slogans and positions right out of the first two decades of the XX Century. For me, it was like visiting the Jurassic Park of ideology. I love feeling close to antiquities. After all, that is why I chose Archeology as a profession.

Unfortunately, I didn’t even reach where the group had gathered. It turned out that about half way into the park, the little comrades of the political police stopped me and thwarted my very good intentions. I was so extraordinarily lucky that my friend and colleague, Eugenio Leal, who had already arrived, came to my support on seeing me with such dubious company, so the Tropical Gestapo decided to have him take part of the tour, and so I was not at all bored: after placing us in the patrol car, they dispatched us around 42nd and 35th Streets, in the Playa municipality, where they informed us that we had reached the end of our excursion. I’m sure they had already spent too much of their allocation of Chávez’s gasoline.

Here I want to make a fair comment: we were taken by blue-uniformed police, that is, they were law-enforcement, not Gestapo. They were respectful. They did not hand-cuff us, did not search us, they didn’t even take my purse. Eugenio and I, during the drive, were commenting about some details of the Biennial shows and performances that are taking place now in Havana. The silent officers did not interrupt us. At the end, they gave us back our cellular phones without looking at them, and they had us leave the patrol car. Both Eugenio and I had the impression that the cops never understood why they had been ordered to take us away from the gathering, and neither did we.

Meanwhile, other friends were able to attend the event, so I have first-hand information, no less than from a true journalist, Reinaldo Escobar, who filled me in on the details. This is what went on: The four lonely guys from the Critical Observatory that were there unfurled a banner reading “Down with capitalism” (not specifying whether the introduced state capitalism in Cuba was included in that command, since they seem to be a bit more cryptic than critical) and another one that read “If you think like bourgeois, you will live like a slave” (with this, I understood that the olive-green theocracy is just a bunch of slaves, and I felt a great relief). They read a kind of communiqué and sang the Internationale. It was all over in about 15 minutes. No kidding.

First thing today, Monday, I went onto their web portal and found out a few other details, such as the so-called support they got from the secretary of the municipal PCC. I did not hear from any witnesses about the “joy and courage” that the speakers were going to show. Anyway, no great amount of courage is needed if you have the support of the PCC. I was also surprised that some of them were a bit ill at ease with the moderate expectation that was created around this event; one must suppose that when they summon you from the web, the expected response should be your attendance. Conspiracies are not advertised political practices. That’s what the Internet is about. When you buy a head, you should not fear its eyes, or maybe it’s just a case of stage fright.

In the end, I think the saboteurs of the event – I’m talking about the combination Gestapo-Policía Nacional Revolucionaria — did both Eugenio and me a great favor. If we had attended such an event, I think I would have felt the same sense of anachronism and shame on their behalf as when they play the Pimpernel Duo over the PA system at the Carlos III Market. Instead of suffering through such a spectacle, I enjoyed a couple of cold beers in the company of a good old friend.

I must also admit that I expected more from the Observatory boys. On occasion, I have read truly interesting and courageous articles in their bulletin, though I do not share in their political sympathies and their Marxist longings. I firmly believe that everyone should have a place in our country and that a bit of political folklore never hurt anyone. However, I think that they should revise their handle, because “Critical Observers Protagonist Web” comes out a bit pompous (just saying). At least, judging by last Saturday’s turnout, they are not exactly a web, not so observant, and not as critical. And if they were the protagonists of anything there, it was of breaking the record for the least to show up among their own brothers in arms. Come on, you guys, a bit more modesty … and more enthusiasm!

Translated by Norma Whiting

May 14 2012

Critical Observatory on the Loose / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Translator’s note: OLPL developed these guidelines to help State Security do their job. It’s not known if they took his advice.

I propose three security cordons:

1 – At the home of Morua Delgado and Antonio Rodiles, so they can’t go out on Saturday.

2 – At the principal access points in the operative area where the protagonists of the Revoluzzionary Ozzervatory of Cuba will pass, Erasmo, Elaine and Eugene (being a Mason he stays in front), but no one else from the Havana Times, nor from Bloggers Cuba, and much less from Cuban Voices.

3 – In the occipital of Karl Marx who could have his eyes bandaged for the occasion, placed by the Moulin Rouge technician, and 50 or 55 Rodney agents with the rhetoric of the left.

Don’t rule out the conga of industrial design nor the concert of Berezain, son of Professor Berazain.

Read verses of Das Kapital, of Carlos Alberto Aguilera, for being a book from the UJC publisher, April.

Undertake prophylactic interviews in the home of the most prominent theorists.

Put the ones against the penultimates.

Exemplify “giving arms to the enemy” with this commentary.

Propose undertaking an institutional outraged act at the site of the Cuban Workers Union Theater, right there (strategy TwittHab).

Have the wife of MH Lagarde film the whole thing, with a paleolithic camera which is the touch of official humility.

Block the implicated cell phones.

Sell un-rationed potatoes from the kiosk out front.

Footnotes: The footnotes would have to be longer than the post. And in any event, jokes that have to be explained are never funny.

May 11 2012

And the Police Arrived, Yes Sir / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo


While I’m a Cuban author, sometimes I would love to be the political police.

Only they have all the information, omniscience obtained by legal means, or through crime under contract. Only they have absolute operability, all-powerful regardless of the mediocre bureaucracy and the little national swamp of ministerial resolutions. Only they have the diegetic sense in the midst of the chaos of has-beens crowing for or against the Revolution. Only they have, in consequence, imaginative impunity when the time comes to sweeten or destroy the fate of the Other (in fiction, these motivated lies are a source of verisimilitude).

As a Cuban author, what more could one ask for, with a literary tradition of a thousand and one mechanical unreadable realisms?

I would have loved, for example, to cite the painter Luis Trapaga for deceptions on Friday May 11th, cooking or coercing him with questions at the police station at Zapata and C (me out of uniform, an informal dialog between citizens), and then obliterate his work and his home with a future threat (a real official time machine): “If you show these pictures on your walls, the Ministry of Culture — and so says an agent outside the institution — will take drastic measures against you.”

I confess that with Guillermo Portieles and Nestor Arenas, his co-exhibitor colleagues of the space Open Studio The Circle (in the home of Trápaga: 10 # 316 (upper) between 13 and 15, Vedado), both fellow residents of the USA, the forecast for these experts was much bolder, with a gun: “Never again set foot on the land that bore thee, to collaborate economically with a counterrevolutionary leader…”

To the critics of Cuban art who, from an insolent intellectualism, privately make fun of the cops brought from the interior (hence the name of the ministry of the mysteries: Interior), I remind them that it would not be surprising that most the works of the Eleventh Biennial of Art in Havana have been negotiated in advance between the creator and security agent in charge of them (who treats them like a child or a patient or both). Without ruling out the possibility that the most controversial pieces are, in fact, conceived by the political police themselves (the Bruguera operation in the Kcho case could easily converge on the table of the same cultural commissar).

How not to envy the high degree of freedom, regardless of all ideology, religion and morality? Today, there is no more Open Studio in Cuba than that of the offices of Villa Marista, factual Alpha of the Cuban nation, Bible of  actions, Genesic navel of the short circuits about what is or is not Real.

Dealing with rebellious artists who in the end always throw a fit about what appears in the catalog (and sell, of course, the law of laws of the Truth). Appeasing self-managing anarchic-unionists who worship a bust of Havana during two stanzas of the badly memorized Internationale (perhaps the Indignationale). Barring women dressed in white so they cannot prop up the skies of Cuba with their flowery swords. Savoring the rhetoric of repression with none less than the purple-robed Cardinal of the perennial smile. Denigrating the dead who stopped eating to escape the ubiquitous cruelty of the prison cells. Tapping the phones of foreign investors and of the entire Council of Ministers. Operating the internet with a private cable of optical fidelity. Annexing yourself to Venezuela like another special municipality while buying food on the sly in the USA (where Guillermo Portieles and Néstor Arenas are deported, while sequestering the canned body of Alan Gross).

What spectator of the country could resist such a package of spectacular paradoxes? Please, let’s not be hypocrites or excessively modest. The only excited official in the midst of the professional apathy of this Island bears the boastful initials of State Security.

Anyone now passing by the little Art Deco apartment at 10 # 316 (upper) between 13 and 15, Vedado, will not find the remnants of the group exhibition: the only things hanging are the old canvases of Luis Trápaga, abandoned to his fate of autistic artist by Portieles and Arenas,who, instead of burning their ships (or their canvases as a performance in the Plaza of the Revolution), preferred an untimely withdrawal that, just the same, can no longer save their passports from ostracism. Instead of going to authorized galleries and reclaiming their works (still frozen at airport customs), better they might take advantage of these days to go, saying goodbye to Cuba, until the end of the Ministry of the Interior: that is, until the State eternity, because our first anti-democratic capitalists can’t allow themselves the luxury of giving up this organizing organ.

As long as there is this marvelous narrative technique called the Permission to Enter and Leave (the pinnacle of governance over the characters of our national novel), we Cubans will be puppets without credibility: art and love and friendship and family and work and creed and all the rest will be no more than a stupid et cetera. That is why, in these kinds of sub-socialist Cuban-style TV series, State Security’s is the only one that can count on an audience for a great many more seasons to come. And isn’t that precisely any author’s dream of a best-seller?

From Penultimos Dias.

15 May 2012

Meow No More / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

How does a cat die?

Rasping, stiffly, gasping for air, looking into our eyes, incredulous at our inability to help him to live his time in this world of mortals, bewildered by our stupid betrayal of a life far more beautiful and true and good than ours.

Adults die, although they have only weeks.

Without a human complaint. With the honor of the fallen gods.

Suffering, and that’s the worst. It is obvious they die in pain. Somehow, we, their poor owners, we put them in the hands of bad Cuban veterinary system. Consisting of fine Cuban veterinarians. Who save a thousand pets, but always fail in one. In the indispensable, in the most feline link in the chain. Intuitively prescribing statistics or maneuvering in very bad guts.

Total.

What does it cost the State, the death of a cat?

Cat. Trash with eyes.

In a time not so remote I believed in spontaneous generation (I am biochemist and in 5 years of college no experiment read convinced me otherwise). I thought that the garbage cans, for example, those plastic pots imported from Andalusia I believe, or the Basque Country, each bred their own cats. Their lycanthropic larvae that is licked and makes meow meow …

I called them “trash with eyes.” I told them of love, petting, collecting, bringing their bacteria and gross earthworms home, making the bed an unbreathable zoo, because the kitty cats shared with me the unspeakable fate of the discarded Cuban people (“mind of trash,” it would be me). And never throw them a wild space where they can compete for food and eventually found their litters. No. The neighborhood of the Island boots them religiously there in the plastic, post-terrorist Spanish garbage, among papers of shit and insignificant cum and rotting remains of the half-rotten food we swallow daily.

How does a cat die, Miss Cuba? He dies at birth, unlike the pathetic kicking humans.

And his august body goes so rigidly into a nylon shopping bag, the greatest exponent of what despotic capitalism accomplished in the lands it will manage to develop.

The deformed jaw, eyelids open wide, the pupils on the verge of exploding, fleas fled just in time from the debacle, claws out to scratch the killer robe of God (no one has killed so many times to all humanity and emerged absolved, save He).

They die miserably, of misery, for our guilt and complicity. But they die without being miserable creatures like us: pagan felinephages that we have usurped the position of planetary princes of its species on Earth, incapable Cubans who do not connect ourselves at all with the cosmos and yet who lay waste to anyone who connects and looks and licks and knows all and dwells in the invisible and to top it off comes out with the miraculous music of a meow meow …

So cats die. Without death.

Death is social ownership of the humans unmercifully left.

May 11 2012

Serene Among the Vile / Lilianne Ruíz

I wanted to say hello to Jose Daniel Ferrer of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), the next time he was in Havana. On Monday I learned that police had kidnapped him while he walked down a street of the capital, and sent him by force to Santiago de Cuba. How frightened they are of Ferrer, because Ferrer has no fear.

I tried to imagine what it means for a man like him to be walking down a street in this country and see a patrol car full of uniformed cops, or agents dressed in plain clothes, who will take you where you don’t want to go because there is a legal trap for Cuban citizens that many have fallen into, which says that you may not make any kind of resistance to “authority.”

But what does this authority represent? It is not the civil authority that ensures citizens do not disobey the law to guarantee the peaceful coexistence of society. It’s the brute force that serves to destroy the freedom of the whole world and guarantee its dominance. Before, of a single leader; now, from the shadows of that leader.

In Santiago de Cuba Ferrer is responsible for UNPACU, to which Wilman Villar Mendoza belonged. The Patriotic Union of Cuba stages protests for Freedom in the streets of eastern Cuba. Not everyone joins in, because most of the Cuban people expect “the security” — the agents of State Security — and so they cannot be free. These men who help Ferrer and are thrown into the abyss of freedom, like knocking on heaven’s door, have for the same reason, being a few, the status of the arsenal of Liberty.

The regime fears them.

It is noteworthy that this country has among its monuments a mass of ugly cement and iron, known as the Protestodrome (in front of the United States Interest Section), which has been the scene of many protests, always guided and organized by the government, so protest does not figure as a crime in the Penal Code.

People who have suffered imprisonment for having been a part of citizen protests against the government have been prosecuted for “crimes against the Security of the State,” “enemy propaganda,” or things like “public disorder,” “incitement to crime,” “insulting national symbols.” Or simply “resisting arrest” and “contempt of authority.”

It’s one trap after another, the cowards don’t even show their faces! The Revolutionaries, and the nameless Revolution, have always aspired to pose a “good,” and so have deceived many people in Cuba and outside of Cuba. Or they have found villains like themselves who support them.

To fall, by way of these legal traps, into any of the Revolutionary prisons — as witnessed by those who have experienced it — is to descend into underworld conditions, to have guards with no conscience run roughshod over you, to be persecuted by other inmates whom the agents of the Ministry of the Interior have convinced, in exchange for some reward, to harass and attack the political prisoners.

The Government/Cuban Regime must be condemned by every person who loves the good who still remain in this world. They will not escape from God, even if they manage to escape human justice. It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

I don’t know if the submission has been only the response of the instinct of self-preservation against the irrational fear this dictatorship has imprinted in every conscience. Or if we Cubans are going through this hell in life because many have found satisfaction in being dominated. I don’t know.

There is always the fear that makes Cubans leave Cuba, at times it is the desire to earn money and to return to spend it on one’s family, but freedom continues to be postponed.

Ferrer does not do this, we must help him. Because the consequences are always growing for the actions he undertakes and if this doesn’t stop, where will we be tomorrow if we continue to allow the Cuban apparatus of repression to act ignoring moral law?

The wider the gap becomes, the abyss, between the defenders of freedom and the oppressors of freedom, the more sure I am that we must defend what we are against what we are not. God made us free. I know that we are not alone.

May 14 2012

Critical Observatory Forced by State Security to Quickly End its Activity in Karl Mark Park / Anddy Sierra Alvarez

Critical Observatory put out a call for a gathering inKarl Mark Park on 12 May 2012 at 2 p.m. Its objective was to show solidarity with the movement of the outraged (May 15th movement), and Cuban State Security deployed in the area around Carlos II and Belascoain Streets.

Taken prisoner were Eugenio Leal and Miriam Celaya, “They put me in a car and put me out on 42nd Street in Playa,” said Celaya by phone. She lives a block from the park.

The zone was full of cops from the PNR (National Revolutionary Police) and the political police (State Security) were there dressed in plain clothes, sitting in the park and at the corners, giving information about what had just happened in the activity in the park.

Regina Coyula went by the place, but at 20 minutes after 2:00 there was already no one there. According to another source, the group arrived, had a small and quick ceremony that lasted one minute, and left. State Security didn’t give them time to fill the area, for fear of some demand on the part of those present.

An hour after the activity, the political police and the PNR were still in the area, showing signs of exhaustion, all sweaty and very annoyed.

May 14 2012

Handicapped Girl Still Without Social Assistance / Wendy Iriepa and Ignacio Estrada

Keylis acompañada por su madre YamaykiKeylis Caridad Aleman RodriguezKeylis Caridad con su Sillon en mal EstadoMalformacion en las rodillas y operacionMalformaciones en extremidadesOperacion del CorazonSome days ago a brief note denounced to the world, what a mother described as hell. After she knew from the workers from Social Security that that agency decided to withdraw the pension given to her each month, for her handicapped daughter Keylis Caridad Alemán Rodríguez.

A month after such arbitrariness, the situation is the same and the mother of the minor, in order to be able to support her, has had to do what we know as a part-time job during the week, while the minor is at school. So that she can make some money and take home some relief.

The decision to withdraw the pension of social assistance from the minor of divorced parents, is because — according to the Social Security agency of the municipality of Santo Domingo and the municipal group of Social Prevention of the Municipal Assembly of Municipal Power, this last entity ruled by Rafael know as the Cat — it’s due to the fact that the mother of the minor has informal relations which someone who is now her partner.

Yamayki Rodríguez, mother of the girl, recognizes the fact that she has a new relationship with someone she plans to marry in the future if both decide, but with what she doesn’t agree with is with the fact that the governmental entities question her personal life and that they cite it as an excuse to withdraw the assignment to the minor, that her new partner has to take the responsibility of her minor daughter.

Keylis Caridad Alemán Rodríguez is a 15 year old girl, handicapped, with congenital malformations in the hips, knees, and ankle to which can be added that the girl’s heart was operated on during the first months after she was born, for which illness she gets regular check ups, being check up followed by a specialist in cardiology.

At the time of writing the note Keylis Caridad Alemán Rodríguez, a native of Santo Domingo, province of Villa Clara, is being analyzed by the municipal entity of education to see if she can continue her studies. Her mother and the girl prefer that she study at the “preuniversity” high school nearby, but her school performance, according to the educational directives, doesn’t not allow her to have access to this superior level.

It is important to clarify that rating given to her school performance, is the result of the non-participation of the girl in sports activities, her non-participation in the schools in the countryside, and her non-cooperation in voluntary activities of her school. According to Yamayki despite her disagreement the directors of municipal education say that they would let the girl attend higher education but it’s not possible simply because of the problem that this educational center has not eliminated the architectural barriers and that they don’t have resources for this.

Up to the moment she’s only be given the possibility to graduate as a qualified worker doing manicures and pedicures. Yamayki cites that the girl is not physically suitable to do such job and that she is suitable to continue her studies.

The pictures before you show the minor, in one of the snapshots she poses next to her mother and in the others are proof and testimonies of each of the surgeries she’s been submitted to, surgical operations that despite the effort of the relatives, some have not been finished so some are pending.

Despite what they go through, for both hope is not lost, they believe something can be done for them and that somebody can listen to them. According to the minor and her mother that hope is what motivates them in front of these adversities caused by those who have the local power, to continue knocking on the doors of any necessary institution denouncing what they call an injustice.

Keylis Caridad Alemán Rodríguez and her mother Yamayki Rodríguez live at Calle Agramonte # 38, on the corner of Calle Maceo, in the municipality of Santo Domingo, Villa Clara.

 Translated by Anony GY

May 14 2012

Havana May 12 at 2:00 p.m. / Regina Coyula

Placard of the 15-M (May 15) in Spain

Saturday I went shopping for Mothers’ Day gifts. The street was full of anxious people wanting to stretch the little bit of money they had in the manner of Jesus. While the expensive items stayed on the shelves, the cheap cologne, little soaps, plastic flowers, fans, and cards of congratulations soon ran low. A few trinkets, my gifts brought back the epoch of the “convoys” of MINCIN (The Ministry of Domestic Trade); the best thing was to find gift-wrap paper, not the really pretty ones of shiny silver, but still nice.

With my colorful rolls of paper in hand, I returned late (2:30) to the meeting of the Critical Observatory on Carlos III and Belascoain. With the vivid memory of having seen the birth of the movement of the Indignados – the Outraged — in Spain, I crossed the street in the direction of the park where it was taking place; in addition to five uniformed police standing on the sidelines, I saw numerous groups of civilians spread around the espalande, but no event happening. On the corner of San Carlos (the first indication of the street name is parallel to Belascoain), I saw another group where I recognized the faces from the day of theLos Aldeanosconcert in the Acapulco movie theater. Faces of those who didn’t like hip-hop, nor the marches with the gladiolas, nor even this demonstration against “all capitalisms.”

In the entrance of the very same primary school, two young people allowed me to verify that the new batch of the political police had stopped wearing those checked shirts they used to like so much, and were now dressing with the same bad taste as the hustlers. One woman in the school doorway was whining with an old security guard that the police had been making fun of her.

All without seeing a familiar face. Luckily I met Andy Sierra, bewildered like I was, and to make this short, we headed out with other friends who didn’t like hip-hop to explore by the statue of Karl Marx. They pointed toward the center of the park, I continued without seeing any statue, and now in the park, I headed toward another group of the same friends. One of them showed me a very discreet bas relief on a long wall that, with my poor sight, I had thought to be a coat of arms, without soul near the sundial. I asked the same friend about the activity that was supposed to be happening there, and making a peevish gesture with his hand he told me: Ah, that took place a little while ago. So short? I asked, incredulous. Yes, they sang the Internationale, said a few words, and that was it.

Since she was close by, I decided to take coffee to Miriam Celaya. I called to her from downstairs in her building to open the door for me, but, to my surprise, Miriam and Eugenio Leal had been “relocated” in Playa by friends who didn’t like the gladiola marches either, just when they were heading toward the meeting of the Critical Observatory.

To judge by the deployment, there had been more police than solidarios with the M-15. The Left were infiltrating the confrontation with the little groups like one more of them. Who would have thought the Internationale would be subversive!

And speaking like these crazy people….How much did this operation cost poor Liborio*?

*Translator’s note: “Liborio” is the Cuban equivalent of “Uncle Sam.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

May 14 2012

15M in Havana / Reinaldo Escobar

If you observe the shadows you can measure passing time.

On Saturday, organized by the Critical Observatory, a small but determined group of people gathered in Karl Marx Park in Havana to support the movement of the outraged in Europe. A couple of minutes shy of two p.m. they hung a cloth (a sheet?) That read “Down With All Capitalisms,” and another with the slogan: “If you think like a bourgeois you will live like a slave.” At about five minutes after two they sang the Internationale, took a family photo, collected their cloths and left when the clock struck 2:15 in the afternoon. That night the National Television News broadcast scenes of the marches in Madrid, Paris, London and other cities, but said nothing of the modest expression of the solidarity in our own backyard.

The perimeter of the park was distinguished by the presence of a dozen uniformed police officers and an unknown number (some say 10, others 30) of State Security agents in plain clothes. The young man Lázaro Yuri Valle Roca was stopped on Belascoaín Street and forced into a police car that drove away. Blogger Miriam Celaya, who was coming down the Carlos III Street was also prevented from participating as a witness in the activity and together with Eugenio Leal, author of the blog Veritas, was put into a patrol car and taken to a corner of the Playa municipality.

When I got out of an almendrón — a private taxi — in front of the little park, I could already hear the second chorus of “So comrades, come rally…” making it’s way downtown and stopped in the distance so they could take a photo without contaminating the scene with my presence. I emerged unscathed, thanks perhaps to those who were there to stop the intruders, who were ranged along both flanks. I would like to say it was a previously arranged diversion operation, but I swear it was a coincidence.

I respect the right of the Critical Observatory to show solidarity with the Outraged Europeans, victims of police repression. I hope my right to express my solidarity with the repressed Cubans in the Karl Marx Park is respected.

14 May 2012