“Today marks 21 days that I haven’t taken a drink…” said a Beny Moré song we listened to back in the 50’s. And today, if my accounting doesn’t fail me, is 21 days since our general-cum-president has made an appearance. Several foreign dignitaries have passed through Havana, the rains have converted some of the country’s eastern and central villages into real disaster zones; national and foreign events worth some statement or other have occurred, and yesterday he turned 81, but the Party First Secretary does not appear.
I’m not complaining about what might be seen as a virtue, especially if we compare it to the omnipresent media style that characterized the retired brother, but the desire not to be a star has its limits, and should not give the impression that the national ship is without a helmsman.
Perhaps we will have to wait for another visit by Hugo Chavez to his Cuban medical team, or another session of the Council of Ministers to produce him, but in any event this July 26, emblematic date of the Revolutionary process, on which he will have to show his face.
Infinitely more lucid, more 20th century, less cowardly than he.
Infinitely more beautiful, more slutty, less reactionary than she.
Infinitely better than he and infinitely better than the woman with whom he would contract marriage out of fear.
She was a Virgo of 17 years. A Latin American virgin, (not by whim is she called Maria), a vision of the succulent jungles of Guatemala, popol-vahgina* martyr of love. Signing exclusively for a twenty-something Jose Marti as no one ever on earth was going to dare, as no one ever possessed him: Tu niña… she signed, your girl.
“Tu niña,” almost the title of an unwritten novel, unwriteable. She was the daughter of a general. She was the daughter of a president. Quetzal that perhaps should have been the Eve of the then unknown Cuban nation (even of today’s unrecognizable Cuban nation). Pupil who from her desk would surrender herself open in soul and body, so that she be swallowed and later birthed by the impetuous little professor Marti. So he could split her life into a before and an after him. So he could split her dry, moist.
Maria Garcia Granados, crystallization of time and apocope of the truth. She had no need for his grandiloquent oratory. It sufficed knowing how to see him (mine him) without demagogy of adults, nor delight of the adulterated, nor the crime of adulterers (and this last Marti always was: for the extreme of calamities, between culpability and repression). Only she knew the genetic miracle to save him from himself, to stop time, with the independence of their two inconceivable hearts, that extended between the night of the thousand and one deaths that followed (still to come later).
I am certain they slept together. I am certain they did it standing up. In an incredibly lovely river scene, with an epiphanic (epiphalic) light, beneath the copious canopy like an ovary that covered the sky of the isms (enslavementism, abolitionism, autonomism, reformism, annexationism, colonialism, independentism, imperialism, republicanism, liberalism, conservationism, capitalism, syndicalism, socialism, communism).
I am certain in such a setting they fucked more alone than the first couple on earth, without violence and without anxiety, without maelstrom nor vileness (although later the archetypal Martian goodness had been no more than that: despotic dualisms where we all democratically fit, on a par that nobody fit but he, He).** It must have been a copulation in more than one asexual sense, without genders (she the girl-man who could be nailed in the center of her spiritual axis by the woman-boy who he always was): Marti and Maria “machihembrados“*** at the margin of the history of humanity as told by its so gloomy tribunes (and he ended up becoming one of the most pathetic).
I am certain it was in that same river that she would go the following spring and contract tuberculosis, when he impotently betrayed that freedom of procreating birds, in exchange for a bed of curdled milk in the intimate ill will of every matrimonial bedroom.
Marti killed her with impunity. Worse: he forced her from afar to kill herself, with his insolent diplomatic immunity. Two decadent decades later, he would repeat the same formula of Maria with the nation he invented for himself for lack of real people to love. Apostles are just that: they instigate for mere instinct to disappear afterwards. They found only to burn out and flee at the hour of truth. And instead of accomplice bodies to be contemporaries, they leave instead opportunist little poems with a rhyme of two by three, birthday prosody (memorizable by boys and girls not yet literate, if not barely the literary hope of the world), verses from the prudish to the perverse, written in the miserable middle of the night with the back turned toward their spouse out of conviction, who knows if out of convenience.
In the end, the young Jose Julian chose the word and not the person. Ideas before lives. The chronicle of his crime: his contemplation in silence, which is more cowardly than perpetrating it (the rhetoric and not the redemption). Perhaps he thought himself too grand to have something small to do (and Maria was small in spite of being so tall, little-ious, diminutivest: because “tu niña . . .” is also the promise to never grow up).
There it ended, with his epitaph he sank verse by verse like a human being light of the future.
There it ended, a no-man being opaque with his suit weightless and his baldness of calvary, in countless cadavers in cloisters of marble, than in the midst of the 21st century we continue hiding in the closet of that Revolution. Perhaps for that reason the young Marti y Perez did not merit leaving fertile decsent (he flew like Matias Perez****, in disposition and genes), paying his discursive gift of impotence with the stigma of sterility. Lovelessness with lovelessness is paid. Lovelessness with lovelessness is native land. Forgive him, Maria, for he knew all too well what he wasn’t doing.
Translator’s notes: * Popol-Vah: an ancient Guatemalan text **Considered to be the “Apostle of Cuban Independence” for his role in Cuba’s 19th century battle against Spanish dominion, Marti was a fervent proponent of an independent and democratic Cuba. *** Machihembrado is the Spanish word for woodwork that is assembled using tounge-and-groove or dovetailing. The origin of the word comes from a synthesis of male and female (macho y hembra). ****Matias Perez disappeared after boarding a hot air balloon in Havana on June 28, 1856. Since then, when someone disappears, people say: “Volo como Matias Perez” (He flew away like Matias Perez).
Saturday night and G Street in the most central part of of the city, is packed with young people sitting on the grass or pressed together in the darkest areas of the park. They boastfully show off every type of tendency, aesthetic, existential, musical and even sexual preference. They are part of the urban tribes that gradually invaded a Havana where a few years ago a man wearing an earring was immediately hauled off to the police station. Now, the impression is that Cubans want to make up for lost time, leaving behind those decades of military grayness where everyone dressed alike. The teenagers choose to emphasize individuality in contrast to spouting political slogans where the “we” is always emphasized, the formless mass of the group or pack.
Party night on the central avenue is just beginning. Quirky and sympathetic figures keep arriving. A group of supposed “werewolves” arrives in their dark clothes, and on the other corner several girls made up as vampires greet each other. From some nearby balconies older people watch and say something often repeated and dull, “These young people are lost.” They say it because their forms of dress seem grotesque to them, their tattoos aggressive, and the languor of some seems to come straight from Japanese manga.
But above all,the adults criticize the apathy of the young. They accuse them of living at the margin of reality, of floating on a cloud of apathy, of being able to spend the whole night talking about the latest Playstation game just released, or listing to music from Lady Gaga they’ve recorded on their cell phones. It would appear they live in another place, in a remote dimension, where material hardships and the prolonged crisis fails to interest them; in a cosmogony of their own that they have created to escape the here and now.
But, in evoking those days when I was the age of those who today spend the night on G Street, I realize that for us it was a time when we were too sober, too old. Those were the days of “volunteer” work on the weekends, endless military practice, and boring official television as the only distraction.
In contrast with the young people today, for us to go out in the street with hair a striking color or wearing jeans would have been interpreted as ideological deviation. And don’t even talk about access to imported comics! Every tendency to emphasize individuality was rejected, and dreams of fantasy stories like Dracula, The Lord of the Rings, or Momo, could be interpreted as psychiatric imbalance or a fascination with capitalism.
Differentiation was the shortest way to signal a possible disaffection to the system. Evasion could be taken as an opposition act, and the first hippies or rockers that dared to walk the streets dressed in their fashions, faced insults and official repression. The police vans raided these meeting places and the archetypal urban lumpen was personified on national television as someone with very tight pants, messy hair and sunglasses.
Uniformity was so abused for so long that new forms of dress began to appear, of living and loving, the rejection of the oldest was heard everywhere. Many of these older people cannot yet accept the existence of these emos, werewolves, transvestites, punk and guerks right in this society that tried to make itself over from a Marxist manuals written in the nineteenth century. For members of the Communist Party and the military has been especially difficult to accept coexistence with all these phenomena of modernity, with the boldness of the young and the explosion of their decorative accessories and body markings. But what arouses the greatest disgust is their tendency to be apolitical, oblivious to the vagaries of ideology, difficult to convene when their attendance is desired at some official event.
So when I see this lazy kids of today I feel relief and joy. I prefer the apathetic to the fanatic, earbuds connected to an MP3 player to heading off to trench warfare. It makes me happy to see them turn away from membership in the only youth organization permitted by law, or fail to applaud an octogenarian leader shouting at the rostrum. Seeing them, I know they will wake up from this inertia, and one day shake off the apathy they now display. It will be much easier for them than it was for us to put aside bigotry, to break the indoctrination.
In a prison just outside of Moscow, the passing hours were shattering the head of the Soviet dissident Alexander Bukosky. The white walls. The cold. The flies on the roof. The prisoners came and went with thousands of complaints and denouncements of violations which the guards were subjecting them to, and he could not last much longer by himself. One day, it occurred to him to recommend two prisoners to write to the district committee, and if they did not respond, to write two, four, or ten more times per week until they paid attention. One morning, one of the superiors nearly begged him to not recommend them to write any more letters because they had no way of processing so many complaints. I am bringing up this story, so luxuriously described in the ‘Wind Blows Again’, in relation to what appeared this past Sunday, May 27th in the “Acknowledgment of Receipt” section of the “Rebel Youth” newspaper.
‘Acknowledgement of Receipt ’ has become a species of social catharsis in our country and Jose Alejandro Rodriguez knows this, as do the bureaucrats and the indolent, as well as the population. Many times the complaints do not go any further than just being published there, but the myth has began to move forward and nothing can stop it. People know that if they appear there is a responsibility which arises. Eliecer Palma Pupo, a worker from the Transportation Base of the Urbano Noris Central, of San German, believed in that, wrote to them, and on December 17th 2011, his complaint appeared on the newspaper. He and various other drivers had not been paid the bonus of the previous period and he was already working during a new season and they were not paying him what they owed. He told Rodriguez, the journalist, of the situation in which he had to drive back and forth, here and there, and all the other tasks he had to complete numerous times. A few months later they paid him his due, but a few days ago, one of the chiefs of the sugar production group AZCUBA mailed justifications and evasive answers to the “Receipt” section of the paper…
Jose Alejandro has once again responded to them and taken up the case, apparently annoyed by the dryness of the technocrat who did not assure that the event, with reprimands and supposed propositions of disciplinary measures against three supposed culprits, will not happen again. I have wanted to point out the opinion he expressed in one of the paragraphs: “The response of an institution to a public complaint made by a group of workers during one period should never stay below the expectations which are created by the denouncement. What is essential is the analysis derived from the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of the offense. If we had all of these elements, and the organizational measures which are taken, then we could say that an error like this will not be repeated“.
Every day, thousands of letters from desperate Cubans fill the post offices of the island. Apparently, the sender’s pretensions are to have them published in order to solve injustices which human misery has plunged them into, and later, if they are not resolved, so that at least the army of useless functionaries will not go unpunished. Now, it does not matter if we write to the Commander- instead, it matters who does, because sooner or later they will all respond to a *Fuenteovejuna, sir!
–
*Translator’s note: Fuenteovejuna– is a Spanish play from 1619, based on the events which took place in the village of Fuenteovejuna, Spain, in 1476, when a commander mistreated numerous villagers. In response, the peasants’ came together and killed that commander. When the king’s men rode into the village to ask who had committed the murder, the villagers responded by saying: “Fuenteovejuna did it”.
I’m too lazy to get out! But I do not regret having gone to the meeting yesterday of the last Thursday of each month at the journal Temas (Topics). The theme was the self-employment. A large audience, including 24 Communications students from a university in southern California.
I expanded my horizons as a housewife. I learned that artists and religious priests are also “self-employed” workers, and that this category will soon become 20% of the workforce. I also found a display on 600 employed persons, which showed that they earn on average six times more than in their former state job (is the concept of “exploitation of man by man” falling into disuse?).
There were those who came to the defense of the reviled carretilleros, walking vendors with their carts, who have received a ton of abuse, as if they were responsible for the lack of variety and the high price of vegetables.
Although the panel members still used archaic language (especially the one “self-employed” panel), they generally spoke of the positive impact of this emerging sector in the recovery of the value of working and the need to change social attitudes that see this work as reprehensible — a form of mild forgetfulness that it is a natural reaction to a half century of government stigma associated with private and personal enrichment.
The best part came with the comments. There was a call for a clear regulatory framework and public statistics about this new line of work; there was talk of cooperatives in transport, (the oldest will remember the COA).
The writer Yoss posed a theoretical problem: If all economic power generates political power, is the state resigned to the possibility of losing their power? Then they addressed a legal issue Would it be better to prohibit early what you can NOT do, rather than approve what you can.
The self-employed comrade on the panel made clear that, contrary to what we were taught in the manual of political economy, economic changes will not bring political change, and the party will remain solely and exclusively in charge. The panel moderator joked about science fiction, Yoss’s favorite genre, but he also must remember, like almost all who have studied in Cuba, the topic of changes, an exam question.
Someone suggested a revision in the 1960 phone book regarding the classifications of national products, which are now imported due to the suppression of private labor. He urged scholars to define what are the basic means of production, which by law must be in state hands.
The young people, as always, shone a bright light. One talked about eliminating the fear of the reality of the changes, another asked if it they import and export, if State services such as SEPSA (security) can be used, if credit cards work. Another said that the union’s role is to defend the worker, not tell the bad news through a press organ of the Party. Another young professor explained his experience being self-employed and advocated that the measures to be regularized before implementation and not vice versa.
I left there in a better mood. We are neither brutish nor dull. What we lack is freedom.
Cane cutters in Mariel Province. Source: Diario de Cuba, from Getty Images
The 2011-2012 sugar harvest carries the same difficulties as those of the past two decades. Although this time enough cane has been planted to fulfill the production plan and from the start of the contest they could count on almost all of the resources planned for, the problems were repeated from previous harvests. The 2011-2012 sugar harvest carries the same difficulties of the past two decades. Although this time is enough cane planted to fulfill the production plan and counted from the start of the race with almost all of the resources employed, the problems from previous harvests were repeated.
The milling should have ended on 30 April, is still not complete. In an article by Pastor Batista Valdes, about the harvest in the province of Las Tunas, published by Granma newspaper on March 30, 2012, he said that because of industrial breaks, operational disruptions and difficulties in the supply of sugarcane, the unstable ground and the aging of the raw material, the province failed to produce about 2,835 tons of sugar and had to grind about 26,800 more tons of cane, so that in the first 80 days after harvest, the province just reported 67% of sugar scheduled for that date.
The second secretary of Communist Party of Cuba, on a visit to the municipality of Campechuela on April 29, 2012, said that “While nationally the industry response has improved a lot this year, shortcomings still attached to the mishaps in the cuts require a thorough diagnosis of the problems to give special attention to the stage to come.” Exactly what was said at the end of each previous crop.
Journalist Ana Margarita Gonzalez in “A better harvest?” published on May 14 in the weekly Trabajadores — Workers — explained that although the harvest should have ended on April 30, still grinding at that time were 29 of the 46 plants. According to her, “The yield which was set at 71.5% is 10 points below, and the industrial performance of 10.57% reached only 10.20%,” to which she adds that the “poor quality of repairs agricultural machinery caused a decreased in the capacity of the operations of cutting, loading and firing of the cane.”
Meanwhile, in An X-ray of a harvest: the leap that’s wasn’t,” published in Granma on May 18, 2012, Juan Varela Pérez and Sheyla Delgado Guerra recognize some modest achievements, but consider that “the dissatisfactions are many.” According to them, the Sugar Group executives said that by the target date of closure of the harvest it was at 94%, because in the 20 days lost due to late cutting and poor utilization of the capacity potential, there were still 534,892 tonnes of cane left to grind, equivalent to 66,502 tons of sugar. They added that among the underperforming provinces, Las Tunas provinces represents 31% of the failure of the harvest in the country.
To this, is now added the low yield of the crop because of the rains in May and the practice of moving men and equipment of the provinces finishing in time to those that have not finished, as is the case in Spiritus, where they completed their production commitments in the first week of April and so will now travel to other regions, thereby increasing costs.
The collapse of the Cuban sugar industry is best understood by comparing the totals of tons of sugar produced in the last 117 years. In 1895 it reached 1.4 million ton; in 1919 it rose to over 4 million; in 1925 the figure was 5.3 million; and in 1952 reached 7.2 million.
In 1970, after a colossal effort, the figure rose to 8.5 million; but went on to fall to below 3.8 million ton in 1999.
To address this decline, a Minister of sugar, Major General Ulises Rosales del Toro, was appointed in 2001; he predicted a quick recovery in that year that would reach 5 million tons. To this aim he announced two projects: 1 – Restructuring of the Sugar Industry, aimed at achieving an industrial yield of 11% (meaning extracting from each 100 tons of cane, 11 tons of sugar), and 2 – The Alvaro Reynoso [1] Task, in order to achieve a yield of 54 tons of cane per hectare (the world average, according to FAO, is about 63 tons).
The results of the announced projects, in millions of tons were approximately: in the 2000-2001 harvest, 3.5 million; 2001-2002, 2.2 million; 2002-2003, 2.1 million; 2003-2004, 2.52 million; 2004-2005 1.3 million;, and 2005-2006 failed to exceed that figure.
In a report by journalist Juan Varela of the latest harvest, published in Granma on Tuesday June 27, 2006, wrote: “The sugar harvest just completed showed that there are the efforts and bottom line do not always correspond…the initial delay could not be overcome… three-quarters of the syrup was not produced because of the delay in the startup of 28 of the 42 companies that opened capabilities… the rest was due to breaches of the standard potential and performance industrial.”
It was not until the 2008-2009 harvest that a slight increase was achieved (it reached 1.4 million tons). This suggests, given the above difficulties, the plan for this crop to produce 1.45 million tons of sugar — a figure produced in Cuba in the late nineteenth century — is not going to be achieved.
In none of these projects designed to reverse the production decline is there any contemplation of the structure of property ownership, the low salaries paid in the industry and in agriculture, or of the major automation of the producers, with the exception of Decree Lay 259 which timidly adventures offering in usufruct one caballería of land — about 33 acres — infested with the marabou weed. All of these issues have a great deal to do with the results of this and previous harvests.
As on this occasion they had counted on the contracted resources and on having sufficient cane, one could now accentuate any other particular aspect, such as the startup date to avoid the dampness on the ground in May. However there will be no solution until the relationship between declining production, the ownership structure and other elements mentioned is established. An approach that goes beyond sugar and points to the structural reforms demanded by the country; facing up to these needs requires a political will that put the needs of society above the ideological interests.
Havana, 24 May 2012
[1] Alvaro Reynoso, a leading Cuban scientist, when Cuba was the first in the world in sugar production and contradictorily, the last in agricultural productivity, fully analyzed every one of the operations related to the cultivation and harvesting of the grass and published these in his “Essay on the cultivation of sugar cane” (1862).
It is rare to find a Cuban who doesn’t know some poem by José Martí, at least some snippet of those simple verses we learn by heart in elementary school. From the time we’re little, in the morning assemblies at school, in Spanish classes, at all the political rallies we attend, we hear over and over the lyrical verses of our national hero. The over exposure to him leads to the point where many associate him with the current state of things, and in the very poor areas, where the electricity often fails and food is in short supply, they have even vandalized his busts.
But back to the Apostle’s poetry, especially the most famous of them, with its childlike tone, full of ribbons, flowers and images, which has the title “Rose’s little shoes.” Any child under ten could rattle off its sweetened octosyllables and narrate the story told in its verses. But could also recite some of the many parodies that have been written, especially those of a political nature that make a mockery of the system. Marti is the most parodied of our authors, which is not a mark against him, but rather proof of the familiarity people feel with his work.
Among the many jokes we draw from the work of this universal Havanan, is one taken from “Rose’s little shoes,” where the protagonist — named Pilar — meets a poor little sick girl at the seashore. Without consulting her mother, the rich girl takes off her shoes and gives them to the little needy one. She completes her generous gesture with a phrase, “Here, take mine, I have more at home.”
That brief line, written almost 150 years ago, is now an infinite source of jokes, wisecracks and imitations. It is used to indicate the social differences that are becoming more obvious and traumatic in a society where the official discourse continues to talk about equality. The most profound of the jokes among the students, obliged to wear school uniforms, has do to with their ability to rate the buying power of each person by looking at their feet. Although one of the slogans most repeated by the Cuban government is that there are no children walking barefoot through the streets of this Island, the big question is where do parents get the money so that their children aren’t walking with their heels on the asphalt. It’s enough to walk past store windows and look at the high prices of leather, to realize that a salary alone — the fruit from working for the State — won’t be enough.
The drama of shoes for children becomes more poignant when school is about to start and the markets are crowded. It is not unusual then to hear the parody of Jose Marti’s poem everywhere, especially when the first day of class hundreds of eyes will look over what is shown below the pants and skirts. The cost of a pair of shoes, the cheapest, is equivalent to the average monthly wage of any worker.
We must choose between surviving for thirty days or providing our children a pair of sneakers, sandals or boots. Luckily people are not satisfied and almost everyone does something illegal to send their children to school smug and comfortable. There are also generous family or friends who donate clothing and shoes, already used, to others who need them most. Those who have no clandestine business, “divert resources from the state” or appeal to the family that lives across the Straits of Florida. Ironically, it is the exiles who end up making the official propaganda come true. The high-sounding phrases of the political billboards are based on the thousands of dollars each year that enter the country through remittances.
But the parody of Marti’s poem does not attack those who have better shoes thanks to inventiveness or a relative, but others, those who have gotten them through privilege. “Take them, take mine, I have more at home,” comes the sarcastic whisper of the son of a colonel or of a trusted diplomat posted abroad. And so the caricature of Pilar and her generosity is evoked again and again when someone brags about owning something that ordinary Cubans can barely dream of.
For example, the teenage grandson of some general, driving his own car, will hear the cute verse tossed at him when he boasts of his four wheels and their gleaming tires. It is also a way of saying: we are watching, we know that everything you are flaunting came to you by way of ideological loyalty. Sometimes it’s enough to say, “Yes, I know, you have more at home,” for the braggart to feel unmasked and the conceited to comprehend the ephemeral nature of the crumbs that come from power. Because history has these ironies, this way of making fun of everything and everyone. The nineteenth century lyricism — by the grace of necessity and humor — converts verbal material into scorn, sweet revenge on those who have less. And at some point far away, Marti’s taciturn face, believing that his Pilar with her straw hat and ribbons will be remembered as an example of kindness, not used as a spear against the false discourse of egalitarianism.
The year was 1993, my son was about to be born and I was given a weekend leave from the hospital. Upon my arrival at home, my husband was absent. He arrived very upset from the home of his son from a prior marriage. An act of repudiation had been made against the child’s mother and her spouse. They closed off the street, installed loudspeakers, brought in a mob that vociferated for hours without knowing for what nor against whom.
The couple had been battling for months to travel abroad, but would not accept the definitive exit that authorities wanted to impose. My husband’s son, then an adolescent student of painting, had decided to stay with us. After that demonstration of “revolutionary fervor”, the youth no longer wanted to live in a country where such things happen. A long time afterward, he continued having the recurring dream that the mob would demolish the door to his home and would squash them.
My son was born within a few days, and his brother left into exile three months later. They never had the opportunity of knowing each, of even recognizing one another, since they have a great physical likeness.
So to the ethical reasons, I add this very personal reason for championing a repudiation against acts of repudiation, so that nevermore any government will be in a position of confronting its citizens ones against the others.
Violence against women within different levels of society has taken an uncommon appearance. Amid campaigns and promotions to end this epidemic, the physical violence continues through untarnished machismo and a vulgar scorn for feminine dignity. Even without counting the official statistics of women who are killed or beaten, every day we hear oral stories of such lamentable cases in contemporary Cuba.
We do not have a realistic or objective press which analyzes and presents these cases in a critical manner. The social poll remains without hands nor feet. Regardless, these appalling testimonies remain in the collective memory and in the social imagination. During the last three months, a small provincial town such as San German has found itself caught up in four cases of murder of women (which I am not citing by name out of respect for the families), and all for motives of passion. Physical blows on the face and on the breasts, stabbings, attacks with machetes, and psychological wounds which will never fully heal.
Currently, the physical aggressions against women range from a shove to a punch while in the loneliness of a house or out in public, as well as cases with guns or sharp objects like knives. The motives of passion are nearly always because of supposed cheating, demands to have more accompaniment, and, only in rare cases, there has been a reverse response. Each passing day there are less women who fight back their oppressors, as was common during past decades through the use of poisoning, death by fire, or wounds with sharp objects.
Behind the pretty words spoken on Radio and TV, we are in need of an urgent action, and we need that action to bear true intentions of healing. The Cuban woman has been exposed to a verbal atmosphere of violence like never before. Their conditioned leadership in the most recent martial conflicts, as well as their participation in the inflamed battles of insults against those who are different have made them different: but also excluded. Years of coexistence in agricultural fields or in construction sites, of living side by side men under the notion that they have the same chores and rights, far from making them “equal” have made them different, but in a negative light. When words are not enough, we must know that campaigns aren’t either. From the coldness of the discourses we should pass into the heat of the facts.
Dawns of the sweetest love, their kindness could possibly be in extinction very soon, and it will be us, the impassive ones, who will be the only ones to blame.
It is May twenty-ninth, the dawn creeps up and brings the end of baseball season with a new champion: Ciego de Avila. Amid the euphoria which caused this tight closing against the giants of the Industriales, the deficiencies of the national pastime were brought to light.
Cuban baseball has been suffering for some time now from an ill which needs a complete cure, so that the passion which can be seen in the provincial stadiums and during international events could crystallize.
Out in the field, during the last few days of the season, when the eight best teams are playing, we can still witness running and batting mistakes, technical-tactical errors, players who do not know how to bunt the ball, and many other aspects which should have been learned during young ages. Clearly, these factors demonstrate the low level of competitiveness which this sport finds itself in.
What is not learned in the base…
Nearly all athletes, specialists, and fans agree in that their are economic difficulties and lack of attention for the social sport in Cuba. “It seems”, says Jorge during an illustrious Sports Debate in the city of Holguin, “that we have returned to the ‘championship-ism’ of the 1980′s”. Like him, others believe that without strong institutional support for the infant-juvenile leagues, there will not be good baseball for a while.
“It’s not enough”, adds Jorge, “to give it all to the established finalists, considering that this has been lacking from the moment the sport was begun”.
The municipal stadiums seem to be in post-war conditions, or like territories which have been ransacked by a plague. In various municipalities of the Eastern provinces, the baseball parks are home to the provincial season games without the frontal net which protects spectators, as well as lack of a roof in the bleachers and deficient illumination (or none).
What can INDER offer? Very little. The horrid diet and the deplorable fields go against the preparation and development of the performances. If the minimal resources are kept for the national championship, what can the baseball players of grade school levels or residents of far municipalities expect?
In provinces such as Las Tunas and Holguin, various teams play the provincial championship with players who end up returning to their homes through their own means afterward. The transportation provided by INDER is a group of trucks in which people must board or get off in order to leave or return. But since the conditions of lodging are horrible, many players prefer, after all, to sleep under their own roofs.
Lost Time
On occasions, the TV and Radio programs dedicated to baseball echo the fact that many people have shifted towards soccer. Every weekend, the TV broadcasts the best of that sport: the European league in all its versions.
Baseball, a captive of an ideology, has not been able to surpass the international obstacles in which the national sport faces. The day is still very far when they exhibit, as a final option, the League of the Caribbean, or its similar games in Venezuela or Mexico. Meanwhile, out in the bleachers and in the homes, the public asks for blood, literally.
The official guide to baseball (2009-2010), even while compiling the statistics starting on 1959 with the euphemistic name of “Revolutionary Baseball” (alluding to the rise of power of Fidel Castro), has maintained the names of those who have decided to leave the country or stay in their foreign excursions and are now stars or once shined as professional athletes. Jose Ariel Contreras, Alexei Ramirez, Aroldis Chapman, Livan and “El Duke” Hernandez, among others, make up the statistics: but they would not dare show their faces on TV.
Internet, the programs stolen through parabolic antennas, or those brought by Cuban-American tourists fill up some of that space. Under names such as “The Best Plays” or “The Best of the Best”, people record the bravery of Yunel Escobar or Kendrys Morales (or information on one of the latest deserters, Yoenis Cespedes) on CDs or USB drives. The ghost of Major League Baseball travels under the table and finds a way to sneak into Cuban homes.
Meanwhile, the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party seals off the floodgates so that no more baseball players can explain or commit what Marxist denomination classifies to be “ideological distractions”. But the deep country continues the passion, and very few ever remember to refer to baseball as revolutionary.
This article was written by Luis Felipe Rojas and published on Diario de Cuba on May 29th, 2012. To read the original publication click here
Havana, Cuba– During the entire month of May, the Cuban government in conjunction with the official entity Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual (CENESEX, National Center of Sexual Education) has developed a group of activities with the purpose of curtailing homophobia in Cuba and to demonstrate its commitment to walk alongside the LGBT, Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgenders on the island.
Fruitless and insufficient efforts that lack credibility in contrast to the true reality that this community lives daily. The official efforts that are led by Mariela Castro Espín have only had, until the moment, the achievement of approving in 2008 genital reconstructions. These add up, to date, to a total of 16 surgical intentions headed by a group of Belgian specialists. It is valid to point out that said operations have been seen to be halted after the abrupt departure of Wendy Iriepa Díaz from CENESEX.
One would have to ask the LGBT, “which is the most homophobic sector in Cuba?” If we analyze the reality this community faces in spite of uncertain apertures and inefficient campaigns, we would find a society in which the existent homophobia may be called Governmental or Official Homophobia.
I realize we are a “macho” nation by identity, but I do not fail to realize who the true culprit is behind what is faced by a community that, for more than five decades, has lived the slap on the back by those who sent it to forced labor camps, into exile, stigmatized it, marginalized it and now, changing its tactic, sends it to prison for the supposed crime of posing a social danger.
It is time to speak of things as they are. “Whoever is afraid should buy a dog,” says one of the phrases repeated daily on the island. I can not adapt it to me because I have no fear of expressing what I feel and think. Even less so do I have to buy a dog because I have on my side all of the existent social networks which, unlike dogs, can not be poisoned or decapitated. It is a weapon that constantly barks and is at the defense of humanity.
Let us call homophobia in Cuba Governmental Homophobia. Is it by any chance not they who are culpable for all that we have lived? Are they not the ones who pursue us daily and take us into police units for roaming the Cuban streets? Is this not the same government that submerges us into a state of lacking rights and usurps each of our spaces? If we wanted to keep asking, I would ask Mariela Castro Espín several things.
One of the questions we could ask this feminine personage, who today makes an effort to demonstrate to the world her leadership, why does she make such an effort in taking all the credit for the work with the LGBT community in Cuba when it was her mother who initiated this gesture before the Cuban government? Why does she try to erase the role developed by that Belgian sexologist who lived for years in Cuba? What is her true intention in representing the Cuban LGBT community? What gives her a sense of identification with our community, perchance is she equal to us or some member of her family a member of our organization? And one of those questions I would not tire of repeating to her is, “Does there exist some relation between those five Cubans sanctioned in the United States — for spying — and the LGBT community?” When I ask this last question, it is due to her use of placards demanding their liberty on behalf of the LGBT community.
I am a member of that LGBT community and have never participated in demanding liberty for any of them (the aforementioned group of five); I believe that before we can achieve liberty for those whom the Cuban government says are innocent, we must achieve liberty for each one of those homosexuals taken to prison and we have to achieve a public apology for what we have lived through for years.
Now let us talk about Homophobia with the truth and, seated in the bench for the accused, the true culprits.
Although I do not consider it one of the current critical issues, I think it is important to set out some opinions about the Cuban left. Today we talk about an old and a new left. I believe that, in the Cuban case, the left as such, whether old or new, is discredited by five decades of political, economic, and social mistakes, dogmatism, and inefficiency, manifested in all aspects of its practice. Holding power, or allowing it to be held in its name for over fifty years, the Cuban left has not been able to do anything important or lasting, and has only rolled back the country to a situation of poverty and subordination to the outside, like never before, not even during the most incompetent and corrupt governments. This disqualifies it morally from purporting to offer solutions and projects in the immediate term at the end of the current “model,” or from even being considered.
I understand that the left may play a temporary role in the transition, but it will take a number of years before another left, stripped of the dogmatism and inefficiency that have characterized the current version, can earn some respect, credibility, and space in the Cuban political landscape. Undoubtedly centrist or even center-right thought will prevail during the early days, without anything close to leftist thought: a logical response to the leftist saturation of more than five decades. Those on the Cuban left should understand this, if they are intelligent and learn from their mistakes, and not try to occupy positions of authority, which would introduce an element of confrontation into the process of change.
If all these elements come together properly, and if, as the saying goes, these fifty years have provided a vaccine against all the “isms,” then the Cubans will be able to return to the Republic — battered in part in 1952 and completely destroyed after 1959 — to restore it, perfect it, and make it our common home, where a real democracy, strong and efficient institutions, and a free economy, ensure to us the peace and prosperity we need in order to insert ourselves into the world and rejoin it.
It is no coincidence that the women who struggle are called crazy, because in reality they must underestimate something, and this has been thus in the history of humanity, because it is very difficult for them to recognize that woman also has a brain…
Elisa Carrió, founder of the Argentine political party
“Affirmation for a Republic of Equality (ARI)”, lawyer, university professor
For some it’s strange to relate Rosa Parks with the largest island in the Caribbean. The Rosa Parks Female Movement for Civil Rights was founded some time ago. Rosa Parks was a reserved and dignified lady who, in 1954, was arrested in Montgomery, a city in the south of the United States, for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. This attitude of hers, so disconcerting in those years, provoked an ongoing popular movement for civil rights in the United States. Anyone was far from imagining that her exemplary attitude would arrive in Cuba.
In the insular history there is a Pleiades of talented and ferocious women: some are most beloved as Mariana Grajales, the mother of the Maceo generals. We have heroines and famous professionals. Others are virtually unknown although they gave their all: their hair, jewels, their life, for the country’s liberty; however the concept of passive resistance was practically unknown in Cuba.
Rosa Parks is at Saint Rita Church as of the first march of the Ladies in White, known worldwide today. The indomitable spirit of Rosa Parks, identical, penetrates each gladiolus, each reunion, each step. No money could pay for the beatings and daily humiliations those simple Cuban women must bear, and even though the populace claim that one of them must be an agent of Cuba’s National Security, one must also certainly recognize, her suffering is double. To stand beside convinced beings must be very hard for a woman, be she mother, wife, sister, and at the same time a spy. The patriotism with which she could be adorned is of scarce value now, after all life will send her the bill.
In spite of the departure of the tireless Laura Pollán, first a grade-school teacher and later a human rights leader, the spirit of Rosa Parks, which does as it pleases in the rest of the country, now adds an extraordinary deed to the History of Cuba: the closure, for months, of the main entrance of the Havana Capitol, the most emblematic edifice of the Capital to all Cubans, constructed in the 30′s decade of the past century.
Four women from the Rosa Parks Female Movement for Civil Rights behave, apparently, like the boys and girls that rode skates and skateboards on the Capitol steps. With the same self-assurance and ruckus, they exhibited a bed sheet with signs that said: “Down with the Dictatorship” and “Long Live Human Rights.” Incredible!
These “cuatro gatas“, a mere handful of the Parks group, make history in August of 2011. Little did they care about the month of the “Maleconazo of 1994″, the so-called “vacations” of many with crumbs and hunger, the breaks on the beaches devoid of palms and umbrellas. Once ex-president Fidel Castro labeled “chicas locas” — crazy girls — those young women who prostitute themselves due to their unending squalor. Now (Thank you, Rosa!) nobody calls these four women crazy; at most, “dangerous”.
The Cuban capitol was partly to blame for all that transpired, constructed in the image and likeness of the one in Washington. Rosa Parks, from another dimension, once again felt the same as in the decade of the fifties. She believed the events were repeating and God only knows how the beliefs of these Cuban ladies were mixed with those she always held. The power of convictions and ideas is without discussion, so for now, the lavish entrance of the Capitol remains closed as of the end of August 2011.
Within the building, the Statue of the Republic awaits sad and lonely. Perhaps she believes that now no one remembers her, so famous for her beauty and size in her time. But no, we must convince her that we continue loving the Republic of Cuba, and although they insist that it is not so, the majority of the Cuban people comment between looks of complicity and kidding around:
…the Capitol still remains closed due to the repairs of:
Sara Marta Fonseca
Mercedes Evelyn García
Odalys Sanabria
Tania Maldonado Santos
There is no joke, nor does there exist, in my belief, any motive for laughter. The ladies of Rosa Parks have before them a colossal task. Each Cuban energy, within their means, will have to help them. Otherwise, some day we shall run into the Statue of the Republic crying in the Hall of Forgotten Steps. We allow the valuable metal of her body turn to mud.
The plane touched down in the middle of a Havana night and the tourists pass through the international airport terminal where dozens of Cubans offer them taxis, rooms for rent, rum or mulatas. A young man approaches a short dumpy visitor and, squatting close to his ear, asks “Mister, you like cigars?” but the answer comes with a strong and well-known accent, that tells the daring vendor the origin of the traveler. These are the new Russians, who come not for business but for pleasure, who have stopped calling each other “comrade” and who now carry their Visas or Mastercards. In short, they seem less and less like those who for decades sustained our social experiment.
It has been over fifty years since the Cuban government resumed diplomatic relations with what was then called the Soviet Union. Those who lived through that time have told me it wasn’t easy to overcome the accumulated prejudices against the inhabitants of the first socialist territory in the world, those who were seen by many of my compatriots as part of an advanced colonization. Life demonstrated that the alarmists were not entirely wrong.
In the great naivete of our collective childhood there were no differences between Ukrainians, Turks or Lithuanians, as we believed them all a single extension ruled from the Kremlin. On the other hand, the cultural abyss between the homeland of Lenin and our fun-loving Caribbean island made one scholar admit that “Cuban and Russian hearts beat on completely different frequencies.” However, geopolitics tried to match us up, without much success. Unlike other European countries, where Communism rolled in with the tanks commanded by Stalin, in our case it came with a subsidy, with boats full of oil that called at the ports of this Island every month.
“The Russians are coming!” cried some, frightened, while others responded, “Welcome to the Soviets!” Choosing between one word or the other was, for a long time, more than a linguistic dilemma, it was the taking of an ideological position. When Cubans of my generation started to be aware of the world, in the early eighties, no one was tearing their hair out to choose between these two words that history had forced to be synonymous.
So we watched Russian films and rode in Soviet Ladas. The downtown restaurant, Moscow, disappeared in a mysterious and voracious fire, and to the west of the city they raised a hideous building that would serve as the headquarters of the USSR embassy, which we jokingly christened the “control tower” both for it architectural profile as well as its political evocations. Those were the gray times, when we kids lived trapped between the teary Eastern European cartoons and the interminable discourse of the then robust Maximum Leader.
At the beginning of the nineties, with the collapse in those parts, the official discourse eliminated the references to former mentors. They erased them from the text books and removed the photos of the leaders in the fuzzy hats with earmuffs from the Museum of the Revolution, while national history was rewritten downplaying the Soviet presence in our lives.
The cultural impact of this abrupt departure made itself felt immediately, especially on movie posters, where the American productions — and it continues today — pack the theaters and only rarely are replaced with the old classics distributed in another epic under the symbol of a soldier and a peasant girl carrying a hammer and sickle.
To the surprise of many, an agreeable surprise of course, television premiered the series The Master and Margarita based on the unforgettable satirical novel of the awkward Mikhail Bulgakov. On the national scene the Bolshoi Ballet — once the flagship of Soviet culture — returned to perform again and, according to those who attended, defrauded the demanding Havana public. But nothing is like that era when the memorandums flew from the palace of colored domes to our sober Council of State.
After years of little interaction, the visitors from the other side of the Urals have returned. They are no longer seen in large groups, dressed in pants always one size too big and white shirts with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. They are no longer those foreign technicians who had the right to buy in stores prohibited to us, and who sold on the black market the trinkets they bought in those so-called diplo-shops.
We haven’t gone back to calling them “losbolos” — the bowling pins — that appellation half mocking and half affectionate, honoring the lack of sophistication of their industrial products, full of rough welds, divorced from aerodynamics and comfort. Now, the returning comrades of yesteryear compete in the discos, look like businessmen, and wear French perfumes.
They are entrepreneurs showing off their computer products, such as the well known Kaspersky anti-virus, before the astonished eyes of those who once saw them in their military uniforms. A couple of years ago they even had an exhibition area at the International Book Fair. Their shelves were filled with diverse topics, including self-help, with very few titles of Marxism and Leninism. They walk among us and no one screams in fear, “The Soviets are back!” Because it’s clear to everyone that they’ve returned and, swimming at our beaches or drinking a mojito in some tourist bar, they are — clearly — Russians.
“Today marks 21 days that I haven’t taken a drink…” said a Beny Moré song we listened to back in the 50’s. And today, if my accounting doesn’t fail me, is 21 days since our general-cum-president has made an appearance. Several foreign dignitaries have passed through Havana, the rains have converted some of the country’s eastern and central villages into real disaster zones; national and foreign events worth some statement or other have occurred, and yesterday he turned 81, but the Party First Secretary does not appear.
