The Right to Fly Without Glass and Bars / Dora Leonor Mesa

A woman watch repairer in Havana

Looking at a country, any analysis of the relative participation of men and women in the economy and politics, is going to show a masculine domination (Global Gender Gap Report 2010). In recent years the role of Cuban women has been increased to some extent in the political and economic sphere, but this evidence is contradicted by the usual practice of the Cuban Government in reserving for men the most important ministries: Defense, Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of the Interior.

The active presence of Cuban women in all fields offers quantitative data of the reality of the country, but this relationship is not proportional to the quality of their positions. The Federation of Cuban Women (a pro-government organization) details in its national report on the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean (Chile, November 2011) that approximately 30% of ministers and deputy ministers are women, this figure reaches 40% in the State Council. In 50 years (2009) only one of them has reached Deputy Prime Minister. In the Ministry of Public Health, of all physicians, 58% are women and 46% of people in leadership positions are the same sex, but none have been able to ascend to the highest office of the institution.

It is also advisable to consider the appointment of women, in and of itself, hardly representative of the general situation of the women in Cuban society. Often, when the Cuban professionals are named as top executives, on many occasions they take the leadership under crisis conditions, where the chances of failure are greater, a reality found in other countries (Ryan and Haslam, 2008).

I don’t know if Cuban sociologists have studied the issue but one could offer as an example the current Minister of Education, who received the portfolio of the Ministry at a time when the institution is experiencing a serious crisis, unprecedented in history.

The current comptroller and vice president (2009), another interesting appointment, was appointed to the office at a time when Cuba has a high rate of corruption as reported by the non-governmental agency Transparency International.

In the form of working in the private sector, known in Cuba as “for oneself,” at the end of June 2011, of 325,947 total licenses held under the Departments of Labor and the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, only 27% were held by women.The report does not clarify what percentage of that figure relates to business owners and which to female employees.

There are positive aspects about gender relations in Cuba, although it is seen as “too optimistic” in ranking 24 worldwide, according to the Global Gender Gap Report, 2010, above countries like Luxembourg, Costa Rica, Portugal and Austria.

It is recognized that Cuban women as mothers occupy an important place in society, where her judgment is respected at the social and family level. Maternity Law and the Family Code reinforce this situation.

This is observed more frequently and in greater proportion in classes with higher educational levels, a favorable change in couples where men are very involved with the care of children, publicly showing stereotypes considered “maternal “including sharing housework equally. However, Cuban sociologists report that the economic dependence of women on men has increased.

Unlike what happens in many countries, in Cuba women receive equal pay with men for similar jobs. However, the reality is that the most prominent positions and better paying ones are occupied mostly by men. Various examples and statistics are available on the Internet that support this view. Cuban women are 72% of the workforce in the education sector and 70% in the health sector (National Report FMC, 2011), both sectors among those with the worst pay and poor working conditions.

We thank those who think that “Cuban women have come a long way.” A paradox in a country where preparing a daily meal is a challenge and travel abroad, without conditions, a dream. Being a woman also means to aspire to, with full rights, the highest spheres of the economy and politics of the nation and yet that conduct creates serious conflicts and suspicions. In short, it remains “much ado about nothing.”

February 23 2012

Cuba: “The authorities attack us because we talk about the issues people face” (Amnesty International) / Luis Felipe Rojas

Amnesty International published the following report regarding the situation of Luis Felipe Rojas, author of this blog, and other independent journalists who face persecution and countless obstacles for wanting reporting the reality of an island under a dictatorship. Visit the original report here.

Cuba: “The authorities attack us because we talk about the issues people face”

For Cuban journalist and blogger Luis Felipe Rojas, posting an entry on his blog Crossing the Wire Fences or even sending an email is a daunting task.

Every time he wants to access the internet, he has to leave his house in the early hours of the morning and travel 200 kilometres from his hometown of Holguín, in eastern Cuba, to the closest cybercafé. If he is lucky, and he is not stopped at a police checkpoint on the way, he will get to a computer in about three hours.

Once there, Luis Felipe has to show ID to buy an access card and pay six US dollars to use the internet for sixty minutes – that is almost a third of a monthly local salary.

Some days he finds websites containing information considered critical of the government are blocked or messages have disappeared from his inbox.

Internet access is so highly controlled in Cuba that critics of the government have come up with creative ways to ensure their stories get out.

Sometimes that involves converting articles into digital images and sending them via SMS to a contact outside of Cuba, to type and post on Luis Felipe’s blog. He also uses text messages for posting on Twitter but the lack of internet access means that he cannot see what others say to (or about) him.

Luis Felipe is part of a growing group of journalists and government critics who are finding new ways to by-pass state control in order to disseminate information about human rights abuses taking place in Cuba.

According to a recent report by Amnesty International, independent journalists and bloggers have faced increased threats and intimidation when publishing information critical to the authorities.

The Hablemos Press’ Information Centre, an unofficial news agency monitoring human rights abuses across Cuba, recently reported that from March 2011 to March 2012 inclusively, more than 75 independent journalists have been detained, some, like Caridad Caballero Batista up to 20 times.

“After the mass release of prisoners of conscience in 2011, we have seen authorities sharpening their strategy to silence dissent by harassing government critics and independent journalists with short term detentions and public acts of repudiation,” said Gerardo Ducos, Cuba expert with Amnesty International.

On 25 March, Luis Felipe was detained in a local police station for five days in order to prevent him from travelling to attend an open-air mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI.

“The authorities attack us because we talk about the issues people face – that not everybody has enough food, that public services do not always work, that there are problems with the health service,” Luis Felipe said to Amnesty International.

“I have been scared many times. Scared of going to the street, of being beaten up, of being locked up for a long time and not seeing my children. But fear does not stop me. I do not think a tweet from me is going to save anybody from prison but it does save them from impunity.”

2 May 2012

Eliécer Ávila and Ricardo Alarcón Face Off / Eliécer Ávila


Video is 49 minutes long.
Note: If the video doesn’t work please put this link in your browser and it will appear:
Click here, or
Insert this line into the menu bar and choose SUBTITLES in the bar under the video: http://amara.org/en/videos/2sn3NOO3uzTj/info/alarcon-y-estudiantes-de-la-uci-video-completo/

Notes: This video came to light in February 2008. It was filmed at Cuba’s University of Information Sciences (UCI), located in Boyeros, Havana, and is of a large meeting where students had an exchange with Ricardo Alarcon, President of the National Assembly. This version of the video omits portions of the event from both the beginning, as well as a few closing minutes at the end [only because we have been unable to find the entire video].

At the meeting, Eliecer Avila [see 1:18 in the video for the beginning of Eliecer’s comments/questions], a student, posed a series of questions to Mr. Alarcon, who then responded. Eliecer introduced himself as the leader of “The Technology and Politics Surveillance Project,” one of the specialties of “Operation Truth,” whose job it was to monitor the Internet and “combat whatever we find in this area,” that is to defend Cuba and its Revolution. He poses his questions from the perspective of needing to have more persuasive arguments:

I selected some issues – to say they are the only ones would perhaps be to lie to you – they form a part of the international debate. They are part of the debate of young Revolutionaries today, when we meet to discuss things in a group, to become more convinced, to commit ourselves more, and to develop more arguments. But they form a part of our own doubts, the doubts of our own conceptions.

As a result of this video coming to light Eliecer was ultimately expelled from the University, and began his own personal transformation from staunch defender of the Revolution to someone who appears as a blogger on this site. Eliecer’s recently launched blog is a series of videos, which will appear here as soon as they are subtitled.

Ricardo Alarcon (b. 1937, Havana), is still the President of the National Assembly, a post he has held since 1993. (Update — Alarcon no longer holds this post)

Until When … / Wendy Iriepa and Ignacio Estrada

El Cobre Basilica in the tropical forests outside Santiago, Cuba. Photo © Klaus Schäfer.

 By Ignacio Estrada Cepero

Havana, Cuba: Once again human rights activists denounce the repression in the Eastern provinces, against a group of women who belong to the organization Ladies in White.

Such an embarrassing event was characterized by a group of elderly and paramilitary people armed with many different types of sticks, some people say, to impede the activists from going down the steps of the sanctuary of El Cobre. Last Sunday the 19th history repeated itself at feet of the Mother of all Cubans.

La Virgen de la Caridad, some time before the event, would welcome each of the fervent prayers made by these women who were demanding the release from jail of all Cuban prisoners and the end of violence. While these women were listening to the Sunday mass, a few meters away from them, the Ministry of the Interior police was preparing a crowd to repress them.

The event is repeated every Sunday in each provincial capital of the country.  Repudiation rallies, temporary detentions, withdrawal of identity cards, the presence of police agents around the temples. These are some of the actions taken by the Ministry of the Interior police to stop these brave women, recognized by different international awards, from attending the churches.

These events are are not unknown to the Cuban ecclesiastic authorities, institutions that become accomplices of such provocative acts, carried out in their own headquarters by the Cuban authorities and their ambassadors of terror.

Maybe this is only the advance of what it will be like for these women when the Holy Pope visits the island next March. Just to think of the fact that Pope Benedicto XVI will be in the same place where Sunday after Sunday these women are repressed and besieged by persons without scruples before faith, makes me feel scared.

It can be imagined the Holy Pope accompanied by his followers all dressed in white going up and down in the presence of the Virgin. They would be surprised by the fact that wearing white clothing, they would be considered mercenaries or receive the repudiation of such orchestras prepared to repress unprotected women as well as human right activists.

Such a fact can only be thought in our minds, we know it is not going to happen, but we will continue asking ourselves how a government which proclaims women’s rights, social equity, equality and freedom like that of speech just to mention an example, why it does not let women today walk along the streets claiming freedom for their loved ones?

Is it something that other women in a different time did not do?

It is a regrettable situation under which Ladies in White live. We must trust in that God who provides their strength, that soon there will be no tears in their eyes. We trust in God that soon their husbands, relatives and friends in prison return home.

As we can see, before the rage of those shaking on the throne before the encouragement of this group of women throughout the country, others like me will keep on asking themselves, until when will things like this happen.

Note the Increase of Violence Against Prisoners with HIV/AIDS.

The Cuban Alliance Against AIDS before the increasing number of beatings in the Cuban jails of prisoners with HIV/AIDS, is calling on international organizations of Human Rights to demand Havana to stop these violations to which prisoners with such disease are submitted.

The violence against prisoners of both sexes is known, the incorrect use of punishment in the isolation cells and the increase of self aggressions as a protest to a whole string of violations on the side of the penal authorities.

To all this, we can add the extremely bad medical assistance, the lack of medicines, malnutrition and humiliating treatment.

The Cuban Alliance Against AIDS alerts the world and asks to stop these violations which put in danger the physical integrity of Cuban prisoners affected by HIV/AIDS in the six penitentiaries in the island.

Ignacio Estrada Cepero
Executive Director
Cuban Alliance Against AIDS
estradacepero@yahoo.es Twitter: @desidahoy

Translated by AnonyGY

February 20 2012

Being Black in Cuba / Iván García

A white-skinned off-duty law enforcement officer, having a drink, justifies the Cuban police force’s racist archetype that turns a black or mixed-raced person into a presumed criminal with the old refrain he learned from his mother, “All blacks are not thieves but all thieves are black.”

The guy is not a bad person. He’s a good father, a competent policeman, and doesn’t consider himself a racist. But it was what he learned in his childhood. Racial prejudice abounds in Cuban families. Then moves into the whole society.

The Havana agent’s attitude informs the National Revolutionary Police in the days of operations and raids: of 10 citizens whom they stop in the street and ask for identification, eight are black. It is a problem of mentality.

A couple of years, a friend who worked in a foreign firm, told me that he was thinking of selling bleaching creams for the skin. I didn’t believe him. According to market research, he said, the cream would have wide acceptance among Cubans.

As I’d never seen them for sale in hard currency stores, I thought it was a hoax. In the book Afro-Cubans, historian and anthropologist Maria I. Faguagua related that in 2009 a Spanish company considered this possibility.

Several respondents, who work providing hair treatments for black women, said that these creams would sell like hotcakes. “You can think what you want. But I’ve spent 20 years straightening hair and I say that many blacks and mestizos would give anything for light skin and becoming white,” said a Havana hairdresser.

Certainly black pride in Cuba is not at its best. What blacks have gone through is a lot. It’s always good to look at history.

Since 1886, when slavery was officially abolished, blacks were left at a distinct disadvantage compared to whites. They had no property. No money. Or ancestry. And much less social recognition.

Years later, during the Republic, their decisive contribution to the struggle for independence was barely recognized. Despite these efforts, they could only get jobs as dock workers, cane cutters, or in construction.

Many black families did not quietly accept the fate of living as lower class. And some were able to climb the steep and difficult social ladder.

But they were the few. Then, as we know, Fidel Castro arrived. He decided to solve the racial differences by decrees and camps where blacks and whites mixed and became “partners”.

At the beginning it wasn’t bad. But racial prejudice in Cuba was more subtle. It was — and is — deeply entrenched in the minds of the majority. And that can not be legislated. If they really wanted to break down barriers, they needed systematic educational work over the long term, and inclusion of blacks and mulattos in power structures.

That was more difficult. It was one thing that the personal bodyguards or soldiers sent to the civil war in Angola were the color of oil, and another, for them to form a part of the status quo.

Although after 1959 blacks won spaces, and they shared with whites the carnivals, ball games, attendance at the best schools and college, then, despite all their talent, they were stuck in the mediocre group of professionals who retire without being able to scale the social or political ranks.

From time to time a black person shows up at the higher levels of the government or the Party. It’s a question of image. But blacks continue to be on the lowest rung of society.
They are, of course, the majority in prisons and in sports. Except for chess and swimming: according to old racist concepts in these areas brown people are failures.

They’re also good for playing musical instruments. Or singing boleros, sones, salsa, rap and reggaeton.

But when they are seeking access to Alicia Alonso’s ballet company, they are regarded with suspicion. Almost apologizing, an old teacher told me: “I have nothing against blacks, but for the ballet they have anatomy problems.” (He ignored the victories in the London Ballet of Carlos Acosta, a Cuban black dancer.)

If they are active in music and sports, they are also known for getting into prostitution. Looking for something different, or because of the myth that they are good in bed, many Europeans travel to Cuba to be sexually satiated with dark skin. Cheap pleasure.

But while the prostitutes offer themselves in the clubs and nightspots of Havana for $20, some black men still look for their future in the distance, especially in Europe.

Thus, the worst of the worst in Cuba today is a woman who is both black and dissident. Ask community activist Sonia Garro. A nursing graduate with stellar grades, she personally suffers racism from some of the Creole mandarins.

One afternoon, proud to be the first professional a family whose members had engaged in lower paid occupations, with her best dress and pair of shoes,  she went to the Astral theater to pick up her diploma. At the time of taking the group photo, a provincial leader asked her to leave: “Those of your color are not good in the pictures.”

Years later, Sonia told me that her anger was such that she left without picking up her diploma. Soon, she became a dissident.

A few days before the Pope’s arrival on the island in March, the anti-riot forces of the political police entered her home as if she were a terrorist.  Using rubber bullets and excessive violence, they charged with Sonia and her husband, Ramon Alejandro Muñoz, also an opponent. They await the legal process in severe prisons. She in a women’s prison, he in a punishment cell at Combinado del Este prison because he refuses to wear the prison uniform.

Blacks in Cuba seek their destiny in the few options to succeed that they have. Their failures are triple the number of successes. A high percentage live poorly and eat worse. Patience has been drying up. And they have decided to stop being prisoners of their race. Like Sonia Garro.

Carnival on the Wrong Date / Fernando Dámaso

In Havana, traditionally, carnival is celebrated in the second half of February. Later they changed the date, and it has practically disappeared. However, the first of May, which was a day when workers presented their demands and requirements to the current government, for years now has become a complete carnival.

Yesterday was this year’s event. Well organized and controlled (the efficiency, unknown in other fields, is remarkable here), it took place exactly as planned: the participants were gathered at the times and places established, taken from there via the planned routes and deposited in their places, from there they formed up ranks, and they all marched, happy and combative, the placards, the banners and the allegorical objects reflected nothing incorrect (they repeated praise for the socialist model, criticisms of the empire, without forgetting to demand the release of the Cuban Five), the speech was more of the same, and, like always, the guests were friends of the government, composed principally of old and young representatives of the nostalgic international left (some 1,900 according to official figures), who once a year get to be tourists for free.

The celebration of the workers developed a rhythm of hymns, complacent chants, Cuban flags, ranks of the red, it couldn’t be any other way! They sang the Internationale in unison, with one fist held high. The return of the participants to their places of origin was realized in reverse, but with equal efficiency.

The number of participants was already known beforehand: that established by the organizers (some 500,000), with each union assigned obligatory numbers, broken down between workplaces and schools. In short, the unions here, as happened in the extinct socialist block, are governmental and don’t represent the interests of the workers, but rather those of the State.

So it happens that their leaders, who do not come from the ranks of labor, are designated officials who are put in their posts, and removed from them, according to the political expediency of the moment.

One interesting detail was the participation, for the first time, of the self-employed, organized within the unions according to their activities. It seems that if they want to keep their licenses and survive without major setbacks, they have to join the carnival.

I remember that in the former Soviet Union, workers marched combative, happy and smiling for their great successes in front of their rulers, in the morning, and in the afternoon, in the privacy of their homes, with family and friends, they drowned their sorrows and frustrations in vodka. I do not want to believe that the same thing is happening here!

May 2 2012

About Hatred / Cuban Law Association, Wilfredo Vallín Almeida

No one shall be subjected to torture nor to cruel, inhuman or degrading …

In the early days of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, in the course of military operations, a scene shown on Cuban television remained in my memory.

A fighter against the Taliban power entered a small town where, shot down by insurgents, there were several bodies on the floor. Approaching one of them, which he seemed to recognize, he began to kick it furiously.

A question immediately came to my mind: What relation could the dead man have had with him, to fill him with such hatred? What had happened between them?

I’ll never know what happened, but it immediately brought to my mind words like these:

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the inviolability of his person.

Did the Taliban, possessors of total power at the time, think that it would last forever and they would never have to answer for their actions and in that belief they acted as they did?

Examples of such attitudes abound, but there they are, for those who want document them, Nero and Caligula in ancient Rome, Adolf Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy, Joseph Stalin in Russia, Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia, Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, Pol Pot in Kampuchea, and many others who would make this list too long.

But there are other examples that call in another direction:

And it is not land that constitutes what is called the integrity of the Homeland. The Homeland is more than oppression, more than pieces of land without freedom and without life, more that the right of possession by force. The Homeland is a community of interests, unity of traditions, unity of purpose, sweet and comforting fusion of love and hope.

This and no other is the direction in which we should go. Because we must avoid, before it is too late, having to hear these words:

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind…

Whereas it is essential that human rights are protected by the rule of law, so that no man be compelled to have recourse to rebellion against tyranny and oppression…

I hope sanity prevails over hate.

2 May 2012

Huge Hell Whether it Works or Not (For the Poetry of the ’90s) / Francis Sánchez

Photo: Francis Sánchez

[In this part of an unedited interview, which I don’t know when it will be published, I respond to the question: “Ciego de Ávila: Love or scorn?”]

I have tried to invent the province lovingly, although for that I had to give a primary form to that love without obligation until it was more or less justified physically. You know what I mean: it was given to me to work on magazines, research, anthologies, events, etc. Anyway, I was wasting my time, “plowing the sea” as we say. I knew that eventually the community where I had lived would not forgive me, and so it has been — fortunately, I must say.

Reality and abstraction merge dramatically in provincial life, love and scorn depend on knowing how to distinguish and connect them. In a highly centralized society, all imaginative communication hangs on a few strange threads, and this is experienced with more tension at the lower levels of the social order, as in the small political boundaries. The pressure that, with regards to my fantasies, exerted by the corner I inhabit it Cuba, my residence in the absence of water surrounded by water on all sides*, definitively results, for me, in a candid inferno. At times I explain it to myself as a liquidation and generational auction.

As much as the redefining of historical stages may seem trivial to me, I am one of those young people — tempering here classifications such as poet, writer or intellectual — who burst on the scene at the beginning of the ’90s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the so-called “Special Period.” I understand my way through this historic turning point that continues up to today, this dismantling of large belief systems, which helps me to explain my particular agonizing relationship with my environment.

We go out into the street — similarly some of us take up poetry — to earn a living by tooth and nail, expecting freedom and giving it to ourselves. Iconoclasts, we trample on the fears of many of the people we’ve grown up around. We defend our right not to be State employees and not to fall prey to the famous and feared Law of Dangerousness.

Most of us have given up our studies halfway through, or at least when any hope in the logical scale of social advancement through the bureaucratic system collapses. We are the laborers in clandestine businesses and the black market, ignorant of the Revolutionary modesty and ethics that calls on us to die of hunger before letting ourselves be corrupted by the supposed vices of capitalism. Then, we even define ourselves as poets when some official comes by asking how we’re different from the lumpen.

We ruined meetings, accusing the bureaucrats of the presidency, we questioned, we spoke up, we played the classic opportunistic chess poorly because we captured pieces in all directions, we didn’t have the grace to get in good with the boss. We asked, of course, that the Hermanos Saíz Association cut itself off from the other political organizations and become independent. We had nothing and aspired to much less. We flat out refused to be domesticated. We had to reject the first time someone edited and approved a poem we were going to recite in an activity the following day, for the first time we told the “secret” agent who always presided over the Literary Workshop to shut up.

We went to church and tried to carry the Virgin on a procession when it was frowned upon and prohibited. Our poems spoke freely of religious beliefs, suicide fantasies, different sexual preferences, or the sublime desire to emigrate; we severed ourselves from the tyrannical deadly placenta, killing the mother and burning the city. We quoted each other and shared the experiences of the exiles, making direct comparisons with the cursed readings and tragic events of Stalinism.

We had to stop using, in essays and criticisms, classifications such as “Revolutionary literature” that had been commonplace until then, and mandatory tests to pass to the next level. Unthinkably, a recognized group shame came over us with the introduction to the anthology Usted es la culpable (You are Guilty), in 1985, where we almost asked forgiveness for living.

Following the takeover, by the powers-that-be, of colloquial discourse after the Triumph of the Revolution, no generation had been so free. At our side, many of the authors of the decade immediately before, those of the great axiological bankruptcy, and especially those who had not swelled the diaspora, suffering the ravages of the ideological uproar: self-censorship, delusions of persecution, deep remorse, psychological scars, as a consequence of the forced learning when the control of artistic activity was still staged, a shock treatment undertaken directly by police dressed as peasants.

The churches overflowed and every Sunday, Mass-as-catharsis brought a collective prayer for those who threw themselvesinto the sea on a raft. We walked the country from house to house listening to banned radio or the cassettes of so many musicians targeted on the blacklist. Nobody lowered his voice while standing in line to echo jokes and anonymous parodies of poems and songs. There was a euphoria paradoxically coinciding with the consciousness of hitting bottom. Our psychic freedom was so spontaneous and vital that we felt ourselves above reality, noting our own detachment and spiritual independence, ignoring the fact that the macrosocial circumstances would remain the same as those suffered by other generations in the hard gray years.

Perhaps we trusted that sooner or later history would have to catch up with us and put itself in tune with our inner world and everything out there would be removed. What happened afterwards? Of course we didn’t change life. We just spent our youth and there was another turn of the screw they gave — and continue giving — others.

I hardly know if I distinguish good from within an experience so tight that it leaves me short of breath, but when I look around I notice that the generation of the ’80s that didn’t emigrate, for the most part they have adapted better, continued the evolutionary heritage of the coloquialists, the Generation of the ’50s, skilled in reaching the power on high and touching its intimate and popular fiber.

Just as there is a “historic” generation that toppled the Batista tyranny and took the baton for life, there is a poetic generation that, within the aesthetic ideals of the process acquired, early on, the same equivalence as the supposed opponents of the old bourgeois sensibility which has been accruing the benefits of power from this extra prestige, not for its abilities in literary recycling and contamination, which has been great over the years thanks to the porous and open nature of the predominant collectivist discourse, but because they distinguished themselves by making the “sacrifice” and occupying the political responsibilities, the positions, the institutions, as so well described by Virgilio Lopez Lemus in his book Palabras de trasfondo (Background Words).

Then the deviations of the young who, at the end of the ’80s answered their parents, reclaimed space, perhaps these were only the sins of transition. Even many of those wizened poets of the triumphalist and opportunistic discourse, against those whom they fought, simply adapted new coordinates, expanding the range, deceiving the thematic present, adding a seasoning of drops of pessimism, metaphysicality or perplexity, and in the end looking too much like their caustic children, sharing the same balance of elite institutions, lifted into power but brought down by the same sociological reality.

I think the majority of the youth of the ’90s — well, of course, I can only speak for myself and a few that I appreciate, within the scope of my knowledge — we still have the stigma of the excesses of frustration and freedom into which we launched ourselves, because it was real, unvarnished. The little we experienced, I think we did it with our backs to the public that had followed, up to now, the spectacle of the internal struggles for the discourse of truth, of facts, to always reach someone with the best and most updated code of the great changes of Cuban history (of this resignation someone has called “boring”) when, along the way, we have seen that this history is never that new, never so distant no matter how overly sentimental or unbearable it has become at times.

We touched, and we are touching, a spiritual flame, energy that did not separate any layer of reality toward another magnetic center. And there was exactly nothing left for us to do, amid essential conditions of maladjustment, to enjoy the good life, save a demonstration of domestic, or minor, virtues, typical of the domesticated.

The truth is that we must have endurance to live in peace in a “huge” village and a “tiny” hell.

*Translator’s note: From a poem by Dulce Maria Loynaz

Translated by: Jeannina Perez and others

January 4 2011

Embarrassed for Others / Rebeca Monzo

Yesterday, watching on my planet’s television the images of the May Day parade, I couldn’t but feel embarrassed.

How is it possible that a people, whose civil rights have been and are being trampled on, by a regime that maintains its power at all costs, for fifty-three years, can allow itself to be a part of such a farce. There was a larger audience than for the Mass offered by Benedicto XVI. It’s clear that both concentrations were convened by the government itself, which is why I didn’t feel motivated to participate in either one, despite the fact that I am still religious.

A friend of mine, who is a civilian worker in a repressive ministry, came over and very proudly showed me a splendid pair of boots, modern, comfortable, of the best quality, that they handed out to those in her organization who agreed to march. I don’t know what other ministries or workplaces offered, or with what subtlety they made their threats. I think I understand the fear that overcomes them, and their desire to keep their jobs at all costs, but I can’t get my head around seeing “self-employed workers” waving placards in support of the regime. I just managed to see the huge banner of La Pachanga (a cafe restaurant), because I couldn’t stomach any more time in front of the screen.

What was made very clear to me, is that these people don’t deserve that civic and honest citizens are constantly being exposed to defend them. I have come, once again very regretfully, to conclude that each people has what it deserves. This is demonstrated by more than half a century of indoctrination.

May 2 2012

A "Methodology" for Criticism / Fernando Dámaso

Archive

To criticize, a verb that was absent from the national press for too many years, in recent time, times of the actualization of the model, has appeared in some media, although in a rather moderate way. Here and there, once in a while, some occasional criticism appears, although mostly relating to minor matters and not those that are really important and transcendent. Regardless: Welcome!

This critique, offered by journalists or even by letter-writing citizens, seems to respond to a methodology where it is established that, at the beginning or end, or sometimes within it, it must, perforce, be noted that the government is good, gentle, intelligent, honorable, concerned, austere, capable and responsibility, usually far from whatever is being criticized, the fault of which lies, by preference, in some misguided official, or insensitive director, who doesn’t meet the standards established by the authorities since the beginning of time. The sugar-coated critique appears to be the only kind that can be published, given its abundance in the media. It seems that the other, the hard critique, which could help to solve problems, is still missing.

As long as the strait jacket continues to establish where, when, how and to whom one can level criticisms, there will be not criticism. Who determines these parameters? The methodology? Is this latter perhaps some bastard daughter of the absurd previous principle.

The one and the other serve the same thing: the harmful and immobile complacency, incapable of breaking the barrier of fear and telling the truth and facing the possible consequences. Criticism doesn’t need to be authorized, nor regulated by anyone, much less conditioned between barriers and ceilings.

The shadow of criticism offered by our media, doesn’t satisfy anyone nor meet any citizen expectations: it’s more of the dame, with a hint of color to make it seem different. If that if the path chosen by the authorities to help undo the accumulated wrongs, they have chosen badly and have been mistaken once again. The responsible citizens demands a serious critique, deep, capable of pointing out the real causes of problems, in order to resolve them, and not sugar-coated words.

This methodology is not original, it’s already been used elsewhere, and has failed in many places. The failures of others should, at least, serve as a lesson to us, or if not, a warning.

April 26 2012

Fear of White / Agustín Valentín López Canino

The man dressed in white walks up to the exit gate at the airport. A person with a calculating official face stops him and asks, “Do your clothes have something to do with the Ladies in White?

The man’s voice quivers. He’s scared like a deer caught in the headlights.

“No, no, I do not know what you mean.”

They let him pass and he boards the plane bound for Nassau, from there to continue on a flight to the United States. He now has a Spanish passport. As the plane takes off, he thinks: “No more white clothes, I swear.” To deny one’s nationality is a means of acquiring rights.

The Cuba that is forgotten after one acquires a foreign passport, a visa to travel abroad, or exile.

The man in white lives better than the dispossessed. He has a rental car, and conducts unscrupulous business on his trips abroad. He knows it is wrong, knows what is corrupt, unworthy, immoral, low, but he closes his eyes and take advantage of the opportunities, the rights that go with foreign passports, of course. He discards and is almost against  the opposition, he doesn’t want to know about it, not even to know it exists. There are thousands of Cubans like him, who look away from the sinking Cuba.

Today, leaving for the United States, a young man with whom I have a deep friendship, so I ask a favor of him that has no relationship to politics. I cut a plastic bottle in half and place a rose inside, and wrap up a petrified shell to send to a friend. My hunch tells me he won’t take it to the airport, which is what happens. The next day his mother tells me.

“Please forgive him, his aunt told him not to try it. He could lose out.”

(Trafficking in roses, fossil of value or fossilized value.)

It’s been more than a year since I saw my daughter. The person I love most in this world. Finally she and her husband left. With them, I wanted to deliver a letter that he had no political connotation. Her husband treated me almost contemptuously and reproachfully (it was his nerves). My daughter almost fought me, it tore my heart out when she left. For her and for the country.

Dozens of friends have gone to the United States, even some politicians who had provided support and assistance when they were in this infernal land, they come and go so many times it’s like they’re traveling from one side to another of this city, not only do they forgot about me but about Cuba.

Except those involved with the opposition, the rest are cultural groups, intellectuals or scientists, including the “internationalists,” minor dictators ordered not to jeopardize their chance at the rights and they become a repudiation brigade not to injustice about Cuba, but suppressing any call for justice for Cuba.

I do not want anyone to come and demand the right and justice that belongs to us, we who hourly eat the dust that plagues our nation and allow ourselves to be torn to pieces by the tyranny that makes all Cubans, in one way or another, scum, miserable garbage, beggars for rights. But neither to I want so much humiliation falling on the nation sold at the  price of the scraps of power.

We Cubans do not need weapons to defeat the dictatorship and establish democracy. We just need a minimum of honor, decency, shame, dignity, and enough courage to exercise it. The people of Cuba have buried their demands for justice. We don’t deserve their reprimands and the dead. But nor do I deserve that Christ went to the cross for me, and yet there he was, martyred for my sins. But there is a difference, Christ is God and we Cubans, who are we?

Martí’s dream is my own and one can no longer say “The palms are brides who wait, and we must place justice higher than the palms.”

The palms that are left are forgotten brides, crying for their Cuban boyfriends who abandoned them, trading them in a horrible and cowardly exchange for American, Spanish, Ecuadorian or Venezuelan passports. Because they lacked the courage to be Cuban in Cuba from within and below. My Cuba and yours, the Cuba I love with tears and strength, with all my heart and my desire for freedom, there is not enough wind to embrace it.

1 May 2012

The Storm Has Passed but the Calm Has Not Arrived / Pablo Pacheco Avila

The visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Cuba left a storm of arrests, blocked phone lines, and beatings against non-violent dissidents.  The most visible of these cases has been the measures taken against the individual who screamed “freedom” in the Pope’s Mass in Santiago de Cuba.  The worst part of this specific case is that the oppressor used a symbol of the Red Cross to attack the victim.

For me, what has been most lamentable about the Papal visit has been the exclusion of a sector of the Cuban population.  It is unbelievable that His Holiness dedicated half an hour to Fidel Castro, the main henchman of the Cuban Catholic Church, and refused to meet with the Ladies in White and/or other peaceful dissidents, even if for just a minute.

On this trip to the island by the Vicar of Christ, there was no truce on behalf of the oppressors against the dissidents.  Actually, I see the Catholic Church of Cuba as the winner of this story, as well as the peaceful Cuban opposition.  The decadent dictatorship has lost.

The Cuban Catholic Church was persecuted, insulted, and decimated during the first years of the dictatorship.  Their convents and schools were closed, countless priests were exiled, etc.  But they never lost Faith and continued preaching the Gospel.  Something similar happened to those who believed in freedom, those who confronted the regime and who would die in the execution wall screaming “Long Live Christ the King“.

The dictatorship loses, because they lose spaces and the tiny openings become cracks.

Raul Castro, one of the executioners of such cruelty, looked tired, humiliated and worn out on television when the Bishop of Santiago de Cuba refused to shake his hand.  Who was to say that the atheist soldier, 52 years after persecuting the religious would witness another Papal Mass.  God forced him, for God has power over men.

I agree with the words of Benedict XVI: “Cuba should be the home of all and for all Cubans, where justice and freedom may thrive in an atmosphere of serene brotherhood“.  But I should also point out that the only ones who do not allow this to happen are the sames ones who His Holiness shook hands with.

Evidently, there will not be reconciliation between the blade and the wound.  The wound is carried by those who slept in dungeons while the Pope visited Cuba, those who are not allowed to travel to their own country, those who have died for defending the freedom of their land, the oppressed, those who were excluded by Benedict XVI.  And the blade is carried by all those who oppress their people, who beat people, especially women who carry flowers in their hands.  They are the sharp blades, ready to stab the victims.

Translated by Raul G.

12 April 2012

Marching on their own? / Miriam Celaya

President on his own during May 1, 2011. Photo taken from the website of the National Information Agency

The official press has been announcing the parade this May 1st with a newly added component to the “army” of workers that will march in support of the revolution and socialism: the self-employed.

I’ve been reflecting on the theme (I’m showing an alarming tendency to reflections) and I cannot quite understand the issue. Aren’t the self-employed a sector that represents private enterprise? Haven’t we been taught in school that private property is one of the “evils of capitalism,” a source of exploitation for the proletariat? Has the Cuban system created a new species, the owner-laborer? Something else is really bothering me: What union does a restaurant or cafeteria owner, or a street vendor with a vegetable and fruit cart belong to? Will they parade in favor of high tax rates and in support of the lack of wholesale markets for the procurement of the materials they need? Are they the new cuckolded and abused?

I can’t begin to imagine, for example, the wealthy owners of certain important “eateries” in Havana — and I beg readers to allow me to omit names, I am not trying to point at the more successful Cuban entrepreneurs — walking in the sun towards the Plaza Cívica, chanting slogans for the proletariat, or singing that song that says “let’s change the world’s stage by sinking the bourgeois empire.” It’s too unreal, too perverse.

Nevertheless, this is Castro’s Cuba, so, mocking the poet, don’t thee be surprised of anything. I know that many self-employed individuals, those engaged in the crafts trade from the stands that occupy space leased from the State, such as the once elegant department store Fin de Siglo, have been ordered to “become members of a syndicate” — as has been stated in the official press — including the payment of union dues and have recently been asked to attend a meeting to sign their commitment to attend the march. I haven’t been able to confirm this fact, but we know that it is also common practice for any state employee.

Paradoxically, employees of a restaurant or any other privately owned business do not have the possibility to organize their own union capable of facing an employer in order to defend their interests, though many work longer hours than stipulated by the country’s labor laws, can be dismissed by their employers without the right to compensation, and lack almost all labor rights, demonstrating that “self-employed unionism” is another false formula of the system to maintain the oppression of individuals beyond their relative economic independence from the state.

It is obvious that, when convening “independents” to this parade, the government has the intention to continue to monitor the supply of slaves, even the sector of freedmen, i.e., those who are in the first phase of buying their freedom through their economic activity, independent of the Master. Official control mechanisms deem important that those individuals who turn autonomous do not become independent or associate freely, and, at the same time, the government needs to offer the world the impression that private businessmen and manufacturers are aligned with the revolution, thus legitimizing the “renewal.”

Worst of all is that there is a representative sample of the self-employed who will lend themselves to the new farce. So then, the self-employed will march this May 1st under the banners of socialism, and maybe soon a “union of revolutionary self-employed” will be established. This won’t, even remotely, be a march on anyone’s own account.

Translated by Norma Whiting

April 30 2012