The Embargo / Lilianne Ruiz / Lilianne Ruíz

The first 100 yards toward Avenue 26 is defined by the neighborhood bakery. The eternal line of neighbors with their little nylon bags and ration books, waiting for the five centavo bread, sour and with the texture of cement. Most of the time they come out unhappy, laughing at their misfortunes. Why they laugh at what insults them, I don’t know. To stay calm? Many of them haven’t eaten breakfast in a long time, not even a cup of coffee, nor a slice of palatable bread. Their lives are elsewhere. I don’t know where their lives could be.

Following the road to 26th Avenue. The panorama changes in the Kholy neighborhood. The houses, which before 1959, belonged to comfortable families, not have modern cars in front with olive green license plates. When these people restore their houses, they really do it. With an abundance of materials and brigades of bricklayers from some State ministry.

Not like those people in the little house at 216 Tulipan — where you come to walking in the other direction — who put some wooden boards and a cement-fiber ceiling in one of the roofless rooms in the old mansion, with the risk it will fall in on them, and three generations live there who don’t know what breakfast is. Do at least the children under 7 eat breakfast? It hurts to ask the question and not be able to do anything. The grandfather told me that if someone, from charity, gave him some old shoes, he would prefer to sell them to kill the family’s hunger.

It’s the worst lie. Because socialist governments, where the State is the ruler to the ultimate family corner (with the story of free education they shape the conscience of our children) they sell themselves as givers of social justice. And it is precisely this condition as “providers,” as “deliverers of benefits,” without respect for individual rights, which makes them the worst enemies of freedom, of happiness.

The cause of the poverty of the neighbors at 14 Tulipan — who are like the majority of the Cuban people — and the immoral prosperity of the olive-green thieves of the Kholy neighborhood, is not the American embargo. The Island’s government says it is Cuban but is only Castro and is not disposed to listen to the Cuban people’s demands for freedom, without sending their repressive commandos from Section 21, who beat “scientifically” — enough to do damage without leaving too many traces nor causing too much of a scandal — or they send their rented populist mobs in their ignorance or ill will.

31 October 2013

Cuba Imports Rice it Could Produce / Osmar Laffita Rojas

cub18-300x295HAVANA, Cuba, October www.cubanet.org – Of the approximately 770,000 tons of rice consumed by the Cuban population last year*, 440,000 were imported from Vietnam, Brazil and the United States. As a ton of rice trades on the world market at $450, the Cuban government had to spend $200 million for the purchase of this food.

Two years ago, rice production was going through a severe crisis in Cuba. There were great difficulties in the harvest due to the advanced deterioration of agricultural machinery, lack of means to transport the grain and the total abandonment of the roads. Inability to harvest the rice at full maturity is a source of great losses.

There were few dryers, mills, silos and warehouses, and the vast majority were in pitiful condition, unmaintained for years. With limited industrial capacity and storage, some provinces were forced to send the harvested grain to other provinces that had dryers and mills for processing, thus incurring costs for fuel, wages, etc.

This situation resulted in low yields that did not meet the needs of the population. The deficit in rice production was offset by foreign imports.

But as of mid-2011, the Ministry of Agriculture launched an investment and retrofitting process to reverse the situation. The state allocated substantial resources for the purchase of agricultural machinery and means of transporting the grain. It embarked on a process of building new kilns, mills, silos and warehouses, while the existing facilities are being repaired and modernized.

Similarly, it undertook the rehabilitation of irrigation channels and roads.

Take the case of the new Guama River diversion in Pinar del Rio, which, with El Punto Dam in the town of Consolación del Sur, ensures irrigation of the Vuelta Abajo rice plantation through a more than 12-mile system of channels.

Since last year, the cultivation of rice in Cuba has undergone positive changes. The provinces of Pinar del Rio, Villa Clara and Cienfuegos reported 86,000 acres harvested in cold and spring sowings. Timely delivery of fertilizer, herbicides, fuel, more efficient water use, among other assurances made it possible for these three provinces to report a production of 42,000 tons of wet rice this year, which represents an increase of 35% relative to what was reaped by those provinces the previous year.

In Villa Clara a mill has been built that will process 220 tons of rice a day, and three silos were built, each with with a 1,100 ton capacity, plus a warehouse with a capacity of 1,980 tons. With these investments, by next year the province may end a daily transfer of 275 tons of wet rice to Sancti Spiritus and Matanzas for industrial processing.

But not everything is going smoothly. In Los Palacios in Pinar del Rio Province, the Air Services Company’s failure to meet its commitments in rice planting, along with the delay in the application of fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides, caused severe damages to this year’s production. Rice production was down 43,700 tons and there was a significant decrease in yields per acre.

The agricultural aviation executives argue that their priority is not the rice companies, but spraying against mosquitoes in Havana, in the tourist resorts of Cayo Coco and Cayo Largo, and in the city of Pinar del Rio.

Osmar Laffita Rojas, ramsetgandhi@yahoo.com

*Translator’s note: Roughly 140 pounds per person

Cubanet, 31 October 2013

Yoani Sanchez Says Google and Twitter Protect Cubans’ Freedom of Expression / Cubanet

Yoani Sanchez during a meeting with teachers and students of the University of Miami
Yoani Sanchez during a meeting with teachers and students of the University of Miami

Senior executives from Google and Twitter promised Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez that they would technological tools to protect the freedom of expression of Cuban civil society.

The author of the blog Generation Y, in an interview with martinoticias.com, said that with her visit to Silicon Valley in California she established serious conversations with these social media giants regarding the need for protection of Cuban activists.

Twitter Representatives agreed to provide resources to detect fake profiles used by people in the service of the Cuban government to discredit and threaten independent journalists living in Cuba.

During a meeting with students and professors at the University of Miami, Sanchez spoke about the elements that characterize the current Cuban civil society and the impact of technology as a force for change to awaken youth and the Cuban population general from their apathy.

For Sanchez, technology is a unifying element that will help the Cuban people to lose their fear of the Castro regime. Her plan to create a digital newspaper aims to contribute to this.

With regards to that publication she said that there are 8 journalists preparing every detail of the launch, so this will be “a newspaper of the 21st century.” So that it can circulate in a printed edition in Cuba, it will be available on the site in a pdf version.

For young people at the University of Miami, who have studied Yoani Sánchez’s work in class, it was particularly interesting to see the positive spirit this communicator maintains, in the face of daily obstacles in Cuba.

The blogger, who has over 526,000 followers on her Twitter account, is considered a pioneer in the use of new technologies in Cuba.

Cubanet, 30 October 2013

“In 2020 we will have street lighting” / Gladys Linares

Cuban blackout
Cuban blackout

HAVANA, Cuba, October, www.cubanet.org — At the end of the ‘80s a neighbor whose name escapes me stuck a sign on his bike basket that said: “Friend of Perestroika.” One day I heard they had searched his house and taken him prisoner. That caused a lot of talk among the neighbors, because he was a Communist Revolutionary. That was the first time I’d heard of perestroika.

Also at that time a colleague of my husband, who had studied in the USSR and returned home with a Russian wife, spoke with great enthusiasm about the reforms, perestroika and glasnost. Because of this he had problems with the political police and lost his job. Later we didn’t know how that managed to get out of the country.

It was hard to get news about those events. Soviet magazines such as Sputnik, which might have information about them, stopped circulating. On the other hand, a great number of Cuban students and workers who were in the USSR didn’t return home for fear of being controlled by State Security, which tried to avoid, at all costs, the expansion of these new ideas. Many of them stayed in Europe later managed to settle in the United States. They were called “red worms.”

As these transformations occurred in the USSR, relations between the Cuban government and the socialist camp were deteriorating. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, at the end of 1989, most Cubans were excited because we were so eager for political change.

In those days, the opposition was growing, and taking off from the disappearance of Communism in Eastern Europe, engaged in a strategy of peaceful struggle to eliminate Communism in Cuba and to establish a democratic society with a market economy.

For more than twenty years, the Cuban people have confronted an economic and moral crisis. Despite this, it is very important to see how new generations look at the future from a different perspective, and are no longer silent about what they think.

With respect to this, the economist and opponent wrote, “The transition that is already taking place is the most important one, that is, in the hearts and minds of Cubans, frustrated and disillusioned with so many broken promises.”

A few days ago, a friend told me: “I’m not psychic, and predicting the date of change is difficult, but it is good to set short-term goals. That’s what encourages us to move forward and not lose momentum, so I like to imagine that by 2020 this dictatorship will be over.”

On the Malecon in Havana
On the Malecon in Havana

After thinking a bit, she continues, “When that happens, we will not have to steal to eat because our wages will be enough to live decently. We will travel along well-maintained streets, and at night we won’t have to be afraid to go out because they will be lit. The transportation problems will be resolved, perhaps with trains or, why not, with electric trams, that will circulate round the cities.

“I’ll take a stroll around the shops,” she adds, “which will have nice things in beautifully decorated windows. There will always be sales that the poor can take advantage of, and we will even be able to buy with easy payment. The houses and buildings and will be repaired and painted, and Havana will be even more beautiful than before 1959.

“In 2020 we will be better off than now, because anything is better than this. From time to time there will be real elections where we elect the president from among several candidates from different parties.

“My son, who lives in Miami, will come to see me more often, and, as in the past, we will have good relations with the U.S., where a large part of the Cuban people live. Some will come back and some wont.” She concludes, “Change will not be easy, but we will achieve it, and we will be here to see it.”

By Gladys Linares

From Cubanet, 30 October 2013

Messages of Desiderio Navarro / POLEMICA: The 2007 Intellectual Debate

Dear Friends and Comrades:

Suddenly, more than thirty years after his dismissal, Luis Pavón, ex-president of the National Council of Culture during the euphemistically called “Five Grey Years,” reappeared in the public sphere on nothing more nor less than an entire programme on National Television dedicated to “his cultural impact on Cuban culture.”

So, was what we saw and heard yesterday Luis Pavón’s impact on Cuban culture?

Or is it someone else who irreversibly damaged the lives of the great and less great creators of Cuban culture, “defined as unacceptable” in one way or another?  Who blocked the creation of many artistic performances and the dissemination of many works of literature and art in Cuba and abroad?  Who forever deprived us of innumerable works because of the almost inevitable forced self-censorship that followed the abundantly fertile ’60s?  Who filled an entire period with a dismal literary and artistic production now justifiably forgotten by those who championed it and bestowed awards upon it in days gone by?  Who flooded us with the worst of the contemporary culture of the countries of Eastern Europe, not letting us know about  the most creative and profound of them?  Who in the short or long term built up the resentment and even caused the emigration of many of these creators who were not revolutionaries though they weren’t counterrevolutionaries, whose apprehension Fidel had tried to assuage in “Words to the Intellectuals”? [A book published in 1972 – Ed.] Who created and inculcated styles and neo-Zhadov cultural doctrines that took decades to eradicate, as they had come to be “normal.”  [The Andrei Zhdanov cultural doctrine, developed in Soviet Russia in 1946, required all artists to conform to the Communist Party line in their work – Ed.] Perhaps we are really a country with such a short memory that we no longer remember the painful state to which our national cultural institutions were reduced by the efforts of the National Council of Culture, which was captured by Cuban humour at the time in a trio of sendups: “If you don’t listen to the Council, you won’t live to be old,” “There is no strength in numbers,” and “A wooden knife in the House of the Americas?”

It is true that Pavon was not always the main driver, but neither was he simply obeying orders.  Because to this day an important mystery has not been explained or clarified: How many wrong decisions were taken “higher up” on the basis of information, interpretations and assessments of works, creators and events provided by Pavón and his associates of that time, on the basis of their diagnoses and predictions of supposedly serious threats and dangers originating from the cultural environment? continue reading

If we are going to talk about courageous cultural impacts in Cuban journalism, we need to mention ones like the man of letters who was Agustín Pí, who, in the same period, from his modest position on the newspaper Granma, helped many valuable people who were “out of favour” and ensured that the cultural pages of Granma were as open as possible at any given moment, and not turned into a wasteland of mediocrity and opportunism like so many other Cuban publications of that time.

In my article In media res publicas, I have talked about the responsibility of the politicians for the limitation of the critical role of the intellectual — above all in the years in which culture was managed by Luis Pavón — but this is only half the problem.  The other half — worthy of another similar article — is the responsibility of the intellectuals: without the silence and passivity of almost all of them (not to mention the complicity and opportunism of more than a few) the “Five Grey Years” or the “Pavonato,” as many now call it, would not have been possible, or, at any rate, would not have been possible with such great destructiveness. With certain exceptions, among the intellectuals, the heterosexuals (including those who were not homophobic) ignored the fate of the gays; the whites (including those who were not racist), the problems of the blacks demanding vindication; the traditionalists, of the fate of the vanguardists; the atheists (including the tolerant ones), the vicissitudes of the Catholics and other believers; the pro-Soviets, the fate of the anti-Real Socialists and of the Marxists unconnected with the philosophy of Moscow, and so on.  One wonders if this lack of individual moral responsibility could be repeated today among the Cuban intelligentsia.

We must, therefore, ask ourselves responsibly and without delay: Why at just this special moment in the history of our country when all our people are waiting to see what happens with the convalescence of the Commander in Chief, do we get this sudden and glorious media resurrection of Luis Pavón, with the generous iconographic unfolding of various old scenes with the the highest political leaders, and this just days after the no less sudden reappearance on the television of Jorge Serguera, who from the presidency of the ICRT [Cuban Institute of Radio and Televison] formed a perfect political cultural double-act with the CNC during the “Five Grey Years”?

“Happy is the man who finds out what causes things.”

Desiderio Navarro

January 6, 2007

Message from Desiderio Navarro to Reynaldo González

Dear Rey:

You can count on me for the collective development of this document, but it seems to me we should wait for other reactions like those of the three of us in the coming hours or days, which could reveal other angles to the problem and greatly enrich the document (and, incidentally, give us a measure of the sensibility and current attitudes of the intelligentsia with respect to this).  I speak of “days” because I am taking into account that many people only have email access through their workplace, that is, starting on Monday.

Do you agree?  Or do you think there are reasons to speed it up?

A hug

Desiderio

January 6, 2007

Another message from Desiderio Navarro

And, in addition to the one from Quesada, which I also find out about now, it was about two or three months ago, a whole programme on the Education Channel dedicated exclusively to extolling the crucial importance to Cuban culture of the National Congress of Education and Culture, but I saw it only a solitary swallow, outrageous but isolated. Now I see that that’s not so. Let’s talk about this proposal this evening (I’m leaving in the opposite direction now, from Los Naranjos to Havana). Even though the ICRT doesn’t accept it, they would be forced to drop the mask of “impartiality” as the nation’s mass media and make it very clear that they are abusing the State information tool to favor a cultural policy contrary to the Minister of Culture — one might rightfully say, if not with much quantitative accuracy, the cultural policy of a “tiny group.”

A hug,

Desiderio

January 8th, 2007

Message from Desiderio Navarro to Loly Estévez

Dear Loly:

I enclose the letter that, in response to one sent to me by Zenaida Romeu, I also sent to the members of the UNEAC Secretariat and other friends participating in the debate(s) arising from the three sudden reappearances, over a short period of time, of these three awful characters of Cuban cultural policy in the three programmes, without any mention of the Pavón years as president of the CNC in a programme on his “cultural impact.”  As you will see, I speak there of the many objections on my part (shared by Arturo Arango) to the writing of the document.  I was able to express them immediately in another meeting with the Secretariat, and can tell you that among them were found some that also figure in your Open Message to the UNEAC Secretariat:

We are not talking about a group” of intellectuals who are protesting:its relatively large size, and its lack of articulation for reasons of ties of friendship, class, aesthetic orientation, etc., does not permit us to call them a “group”, but rather “a large number of” intellectuals; I added that we are not looking at only “our most important” intellectuals, but also many others equally or less important who were also adding their voices and reasons;

...  that the lack of any mention of the true specific cause of the intellectual outrage, or the sudden reappearance of these these three awful characters of Cuban cultural policy, after thirty years, in three television programs so close together, would make people, the millions in the street, wonder what happened on these programs that was so bad: an attempt at another live wedding? sexual indecency? corruption, bribery? a counterrevolutionary comment or joke? and so many other questions about possible attacks on the irreversible cultural policy of the Revolution, leaving the figure of these characters and specific political meaning of what happened in the shadows, and putting under the spotlight, without distinctions, the teams of the three programmes who, together or not, could have been complicit with external forces, or simply acting on directions from higher-ups (which is what people are inclined to believe in your case), or clumsy ignoramuses with initiative and ingenuity (which almost no one believes in the case of the “Impact” and “The Difference”).

What I could not fail to personally tell the President of the ICRT is that I do not believe in lack of control as an explanation of the three incidents, because I have more than one personal experience to base that on: as you will remember, when you kindly invited me to participate in the programme “Open Dialogue” in a discussion about mass culture–a theme on which I’ve written and spoken a lot – it was put to you as a condition that I would not participate in a live programme, rather my participation would be recorded three days in advance so that it could be reviewed, eventually approved by the management bodies and only afterwards mechanically juxtaposed with the live dialogue of the other three participants (Julio Garcia Espinosa, among them), which, of course, I indignantly refused.

Control is what there is more than enough of in the ICRT for anything except racism, homophobia, mocking people with physical defects, a Yankeephilic worship of the Oscars, Grammys, MTV etc. as perfect examples of global assessment of the arts; nostalgia for pre-revolutionary kitsch, the cult of ancestry and artistic lineages, New Age ideology in its various manifestations, worship of the millions earned in contracts, ticket sales or auctions, and media fame, as criteria of artistic success; militant defense of banality from the neo-liberal relativism and consumerism, and much much else.

But, just as in the ’70s being in the CNC did not mean sharing its political culture (I myself worked in it between dismissal and dismissal) I know that still today to be in the ICRT is not to approve all its policies or, if you prefer the euphemism, its lack of control.

Best wishes and my hopes for a successful stay in Gijon.

Desiderio Navarro

Message from Desiderio Navarro to Zenaida Romeu

Dear Zenaida:

I agree with you and thank you very much for having included me in the addressees of your letter.

Well, in the text of the Declaration is states that in the two meetings they tried to reach a consensus with some of the authors of protests (in fact, with the first ones, chronologically), which is totally and absolutely true.  But neither I nor Artura Arango, nor other authors of protests participated in the subsequent formulation written in response, nor in its revision and final approval, which explains, that as expected, the only signer is the UNEAC Secretariat, and there are no signatures from the authors of protests, none of whom are members of the Secretariat.  Unfortunately, the wording gives the impression that we are co-signatories of the document, despite the fact that several of us — I know this includes at least Arturo Arango and myself — have numerous objections to make on the text itself, whose formulation does not reflect the frankness, depth and firmness with which, with names and surnames, facts, dates and the corresponding descriptions, they debated these themes at those two meetings, meetings about which UNEAC, our UNEAC, can be very proud and would have nothing to hide.

As a member of the National Council of UNEAC and as a member of the ranks, I hope that they will correct what has happened.

With best wishes

Desiderio Navarro

P.S.  I have just read this letter to Arturo Arango and he is totally in agreement with its contents.

Another message from Desiderio Navarro about the National Social Sciences Prize to Fernando Martínez Heredia.

Friends and comrades:

Arturo Arango’s recommendation to us to pay attention also to the National Social Sciences Prize awarded to Fernando Martínez Heredia, is so relevant that I followed it seven days before he formulated it in his message today, and thus, some days before the “cleaning of the biography” on television that worried us. I reproduce below the message I sent to Fernando the 31st of last month, as soon as I heard the good news.  There, as you will see, as well as celebrating the intrinsic value of the work and struggles of Fernando, the prize is also seen as a sign of fruitful possibilities.

Sadly, the two events that Arturo juxtaposes in his message–Fernando’s Prize and Pavón’s Epiphany–have to be seen as antagonistic signs, and not contradictory, as they come from very diverse institutional and political-cultural sources and not a single source which would be contradicting itself loudly and thoughtlessly or trying naively to reconcile the irreconcilable.

And now, to share that bottle  and  those stubborn revolutionary dreams with Fernando.

A hug

Desiderio

7 January 2007

Dear Fernando:

I have just found out, by reading the magnificent text by Guanche [Cuban lawyer, writer, essayist, editor – ed.] in La Jiribilla [a magazine about Cuban culture – ed.] , that they have awarded you the National Social Sciences Prize. Honestly, is one of the few great joys I have had this year. In culture, and even more in cultural policy, justice is slow … Eppur si muove [“and yet it moves” – what Galileo is supposed to have muttered after being forced to recant by the Inquisition – ed.] and finally arrives. In the words of Althusser [French Marxist philosopher – ed.] from  our youth, this award honours the Ideological Apparatus of the State [book by Althusser published 1969 – ed.] and opens up new hope in these times full of fruitful possibilities and insidious dangers.

Those who noticed the lexical and semantical similarity between the names of “Criterios” and “Pensamiento Crítico”, as being elements of the same lineage, weren’t mistaken. Those who saw, in the emergence of “Criterios” just seven months after the disappearance of “Pensamiento Crítico” a catalytic relationship, weren’t wrong either. In the history of the cultural struggles of the Cuban Revolution, both editorial efforts will be seen as a united desire to practice and preach Martí’s ethos of the grafting of the world into the core of our republics and the Marxist ethos of radical criticism. As I told Abel about three years ago at a meeting with Fowler and Reina María in his office, I haven’t lost hope that a Cuban journal of social thought will emerge that could be today, mutatis mutandis, what “Critical Thinking” was in its time, a magazine bearing the same name and directed by you. What an encouraging sign of health, strength and renewed ideological and cultural youth for a socialist revolution that would be! What news it would be of that critical and creative socialism which your essay advocates and prefigures with clarity and passion! Let me dream.

Dear Fernando, it is lucky to have the certainty that you will not be absorbed by any Canon and will make use of all the symbolic capital this award gives you on your continued efforts to do what Marx would really have done now.

A fraternal hug and I wish you and Esther a 2007 filled with new successes.

Desiderio

January 7, 2007

Another message from Desiderio Navarro

Comrades and friends, this is outrageous; not only does the ICRT not apologise, but rewards the director of the programme with an appearance in the headline midday programme, the same person whose work responsibility — if not policy intention — had been evident in recent meetings.

This is going to cause general indignation with unforseeable outcomes. Who is behind all this provocation? What microfraction, what little group? If there is no official condemnation, no-one is going to believe that it doesn’t have the blessing of the highest circles in the party. It is essential that we think up a deserved, but quick, response to this lack of respect for all those who last week met on two occasions in the UNEAC, starting with the Minister of Culture, and for all those who inside and outside Cuba have hoped for concrete results from that meeting and those who gave a vote of confidence to the Party and UNEAC.

A hug in these crucial moments for Cuban society.

Desiderio Navarro

Desiderio Navarro’s reply to Orlando Hernández

Dear Orlando

It seems to me there are some unfounded and unfair statements in the final paragraph of your letter to Arturo Arango, which I reproduce here:

I have just received Desiderio’s invitation for a conference in Opinions “The Five Grey Years: Revisiting the Term”, by Ambrosio Fornet as a part of the Cycle “The cultural policy of the Revolutionary period: Memory and reflection”, where you will also make an appearance. I think it’s excellent of course, but I am also worried that it will convert itself into an academic, “terminological”, etc. debate. Apart from this message from Desiderio, I have hardly received any new messages, only Amir’s text and the discussion between Rosa Ileana and Desiderio. And the El Pais article of course. So anyway, either there is nothing new to say, or it’s all been said? Hopefully, neither of these.

How can you say, not that you are worried that “this will convert”, “is going to be converted”, or “could be converted” into an academic “terminological” etc. debate, but, durative gerund and all, that you are worried that “it is converting itself” into such a debate? The last meeting in the UNEAC about this matter ended the day before yesterday at seven or eight at night and already yesterday at 11:10 at night I was sending around an email with an invitation for a whole cycle of conferences which had been organised in the 27 or 28 hours which had passed. I think very rarely has a Cuban cultural academic institution reacted so fast as Criterios has to the pressing needs of Cuban intellectual life. There are still some weeks to go before that conference, which would be the first, and you can already say that this is converting itself into an academic “terminological” debate? It looks as if you are rushing to prejudge it.

That said, is it damaging and unnecessary to have an academic debate about that period of Cuban cultural policy and its consequences, survival and relapses? Isn’t it perhaps the absence of investigations and academic events, of a whole academic literature, and not just essays about the topic, with its descriptions, analysis, interpretations, explanations and assessments, one of the principal causal factors which allow, among other things, that period and the phenomena of that period to subsequently survive or revive, remaining so unknown or unexplained for so many generations who didn’t live through it as young people or adults — as we have seen in many messages about those times?

On the other hand, who said that an academic debate implies the silencing of all non-academic debate about the same theme? In the first place, even if you wanted to, is there any way of silencing it? Since there isn’t any power, or technological media, to hold up the interchange and circulation of electronic messages which started a week ago. On the contrary: if the academic debate is serious, and not just pseudo-academic speculation, we need to listen carefully to all the empirical material floating around in those other discussions, all the ideas and experiences, the reflections and witnesses statements — which, in this case are very scarce — about everything that has been silenced or self-repressed for decades. And each and every one of us has the responsibility for continuing the discussion about these matters one way or another as long as there is a need to do so.

Ambrosio’s conference is called “The Five Grey Years: Revisiting the Period”. Do you believe that discussing the expression “Five Grey Years” is just a superfluous terminological debate? Those of us who have taken part in the last few days’ electronic correspondence, also myself, in “Medias Res Publica” (“Public Affairs Media”) seven years ago, and César López before me — as Ambrosio himself said to me the day before yesterday — have questioned the “Five Grey Years” as a name for the period and as a chronological limitation. Having said that, can we view that questioning of the expression — and others besides which have come up, such as that of Rine Leal (Cuban theatre writer and critic) and also what I am sure Ambrosio will talk and argue about on the 30th — as a useless debate with aseptic academic terminology, or as a crucial problem of historical periodisation about cultural policy, in which you have to take a position about everything that happened, with so many creative works and lives, for years before 1971 and also years after 1975? It’s enough to remember that that the last attempt to impose the most dogmatic form of Soviet-style socialist realism as official doctrine took place between 1980 and 1983, in the middle of a tense ideological-political struggle between cultural personalities and institutions, given the change in the correlation of forces in the prolonged journey from total control to jockeying for position. None of this is just a question of words.

Having said that, Dear Orlando, I believe Ambrosio’s conference, which is father to the little child which has run so far, will start up the debate in media res – or going from the Latin to the language of local people — in concrete terms, far from Byzantine complications and closely focused on the relationship between words and deeds, without academic-speak, but also without vulgarity. The rest depends on the public, which is to say, including you. On that basis I am very happy that Ambrosio has agreed to participate in this round of remembering and reflecting and, more than that, to start it going.

About UNEAC’s reply, to repeat, I am not pressuring you, and we will wait for the President of UNEAC’s document, which he will shortly issue, on what has happened.

Best wishes, brother

Desiderio

14 January 2007

Desiderio Navarro’s reply to Rosa Ileana Boudet

For those who don’t have acces to the internet, or the time, to do a search, I show below the text which I emailed in October 2002 to the e-publication Teatro en Miami, in reply to an unexpected atack by Rosa Ileana Boudet in their pages.

In the name of the Rose

Desiderio Navarro

What has happened is that Rosa Ileana Boudet, in the website www.teatroenmiami.com, now writes something which from 1994 up to her recent emigration to the USA, she has never expressed here in a public conference or in writing, although she had, among other platforms, the pages of the theatre magazine Conjunto — which she was the director of for years before her departure — in which to offer whatever opinion about whatever theatrical publication, whether Cuban or foreign.

In her keenness to go off with a great fanfare in praise — which she also never did here in writing, as far as I know — of the relationship between the also-emigrated Cuban Gloria María Martínez [ex-teacher at the Instituto Superior de Arte, now working at a university in Chile – ed.] and the work of Patrice Pavis [Professor of Theatre Studies in the University of Kent, in England – ed.], the sees it as necessary to create a dramatic counter-figure resident in Cuba who had put up obstacles in the way of the success of the elevated cultural objectives her heroine had been fighting for Prometheus-like here up to her departure. Below I cite a passage from her recent article entitled “Patrice Pavis: his own vision”, which you can see in the above-mentioned website.

In 1989 (Pavis) participates in the Second International Debate, held in Havana, at the invitation of Desiderio Navarro, who, years later, compiles and translates El Teatro and its reception, semiology, crossing of cultures and postmodernism, published in the same collection in the magazine of opinion and culture studies in 1994, and which is perhaps still to be found in the Rayuela de la Casa de las Américas bookshop. Navarro has gathered together the worries of the author about that “other” Latin American. Unfortunately a history of disputed translations — and some pedantry — made it more difficult, when it came out, for the book to bring us up to date on Pavis, and publishes texts unknown in our language relating to Le Théâtre au croisement des cultures (1990) or Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, (1992) and Confluences. Cultural dialogues in contemporary performance (1992).

On the other hand, the contrast created between Gloria María’s “handcrafted editions”for the ISA students (mentioned just before by Rosa Ileana) and my anthology in the form of a book, tries to get across connotations of semantic opposition between the “fringe” and the “official”, as if Criterios, from some position of supreme political power (ludicrous and risible fantasy in the eyes of any knowledgeable Cuban in the last few decades), which would have obstructed Gloria María Martínez from publishing her translations in any of the Cuban editorials of that time (as evidenced by her publishing them in the Cuban magazines Conjunto and Tablas); as if the intermittent and hazardous history of Criterios had not precisely been a story — unfortunately in large measure of one person — of battles, defeats, frustrations and small victories against official dogmatism to open Cuba up to the wide variety of international theoretical thought.

Saying that, it happens that my anthology of the general theory of Pavis, El teatro and its reception includes, among others, exactly four of the five general theory texts from Pavis’ book “Theatre at the crossroads of culture”, namely,” “Toward a theory of culture and theatrical production,From the text to the scene: a difficult childhood”, “The classical heritage of postmodern theatre” and “Towards the special character of theatrical production: translation between gestures and between cultures”. (The fifth theory text, an analysis of theatrical theory in 1985, was not included because it was already obsolete in 1993 and Pavis himself in two 1990 footnotes asserts: “This chapter drives me toward a level of subjectivity which I would not want to deal with any more today”, and with respect to his own theories about the theory in the East, “I am pleased to see that in 1990 all of that is past history.”)

More than that, my anthology also includes Pavis’ postface article, “Towards a theory of interculturality in theatre?” from the book Confluences. The Dialogue of cultures in contemporary performance (of which Rosa Ileana seems unaware that it is not a theory book by Pavis, but his anthology of other peoples’ writing). Or that in my anthology I translated and published the “texts unknown in our language” which, according to Rosa, I prevented being published.

On the other hand, my anthology, finished at the beginning of 1994, included texts published by Pavis not only between 1982 and 1990 (up to his last book at that time) , but — thanks to the generosity  and diligence of Pavis himself — also a text published by him in the autumn-winter of 1993 (“Towards a theory of the actor’s art”, Degrés, no.75-76), that’s to say up to only one month before the conclusion of my work as a translator and editor and only six months before the appearance of the printed edition (July 1994). Never in Cuba has the appearance of a foreign book of theory followed so closely in time after the initial publication of the work in its original language — and what’s more in the worst publishing moment of the so-called “Special Period”. And that was how I obstructed “the book updating us on Pavis”.

I am not surprised at the “men’s probable ingratitude” toward the only person in Cuba who, committing a good part of his investigative time and his income, has translated from twelve languages and published more than 300 texts of foreign theory over more that 30 years — among those authors Pavis is only one among more than 100 — in order that his Cuban colleagues could have access to examples of the best of worldwide theoretical thought which would otherwise have remained inaccessible materially and/or linguistically to many of them. I have pretty well got used to that demonstrable ingratitude on the part of many men — and women.

Neither do I feel surprised by the meanness with which that same person who, trusting in the nonexistent marketing and limited international access to the editions of Criterios, this same person who more than once rejected an article of mine when she (co)directed the Revolution and Culture magazine, as a trusted and diligent assistant to Luis Pavón (President of the National Culture Council) in questions of policy relating to cultural information during the period which some continue to insist on calling the “Five Grey Years”, now, from Miami reverts to the clumsiest lies in order to throw mud at my work and my intellectual ethics, in her hasty baptism in the waters of Theatre in Miami, Meeting in the Network and other similar diaspora publications. As far as I’m concerned, she can continue doing her “theatre in Miami” with every kind of true or false Glorias of the diaspora; there will be a good friend who recommends that she write for herself a script whose local villains can’t reply demonstrating easily the untruthfulness of her slurs, either because they are dead, or they are decrepit.

Oh dear, Gertrude, a Rosa is not always a rose …!

Los Naranjos, October 24th 2002

Appendix: As a demonstration of the kinds of discrepancies in translations — inadmissable above all in a work on theory — whose challenge by me Rosa Ileana, there and now, dares to call “pedantry” with a view to rescuing her heroine, I show below the footnote to page II of the introduction to my anthology. Not even the Spanish subtitles to North American films reach such heights!

  • Here is a small example, taken at random, of a translation of “La herencia clásico del teatro postmoderno” (The classical legacy of postmodern theatre”) published in Apuntes, Santiago de Chile, 1-101, spring, 1990, pp. 117.127:
  • It says”Vitez wants to reinvent tradition, removing all trace of it from herself. (en s’en démarquant) It should say “Vitez wants to reinvent tradition, distancing herself from it” (“se démarquer”: “to distance yourself from something”): from here on the dictionary definitions are from Petit Robert)
  • It says: “opening it (the text and the mise en scene) to a series of trails which are self-contradictory, they cut back [se recoupent]” It should say “opening it  to a series of trails which are self-contradictory, which happen to meet” (recouper, pronoun., “Intersecar. Fig. to meet, agreeing”).
  • It says: The work vigorously denies the feeling is respectful, by this logic with [est tenue par cette logique à] the same coherence and the same unity as those which should, at another time, evoke this feeling.
  • It should say: “The work that rigorously denies the sense is obligated, by this logic, to have the same coherence and same unity that formerly should have evoked the sense.” (être tenu à: “estar obligado a (una acción)”.
  • It says: “The postmodernism, conceived as a practice of destruction (déconstruction)”
  • It should say “The postmodernism, conceived as a practice of deconstruction
  • It says: “This record is effected … by the recovery (des reprises) of sentences”
  • It should say: “This record is effected … by repetitions of sentences (reprise: “action of saying again, repeating)
  • It says: “The music of Stockhausen like the theatre of Wilson is not in fact notable or respectable”
  • It should say: “The music of Stockhausen, like the theatre of Wilson, is not, in effect susceptible to notation, or repeatable.”
  • In the same translation of the text where these examples are taken from, you can find more than one case of conversion from negation to affirmation – “Even the theatre of the absurd belongs to modernism (and [not] to postmodernism)”; “The ’post’ – of ’postmodern’ means (ne signifie pas) a movement of comeback, of flashback” — of neologisms due to ignorance of the original meaning — “Jacobismo” for “Jacobinismo; “anamorfis” for “anamorfosis” — big differences.
  • “The man doesn’t now have anything of the individual written in the history or historical which regulates all the problems”, where what is missing is after the word “or”, and in place of the word “historical”, the phrase: “historicised by a radical scenic treatment, by a sociohistorical explanation” — all of them attributable to mistakes if they don’t repeat themselves in other documents carrying the same signature (for example, “From text to scene: a difficult labour” and other things published in Conjunto y Tablas, Havana).

Another chance oversight by Cuban television

Dear friends:

In today’s programme Midday on TV (Tuesday February 6), intended to celebrate the Camagüey Culture Conference which is taking place now, dedicated a segment, put together by the journalist Aimée A. Margoz, to presenting the principal cultural historical achievements of Camagüey, which started, as it should, with the Mirror of Patience, from which it went on to Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and Carlos J. Finlay, but, in a fatal leap (maybe there was a blackout?) they omitted, and left within the category “and others”, ever mention of none other than the twentieth century Camagüeyan poet who is our National Poet, our greatest social communist poet, Nicolás Guillén — and what’s more founder-president of our Cuban Union of Writers and Artists until his death. Those of us who are still waiting for Camagüey to totally rid itself its prerevolutionary and Pavonist prejudices, in its local “Giordano-Atiénzar” form, and finally start to be proud of the novels and essays of the internationally celebrated emigré-mullato-gay Severo Sarduy, see ourselves kilometres away from that horizon, with this step backwards, which, even more inconceivably and impardonably, ends up with Nicolás Guillén, the great revolutionary poet of Cuba and the world, left outside the cultural historical record  of our city, province and nation.

With best wishes

Desiderio Navarro

6 February 2007

Desiderio Navarro’s reply to the message signed “Betty”

One of the most pathetic things for me these days has been seeing how people who have been silent and uncritical all their lives in the public sphere — in the assembly, on paper, by email — after carefully waiting a week or two to see “what happens to me” after my initial critical letter, and after my invitation to the debate on taboo topics, they join in the discussion only in order to ask me in a modest way, not to say this or that — always something they themselves have never done or said in the Cuban public sphere. I am not only talking about the political prostitutes who are now abroad, who never wrote hardly a controversial line about anything in Cuba in the “public media” (2001) or, decades earlier, “Literary criticism: also a moral question” (1981), and who never gained any reputation as a controversial person in any congress, assembly or debate they attended between the 70s and now, paying the resulting biographical and intellectual price.

You interpolate me in the following terms: “in the same way that you didn’t accept  Pavón on the TV, neither should you concede now to them choosing the quorum on your behalf.” You don’t have to be a semiotic genius to see how the tendentious ellipsis works in that sentence: who is the subject of the action of “choosing”? Who are the “them” that you don’t name? By not naming them you are creating what is known as an area of doubt which can be filled by the reader with subject like “the bureaucrats”, “the Power”, “the closed circle”, “the elite”, “the apparatus”, etc. depending on the individual person’s suspicions, experiences or expectations. Or, let’s say, a symmetrical variant, going off in the opposite direction, the much criticised “Mystery Syndrome”. No less a part of the Orwellian “newspeak” is the implication: the verb “to cede” has two very different meanings: transitive verb – “give”, “transfer, pass to another thing action or law” — and the other, as an intransitive verb — “give in”, “subject oneself to” (DRAE). The verb “to cede” in its transitive form is an action that the subject may carry out of his own accord and volition (like giving up a seat to a pregnant lady in the bus). Nevertheless, you use the verb in its intransitive form: “concede to”, that’s to say, to not offer much resistance to, to give in to the will of another, capitulate, not resist pressure, or force (like to give in to the threats of an aggressor), sneaking in the impression that there are newly unspecified pressures on the part of “them”.

Now, Betty, although I have not “conceded” that they “choose the quorum,” for me, at all times I have made it clear that I have ceded the right to” choose the quorum.” As I explained in messages widely disseminated by email, after having got the Che Guevara Room and quadrupled the capacity for the public, and having soon seen that those interested in attending exceeded even this capacity, I decided I had to assure the participation of Cuban writers, artists and intellectuals in general, but it turned out even the number of these interested in attended vastly exceeded the capacity, and that’s when I refused to play the role of omnipotent czar singlehandedly deciding who may enter and who may not, and I passed this responsibility — and this is explained again here, one more time, to the “them” of the message whom I informed them of my decision — to the numerous cultural institutions of Cuban writers, artists and intellecturals who are members or workers. It is therefore up to these organizations to question or not any decision of the bodies that they themselves have chosen in the institutions of which they themselves have decided to join voluntarily, including the criteria for making those decisions. What, even so, I did do was insist that they do not allow the diversion of invitations in favour of secretaries or officials; so as not to leave off the lists important cultural figures, simply because they don’t have important positions in UNEAC or elsewhere, and they were taken into account, especially the critics and researchers of the cultural sector, which is the natural and usual public for Criterios, cultural theory center/publisher. I am sure that if I had not done so, indignant letters would now be raining down upon me, not for having made supposed “concessions,” but for having acted in the same autocratic and undemocratic way that I have criticized in such and such institutions or agencies and which you also seem opposed to.

The insinuation, or rather the accusation in advance that the audience will receive “an edited version (as has always happened) of reality” is more than offensive, in the case of Criterios, and I won’t waste time in answering it, because to any honest intellectual, Cuban or foreigner, who knows the work of Desiderio Navarro and Criterios for 35 years, it will be disgusting and unacceptable. Not to mention how offensive it will be to the speakers themselves. In any case, you also — though you haven’t requested them as have, already, more than four hundred people — will receive the texts of the lectures, if only so you can scrutinize them looking for some sloppy trail of an eraser and editorial scissors.

Desiderio Navarro

Translated by GH

28 January 2007

Western Pumpkins / Rosa Maria Rodriguez

Graphic from: http://www.cubaenmiami.com/

I am not going to tackle an everyday plot related to the cinemagraphic or literary genre that became one of the cardinal points of the United States, but that historic company that offers financial and commercial services, Western Union.

Until sometime more than three months ago, if some friend or relative abroad advised by phone that he was planning to send “a little help” by that means to a Cuban inside, those here had the possibility of calling one of the offices of Western and giving his name or that of the sender in order to see if the deposit was already posted and to go and cash it. Since the beginning of July you have to have the transfer number to receive the money, and if not they “give you pumpkins” — that is, they dismiss you — by telephone or personally, although you have the documents and identification that prove that you are the beneficiary.

I’m bothered by the suspicion that that measure is the result of joint management of those that work at the Western Union offices in the Cuban capital — almost always a female — because all those I know are embedded in dollarized businesses and “it is established” that the employees of those offices work simultaneously in the store.  As is natural, it is more stimulating for them and economically convenient for those of Western Union to work with those who are going to spend at the store, than with those who come to their offices to get cash and who know through their relatives how much it cost them to send the shipment.

Some days ago I went to the Casino Deportive internet navigation room or “cyber-without-cafe” in order to send an email and there I found myself with an old woman who asked me for help.  Information technology has still not reached her understanding and her arthritic fingers and she did not know how to create an email account so that her daughter who lives abroad and financially subsidizes her can send her the transfer number.  I wrote her user name and password on a piece of paper for her and she left very grateful, but it left me with doubt whether the next time she will find someone else prepared to leave aside their communication management in order to help her computationally.

What will the old people, whose relatives are accustomed to sending them a regular remittance from abroad, do now?  (In socialist and contemporary Cuba saying “remittance from abroad” is almost a redundancy).  Without doubt, the benefactor will have to call, with the consequent telephone charge in order to give the number of the financial transaction so that the favored one might receive it.  And what about the old people that suffer advanced cataracts, glaucoma, Parkinson’s disease or some other degenerative illness that impedes them from doing it?  And the visually impaired?  With so few computers with internet access in Cuba, that measure against a part of the population is such a great abuse that it verges on contempt.

It seems that when the money already makes up part of the government’s coffers, no one worries about the fate that befalls its intended recipients, if it is in the only hands that really interest the Cuban state: its own.

Translated by mlk

30 October 2013

“Normal Travel”: 42% Don’t Return / Enrique Del Risco

Normality

Colonel Lamberto Fraga, Deputy Director of the Office of Immigration and Foreigners of CUba, has declared that 57.8 percent of those Cubans who have traveled abroad since the travel and immigration reforms have returned to the country, and he concludes:
“We Cubans are not fleeing [the country], this is normal travel.”
Thank goodness.
P.S. The 42% (who don’t return) are (the figure is not mine) 95,888 Cubans. Three times more than during the rafter crisis. This is what’s called a peaceful Mariel boatlift.
Enrique Del Risco (from his blog: Enrisco)
29 October 2013

Remnants to the Wind / Rosa Maria Rodriguez

I found the body of a dead dog like a decal on the floor of the intersection of the streets Amado and Goss, in Vibora, and twenty meters closer to Mayia Rodriguez, a bird also laminated in the asphalt.  That image filled my retina in the block of the Monaco market.

So daily deteriorates the hygiene in any Havana neighborhood for ordinary Cubans. There where the animal died — it does not matter if run over by a car or illness — his entrails were left in the sun for the decay to infect the environs and pollute the olfactory space of the passersby.

What’s worse is the level of contamination to which those who habitually pass through there — among them many children — are exposed and the possible breeding ground for transmission of sicknesses and the risk of contagion for other vagabond dogs and hungry scavenging animals that poke at or feed on the hound’s remains.

Cuba has become — also — a dump or open cemetery for unburied animals and it seems to matter to no one.  These kinds of situations should not happen, but now that they do, to whom to write or direct oneself?  It is possible that we get a faceless, nameless replica of an entity and although you have it, it does not fill the void of decades of helplessness, indolence and filth.

The most regrettable thing is that the answers almost always remain on paper, in the article and personal interest of a journalist, in a public complaint and nothing more.  When will we overcome the stage of explanations and confront problems with facts and concrete solutions?

The remedy would not be — as the authorities are accustomed to doing — to create more entities to attend to social matters and needs accumulated for decades, but they should de-bureaucratize the agencies or firms and give them the resources and powers to quickly and satisfactorily solve these kinds of issues that confront the people and that the State does not solve.

I would like to see the surroundings of the residences, markets and commercial centers that the head honchos, their relatives, their friends and high military chiefs frequent.  I wonder if there are stray dogs in those areas.  Possibly not, to avoid fecal waste, disagreeable odors and the running over of one of those animals.  But if something were to go astray, have an accident or perish in one of those places, surely it would be duly and diligently “transferred” in order to receive “rapid” burial or cremation.

Logic works expeditiously for sectors from “above” like a horizontal and vertical elevator which, although it seems to be, is not stuck but really designed not to go further down from a certain level.

Translated by mlk

29 October 2013

Finally, A Crime or Not? / Cuban Law Association, Osvaldo Rodriguez Diaz

In Cuba prostitution is not a crime, this statement is repeated over and over by the media and by people who are considered to have due authority to do so.

In the special part of the Penal code on crimes, this figure does not appear.

Thus, many ask, “How is it that there are so many who are detained for this type of activity?”.

Our society, like others, suffers from it and also considers prostitution as a reprehensible vice, affecting morality and decency.

This “antisocial behavior,” as it is named in the criminal law, can be punished with rehabilitation measures of up to four years of detention in certain establishments.

These security measures, which are called “pre-criminal” and whose purpose is expressed in the law and complementary provisions and which prevent the subject from committing a crime, are imposed on prostitutes. So, is prostitution a crime or not?

If the objective of these security measures is to to avoid crime, then what crime can be committed when a young girl dedicates herself to the oldest profession?

We must look at the causes and conditions that have generated the excessive increase of this activity, and try to eliminate them at their source.

Despite the rigor of pre-criminal security measures, with almost the same regulations as other punishments, although classified as protected, many repeat their act.

In this area, a sad reality is presented in everything that revolves around prostitution, persons accused of and punished for renting a room to a prostitute, not for the exercise itself but as a temporary dwelling, or the hired driver that transfers them to where they will practice the oldest profession.

The subject presented is complex, others who are licensed in the matter should offer their opinion in respect to this matter.

Rodríguez Díaz

By Osvaldo Rodríguez Díaz

Translated by: Shane J. Cassidy

25 October 2013

State Security Tries to Stop Possible Mass Demonstration / Miriam Celaya

seguridad-300x256HAVANA, Cuba , October 2013, www.cubanet.org.- Rumors have been circulating in the past few days about an alleged “strike” or “demonstration” of the self-employed to be held in Havana next November 1st. This is not an extended commentary on society, but it’s limited to the self-employed sector, stemming from official countermeasures that aim to increase controls on small family-owned clothing businesses.
Some say that this call to a public and peaceful protest, with a march ending at the Plaza Cívica -(Plaza de la Revolución)- was summoned “from outside”, while others claim that it is the initiative of a group of self-employed who have been affected by recent government restrictions particularly harmful to those who trade in articles of clothing, and that it will soon reach other private businesses.

Whether or not these rumors about the protest are true, places in Centro Habana, some of which were once shops, where now several private workers group together to offer their services, be it merchandise sales, equipment repair or even bodybuilders gyms, have been visited by agents of the State Security (“DTI agents”, according to some people), who have warned the self-employed” that disorder or disturbances will not be tolerated”.

On the real possibility that there will be an autonomous demonstration in Cuba without being suffocated even before it starts, there is every reason for doubt. In fact, some argue that potential marching groups have already been infiltrated by the political police, something that is not new. Nevertheless, government measures that keep limiting or stifling private businesses are accentuating the discontent in a sector that has begun to identify itself as independent, legitimate and self-funded, and the insertion of agents to contain their claims would not be sufficient in the mid-term.  Additionally, there are many self-employed who already view the Party-Government-State as a parasitic entity that feeds on them, and not as the benefactor that, until recently, guaranteed certain social benefits.

52C6F4B4-5B52-4E22-8786-4FB8E28DF279_mw1024_mh1024_s-300x168Other rumors have been anticipating that the turnaround will expand to other private businesses, including to 3D theaters that have been proliferating in several provinces, and more so in the capital, heralding the increase in volume of dissenters who would join the chorus of protests.

If the new edicts of the olive-green caste generate a level of dissatisfaction sufficient to breed a movement of protest and eventually become an alternative social force is something to be seen. However, the deployment of repressive agents around self-employed merchants is evidence of the government’s concern with the potential of a sector that, in current circumstances, brings together the biggest and best conditions to stand up to power.

In any case, even if said protests of the self-employed don’t take place, the acknowledged concern of government officials in the face of a rumor should serve as a sample button to private businessmen about their mobilizing potential to transform Cuba’s reality, not from the meager and illusory “economic opening” dispensed from the cupola as a function of the interests of the authorities, but from the interests, needs, and the will power of independent subjects, an unwanted effect miscalculated by the General-President when he decided to open his Pandora ‘s Box of “reforms.”

By Miriam Celaya

Translated by Norma Whiting

Cubanet, 29 October 29, 2013

Antennas and the Ears of the Gods / Rosa Maria Rodriguez

It is not my invention, it was on Cuban TV where they announce the creation of national social network called “The Clothesline,” for domestic users. Do you think they’re finally respecting our rights to have Internet? Hopefully! But in any event it wouldn’t be a “half respect” nor even a half measure of respect, but the total lack of it, for them to limit or prohibit our access to sites like Twitter and Facebook to constrain our social, virtual and mental frontiers.

To force us to interact entirely within the country is a violation of a fundamental human right and also, ironically, almost like inviting us to a prison to take part in a conference about the freedom that will be offered to someone condemned to 55 years in jail.

A friend — the very best of friends — and reader called me on the phone to tell me about Cuban social mesh. She noted the coincidence with a writing of mine that she couldn’t remember the title of, but she did remember the metaphor.  I remembered it too, but I had no idea of the approximate date nor the context in which I used it.  Later I hunted for more information and was able to recall it.  I put the noun “clothesline” in the XML code I keep the blog in and it appeared in the post SOS: The Weapon of the Word, which I published on 16 August 2011.

In the third paragraph of the text I stated: “But here we are and will be as long as God allows it.  I will continue using the clothesline — in the original text it’s not in bold — of WordPress to hang my opinions without letting myself be intimidated by those who come along with their shears, cutting freedoms to feed despotism.”

Coincidence or inspiration?  Don’t know if an official “liked it” and borrowed the term, like Aida says.  If that is what happened, I think it’s a real shame that they don’t have the same ’ears’ when it comes to paying attention to the multiple political and economic proposals that we, the opposition, have been working on throughout the years; proposals whose implementation would help untie the knots of many of the problems which, as a country and as a nation, we suffer.

However, I invite them to continue visiting the websites of the political organizations — illegal according to the dictatorships — and the blogosphere of the emerging alternative civil society, and which there are many talented people who have spent decades offering antidotes and paths in an endless stream, preventive and therapeutic solutions and ideas.

Let’s drink from our own source in a respectful, participative and diverse dialog, including the range of cultural identities.  No matter what the discriminating historic leaders say, we still have more, “much more to give!

27 October 2013

To Have or Not To Have a Car / Fernando Damaso

Above: Two men repair a car from the former USSR.

In any country, the acquisition of a car, whether new or used, usually represents a reason for the new owner’s satisfaction.  In Cuba, if acquiring a vehicle demands overcoming numerous obstacles, keeping it functioning requires overcoming many more.

In the first place, new cars can only be gotten if the State grants the right, generally to functionaries of political and governmental agencies, armed forces officers, some professionals (above all from the health sector after completing missions abroad), artists (mainly musicians), some intellectuals and high performance athletes with relevant results in international events.  In all cases, demonstrated loyalty to governmental ideology and politics is an indispensable requisite.

In the second place, the decree that authorizes the purchase and sale of vehicles between citizens — something that was already done in an illegal manner — refers only to those in use for several years.  We are talking about those that have traveled our deteriorated roads and avenues for a long time: vehicles from the ’40s and ’50s, the first known as “almendrones” (from the word for “almond”) mostly of American make, some German and Italian, and the ones built in the formerly socialist camp, largely the extinct Soviet Union and Poland.  In recent years, although in reduced quantities, vehicles from Japan, South Korea, Germany, Brazil and lastly China have been added.

The owner of a vehicle must confront various problems, one of the most important being the acquisition of fuel: he must pay 1.20 CUC in convertible pesos for each liter for regular gasoline and 1.40 CUC for higher octane.  This represents, in the first case, two days’ salary in national currency (29 Cuban pesos, or CUP), and in the second, more than two days’ (33 CUP), based on an average monthly salary of 440 CUP.

The next problem refers to the oils and lubricants, missing in the garages that offer scrubbing and lubricating service in national currency, requiring the car owner to get them in CUC, at elevated prices, in the convertible pesos garages, or in CUC or CUP at a lower price on the black market.

Nevertheless, these problems are trifles compared to those involved in confronting repairs and the acquisition of replacement parts, tires and batteries.  The majority of state mechanic shops disappeared, and individuals not yet authorized, the repairs must be resolved with private mechanics, who are able to work on state premises devoid of equipment (by arrangement with the appropriate administrator), at his home, at that of the car owner, using his own tools and, sometimes, even those of the client.

The prices, as is to be expected, are arranged directly between the mechanic and the car owner, usually being elevated, as much in CUC as in CUP.  The main replacement parts, almost always missing from the state stores, must be gotten on the black market.  Customarily, near the state stores, the presence of the citizens equipped with cell phones that, before any solicitation, immediately locate the searched-for piece or accessory.

In the state stores, depending on the type of vehicle, a tire may cost between 89 and 155 CUC (five or eight months’ average salary) and a battery between 90 and 175 CUC (the average salary of almost five to nine months).  On the black market tires can be acquired for 60-80 CUC and batteries for 90-110.

It seems, although it may not be the intention, that the State, with its elevated sale prices for citizens, stimulates the the existence of the illegality, especially when all or most of these items come from the “misappropriation of resources” and theft from the state stores and warehouses.

And best not to address the issue of sheet metal and paint, because these services, more than the cost of the materials (sheet metal, acetylene, welder, paints, thinners, etc) reach astronomical figures, on the order of hundreds of CUC.

The decision about having or not having a car in Cuba demands a lot of reflection: although it resolves a problem of scarce public transportation and represents freedom of movement, it constitutes too heavy a burden for any pocket and the psyche of the happy (?) owner.

From Diario de Cuba.

23 October 2013

Translated by mlk

Prison Diary LXII: Award-Winning and Censored Books / Angel Santiesteban

With the recent presentation in Europe of my novel “The Summer When God Was Sleeping”, which won the Internation Franz Kaka Prize for Novels from the Drawer, convened in the Czech Republic, and the resumé of awards which accompany me, you could think that I am a very lucky writer when it comes to awards, but this is very far from reality.

I want to share and I’m sure that I once wrote this in another post, that if you could publish in Cuba, it was thanks to the competitions, which function as a form of blackmail, once won, it shows their moral and ethical responsibility, which I assure you that they do not have, but they like to pretend to the public, especially internationally, that they themselves do have moral and ethical responsibility, because my books were and are rejected out of hand as soon as they are presented to publishing houses.

To me, they made it harder than anyone to get published. The editors and newsroom chiefs of these publishers, who maintain dialogues at book fairs as friends, confessed to me the impossibility of publishing them, precisely because of the topics addressed; if they did so they would be relieved of their jobs. Therefore, at different times, I was rejected from several news features, which were intended to show the different ways to approach the narrative by writers of my generation.

My art was always accompanied by the themes of social deprivation and lack of political freedoms, so I was constantly an unprintable writer. I learned that winning the awards was the only possibility for me to address my failure to publish. Therefore in 1992, after I had been awarded the Casa de las Américas Prize, it was withdrawn thanks to the interference of State Security before the jury which retracted its vote, convinced that my human and slightly epic vision of the war of Cubans in Africa would create great political damage and it did not seem eloquent nor productive to present an image of those suffering soldiers that I outlined in my stories.

After changing the title of the book, in an attempt to mislead the State security agents, who were like dogs sniffing the trail of my creations, I sent it to a contest of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), and it was honored in 1995; but that wasn’t enough to get it published and for three years it would remain on the desk of the then President of UNEAC, Abel Prieto. After a dark negotiation, it was published in 1998, after I agreed to remove five stories from the final copy. They published a poor and ugly edition on purpose, which more closely resembled a box of detergent than a book and this was done with the purpose of weakening the book’s distribution.

In 2001, after internal pressure from the organizers of the Cuban Book Institute, whose president was the Taliban Iroel Sánchez, it was decided in the office of Iroel Sánchez himself, with a vote of 2 to 1, with the previous winner of the award, the writer Jorge Luis Arzola, communicating via telephone and by giving his vote to my collection of short stories, my book “The Children Nobody Wanted” saw the light of day.

Immediately, the War Combatants Association of Cuba (veterans), sent a letter to the Ministry of Culture and the Book Institute itself, for the critical vision of my literature, cataloged the poor management before the Revolution and condemned the actions of those leaders of the culture that allowed it. Iroel Sanchez himself, who was taunted for having participated in the Angolan war, confessed to me that his fellow soldiers criticized him for having allowed, despite it being against their will, the book’s publication.

Later, in 2006, also under pressure, when the doctor Laidi Fernández was part of the jury, and at the end she gave her vote, when she realized that there was no point in voting against, it would be 3-2, and that her father, the poet Roberto Fernández Retamar, president of Casa de las Americas, made the comment to Roberto Zurbano, then Director of the Editorial, “my book would remove the foundations of the institution,” the jury awarded me the prize, and the book, despite being published and presented in a small percent of the copies which they delayed for two years, in another attempt to postpone the promotion of the book.

Anyway, I regret nothing, something made me guess that it was the right thing, so much censorship against me was the announcement of a literature which was non-conformist and contained an unfriendly vision of officials. These are the fortunes of my “prize-winning” books, and so much anguish has accompanied them, to the same extent that they caused distress to the political and cultural leaders.

For many years, more than ten books have slept in my drawer. Sometimes they look through the crack and sigh, waiting for better times, that the darkness would dissipate and the light and the wind would come in and stir the box like signs of progress, as it did recently with a ray of light with the Franz Kafka Prize.

One already escaped, and those that remain in the drawer await the literary raft which will take them across the raging sea of censorship imposed by the dictatorship, to reach the land of the reader and be published in their own right, and not to be silent but to be waving little flags and smiling at leaders and self-censors. At that price I prefer the “unpublished.”

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Lawton prison settlement. October 2013.

Translated by: Shane J. Cassidy

28 October 2013