Laura Álvarez Rojas, a Cuban woman resident in South Africa, in less than nine months lost two of her loved ones. Her brother, Alberto Álvarez Rojas, a resident in the island, died last March 13th, in a car accident in that country.
“When I had not yet recovered from the pain of losing my mother, I found myself unprotected and enormously depressed at the death of my brother”, wrote Alvarez Rojas in a letter to some of her friends. She decided to take the remains to her motherland and share such a painful loss with her relatives in Cuba.
She went through all the bureaucratic requirements demanded by the Immigration and Foreign Department to go to the island. She had her passport extended, also had legalized her brother’s death certificate and paid all the consular tariffs. Last March 23rd, she left the African continent with the flight KL 0592 and landed in Cuba the ext day at 6.00 pm.
She was surprised when an immigration officer told her at the window, that she was not allowed into the country and did not know the reasons. In a separate office she asked them to check her name. In the year 2011 she visited Cuba twice without any trouble. She did not come to have holidays. Her mother was suffering from a terminal liver cancer. “You can not come in and that is all, your embassy in South Africa is the one responsible to explain the reasons”, answered the officer.
The officer tried to find out why the entry was denied. “Did you pay your tariffs at the immigration office in Cuba?”, she asked. “Yes, I did”, answered Laura. “Did you fight with anyone?”, she asked again. “Never, neither before nor later”, she rejected. “Did you visit some places?”, she continued asking. “My visits were to the hospital to transfuse my mother, to immigration and to the airport”, she refuted.
In a bag she had Alberto’s remains. “To the persons whose entrance to Cuba is denied, the luggage is not allowed”, added the immigration officer. “Ask the embassy to send the remains of your brother using diplomatic mail, she woman advised.
Desperate, she phoned her husband, a doctor who deserted and who had been working for approximately 10 years in South Africa, her sister who was waiting for her outside and the consul of her embassy. “Turn off the phone, you can not communicate with anyone else”, the officer advised to her. The woman “became furious and took my phone”, added Alvarez Rojas.
Laura insisted in bringing in her brother’s remains. “They saw me like a crazy one talking to all officers, I was locked in an office and some body took me by the neck, breaking my rosary”, she stated.
In spite of the mistreatment and physical aggressions, she insisted on her purpose. “I kneeled and begged to give the remains of my brother to my sister who was waiting outside, I could be returned, I did not care”, she insisted to another officer who was watching her in the office.
Laura did not make it. She was seated in the flight KL 02724 the same day, in the same airplane she had arrived. The pilot was told she was an illegal person for being delinquent in Cuba. The man was furious when the young lady showed her papers in order, the ashes of her brother’s and the death certificate of the embassy.
The pilot complained. It was not the first time it happened. “I was returned without a pre-ticket so that once in Holland I had to pay my ticket to South Africa again”, argued Alvarez Rojas. He refused to board her without the ticket and warned he would report Cuba through his airline, for the frequent abuse to its citizens.
The crew tried hard to assist her. “They made me feel like a person since the treatment received in my country was that of an animal”, she continues. “I was not carrying a dead dog, I was carrying a part of my Heart”, said Laura in a desperate attempt to find comprehension and solidarity for what had happened to her.
“They did not let me cry my pain for my loved ones, neither did they give me the right to hold my sister who was crying desperately on the other side and I was forced to come back here with the remains of my brother, unprotected heart, broken hope, and the biggest disappointment in my life”, she ended.
Laura insists on an explanation at the Cuban embassy in South Africa, although she knows there is no reason for what has no explanation. However, she is wrong when she says no one can understand what she feels. Cuban authorities treat many of its citizens like this. No doubt it is a cruel treatment, brutal and humiliating.
The presence of performance artists in the streets of Havana, is increasing. Today I want to give you a new photographic exhibition on the subject of mimes. Women and men today are capable of sharing the stage on our roads, their only reason being to delight all who stop to look at the difficult art of mime.
Most of the time I end up agreeing with my dearest friend Agustin. But it always happens that after he’s gone, I find myself thinking about what he said to me and what I said to him. It’s so passionate, and one fears this. Even I, I also fear it. In this case, we have been talking this afternoon about the intentions of Carlos Saladrigas, the Cuban-American businessman who wants to invest in the Cuban economy, even under the regime that seized, expropriated, stole the wealth of his family in the name of the people.
Agustin has been very hurt, has seen a family, in the neighborhood on the outskirts of central Havana where he lives, which has no food to give their children. He always says that the real Cuba is below, within. So he doesn’t trust that this man of business comes to be anything more than another foreign businessman who amasses a fortune with slave labor and so gives the regime the gift of a few more years.
I also heard the words spoken by this gentleman in the Centro Laical, I am also Catholic, knowing my own prejudices I tried to open my mind to the words I heard but a critical piece came to change the shape of the jigsaw puzzle and that was hearing him say to someone who has traveled more than I have: capitalism does not mean democracy.
I warn you that I am not a leftist, because I believe it’s a trap to impose “good” dictatorships. What I understand is that it will not solve the problem of Cubans (which is nothing other than being able to free ourselves from the Castro regime peacefully, without violence), to follow the path of a market economy in Chinese-style Communism, which, incidentally, was held up at the beginning as an example of “taxpaying diasporas.”
All money invested “outside” of freedom, will contribute to more slavery. One can invest in freedom, or one can give time and money to our repressors, cunning, crafty, who for 53 or 54 years, I’ve already lost count, have used terror to subdue all Cubans.
Perhaps the money will make some people forget, for a while, the problem of lack of freedom and the danger to all those who have opposed Castro’s Communism since 1959. But luckily there are some who don’t care about money, because with freedom you can create everything and be happy, but without it everything is cardboard, lies — like the Cuba in the restored Old Havana — while it requires an abominable mutation of human nature to live in prosperity and without threats in the Cuba of today.
I want freedom before wealth, poverty is the least of the punishments for those who don’t love freedom and defend it, freedom of conscience, freedom to be… almost soil, beloved dust, star, earth, light: freedom is the medium where humanity grows. The freedom of each person, touched only by the wisest law, the most impartial, ancestral, human and divine, not political, not military.
Normally those who abhor freedom are those who sell it, so I insist that all those who sit around the Round Table on TV are the only mercenaries. No one can pay us to be free, it’s redundant. You pay someone with what you deprive another of, you compensate, you reward. There is no prize for freedom that is greater than freedom. When freedom is at stake, we must defend it.
But there are families in Cuba reduced to living almost like animals who cannot think of freedom, who cannot be punished for this with more poverty, but the lifting of the embargo would not necessarily solve the problem because it is not the exclusive cause of poverty in Cuban homes. In fact, when it comes to the works of the “Battle of Ideas” the money flows and touches all the Revolutionaries involved, and still today they are financing the Utopias that serve to flood the dictatorship with the capital that is missing from the tables of Cubans. Life must be looked at up close to have neither ideas nor ideologies.
It is true that this family that made an impression on Agustin, and that makes an impression on anyone, continues to experience dire need. And you can keep on blaming the embargo. And you can think, or Saladrigas can think, that you have to heal everyone’s hearts. From the point of view of yoga, or Hesychastic prayer, the famous entrepreneur would be right; but that is not the healing he was talking about.
When I listen to the Catholic Church talk about national reconciliation, I also wonder, who needs to renounce themselves to achieve peace? Is it, perhaps, an invitation to renounce freedom? There is no reconciliation with tyranny.
The immense peace of those who believe in freedom is sufficiently transgressive to excite the violence of a regime that has always feared and hated the citizens. The faith I have in Christ will find a way; I believe and I believe in Him. My shield, my fortress, my refuge.
The role of the Catholic Church in Cuba right now is such a critical issue, that we are posting this video so you can hear Cardinal Ortega, discussing it in his own words (translated within the presentation itself). The Q&A starts about the one hour mark. The first question is in regards to the protestors that the Cardinal had State Security remove from a church in Havana.
José Daniel Ferrer suffers in the dungeons of State Security in Santiago de Cuba, subjected to psychological pressures and macabre practices (like night attacks from swarms of mosquitoes) that seek to break his health. What has Raul Castro gained by the detention and harassment of the leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba? Nothing at all. José Daniel rises today from the dungeons of Versalles as the most charismatic and active figure of the Cuban dissidence. His work has transcended the east of the island, and from outside is seen with deep admiration and respect. When such heights are reached, no such measure is effective. His incarceration only produces more activism and others, inspired by him, multiply his example.
Today this man, whose courage and integrity is surely the envy of more than a few Cuban generals (if they say it’s not so ask them whether or not Military Counterintelligence fears him), has just declared a hunger strike. For many Cubans, I’m sure, this news means nothing. They think it is about one more criminal who wants his cell to be a room in a five star hotel. The information blockade to which this government subjects them makes them indifferent, and ever more ignorant, and also more insensitive. By the time they get home after a thousand vicissitudes with transportation, stealing, resolving, a little “business” and then watching the ball game — to repeat the cycle again the next day — their life has gone by. There are those who don’t even have a job, but not a few of them handle money, go on a little trip abroad, and even enjoy Internet access.
Within the latter group — from which we don’t exclude the shady dealers — there are recognized and not recognized intellectuals and artists. They can be seen full of their theories, critical thinking, convenient reports, in permanent contact with their colleagues in exile. But there are many others within this group (which has already ascended to the middle class) who have never boarded public transportation, nor watched national television. What prevents all these people — and I circumscribe them in the interests of brevity — from knowing what happens in Cuba?
Recently I asked one of the most famous writers on the Island to say something on behalf of José Daniel Ferrer. The reader can already imagine his response. But this is not the most alarming: a great number of our academics and intellectuals are unaware of the existence of civil society. If you ask them about it they immediately think you are referring to NGOs (which in Cuba, paradoxically, are governmental) and community projects (also obliged to be linked to the government). The full range of independent projects, the civic and political activism, the opposition movement, the various forms of dissidence, the alternative spaces, the rebellious groups and even individuals such as Yoani Sanchez, all are unknown to this Intelligentsia that refuses to leave the Big Bubble.
From the exile I have heard the opinion that culture and politics should be separate so as not to run the risk of running out of artists (as if staying inside the Bubble was nothing more than the way our artists engage in politics). We can see how far the enchantment reaches. We must break this immense bubble to access civic society and its spaces, unique places where the opposition, the dissidence and the civic movements can interact with the rest of the population. Thus, they constitute, these sites of connection, the articulation that is needed to make political reform viable.
It’s not just for something to do that State Security spares no effort to keep these bridges broken. It’s time for Cubans outside and inside to recognize the real Cuba, which is not confined in the Big Bubble, inside of which float the organic intellectuals, the government, the State institutions, the media images and the neighbors grouped into their Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs).
Cuba is more than this: it is also — and better for it — this vibrant civil society that involves citizens and their autonomy, dreams, projects; their sequestered lives, the streets — our streets — the decision to have our own voices.
Sport is a power in Cuba but its role has been changed, the efforts, education, training, in short everything but money that the government offers, makes Cuba a pool of athletes for other countries such as USA, Italy, Spain etc.
When someone begins a serious sports career and leaves to travel they encounter a reality and the stage is set when their pay is delayed or they don’t get their prize.
They begin to realize the exploitation they’ve been subjected to, receiving only crumbs with bad intentions where the the idea is to work on them psychologically to maintain their motivation.
But the blows teach them, over time, and then a comparative analysis of other athletes in other countries with poorer results or less of a future in sports than they have, they see the foreign athlete enjoy the fruits of his sacrifice and they have nothing, and they start planning to escape on a trip or to marry a foreigner.
What one sows is what one reaps, and what was, yesterday, a power, today is a shadow as Cuban sport is in decline.
Mariela Castro holding a sign that says “Freedom for the 5 Cuban prisoners in the U.S. LGBT Social Networks of CENESEX”
From May 8 to 17, the National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX) returns to the official stage with the terrible theatrical work directed by Ms. Mariela Castro Espin entitled “State Faggotry”
It’s not that I have anything against the experienced sexologist’s forays into the world of performing arts, but what I do object to is the continued manipulation and using of the Cuban Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community to benefit the ill-fated Revolution now led by her father Raul Castro Ruz.
The activities will have as their stage different cities in the country, with the city Cienfuegos being the site of the national celebration on this occasion. Havana has not been left behind in these celebrations, conga lines once again traverse the streets, with those who, despite receiving little benefit, use the occasion to go out in the streets at night which the police, otherwise, deprive them of the right to do.
The image you have before you traveled the world in the last day of the international struggle against homophobia in Cuba. They are not any image, these are tied to the (LGBT) Cuban community in various political campaigns. The posters speak for themselves, the faces may not tell us anything beyond the mere fact of carrying these banners for a march or a day that is supposed to be about defending the rights of the (LGBT) community, and we should reject it and demand that those who lead this campaign not repeat it.
I remember having heard from someone who was standing by the podium where Mrs. Mariela Castro Espin uttered the opening words of the day spent carrying in her hands the sign demanding the release of the five Cuban prisoners in the United States. “Are they also homosexuals?” someone asked. The question occasioned great laughter but really you have to wonder how these things happen. We must be clear about the scenario that we use for political purposes.
Let’s ask God and Mrs. Mariela Castro, now known among Cubans as the Empress of Homophobia, not only to concede the capital La Rampa, the areas of the Malecon, and the Cuban streets to the (LGBT) community on this date, instituted by the center she directs, but that she also return these streets to those who are the stars of their own history and no some badly conceived theatrical work.
I met him in 1998. That year, on October 12, he received the “José Vasconcelos” prize in a ceremony at the National Hotel in Havana. The gold medal, conferred by the Hispanic Affirmation Front (HAF) to intellectuals of the Castillian language for lifetime achievement, had already gone to figures of the likes of Jorge Luis Borges and León Felipe. He was added to the select group with no less dignity, like a venerable man of letters whose patient and helpful work had contributed to the appreciation of Cuban literature beyond our shores. Coincidentally, that day the same institution in Mexico gave, with exceptional character, the Young Talent Prize to Ileana Álvarez. In the next few years we would share various times, invited always to activities in which the HAF and its president, Mr. Fredo Arias of la Canal, continued enhancing the knowledge of Cuban literary heritage, influenced especially with its “savior” influence.
It was the next year, in Holguín, where we traveled to pay homage to the poet Lalita Curbelo, that I asked if I would be allowed to turn on a small recorder, in the middle of some chats which he adorned with his rich knowledge and anecdotes of who had been not only a researched, but also a protagonist and exceptional witness to the vicissitudes of literature and Creole society for the better part of the twentieth century. Then, the century was drawing to a close, a good excuse to ask my interlocutor for a brief overview, a review not only of those hundred years but also his own unique look.
At the start I wasn’t excited about anything more than the idea of collecting, as a curiosity, part of the treasure of these conversations, and learning something about someone who had preferred to dedicate his energies to study and the promotion of other authors and tradition, from a university chair, as well as a writer, or — though he sneered at old age, keeping very active — directing the Cuban Academy of Language. I wanted to take advantage of this situation facing a young man who asks, in a classroom, partly because he doesn’t know and partly to be provocative.
When I got home I prepared the transcript and sent it to him with this message: “Here I have made a verbatim copy of the interview I managed to record in those hectic days of our stay at the Pernik Hotel in Holguin. As I promised, I am sending it to you for your review and editing of everything you want to clarify, and then return it to me.”
But time passed and passed … and every time I phoned, he would ask for another extension. Until we met around the table again and I didn’t give him any more cracks at it: I thought perhaps he would loosen his tongue with regards to some simple themes that, looking closely, were still uncomfortable, at least as long as the people involved were living. He asked me to let the water run under the bridge a little more. The truth is, that except for this interview I kept it to myself and since then it has remained unpublished.
When he passed on physically, Salvador Bueno (Havana, 1917-2006) closed an extensive work that he worked on until his final hour, consisting mainly of research, essays, articles and anthologies, which began in 1950 when he published Outline of Modernism in Cuba (Talleres Tipográficos de Editorial Lex, La Habana), a conference he had held at the Universidad del Aire on September 3.
Then in 1953, the National Commission for UNESCO would print A Half-Century of Cuban Literature (1902-1952). His History of Cuban Literature, adapted to the current official program in the institutes of secondary education in Cuba, appeared in 1954 with the Minerva seal and later would be reissued after the triumph of the Revolution.
Among his outstanding monographs was The Negro in the Hispanic American Novel (Ed. Letras Cubanas, La Habana, 1986), with which he had obtained, in 1978, the Candidate of Doctor of Sciences in the Literary Academy of Sciences of Hungary. The milestones of poetry also always received the benefit of his attention, from Image by the poet Milanés, a reprint of the Journal of the National Library José Martí (Havana, 1963).
In his later years, he fulfilled the responsibilities of President of the Cuban Academy of Language with the same humility that Dulce Maria Loynaz had left this institution on dying. What then was the main promoter of the collection of Cuban Classics, thanks to funding from the FAH, but with the seal of the Academy, he returned to life and put back into circulation many indispensable books, always with his prefaces and notes.
Now in the last stage of his life he received other awards that came to validate the homage of his Mexican friends. He won the International Fernando Ortiz Prize, in 2000, then on the same date the National Award for Cultural Research, and four years later, the National Social Sciences Award.
When he’d already let more than a little water run under the bridge, I think it’s necessary to deliver to others that part of his words that I picked up one day.
Francis Sanchez: Your love of literature, is it a family inheritance?
Salvador Bueno: I can’t say that in my family there was some ancestor that was dedicated to literature. Although my father was a great reader and also, according to what he told me, when he was very young he wrote some articles. I think that in the stages of Cuban life that I lived, there were those who got me interested in literature, as the necessary expression of a man, that is of the whole society.
I studied at the Havana Institute in a tumultuous era, when there was even an attack by the army and the police. I think on March 3, 1934 they threw tear gas. There is even a chronicle published by Pablo de la Torriente [Cuban writer, 1901-1936], about the terrible things that happened there, in a place where there hundreds of boys and girls.
As the police were already fired up, any gesture of rejection was sufficient motive to set them against us. In that situation we had long periods of truce, most of the time the strikers were the same students, although it was always the government that closed the classrooms.
After the fall of Machado the opened the institutes for what they called lightning courses, but then came the strike of March 1935, and they suspended classes again, and it was the same in other months. All this inclined me, as well, towards reading. In the long periods where there no student obligations I dedicated myself to reading everything that fell into my hands, not just works of pure creation, like novels, stories or poems, but also I read critical essays, histories… I read a lot, both good and bad, from contradictory positions, which I think ultimately opened a very wide spectrum for me.
FS: And in the beginning, as a man of thought, were you marked by the social aspects?
SB: That vocation was born and developed over all the years at the Institute of Havana, then in the Institute of Vibora and finally at the University, because the agitation continued throughout all these years. I entered the University in 1938, and Abel Santamaria in 1942. The situation of unrest that existed in Cuba was very big, especially among students. Among teachers of all types and kinds, they were very good for the students because not only were they very good at their material, but they also maintained a civic position that they drove us to follow. For example, there was Vincentina Antuña who conveyed his concerns to us, so this way they also directed us. I think those years of struggle were invaluable to me in that sense, because I learned from books and beyond the books.
FS: Talking about the matter of your own work, what do you think of Cuban poetry of the twentieth century compared to the nineteenth century? That upward spiral — as Lezama said — which would certainly mean the poetry of the nineteenth century, in relation to what was being written then in the rest of America, do you believe that it had continued during this last century?
SB: I think that in the first fifteen years of the century, the poetry written in Cuba was delayed relative to the rest of Hispanic America. However, from that stage of disillusion rose great powers like Regino Boti, José Manuel Pobeda, Agustín Acosta and others, And in this what, despite what the frustration of the Republic meant, they found better ways to express themselves in taking into account the situation in the country.
Pobeda, for example, demonstrates a poetry and a prose of total skepticism, but also with a great anger … There’s a poem he called “Dirty rag,” dedicated to the flag, where he tells people precisely that, that their flag is a rag. So it was afterward that the other poetry arose, between 1920 and 1930, where we also find notable authors who were reacting against their predecessors without totally separating themselves from them. They are poets like Tallet and Regino Pedroso, who on the one hand leaned greatly toward social concerns and at the some time possessed a skepticism that they were going to try to placate.
Then comes an important event, the revolution against Machado, which means a new frustration for Cubans, because when we expected that the leaders that emerged after the fall of the tyrant would improve the situation of the country, the opposite happened. The most obvious case was that of Grau San Martin, who was elected by a huge majority, and also with tremendously enthusiastic demonstrations, this Cintio Vitier who spoke very well in the novel De peña pobre.[1] There was joy because finally a popular president was elected, and then there was widespread frustration.
So, I think that with those relapses will there will always arise the spirit of the Cuban rebel who stands in front of those gaps and faces the same skepticism that comes from such experiences. So we have the case of Chibas who is, I would say, a reformer, but around him there is a series of guys who later will be the starting point of the generation of the century. And besides, in poetry (it seemed as if we were not already talking about poetry) there were the great teachers who were born early in the century, Nicolas Guillen in 1902, Lezama in 1910… These important figures will manage to be heard. Guillen for his particular expression, for his own communicability, which he managed, perhaps, more easily than others.
FS: Do you think it’s an exaggeration to refer to Origins as a movement.
SB: No because without a doubt it was a movement. It had to do with Lezama, and the youngest, Eliseo, Cintio, Fina, were the ones who gave it vitality. So much so that when the Revolution came that required taking positions, and Lezama and they were left in Cuba. Although they say he tried to leave but the truth is he stayed in Cuba when his sister left. He was a man who lived very immersed in his own environment. I remember once at his house he confessed to me that he couldn’t live without the dampness that left stains you could see on the walls, although, in the end, with his asthma, it was precisely those water stains that killed him.
FS: With the Revolution, what significance did Lezama continue to have for you?
SB: I will tell you something that is certainly going to amaze you, many people no longer remember that Lezama Lima was vice president of UNEAC (Cuban Artists and Writers Union). I have a card with his signature. The UNEAC ID card had be to renewed from time to time, but I kept mine, I save it like a treasure, a UNEAC card with Lezama Lima’s signature as vice president, that is acting vice president, because when Guillen went abroad he stopped fulfilling the functions as one of the first vice presidents.
FS: When was that?
SB: UNEAC was founded in 1961 and this was in the first ten years. Also, in 1959 they offered a series of conferences on the steps of the University, they would invite there the most distinguished poets and writers, contributors included Tallet, Regino Pedroso, and also Lezama, but his contribution is almost unknown although it was published, because Ciro Bianchi included it in a boo where he brought together a lot of the works of those who were dispersed and little known. [2] The initiative of offering this conference on the steps, his contribution, his thinking, was very good. That is, some have wanted to accentuate Lezama’s withdrawn personality, or his anti-Revolutionary character, but you have to read his work carefully.
FS: In the second half of the twentieth century, we have the poetry that is already within the Revolutionary process.
SB: There’s even a debate about what has been called “First generation poetry of the Revolution,” some who had been publishing before the Revolution, as is the case with Robert Fernandez Retamar, and even those who began to publish in the first years. Then, in 1959, those Cuban Book Fairs started, and there we find a selection of poetry from the young, prepared by Retamar and Fayad Jamis [3]. You have to pay attention to what they say in the prologue, and the authors that are included there, is something fabulous. They increasingly emphasize the desire to identify with the priorities of identity, but also the desire to penetrate their own personalities, and in this way I think they they achieved the best results of this first stage of the poetry of the Revolution, that is, that which comes with full force from the young people who founded El Caimán Barbudo (The Bearded Cayman) in 1966, Luis Rogelio Nogueras, Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera, Víctor Casaus…
FS: Do you think that in this 20th century we have some intellectual that is head and shoulders above that we will be able to recognize as the most significant figure?
SB: I think without a doubt that the intellectual figure most important in this century in Cuba is Fernando Ortiz, and I think that in the new century new generations should know him completely and follow his direction. His works should be republished, and we must always insist on the fundamental messages of his work.
Notes:
* “Salvador, un sillón ocupado en las letras cubanas” (Salvado, a Chair Occupied in Cuban Letters) won the Orlando Castellanos Interview Prize in the cultural magazine Videncia (Clairvoyance), 2010. Jury: Gina Picart, David Leyva and Juventina Soler. This is only a fragment.
1 Cintio Vitier published the first part of his novel De peña pobre in México, in 1978.
2 Aludes to a text compiled by Ciro Bianchi in Imagen y posibilidad, Ed. Letras Cubanas, La Habana, 1981.
3 Refers to the selection, Poesía joven de Cuba, Ediciones del Festival del Libro Cubano, La Habana, 1959.
When Norberto (alias) defected from a sports tournament in Canada, the Cuban authorities, as usual, tried to erase him from the collective memory of fans who deliriously cheered his spectacular shots at the basket.
No journalist dared to write his name. Nor tell of his athletic feats. When they tell the history of national basketball, they intentionally mutilate the moments of glory that Norberto gave the sport.
Much later, when he was over 40, Norberto arrived in Havana laden with bags and gifts for family and friends. It wasn’t the first time he’d come.
On one of those trips he “made holy” in the Santeria religion. And on hot Havana nights he sits with a group of friends drinking rum as they talk about sports, women and, of course, the current situation. Although Norberto opposes the form of government of Raul Castro, he is wary of giving political opinions. “You know, my friend, I have my mother here and part of my family,” he justifies himself.
Norberto’s real fear is that the government will check its blacklist and, for desertion from an ’official mission’, he will be denied entry to the country and can not walk the streets of the city and share with his childhood friends.
Other Cubans in exile behave as Norberto does. To hate all the time is not healthy. But to forget the indignities suffered is not advisable. It is synonymous with cowardice, this justification used by some Cubans who annually visit the island and declare themselves ’apolitical’, assuring us that they have no interest in politics.
The country belongs to everyone. Therefore, the authorities do not grant any favors by giving you a visa to visit your country for a couple of weeks. You shouldn’t have to ask for what is a natural right.
The immigration issue is a subject suspended by the Castro brothers. Don’t forget that for a long time the regime hated Cubans who preferred to live in other latitudes, far from the tiresome Revolutionary campaigns.
Remember Camarioca in 1963. Or Mariel in 1980. Shameful chapters of the Revolution, when to show support for their ideas, they verbally lynched people with disgusting words, not to mention volleys of stones and eggs and the label of ’scum’ imposed by an offended Fidel Castro on the thousands of compatriots who decided to leave.
In the immigration offices they would put the initials SOB in their records. It’s hard to think that those same mandarins who detested those who abandoned ship, now have made an examination of conscience and revised their energetic speech, full of resentment toward Cuban migrants.
If Fidel Castro, 34 years ago, gave way to the council and family reunification with that Dialogue 1978, it was mainly for economic reasons. Almost two billion dollars in cash and thousands in little items and phone calls, is not negligible for an economy that has spent decades treading water.
But, like every autocracy, the authorities claim the right to decide which Cubans living abroad can enter the island. They do not care who oppose the system, as long as they do so quietly and anonymously.
It is estimated between 30,000 and 70,000 Cubans are on a blacklist. They are those who openly and publicly criticize the regime from the nations where they live. Dissidents, intellectuals and journalists who have written texts that expose the innards of an almost scientific repression and who opening express dissenting opinions.
The government classifies the ’worms’ (disaffected) in three categories. The good and meek, who generously spend thousands of dollars on their families. And only at home with their relatives, do they quietly criticize the state of affairs. Those do not bother them. After all, in Cuba, a silent majority speaks evil of the Castros.
Then come the most precious. The “Revolutionary worms” living in the United States, They are very useful to Castro propaganda. For from the heart of the ’empire’ they support the regime’s policies, go to rallies in support of the five spies and even have breakfast or dinner with representatives of the government when they come to visit Cuba.
Many of these ’worms’ in olive green will participate in the First National Meeting of Cuban Residents in United States of America, scheduled to be held this coming April 28 in Havana. Among these may be the occasional dissenter, but in essence, they are in favor of ending the embargo, approving the update of the economic model and calling for the freedom of the spies imprisoned in the U.S..
The third group of ’worms’ is marked with iron and fire by the official spokesmen. They are the ’counterrevolutionaries’, labeled as ’Miami Mafia’ or ’CIA’, among which are web managers and bloggers on Cuban issues who wield their pen like a whip. Those can never return. And they can’t even dream of being buried in the land of their birth.
It is time that the Cuban diaspora oppose the categories created by the regime to divide the migration. It’s lawful that Cubans living in other nations have their own opinions, even pro-Castro. But it is reprehensible that they separate out those who peacefully oppose them.
As long as only the “Revolutionary worms” (the “respectful” as the organizers of this meeting call them), can discuss certain topics — and not the hottest — the meetings in Havana will be a joke. When we want to talk seriously about Cuban emigration, we must have all two million compatriots living abroad. Whatever they think.
A few days ago a friend asked me whether, if I had gone on a hunger strike five years ago, our case would have had the same outcome. Without hesitation I said no, and doing so caused me to immediately stop and ponder the differences, in terms of internal political circumstances between then and today.
The Cuba of 2007 still faced the uncertainty of the transfer of power from Fidel to Raul Castro, which, it was conjectured inside and outside the country, would create a power vacuum and I don’t doubt that this would have made the Leadership of the country more likely to take extreme positions. The streets of the Havana were the scene for the marches of the Ladies in White in pursuit of freedom for the prisoners of the Black Spring; the alternative Cuban blogosphere did not have the maturity it exhibits today; there were not the civic initiatives that emerged later — for example the Cuban Law Association and projects such as Estado de SATS — which imprinted, with the passing of years, a different dynamic with regards to the embryonic civil society and its projects towards the authorities and vice versa. In the Cuba of 2007, neither Zapata, Wilfredo Soto nor Wilmar Villar had died, Coco Farinas had not come to the end of his hunger strike, nor had the prisoners from that cause of 2003 been released into exile.
During these five years, Cuban society has seen transformations, some more obvious, others more underground. The same tensions have accumulated, a product of the confrontation between the opposition and a power which, although it has taken some steps in the sense of “legalizing” some property transactions and has made access to the small family business more “flexible,” it remains reluctant to opening, unconditionally and definitively, the door to more far-reaching civil rights such as freedom of travel, the right to freedom of association and access to an objective and uncensored press, plus it continues to staunchly forbid Internet access.
But despite everything, Cuban society has long ceased to be that bell jar isolated from the world of the 70s and 80s. Undoubtedly, it is no longer the same. The alternative blogosphere, based on social networks like Twitter, has built its own paths and today is an open window through which the world looks at that part of Cuba that it does not see on the news; the Ladies and White are not stopped before the scandalous mobs organized by the Communist Party and State Security; the death of Zapata marks a turning point, avoiding the death of Farinas and causing, finally, the release of the political prisoners from 2003 and later of other causes.
The subsequent deaths of Soto and Villar ended up drawing attention to the issue of repression in the center and east of the country, undoubtedly more dramatic than in the west and the capital. All this has called the attention of a civil society that is not yet definitive in its courses, and that seems disjointed under repeated waves of repression and the systematic work of the counterintelligence, but that has come to represent an underlying tension, a silent resistance to the all-embracing government of Raul Castro, which, on the other hand has been rather more pragmatic than that of his predecessor in the economic leadership of the country.
In the midst of this agitated dynamic both parties are rearranging their forces, learning their own lessons and evolving each in its own way. Civil society now has mechanisms that have broken, once and for all, the information monopoly that the State has held for decades and they now have to be taken into account by it when making decisions. To this complex Cuba Pope Benedict XVI came recently and it was in this context that the outcome of our case was resolved after 5 years of unsuccessful claims. Events like this would definitely never have happened in Cuba in 2007, it would have been unthinkable then, and this shows that, somehow, we are evolving. In this dialectical spiral of contradictions Cuba’s future is emerging, perhaps not at the pace we need or want but I am sure we are no longer exactly the same, not one side or the other.
On Saturday, April 21st, 2012, Granma published an angry article on page 3 with the title “Yankee Oligarchical Press was disrespectful to the President of Argentina”. The article restates the opinion of The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post criticizing Mrs. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s decision to nationalize 51% of the shares of the Repsol Oil Company, a subsidiary of the YPF Company.
The Wall Street Journal maintains that “Argentina should be taken out of the G-20*** until Fernández has the dignity to behave as a real head of state and not as a bully” and believes that ’”By stealing Repsol, Mrs. Kirchner seeks to take advantage of nationalist sentiments “and to use oil supplies and the media to feed the machinery of political patronage.” Meanwhile, according to Granma, The Washington Post “disrespected Fernández, calling her a populist, and accused her of distancing herself of the economic progress of her neighbors”. (Quotations taken directly from Granma).
Despite the limited and out-of-context information, I have the impression that the ones over there are not as mistaken in their considerations about the Argentine president, though, as usual, the most important newspaper of the olive green oligarchy deprives us Cubans on the Island of the opportunity to see with our own eyes the daily publications of the “Yankee financial oligarchy”. Especially as far as “populist” is concerned because, now, as Leopoldo Galtieri did when he was president de facto 20 years ago, with tragic results for the Southern Cone Nation, the arrogant and wholesome Cristina is stirring up nationalist feelings about the issue of the Islas Malvinas (or The Falkland Islands, depending on your point of view) while at the same time she is trying to export the British conflict to all of Latin America.
Anyway, it’s likely that I wouldn’t even have noticed such a “Yankee disrespect” highlighted in the Cuban press, were it not that just the day before, on Friday, April 20th, Granma had published a not-at-all friendly article on page 9 about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, entitled “In the wrong place? Clinton Partying Hardy in Cartagena”, by reporter Pedro de la Hoz, which passes judgment on the fact that 63-year-old Mrs. Clinton had the audacity to drink an “Águila” beer and dance a few salsa steps (rhumba steps, according to the official writer) in no less than a disco club named Havana during her stay in Colombia for the Americas Summit.
I do not know about you, but beyond radical political sympathies or considerations, I found pretty funny the image of Hillary enjoying herself. Far from ridicule, as was the obvious intention of the yeoman of the regime, he achieved exactly the opposite effect: a woman who, at the beautiful age of 63 forgets the importance of her public office and allows herself the freedom to enjoy a beer and catch a few Caribbean rhythms cannot but arouse my support. I get the sense of a happy image, and even the acknowledgment of a culture different than hers. I will be 53 this year, and I also like to drink a cold a beer every once in a while and shake my booty to the rhythm of salsa, dammit! That does not make me less respectable, but more human. And let the forever rule-makers, the embittered, the censors and detractors say whatever they please.
I just cannot imagine a person so stark and stiff as Kirchner partying, not even at the beat of a lively merengue or a delightful vallenato*, even in an elegant room dancing to the rhythm of a milonga** from the Río La Plata. But I won’t judge her, because not everyone is obligated to dance, but all this reminds me that we don’t have any reference that the Castros have ever moved to the rhythm of a cha-cha or a mambo. At the end of the day, this thing about criticizing the American seems only about musical preferences, because both the Argentinian president and the Caribbean brothers have applauded joyfully at such times when the donkey from Barinas [Hugo Chávez] has taken over microphones and brayed Venezuelan songs.
P.S.: For the Venezuelans who read me, I have absolutely no objection against their songs, only against the singer.
Translator’s notes:
*Colombian dance similar to the cumbia
**Argentinian dance similar to the tango
*** G-20, G20 or Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (also known as the G-20, G20, and Group of Twenty) is a group of finance ministers and central bank governors from 20 major economies.
I knew they would go after him. When I spoke with José Daniel Ferrer for the first time, by phone, I immediately noticed his exceptionality. Shortly after, we talked around the table in our house and this impression was further confirmed. While outside night was coming on, the man from Palmarito de Cauto told us of the years he spent in prison, from the Black Spring of 2003 to mid-2011. The beatings, the denouncing, the inmates who respectfully called him “the politician” and the guards who tried to crush him by force. We spent hours listening to those stories, at times of horror and at others of true miracles. Like when he managed to hide a small radio, his most precious possession, from the searches until he himself smashed it against the floor, seconds before a guard confiscated it.
José Daniel, the leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), is today State Security’s main headache in the East of the country. He occupies that place — admirable but dangerous — in part because his every word projects honesty and determination. Good-natured, young, conciliatory, he has managed to revive a dissident movement languishing between repression and the exile of some of its members. His drawing power, and the respect many have for him, comes also from his perseverance and, in particular, from the fact that he is quicker to embrace than to distrust. He has become a human-bridge between several citizen projects and, right now, that makes him a sharp stone in the Cuban government’s shoe.
For 23 days this tireless Santiaguan has been detained. He can no longer traverse the steep roads connecting the towns of his region, nor respond to interviews, nor send messages via Twitter from his cell phone. Last Monday he declared a hunger strike in the police station where they are keeping him incommunicado. His wife, Belkis Cantillo, still has no information about how much longer he will be under arrest, or even if they plan to file legal charges. Some of us, his friends, have a bad feeling. José Daniel Ferrer has come to have an ability to call people together that frightens the Cuban authorities and they will punish him harshly for that. They fear him because he could give Santiago de Cuba’s slogan, “Heroic City,” a new meaning in these times.
Amaury, Iris and 5 of their (now) 6 children. FotosCubaHoy
By Yaremis Flores.
On Tuesday, March 6, Iris Ruiz, wife of the Omni-Zona Franca cultural project coordinator Amaury Pacheco, received the response of local government of Alamar, a neighborhood located in Havana del Este, which confirms their status as an illegal occupier and warns her to “leave the premises of her own will.”
Iris, her husband, and their 6 children under 12, were living in appalling conditions and so, 4 months ago, took over an apartment in Building E-83, Zone 9 of Alamar, that is “Cuban state-owned” according to Rita Hernandez Batista , President of the Government of the municipality.
Iris Ruiz knew from the neighbors that the officials of the Municipal Housing Office (DMV) of Habana del Este, showed the apartment to prospective buyers when such a procedure was not yet authorized because there was no paperwork, which left the apartment in legal limbo. “This ‘property of the State’” allowed them to destroy her plans and the sale was illegal. However it is Iris whom they recommended to “mediate on the consequences of your improper proceeding.”
Iris confesses to feeling punished by the State institutions for having so many children. “On one occasion the Director of the DMV questions me about having so many,” she said. She said this contradicts the concern that the birthrate has fallen from 12.18 in 2004 to 9.99 in 2011 (births per 1,000 people), which is exacerbating the aging of the population.
Although the birth rate depends largely on the level of fertility, in our country a decisive factor in the decision to have children is the economic instability and the homelessness, causal determinants for various forms of birth control.
According to Rita Hernandez, Iris’s family “is not a ‘social case’ and its remaining in the building contributes to the worsening health status of children.”
Iris thinks the possibility of their being “extracted” (by force) from the property, along with their 6 children, is high. “Maybe after the Pope’s visit and taking advantage that my husband is traveling abroad.” But the president of the Government of Alamar said in response: “In our society no one is left to die, especially children.”
I am not going to write about the magnificent John Grisham novel of the same title. My intermediary corresponds to one of the dictionary definitions, the one that defines him as the mediator between the producer and consumer. His origin dates back to the emergence of trade between humans, even before the emergence of money as having value, as way to make exchanges between different products. If for centuries he has demonstrated the need for him, I don’t understand why it is that here he has been disallowed by the authorities, and even placed on the list of antisocial and criminal elements, and is being pursued with a vengeance, creating a certain animosity toward him in the common citizen.
Being an intermediary has become synonymous with parasite, living off the work of others, and so on. There have been the groundless persecutions, with the absurd goal of eradicating him, without realizing that, in removing him, we have also lost one of the main links between production and marketing. Maybe that’s why everything here works so badly!
However, what is striking is that the State, his main detractor and persecutor, is saturated with intermediaries. What is the state wholesale agency but a lousy intermediary? What are the officials, administrators, ministers and even politicians, but merely intermediaries between themselves, starting from the ordinary citizen? What are the different national networks of trade, but intermediaries? What happens is that these are state intermediaries and the war is against private intermediaries who, despite difficult operating conditions, have proven much more efficient and accountable than those of the state.
Among the many things to update in the model, one of them is the complete rehabilitation of the intermediary, enabling him to act. While the producers and consumers have no intermediaries to work with their initiatives, efforts and legitimate interests, they will lose the crops in the fields and the products will never reach the hands of the population. Here, as in many other places, the state solution has been a resounding failure. Here, as in many other places, a private solution is needed to solve problems and untie the many bureaucratic knots that still exist, despite the speeches and resolutions.
To keep thinking that anyone who obtains wealth from his work — and that the work of an intermediary is as worthy and necessary as any other — are antisocial ideas, is to continue supporting the absurdity that, to maintain social equity, we all have to be poor. There is widespread evidence that this is a simple fallacy, that only leads to misery, as human beings are stripped of initiative and desire to work and progress, to watch and enjoy the results of their efforts. I think it is time to abandon these unceremoniously extravagant views, they have failed wherever they have been implemented. The present and future has nothing to do with them, if we really want to move forward and develop the nation. Examples abound of what his abandonment has meant to progress! There are also overflowing examples of what it means to maintain him!
Laura Álvarez Rojas, a Cuban woman resident in South Africa, in less than nine months lost two of her loved ones. Her brother, Alberto Álvarez Rojas, a resident in the island, died last March 13th, in a car accident in that country.
