Translating Cuba

Eugenio was released in the afternoon, after the disastrous Pope took his plane back to Rome. But Augustin was still in a cell, because Eugenio saw him in passing, and also with him a member of “Los Aldeanos.” They have arrested many people. When I returned to my house I met in the elevator one of my very “integrated” neighbors, returning with his white cap and T-shirt and asked him if he had gone to see the Pope:

— No, I was in the Buena Vista cordon, in Playa.

— That’s a long way from the Plaza.

— But on the way to the airport.

— And all this was to protect the Pope?

— To keep anyone from getting close to him.

I insist that this may have been the orders even of the Pope himself, but in the case of Cuba not only for safety but because in this visit the opponents of the regime have been excluded once again. The Pope did not come as a champion to advocate for the rights of human beings not to be treated as a “species” without rights. The Pope came so that the Church would have more space for Public Relations. And while I believe in the Gospels, the Catholic way is not to preach a living Gospel, but merely liturgical ceremony.

The Pope did not met with the Ladies in White because having “little time” he did not consider what affects Cubans most a priority: segregation, political imprisonment. The Ladies in White are the only gladiators who “do not hide their face from the blows and spitting.”

The Pope is an emperor who judges sinners and seems to absolve from their blasphemies only the powerful. The power in Cuba is blasphemous, abhorrent to the human person and the Pope himself said at the Plaza that the measure of man is Christ.

I already knew this, because fortunately I did not learn the Gospel from any priest, any catechist, they could not save me from an adolescence marked by a manipulative and destructive mother like mine. God saved me, reading the Gospels, giving me peace, certainty, full identification.

I went out with my daughter to buy bread, because to all these hunger is also like Jerome’s lion. On the way back a dog followed us. A real dog, a hound, clearly a little less a dog than State Security. My daughter, like most children, is afraid of dogs, and I perhaps inspired by this terrible day, had heard me tell her: Dogs sniff your adrenaline and want to attack you, do not be afraid, one should not feel afraid of anything.

One should be afraid only of God to not offend him, respecting our neighbors and yourself respecting yourself. I don’t want her to forget me. I’ll have no more fear of state security, I fear only God who I can love because he has loved me even unto torture and death. And the Resurrection.

April 6 2012

The right not to be subjected to cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or penalties should be addressed in several ways in the context of HIV in Cuba, for example in the treatment of prisoners who are sick.

The penalty of imprisonment should not provoke the loss of those rights or of dignity. In particular, the State, through the penal authorities, has the duty to care for prisoners. This implies the duty to protect the rights, life and health of all people in their custody.

Denying prisoners access to information, education and means of prevention (disinfectants, condoms and sterile injecting equipment) with respect to HIV / AIDS, voluntary testing and counseling, confidentiality and health care to HIV/AIDS and the ability to participate.

The National Directorate of Prisons in Cuba has recognized a total of six prisons for inmates with HIV/AIDS. Prisons that do not differentiate between the treatment of healthy prisoners and the prison population affected by this disease.

Inmates who commit dangerous acts, such as rape and sexual violence should be punished regardless of their HIV/AIDS status. There is no reason for the health or security authorities to justify mandatory HIV testing or to refuse prisoners living with HIV the chance to perform all the activities available to the rest of the prison population. The only justification for segregation of people living with HIV in the prison population would be the preservation of their own health.

The Cuban state should consider that prisoners with a terminal illness, including AIDS, be given early release and given proper treatment outside prison.

https://www.ligacubanacontraelsida.com

March 19 2012

Pedro Valerino Acosta, 28, son of Pedro and Corina, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for killing Humberto Gonzalaz Otano, a jeweler in the neighborhood of San Miguel del Padron in the capital, a process that also resulted in sentences for 5 other people.

He had no criminal record, but he didn’t participate in the activities called by the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. His neighbors “reject him for his maladjusted conduct,” said the judges.

According to the Havana Court, the existing proofs against him “are sufficient to name him as the intellectual author of these events.” In its sentence it affirmed that he sold the idea of burglarizing the goldsmith’s house, without specifying how, to the rest of the accused.

Valerino Acosta admitted that he put two acquaintances in the neighborhood in contact with the jeweler in San Miguel, who bought clothes and exchanged US dollars for convertible pesos.

The police say they all proposed to rob the place and the court that they participated in the meetings to perfect the plan, circumstances denied by the rest of those punished in court. According to the judges, the declarations of the accused vary, because of the bonds of friendship that untie them and because they stated in the same prison during their pre-trial detention.

However, recognizing that the declaration of the co-defendants was not proved, the court came to the conviction of his guilt, because along with Eduardo Serna, one of the witnesses who spoke in court, they visited the jeweler’s house. Also there was a relationship with the rest of the accused because of the ties of friendship and living the same neighborhood.

Soltero, with a 9th grade education and unemployed, Valerino Acosta is described by the judges as a tough guy who shows off shouting obscene words. “He frequently disturbs the peace and associates with anti-social elements, and has been an object of interest for the operative organs of the Ministry of the Interior,” they affirmed,

The instructor/investigator in the case, Capitán Yoelkis Céspedes Ramos,who according to the court showed the masterly manner in which the investigation was carried out, never explained why Serna was discarded as a suspect, if, like Valerino Acosta, he knew most of the accused and lived in the same neighborhood.

According to the families of the accused, Eduardo was not charged because a member of his family belongs to the Havana Territory Division of Investigations, a military arm in charge of investigating the case.

In Cuba, we are equal under the law, but having friends, or a family member with a position, or simply being well-off economically, can make the difference. Worse luck for Pedro Valerino Acosta, son of Pedro and Corina, who has no one to protect him.

April 4 2012

The jail guards had a small battery-operated radio, an obsolete gadget like everything in the Regla police station, on the other side of Havana bay.

The decor of the interrogation rooms was antediluvian, pure Soviet-style political propaganda, with quotes from Fidel Castro stuck to his early icons of the Revolution: the assault on the Moncada Barracks, the landing of the Granma yacht, Che Guevara’s arm in a sling, the wide-brimmed hat of the late Commander Camilo.

The dungeon looked newly renovated, with a certain look of having been straightened up by me, which rendered the neatness in terrifying detail. I felt an inconsolable loneliness in that basement of bars and colossal locks. I had never been imprisoned, I have no criminal record. In fact, this time I was hunted like a wild animal in the street. Without criminal charges against me. Without identification from the commando that kidnapped me (they never told my family or friends). Without legal documents for the arrest, seizure of property, and detention for two days: two days of Pope Benedict XVI in Havana, in a parallel installation of bliss and barbarism (Kafka 100% flush with the Caribbean Sea).

On the morning of Tuesday 29 March, on the eve of the Pope’s Mass at the Plaza of the Revolution, the Cuban capital awoke unhinged by a flood of officers in uniform or civilian clothes. They coagulated traffic. They coerced and captured countless independent journalists, human rights activists, political opponents (as well as beggars and unlicensed vendors). They did so right in the face of the international press correspondents, all concentrated on the altar of Joseph Ratzinger, or perhaps in the facial reactions of President Raul Castro before every subtlety of the papal homily.

From a few days ago, the State telephone companies — ETECSA CUBACEL — were complicit in the operation unofficially called “Vow of Silence” and blocked, without any technical reason, thousands of their users’ lines, without notice or right to compensation. They also cut all the very limited internet service, which in Cuba is the privilege of foreigners and a certain caste of officials.

From the beginning, I stopped eating and drinking water. Nor did I responded too much to the personal provocations of an attorney for State Security, like a character out of the film Minority Report, he wanted to buy time until the Pope took off for the Vatican, charging me with the words, without requiring evidence, “subversive activity” and “public scandal” with “preventative character.” Apparently, H.G. Wells’ time machine Wells retains all its functions intact in the Cold War Museum of Cuban Counterintelligence (or perhaps should be renamed the Cuban Countercitizenry).

Only one small battery radio, a gadget discontinued at the time of Cuban socialism, kept me connected to the world beyond our modern catacombs (the police station is across from the Regla cemetery). So I kept count of the passing hours (it was the world’s most endless night). Thus, already with symptoms of muscle weakness and lack of glucose in the brain, I finally heard the chorus of the only liturgical Mass kidnapped in the history of Catholicism.

It was a sad theater crammed with atheists workers, inspired unions more Stalinist than Marxist-Leninist, not to mention security personnel disguised as Red Cross stretcher-bearers or, who knows, as altar boys. Not even the parishes could choose freely who would attend and who is not among their faithful, as there were “black lists” with names that were promptly thrown under the official buses, which were the gateway to the Plaza of the Revolution: the tribune so often changed into a tribunal, where the blind masses and the Maximum Leader (excommunicated by Rome decades ago) have clamored hysterically for “Death to the traitors.”

When the Mass of His Holiness Benedict XVI seemed it would never end, I knelt instinctively and prayed for release from my cell. Not to God, but to the man Joseph Ratzinger in person. I asked him to abbreviate the stages of his rhetoric, to skip the Eucharistic formalities, and not to delay over the diplomatic greetings between the Catholic and Communist hierarchies, that would not repay the bullying of the Cuban Cardinal’s smile, that the Popemobile leave at top speed from the altar itself directly to Havana International Airport, so as not to commit heresy, I prayed that no Pope ever again accept an invitation to repress the poor people of this or any other country-prison.

This morning I had invited some friends to watch the Mass at the Plaza on television, and afterwards to talk. The last call I got yesterday evening was from my friend Agustin, before the political police stopped him, was to tell me that he had talked with Felix, the pastor of the beautiful Baptist Church, and that he had let him know that the whole area were I live would be closed off to access, and we would see each other after the whole thing was over.

I don’t remember seeing such a display of control by the government. Nor seen it look as ugly as in these days when they march and shout in the same plaza where the government celebrations are held. Everything is closed, Boyeros Avenue is so quiet since yesterday evening. Then in the morning, from afar, some people passed by and I compared it with the days of their Revolutionary marches when, at dawn, that would gather around the Plaza. We mustn’t forget that the Pope will officiate the Mass in front of a few believers and a multitude of paramilitaries.

First we notices that Ismael Diego disappeared, he’d gone out to look for cigarettes and was detained as on another occasion. Afterwards we knew he’s gone looking for Agustin. Later Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo and his girlfriend, they were also detained at some station. None were able to call their family or friends, we still don’t know where they’ve taken anyone.

The Vatican knows of these abuses of the dictatorship. We are treated like leaves, like stones, like animals, people without rights.

The dictatorship of “the good” has woken up to congratulations. Everything went well, the Pope behaved very well, he is not a dissident Pope. Somehow he’s awarded an ecclesiastical license to the regime to repress. They can’t even prove we wanted to go to the Plaza where this disastrous marriage was celebrated.

But the leitmotif had been announced with the Cardinal’s order to evict the protestors from the Cathedral, this will be the color of the Pope’s visit. We don’t matter, humans don’t matter, nor do Christians, what matters is the Doctrine, what matters are the negotiations that exclude these mundane sinners who want to be free and need Cuba to open itslef to the world and the world to open itself to Cuba. Agustin, my friend is a prisoner, Ismael Diego,Orlando Luis and his girlfriend, and so many others whom we will be finding out about because the cell phones were cut to block communication.

April 3 2012

Os Gêmeos

Esteemed visitors:

In the previous post, “Scorn for Prices,” the first paragraph did not show up on the published post. With this omission, the necessary introduction and its integral clarity were lost. I hope you will forgive this inconvenience, which is the fruit — in part — of the difficulties we Cubans have in accessing the internet and the conditions in which we do this work.

Due to the very little time on-line we have (and the very slow dial-up speed) I have been unable until today to amend the piece and offer my apologies. Thank you for your generosity and patience.

April 5 2012