A new strategy, a new option, improvements in their cell phone services is what Cubans were expecting starting February 1st, 2012. The offer that a message would cost 00.09 cuc was better than the previous 00.16 cuc, it was encouraging, the cost of a call was better since the person who called also had to pay for it, similar to the fixed lines, and the cost was 00.45 cuc per minute, better than the previous options since using *88 the person who called had to pay, but each minute would cost “00.60” cuc, similar to *99, where the person who was calling was charging the cost of the call to the receiver for the same tariff of “00.60” cuc.
The offer is not bad since there is an improvement, not big, but something is better than nothing. What happens then to ETECSA clients? Why is there a discomfort among clients?
The service they activated for customers so that the receiver would not have to pay for the call, was to activate *88, I mean, the person who wants to phone a friend searches in the cellphone contacts and the number appears with *88 activated, it does not appear on the screen of the person who calls, but on the screen of the receiver, but the number of the calling person does not appear on that of the receiver, for example: -00535387234588- so that the name does no appear, despite the fact that it is in the telephone contacts!
The option would be to save it as it appears and one does not feel uncomfortable not knowing who is calling. But there is another problem, as it was saved the same way it had appeared in the example above, one can not send messages. The other option is to save it twice, one to identify the name if it is in the contacts and another one to send messages.
The only hope we have is to expect this small, but inconvenient, problem to improve, for the use of the cell phone.
This last March 23rd, two officials of the Department of TerritorialInvestigations (DTI) and the military Counterintelligence, respectively, threatened the mothers of the mother of Jesus Daniel Forcada Portillo and Ramon Echevarria Fernandez, who have been sentenced to 35 years in prison for murder, with a worsening of the case of their sons because of signs that appeared in Mantilla, a working class neighborhood of the municipality of Arroyo Naranjo.
“On March 20, there appeared several signs in Mantilla denouncing the injustice committed against our sons” explained Adelaida Portillo Heredia, mother of Jesus Daniel. “The officials wanted to know who put the flyers up and we don’t know anything about that” she added. The climate of tension in the streets increased with the arrival of the Pope to Cuba
Portillo Heredia confirmed also that the officials threatened to obstruct justice in the case of her son. “They told me that it was worsening the case if signs continued to appear, although I had contacted the police and the prosecutor and told them I was not going to be able to correct this, not even with the lawyer of the case,” referring to the possibility of filing an appeal of the sentence handed down by the Havana Court this past third of March
She also revealed that they had threatened Aida Echevarria Fernandez, the mother of Ramón with holding up her exit from the country and the return to Cuba of one of her sons who resides in the U.S.
The officials asserted to the mother of Jesus Daniel that the signs were all over the city and they showed her one. According to Adelaida, the flyers accused Esther Fernández Almieda, 60 years old and the widow of the jeweler, Humberto Gonzales Otaño as the person responsible for his death and of having paid the police, district attorneys and judges to avoid being incriminated. Also on the flyer, they asked why the families of the Five Heroes* appealed for justice all over the world while they could not and because no-one was listening to them, they would appeal for help from the Pope”
Portillo Heredia also affirmed that they had sent more than a dozen written complaints to different authorities motivated by the departure from the country of Mrs. Fernández Almeida during the investigations and asserted that she is recently overseas. The wife of the jeweler gave her declaration as the only eyewitness of the murder and surviving victim in the trial but the court did not ask her about her travel outside the country in spite of continuing complaints of the family members of the accused.
Translator’s note:
* A reference to the five Cubans convicted in a Miami court of being unregistered foreign agents and given long sentences in the U.S. The Cuban government has maintained a high level of publicity regarding “the 5″.
The man came alone in a small rowboat. When he reached the shore, he was immediately confronted by a border patrol agent.
Agent: “Hey, man! Who are you and where are you from.”
Man: “I am Venezuelan, and I left my country because I am fleeing socialism.”
Agent: “But, buddy, there’s socialism here too.”
Man: “Yeah, but here it’s ending. There it’s just beginning!”
It’s a joke, but today I experienced the reality firsthand.
We left at dawn. I was picked up by a female friend, who does not like driving long distances, and a gentleman, who served as chauffeur and provided us company. The purpose of the trip was to procure some fresh fish. We arrived very early at a pleasant little fishing village, almost at the outer edges of Havana province.
It had been many years since I had visited such a picturesque place, as being able to do so meant having a vehicle in good working order, and money to buy gasoline. I therefore gladly accepted the invitation since it coincided with my having just completed some work with which I had been tasked, and since I now found myself with a bit of hard currency.
The trip was quite pleasant, not only because the route we took was one of the few which had been properly paved, but also because it was lined with lovely plantings on both sides of the roadway. I presume this is because it is well-travelled by important visitors and high-ranking officials.
Upon entering the village, we were led by pure intuition to the first house we saw along the coastline, where we figured they would be able to sell us some fish. They did not have any there, but directed us to another — simply gesturing towards a pharmacy and providing us with a nickname: the Venezuelan.
We did indeed find a great variety of well-prepared seafood at this location: porgy fillets, dogfish fillets, swordfish steaks, octopus, etc., all cleaned and packaged for 10.00 CUC (convertible Cuban currency) each. I bought some swordfish, deciding to forgo the octopus.
Addressing the young man who had been identified as the Venezuelan, I asked him about his nickname. He told me that in fact he was a native of that country, that as an adolescent he had come here to study, and that one day, while visiting the village, a Cuban girl had stolen his heart straight away.
“Currently, we have two children – a girl and a boy – and I now feel like any other Cuban, but I am not the only one here. I quit school, settled here, and took up fishing, which is my true passion. I only go to my country for a month of vacation. You cannot live there because of all the violence. I used to live in the capital, and, believe me, in Caracas there are a score of violent deaths every day. Drugs have turned that city into one of the most dangerous in the world, and I don’t want that for my children. I like how peaceful it is here.”
I asked about the Cubans who were there on a mission. He said he knew many who been killed because of drugs. Since their salaries were not enough for them to buy the things needed to return to Cuba, many had resorted to the dangerous work of drug running. It was like carrying a sign on your forehead that said, “Kill me; I am carrying cocaine.”
Then, to lighten the mood a bit, I told him the joke with which I began this post.
We all laughed uproariously, and said goodbye, wishing him good luck, and promising to come back as soon as we had the chance.
Last Sunday ended the Catholic Social Week of the Miami Archdiocese, and luckily, I was able to participate in two of the events.
In one of the programs, Cuban American businessman Carlos Saladrigas held a conference on the business future of Cuba.
Saladrigas allowed the public to present written questions. According to the moderator, not all were answered due to the financier’s lack of time. A group of participants in which I found myself offered a retort to some of the answers given by Saladrigas. This gentleman compared our retorts to an act of repudiation.
Personally, my concerns are for the members of the peaceful opposition who risk their well being and even their lives for the rights of all Cubans to participate in the country’s economy. Those who demand peaceful changes and are repressed by the Cuban political police.
I have a premonition that the thesis presented by Saladrigas regarding the economic future of our country will serve the rich businessmen in exile, like Saladrigas. Those who today demand liberty for Cuba from inside will not have many options; they lack capital and business experience.
According to Saladrigas, an opposition member may be within the actual ranks of the Cuban Communist Party.
What is curious here is that Carlos Lage, Abel Prieto, Esteban Lazo, Jose Ramon Machado Ventura or any other can be an anonymous member of the opposition according to his hypothesis. These individuals can possess large amounts of capital obtained through theft and the suffering of the Cuban people. Those who confront the regime hardly have enough to put food on the table and feed their children.
Nevertheless, I respect the beliefs of Saladrigas, it is his right and I will not deprive him of it. It is also my right not to believe in his theory and my duty to remind him that the most vulnerable sector in Cuba are the members of the peaceful opposition in Cuba who the regime prohibits from investing in the country’s economy.
What caught my attention the most at this conference with Carlos Saladrigas were the words of Father Jose Conrado in response to the replies to Saladrigas. According to the pastor, he saw in this conference the same thing he sees daily in Cuba and he felt shame because of this.
Shame is what I felt, and much of it, after hearing these words from a man whom I admire. To offer a retort is a right provided by freedom of expression. The opposite would be true if they had not invited those who disagree with Saladrigas’ theory. What happens in our country can only be compared with fascist hordes or totalitarian communist regimes like the one in Havana. It has nothing to do with what took place at this conference held by Saladrigas.
Today I felt like throwing in the towel, forgetting everything, but I cannot. Cuba is above everything and everyone. I hope my wife and son will understand because I have involved them in something that is very personal; the liberty of Cuba.
I arrived at the Matanzas prison known as ‘Aguica’ on April 29th. I was kept there in solitary confinement for 17 months. The Head of Penitentiaries applied a special regiment on us: family visits were only allowed every 3 months and could only last 2 hours, they only allowed 2 relatives and their underage children, the bag with food which was intended to keep us somewhat healthy had a limit of 30 pounds. Conjugal meetings were only allowed every 5 months and could not exceed 3 hours.
My time in ‘Aguica’ was always in The Polish Cell, located in the most rigorous of sections and which aimed to hold prisoners who were punished for disobedience, those who were sentenced to death, or those with life sentences. There were other members of the group of the 75 there. In ‘Aguica’, I lived the hardest days of my life, but I was also blessed because I met Miguel Galban, Alexis Rodriguez, Manuel Ulvas, and Roberto de Miranda, also victims of the crackdown of 2003.
In a matter of 7 years and 4 months, I learned of the dark side of humans, the misery of the heart always corrodes the conscience. The impunity and low level of education of the soldiers would always start quarrels between guards and prisoners. The soldiers would always win, while the latter suffered unimaginable punishments. With my own eyes, I saw men amputate their ears, cut their veins, pinch their eyes and go blind, cut of their hands and legs, swallow barbed wire, throw themselves from a third floor, and all with the intent of avoiding a beating by the guards.
The sad part of this story is that, in the majority of these self-inflictions, the ones suffering are demanding that their fundamental rights, which had been violated for years, be respected. Others grew sick in the nerves due to the rigorous conditions of captivity, while some would hurt themselves to end up in a hospital, where they could eat at least a little better.
Putting us together with common prisoners was a perverse tactic by the authorities. Fortunately, during those years I was able to shatter the plans of the ruling elite. Without intending it, the prisoners saw me as a shield to confront their oppressors and, with time, they [the common prisoners] ended up respecting our cause, with very few exceptions. In fact, there were even some policemen of lower ranking which defended political prisoners of conscience.
On the day which Cardinal Jaime Ortega informed me through the phone that I would be allowed to travel to Spain, I was shocked and it was difficult for me to speak. It was the end of a terrible nightmare which consumed me for years.
Now that the storm faded, I believe that if it had not been for my faith in God, the love of my country and love of my family, I could have not withstood such torture. I appreciate all that Spain and its people did, offering human warmth to me, despite the difficult financial crisis that country is going through. They lent me their hand, and I will never forget that, just like I will never forget my days behind bars.
To live in exile is difficult, and because of this, I admire the Cuban diaspora very much. Despite the hardships they may live on a daily basis, they never forget the political prisoners and they offer help to those who now arrive with nothing.
Cuba is physically missing from us, but it is still in the mind of this exile. What is true always lasts, and because of this, my cause does not fade, for it is the cause of those who aspire to achieve a better world.
Carlos Saladrigas in Havana (Photo: JUAN A. MADRAZO)
An endowed chair with name Felix Varela can not be other than inclusive, Cuban from top to bottom and, of course, plural.
A happy chance, then, on Friday March 30, under the image of our illustrious priest, to see the variety of people congregated in a room of the former San Carlos and San Ambrosio seminary. The reason for such a mixed gathering was Carlos Saladrigas’ conference on the subject of the Cuban diaspora and its relationship to the nation. The location served as a stage to achieve what in any other environment could not have counted on such diverse participation. Practice has shown that when civil society organizes a discussion and invites government or church officials, in general they don’t respond to this gesture of inclusion, or they simply reject it.
The soliloquy of some illegal spaces results less from the intolerance of its hosts and more from the voluntary absence of their counterparts. Also well-known is what happens when the call comes from the ruling party, because then the most critical sector of society is blocked from attending. The police cordons around the doors of cultural and academic institutions have become common practice for activities, meetings or festivals. Hence, the Church achieved what other sectors of the society cannot or do not want to: to protect with its mantle all those attending the conference.
We have to celebrate the miracle of inclusion that took place in the Felix Varela Cultural Center, whether by the true will of its organizers or because the information “leaked” from cell phone to cell phone a couple of days beforehand, I don’t know. The truth is that no one was prevented from hearing the words of the speaker and this simple fact is a true marvel in these times we live in.
In addition, his reflections carried a conciliatory tone that is completely absent from official discourse. Words we are not allowed to pronounce in the Auditorium at the University of Havana, nor in the Assembly of Popular Power, much less from the dais in the Plaza of the Revolution. First of all, we are grateful to be able to hear “another way” of narrating what we live, to see other words that break the logic of confrontation and grievance within which we normally live.
The speaker himself had been the target of every kind of attack and had experienced first hand what it is to insult and be insulted. In 1988, Saladrigas opposed the journey of numerous Cuban exiles to the Island to attend the Masses of Juan Pablo II and now found himself condemned for coming himself to those of Benedict XVI and sitting in the VIP area of the Plaza. The serpent of personal and national history that swallows its tail, digests itself and is reborn.
Carlos Saladrigas has been accused, among other niceties, of being a Trojan horse that “carries within it both Castroism to Florida and Imperialism to the Island.” I confess I have always been interested in those individuals around which so much applause and so much scorn circulate. I sincerely believe that when the extremes of intolerance attack someone, it’s because he has identified a path of moderation that does not please them. But beyond the controversy surrounding a man who comes from exile and whose present and future role is subject to question, better we should analyze his conference of that Friday afternoon.
Succinct and read from an iPad, his paper conveyed modernity, ease, new ways of looking at old problems. More than once I felt they allowed Carlos Saladrigas to say on that stage what they forbid us to say in so many spaces. However, between choosing to let your voice die in your throat, or letting another take it up to intone it in their own way… the latter is always preferable.
The successful entrepreneur who emigrated as a child uttered phrases that looked to the future: investments, transformations, velocity of the changes, projects… For a few minutes I thought we were in tomorrow, and today was just the faded memory of yesterday. But, in the words of a beautiful saying, “no one can jump beyond his own shadow,” and Carlos Saladrigas is no exception.
At one point he explained that Cuban exiles can be divided between “historics” and “hysterics” by the degree of passion and intolerance that characterize their positions. I confess that, to me, this sounded totally contrary to the spirit of his allocution. I don’t have, nor will I have, the life experience Saladrigas has accumulated in decades of living and interacting with the Cuban diaspora, but at this point my mind returned to the injuries we nonconformists receive in our own country.
The play on words–because in the end it’s just that, a play on words–of “historic and hysteric” had become notorious in the mouth of Carlos Aldana. This other “Carlos” directed the Department of Revolutionary Orientation (DOR) and was even considered a possible successor to Fidel Castro. In the time of the so-called “Letter of the Ten,” signed by several Cuban intellectuals, Aldana did as he pleased from his position as controller of the culture and official journalism. Someone asked, then, about the poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela and the severity of her incarceration simply for signing that protest. With his smile carved in power, Aldano is reported to have said, “they will say she is a historical poet but in reality she’s hysterical.”
Twenty years later the same play on words resonated in the Felix Varela Cultural Center. I had no choice but to cross myself.
Verbal violence hides in a thousand and one ways. Sometimes, trying to find the the easiest way to explain an idea, we involve ourselves in Manichaeism and verbal attacks. I think it would be very difficult, on this basis, to build the Cuba of the dream that is also Carlos Saladrigas’s. Similar oral flippancy has been used by people who have defined nonconformists as “mercenaries,” the alternative blogosphere as “cyber-trash-talkers,” those who want a change of government as “unpatriotic.”
To prolong the cycle of insults doesn’t help anyone. Something very different is the critical need and importance of having a multiplicity of opinions, and the following point is something I disagree with Saladrigas on. In relation to the Pope’s visit, he raised a variety of opinions before, during and after his stay among us. Instead of seeing these negative approaches and criticizing–as did the speaker–that “we began to criticize the visit of the Pope before it happened,” I perceive the appearance of that confrontation rather as a sign of democracy.
The Cuban dissidence and exile are infinitely more pluralistic than the ruling party. Different positions, for example, can be found among opponents and emigrants with regards to the U.S. Embargo against Cuba, the sending of family remittances from abroad, the right of Americans to travel to Cuba, the Papal visit, and methods to achieve regime change. Civil society, meanwhile, for its part, has vibrancy and diversity and this is, in no way, a sign of disunity or conflict.
One of the most obvious absences in the three days in which Joseph Ratzinger celebrated Masses on Cuban soil, was the lack of spontaneous protests from groups opposed to his figure. Beyond the respect for one religious belief or another, a healthy society is also measured by its ability to raise its voice toward a multitude of figures, creeds and traditions. Why didn’t CENESEX organize a rally in those days to confront the man who has emerged as one of the fiercest critics of condom use? Why were there no gay couples outside the airport demanding to be included in the flock of God? These absences denote only one thing: we are not free.
But beyond these two points of disagreement–a healthy and respectful disagreement–with the words of Carlos Saladrigas, I must conclude that his lecture captivated me. I was fascinated by the hiatus that was achieved in the midst of a strong wave of repression that beat on the doors of my friends and my colleagues. The smiles I hinted at that evening were the first I’d managed in a week of grim faces who watched all around my house.
In the Felix Varela Cultural Center I found people who fondly embraced me–among them the speaker himself– and others who averted their eyes from me with disdain… I loved the contrast. I hope we do not have to wait for Carlos Saladrigas to return to Havana as a guest of Lay Space to again live such a moment. And I await, also, because the histrionics, those who pretend to be what they are not, who pretend to believe, who applaud without conviction, are no longer hijacking the destiny of our country. They, in my opinion, can take us down a worse road than the stubbornness of the “historicals” or the excessive passion of the “hystericals.”
A child of five starts school, but a blog of the same age has already taken more daring steps. Today I am making an effort to remember that quiet and fearful woman, from before April 9, 2007, who created Generation Y. But I can’t. Her face disappears, dissolving among all the beautiful and difficult moments I’ve experienced since I posted my first text on the web. I can no longer imagine myself without this accidental and personal diary. I have the impression that I have always, in one way or another, been writing a blog. When the indoctrination and the injustice reached intolerable points, my childish head glossed the reality–from the fringes–in ways I could never say out loud. The evasive adolescent I became did the same thing: narrating her daily life, trying to explain it and trying to escape it.
The truth is that when I left home that morning to hang my virtual page on the Internet, I never could have imagined how much this action would transform me. Now, whenever the apprehension that the Cuban political police are “infallible” assaults me, I exorcise this thought by telling myself that “they didn’t know, that day, they couldn’t even guess that I would create this site.” What happened afterwards is already well known: the readers arrived and took over this space like citizens take over a public plaza; many others knocked on my door wanting help to create their own spaces of opinion; the first attacks appeared, as did the recognitions. Along the way I lost that 32-year-old mother who only spoke about “complicated issues” in a whisper, I misplaced the compulsive woman who barely knew how to debate or listen. This blog has been like experiencing — in the time and space of a single life — an infinity of parallel existences.
I have never again been able to walk the streets incognito. That gift of invisibility that I boasted of possessing fell by the wayside, between the hugs of those who recognized me and the attentive eyes of those whose job it is to watch me. I have paid an enormous personal and social price for these little vignettes of reality and yet I would do it again, taking my flash memory to the lobby of that hotel where I launched my inaugural post on the great world wide web.
Some readers have written to me wondering how I recovered after a year of freedom. Well, it has not exactly been easy to start, I found a country with a critical economic crisis and especially in the field of construction.
I was also a victim of bank fraud and the perpetrators were two people whom I’d considered my friends and they had borrowed $15,000 and $23,000, money which they never repaid despite all the time I was in prison. I also built this supposed friend his house without having paid one cent of what was supposed to be a price of $35,000.
My advice to everyone is to take care, because those we think we can be friends with and who apparently want the best for us, can be turned into the worst unscrupulous opportunists. Other friends and family have told me that we know who the people are at your side when we are in prison or in a hospital, that’s true. I never thought a human being could be so evil and able to do things they wouldn’t even do to an enemy, much less to a friend, but with experience I learned, along with the bitter taste of the Castro regime.
All this forced me to start from zero. Now I am again working as a general contractor, with the highs and lows we are all suffering in this construction industry and in real estate, but it is progressing.
I still have nightmares when I sleep that I am a prisoner in this regime of terror, I dream that they have me in the punishment cell and I wake up very sweaty even with air conditioning. I think I will spend many years with such a nightmare though to forget it is what I most desire. I look at life positively, in this new opportunity, but I keep thinking of all Cubans in the country where we were born who can not aspire to the economic freedoms that I enjoy today, much less freedom of thought and expression.
It saddens me to remember that the country I was born repressed me by imprisoning me in the hardest conditions and punishment only for demanding my rights, judging me for the sad reason that I didn’t think what they thought. They didn’t even imprison me because they thought I wanted to rob a bank, which in this case would be to think about committing a crime, but it’s not a crime if you never execute it.
I was sentenced only for believing that for love I could have what I desired: freedom for my wife because today we are married in the United States, in this case it would be convicting someone for love, because this is not trafficking.
For three years they hid their approval of her visa until it was returned to me along with my belonging. They did not return the video camera that they signed for because it was stored so badly that it deteriorated, in its place they just gave me another of their promises. The boat was supposed to be returned to me, but they did not. Why?
Meanwhile, on arriving in the U.S. the immigration official who checked my U.S. passport asked when I left, by what route, and without asking anything else said, welcome home. What a difference!
Today I have my own company, I have my own construction businesses, and I wonder what would happen if I wanted to do this in Cuba? I am sure that I would end up being arrested and prosecuted for illegal enrichment.
Economic freedoms for Cubans are just one of the inflated balloons among so many other lies of the Cuban regime, like the supposed opening for the sale of cars, I still hope the typical Cuban can freely buy a Toyota or a Chevrolet to develop his business or company, or to go to and from work.
Every day that I enjoy freedom in all its aspects I find it very cruel that a regime fools its people and deprives them of their rights.
When a political personality, in the exercise of power, is fired from or retires from his job, to refer to his opponents or whoever does not share his ideas or opinions, to use insults, disrespect, derogatory adjectives, taunts, insults, rudeness or even personal character attacks, shows, as well as bad manners and lack of ethics, mediocrity, pettiness and meanness.
At times I ask myself: How is it possible that characters with these attributes will be respected and followed by anyone? Unfortunately, this has happen and continues to happen. Our country has been generous to them throughout our history, but in the Republican era those offended could defend themselves, and currently that possibility is forbidden, unless they do it in a way considered illegal, since the offender is shielded by the impunity power gives, which makes it even more despicable.
This evil, with its systematic practice in defense of the fatherland, the Revolution and socialism, has taken room in the minds of many citizens, who consider it worthy, honorable and patriotic, complicating still more the already difficult peaceful coexistence among people with different idea and, what’s more, blocking the path to the essential tolerance for the good of a Nation with all and for all.
They forget that the only real unity is that based on diversity. Just as a sheep that decides to leave the herd and bleat on its own, without an order from or the authority of the pastor, will turn the rest against itself and they may even demand she be sacrificed.
So it is with Cuban who, in one way or another, publicly express opinions different from those of the officials: they are isolated, watched, discredited, blocked from entering public places, not allowed to participate in debates and even, as a few days ago, not allowed to attend Papal Masses, when they are arrested and jailed for hours or days, according to the convenience of the authorities.
This reality, which as far as the national media is concerned does not exist, nor for some illustrious visitors, is the every day bread of many worthy and honest citizens, whose only crime is to think with their own heads. The Internet has become, for these totalitarian gladiators, the preferred field of battle to employ their dirty weapons, following to the letter the example of their icons: the use of falsehoods and insults without measure. Each tries to outdo the other, accumulating merits for some material or moral stimulus. In any event, the truth always prevails over the lie, and it will be known sooner rather than later: today it is impossible to hide it. Perhaps there lies so much overflowing anger!
I wonder if these cameras they say they have that locate someone anthropometrically, they have so as to lift the economic embargo. Says someone who has gone hungry. All the Alfa Romeo pursuers, and the amount of wages in a population where the number of police are growing disproportionately, and the gasoline to cruise the neighborhood and every time you go out you seen one and even two and even three. The only thing we would get from lifting the embargo is financing for more of these monstrous beasts. We will be getting ever poorer and our watchers and pursuers more sophisticated.
Camila Vallejo from thenation.comThe cellphone rang nervously and I jumped in my chair. It had been more than a week since the telephone service was virtually cut off and suddenly that little gadget with its keys and screen gave a sign of life. “Camila Vallejo will be in Havana tomorrow,” a voice on the other end said and hung up. After the days we lived through during the visit of Benedict XVI to Cuba, I confess that the news of a new arrival didn’t raise my hopes.
We were still trying to complete the reports of the arrests during the Papal days and the living room of my house was a hive of friends telling stories of cell blocks and house arrests. The vice-president of the University of Chile’s Student Federation (Fech) came at a bad time, I thought. But then I realized that the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the Young Communist Union had just begun, and it all started to make sense.
The two islands in which I live were all mixed up in my head: the Cuba of the official celebrations with smiles and slogans, and the other one, that of dissidents forced into cars and prevented from attending a Catholic Mass.
The tracks Camila Vallejo would follow once she arrived in our capital would be difficult, almost impossible, to know beforehand. On one side was the circle of protection — and control — that surrounded her, and on the other, the “long shadows of the watchers” who follow me everywhere.
To make it more difficult, the events on her agenda would occur inside schools or political institutions, where the public is winnowed to the most reliable. So Camila and I would travel in two dimensions that very rarely touch, in two worlds separate and incommunicado, between which all the bridges have been blown up.
But there remained at least one terrain where some type of dialog was possible. I took my cell phone, the same one that had come to life just days before. I wrote a short text message and sent it to the phone number of the social network Twitter, an accidental and blind road numerous Cubans use to narrate the island in 140 characters. “I would like to talk with @Camila_Vallejo but the official circle around her is unassailable,” read my short trill into cyberspace.
By then, two men in plaid shirts had prevented me from approaching the Auditorium of the University of Havana where she presented her book, “We Can Change the World.” As I approached, one of them questioned me: “Get lost, you will not gain entry here.”
I confirmed, then, that there would be no blonde wig nor bushy mustache that would serve to as camouflage to allow me to sneak into the place. I resigned myself.
A few hours before my tweet appeared on the great World Wide Wed, Camila Vallejo visited with a group of young people from the University of Computer Sciences. She and Karol Cariola, secretary general of the Chilean Communist Youth, were met with a wave of smiling faces, applause and admiration.
In the audience, dozens of young people paid silent attention to her stories about the situation of education in Chile, the students’ demands, and the details of the street protests. A University Federation that was not able to organize a single spontaneous March in the last 53 years, heard the anecdotes of asphalt and strikes that came to them from the south.
Among those listening were, without a doubt, the most promising computer scientists in our country, but also the police who crawl the web. There was the creme de la creme of “Operation Truth,” in charge of denigrating on the internet those with views contrary to the system, and attacking sites critical of the government of the island.
Camila and Karol talked opposite our virtual soldiers, before our riots of thought. Those who use not rubber bullets but insults, not fire hoses but stigmatization and slanders about the defenseless nonconformists.
The other meetings ended up marking the strictly official character of the charismatic Camila Vallejo’s visit to our country. She exchanged opinions and hugs with the secretary general of the Young Communist Union of Cuba, the grayest of all the obedient leaders this organization has had. The Chilean was still enveloped in the glamor that always accompanies her, but subjected to the hidebound and obedient protocol of her Cuban counterpart.
A curious paradox, from her anti-hegemonic posture in her country, Camila passed to sharing a word and a smile with the hegemony of official Cuban thinking. She also shook hands with the current president of the University Student Federation (FEU), Carlos Alberto Rangel, who fulfills the sad role not of representing the interests of the student body to the powers-that-be, but rather the reverse.
So the leader of an organization without autonomy posed for a photo with the promising figure who, in 2011, shook Chilean reality and raised in passing strong sympathies and antipathies in the rest of the continent and the world. The Cuban FEU tried, in this way, to reap a share of the irreverent aura that accompanies Camila Vallejo, knowing that disobedience is a posture that, for five decades, has not resonated on the wide steps of the University of Havana.
Each handshake offered by these cadres formed in opportunism, was like an urgent ritual to appropriate the image of the young rebel. However, whenever their eyes met they realized that, had she been born here, they would have pushed her — without mercy — to exile, to prison, or to wearing a mask.
On her personal blog, Camila Vallejo had fanned the flames of the controversy before arriving in the largest of the Antilles. “Cuba is not a perfect society, nor does Chile have to follow its path,” she declaimed, and this single phrase already marked a distance with relation to the most outdated postulates of our official discourse.
But she also made the mistake, as many do, of identifying our country with the government that directs it, our nation with the ideology in power. Camilla wanted to share with her readers a reflection “on the paradox of the discourse of those who criticize Cuba so rabidly, or those who feel love and respect for her,” not realizing that in that statement she was incurring a confusion as hard to remove as the roots of marabou weed are from Cuban soil.
The so abundant reproaches are not directed at our national identity, nor at the palms that grow in the plains, nor at a culture that, in the last three centuries, has produced writers, artists and musicians of universal scope. The contrary opinions are not aimed “at Cuba” but rather directed to a government that has penalized differences in thinking and kidnapped our voice.
If the injustice of identifying the millions of people who inhabit this island with a sole ideology is not dismantled, then the sad situation of citizens born here being called “stateless” or “anti-Cubans” for having opinions different from those of the Communist Party will continue.
I invited Camila Vallejo for coffee, precisely to debate these injustices and misunderstandings. I did it via Twitter, because I am aware that trying to direct a word to her in public would be taken — at the very least — as an attack. But the hours passed and the sign of a possible meeting never came.
A week earlier Benedicto XVI had also declined to listen to other voices from our illegal civil society. The Ladies in White had asked Joseph Ratzinger for one minute of his time, in exchange the Cuban government arrested many of them and prevented many others from leaving their homes.
With the recently arrive geography student it wasn’t necessary to trigger a wave of repression in the style already known as “Operation Vote of Silence,” it was enough to lock the visitor in the official circle from which she could not extract herself. The rebel Camila obeyed these rules.
Later I learned from the press that — like the Pope — she had been talking to Fidel Castro. She had been taken to the quasi-secret place where the elderly ex president writes his long and delirious texts. The patriarch of the Cuban Revolution received the young woman who, for a while, managed to infect him with her aura of youth, of the future.
The same Comandante en Jefe who dismantled all traces of student independence — burdening it with controls, informants and purges — declared his sympathy for the stories of rebellion told to him by Camila Vallejo. That man, who stood out in his own time at the university for his tendency to confront power, ended up cutting off all roads so the young people of today cannot do the same to him. He who shouted himself hoarse in his younger years yelling “Down with the dictatorship,” ended up creating another and preventing the anti-government slogans.
The vice-president of Fech left the meeting with him declaring that “all the Reflections Fidel has written constitute light and hope for Chile.” She made it clear that an exchange of ideas and sips of coffee at my table was an impossibility. Official Cuba had abducted Camila Vallejo.
I picked up my phone again, the only and immediate way for people like me — who, in a country like this, will never get one minute on television, nor space for some lines in the national newspapers — to express an opinion. I sent another message, but without much hope: “Yesterday @Camila_Vallejo met with Fidel Castro. Does she have one minute for irreverent and rebellious youth?”
At the moment when I wrote these lines, I didn’t know whether she had been able to read my tweet, or if she, too, is suffering the problems of lack of internet connectivity endured by so many Cubans. I had no more than sent this invitation when there was a frantic ring ring echoing in my pocket.
I confess that at that moment I thought it was a call from this twenty-something of the perfect face and passionate talk who is a member of the Chilean Communist Party. But in reality the voice I heard on the other end was a woman desperate about the arrests in the east of the country.
She wanted to tell me how the political police raided the home of a dissident and took him, his wife, and various colleagues in the struggle away, along with a good part of his papers and books that they found in passing. She also told me about the three daughters of the marriage who were left in their grandmother’s care, until we learn if their parents are going to be prosecuted for some crime or are only being detained to intimidate them into ceasing to express themselves.
The other Cuba that had not learned of Camila Vallejo broke in on my telephone, calling on me for greater attention and responsibility than some journalistic romp of pursuing a delegation that moved only in secure, filtered places. I could not determine the age of the woman who had called and described to me the repressive wave in Palma Soriano and Palmarito del Cauto. I never knew if she was mixed, black or white; young, mature, old… But in my fantasies I saw her with an almost perfect aspect, sculpted with the mastery of Greek statue.
As she spoke, I constructed in my mind some cheekbones and a magazine-perfect chin, dreamy chestnut locks, a discouragement-proof youth. But a sob broke my digressions, a whimpering on the phone unmade that perfectly proportioned face and confronted me with the decomposed face of the real Cuba. The face I had wanted Camila Vallejo to also see!
Translated from an article in the Chilean newspapre La Tercera.
Reggaeton: a love story; Better bayuti[1] than dictatuti
In real time, it’s illegible but the Cuban press has come to be very creative if it is read with a five year lag time, “chabacaneria”[2], luxury, lechery, lamentation, vice, consumption of toxicity, banality, corny-ness, trinket shops, flamboyant attires, cheesy bargains, and an ecetera half ethical and half ethnical. The self-titled “Cuban Youth Daily”put forward its best effort in the beginning to frame the coordinated condemnations of reggaeton, even if a bit late, with the flow of time and money, and has attempted several baby steps towards tolerance.
Why would the Cuban intellectual have to think or at least give some weight to reggaeton? Why isn’t it reggaeton that intrudes on the theory chorus of the cultural realm? To think is to possess. We want to put all phenomenon in the civil waistline of power. We can’t stand to be stuck outside the the flow of sense that, for its part, is a source of capital. We know that we can legitimize or stigmatize a genre of music that, while the more it goes along with a big mouth and sticks to people, the more voiceless and vulnerable it seems facing the Institution that is always a bit inquisitorial. for the moment we fool along (we make ourselves the fools). It’s still early to be passing judgement and maybe it was our turn before for a good piece of cake.
Reggaeton as a form of linguistic violence has always captivated me as a distortion of the Cuban norm (unconscious Cabrera infantilisms or translated captions something like the movie La Naranja Mecánica[The Mechanical Orange]). Any break-out or emptying of the language fascinates me, even when it closes upon itself and doesn’t blow up in the face of the social consensus.
In terms of textual terrorism, the territorial reggaeton slang in truth promised much more than it produced, but in Cuba this inefficacy far from being a sin, at these heights already, should be a constitutional preamble. We don’t come to any libertarian limits. We cross the line, yes, but only from a heavy conservatism, never out of fashion. Cuba as commodity.
The strange family sagas of the first texts that I have a poor memory of, with their twisted Oedipus-isms and certain common, criminal-esque places, soon were dissolving in the friendly media of the caricature. The themes ended before being completely explored, even before turning out to be interesting for our most restless intellectuality (worthy oxymoron).
There remain then the eternal twitches of Cubanity, the alpha macho uprooted or predatory, the mean and voracious girl, the consuming at an open bar (the CUC [3] as the measure of all things, the almighty buck as the only real event to be remembered in anniversaries) complete forgetting of those who died needlessly, hedonism before historicism, a certain “sexual promiscuity” and a lot of “moral relativism” (that still generates panic in the chorus line of our insular churches), and all the other aesthetics that pass for icons, brand name clothing, tattoos, glitzy jewelry, luxury cars, purebred pets, the mass orgy as a substitute for the organization of the masses, in the end, a final assault on all those delicate distractions that the ideological elite hid for decades by the frugal instinct of self-conservation.
When it’s allowed (with some possible exceptions) to be aired in official media, reggaeton pays homage to the popularity they charge for it under the table [4]; and pardon me those of you present here from the left, this bad metaphor, the announcers and radio producers, among other new actors of the Cuban post-socialism of the 21st century). The Quinquenio de Oro of this class does not stain its fingers with the ink of the “best pens of the Republic” as have been called its songwriters a bit in the style of “the best minds of my generation” of Allen Ginsburg, howled a lot but seldom criticized. More like attendance records and prohibitive prices for their spectacular spectacles not like the cock fighting rings but like vaudeville. No-one loses. Not even those who lose their heads only to lose their clothes in public in a corporal climax of the corporate show (there was even someone who involved their skin in the first comandante-esque tattoo in five discursive decades of the Revolution).
Precisely then, after the first putative death of Fidel, it was the Cuban state that began to find itself outside the game, victimized budgetarily, reggaeton-icized by an emerging industry much better than its functionaries. Tickets were running somewhere between the corrupt and the legal, between the clandestine disc burners and the video clips of national television (contaminating the increasingly professional artists and technicians) between the Makumba and Miami (it’s only an example) and the power doesn’t know how to boycott this short cut direct to the future, no, to the extreme future.
The little dogs, who knows if from the political police (it’s only another example), gave a hand to the ministerial marionettes. Here or there in every six months there rises some brilliant conference that rebukes reggaeton in the sacred name of the little people, that fascist totalitarian defect of the disguised demagogue of pedagogy. When the Premier of Culture himself appeared on the Mesa Redonda[5] of Cubavision Internacional(which is our de facto Parliament before the world) a fake head was chosen and it was so simple to deconstruct the remains of a slang that was barely mumbling genital syllables.
Case closed, comical circus , semantical of semen cyclical: chabacaneria,luxury, lust, lamentable, vice consumption of toxics, banality, corny, trinket shop, flamboyant attire, cheesy bargains (put on the hot underwear-uty, take down the wild par-uty, spit all-uty out the mouth-uty because the dictator-uty is here to order you to stop-uty [6]).
To the new class of non-consumers of Reggaeton, you’re within your right to defend the status quo of your governancead infinitum. For lack of rash intellectual attempts, the transition in Cuba could have well been able to slip into the background of the neighborhoodof the last tam-tam[7]. A lesson is necessary in order to expose the lack of solidarity of the trade (not even a single collection of signatures against the censorship) and the shunning by steps of its most successful leaders .
Now in the second stage of the rhetorical recruiting of Reggaeton as state lever, for sure a mutual pact in terms of taxes and resolutions against the delinquency of debt and infractions, ethical codes and sanctions including even for reasons of grammar, symbolic management salaries and permits in passports in order to allow departure from and return to the country with money, more so the customary community signboards, clearly, and perhaps these colloquiums or lectures where, to legitimize or stigmatize this idiot son of the post-modernity that, meanwhile the more lap dancing, bumping and grinding gets more promiscuity to the people, the more mute and defenseless it leaves us in the face of our own inquisition that’s always a bit institutional. We fool around for the moment (we make ourselves the fools ). It’s never too late to pass sentence and I believe it will be our turn before that nice slice of cake.
Translator’s notes:
[1] The word “bayu” in Cuban Spanish means a wild, orgiastic party. Adding a syllable to the end of that word enables reggaeton to rhyme the word bayu-ti with “dictadura” (dictatorship)which has the same syllable added to it to make dicatu-ti
[2] “Chabacaneria”: crass , loud , mannerisms of the street including vulgar sexual talk.
[3] Cuba has two currencies. There is the traditional CUP (Cuban peso, also known as “moneda nacional” or national money), and then there is the coveted CUC – Cuban Convertible Peso, thevalue of which is tied 1:1 to the American dollar. CUC enables the holder to purchase goods at government stores that sell goods from overseas, quality foods, luxury items in addition to anything that CUP can buy as well as purchasing or selling such items between private parties.
[4] the expression “under the table” in English is rendered as “by the left” in Spanish which is why the writer apologizes for the use of the metaphor.
[5] Mesa Redonda or Round Table is a nightly show on Cuban television where prominent academics and members of the government discuss matters of national and international importance.
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.
Last Sunday ended the Catholic Social Week of the Miami Archdiocese, and luckily, I was able to participate in two of the events.
