Chinese Torture / BuenavistaVCuba Weblog

By Yoaxis Marcheco Suarez

Many people think I’m talking about some torture method designed by the Chinese to deliberately hurt someone, but it’s far from that, I’m talking about the famous Yutong brand buses made in China, although I am sure there is nothing intentional in their design with the goal of torturing us, but even so they do so with amazing efficiency, especially when the distance traveled is long.

Obviously the Chinese did not make their Yutong buses thinking about the characteristics of Cubans. If they had they would have made the space between the seats a little greater, because we don’t like to ride with someone else hanging over us, especially if people we don’t know are too close to us.

The seats in these buses have caused more altercations between the passengers and if you really want to know what I mean by torture you would ride one of these buses from Villa Clara to Havana and it would be enough to understand, although you would have to be a masochist to take this 14 hour journey from the capital to a point in the eastern part of the country.

Jokes abound among the clients of the nation’s only bus line, the ASTRO, which despite its name loses more luster every day, because the buses are aging and not receiving much maintenance. For example the backs of the narrow seats have mesh bags for a water bottle or some other object that we carry on, but no more. In many of the buses the curtains are cracked, or cannot be snapped shut, so we have to travel under the hot Cuban sun, or in the cold of the moonlit night. Or if the glass is dirty you can’t see out which is very bad for the claustrophobic.

If we add the stink that emerges from the bathroom, added to the monotony of travel because the screens for projecting films don’t work and the music is unserviceable for the whole trip. But the most uncomfortable thing is how little space there is between the seats.

As I said, the joke and conjectures are many: that the Chinese think we Cubans have limbs as short as their, or we’re as skinny or as stiff as they are, that the buses were made to travel short distances, that even if I wore kneepads I’d be poking some guy in the back, that the fat chick next to me almost pushed me to the floor and the last I heard: HEY! This bus is a Chinese torture chamber!

Recently we were visited at home by a group of friends and the anecdotes rained down and in my house I finished the tube of Ben-gay giving my visitors massages, imagining their misery stuck in the seats right in front of the bathroom which don’t even recline.

If anyone still doubts what torture these buses are, if a foreigner comes to the country and doesn’t travel in a rented car or the tourist buses, they should climb into a national Astro, sit themselves down on one of those rigid seats and I’m sure after that experience no one will be able to tell them stories about the true reality that we Cubans live every day.

9 Mar 2012

Theatrical Virgilio / Miguel Iturria Savón

More than two decades after the postmortem repair of the literary legacy of Virgilio Piñera (Cardenas-Havana, August 4, 1912 – October 18, 1979), most people who speak of the author have barely read his stories, poems, essays, dramas and tragedies. What are they talking about then? His homosexuality and aspects of his personality such as his verbal duels with the critics, his sarcastic answers, and even trivia about the suit he wore, his umbrellas, cigarettes and even his fear or, better yet, his intellectual honesty in front of the Commissioners of Culture of the Cuban military regime.

Except for actors, playwrights, storytellers and those knowledgeable about our literature, Piñera is an echo of echoes, a literary myth, a protean creator, experimental and challenging, who merits a re-acquaintance with his writing and the staging of his dramas, tragedies and comedies.

The year 2012 could be a propitious occasion because it his the centenary of his birth, and there is a program of tributes, complete editions of his works, and presentations of his theatrical pieces, which is appropriate because from 1961 until his death he continued writing which he supported himself as a translator of French, but his plays ceased to be performed, his stories, poems and essays were not published, until his name disappeared from the magazines and newspapers.

Virgilio Piñera represents the antithesis of José Lezama Lima, another famous writer excluded from the literary pantheon for political rather than aesthetic reasons. To the censors, they were both troublesome because of their contempt for the myth of violence and the so-called Socialist Realism. Paradoxically, both would be reinstated after death. Lezama as a symbol of the “writer’s-writer,” that is “unencumbered” or just committed to artistic creation. Virgilio, less baroque and more colloquial, became the paradigm of contemporary Cuban theater.

Like all celebrated creators Virgilio had his black legend: famed for being clownish, intolerant and hypercritical to tradition, not with his disciples, to whom he offered his human profile and the keys to allow us to enter his narrative and theatrical legacy. The playwrights who perceived his mastery and meaning were attracted by the echoes of “his disdain for the official world, his corrosive humor, his position as a sniper, his iconoclastic rebellion and even his dark legend of countless literary duels.”

Virgilio, essentially theatrical, used the scene as a mental exercise, valid to relieve the poverty that marked his family and the provincial insular environment. “I am the one who makes the serious more serious with humor, the absurd and grotesque.” To justify himself he adopted the role of rescued scapegoat and divided the human race into the elected and neglected, settling among the latter.

He lived nearly a decade in Buenos Aires, but his plays are essentially Cuban, a Cuban identity that comes not from the comic or didactic and moralizing theater, but from the handling of Creole issues and circumstances and from dialogues and phrases coined by the populace.

Prior to 1959 published three parts and released four: Garrigó Electra (1948), Jesus (1950), False Alarm (1957) and The Wedding (1958). Later he represented five titles, edited nine books and two periodicals. In 1960 his Complete Theater was released, expanded and reissued later by Rine Leal. Outside the island Garrigó Electra and Two Panicked Old Men were staged, winning in 1968 the Casa de las Americas prize; Cold Air and An Empty Shoe Box.

Anyone wishing to know the work of this author should get the anthologies Virgilio Piñera Complete Stories of Anton Arrufat, published in Havana in 2002 and 2004, Complete Theatre, arranged and introduced by Rine Leal-Cuban Literature Library, 2002 and 2006; volumes that will appear again in the Havana 2012 Book Fair , with collections of his poems, essays and articles, and testimonials written by friends and followers of Piñera, described as a belligerent intellectual, sharp conversationalist, and creator of the theater of the absurd — his Garrigó Electrapredates The Bald Soprano accredited to Ionesco.

On the occasion of the centenary of his birth it is nice to return to his dramas, tragedies and comedies, to the incessant throbbing searches and expressive experimentation, as well as to his apparent simplicity, achieved on the basis of Cuban dialogues so sharp, full of tragicomic and absurd situations, sometimes gritty realism, like Cold Air, inspired by his family.

Rine Leal described Piñera as a transitional dramatist who influenced the later playwrights and elevated the Cuban scene to levels reached before in music, poetry, narrative and visual arts. The critic puts the great playwright in the aesthetics of denial and value as he enters the absurd paradoxes, the game of mirrors and the ritual of the masks, in sharp avoidance as a means of resistance to the stresses of his day .

We recall, for example, that Garrigó Electra was considered by Maria Zambrano in 1948 as “the most beautiful work, brave and capable by a Cuban author premiered in Havana … performed with consistency and fairness, and the honesty of that terrible suicide.” In Jesus, Piñera weaves a poignant parody of an allegorical value, where the main character, the barber of 33 years Jesus Garcia, a resident of Havana refuses to work miracles on rumors from neighbors and authorities, to whom he represents a challenge to absurd expectations.

We could continue with notes on the The Philanthropist, False Alarm, Two Panicked Old Men and other memorable works by Virgilio Piñera, but we prefer to let the reader come to him though reading or attending theatrical performances of his legacy on the occasion of his centennial of life.

February 19 2012

Postcards / Lilianne Ruíz

I write most of my posts purely from my opinion, I lack the experiences of people who spend more time outside. I have many reasons for not spending more time outside, but the main one is that I have always tended to retire, to stay inside. The day passes quickly for me, waiting, waiting, we Cubans are experts in waiting, in wasting time, in forgetting that we are waiting and we can entertain ourselves with anything.

Odd: The second meaning of politics in the Cervantes dictionary used in Cuban schools is: “activity of citizens to drive the issues that matter to the State,” and I could have sworn that the State and citizens have been exchanged, changing the meaning.

I have found a new addiction to exercise, but I’m not the only, a blogger friend has confessed to me that she does the same. Claudia says that she would go to the gym twice a day. I never imagined myself lying on a bench with my quadriceps lifting 20 pounds, but if I stopped doing it I would feel I was missing something. The strength of my muscles is also an act of rebellion. After struggling against inertia and cookies, I lost myself in a bun with a croquette to kill the hunger.

For a year now I have had a boyfriend who doesn’t leave me, he has cultivated my sensuality  without touching my heart and after 30 it doesn’t bother me. We women learned after 30 to limit the dominion of the body and the dominion of the soul. I do not fall in love by choice. “The Alfre,” as I call him, complains that I don’t let him stay overnight, but I never find a good reason. And the last morning I told him jokingly that he had made it through the night like Scheherazade. He is the perfect companion, however, he will not let me have illusions.

My voice no longer fits inside me, it overflows and I write my post. With hope. I write also to God, because I have a special relationship with each word in the Christian tradition which I consider a foundation of faith that God Himself put in the world and although it distresses me to think how many before me have believed in Christ and have suffered, I continue waiting and waiting and joining my prayers and words to produce a miracle.

March 9 2012

Directors of the CID Send Condolences to Czech Officials / Katia Sonia

Directors of the Cuban Independent and Democratic Party in Havana, on the afternoon of Thursday 22 December, personally expressed their condolences to Mr. Frantisek Fleisman on the occasion of the passing of the former Czech president Vaclav Havel, in the embassy of the country located in Kohly # 259 Nuevo Vedado, Havana.

Mr. Fleisman, who serves as Political Adviser to the Czech diplomatic mission accredited in Havana, personally received the message of condolence and several copies of the weekly publication of the CID “The New Republic,” after which the representatives signed the condolence book open at the embassy to facilitate the people of Cuba sending messages of condolence to the family and the Czech people for the death of former Czech president Vaclav Havel, information totally ignored by the Cuban media.

Present at the mournful meeting were Abdel Rodriguez Arteaga, National Vice President of CID; Lisbán Hernandez Sanchez and Elizabeth Linda Kawooya Toca, Delegate and Vice Delegate in Central Havana, Aimé Cabrales Aguilar, Attention to Political Prisoners in Havana and Santiago Ricardo Santiago Medina Salabarria, the National Executive Committee of the CID, who highlighted and appreciated the closeness and concern of Václav Havel for the political prisoners, the opposition movement and the democratic destiny of the Cuban people. Fleisman was interested in the work of the party.

Katia Sonia Martín Véliz

December 23 2011

Congratulations Women Bloggers! / Reinaldo Escobar

For many years March 8, International Women’s Day, meant for many of us the opportunity to conclude out work duties before the official time and the promise of a little party in the workplace. On leaving home, in the bus, or arriving anywhere, one offered a Congratulations! half formal, half authentic.

I would love to have a Day of Men, among other reasons, so that the idea of equality made more sense. But until someone finds a suitable date for the masculine celebrations, I want to congratulate today all the women and especially the women bloggers. If I had a talent for poetry would take a stab at a “Triumphal March of the Cuban Alternative Bloggers,” but I will not even try.

What would I say, then? I would mention Miriam Celaya, that flagellator of tyrants, with acute ideas and the precise word; Rebecca Monzo, our carnival star with her bittersweet and fun humor; Lía Villares, so playful, so creative, so herself; Regina Coyula, who left “the intelligence” for what an intelligent and good person she is; Esperanza Rodriguez, who always reminds us of our rights and teaches us to defend them; Claudia Cadelo, despite her already long vacation; Ana Luisa Rubio and her moon full of dreams and kindnesses; Laritza Diversent, showered in the law and in architraves; Rosa Maria Rodriguez, for her barefoot roses without thorns; Katia Sonia Martín, bellicose and happy with her twin girls; Wendy Iriepa, who fought so hard to celebrate this blessed day; Liliane Ruiz, recent and ancient, premiering the word in a luminous form; and of course, the skinny one, the multiple-prize-winner, “the worst of them all,” who initiated us into the guts of WordPress, to Yoani Sanchez, whom I had the enormous pleasure of waking up with a kiss this morning.

8 March 2012

Ideology, Ideologues, Ideologize / Fernando Dámaso

Any respected scholar of philosophy, dedicates preferential attention to his ideology, that is, the set of his own ideas. The ideologue is the same, but with absurd and preposterous ideas: therefore, it consists of a set of anti-ideas, which are intended to provide a multipurpose drug for the evils facing the world and, it is affirmed, provide a complete cure.

An ideology needs ideologues to provide a base and make the ideology known to the exploited masses, ensuring its understanding and acceptance, creating a battle flag. The work of ideologues will not be successful without the creation of the ideologized, which constitute the main purpose and goal of their efforts.

This triad (Ideology, Ideologues, Ideologize) — it seems like a tongue twister — is easy to find in Cuban society. The model is ready and has all the elements for its existence and development: control of media, agencies and institutions and political and social organizations formed for this purpose and, most importantly, a population devoid of instruments granted to civility in any moderately democratic system. Thus, we find many examples, past and present, to prove it conclusively.

The failed Ten Million Ton Harvest, Converting Setbacks into Victory, the Battle of Ideas, the Fight to Control the Aedes Aegypti Mosquito and the Liberation of the Five, in addition to their economic, political, social, health, family and other types of reasons, have had and have a high ideological component, both to convince citizens that they could achieve something that was material and objectively impossible, and to maintain the ideologization achieved withsamurai machetes that go, go, go in the first two examples.

In the third, it was about filling with ideas the real vacuum created by the collapse of the socialist camp, and with it, dealing with the economic underpinning of the deteriorating Cuban economy, unable to afford even the minimum necessary to feed its poor population.

In the fourth, which has now lasted for over thirty years without tangible results, with its ineffective measures, applied over and over again, with a stubbornness worthy of psychiatric studies.

In the fifth, it is more of the same, present even in the soup, with the aggravating circumstance including not only the adult population, but even children, something rejected and condemned by UNESCO, but their representatives here have not yet been warned.

These are just some random examples: there are many more. Although ideologization, applied for over fifty years, has affected much of the population, polluting society with the virus and the inertia,and the letting things go, waiting for better times, it has not been the case with all its components.

Today, more and more voices are raised rejecting it and demanding the full exercise of citizenship rights and the necessary changes: the emergence of a civil society in the face of an exhausted discourse and also worn out speakers.

It is true that it is still very weak and has only begun to crawl, but hopefully, by natural law, sooner or later it will stand up and begin to take its first steps. All, without exception of any kind or political intolerance, we must help to walk.

March 6 2012

Who Are the Real Anti-Cubans? / Estado de Sats, Antonio G. Rodiles

Once again, State Security uses the old tactic of trying to discredit, given its inability to come to a public debate of arguments and ideas. A debate that would have a long-awaited end, because absolutely nobody can hide the ruin they have brought to the Cuban nation. They razed it and follow by trying to sweep it up. On this occasion the attacks have been directed at the Estado de Sats project and directly at my person.

I feel the need to contextualize this reply because otherwise we would lose the true perspective of what is happening. It is no coincidence that this barrage of distortions and speculations comes from Cuba Debate, the page of Fidel Castro and his employees.

To begin, let me clarify that with regards to my family history (I’m not talking about Division General Samuel Rodiles Planas, I am speaking exclusively of Manuel. G. Rodilas Planas, my father), I have a direct version of our recent history somewhat different from the official one. This is why I can understand perfectly the root of this despicable tactic of personally attacking the dissenter, from which flow the use of lies, manipulation, contempt for the other, as indispensable and essential tools.

The root has a name, Fidel Castro and company.

There are several questions I want to share publicly, and believe me, there are still more. I ask myself:

Who really has defrauded the Cuban people?

Who has despised our rights?

Who are the real traitors?

It’s time to review a little history and to ask Fidel Castro and company directly, although they refuse to answer us, as they always have.

Who deceived that group of pilots and offended ad nauseam a person of the quality of Félix Pena, forcing him to commit suicide?

Who crushed the independence of the judiciary a few days after January of 1959?

Who lied again and again, in the face of a whole people, saying he was not a Communist and that the Revolution was as green as the palm trees?

Who sentenced Huber Matos to 20 years in prison on charges of slandering the Revolution for saying it would impose communism?

Who manipulated the Cuban people saying, “Elections? What for?” in order to remain in power?

Who is responsible for the execution of scores of Cubans?

Who deceived the people into believing that Fidel Castro participated in the combat  on April 19 at the Bay of Pigs, where he was not really present?

Who left the extraordinary young man Pedro Luis Boitel to die on a hunger strike?

Who has subjected thousands of prisoners, political and common, to inhuman conditions and degrading treatment?

Who stripped the fruits of their labor from thousands of Cuban families promising them a prosperity that has never arrived?

Who, to satisfy delusions of grandeur, sent thousands of young Cubans to die in Africa?

Who authorized and encouraged the outrage toward thousands of Cubans wishing to leave the country, stoning their houses and provoking violence and now takes advantage of the remittances sent by their families to support a delusional and inefficient system?

Who has forced a whole people to live in conditions of hardship for so many years?

Who are the principals responsible for the destruction of the entire industry, infrastructure, agriculture, and housing of a nation? Who governs the country based on decisions and whims that show only a great ignorance and arrogance?

Who authorized the sinking of the 13 de Marzo tugboat that killed about forty people, mostly children and women? I still remember the cynicism of Fidel Castro in front of the television cameras, saying it had been an accident.

Who ordered the midair pulverizing of two unarmed civilian planes and unscrupulously ended the lives of four people?

Who is ultimately responsible for the execution, before a firing squad and after a summary trial, of three youths in 2003?

Who ordered the brutal punishment of 75 political dissidents, for the mere fact of being free men?

Who ordered the violent humiliation of a group of defenseless women demanding the release of their husbands and of all Cubans?

Who is responsible for the death of the young man Orlando Zapata Tamayo who asked only that he not be subjected to more beatings?

Who ordered the death of Wilman Villar Mendoza? Who ordered him to be taken to the hospital only when there was no longer any chance of saving him?

Who used violence, terror and death as a form of punishment? A practice that began from the time of the Sierra Maestra and which has always been the face paint in a theater of legality.

How many deaths are on your shoulders, how many?

Who is responsible for the stampede of Cubans seeking to leave behind at all costs a situation that overwhelms them? Who is responsible for the dead in the Straits of Florida? Who is responsible for so many separated families?

Those responsible are themselves the real traitors, are the true anti-Cubans, they are those who panic when there is talk of a Cuba where everyone has a voice. All their arguments are hollow words trying to deflect the finger pointing to the accused, to the principals responsible for our national tragedy.

As for us, we have little left to lose, they have managed, over 53 long years, to ruin our nation, they have managed to impose misery. At least show some embarrassment at the end.

Because however much they hold on they are out of time, Cubans are tired of their excesses. The future, where there will be no room for hatred and slovenliness, is knocking on our doors.

8 March 2011

Story of an "Occupation" / Yaremis Flores

Yaremis Flores.

The coordinator of the Cultural Project OMNI Zona Franca, Amaury Pacheco del Monte, is a dreamer. He fantasizes he can offer his family a comfortable life. He’s far from juggling enough to meet the needs of his six small children. His family suffers fromthe housing shortage onour island, and on top of that,from institutional and human indolence.

Fourmonths ago Amaury illegally occupied an apartment in the capital district of Alamar. He broke into a building that had been vandalized and used by lovers. The apartment was empty for years, but it was requested by several neighbors who lived stacked on top of each other, or who had serious health problems and needed an apartment like that one, on the lower level. Amaury lived in subhuman conditions, like other Cubans, even if, according to the Constitution, everyone has the right to adequate housing.

The maxim that your best friend is your nearest neighbor doesn’t have as much force today. The neighbor upstairs sleeps peacefully, without turning the passkey that could supply water to the new tenants. He refuses to do it until ordered bysome authority.

Weeks pass without access to water or electricity. Institutionslike the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, the Federation of Cuban Women and Social Workers have made an appearance, each like a poor student who goes to school just to be present. They appear unfazed by the shortage of essentials. The Neighborhood Council also remains deaf and dumb before these events.

“Representatives of some agencies advise me to say thatthey alreadywent through here if someone checks; they take notes as proof and go away,” points out Iris Ruiz, Amaury’s wife. “I won’t accept a bureaucratic response,” she says, with her newborn daughter in her arms, who, asleep, seems oblivious to what is taking place.

One of the most famous phrases of our National Hero, José Martí, comes to mind: “Children are the hope of the world.” It’s ironic to see a family that has contributed to thealready marked birth rate in our country unable to find a solution to their problem.

The General Housing Act offers some ways to solve cases like this. One is to facilitate the status of squatters so they become renters, with the possibility of purchasing the home and paying the set price.

Ibelieve in the popular saying “if you want it enough, it can happen.” However, Amaury’s family awaits a favorable ruling by the lazy officials. Not out of pity, but because of their duty to uphold the law.

Translated by Regina Anavy

March 8 2012

Letter to Raúl Castro Ruz / Jeovany Jimenez Vega

Artemis, January 28, 2012.
“Year 54 of the Revolution”

To: Raul Castro Ruz
President of the Councils of State and Ministers
First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba

Mr. President:

At age 35, the person who is writing to you dedicated his youth and the highest part of himself to the Revolution. I had heard from Fidel and you that we should seal an unconditional commitment to the truth regardless of consequences; it was a question, we were told, of putting the truth above all. That student writing you was at his door in the early morning, on the Sundays in the micro at the foot of the foundations, in the campaigns in agriculture, in the youth marches in Havana; that young man who didn’t hesitate to surrender when he believed it necessary, who when he graduated started to receive less than two dollars a month salary and never faltered.

But years passed and we came to May 2005; then Fidel announced that there would be an “increase” of $ 48.00 pesos (less than two dollars) in our monthly salary as doctors, which was perceived as disrespectful by most of our workers. Since I have the precept to do at all times that which is right and proper, I thought it ethical at that point to convey to our minister the opinions generated by that decision among my colleagues. The story that followed I will not repeat it because you should know from the first of three letters I have sent you that remain, today, unanswered.

This is where I ask, with all due respect, President: how is the serious fact of permanently barring two doctors from practicing medicine for more than five years for having sent that to that minister, consistent with your discourse about our right to express ourselves freely? Are we perhaps vulnerable to the law when together, as a group of workers, we address the ministry to which we belong? What relationship did this teaching have with my deserving an arbitrary separation from my Internal Medicine Residency? Is it immoral to aspire to live honestly on wage emanating from my effort? Is there anything established in our Penal Code that says the exercise of discretion as a crime? Is it not, however, illegal for political and administrative officials to threaten and coerce two workers, even in the middle of their workday? Is it not illegal and immoral to lie and alter documents to legitimize this outrage against us, applying also a Ministerial Resolution attesting that there were harmful events involving a patient that never happened? Is it not a colossal atrocity that the Chief of the National Union of Health has personally conducted these shocking meetings to expel from the NHS two of its own members for having addressed their minister?

You will notice that among the arbitrariness I do not mention my expulsion from the Communist Party because I believe that this is the only point that can not be disputed. As the party is a political entity no one questions its right to deprive someone of their membership if it considers that he broke from the line; I only consider it questionable whether the expulsion was applied instead of the separation – terms conceptually distinct – when I committed no immorality not incurred any act of treason, because there is no treason, but on the contrary, in speaking honestly. But this decision, obviously partisan, to suspend my Residency in Internal Medicine and then impose an administrative penalty – indeed, the most extreme – goes an enormous distance. I just hope no one offends my intelligence by ensuring that the Party had nothing to do, it was all determined at the union level – as that would be the great atrocity – and decided in the leadership of MINSAP, when it is a discounting of reality that all was what the party ordered from the highest level, then occupied by Fidel Castro.

Today I do not intend to question the sincerity of your promises to implement the major changes that we Cubans urgently need under your rule, as this is something that will be confirmed or denied inexorably through time and, therefore, is beyond the scope of the present and even my personal potential. It will not be I, but History, who judges it. But yes, it is clear that one cannot speak of freedom consistent with outrages like this, that sincerity is not asked a people while it is gripped with the fear of such abuses, as there can be no democracy where the free exercise of discretion is punishable, that it is not consistent to speak of ending impunity it the untouchables committing such abuses of power are protected; it is not possible in a State of Laws that someone is punished brutally for something they did with the full support of the Attorney General; in short, one cannot claim justice when one knows of abuse and permits it, and even less when the power to redeem it is in their hands.

Mr. President: you can repair in part the outrage on our dignity. I say only in part, because there will always be a dose of human and family suffering that no one can erase after an experience so disturbing, because even going back to work today, how can we get back five years away from the profession we love? How to erase the memory of those dark days in which we are judged publicly for something we didn’t do? Who will pay for such brutality, for the defamation, for so much unpunished despotism? You have the power to end today this injustice and from the moment you know it and, having the power to do this, do nothing, you also assume some responsibility in this barbarism.

Unable to live on the margins of my time, what I was yesterday, I was for Fidel and for you, as I am today, and as I will be tomorrow. As the rest of my generation, in no small measure you shaped in me – is not something hidden – concepts that today, however, I am seriously rethinking also thanks to you. I was always consistent with the faith that moved me at all times, but when I tried to be so in regard to this truth, I was not allowed to be. Personally I regret how incisive and harsh these words are, and yet, despite everything, I keep my heart safe from hate, but I can not simulate and say what I think; believe me, the reality was always more painful than any words. It was not me who lied, it was not me who simulated, it was not me who altered the truth and swindled the workers to get out of the difficulty; among those infamous who did lie the traitors will have to be sought. They fear the fugitives from the truth, I am only an honest man and I live at peace with myself.

Thank you for your attention:

Dr. Jeovany Gimenez Vega.
Specialist 1st. degree in General Medicine.
Resident 3rd. year in Internal Medicine.

February 28 2012

 

With Clitoris and With Rights / Yoani Sánchez

mujer_cubanaAt times with good intentions – other times with not so good – someone tries to silence my complaints about the machismo in my country, telling me, “Cuban women don’t have it so badly… those in some African nations, where they are subjected to ablation, are worse off.” As an argument it’s a low blow, it hurts me in the groin, connects me to the cry of a defenseless teenager, mutilated, subjected to that ordeal by her own family. But the rights of women should not be reduced only to the power to maintain their physical integrity and to defend their biological capacity to experience pleasure. The clitoris is not the only thing we can lose, there is a long list of social, economic and political possibilities, which are also snatched from us.

As I live in a country where the paths of civic protest have been severed and demonized, I dare to offer in this blog a list of the violations that still persist against women.

  • They do not allow us to establish our own women’s organizations, where we can unite and represent ourselves. Groups that are not channels of transmission from the government to the citizens, as sadly happens with the Federation of Cuban Women.
  • When they speak of women in the political class, it’s clear that they don’t have any real power but are there to fulfill quotas or assignments by gender.
  • The icon of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) – the only organization of this kind permitted by law – shows a figure with a rifle on her shoulder in clear allusion to the mother as soldier, to the female as a piece of the warring conflict cooked up from above.
  • The absence in the national press of reporting about domestic violence does not eliminate its real presence. Silence does not stop the aggressor from hitting. In the pages of our newspapers there should also be these stories of abuse, because otherwise we are not going to understand that we have a serious problem of assaults, silenced within the walls of so many homes.
  • Where can a wife go when she is beaten by her husband? Why are there no shelters or why doesn’t the media publicize the locations of these refuges for battered women?
  • Buying disposable diapers is almost a luxury in this society. Most new mothers still have to spend a good part of their time washing baby clothes by hand. Every emancipation needs a material infrastructure of freedom, otherwise it will remain so only in slogans and mottoes.
  • The high prices of all the products needed for motherhood and pregnancy are also a factor that influences the low birth rate. A crib with mattress costs the equivalent of $90 U.S. in a country where the average monthly salary doesn’t exceed $20.
  • The child support that a father must provide for his children after a divorce – as stipulated by law – doesn’t exceed, in many cases, the equivalent of $3 monthly, which leaves a woman economically powerless to raise her children.
  • The extremely high prices of food relative to wages keep Cuban women chained to the stove while performing economic pirouettes to put a plate of food on the table. It is the women and not the political-economic system that performs a daily miracle so that Cuban families eat, more or less well or more or less badly.
  • After so many slogans about emancipation and equality, we Cuban women are left with a double workday and dozens of cumbersome bureaucratic tasks. It’s enough to go outside to see the effects of this excess load: most women over forty have bitter faces, make no plans for the future, do not go out with their women friends to a bar, and have no escape from their family and the tedium.
  • When a woman decides to criticize the government, she is immediately reminded who wears the skirt; they accuse her of immorality, infidelity to her husband, being manipulated by some male mind, and call her “prostitute,” “cocky,” “hooker,” as many discriminating cutting insults as they can imagine.
  • You can’t try to liberate a specific social group in a society gripped by the lack of rights. To be a woman in the Cuba of today is to suffer these lacks twice.

In short, we want to have a clitoris and rights, to feel pleasure and to speak our opinions, to be known for our skirts, but especially for our ideas.

8 March 2012

Brave and Opportune Decision / Jorge Luis García Pérez Antunez

Jonniel Rodríguez Riverol, in the orange T-Shirt

A group of Santería practitioners from Placetas, as a sign of will, independence and a liberating spirit, have decided to shortly appoint a group independent of state control, which so far they have agreed to call the Independent Yoruba Association.

It will be headed by the priest of that African religion Jonniel Rodríguez Riveról, initiated in the Ollá orisha worship called Ollálarde.

The commissars of the political police are doubly alarmed by this situation. In the first place because it extends independent civil society in ways that group them beyond their ethnicity, and especially because most of this group are open political opponents of the regime and many have participated and engaged in acts of protest and civil disobedience.

They are said to have lost their fear of tyranny and its repressive methods. Rodriguez Riverol will very soon have a twitter account called @yorubalibre which will be accessible to colleagues anywhere in the world to exchange information, experiences and especially experiences from here, where freedom of thought, expression and religion is massively violated.

Congratulations to these Free Yorubas whose vice president will be Loreto Hernández García. Great success in your noble enterprise.

February 15 2012

"Occupy" in Havana / Yaremis Flores

Yaremis Flores.

On the periphery of Havana, in the Alamar district,cases of illegal squatters inunoccupied buildingsare proliferating. The Government and the Municipal Housing Division (DMV), the entities in charge of solving the problem, are simply targets for the numerous complaints and pleas of the population.

“You’re not on the list of priority cases, there are people worse off, and they haven’t committed an offense like you,” said Rita, president of the Alamar Government, to Iris, on Thursday Feb. 9, in an interview, togetherwith the DMV Legal Subdirector.

Iris Ruiz, the wife of the OMNI-ZONAFRANCA coordinator, and her 6 small children, occupied the apartment 4 months ago, Number 1 of the Building E-83, Zone 9 Alamar, where they currently live without water or electricity. Her family was declared an illegal occupant by Resolution 1608/2011, which establishes that “in 2004 the house was confiscated, after the definitive exit of the owner, who went to the U.S.”

“It’s uncertain that the house was confiscated,” said Iris. “The Director of the DMV told me that the apartment is not included in the housing stock. After 2004, two people lived there. One of them is still on the records of Betty, the president of the CDR, even though they abandoned the country more than 5 years ago.”

“They left this apartment ruined, while other people needed it,” Iris added. Neighbors say a DMV inspector visited the site several times with apparent illegal buyers for the property.

“Rosaura, a neighbor of this building, has a son who had a heart operation, and she lives together with 10 people; Estela, a neighbor at Building E-79, has a paraplegic daughter and needs to live on the ground floor. These are two of the parties who tried to get the unoccupied apartment. The Government’s response was negative, because “the apartment is already taken.”

Who gets priority? Iris wonders.

According to the President of the Government of Alamar, at the municipal level no institution has the power to assign housing. Since 2006, this functionhas been the responsibility of the Provincial Government. “Only from me can you get an apartment, since our mission is to combat illegal behavior,” Rita warned Iris, after showing her the extensive list of squatters, waiting for eviction by the authorities.

Yaneisy, known as “the Twin,”already has lived through the experience of an eviction. She’s had a social-work case-file in the Alamar DMV for 16 years. Some time ago, she illegally occupied an apartment. “Theyevicted me with my 2 young children and put all my belongings on the street. They told me I should go back to my place of origin: a 2-room apartment, where 12 people were living together,” she said.

The housing shortage is a sad reality that increasingly affects a larger number of Cubans. Those scattered around by the usual shortage can’t afford to pay monthly rent for housing, let alone buy a house, whose prices don’t invite optimism.

Translated by Regina Anavy

March 6 2012

What is “Estado de Sats” / Translating Cuba

This interview with Antonio G. Rodiles in Havana Times, explains the Estado de Sats project in English, including the meaning of the name.  To add one more element to that: the word “sats” is Norwegian and means “velocity.”

In Antonio’s words from the interview:

Antonio Rodiles: The Estado de SATS name stems from an idea by actress Esther Cardoso, whom Jorge Calaforra, Evelyn Quesada and I went to visit when looking to see if she could provide us space at her Casa Gaia, where we held out first event in July 2010.

We were thinking about a name for the project, and I since I’m a physicist I was leaning toward something that had to do with resonance, something that accumulates that state in which everything begins to look and think in a similar direction.

Then Esther told us about “Estado de SATS” [state of sats], a term used to describe the theater prior to the time when the actor appears on stage.  It’s the moment when all energy is concentrated to explode on stage… finally realizing what has been prepared for a long time.

Cultural Exchanges and a Democratic Transition / Estado de Sats, Antonio G. Rodiles

On Saturday March 3 we had a meeting at Estado de SATS regarding cultural and academic exchanges between Cuba and the United States. The panel consisted of the philosopher Alexis Jardines who participated by video-recording, political analysts Julio Aleaga Pesant and Miriam Celaya, and Charles Barclay deputy head of the United States Interests Section in Havana. Over the two hours that we debated this issue, fraught with multiple twists and turns, we generated an intense and respectful dialogue that we hope will soon proliferate in our country.

The reaction of State Security was swift: an organized police operation in the surrounding streets to intimidate the participants as they departed once the meeting ended, and the almost simultaneous publication of several comments on the internet full of lies and false conclusions.

Why the rejection and fear around Cubans discussing our reality, and particularly on such an important topic?

The answer is undoubtedly in the nature of the system itself, in the difficult context is it facing, and in the absence of resources to maneuver given that the country is totally ruined. Every day it becomes clearer that the cosmetic changes initiated by Raul Castro can do little to revive an economy that needs an injection of billions of dollars, or to revitalize a governing party that has no roots or legitimacy among the population. The fatal illness of Hugo Chavez, his principal ally, becomes an extremely inopportune element faced with an unpredictable electoral process, which puts in danger the more than 100,000 barrels of oil Cuba receives daily, without no sign of a possible replacement. With values exceeding $100 per barrel, the Cuban government once again finds itself on the edge of the abyss.

On the other hand, the investments from other countries, such as Brazil and China, are clearly directed at bettering future relations between the island and the United States, which remain at a complete standstill due to, among other things, the refusal to release the contractor Alan Gross and the inability to take concrete steps in the direction of political reform.

This difficult scenario forces the Cuban government to restart an offensive to convince that neighboring country to ease its trade sanctions, or at least to ease restrictions on travel by American tourists. To accomplish this will require persuading the many who distrust the ability of the current government to carry out major economic and political changes. Within this strategy of “soft power,” academic and cultural diplomacy play a major role. By the same logic, the radius of influence for political actors who support the transition to a democratic system, both within and outside the island, must be reduced to a minimum. Time is running out and the elite needs to consolidate its corroded power as quickly at possible, in order to reshape itself to maintain its position, regardless of future changes.

Academic and cultural exchanges are extremely important to call on all the human capital that has escaped our country in a stampede, and to permit the free flow of information and knowledge that characterizes today’s world. But they cannot become a tool to legitimize a government that has destroyed our nation. These cultural exchanges could be called upon to become an indispensable ingredient in the transition to democracy, but this will only happen if Cuban civil society and the diaspora intersect, this must be the fundamental challenge.

Cuban civil society is in a period of resurgence that obliges us not only to exercise our rights, but also to do so with the greatest possible rigor.

Civil society’s demand to play the role genuinely belonging to it, greatly irritates the powers-that-be, especially considering that for 53 years the same group of individuals has assumed absolute monopoly over words, faces, and logic and, above all, counts on the power of force to prevent, at any price, Cubans from demanding another choice of government. The absurd accusations that seek to personally discredit everyone who dissents, the use of cynicism and deceit as irreplaceable tools, are demonstrations of the primitive and senile vision of this group clinging to the past, clinging to totalitarianism, refusing to accept that time is relentless.

The highest representative of this policy has been and is Fidel Castro, an individual whose hand has never trembled when he has imposed it, be it even to crush the life out of a human being (examples abound). I do not know the individuals employed in these media campaigns of rage and hysteria, but what is left is to invite them to understand that Cuba will inevitably change; it is just a question of time and circumstances until this so long-awaited rearrangement occurs, and I remind them that each human being is responsible for his own actions, a reality that should not be forgotten.

From our activism, we have no option other than to continue working on the transition to a democratic society, where the power of a few is never again imposed by force on the rights of an entire nation.

Note: I just read about Abel Prieto’s new assignment as an adviser to Raul Castro. Events will tell whether this move is consistent with the strategy set out above.

6 March 2012