Translating Cuba

As 2012 begins it seems that the burden of the two currencies will continue on the weary shoulders of Cubans. When, before the Cuban peso was devalued and in a state of coma, and a U.S. dollar strong and active as the trickster deity Eleggua, there were roads everywhere, it was decided to remove the latter from circulation substituting for it the convertible peso (CUC), and no one anticipated the financial chaos this absurd decision would lead to.

Responding to eminently political objectives — that the enemy’s money with its ideological burden should not continue to circulate — the new notes, baptized by popular wit as “chavitos” (after Chavez), “carnivalitos,” “cuckoos” and so on, as virtual as the Cuban pesos (CUP), some overvalued and others devalued. They are not accepted by any international financial market, nor even by Cubans themselves, who try to maintain their meager savings in dollars or euros, and only change them at banks of currency exchanges when they have no choice.

The existence of two currencies is a reality very difficult to solve, in the context of current political and economic criteria, and they contribute very little to the needed increase in domestic production. The producer, if he receive income in Cuban pesos (CUP) and must satisfy his needs with convertible pesos (CUC), is not stimulated to produce, although some charity is delivered, from time to time in the latter currency. Citizens should receive their salaries, 100% in the same currency in which items must be purchased to meet their needs. As long as this absurdity, the result of voluntarism and improvisation, is not solved, everything else is just talk and good intentions.

To make a decision so disastrous, they consulted with neither God nor the Devil, and here are the harmful results. The blunders fill an endless list, and now they must try to rectify them, but as I pointed out on other occasions, there is a lack of time and credibility, which complicates the task. The authorities do not seem willing to implement it. It is possible the task will remain for those who come after them.

January 9 2012

The last time Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stepped on Cuban soil, Fidel Castro’s illness had been announced a few weeks prior, generating tons of speculation. In that September of 2006, the Iranian president was a witness to the awarding of the presidency of the Non-Aligned Nations to a head of state physically incapable of exercising it. Instead of the Maximum Leader, in the Palace of Conventions they heard the speech of his younger brother, while in the hallways and in front of the cameras official spokespeople predicted that the Commander in Chief would reappear very soon. But they lied. In the final photo of the event — taken on the lawn under a playful sun — the invited rulers are captured, but the primary host is missing. In the light of today, that was an image almost prescient because it marked the former guerrilla’s loss of leadership in international life.

Now, Ahmadinejad has returned for a new snapshot. This time it will be behind closed doors, perhaps without witnesses, and in the place where Fidel Castro convalesces and from where he writes his lengthy Reflections. Much has changes for both of them in the last five years. The first is in the midst of escalating tensions with Washington and has even threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz; the second is passing through the gradual fading of his image inside and outside the country, and has lost much of the ascendancy he once had.

The political impulse that came close to triggering — in 1962 at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis — the third world war, lives today in the Persian leader who could be a part of the next conflict. Both urgently need this new family photo. The one to prove that he is not isolated, as American diplomacy would like him to be seen, and the other because he needs to demonstrate that he is still alive, as opposed to what is rumored in the social networks. But it will be a portrait almost in sepia, because the color green which has been absent these last five years is an uncomfortable shade for both of them. It reminds Fidel Castro of the uniform from which an important part of his power emanated, while to Ahmadinejad it evokes young people protesting in the streets, the young woman Leda, and the summer of 2009.

*Translator’s note: The title of this post is a play on a line in poem by Garcia Lorca, “Verde, que te quiero verde.” The poem is titled Romance sonámbulo (in English, The Sleepwalker’s Romance).

11 January 2011

As if by agreement, Mariela Castro flatters the Dutch system of prostitution in the Amsterdam red light district, and Aleida Guevara (both without highlighting they’d come from the most advantaged sperm of their fathers who fertilized the eggs of their mothers), counsels the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez Frias, that he should nationalize the entire press. Their declarations do discredit to themselves. In each interview they gave they received a red card and a penalty.

To recommend such barbarism to the Caudillo shows an Olympian underestimation of him, as if it hadn’t already previously occurred to him. Perhaps little Aleida didn’t read about Chavez’s closure of the newspapers and radio and TV channels? Couldn’t she imagine that her uncle Fidel had already advised the same.

What is happening is that times now are not the same if we compare them to the decade of the sixties, and no one has informed this brat that she has lived in a bubble (having had the privilege of believing that socialism is effective because her table has never lacked filet mignon, nougat, apples and wine, all as a great concert of imports), and she is unaware that the world is watching and expressing its disagreement with such abuses and lack of democracy, and, precisely because of these follies typical of dictators, in recent times the most important political changes in contemporary history are taking place.

I’d like to note that this post has been the most difficult of all those written by me so far. I find Aleida so alien, so distant from the events of the world, that at times it seems to me as if she is mentally retarded. I saw her with her children in primary school many times, at 5th and 62nd Streets, with her arrogant airs and figure, looking at the rest of the parents over her shoulder at a prudent distance so as not to mingle with the plebs. I could also appreciate the sly contempt with which the parents responded. Listening to the teachers, after flattering her, cursing her and cataloging the ungratefulness and abuse of her position as “daddy’s girl.”

In addition to her caudillo-taliban education, you have to remember her genetic inheritance, hence Aleida Guevara’s pose as a Court Aristocrat, nails bared as is natural. It doesn’t take much imagination to know what she would be capable of if you put a little power in her hands.

I always remember the shocking testimony of Comandante Benigno, who may have known Che well, when they went to execute the peasant who told the enemy the coordinates where they could find Fidel Castro’s guerrilla camp in the Sierra Maestra, and after a “summary trial,” the accused was led by Che, William Galvez and Benigno, and as they left the camp, looking for a place to carry out the execution, they hear an unexpected gunshot very close to their ears. The shock made them take a defensive position, when they looked they saw the body of the peasant fall with his head exploded from a shot by Che, who, cold-bloodedly, put away the pistol and advised them to hurry back because it was going to rain. There’s nothing more to say. To end this interminable story, on his arrival at La Cabaña prison, where he established his command post, he provoked a river of blood with hundreds of firing squads. He spent more bullets in La Cabaña than in the entire guerrilla war.

In Africa, after the battle in which an African soldier, in order to save his own life, had to abandon his machine gun because of its weight and the difficulty of moving it, Che called him a coward in front of everyone. And the African soldier refuted him, explaining that he had no other human choice. And Che, with the same coolness with which he destroyed the peasant’s head with his bullet, said laconically, “you made a coward of yourself.” And in the follow battles the soldier chose to lose his life rather than abandoning the machine gun again, and the same Che, later in his diary, recognized that it had been his fault. He had this gift of killing people, directly and indirectly, those who because of ideology and by chance ran into him.

And now his daughter, she takes after her father, doesn’t know the reality of Cubans, lives in a house that she doesn’t know how or by whom it got built and she’s never had to pay the costs of it, drives a car without having earned it, at a cost which is the sweat of people who were never consulted about whether they would accept the sacrifice for her comfort, and now on her Trip to Peru she assures the press, thinking herself greatly conversant in the political and social world, that she has counseled the dictator Hugo Chavez to imitate her uncle Fidel. How ridiculous is this girl from the court? I can’t forget when, as an adult, she went to Argentina for the first time, and in less than a month returned speaking with the intonation of her father. She was greeted at the airport before a world cringing in embarrassment, in front of her uncle Fidel, who timidly watched her butcher the accent, a capricious cadence at a desperate speed.

And now she comes to us with her know-it-all airs, wandering the world with the people’s money and the memory of her father. I’ll never understand how there can be people who are proud of a man who ordered executions and who, himself, with his own hand, carried out the sentences. It seems to me that the figure of Che has been the image most manipulated in our era.

Now we have to endure this daughter of her father and niece of her uncle, who comes to us with her extremist actions that reaffirm, in addition to her genetics, the sentiments of her biological family and the work of her in loco parentis Fidel Castro.

As my aunt would say, “God save us, and take us confessed.”

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

January 10 2012

One.

In the distance, a horizon of clouds promised to relieve the temperature. From my bicycle I felt the comfort ahead of time, even though my sweat was forcing me to squint to see the semi-deserted road. On my back a backpack, inside it a bouquet of flowers.

The pedaling became much easier. Before arriving at the cemetery, a short slope slipped the tires almost to the corroded and faded double iron doors that lead into the sacred ground.

Sacred ground: crass euphemism. The depression of the cemetery of my city killed the dead.

So I arrived there. It was a Thursday in 2010, almost three in the afternoon. I was not going to visit my dead. I went for those of someone else. Those of a stranger who, from Miami, sent me on plea with his lovely mission which I had to read only once before taking it on as mine:

“I have read your blog with great pleasure, I ass that you live in Bayamo, the same town where I was born and from where I left when I was six years of age. I have never returned. I would like to ask you an enormous favor, I don’t know if you will forgive my daring to do so. Somewhere in the provincial cemetery rest the remains of my aunt Amanda. She died in a tragic accident when she was less than twenty, before I was born. According to my elderly mother, her sister was the most beautiful girl in the Bayamo of her time. Her eyes adorn the homepage of my personal blog. Would it be too much to ask you to look for her grave and put flowers on it in my name, and send me a photo so I can see the site where someone so important to us rests?”

Two.

I had only a name beginning with “A,” the year of death and the approximate month of the funeral. “Mama doesn’t remember well, Ernesto, forgive me for burdening you even more with this task.” So my search relied on two and a half pieces of data and a mountain of good will.

I was lucky: I happened on the most solicitous employee of that sad place. Cemeteries usually infect the living with their effluvia. The employee, with a translucent shirt he had to constantly pull away from his torso, bathed in sweat, and with thick glasses, put a book in front of me that seemed to hold all the truths of this world, and of another, never better said.

“Turn the pages gently,” he warned me. “Remember it’s nearly 50 years ago. Get ready for the dust.”

And there I passed my next two hours. In a volume of almost five thousand pages, written in pencil, deciphering the hieroglyphics of hurried and disinterested letters, trying to find the exact date of the burial of a lady I had never known but who was very important to someone else, a stranger. Once we knew the date she entered the necropolis, we would know the street, row and pantheon where her remains reposed.

When, a couple of hours later, the employee returned from a room behind me with the stub of a cigar in his mouth, I got up with a piece of paper in hand and some satisfaction in my voice:

“Street 12, Row 308, Grave 44 L.”

Three.

The pictures took longer than expected. Standing before the rectangle of cement that covered — like a headstone — the grave of Amanda who never made it twenty, I found myself not knowing what to do.

How to send images of such a scary place, with stinking weeds surrounding the edges of the sepulcher, a bent and rusty tin cross adorning the head, a powdery dust announcing the state of abandonment of Amanda’s grave.

I cleaned it. I straightened the cross as best I could. Without any tools, aided only by my hands and will, I cleared the site of weeds run wild. I pulled the flowers from my backpack, put them in a reliquary filled with water. My sweat pasted my T-shirt to my body. Overhead the clouds darkened the sky announcing their danger: a downpour and me on a bicycle.

Nothing mattered.

The image of a distant family, an elderly woman eyes moist, honoring with her tears the site of her beautiful sister; the image of a stranger hugging his mother, thinking about his aunt and putting into context the abstraction of his mythical Amanda; the beautiful charge of my enterprise absorbed every second of the afternoon.

When I was sure that some thirty digital photos would allow me to choose which ones to send off electronically, which would offer the best panorama, the most comprehensive, the least depressing possible, I thanked the employee with a handshake that represented myself and those exiled from Bayamo, and began to pedal once again.

Four.

No, the infamous downpour didn’t damage the digital camera. I did damage the gears of the bike which, without grease, made a noise like grasshoppers for several weeks. But the photos were safe. If I could manage to connect myself to the Internet (with my clandestine connection), in a few minutes a stranger’s afternoon would change completely.

Five.

“Dear Ernesto:

“You made me cry. I have cried for happiness and little for the melancholy of several members of my family. I will never know how to thank you for your gesture. Right now I’m a little embarrassed, when I can tell you more you will receive the mail you deserve. I just want you to know that in Miami you have one more family.”

Epilogue.

On February 20, 2011, two months and twenty days after stepping on American soil, an article entitled “Uncomfortable Freedoms” appeared on this blog. It was my position on the American restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba — which months later I addressed in other texts — where I responsibly criticized the positions of Senators Bob Menendez and Marco Rubio.

The day after this publication, my wife received a brief message on her cell phone. I will try to reproduce it verbatim:

“I can not describe how disappointed I am Ernesto. Your article seemed to me the most hypocritical and lamentable that I have read in a long time. What a shame, having once been a true patriot.”

I smiled halfheartedly. I had just win something like an enemy, who would not hesitate in the future to employ offensive epithets against me from his patriotic and well-known blog, and between us was raised an impenetrable wall of political posturing.

I never got to know him. The lunch date set for some weekend never came to pass. I was sorry I wouldn’t get to kiss an old woman who kept intact her love for her dead sister, that I could not tell her in my own voice the details of the day when I humbly honored the memory of her Amanda.

I carefully conserve the memory of a sweaty Ernesto, determined to clean an unknown grave, excited at the thought of causing happiness in a distant home. And since then I have also conserved an almost absolute certainty: I am not disposed to believe in libertarian yearnings, in the search for the well-being of a trampled Country, from someone who is not capable of refining his own human condition.

10 January 2012

The singer intones one of his old songs on the stage. The public presses closer, repeats the chorus, is moved to delirium. This week we’ve enjoyed one of the many festivals of trova music that have begun, this time, in Santa Clara province. With themes ranging from the romantic to the most contentious social issues, the event allows to to hear some happy new releases and other well-known compositions. Musical creation that had its golden age in the seventies, but that its now losing ground to more commercial and fast-paced melodic forms. Most young people don’t want to hear trova ballads with lyrics that speak of complaint or daily chronicles, they prefer to relax and enjoy themselves, to abandon reality, if only for one night. They go to the clubs to escape what is outside, not to be reminded of it. So those ideological tunes — alluding to the New Man or the society he will inhabit — have been thrown into the well of forgetfulness.

Despite the loss of popularity, there are still dozens of cultivators of the trova song tradition in Cuba. They sing for people who prefer to ponder daily life and its absurdities rather than run away to another dimension. There are also many of us who still shudder at the lyrics of Silvio Rodriguez, separated as we are from him by an abyss of political opinions, a ravine of philosophical positions. When it comes time to organize our musical — or literary — libraries, we’ve learned that the best idea is not to do it by party preference… if we don’t want to suffer the sad loss of numerous authors.

Beyond the quality of the chords and verses, a good part of the public seeks in trova ballads their ability to evoke past memories: a first love, a close dance, the difficult years, that day of the first kiss, or the concert where we met someone very special. They trigger memories, like Proust’s madeleine, but which enter through the ears rather than the palate. When the singer appears with his guitar in hand, he is, in reality, engaging us in an act of remembrance: taking us back to those times when we were so young, when Nueva Trova had not yet been totally faded by the acid of reality.

January 10 2012

He died as he had planned. It may have been a fit of improvisation. We will never know.

But the suicide of Alfredo, better known as ‘Package’ in the La Vibora neighborhood, is still discussed among neighbors and friends of this marginal mestizo whose 40 and a few years were spent somewhere between prisons and brief oases of freedom.

I knew him. He was a short, slow talking, lost looking and gloomy. When the neighborhood got to discussing who was the best hitter in Cuba, Rey Vicente Anglada or Alfonso Urquiola, holding forth in the doorway of Matilda, the only neighbor who would allow these late night gatherings, drinking alcohol with water that cost us 5 pesos a bottle from the home of the negress Giralda, ‘Package’ already had his history in the neighborhood.

One Saturday night at the home of a friend from high school, to the rhythm of Roberto Carlos, Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple, Alfredo arrived with his head down, casually smoking a marijuana cigarette.

We were all silent when he approached the group and asked, “If you want to try it, this herb is called Black Bird.” We stayed together and each in his way gave an excuse not to try the marijuana that briefly threatened to burn his fingers.

At that age, we felt a genuine respect, almost fear, for ‘Package’, a guy who had pulled nearly 12 years in prison. In the ‘bag’ (prison) he cut the face of another character of the neighborhood, ‘The Salted Soap’, the same specimen.

With that nickname, the best option to avoid him was to cross the street when ‘Salted’ passed, a bully after two liters of rum. ‘The Soap’ would die from a beating with sticks inflicted by the police, close to the then Tenth Police Unit at Avenue de Acosta.

Over the years, Alfredo inspired more pity than fear. He had shrunk and was chronically malnourished. And he was off in the head. I remember seeing him talking to himself in the early mornings or hatching outlandish plans in a seedy cafe at the corner of Calzada de 10 de Octobre and Patrocino.

He wasn’t a bad guy. He barely spoke and wasn’t a habitual drinker. He returned to prison for some petty crime. A few months after finishing his sentence he, landed in a mental hospital.

A few days ago ‘Package” killed himself. According to the neighbors his father was working in the yard when his son said, “Old man, take ten.” He took the machete, leaned against a wall and plunged it into the center of his chest as if it were a Japanese Samurai sword. Right in the heart.

He died instantly. Many neighbors are still wondering why Alfredo killed himself hara-kiri style “a la cubana.”

According to statistics, suicide is the leading cause of violent death in the world. Greater numbers kill themselves than die in war, and even traffic accidents, and the gang wars in Mexico.

In Spain, from 9 to 10 people immolate themselves up every day. It’s an epidemic. Cuba’s suicide rate is among the highest in the world. The regime does not like to mention that statistic. Nor report the stories of this red chronicle.

It’s a bad image for “a happy people, hospitable, who love to rumba,” according to the little sign in the official media. So Alfred, alias ‘Package’ was not news.

December 3 2011