Translating Cuba

In a country where the politicians are puppets of a histrionic megalomaniac, their loyalty in the process of extinction, it was logical that politics would displace the empty womb of the neighborhood, its ovaries dying of boredom and horror, and that a Cuban woman in her kitchen cooking up Cuban food would take Cuban nylon bags to her Cuban husband, imprisoned perhaps for life in a Cuban jail.

In a country where the opposition and independent journalism are not only infiltrates, but function as a de facto most secretive branch of State Security, where the customary and counterrevolutionary anger is channeled and controlled, it was logical that the rebellious spirit would be reincarnated outside any dissidence and its digital string of complaints.

In a country where the last thing that happened in the streets, in January of 1959 (half a century or half a millennium ago, infra-national paleo-history) was the eternal treads of a tank crammed with the “bearded ones” with their charismatic weapons, it was logical that tomorrow’s illusions would announce themselves now on foot, without the cannon of the future nor complicit charges to kill the rascals (just a few with white shoes, almost barefoot, like in the worst patriotic poetry).

In a country which maintains behind closed doors a claustrophobic reserve against the word, with inertially headless ministers and headlessly inertial police, where suspicion is synonymous with survival and lying is the only remaining reason of the State, it was logical that the silence of gladioli held high would resonate, flaming and ephemeral swords, petals sold cheaply by the self-employed, decapitated flowers from Sunday to Sunday as a sacrifice of love (a sentiment so archaic).

In a country there the protagonist is punished (only the amorphous mass is legitimate), in a country sandwiched between a precarious present and the notion that only a fight to the death is fraternal, where exile is taken and treated like a disease (an ailment to which hypocrites and the non Hippocratic alike aspire), in a cult-of-personality country even after the cult of Maximum Personality (Alma Pater), in a country cauterized of civility and where evil is materialized with constitutional status, it is logical that the best souls die or they make them die (under the indolent magnifying glass of the mocking majority).

Goodbye, Laura, Lady in White.

In Cuba whoever speaks aloud the temptation that in the end there is a promised land, must pay the unpronounceable price of not being able to live here. Cuba as a scaffold. Who risks themselves here assumes the truth of their biography, they will be digging their own gospel in peace. Cuba as a plot. The official reality is One, and the demagogue cannot allow himself the luxury of pluralizing his decrepit speech. Cuba as an immovable cosmos. Sad interminable tragedy.
In the debased throats of our compatriots, in the air stuffy like a dominating socialist spray in the face of idyll of the international left, in the ugly photos of the executioners on stage and in the anonymous assassins also as props in the play, in the secret solidarity and the timid sympathy, in the amateur marches (open like gaps in the totalitarian city crazed by a power as despotic as popular), in the forgetfulness of our intimate pettiness (on the island as in the diaspora), in the implausible shame of our descendants, here and there will remain an echo of the insults which gave them no tome to stone you.

Like a nation on the verge of disappearance, we must ask of you the impossibility of forgiveness in life. Cuba as a life sentence. We, the surviving dead.

Adiós, Laura, Damísima de Blanco.

Originally published in Diario de Cuba.

October 16 2011

www.thestarklife.com/2011/11/03/el-sexto-cubas-graf-king/

This article can be read at the original site – STARK: A Digital Culture Magazine – here — along with the accompanying images. The original article is in English.

EL SEXTO: Cuba’s Next Graf King

Danilo Maldonado may be the new face of revolution in Cuba, but he’s no politician. As El Sexto, he’s one of Cuba’s most notorious graffiti artists, and he finally shares his undiluted story.

Words: Aimstar
Images: Courtesy of El Sexto.

El Sexto means the sixth in Spanish. It’s also the title of the fourth novel by Peruvian writer José María Arguedas based on his experience being held captive in a Lima prison during the dictatorship of Oscar A. Benavides. When it comes to the art world, El Sexto is a play on Cuban political propaganda by the infamous graf king and art activist, Danilo Maldonado, who tags the name and his elaborate manifestos throughout the city of Havana. No stranger to the downsides of making street art, El Sexto shares all in his first interview since being apprehended—he says “kidnapped”— by Cuban government officials for his creative movement that is steadily building momentum.

Translator’s note: These posts are a series of comments Regina has posted in the blog “La Joven Cuba.”

With regards to exegesis, one could say that Lenin was the first revisionist, a tendency that we in Cuba know in passing. I say in passing because they didn’t study the texts of Gramsci, Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg; Trotsky was the antichrist. Marcusse did not qualify as a Marxist. I speak of the years before the fall of socialism.

After reading your work [in La Joven Cuba], it seems that not much has changed in the landscape, with the aggravation of the cited “Cuban socialism,” where there will be many adaptations, but not a single philosopher, where I imagine those booklets full of quotes from Fidel. How could it not be mission impossible to pretend thatFrankenstein motivates a student !

Continuing with the exegesis, we may come to the conclusion that Marxism has passed from being a theory; that in Russia in 1917 and Cuba in 1959 there were social revolutions that undertook a semantic adoption of terms, but did not give rise to the embryonic communist, that Marx was right in saying that social formations have to be exhausted to bring about a change.

Clearly one has to be open to new philosophical currents. Marxism is 150 years old and the world has changed in a way that neither Marx nor anyone else could imagine. Therefore it would be better to study Marxism as one more doctrine while we concentrate on finding solutions to bringing the country out of the economic crisis and the crisis of values that it is in, without looking for labels, without putting everything under the ideological microscope. If we even have the luxury of a José Martí, we don’t need to look any further.

January 13 2012

The Grandchildren of the Cuban Revolution from Carlos Montaner on Vimeo, with ENGLISH subtitles.

Crushingly, even the elementary school textbooks still repeat in Cuba today the media coup of Fidel’s phrase: “In 1956 we will be free or martyrs.” From the mouth of someone convicted of armed rebellion, it was little more than a threat. In fact, it was a battle cry against the then dominant national security.

As the months ran out nothing happened. Fidel reiterated his slogan in articles published here and there. He played it in public, but in fact he was running out of time. The year was nearly gone. And the young exile didn’t want to call for his own suicide, as Eduardo Chibas had done when he couldn’t stand behind his word in front of the whole country.

It was a time of facts and acts, when the word (as in Genesis) was freely convertible into real events. To speak was the most cunning weapon. It was a moment full of players and soon death would play a starring role.

Today, in contrast, everything seems to have a less foreboding tone, a muted urgency, survivable without great effort. Fortunately or unfortunately, the leaders in Cuba have lost their ability to manipulate tomorrow (politics here is the art of the past). Whether on the official side or from the opposition, all are a puppets of the precarious present. It’s as if the customary fatigue prevents them from raising their heads (and, on consequence, their vision). So now people can afford the luxury of accepting or ignoring this or that discourse, always without over involving themselves. At the end of the day they are just that: discourses (the blah blah blah of barbarism).

Without the hysteria of the visionaries (Gimme an F!), there is no upheaval of History (Gimme an I!). Without proactive people (Gimme a D!), there would never be a post-nationalism (Gimme an E!). Without the hypocrisy of honor as an accomplice to horror (Gimme an L!), there would never be new concepts of the truth (What does it spell?!).

For the powers-that-be the euphoria of their aesthetic statistics is no longer enough to create consensus. Nor are their peregrinations in the streets or their digital pamphlets enough for the opposition. In the end, all change is violent.

So, to break this infra-national homeostasis, we need to bend the chronological curve of the Cuban Revolution, anachronize its process, arm another narrative machine of equal effectiveness (falseness). Invoking, for example, milestones of heroism unimaginable up to the moment of their utterance. Give dates and them meet them with heroic rigor (the rhetoric of rigor mortis).

Each jail cell or cadaver called (not necessarily the actors, but first of all the public) will then be a bit of change. Only such theatrics can draw back the curtain of tedium, making our story plausible to the media of the world. Ah, but will the peaceful opposition be able to pull off such a script banishing the despotism in real time? And to what extent would it result in the power to keep alive the idyllic novel of its unique voice?

One young leader survived 1956 without liberating anyone around him that year. We already know that promises will not be the most important, but the greatest impact.

The years have nearly run out.

Originally published in Diario de Cuba.

November 5 2011

The 14th annual Festival of French Cinema, June 2 through the 23rd screened in various venues from La Habana to Rialto de Santiago de Cuba, having brought 20 feature fiction films and 6 documentaries that attracted thousands of spectators who attended theAcapulco, Chaplin, Infanta, Yara y Glauber Rocha cinemas.

Organized by ICAIC, Cuba Film Archive, the Alliance Francais, the French group ‘Cinemania’ and the French Embassy, the event is sponsored by the French Institute, Air France, UniFrance, Peugeot, Havana Club, Ciego Montero, Occidental Miramar, and other corporations. As in every year, an artistic delegation attends, consisting of directors, actors, screenwriters and promoters, who present their films and grant interviews during the first week.

The dramatic solidity, the variety of schools, the virtuoso performances, the originality of their stories, and the leadership of the producers mark the return of Lumier’s disciples, in whose films the dilemmas of French society become tangible, in harmony with challenges from other latitudes.

In the 2011 edition, the director Jacques Perrin and his co-writer Francois Sarano – creators of the impressive documentary ‘Oceans’ – took part, opening the exhibition on Tuesday the second in the Chaplin, and were on again on the 12th. Phillipe Lioret, producer of the features ‘Welcome’ and ‘Mademoiselle’, the producer Emilio Maille (The Crazy Life), and the actors Ronan Choisy (The Refuge) and the Cuban actress Yahima Torres, lead role in The Black Venus all came.

Without a competitive character, French films circulate through our theatres like a celebration of island culture that fertilizes the footsteps of that country’s immigrants among us since the 18th century. Since we’ve come to expect works that entertain and make us think from Gallic cinema, the viewers pursue premiere tapes like the cycle that pays homage to the multi-award-winning actress Sandrine Bonnaire, the protagonist of Mademoiselle, The Queen Plays, The Ceremony, Vagabond, Our loves, and the documentary Her name is Sabine, her directorial and screenwriting debut.

Within the mixed selection of Sandrine the emphasis is on Mademoiselle, awarded the best actress in the Festival of Romantic Film in Cabourg. Along with Jacques Gamblin and Isabelle Candelier, she plays Claire, a young woman without a history that works as a traveling doctor and is married with two children, but is transformed when she meets a half crazy actor transformed into a sad clown by forces of joy.

Movie buffs are also seeking out “The girl from the train,” by director Andre Teclune, a 2009 story about a lie that turns into a political event highlighted by the media; “God’s office,” by Claire Simon; “Of Gods and Men,” by Xavier Beauvois, inspired by the lives of the Trappist monks kidnapped in 1996 in an Algerian monastery; “Black Venus,” by Abdallatif Kechiche; and the documentaries “La vida loca,” a Spanish-Mexican co-production about the rivalry between the Mara 18 and the Mara Salvatrucha gangs in El Salvador and “Brook by Brook, an intimate portrait,” in which playwright Peter Brook talks with his son Simon about his career in theatre, cinema, and opera and about his travels.

The Black Venus, played by Yahima Torres, Andre Jacobs and Olivier Gourviet, takes up with grace and ease the mythical Hottentot Venus, the pseudonym of Saartijie Baartman, a beautiful young South African from a tribe that impressed nineteenth century westerners with their spectacular buttocks.

The program is filled with the most allusive works of French cinema, such as Welcome, The Shelter, The Tempelbach Children, The Song of the Bride and documentaries that blend fact, art and fiction, such as Phaedra, Operation Luna, The Rabbit Hunter and Ray Lema: A World to Share.

Image taken from:mao-en-el-corazon.blogspot.com

Sunday, November 27, we woke to the “red” news of a death in the neighborhood. On the Goicuría block between Freyre de Andrade and Espadero, in Vibora, Havana, they stoned a man whom they said had a bad social attitude. I couldn’t find out much, because the neighbors — given the secrecy of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) — were unaware of the details of the case. The surrounding population did not show much interest in the event, because they were upset that the eggs hadn’t arrived at the shop and they weren’t going to come the following day, either. So I went from shock to outrage in the blink of an eye.

My neighborhood is fairly quiet — with the well-known exception of a person they extradited from the United States some years ago and who today is in hiding for having stabbed the sector chief of the PNR — so the lack of repercussions from this event among the local people came as a surprise. Two or three hours sufficed to spread the news of this Pedro Navaja*; after which interest waned in the search of something to put on the lunch plate, the required protein (or something like it) and some other vegetable to accompany it, along with the Sunday movie.

Some might think Cubans are lazy, but that’s not the case. It’s that we don’t have any time to look around when so many of our problems are not resolved and the majority of society is worn out by the fight for daily survival and almost no incentives exist beyond the horizon.

When we have a government whose leaders — with few biological-strategic changes — are the same ones we’ve had for half a century, helping the rest of the world while neglecting their own national home. The government has “instructed” us to ignore the events of the capitalist tabloids in order to put us to sleep with their own daily social, caudillo, and political chronicle. However, I hope that some day we can have a free press where events such as these can be told, among the many others that interest the population, and that we will have the option to “turn the page” to another through our own election, as we finally pass beyond the history of this long political process that has been imposed on us.

I hope to be there then, although surely — by repeated practice of my freedom of conscience — the variety and focus of the topics dealt with won’t be any different than they are today.

*Pedro Navaja is the title of a song from the Panamanian salsa singer Ruben Blades, who was very popular in the ’70s.

December 13 2011

The pronouncement of the Cuban Workers Center (CTC), regarding the measures taken by the Government to deflate workforces and to bring about greater self-employment, published in the Journal of Communist Party on September 13, 2010, is a good reason to discuss the dependence of the Cuban labor union movement with respect to the State.

According to some paragraphs in the document: “The leadership of the Government has been working on a set of measures to ensure and implement the changes necessary and urgent to introduce into the economy and society …; In correspondence with the process of updating the economic model and the economic projections for the period 2011-2015, the Guidelines provide for next year’s reduction of more than 500,000 workers in the state sector …; Our state can not and should continue to maintain businesses, productive entities, of services and budgets with inflated payrolls, and losses that slow down the economy …; the union is responsible to act in its sector with a high level of demand and to maintain systematic control of the progress of this process from start to finish, taking the appropriate actions and to keeping their superior organs and the CTC [Cuban Workers Union] informed… “

Both these paragraphs, like the rest of the document, show the total lack of independence of the CTC. There is no mention in them of the interests of workers, which the organization supposedly represents, such as the failure of wages with respect to the increasing cost of living, violations of the conventions of the International Labour Organisation that have been ratified by the Cuban government and the helplessness of the workers in the face of the administrative arrangements, such as the massive job layoff that is taking place.

To understand the impact updating the model will have on workers it is necessary to understand the process by which the labor movement was denatured.

The Cuban unions gave the first signs of life during the substitution of wage labor for slave labor. The creation of the Association of Cigar Makers of Havana, the first strikes and the establishment of regular workers, since 1865, prove it. The growth and strength of this movement led to the establishment of the great twentieth-century labor unions, which, resting on the freedoms and rights recognized by the Constitution of 1901, achieved considerable benefits, particularly in terms of wage increases and reduction of the duration of the workday, while playing an important role in major political events such as the overthrow of Gerardo Machado regime in the general strike on August 5, 1933: an unprecedented event in the history of Cuba.

The strength achieved by the labor movement was reflected in events such as: labor legislation passed in this period included the legal existence of unions, the right to strike, the eight-hour day, minimum wage for sugar workers, stable employment, holidays and sick leave and maternity pay, among other measures that were expanded and supplemented in April 1938 with Decree 798, the most important Republican labor legislation and one of the most advanced in the world; many workers demands became laws for the benefit of workers. The economic autonomy of the unions was reflected in the acquisition of properties, such as the construction of the modern building of Carlos III by the Electrical Workers and their leasing it to the Electric Company, the construction of the Havana-Hilton hotel by the Gastronomic Union and their leasing it to the Hilton chain, and development of the Grafico, by the Graphic Arts Union.

However, the destructive germ of that movement had been brewing since 1925. In that year, almost simultaneously, they founded the National Workers Center of Cuba (CNOC) and the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). Then, in 1934, with the founding of the Cuba Revolutionary Party (commonly called “the Authentics”), a struggle began with the Communist Party for control of trade unionism, which worsened in 1939 with the dissolution of the CNOC to make way for the founding of the CTC and, in 1944, with the Authentics victory in elections that year, so that during the celebration of the 5th Congress in 1947 — there were actually two conferences: one controlled by the Authentics and the other by the Communists — a ministerial resolution declared the Authentics Congress legitimate, at the expense of the Communists.

The subordination sharply manifested itself before the coup d’etat of March 10, 1952. The then Secretary General of the CTC, Eusebio Mujal, who had called a general strike against the coup, accepted an offer from the Batista government in exchange for preserving the rights acquired by the CTC, which dealt a severe blow to Cuban labor. In 1953, with the resurgence of labor strikes, the Authentics union leadership was trapped: if they supported they strikes they would be in conflict with the government, if they didn’t support them they would lose the workers movement, and Mujal opted for the latter: an alliance with the dictatorship.

The government that took power in 1959 needed to shore up union support for its project, and a general strike from January 1-5 served to consolidate it, and was used to create an illusory image of the role that workers had played during the insurrection. However, on January 22, 1959 came the first blow to trade unionism.

The CTC was dissolved and replaced by the CTC with the surname of Revolutionary (CTC-R). The resistance to such intention was swift. The Humanist Labor Front was created, where 25 of the 33 federations of industries joined together under the slogan Neither Washington nor Moscow! This opened a period of conflict that was resolved at the Tenth Congress in November 1959, where David Salvador, appointed Secretary General of the CTC intervened, when asked by an observer of the Social Christian Movement, about what was then the plan for the workers, David responded firmly and laconically: “Whatever the Comandante [Fidel] says.”

Faces with the division, the then prime minister of the government, Fidel Castro, proposed a vote of confidence for the candidacy of David Salvador, leaving out the most prominent anti-Communists. However, after the Congress, the Labour Minister, Augusto Martinez Sanchez, did what the government could not do during the sessions of Congress: He began a process of dismissing the officers of the unions, and interventions in the and federations, which was not completed until they had a majority in the leadership.

Already by the XI Congress of the CTC-R in 1961, there were no traces of the former workers’ movement. For the first time a candidate was put forward for each position and every delegate, representing the Government, renouncing almost all the historic gains of Cuban unionism: the nine days of sick leave, the extra Christmas bonus, working a 44 hour week which was constitutionally increased 9.09%, among others.

The coup de grace came in 1966 during the XII Congress (which I attended as a delegate for Santiago de Cuba) in which Lázaro Peña, then Secretary General, was dismissed. Thus unionism came under state control and the CTC became an appendage of the Communist Party to control workers. The results of the subordination results were reflected in the 1976 Constitution, in which only six articles of Chapter VI are dedicated to the rights of workers, and ignore almost everything achieved by the union movement since the creation of CNOC 1925.

The process described was a consequence of considering that people are reducible to a form of organization where people act as mere implementors, which corroborates the undisputed proposition that autonomy is impossible without the existence of a genuine trade unionism.

In the current situation, i.e. in the absence of a genuine trade unionism, the Cuban Government, after exhausting all possibilities to survive without change, is undertaking some reforms under the name of updating the model, which will have a strong negative impact on workers with regards to the degree of helplessness in which they will find themselves before the State, which allows the State to decide for itself and is limited to seeking support for the workers, as evidenced by the current Statement of the CTC-R.

If the current government plan does not address the rights and freedoms that unions require to enable workers to move from the present mass condition to being true subjects of economic management, that is, that they can earn wages corresponding to the cost of living and that being an entrepreneur is no longer a privilege limited to those not born in Cuba, the State will face a new and resounding failure. There is no alternative: Either the independence of unions will be restored or there will be no update of the model.

November 12 2010

Image taken from: http://www.hechosdehoy.com

Rodney is a mischievous and happy child who is a little confused, because since he became a pioneer in October he does not fully understand the slogan “We will be like Che!” It is true that he has incorporated it like the rest of his classmates and repeats it as if he had a sensor that operates at certain stimulus. His parents and grandmother say that Che is the black spot appears on T-shirts, posters and on national television; that it is the poster of a photo that made him famous. they tell him he is also a martyr, but what does a child of six years understand about a champion? How many times will they have to repeat that the neck-scarf is not a rag for him to use to wipe his snot?

Last week, the school principal summoned his parents, because an extremist teacher ‘saw him’ stick gum on the bust of Marti that is in the patio. It really wasn’t her, it was another student who discovered the rubbery polymer in his hand and told her about it, but it is for her to “take on the case” because she is an educator and knows that the father of the student speaks ill of the government loudly.

As if it were a profanation, she was the highest authority with the information and so obliged to proceed, and she threw out the grave threat of “elevating it” to a higher level. So the parents came to the school and the director raised the issue with repeated interventions, and threatened to go to the police specializing in juvenile matters, and this mention set off the dissident father who ended the meeting.

This all set off such a commotion that Raul Fidel, the boy who really put the gum on the apostle’s face, arrived home terrorized and told his parents and grandparents, who know that an insignificant childish prank will not define the adult.

He told them that at the end of recess, he was fixing the velcro on this shoes and that he raced back to the classroom, spitting the gum out into the wind. His father and paternal grandparents have a long record in the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) — the father entered the Camilitos (the Camilo Cienfuegos Military School) when he finished sixth grade — and all hold high military rank.

So they put on their uniforms, hung all their badges and medals on them, and set off for the school. They were gang under the direction of the leader and they called the teacher on the carpet who apologized and praised “our glorious combatants of the FAR and the Interior Ministry.”

The surprise in her face, the gesturing excuses, the throwing aside of educational culture, anything not to look for trouble or a stain on her work record. That was the burial of an “ethics education” that saved Rodney from being wrongly accused because his father expresses himself freely in a country where we walk morally herniated due to the shackles of slavish thinking and the weight of words.

December 13 2011

A couple of days ago I was at home with two friends and, as usual, we returned to the “single topic.” On this occasion we were analyzing what the changes — what is happening now — could be called: the right to buy and sell cars, the right to buy and sell houses, licenses to open barber shops and beauty salons.

We came to the conclusion that the only thing that could call itself a change lately, was the way the new laws they are passing come to terms with, as the absolutely normal beings that they are, people with different inclinations and sexual practices.

As for the rest, it’s not about changing anything, but simple reestablishing the rights that have been violated by the same regime that now appears to be kindly awarding them to us. Rights that were torn from us for half a century, and that they now would have us believe are changes that don’t exist.

It’s said that many others will come at the end of the year [2011] including possibly travel and emigration related ones. Wouldn’t it be easier and much more fair to lift all the prohibitions they themselves established? Respecting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Cuba is a signatory, would be a good start. All the rest seem to me to be palliative, bandages, that seek to heal the great wounds caused by the system itself.

In my view, this all could be a smokescreen to hide the great economic, social and moral crisis into which they’ve sunk the country. Meanwhile the people are excited about legalizing the purchase and sales of homes and cares, which should have never been illegal, just outside the law. Immersed the hassle of red tape, the lines, the taxes you have to pay, and so on, no one has time to think about the fact that they don’t have any food to put on the table. Meanwhile, the farmers markets and shops are empty, and the civil records offices are packed.

Despair grows in the population, and the leaders are struggling to make us believe in changes and improvements, but the fact is that to date, these new laws have not led to major improvements in the standard of living of citizens.

November 19 2011