Translating Cuba

The Cuban Revolution has always raised great passions. Millions within and outside the island are split between those who applaud and offering moving excuses, or those who clench their fists and launch incendiary accusations. But without a doubt, among the picturesque barbarities that flourish under the tropical sky there is one that is particularly atrocious: the condition of semi-slavery affecting public health professionals. To shed some light on the matter, I suggest you follow me through this attempt at a chronicle.

Imagine for a moment you decided to study medicine in Havana and graduated in 1994, during the worst economic crisis in our history. Some of your friends from high school, who take life a little more lightly, decided to raise and sell pigs, open their own businesses, or start working in tourism. Once you graduate, after six years of personal sacrifice, you naturally aspire to live honestly on your salary, but it starts at 231 Cuban pesos a month, that is you receive less than two dollars for a whole month’s work for almost two years.

From time to time you run into a friend from high school, who has bought an elegant car, as compared to your raggedy bicycle. But you want to get ahead so you devote four more years of your youth to study. After a total of ten years study (combining medical school and your specialty), you end up as a specialist in internal medicine, with which, given that specialty, your salary will be around 531 Cuban pesos a month, Meaning you will work a full month for a salary equivalent to $21 U.S. Meanwhile, a barman at a hotel earns $200 U.S., on one shift! The customs official at the airport earns $500 U.S. extorting the tourists, and this is 25 times the monthly salary of a doctor, again, on one shift!

This abysmal difference in living standards is the root of our dramas. Painfully, in Cuba, the well-being of your family doesn’t depend on your dedication to work or on your desire to excel, nor on the respect shown your profession, which also illustrates the chaos that has ruled our lives for the last 20 years. It is in this jungle where our doctors “fight,” not living in the encouraging world of International Cubavision TV, where the Revolution continues strong and victorious, with GDP growing 10% a decade, while the little guy suffers an economy in ruins, a complete divorce from reality, as if we are talking about two different countries.

Faced with such a hostile reality, our doctors have to invent miracles in their free time to feed their families, badly; make “magic” in the black market, work as a photographer, clown, carpenter, shoemaker or cosmonaut, always illegal, because up to a few months ago the Ministry of Labor prohibited, by Resolution, access to self-employment.

Suppose that you, a specialist in internal medicine, decide to go for a second specialty. After another four years of great sacrifice you graduate, for example, as a surgeon and now your monthly salary is augmented with 50 Cuban pesos (just over $2.00 U.S.), which is enough to buy four bars of soap. Thus, while a surgeon’s monthly salary is 623 Cuban pesos ($27.00 U.S.), a guard in the Specialized Protection Services, after a one month course, earns about 1,500 Cuban pesos monthly in cash, plus extra food and toiletries, while a cop on the beat receives up to 1,600 Cuban pesos, plus other benefits. For some obscure reason our government believes that doctors don’t merit such deference.

After getting over your shock, you say, “But come on man! If a salary isn’t even enough to buy toilet paper, become a barman, a customs inspector, even the security guard at the hospital will make out better!” I would respond: My friend, the leaders of my country literally turned the sacred practice of medicine into the famous tunic of Nessus — the poisoned shirt that killed Heracles; our doctors cannot work outside the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) because a Labor Ministry resolution categorically forbids it. No entity outside MINSAP is permitted to offer a doctor work. Can you comprehend it? But you meditate on this and your face lights up: “Emigrate! To some country that needs doctors, at least temporarily, while things improve.”

Then I ask you to make yourself comfortable and listen carefully to the good part, because here it comes…

Everything you’re read up to this point will seem like a game of little girls playing in the convent garden, compared to how you will live if you decide to travel outside Cuba as a doctor and Cuban citizen. In July 1999 the Minister of Public Health issued Resolution 54, still in force, whose details I don’t know and nor do our workers, as they are hidden from us with the zeal of a State Secret. This Resolution of Ignominy, as we call it, is the most humiliating insult inflicted upon those who embrace the medical profession in Cuba since the coming of Columbus. It states that if you want to permanently leave the country, or even do so temporarily, you must ask the Minister of Public Health for “liberation” from the sector.

That is, if the happy idea occurs to you to visit your family or friends abroad during your vacation, you must wait an obligatory five years of your life at a minimum (!!), during which you will be held against your will by the Ministry of Public Health, with no options. It doesn’t matter if you just graduated or if you’ve been working for 30 years, both have to wait five years! I know, personally, cases held for 7 years before their “liberation.” Even retired doctors and dentists are held for three years before being allowed to travel; even a nurse faces this aberration!

Let’s clarify that from the moment that you begin the paperwork to travel, you will automatically be placed on a list of the “unreliable,” and will be relieved of all your administrative posts and teaching positions, if you have any, and you will be transferred from your job to one further away and that is a demotion. As the years pass marriages break up, children are traumatized, parents die without seeing their children again.

I can’t adequately describe the human suffering that is caused by the monster to those who see their rights undermined, but none of this concerns the Union or Parliament: they can always blame the Cuban Adjustment Act for your death if instead of resigning yourself you improvise a raft and end up devoured by the sharks. As you can see, under such circumstances to speak of semi-slavery is much more than a euphemism.

*Footnote: As of two decades ago, two currencies circulate in Cuba: the Cuban peso (CUP), also called “national money” — in which workers receive their wages — and the convertible peso (CUC), also called “convertible currency” — which is used in the chain of hard-currency stores that accept only this money.

EXCHANGE RATES:

1994: 1 CUC = 1 USD = 140 CUP

Since the late 1990s to 2001: 1 CUC = 1 USD = 21 CUP

September 2001 to today: 1 CUC = 25 CUP

(To be continued …)

August 17 2011

Between the 2nd and 3rd of November in the Taganana salon of the ancient Hotel Nacional, within walking distance of Havana’s waterfront, works from the giants of Cuban art were auctioned off.

The sale, which took in some $600,000, was a part of the tenth edition of the Havana Auction, an annual art auction on the island, this time consisting of 110 lots with a total starting value of $1.2 million.

They included pictures from notable artists such as Wilfredo Lam, Wilfredo Lam, Mario Carreno, Rene Portocarrero, Amelia Pelaez, Servando Cabrera Moreno and Tomás Sánchez.

The Havana Auction leaves many unanswered questions. Its director, Luis Miret, curator and gallery owner, in an interview with the digital edition of the journal Arteamérica, made known that the initial idea started a decade ago with the National Arts Council.

In expert language with a feeling of business, capitalism style, this gentleman, or comrade(?), in various segments of the conversation justified the decision of State institutions to undertake these sales, with the assertion that the works of Cuban artists are severely under-valued in the prestigious international auction houses, New York’s Christie’s and London’s Sotheby’s, commercial centers for art worldwide.

Cuban art is not the only one sold at low prices. If we look at Latin American painting, we see that it is also undervalued. The sale of 61 works by the most sought-after Latin American painters — a list that is led by the Mexicans Rufina Tamayo and Frida Kahlo, and on which figure the Cubans Mario Carrreño and Wifredo Lam — brought in just over $122 million. A minimal figure, if we take into account that on May 4, 2010, a single painting, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, painted in 1932 by the Malagan Pablo Picasso, brought $110.2 million at auction.

Mr. Miret’s other excuse is how they embrace him for his kindness. In the interview, the curator notes that these auctions are a good way to get a fair price for the works of the “poor little” painters of the patio, who usually sell to independent patrons at bargain prices.

And, he alleges — imagine it after drying your tears — that he has created a fund of two million pesos (I don’t know how many valuable pieces you can buy for such little money), for the acquisition of key works of today’s artists, paying 50% of their value.

The “goodagent” Miret also looks as if he is acting for different auction houses in the world. It’s a question of business. Nothing more. What the official media hides, as does, of course, its fervent promotor, is that part of the money coming in is credited to the “artists of the people.”

Nor are we informed what the Ministry of Culture does with the dough obtained in the ten editions of the Havana Auction.

Do they repair the theaters closed dozens of years ago? Do they put some paint on and seal the leaks of the Houses of Culture? Maybe they think about rehabilitating municipal museums. But I’m afraid not. There are no good intentions hidden behind this artistic looting.

Almost all the works auctioned are from key painters on the cultural map of the green caiman. They are not run-of-the-mill paintings. The majority are from already deceased artists and their legacy forms a part of the national patrimony.

Just over $600,000, according to the announced sales figures, is chump change for any government, no matter how poor it is, as is the case with Cuba. Even hundreds of millions of dollars would not justify raffling off the creative treasure of a nation.

It’s nothing new that the Castro brothers’ regime uses artwork and jewelry to obtain hard currency. Since the late 1980s, in the so-called “gold houses,” valuable paintings, porcelain and top quality gold and silver jewelry were exchanged for color televisions, audio equipment and Russian cars.

Cuban intellectuals should oppose these depredations of local and national heritage.

And the charitable Luis Miret, who wants us to see that beneath his brand-name shirt is hidden a noble heart, incapable of harming anyone, banged the gavel after the conclusion of the sale of a work of Cuban art. Indeed, his name sounds familiar.

Photo: Guitarist, by Mario Carreño, was picture most quoted the Havana Auction 2011. Its starting price was set at $200,000, but we don’t know how much they finally paid for it.

November 14 2011

A stone’s throw from the corner of Galiano and Reina streets, huddle some twenty movable stalls. After nine on the morning, Rodobaldo, a tall and lanky man from Guantanamo without a permit to live in Havana, opens his junk shop where he sells T-shirts for 7 convertible pesos, girls’ sandals for five, and Nike tennis shoes for 45, “they’re authentic” he says.

By noon there are so many people they knock into each other like the bumper cars at a fair. From one stall someone shouts, “Buy your panties here, they’re the latest fashion.”

In another timbiriche — a local term for these micro-enterprises — a fat mulatto unhurriedly eats bread with a little fish, fanning himself with the Granma newspaper. When he sees some customer approaching, he tries his best Colgate smile, and shows off a wide variety of trinkets.

In a doorway a guy who looked like a gambler, openly played the list of the “the little ball” — the clandestine lottery. We call him René. His wife sells jeans, socks, and low cut tennis shoes that she buys in bulk from people who make a living moving goods from Ecuador, Venezuela or Miami.

“Sales in this area of Central Havana are usually very good,” says René. “Yeah, there are a lot of shops. But we offer the best and the cheapest of this stuff. I dedicated myself to the game, but I was a born loser. With the money I put together I buy large quantities of clothing from some friends who frequently travel to Ecuador and bring back tons of textiles and costume jewelry. It’s not going badly. And of course I play the lottery,” René reports while taking a good swallow of white rum.

When you walk through Havana you notice how the ambulatory stores are dispersed. Selling anything. Religious objects. Pirated discs. Or clothes and shoes.

Whether in Central Havana, Mantilla, Marianao or Vibora, at any central point, you see a rolling wardrobe full of cheap goods. According to Marlen, a bleary-eyed mulatto, the business pays enough for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

“It’s not a fire sale or anything like that, but I get by. On a bad day I look to earn between 15 and 20 convertible pesos. This from 9 am for ten hours, sitting on this wooden bench,” says Marlen.

The legal self-employed can’t escape the fiscal blade.

In October of 2010, General Raul Castro, overwhelmed by an economy going down the tubes, productivity in the basement, and inflated payrolls, without much bureaucratic rigor or controls, authorized 178 private professions, which later increased to 181. It’s what it is.

What was that object? What purpose was served by its polished surface, its rounded shape? Why did Grandma keep it at the bottom of a drawer with her most intimate clothes and some letters written to her half a century earlier by her first boyfriend?

My sister and I occasionally stole the box — lined with black felt — where this object that looked like a lightbulb or the handle of delicate door resided. When our younger cousins came from a provincial town, we boasted to them of our Havana slang that rang out in the slum, of the black and white TV displayed in the living room, and especially of that golden ball of glass, around which we wove a mountain of inventions.

Without its cantankerous owner seeing us, we decided the delicate sphere owned by our mother’s mother had once belonged to a princess. We fantasized that this possession was all that remained of a past life, the only clue connecting our family to the lost lineage of its predecessors. And extremely naive kids that we were, we believed, looking at our reflections, that something like this could only have belonged to an exalted family like that of Scheherazade, or the Queen of Sheba, or even of King Tut himself.

One afternoon it slipped from our hands and shattered on the floor of the tiny room where we had grown up. The crystal had a bright layer of dust inside and that night our grandmother’s slipper left marks on our backs. When August came around and our “peasant” relatives returned, we now knew that the beautiful golden ball had been only an ornament, a simple decoration for a festive tree we had never seen. I was about to turn eight and it would be nine more years before I would approach, for the first time, a Christmas creche.

But the anticipation, the herald that something that existed beyond the blunt reality, had come to me with that painted glass that a Spanish immigrant had saved among her most cherished possessions. This same Galician, now settled on the Island, told us in secret of a child born in the hay among the lowing of goats. She narrated the story of Jesus in a whisper, because our parents, at that time, were passing through their period of greatest atheistic bigotry.

The building, the neighborhood, the school, the whole city, lived hiding scapulars, praying in whispers, covering up the images of the Virgin behind some book about Marxism or a red flag. In their bras, under their blouses — sewn in or fastened with pins — old women carried crucifixes with the image of another bearded outlaw, one who had not come down from the Sierra Maestra. To show even the slightest faith in Him was one of the fastest ways to make problems for yourself, surpassed only by the act of professing another ideology. So we learned religion and suspicion at the same time, discovering a cosmology and its denial together.

Months after the ball broke against the floor tiles, my sister and I lived through another gray December that ended with neither tiaras nor crowns. On December 24 we got itchy, because we knew that in other places green branches stood in the middle of living rooms, surrounded by lights. However, in our prudish Real Socialism, on our Sovietized Island, nothing betrayed the hidden celebrations that many held indoors. We went to bed early.

The following morning Grandma took longer than usual in the bath, and through the blinds we managed to hear a brief “Amen.” Christmas was over. All that was left was to wait for the end of the year, when, between spoonfuls of rice and beans, a piece of pork awaited the first light of January and the anniversary of the Revolution. This is what our December was reduced to, a national holiday, a man in olive green proclaiming the start of a new historical era that never fulfilled its promises of redemption.

But the restless girls who had broken that crystal orb, that quasi-magical object, would never be the same. Some of the golden dust that flew from the broken glass settled over our lives. It made us wary, not with credulity but with skepticism, suspicious of the masks of materialism rather than of the poses of religious dogma. It turned us into beings distrustful of that red card that forced one to hide a cross near your breast, to cover it with the black felt of fear.

Originally published in Letres Libre

25 December 2011

I want to share with readers, colleagues and visitors, the good wishes that radiate from my Cuban tree of hope.

[On the tree: Implementation of Human Rights. Market Economy and Social Solidarity. Free and Democratic Elections. Separation of Powers. Subsidiary Principle. Participative Democracy. Respect for Diversity. Direct and Secret Vote. Citizen Sovereignty. National Dialog. Multiparty State. Common Good. Justice. Peace.]

May the light of Bethlehem light your way this Christmas and in the coming year, and the Family of Nazareth be a permanent and living reference for us to defend with discernment, prudence, and wisdom our rights and desires for peace, justice, freedom and democracy for all.

A very Merry Christmas and a prosperous 2012.

Havana, December 2011.

“Don’t be naive,” “You’re going to be left with a packed suitcase,” friends everywhere tell me, with the best of intentions. But an inmate always dreams that the door will open, that the jailer himself will take the keys and draw back the bars. Instead of immigration reform, the highlight of what was announced in the National Assembly yesterday was limited to a pardon for 2,900 prisoners. A subtle way of telling us that real cells are easier to eliminate than bureaucratic ones, that a certificate of release can be signed more quickly than the repeal of the exit permit. I don’t know if Raul Castro could comprehend the frustration caused by his words yesterday, the discouragement generated by the absence of the announcement his own spokespeople had predicted.

I put my suitcase back in the corner of the room, rearranged my plans for Christmas Eve and called my mother to confirm that I am staying. I imagine that in thousands of Cuban homes today they are celebrating because their relatives will soon leave some sordid penitentiary. But I also know that on this December 24th there are many who feel cheated, once again deceived. How much time does government need to erase the limitations on movement that it itself imposed on its citizens? Is it possible that in this country the word “gradually,” or the phrase “we are working to implement this or that measure,” is, in reality, synonymous with “never.” How can they continue to justify something that no longer has any ethical or legal form to sustain it? When will a presidential pardon arrive for those condemned not to enter or leave their own country?

But I don’t want the government’s immobility to make me sad in these days, nor let the stubbornness of our authorities spoil my Christmas festivities. Instead, at midnight I will empty my glass, hug my son, outline my future plans for 2012. For a short time, I will forget the bars, erase from my mind the image of a General who grants indulgences, who plays with the life of whole nation, and calls what is simply fear: Taking small steps.

24 December 2011

This video came to me on a flash drive. I found it interesting because it’s about the school where my son recently finished his high school studies. Rafael still hasn’t seen it since he is now in what is called “the prior” — the first part of the year of military service that boys must complete before starting higher education.

The images in the video are familiar to me, I remember them from when I taught. With the strength of the image, each person can draw many conclusions. I love professor Fidel when he “clarifies”: There are many things in this school that really… could produce a viable change with regards to the situation that occurs at determined moments.

The video is above.

October 5 2011

For some time here the leaders of the Cuban government have been given to talking about diversity and defending the importance of respecting this in different groups of people in our national home. It’s a positive discourse, of course, but something rather “tricky” if we take into account that it only refers to the social and cultural which in our country is always imposed with militaristic criteria from the seats of power. But perhaps it is the sowing of a seed — I tell myself — of the context for a transition towards which Cuba seems to be beginning to “crawl,” toward a society of openness in which we all can walk. I don’t want to be too innocent, but neither do I want to be too skeptical about some curtains that seem to be moving, although they still won’t let us open the window.

The Cuban government is going to integrate “in its own way” into the world and needs to legitimize itself with slow and calculated steps, into the community of democratic nations in the world, most concretely in Latin American, where it is the only one that currently has a single-party system. With its radar focused on this hemisphere — keeping in mind the recent creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, CELAC; its partial reconciliation with the Catholic Church which covers the majority of the continent and is a force for action — although with great fear of losing power; timidly instructing and ordering as Party concession the spaces and socio-economic achievements and policies we used to enjoy in society and that they took from us on violently coming into power.

After almost fifty-three years, these steps are the tacit acknowledgment that their model failed and they are preparing the society for its incorporation into the democratic world when they are no longer. However, it is illogical to talk about diversity only for a part of the social fabric. For a people subjected for decades to assimilate this concept, it should cover the entire spectrum of national life, including the political. It should legitimize political parties and respect for the human rights established by the United Nations. Diversity in everything and for everyone should be the motto, which is synonymous with pluralism and rule of law; if not it is a euphemism for the repression of progress. To offer it in a partial sense, according to the interests of the state is demagoguery, at least I think so.

December 13 2011

It came carefully wrapped in a page of the newspaper Granma, but bore no relation to that official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba. The dull wrapping was just camouflage, the mask under which a copy of The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel was hidden. The friend who first brought it into our home had been ousted decades earlier and was expiating his crime in some forgotten department of the public library.

Like the Czech playwright and politician, our supplier of “banned literature” had shown his concern over the entry of Soviet tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968. For Havel, his position had cost him the banning of his work, harassment, and even prison, while our acquaintance had better luck and only lost his promotion, the possible Soviet-made Lada car he might have earned, and his wife — who could not stand living with someone without privileges.

This shared ordeal might have brought about the sympathy expressed by that habanero in his fifties for the man who would become the first president of the Czech Republic. He spoke of him as if they had shared space in Tvar magazine or in Charter 77, with the camaraderie of a cellmate.

Punished politicians have an immediate predisposition to solidarity among equals, and recognize and admire each other from afar. So, more than once, in informal gatherings and conversation, the gift-giving librarian declaimed fragments of Democratic Ideas: The Arms of Freedom. It was his obsession and also became ours.

Words live fighting with power, culture rarely has access to the political heights. Its creators wash their hands of it and assert – not without a certain hypocrisy – that they aren’t interested in public office, that government is something dirty that ends up paralyzing the pen and muddying the soul. And they have a good point, as the historical misfortunes of president-writers and artist-ministers confirm.

But still, we must not settle for the reign of the ordinary and the regency of the mediocre. Fortunately, once in a while creation and political office are not mutually exclusive, ideological play and the beauty of language come together in one individual. Coming from the theater, Vaclav Havel was familiar with the deceitfulness of human nature, with the certainty of its masks and its moods. Poetry provided him spiritual armor, an essential inner courage to survive in a totalitarianism whose favored weapon was the invasion of privacy.

His own literary work probably saved him from suicide, from being paralyzed by the ostracism this kind of regime directs to nonconformists. The man of letters never let the political animal get the better of him. Nor did prison manage to convert him into screaming leader demanding a rematch from the podium.

He knew that from the other side of the stage the audience could applaud or whistle when the spectacle ended, he was prepared ahead of time for the vagaries of popularity. Havel was a scriptwriter. He decided to write the libretto of his days and left the secret police nothing but the ability to scribble a few glosses on the margins of his life.

A portion of Cuban intellectuals – who even today won’t admit it – was captivated by this rare specimen of poetic writer and activist. Few dared to publicly profess their admiration for the leader of Civic Forum, or to acknowledge that they read his texts. But the truth is that when certain breezes of Perestroika blew over the official media of this island, he was one of the most common references among journalists, novelists and playwrights.

The cult of Havel kept its voice down; only a few of the intrepid, like our ousted friend, dared to leave the house with one of his books under their arms… of course it was always wrapped. The Czech president enlarged the pantheon of banned faces and censored figures. We lost Havel, as we had lost Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Milan Kundera. Because, as he himself said, “Between the plans of the post-totalitarian system and the plans of life there is a deep abyss.” We wanted to learn more of Havel, but in the Plaza of the Revolution they always had other ideas about what we should know.

Last weekend  Vaclav Havel died, just at the time when he was most read in Cuba. He left and we can’t hear his voice in a classroom of our University, nor listen to his extensive collection of anecdotes about the years of Soviet control. Raul Castro’s government still hasn’t made the slightest public allusion to the death of the Czech democrat, but it decreed three days of official mourning for the death of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Il.

Of this latter, the official media of his country say that he wrote more than 1,500 books over the course of his life. None of them, today, is reading material for us. However, the author of The Garden Party (1963) and Temptation (1986) is increasingly well known and admired. Like missionaries of a peculiar religion, many now distribute his works, and spread his writings across the Island. But, in an irreverent and defiant gesture, they no longer hide the covers with the monochromatic pages of Granma.