Translating Cuba

The nothingness, the apathy, the wall at the corner to sit on, forever wasting time. The hero of the film “Juan of the Dead” was already acting like a corpse before the zombies invaded Havana, a city in fact shrouded and dead. This fictional antihero calls on his creativity and ingenuity – in the midst of chaos – to establish a blood-chilling business. “We kill your loved ones,” reads the slogan of the company he creates with other pals as dysfunctional as he is; its market niche is to hunt the living dead. An enjoyable script mixes humor and fantasy, special effects and unretouched reality. On this side of the screen viewers are caught between terror and snickers, watching the image of the Capitol destroyed by a helicopter and the emblematic Fosca building reduced to rubble. They laugh and cringe at the same time.
Directed by Alejandro Brugués, “Juan of the Dead” is causing a furor in the Cuban capital. It has provoked extremely long lines outside the movie theaters, some of which end up with police beatings and pepper spray falling on dozen of eyes. But the curiosity in this case has been greater than the caution. More than gazing on a story of beings taken from our worst nightmares, the public wants to decipher the second reading contained in the film. Especially in the scenes where hundreds of desperate people leap over the wall of the Malecon — into the sea — to escape a county where putrefaction is gaining ground.

Something of the automatism of the shock troops and of the mob prepared to attack those who are different, is also exhibited by these frightful creatures that the hero confronts and whom he can only overcome by “destroying their brains.” And Juan is a character of great irreverence, someone who, according to his own words, has survived “Mariel, the war in Angola, the Special Period and what came later.” Such that, between laughter and shrieks, the metaphor crumbles, it is more direct. And it ends up tossing into the laps of the audience, perched on their seats, the cynical but clear question: Won’t you also be like corpses, a faraway look in your restless eyes, like zombies with no future plans, walking along La Rampa*.

*Translator’s note: La Rampa is a long street running down to the Malecon, and the sea, the location of much of what passes for what is left of Havana’s night life.

15 December 2011

The Ministry of Interior Trade, part of the Central State Administration, is a purely socialist invention. It did not exist during the Republic. Created to control and distribute the misery, its physical inventory consisted of businesses, shops, warehouses, and other facilities that were seized or nationalized, before and during the infamous revolutionary offensive of the early sixties, which liquidated the remaining private property, nationalizing everything from department stores to fried food booths and shoeshine stands, to make them disappear in a demonstration of administrative incompetence and inefficient services. Living examples are the dark, unsanitary, and dilapidated warehouses that still survive, bearing little resemblance to the establishments they once were.

With a history of failures, regardless of who was in charge, the agency has tried out the most absurd methods of sales and service, each more outlandish than the last, from check-in by telephone in order to buy goods or receive services, to boxes in coupon books for food and industrial products, product convoys, long and unbearable lines, etc., up to the present when, pressured by the economic crisis, it has been forced to turn over to private individuals a few of its minor functions – mainly in the service sector, beginning with the lease of premises for hairdressers and barbers.

These places, mostly in poor condition and with outdated equipment, left to decay for decades, are leased under contract for up to 10 years, with a limit of three chairs per establishment. What a way to get started! The absurdity is that the Ministry’s Personal and Home Technical Services Company (what a name!) which has always demonstrated its incompetence, continues to manage the state property and assets that are included in the lease.

I wonder: How can the tenant invest to improve the building and its equipment? Does the Company deal with this? Do you need its approval? I really do not understand how two administrations can coexist on the same property: one real and the other virtual. A government bureaucracy has a hard time giving up its possessions and always tries to maintain an umbilical cord of control. After so many years of absolute ownership, however incompetent, it is not inclined to lose its privileges. If the cord is not cut outright, failure will continue playing at our doorstep, in any one of these convoluted new management systems.

December 13 2011

I had the exceptional opportunity as a Cuban islander to see the Movement of the Outraged in Spain. To tell the truth, they didn’t appear so outraged; they were, indeed, eager to improve their society, spoke in an organized way; the public waved their hands in the air for acceptance or turned their hands over in disapproval. In Valencia, in addition to being at the principal headquarters, I was at the meeting at Cabanyal, a poor neighborhood, but poor by European standards, very interesting; in that movement I saw the stamp of genius. And as has almost always happened, the demands of this movement will result in an improvement in their respective societies, open and eclectic.

In Cuba there is every reason to be indignant, although there are those who think it’s enough with the “outraged” or 1959. Those octogenarians should have retired long ago. Before history, the good that could have been provided will have to compete with the mountain of broken promises, or errors, of volunteerism.

In a society such as ours, no similar initiative could be formed without being discredited by the government as having secret ties with the United States. It’s amazing how one perceives the disappointment on the surface of society, but there exists fear and the people don’t want to be categorized as the puppets of another without being so. One of the achievements of the past half century has been the general paranoia of seeing microphones and G-2 agents at each step, believing that Big Brother is watching us. After this, no one wants to become indignant beyond the everyday catharsis, individual and anonymous.

November 23 2011

All societies require changes. Cuba, trapped in the past half century, requires not only changes but major changes. In the last three years the government has dictated some important steps but that importance lies not in their scope — quite limited of course — but in the government’s need to undertake transformations and to break down the stagnation that characterized the last decades.

The paradox is that the recent measures are simultaneously a step back and a step forward. A step back because after taking the wrong road against the logic of history, we are heading now toward the Cuba of 1958. An advance, because given the time lost overcoming the crisis to the return to the point of departure, and from there to correct the course. The concrete fact is that the Cuba of 1958 with its inequalities and injustices was in better shape than the Cuba of today to undertake a project of changes. Hence, the return is an advance that will allow a getting back on a course that never should have been abandoned. Let’s look at some of the measures taken since 2008.

1 – Decree Law 259 of 2008, which provides grants of land in usufruct is a retreat from the first and second Agrarian Reform Law, passed in 1959 and 1963 respectively. These two laws, on liquidating the landowners’ monopoly over the land, could have been the basis for the formation of a national middle class and a diversified economy. However, the turn toward totalitarianism wasted these possibilities. Almost all of these lands were turned into a great State-owned estate. Then, as a result of mismanagement and loss of interest by those who worked the land, the land was taken over by invasive marabou and other weeds; when the country had to buy 80% of its food from abroad the Government saw itself forced to dictate the decree mentioned above through which 1 caballería (33.2 acres) of land was distributed in usufruct, an arrangement that had to be modified to bring it into line with the Second Agrarian Reform Law of 1963, when up to 5 caballerías were offered.

2 – The Labor Reform, regulated by Decree Law 276 of September 2010 constitutes the recognition of the failure of the “full employment” policy, in which inflated payrolls were maintained in order to show the world the “superiority” of the Cuban system, against all economic logic. Now this decree leaves more than a million workers without employment, which represents 20% of the Cuban labor force, a figure significantly higher than the 1.7% unemployment declared in 2009 and also the unemployment that existed before 1959.

3 – Self-employment, including the latest amendments introduced in Decree Law 284 in September 2011, increased the number of permitted activities from 178 to 181, and added the flexibility to hire labor in some activities. This list of what is permitted, which for the most part is a legalizing of what already goes on, ignores the development of small and medium businesses. If the widening of self-employment has as its objective to put to work a share of the million and a half workers who are being laid off, and to generate goods and services that the State is incapable of providing, then that list of permitted activities will have to be abandoned and instead only the few activities not permitted should be defined. For the rest, citizen initiative will give ample evidence of its potential, much more so in a country like Cuba with such a high level of education.

4 – In 2011 Decree Law 292 was adopted, which established regulations for the transfer of vehicle ownership through purchase-sale or gift between Cubans who live on the Island and permanent or temporary resident foreigners. Also, Decree Law 288, similar to the former, allows the purchase-sale or gift of real estate. Another recent measure is aimed at barbershops and beauty salons, although the premises remain State property. All of these laws fall short of what existed in these areas before 1959, when cars, homes, barber shops, beauty salons and hundreds of thousands of goods-and-services business were owned by citizens, who could dispose of them freely.

To this must be added the widespread corruption that resulted from taking the wrong path. By eliminating the small owners and true cooperatives, the State enterprises became “estaticulares” — a term coined in 2001 that combines the words “state” and “private” to designate enterprises owned by the state whose earnings accrue to individuals. This results in a vast underground network of goods and services that cannot count on supplies of raw materials, tools, and spare parts, and generates widespread theft, which is known in popular slang as “escape, struggle and resolve,” words to describe actions taken to survive. This abnormality is strengthened by the low salaries, which has made corruption — which until 1958 was essentially limited to the political-administrative sphere — into the survival device that predominates today.

However, this return to the past is an advance relative to the present, taking ourselves back to the point where the tide turned to see if from there, and despite the delay and anthropological damage inflicted, we can get ourselves back on track. It is a possibility that depends on the deepening of the measures to bring us as close as possible back to the starting point. But it also depends on the creation and construction of a social structure that guarantees the participation of Cubans in decision-making and a conception of private property, in which various structures live together and cohabit, because property, be it individual, family, cooperative or state, has the social function of mobilizing the potential and initiative of people to produce.

In short, it requires, once we are back at the beginning, that Cubans be reconverted into citizens.

Published in Diario de Cuba on Wednesday, 13 December 2011 (www.ddcuba.com/opinion/8265-de-regreso-al-punto-de-partida)

If somehow I managed the unthinkable — five minutes with president Barack Obama — I think I would use the time to convey a clear message: “Do not veto the provision that restricts travel and remittances to Cuba, Mr. President.”

I don’t know if I would say to him what I have to my friends and family in Cuba, and which in my year in the United States I’ve never stopped repeating, with impertinent insistence, that to alienate Cubans on and off the island from each other is more than an injustice, it is a serious mistake.

But I would advise the President not to veto, in the case of Cuba, the budget bill that will be approved or rejected by Congress on the 16th, where the Republican Representative Mario Diaz-Balart cleverly slipped in a return to the Cuban travel and remittances policies from the time of George W. Bush.

Why? Because just as every people has the leader it deserves, each sector of a democracy has the measures it deserves, promulgated by the legislators it elects and deserves.

And while Obama’s veto would avoid the catastrophe of severing the ties between exiles and Cuba’s nascent civil society, and would prevent more than a little suffering among mothers who would not be able to see their children more than once every three years, I don’t believe it should be Obama, an American born in Hawaii, who should protect us from whomever we Cubans ourselves elect, or allow others to elect, and who eventually adopt laws against us.

Only those who cannot exercise their right to vote because they do not possess citizenship in this country are excluded (temporarily) from the blame. The rest of those in South Florida have signed on so that those with positions like those of Mario Diaz Balart seem representative of this community, and those who prefer to go shopping on election day will receive what they appear to have asked for, whether or not they exercised their rights.

The truly unfortunate are the almost two million Cubans living in the United States today, and the 1.2 million living in South Florida, an ever smaller percentage of whom sustain these alienating postures and restrictions that in more than half a century have not hurt so much as a hair on the head of the Castro brothers.

But it so happens that the true majority now has its hands tied because of one of two reasons: either legal impossibility or apathy toward the exercise of its rights, incorrigibly inherited from its days on an Island where the word “elections” has no mental resonance.

So who is left? Those who because of stubbornness, ignorance, lack of re-programming or opportunism insist on supporting a clearly failed policy, based more on the absence of ideas than on the dialectic of thought and societies.

That explains why it is not imperative to have an intelligent and bold platform in the south of Florida in order to have a rising political career; if you repeat the same chants, the same anti-Castro formulas, the same methods that have proved ineffective decade after decade, you’re more than halfway along the path to success.

It doesn’t matter that every day the facts prove that without the people who travel to the Island the cellphones don’t bring themselves and, in consequence, the images of repression cannot be shown to the world. It doesn’t matter that those like me who are newcomers shout ourselves hoarse saying that every Cuban who receives financial support outside the State is a much more independent and honest citizen than those who depend on the government to fill their stomachs. It’s not important to remember the basis on which this great country is founded: respect for diversity and individual decisions.

Therefore I, who advocate for all those who want to visit their family and friends being able to do so whenever they and their wallets decide (not the amendment of some congressman born in Fort Lauderdale, lucky for him), would applaud the president’s veto in the name of the consequences it would avoid, but if the man elected to decide the fate of this nation asked my humble opinion, I would repeat the same sentence: “Don’t veto the clause that restricts travel and remittances to Cuba.”

As long as there is no accountability and good sense on the part of Cubans in the exercise of their rights; as long as there is no awareness of what it means to elect those who promote policies respectable in their quest for freedom but that should be dismissed as outdated, there will be draconian laws governing the destiny of this community, and we say: welcome to the past.

I don’t believe it should be the president of the United States who, like a wise adult, makes the right decision in the name of the children. Rights come with responsibility, they are not received as an indulgence.

(Originally in Martí Noticias)

December 14 2011

In the lower left corner of my screen I have the Windows Taskbar. When I click it suggests different shutdown options:

Switch User

Log Off

Lock

Restart

Sleep

Hibernate

Ah, if it were only that easy! On the keyboard and over the mouse keys I have a monopoly on decisions, but in the realm of reality I can barely manage to blow the dust off my table. Cubans in exile approached our shores to launch fireworks. The newspaper Granma assures me they are terrorists. I saw groups on the Malecon in the rain, brought there in a bus with government license plates, and they want to convince me that it is the people spontaneously gathering to confront the provocations of “the employees of the empire.”

I get calls from almost all the provinces in the country denouncing arbitrary arrests, beatings of opponents and other abuses. On Sunday the Ladies in White try to march down 5th Avenue and are forced into official vehicles and taken away. There are people on hunger strikes, others prepare and sign documents, the Twitterers tweet, the poets do their thing, the movie lovers gather in the screening rooms of the 33rd Cinema Festival.

Nightly TV programming includes a science fiction film where a young man leaves the plane of reality and enters a computer game. I didn’t have nightmares, but on waking up this Monday I surprise myself trying to find a comparison between the options offered by technology and those I just haven’t found in reality.

13 December 2011

The recent case of censure against a reggaeton and all the virulent editorial campaign against it –through the official press- bring once again to the spotlight the topic of the cultural revolutionary politics and the controlling function of institutions. The absence of rights touches everyone, not just from the standpoint of artistic phenomenon (let’s generously refer to it as the reggaeton epidemic), but of the control equally exercised over cultural events, authors and the receiving public.

On the other hand, the fact that a subject with the rank of minister should devote his attention to mediocre work, and that an official academician should cast furious rays from her vain heights with pedantry almost as vulgar and coarse as the very song she criticizes, seems more a pose than the real intention to condemn what the cultural Olympus assumes to be an intolerable vulgarity. The confusion lies, then, in properly ascertaining the limits of vulgarity and limiting at the same time in what spheres of social life vulgarity will be allowed without it constituting a blemish in the purity of the “culture” of this people.

And I say this because I now come to realize such a host of memories about events that are vulgar, called and encouraged by the powers that be, that I find it difficult to see any consistency between the official discourse and its current claim to decency. I find it even more difficult to understand why the Culture Minister, sensitive as he is, has never acted against more severe cases of rudeness in which large groups of people engage. I maintain, for example, that the image of the aberrations of a multitude constitutes an unspeakable vulgarity; a crowd that offends, insults and attacks peaceful citizens expressing their dissent against the government, especially while dissidents elsewhere are referred to as “outraged”, and whose claims are said to be just. Yes, to be exact, our protesters are a group of women marching peacefully through the streets to church, gladioli in hand, calling for democratic changes and freedom. The vulgarity of the screaming hordes that attack them, which are, in addition, larger in their numbers, is extreme. If, besides that, we know that the mob has been organized and financed by the authorities, that vulgarity attains the category of crime.

I remember other similar hordes that more than 30 years ago reviled and beat any citizen just because he decided to emigrate via the Mariel boat lift or the Peruvian embassy. Those were the most vulgar and hateful scenes I have ever witnessed, and they were convened and powered by the Cuban government. The slogans at the time, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, down with the bunch of worms”, “let the scum go!” and so on, were just as vulgar and low-classed as today’s “acts of repudiation”.

And speaking of rude slogans, who doesn’t remember Felipe Pérez Roque when he was the president of the FEU, (University Student Federation) youth prospectus of the quarry of corruption, who Mr. F., with so much hope and such perks, cultivated so long ago? Back then, the future Cuban Chancellor introduced a slogan so vulgar that I doubt has been surpassed to this day. The misguided young man would cry out from his rostrum: “Reagan wears a skirt, we wear pants, we have a commander whose cojones roar”….” A rude and submissive ode to the supposedly sacred testicles wrapped in olive green; the same ones in virtue of which, years later, produced the deposing of the idolater who composed that wretched rhyme.

Spurring the vulgarity of the masses has been one of the most useful methods to turn them into the dictatorship’s instrument of the mechanisms of control. What decent Cuban doesn’t shake in the presence of limitless, unbridled and multiplied riffraff, blessed and legitimized as a manifestation of revolutionary zeal?

I still remember and I regress to the long ago March of 1972, when I had my first experience in the school in the countryside in seventh grade. I was twelve, and one of the smallest kids in the camp “The Marquis”, in the fields of Güines. I endured, like other girls, the hard agricultural work on the muddy furrows, the damn thorns that dug into my hands, the sun, the hunger, the fatigue, the promiscuity in the huts with their horrible rebar and jute bunks, the punishment of the mosquitoes, the filthy outhouses, the cold baths, the remoteness of the parents, the lice epidemics that endangered the survival of my two long and very black braids. I thought about running away that first Sunday, when my parents arrived, but just a few days after our arrival at the camp, one of the girls decided to leave with her father, who went to visit one afternoon in mid-week. The girl walked quickly, holding her father’s hand, her wooden suitcase in hand. They immediately convened us as a group to follow her to shout in chorus: “Flunky, flunky, weakling, bitch” over and over again, while they followed her menacingly to the outskirts of the town. The camp director’s specific instructions were to show that girl who was afraid of hard labor the difference between a revolutionary girl and another one with “petty bourgeoisie residues”. There was so much violence in that act that it impressed me deeply. I swear I did not shout or follow them. I stood, rooted to the floor, scared, ashamed. Other girls also froze in terror. That day, I knew that I would not leave, for I was so afraid that they would do the same to me. That girl never returned to our school. Her parents had her transferred to a different one. Our high school’s name was “Forjadores del Futuro” (Forgers of the Future), life’s ironies. This present was our future then. After becoming an adult, I have often thought of the damage that such repudiation, both verbal and orchestrated by a very revolutionary teacher, must have caused the adolescent. I never heard about her or of that teacher. I hope that, if the teacher is still alive, she feels very ashamed of what she did.

For decades, decency became a lag, a kind of stubborn crust of the capitalist past that held back the development of “revolutionary intransigence.” The schools that proliferated in the coountryside from the very early 70’s and ended up being mandatory, multiplied these evils. Children, now separated from their families, lost the values that their parents had forged over generations. The coexistence and mixtures have resulted in uncontrolled sexual precocity, the multiplication of abortions, messy relationships, often between students and teachers, the loss of privacy, the blurring of the individual in a group, and the standardization of vulgarity. Whoever did not dare utter a curse were “flies”, prudish. You could not be out of tune with the group: all mixed-in, all alike, all vulgar. And those who were not, pretended to be in order to fit in or to avoid public ridicule.

Those waters brought this mud. The following years would be responsible for strengthening the vulgar egalitarianism which assumed the worst values as the best, and imposed them as the norm. We all know the results: today, vulgarity pervades almost every corner of Cuban culture. Any kid in grade school uses the grossest words with an ease that would be the envy of a truck driver, anybody expresses the worst insults in a bus, in a public place or in the middle of a simple dialogue with the lightness and grace typical of one who is reciting a sonnet by Lope de Vega. That is the standard in today’s Cuba, and one of the burdens that will be hardest to surmount in the near future, though now a stern professor and a minister are, surprisingly, stirring against the shocking vulgarity of a reggaeton that masterfully reflects to what level of blatant vulgarity the most cultured people* in our planet have sunk.

*Translator’s note: An oft-repeated claim of Fidel’s.

Translated by Norma Whiting

December 2, 2011

They were all arrested because they didn’t want to stay inside their house. Cuba is not a jail cell. The house is not a jail cell.

12 December 2011

The International meeting held in Havana, Society and its Challenges of Corruption, caught my attention. In a society overwhelmed by disaster like ours, the Cuban delegation would have to expose a scenario of the failure of all the social theories upheld my Marxist ideology, that, setting aside Marti, could not be further from Marti-inspired ethics. The “moral literacy” has come to be — of late — like treatment with painkillers when there is a lack of third generation antibiotics.

The government is alarmed at the phenomenon: The Comptroller is created: we are told about those ousted sotto voce. Each time, a brief note in the inside pages of the newspaper Granma announces the process (behind closed doors) and the sanctions.

In no part of our legislative body and administrative rules do there appear to be authorized charges to deliver gifts, to limit the value of such gifts, the quantity, nothing. Our officials have resources according to their will, while the higher the office, the greater the resources. By this means we can reach the famous “Comandante‘s Reserve,” an inexhaustible source in the literal sense, because delivery of the consumable was carried out automatically (gifted), it was put back in the inventory.

Throughout this half century, we all know someone who has benefited by that power of the leaders, either with a car, a house for living or for vacation purposes, trips, and so, down the pyramid of power. Intermediate officials only had to imitate, each according to his possibilities. They are co-responsible for the present corruption, but no theory will come to differentiate between bureaucracy and power as these antagonists behave.

With regards to this expert meeting I repeat: The wolf can not be sent to look after the sheep.

November 10 2011

With just one click from his holy finger, he lit the most colossal Christmas tree in the holy world 220 kilometers from his holy dwelling. So says the Guinness Book of World Records: the tree rises 750 meters up the side of a mountain in Gubbio, Italty, and is a record And this tree was lit by Benedict XVI from Rome using a $500 Sony Tablet.

Thousand of my readers who are engineers could explain the mystery to me: how to implement a mechanism that, via satellite, lights far off bulbs with the single touch of a button on an electronic tablet. But one thing I do know from my own common sense: This mechanism is expensive. In spades.

His Holiness saw the result of his click on a modern LCD wide-screen TV. Perhaps he saw the image and thought to himself: “At this point, making miracles is a little bit easier.”

If he changed the channel and put some of the cameras in the Vatican, he could also see the Christmas tree that he ordered for the House of God, which will be lit this coming December 16th: it is a fir tree 5.6 meters high brought from the Ukrainian region of Zarkapattie and ornamented with 2,500 figurines in gold and silver.

This is not the most fascinating thing. That is what happened three days earlier, on December 4th, from his balcony facing the Plaza of St. Peter: the Holy Father exhorted his faithful to practice austerity this Christmas.

During the recitation of the Angelus, Joseph Ratzinger said that the Lord, “of riches he became poor for your sakes and he will make you rich through your poverty,” and he remembered the humble John the Baptist, whom Jesus himself admired above all those who “lived in the palaces of kings and wore luxurious clothes.”

When the absurd is too grotesque, there is only one reaction: silence. Perhaps a little introspection. For my part, I would dare to ask something of the advisors — or whatever one calls them — of Benedict XVI in these days of prayer and rejoicing: that they tell the Pope, if he ultimately goes to Cuba in March of this coming year, it would be a good idea to sell the Sony Tablet beforehand.

I know that the tithes only go from the faithful to the Church, never the reverse, but with $500 he could feed a lot of the mouths of my people, and by this date Christmas 2.0 will have already passed.

December 8 2011