Translating Cuba

Laura Laura Laura, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

Days without Laura, Damas without Laura, Democracy without Laura…

October 15 2011

And now, what do we do?… What right do we have to continue breathing, treading on this Island that she so defended in the face of insults, threats and beatings?… I know that “to die for the Motherland is to live”*, so why are so few interested in living and prefer to live in silence, which is the worst of all deaths?  What stuff was the Lady made of that, if she were granted the opportunity to return and change her position regarding the dictatorship, she would prefer to stay dead in spite of the sorrow of her family and grateful Cubans?

My mother used to tell me that in general good people live short lives, in contrast to the dictators. Could it be that having done one’s duty exonerates you from continuing to suffer? Laura, go in PEACE, you deserve it. We will try to gain that peace that makes us so proud when we speak of you… We will pick up from the ground the gladioli that the hordes tore up, and each of them will give birth to ideas, feelings, unity, millions of flowers protected by the tenderness of your hands…

As you taught us, each tear they made you shed is a hymn that encourages us to not give up. We know that in the morning light you will return for the rest of our days, and that inspires us. Your white figure will be a way of making us recall your attitude and conscience for history…

May we be able to earn that life in which you now live, having justified staying on this Island you defended until death – it will be the only way in which you will live for the Motherland. And then may it not be the dead who raising their arms will still know how to defend her**. It will be us, possessed by your spirit, who will conquer the yearned-for freedom.

Only thus will your death be a lie.

Translator’s notes:
*Words from the Cuban national anthem.
** Words from a Cuban poem.

Translated by: Espirituana

October 15 2011

In the same days when Laura Pollán lay dying in intensive care, Cuban television rebroadcast a dogmatic serial where they insulted the leader of the Ladies in White. Among the most notable signs of the Cuban government’s pettiness is its failure to respect a political adversary, even when she is dying. A system that so wallows in the funeral rituals of its own, shows no consideration when the time comes to deal with the deaths of others. This lack of compassion compelled them to deploy a crude police operation outside Calixto Garcia Hospital last night, shuffling her body from ambulance to ambulance so that we wouldn’t know to which morgue they were taking her. And, finally, they did not release even a short death notice in the national press. If honor honors, in this case denigration denigrates. They have lost a final chance to appear, at least, to have pity.

How do they feel now, all those women brought to scream insults in front of the door of 963 Neptune Street? What are they thinking right now, the members of the shock troops who shoved and beat Laura on September 24? Is there any remorse among the State Security officials who directed so many repudiation rallies against that peaceful lady in her sixties. Which of them will at least have the humility to mumble a condolence, to offer sympathy. Sadly, to all these questions the answer is still an infinite ideological rancor that doesn’t know how to pay tribute to an opponent. Laura has gone — has left us — and they lost the opportunity to repair so many atrocities. They believed that by hanging degrading epithets on her, preventing her from leaving her house, accusing her of being a traitor, “stateless,” they would prevent people from approaching her, from liking her. But in the dark hours of the morning, a funeral filled with friends and acquaintances rejected the effect of their demonization.

Laura is gone and now all the acts of hatred against her resonate even more grotesquely. Laura is gone and we are left with a country slowly waking up from a very old totalitarianism that doesn’t even know how to say “I’m sorry.” Laura is gone, to the sadness of her family, her Ladies in White and of every gladiolus that has grown and will ever grow over the length and breadth of this island. Laura is gone, Laura is no more, and there is not a single olive green uniform that looks clean in the face of the white radiance of her garments.

October 15, 2011

Laura Pollán was initially admitted to the hospital on October 7th for respiratory failure and was subsequently reported to be suffering from Dengue Fever. She died of heart failure October 14, 2011.

All photos by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

15 October 2011

To El Sexto, arbitrarily detained Havana graffiti artist

The tires squeal, the car doors fly open, three men pour out, all produced by the same mold: strong, military haircuts, cell phones clipped to their belts. There is no possible escape. No neighbor will provide refuge, the curious move away, frightened, and potential witnesses won’t want to talk. They force you into the car without showing you an arrest warrant, nor even an ID showing they belong to the police. The license place is private so as not to leave any institutional trace. Nor are the blows accompanied by any stamp or signature, not so much as an acronym. You have just fallen into the hands of the Cuban “paramilitaries,” those political police who never wear a uniform, who have the power to break all the laws, to lock you up in the absence of any crime, and to take you for a “walk” while shouting their threats and sinking their knees into your abdomen.

More and more often the methods of the mafia are found in the ranks of State Security. Their impunity even upsets the regular police, who watch as these guys with aliases fill the cells with detainees never entered into the station’s incident book. The practice of fishing on the margins of the law has become routine for the restless boys of Section 21, who feel themselves to be members of a select body who can block anyone from any place, or forcibly detain them, even inside their own homes. They are trained not to listen so it’s not worth the trouble to fill their ears with phrases such as, “I am a citizen, I have rights,” or “I want to see a lawyer…” or “What crime am I accused of?” For them, their victims are not individuals protected by a system of laws, but merely “worms,” simply “vermin”… those whom a despot like Gaddafi, in his time, called “rats.”

And there you are, inside that car that is a black hole swallowing the Constitution which should save you, encircled by the muscular arm of someone who calls himself Agent Camilo or Lieutenant Moses. For now, they are only going to frighten you, but in the future — when you are more daring — they will be tempted to scratch you with their fingernails, push your head into a bucket of water, play games with electric current and your testicles. Because when the government creates structures that are not accountable to any law, there is no possible defense for those who oppose it. These paramilitaries of today are the thugs of tomorrow. These elite forces, who project themselves as defenders of a dying system, may find their hands don’t hesitate to kill. They have already proved their frenzy by stopping abruptly in the street and forcing you into a car. The next thing they want to see running is your blood.

13 October 2011

How can an admired writer be turned into an alleged and persecuted anti-social? How can one pass from being a creator of stories, a prize-winner, read, respected, cited, to become part of the social evils which, according to the all-powerful authority, it is necessary to mercilessly eradicate?

The answer is very simple: Live in Cuba. And distance yourself from the powers-that-be.

When I met Ángel Santiesteban, some seven years ago, I still hadn’t read a single one of his stories. Later I would regret it, on looking over the most overwhelming volume of stories in recent Cuban literature: The Children Nobody Wanted, that kind of stinking garbage where a phenomenal narrator tells stories of convicts, cattle killers, prostitutes, rafters and crazed war veterans.

Even before the iron friendship that binds us both, a reality about his work seemed certain to me: with just two books of stories known to the Cuban public — published against the will of the publishing industry: The Children Nobody Wanted, winner of the Alego Carpentier Prize, and Blessed Are Those Who Mourn which brought home the Casa De Las Americas Prize, turned Angel Santiesteban into an author fiercely pursued by the Island’s readers.

While the works of the cadaverous National Literature Awards gather dust on the shelves, the books of Santiesteban are undetectable ghosts: there is not a single one in any bookstore. They have all been bought or stolen from the libraries.

I think of this now that the name of Angel Santiesteban has become a bad word in trembling Cuban literary circles, now that he has been stripped of the social status his voice once earned him. I think of this now that the anxieties of an author with so much to shout about found freedom in a personal blog, and who now has a 15-year prison sentence ever more dangerously hanging over him.

Did he imagine that one day it would come to this, that the unbridgeable distance between him and the dictatorial government that rules the fates of his Island would turn him into a cursed writer and citizen?

“Someone warned me, before I started the blog, that it could cause me a great deal of adversity,” he confessed to me. “I thought it would be on the order of censorship, relegated to the cultural media, which I was already familiar with. But I never thought they would manipulate people close to me, that they would invent such a long and perverse script to discredit me and leave me all alone.”

Feeding the grudges of an old marital relationship, State Security showed signs of an imagination almost as fertile as the writer’s: today Ángel Santiesteban is accused of rape, theft, and attempted murder of his ex-wife, charges that carry a penalty of more than 50 years in prison.

“They have been lenient with me,” Angel says sarcastically, “proposing that I accept nothing more than 15 years behind bars.”

They constructed the story without evidence, without witnesses, without definitive facts: that’s the least of it. In the same country where you can be shot for your beliefs; where 30-year sentences are handed out for writing on typewriters, today it is possible for a valuable writer to be accused of murder, rape and theft without proof. And the worst of it: to be made to pay for it.

“The last time I was invited to the Book Fair as a valued writer was in 2008,” Angel told me, and my memories surge, unavoidable: during those meetings he was in my city more than once. “When I spent three days in Moron, Ciego de Avila, on returning to my hotel at night from the literary activities, I was informed that my reservation had been cancelled by the organizers of the Fair. That night I slept at the house of the taxi driver who drove me, and in the morning I went back to Havana.”

The worst, however, isn’t this. The worst is not going from an idol to a pariah. The worst is not no longer being called by any institution in Cuba, interested in having you read your stories at their conferences about contemporary writing, in their chats with readers. The worst is not this.

How have they damaged his work? How is it possible to survive in a hostile country and still maintain a creative rhythm, maintain your healthy and coherent work?

“In some ways there has been a positive aspect,” Angel admits, “because they’ve helped me to change my style a little, I have written a book of stories of the absurd. But on the other hand, sometimes many days pass when I don’t create. They have succeeded, I wouldn’t be human if it didn’t affect me, and I accept that without shame. I’m not just constantly anxious about the defamation, nor even the beating where they broke my arm. This doesn’t even compare to the terrible reality that for two years they haven’t let me see my son. This is my true martyrdom. Although in the end, inevitably, I end up taking refuge in literature.”

Most of his friends have distanced themselves. Forgotten his telephone number, forgotten his apartment and his street. “They don’t want to commit suicide, culturally speaking,” says Angel, and without his knowing it something like guilt and remorse came over me because I know that I, like the writers Amir Valle, Alberto Garrido, Jorge Luis Arzola, like so many others we love and admire, we have also left him a bit alone, scattered to the United States, the Dominican Republic, Germany, and search of a happiness and peace that we know we can’t find.

I like to think of Ángel Santiesteban like our Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Too many similarities exist between this tropical Havanan and that Russian dissident who with a couple of books, (A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago) not only won the Nobel Prize and immortality, but also gained the eternal respect of those who worship freedom.

The day when this grey storm comes to an end, and the meetings and reunions take place; the day when we can start from scratch to build a better country for our children, the blessed like Ángel Santiesteban who has written so much and mourned so much, will be our intellectual guides and our written memory so that we will never again make that mistake.

(Originally published in Martí Noticias)

October 12 2011

Text on Poster:
Havana 11 October 2011 8:49 PM
El Sexto
The famous Havana graffiti artist Daniel Maldonado, known as “El Sexto,” has been kidnapped by State Security. Security officers forced him into a white Lada [Russian-make car]. His whereabouts are unknown.

http://hablalosinmiedo.blogspot.com/2011/10/afloran-detalles-sobre-secuestro-de.html
http://elsextocuba.blogspot.com
dmmelsexto@gmail.com
danilomaldonado83@yahoo.es

The traveling cake vendor stopped at my door. He wanted to know the address of the lawyers who could help him. I asked him about what his “upper management” was doing, and he sadly replied that the person couldn’t (or didn’t dare or didn’t want to) resolve the problem. For those who don’t understand, I wrote “Bitter Cakes” first and then “Stale Cakes” with the background of this story.

“I’m going to go see them now because I have nothing to lose,” he said.

October 12 2011

A woman, the owner of a recently opened snack bar, responds to the inquisitive questions of a reporter about her use of the public space. In the evening, her statements along with many others will be broadcast in an extensive television report about the invasion of common areas by the new private businesses. A very controversial topic. On one side are those spending their own money to build a counter, or to enlarge it to serve more customers, and along comes a demolition order for having extended into areas that don’t belong to them. On the other side, we encounter many passageways which, like certain entryways and walkways, are giving up space to the advance of construction extending from inside the houses. But it is notable that the penalization of this urban encroachment is not applied to everyone with the same severity. The state seems to have a free right-of-way — literally — to invade spaces, pushing pedestrians out into the streets, or constructing the greatest atrocities without any accountability to the people who live there.

In the neighborhood where I live, for example, a hotel covering an entire block rose at an incredible pace. Initially it was planned as a shelter for the patients of what is called Operation Miracle, but for about a year, responding to the laws of supply and demand, it has opened its doors to the public. This institution — without the consent of a single neighbor — stole a part of the sidewalk of Hidalgo Street. Where before there was room for us to walk by free from the danger of cars, the enormous building now has its truck loading area, an ugly ramp where there are never any vehicles unloading goods.

The damage appears to be irreversible in this case, because unlike the improvised constructions of individuals, here we’re talking about a mass of concrete which no one could cut a piece out of. People on foot, many of whom come out of the market and who used to walk along a sidewalk protected by curbs, feel like it’s not even worth it to complain. “It belongs to the State and you already know…” they tell me when I try to call for volunteers to protest. And the saddest thing is, they’re right. Not even the incisive reporter who criticizes the expansion of certain private businesses on prime time news, will prepare a story about this piece of the city they have taken from us.

12 October 2011

This article will appear in the November print edition of Foreign Policy Magazine, and is available on their website now.

At the end of his July 31, 2006, broadcast, the visibly nervous anchor on Cuban Television News announced that there would be a proclamation from Fidel Castro. This was hardly uncommon, and many Cubans no doubt turned off their TVs in anticipation of yet another diatribe from the comandante en jefe accusing the United States of committing some fresh evil against the island. But those of us who stayed tuned that evening saw, instead, a red-faced Carlos Valenciaga, Fidel’s personal secretary, appear before the cameras and read, voice trembling, from a document as remarkable as it was brief. In a few short sentences, the invincible guerrilla of old confessed that he was very ill and doled out government responsibilities to his nearest associates. Most notably, his brother Raúl was charged with assuming Fidel’s duties as first secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, commander in chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, and president of the Council of State. The dynastic succession had begun.

It was a miracle that the old telephone exchanges, with their 1930s-vintage equipment, didn’t collapse that night as callers rushed to share the news, in a code that was secret to no one: “He kicked the bucket.” “El Caballo” — the Horse — “is gone.” “The One is terminal.” I picked up the receiver and called my mother, who was born in 1957, on the eve of Castro’s revolution; neither of us had known any other president. “He’s not here anymore, Mom,” I said, almost whispering. “He’s not here anymore.” On the other end of the line she began to cry.

It was the little things that changed at first. Rum sales increased. The streets of central Havana were oddly empty. In the absence of the prolific orator who was fond of cutting into TV shows to address his public, homemakers were surprised to see their Brazilian soap operas air at their scheduled times. Public events began to dwindle, among them the so-called “anti-imperialism” rallies held regularly throughout the country to rail against the northern enemy. But the fundamental change happened within people, within the three generations of Cubans who had known only a single prime minister, a single first secretary of the Communist Party, a single commander in chief. With the sudden prospect of abandonment by the papá estado — “daddy state” — that Fidel had built, Cubans faced a kind of orphanhood, though one that brought more hope than pain.

Five years later, we have entered a new phase in our relationship with our government, one that is less personal but still deeply worshipful of a man some people now call the “patient in chief.” Fidel lives on, and Raúl — whose power, as everyone knows, comes from his genes rather than his political gifts — has ruled since his ultimate accession in February 2008 without even the formality of the ballot box, prompting a dark joke often told in the streets of Havana: This is not a bloody dictatorship, but a dictatorship by blood. Pepito, the mischievous boy who stars in our popular jokes, calls Raúl “Castro Version 1.5” because he is no longer No. 2, but still isn’t allowed to be the One. When the comandante — now barely a shadow of his former self — appeared at the final session of the Communist Party’s sixth congress this April, he grabbed his brother’s arm and raised it, to a standing ovation. The gesture was intended to consecrate the transfer of power, but to many of us the two old men seemed to be joining hands in search of mutual support, not in celebration of victory.

Raúl’s much-discussed reforms followed the supposed handover of power, but in reality, they have been less steps forward than attempts to redress the legal absurdities of the past. One of these was the lifting of the tourist apartheid that prevented Cubans from enjoying their own country’s hotel facilities. For years, to connect to the Internet, I had to disguise myself as a foreigner and mumble a few brief sentences in English or German to buy a web-access card in the lobby of some hotel. The sale of computers was finally authorized in March 2008, though by that time many younger Cubans had assembled their own computers with pieces bought on the black market. The prohibition on Cubans having cell-phone contracts was also repealed, ending the sad spectacle of people begging foreigners to help them establish accounts for prepaid phones. Restrictions on agriculture were loosened, allowing farmers to lease government land on 10-year terms. The liberalization brought to light the sad fact that the state had allowed much of the country’s land (70 percent of it was in state hands) to become overgrown with invasive weeds.

While officially still socialist, the government has also pushed for an expansion of so-called self-employment, masked with the euphemism of “nonstate forms of production.” It is, in reality, a private sector emerging in fits and starts. In less than a year, the number of self-employed grew from 148,000 to 330,000, and there is now a flowering of textile production, food kiosks, and the sale of CDs and DVDs. But heavy taxes, the lack of a wholesale market, and the inability to import raw materials independent of the state act as a brake on the inventiveness of these entrepreneurs, as does memory: The late 1990s, when the return to centralization and nationalization swept away the private endeavors that had surged in the Cuban economy after the fall of the Berlin Wall, were not so long ago.

So for now, the effects of the highly publicized reforms are barely noticeable on our plates or in our pockets. The country continues to import 80 percent of what we consume, at a cost of more than $1.5 billion. In the hard-currency stores, the cans of corn say “Made in the USA”; the sugar provided through the ration book travels from Brazil; and in the Varadero tourist hotels, a good part of the fruit comes from the Dominican Republic, while the flowers and coffee travel from Colombia. In 2010, 38,165 Cubans left the island for good. My impatient friends declare they are not going to stay “to turn off the light in El Morro” — the lighthouse at the entrance to Havana Bay — “after everyone else leaves.”

The new president understands all too well that transformations that are too deep could cause him to lose control. Cubans jokingly compare their political system to one of the dilapidated houses in Old Havana: The hurricanes don’t bring it down and the rains don’t bring it down, but one day someone tries to change the lock on the front door and the whole edifice collapses. And so the government’s most practiced ploy is the purchase of time with proclamations of supposed reforms that, once implemented, fail to achieve the promised effects.

But this can only continue for so long. Before the end of December, Raúl Castro will have to fulfill his promise to legalize home sales, which have been illegal since 1959, a move that will inevitably result in the redistribution of people in cities according to their purchasing power. One of the most enduring bastions of revolutionary imagery — working-class Cubans living in the palatial homes of the bygone elite — could collapse with the establishment of such marked economic differences between neighborhoods.

And yet the old Cuba persists in subtle, sinister forms. Raúl works more quietly than Fidel, and from the shadows. He has increased the number of political police and equipped them with advanced technology to monitor the lives of his critics, myself among them. I learned long ago that the best way to fool the “security” is to make public everything I think, to hide nothing, and in so doing perhaps I can reduce the national resources spent on undercover agents, the pricey gas for the cars in which they move, and the long shifts searching the Internet for our divergent opinions. Still, we hear of brief detentions that include heavy doses of physical and verbal violence while leaving no legal trail. Cuba’s major cities are now filled with surveillance cameras that capture both those who smuggle cigars and those of us who carry only our rebellious thoughts.

But over the last five years the government has undeniably and irreversibly lost control of the dissemination of information. Hidden in water tanks and behind sheets hanging on clotheslines, illegal satellite dishes bring people the news that is banned or censored in the national media. The emergence of bloggers who are critical of the system, the maturation of independent journalism, and the rise of autonomous spaces for the arts have all eroded the state’s monopoly on power.

Fidel, meanwhile, has faded away. He appears rarely and only in photos, always dressed in the tracksuit of an aging mafioso, and we begin to forget the fatigues-clad fighting man who intruded on nearly every minute of our existence for half a century. Just a year ago, my 8-year-old niece was watching television and, seeing the desiccated face of the old commander in chief, shouted to her father, “Daddy, who is this gentleman?”