Translating Cuba

The oldest of the three, Dylan McFarlane, is 18 and is the only one who didn’t fire that night. Eric Ronald Ellington, the first to be arrested and the author of the most amazing confession the police interrogators of Miami-Dade had ever heard in all their years in their posts, is 16, the same age as his partner in crime Wayne Williams.

After stealing a van, Ellington and his two companions in fun amused themselves in a strange manner that July 25 at a Miami Gardens gas station: eleven bullets in the chest of Julian Solar, four bullets for his friend and former girlfriend, Kennia Duran.

The security videos captured the a scene as daunting as it was disconcerting: at the point of Eric Ronald Ellington’s gun, Julian opened the door of his Mustang, took several steps away from the car with his hands in the air, but even this didn’t avoid the eleven impacts Ellington directed to his chest. He died instantly.

Then came Kennia Duran’s turn: Wayne Williams’ bullets allowed them to take her to Jackson Memorial Hospital, but no further. On the last night of their lives they had lived only 23 years (him) and 24 (her).
Julian Soler (23) and Kennia Duran (24). Killed because Julian didn’t show sufficient fear when the offender pointed the gun.
Asked about the indecipherable cause of the horrendous murder, the main leader of this double play, Eric Ronald Ellingon, responded with a coldness that chilled the bones of his interrogators: “I pointed (at Soler) with the gun and looked at his eyes and he didn’t look scared enough.” Just that.

I have thought about this case, thought about the miserable existences of the mothers destroyed by fear and helplessness, after listening to why their two children rest under the earth today. Some days ago I saw Jenine Dias, Julian’s mother, and heard her say that her life is a constant effort to get through to day, to bear the terrible weight of a day without her young and loving son.

And I think, inevitably, of one of the most thorny, discussed and argued issues of our civilization: the death penalty. Obviously: because I wholeheartedly wish it upon these three miserable beings.

Opposition to capital punishment has become, suspiciously, one of the colored flags flown by modern worshipers. Today, opposing the death penalty speaks of an advanced mentality, civic, humanistic, like those who defend gays or freedom of expression. Although unlike in these latter cases, it is nothing more than a crass snobbery.

In the same way that Ortega y Gasset believed in the elevation of the average level of the masses at certain times, today it is worth asking whether there is a direct link between the scientific and technological progress of our era, and the progress of trends such as the hypocrisy and social stupidity.

Except for Belarus, all European countries have abolished the death penalty. It is the same in Oceania, and most of Latin America. Democracies such as Japan, India and the United States hold onto the maximum penalty, while dictatorships like China (where they use it routinely), North Korea, Iran and Cuba, also apply it.

This is the only point where irreconcilable and disparate societies and systems converge.

Now, as we know, scales are the universal symbol of justice. I wonder at what level if rational deformation have we come to assume as balanced, as just, a set of events such as: on one side we put the life of a human being, unmercifully destroyed by the will of a murderer, and on the other side we put fifteen, twenty years of his life that the criminal must “donate” in exchange for such an act.

For the enemies of the death penalty, for the defenders of, at most, life imprisonment, is this a fair and deserved exchange: the life of one person, for fifteen or twenty years of that of another.

Such high-minded reasoning, provisions so in tune with our civilization and morality, are what allowed the butcher Anders Bhering Breivik, who mortally shot 68 Norwegians and injured 96 others on July 22, to spend 21 years confined in a comfortable Nordic prison or, in the worst case (if his accusers manage to condemn him for Crimes Against Humanity), to theoretically lose 30 years of his existence.

In Norway, of course, the rules establish extensive privileges for prisoners of good conduct: the penalties can even be reduced by a third. From which we can conclude that Anders Bhering Breivik, citizen without even criminal fines on his record before July 22, has in his hands the possible objective of reducing by half the worse possible sentence.

This is also Justice for the advanced citizens of our time: 68 dead in exchange for, say, fifteen years of comfortable confinement. A rate of four and a half young Norwegians for each year incarcerated.

The last straw: the most violent country in the world today (second only to Afghanistan, at war), a modern record holder in terms of human atrocities, does not include the death penalty in its penal code. Mexico does not even have life imprisonment in a strict manner: just a sum of years for each conviction, which can reach 100 in theory but in practice never exceeds 25.

Yes, the country of the sickening massacres of severed heads, of the charred casinos with hundreds of people inside, is one that displays the civic flag of “No to the Death Penalty.”
Above and beyond religious arguments, which do not concern me this time (faith is not rational matter), there is an argument always put forth to declare the Death Penalty an inhumane and brutal practice: no one is born guilty. No one is born a criminal. There are different actors and social factors that cause this fatal deviation. Ergo: we must “isolate” those individuals from society, not irreparably expel them from it.

What I couldn’t find in any reference on the subject, is under what premise it is acceptable that those who are not guilty of these criminal deviations, of raping young girls, of cannibalism like Jeffry Dahmer of the Japanese Issei Sagawa (who lives peacefully today, as a celebrity, in Tokyo) must pay for the sins of alcoholic parents they don’t know, or bullies at schools they did not attend.

We should lock up these social bacteria for life, right? Very well: the 31 years that Mark David Chapman has spent in the federal prison in Attica, New York, for shooting one of the greatest geniuses of music history, have cost U.S. taxpayers about $678,900. (The approximate daily cost of an inmate in federal prison is $ 60, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons Department of Justice). It turns my stomach thinking about it.

There is another argument to remove the death penalty from the just, and what’s more, necessary, practices: the danger of making a mistake. Too many condemned and executed have been declared innocent several years after their burials.

However, following this reasoning, it would be worthwhile to decree absolute impunity, to abolish any type of penalty for criminality, to avoid the grievous errors like those applied to the “Guildford Four” and the “Maguire Seven” who spent more than 15 years in a British prison for an IRA bombing they didn’t commit.

It’s the illogical principal of not making the pills that an incompetent doctor mis-prescribed and we wouldn’t have the death of Michael Jackson.

If Iran condemns to stoning for laughable crimes such as adultery, if North Korea took the life of an entrepreneur in 2007 in front of 150,000 people for making calls abroad; if Cuba shot three young black men for attempting to escape from the island in the small Regla ferry; and if the state of Texas in the United States accounted for several deaths that should never have been, the death penalty should also to execute the perpetrators of these “mistakes.”

When in the late 90s a couple of voodooists from Manzanillo, in the same province where I was born, tortured, dissected, and sewed shut the mouth and eyes of a child as part of a “sacred” ritual, did they deserve to be simply “isolated: from society? When a frightening character named Ted Bundy appeared in American history, proved to have slaughtered 14 women and by his own admission having raped and dismembered 28 more, what should justice do in this country? Care for his life in a distant prison?

Those who believe that life imprisonment is the real punishment for these twisted beings are wrong: human adaptive capacity is infinite. After ten or fifteen years of incarceration with no end in sight, man adapts and survives peacefully. Life is the supreme good. And life is a right to be earned, respecting that of others.

A State that applies capital punishment fairly and rigorously, not only closes ranks around its good citizens,not just those who exhibit disrespect for the grace of life as a worthy trophy; but it avoids that the just, the lacerated, those who have seen their loved ones die, take justice into their own hands.

I am sorry for the sixteen and eighteen years of age of those who killed Julian Soler and Kennia Duran in a gas station in Miami Gardens. I’m sorry because, at the end of the day their being minors may mean they will not receive lethal injections criminals could use in their forearms.

I haven’t the slightest doubt: the day on which the worst humans on this planet get what they truly deserve for their actions, we will have fewer murders, fewer terrorists, fewer dictators, fewer rapists, and perhaps the verdicts of Justice will no longer be called failures and will begin to be called successes.

September 19 2011

The Cuba of the 21st century is split in two. The islet of the gentleman and the atoll of the comrade. The keys of capitalism are recognizable. Neon lights, fresh paint, large windows and air conditioning.
In its stores, hotels, cabarets, nightclubs, bars and restaurants charging in hard currency (with New York prices), its employees, uniformed and smiling, calling you Sir or Madam and allowing you to order them around.

It is the capitalism of the Castros. There, there are no revolutionary slogans nor murals featuring the faces of the five spies imprisoned in the U.S..

What is left is for the Cuban of the comrade. The bodegas, farmer’s markets, paperwork and municipal housing offices, lines to collect pensions and low-class bars.

People are treated badly and rarely laugh. Cheap watered rum in dirty hot places. In this slice of  tropical socialism if you say Sir or Madam they sneer at you. The appellation is compañero or compañera

Since 1993, when the enemy’s dollar was legalized, Cuba has operated at two speeds. It’s not that things are efficient in the pockets of capitalism, but one notices the difference.

In addition to Chinese goods, as everywhere in the world, there are Japanese clocks, music equipment from Germany, South Korean plasma televisions, and unrestrainedly, shoddy goods that say Made in USA, haughtily mocking the embargo fence.

If you want to live better in the Marxist capitalism of the Castro brothers, you must have dollars, euros, Swiss francs, or pounds sterling. Any first-world currency is worth its weight in gold in Cuba.

The national currency, the Cinderella, with which you are paid once a month in factories, state agencies and checkbooks of retirees, only serves to buy food, a few pounds of pork and pay the electricity bills, water and telephone, if you have one.

The death of Castro socialism began without fanfare on July 26, 1993, with the legalization of the dollar. Although the slogan of Socialism or Death and continued to be heard at the November 7th celebrations of the triumph Bolshevik Soviet Union. And cyclically, the comrades and those who have always lived like gentlemen, are seen uniformed with their AKM rifles, preparing for war against the ‘evil empire’.

Fidel Castro has been a real political contortionist. The Taliban discourse, the dictatorship of the proletariat, national sovereignty, permanent mobilizations, unlimited sacrifice, and a bright future. But behind the scenes the entrepreneurs or businessmen passing through Havana fall in love.

Their olive green revolution needs dollars for the carburetor. And many. Let them come. They are the lifeline of the last bastion of communism in the Western world.

‘Prostitutes’ by any means.  With Revolutionary and abusive taxes of 240% for consumer products sold in hard currency. Storming the pockets of tourists and Cuban-Americans with first world prices in a nation with a third world infrastructure.

The commander has only been a strategist for survival. To stay in power, anything goes. He once said that if he had not had the support of the USSR, he would have allied himself with the native bourgeoisie. They wouldn’t have packed their bags and headed north. With gifts and sophistry he paid for his revolution.

This is what is happening, with the millions that will come by way of remittances. The Brothers of Biran are a kind of Caribbean Robin Hood. Apparently, they take the money from those who have more to “give to the poor.”

The reality is that neither the poor nor the capital nor the  provinces of the island — including the vaunted social achievements such as education and public health — benefit from the billions in hard currency coming into the country annually.

Worst of all is that you cannot ask uncomfortable questions. You have to blindly trust “our leaders.” They know what they are doing. They are the “Saviors of the Fatherland.”

Now, have patience and trust in Comrade Raul. Or, the Lord? These high levels in the exotic Cuban social process, and I swear I do not understand.

September 21 2011

Normally, the emergency room of a hospital is a chaotic place, where ambulances are constantly arriving or cars bring in injured people, you hear screams and cries. But not always, at least not in the neighborhood polyclinics. Here things are more relaxes, as the emergencies go direction to the hospitals, as do the people who feel extremely ill, they don’t come to these primary care centers, they go quickly to the place where they know their problems will be resolved: the hospital, where they can count on there being more resources.

The cases I related below are true, though they seem like jokes, and what’s more they star the polyclinic in my neighborhood.

One of the doctors in whom I have the greatest confidence told me, that one Sunday when she was in the emergency room a young woman came in somewhat upset and said to her, “Doctor you have to save my life, if you don’t help me my husband will kill me.”

“Tell my what the problem is and let’s see if we can help you,” the doctor said to her.

“Look, in all honestly, I am having an affair, and the thing is, I fell asleep and now I can’t go home without justifying to my husband where I was. I need you to admit me, and if you can, give me an IV!”

“Let’s see,” the doctor answered, “for this I have to consult with my superior, I can’t do this on my own.”

She consulted with the chief of the emergency room and both of them fearing for the physical integrity of the woman who was really very upset, decided to admit her and give her an IV with glucose. They called her house and told her husband to come and get her, because she had come into the emergency room sick and they had spent the night stabilizing her. The husband, totally crushed, came immediately and looking at his defenseless wife he covered her in hugs and kisses and only reproached her for not waking him up and asking him to accompany her.

The other case was simpler but nicer: A woman of about 30 came and said to the doctor, “I’ve discovered a lump in my breast, but as I was teaching a class I waited to finish before coming to see you so you can tell me it’s cancer and how long I have to live.” The doctor grabbed a short white coat and said, “Take off your clothes and put this on and I will examine you immediately.”

The lady went behind the screen and at that moment a little metallic sound was heard. “Thank you doctor, but I don’t need you any more!” the patient said, “I found the cancer. I hadn’t noticed but in my haste to finish lunch, I was holding a dessert spoon in my hand and when I looked at the clock I had to run so I wouldn’t miss the bus, and I couldn’t think of anything to do with the spoon other than to put it in my bra and I forgot about it. You can’t imagine how worried I was having that lump all that time.”

The other case was a man who came to the emergency room with a matchbox, and shaking it to make a noise, showed it to the doctor. “Doctor, don’t think I’m crazy, but these are not matches, look, it’s two stones.”

The doctor asked, intrigued, “Are they something you excreted?”

“No, Doctor, I found these in my Cerelac when I was eating breakfast, and I wanted you to send them to be analyzed to see if they are poisoned.”

“Please, Sir,” the doctor said, “If you had been poisoned you would have symptoms. Better you go back to where you bought the product and make a claim against the seller.”

September 22 2011

The voice of William Herrera Pereira, in the name of all those together with his father, the Pastor Braulio Herrara Tito within the Count of Life temple at Infanta and Manglar, Havana, Cuba. Wednesday, September 14, 2011, at 7:30 PM.

September 15 2011

Much has been said about the new image of the Cuban woman. In official spheres they speak of the revolutionary woman, mother, comrade, worker, housewife. But what’s certain is that, more and more, our women suffer transformations that are detrimental to their appearance and self-esteem.

A free woman is not a woman who tosses out profanities, gesturing, yelling, and baring her anatomy, or who wears a uniform to prove how free she is. A free woman, in my opinion, is someone who doesn’t undermine her public image, who behaves socially according to the most basic and simple rules of education, dresses neatly but humbly, according to where she works or is going, who curbs her tongue and tries to enrich it, not with swear words, but with simple and friendly words to others, treating everyone equally, showing care in the details. To be equal to men we don’t have to lose our femininity, it’s enough to demand equality of rights and duties and above all to respect ourselves.

One of the most common phenomena is the degradation of the image of women, here on my planet, it has been, among many others, through the brutal scarcities we have seen ourselves steadily subject to, being women, of course, the most vulnerable, precisely because without any doubt we are the gender most obliged to ensure the social ravages: scarcities of the most intimate personal articles, absence in the home of the father figure because of the sugar harvests, the wars on other continents, the international missions, and so on, where the woman is left alone at home with the children and the elderly, without the ability to go to work to help sustain the family economically.

On the other hand, the absence of information (this includes especially women’s magazines), as well as the abundance of negative examples in the media, in terms of the gestures and clothing seen in video-clips which sadly have been taken by the population as the standards of fashion, without taking into account that one thing is the ordinary daily clothing for work, whether in an office or factory or a doctor’s clinic or something else very different, is that used for fiction. Not to mention how insulting it is to show women as ornaments or objects for pleasure that are for sale.

We are those, precisely, who have to fight to be treated with respect and consideration by men, respecting ourselves and showing our intellectual and working capacity, just to be, without any doubt, those who bear the major social weight.

September 1 2011

Tokmajián, a Canadian firm among the largest based in Cuba, closed on Monday morning. Its offices in the Miramar Trade Center are sealed and their computers seized for the investigation of their hard drives. The vendors, under arrest. Even the deputy minister of sugar, they say, is involved in the “explosion.”

All the workers in this firm, known as “the firm of Daddy’s boys,” who are not detained, were sent home to be called if necessary. Unemployed without pay, this has been the worst week of their lives, suddenly falling into an exhausted labor market in which they’ll never find another option like that they recently lost.

In the rest of foreign firms, fear. Meanwhile, conversations outside, casual messages, trying to erase the traces of so many businesses which functioned above (or below) the regulations and laws, with Valium and rum. Whiskey, no; that has to be saved just in case.

September 19 2011

He was working for a new kind of corporation, one of those occupying a luxurious mansion in the Miramar neighborhood and importing goods from abroad. To find such a job it was enough to appeal to the influence of his father, a lieutenant colonel, the pull of the family tree. He belongs to a new generation of ideology-free entrepreneurs, but to keep his job he shouts a slogan every now and then, faking loyalty to some leader. This crafty “New Man” seeks out the cheapest, lowest quality goods on the international market and passes them off as the choices of his bosses who assigned him to be a buyer. From the difference, thousands and thousands of dollars go into his pocket every year. Like him, a whole litter of money-grubbing cubs defraud Cuban enterprises, arming themselves financially for the changes to come.

The latest episode of moral corruption in the business sector is related to the highly publicized fiber optic cable connecting us to Venezuela. Announced since 2008, it only reached our shores in February of this year, under the anxious eyes of 11 million citizens who dream of connecting, en masse, to the Internet. After several postponements, July was set as the date for it to start working. Between rumors on the street, dispatches from foreign agencies, and the testimony of workers for the only telephone company allowed in the country, we have learned that the cable is a disaster. A bad choice in the material from which it is made, the lack of the correct covering to prevent it from being chewed by the sharks that abound in Caribbean waters, and even the theft of funds meant for its activation, seem to have disabled its implementation until further notice.

But beyond the almost comical details of the non-working cable, our attention is called to the high level in the political hierarchy of those involved in this new corruption scandal. They are not second-tier officials, but strait-laced Party servants previously entrusted with lofty responsibilities. How did these faithful employees of ministries, joint-venture firms, and foreign companies become “green-collar” criminals? Red-card-carrying thieves? Perhaps it was their opportunistic-fueled noses that made them believe the future was ever closer and if they met the changes with an economic foundation they could become tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. For each one that has been discovered, there are dozens who continue “fishing” in the shadows, shouting slogans, swearing allegiance to a leader, and who, when they are alone, calculate the number of digits already in their personal fortunes, the size of the pile they have been able to extract from a State that trusted them.

An expanded version of this text was published in the Peruvian newspaper, El Comercio.

21 September 2011

A friend tells me that when she feels overwhelmed by daily life she goes to Old Havana. She grabs her purse and heads off to some of the restored streets that recall Barcelona, where she has two sons who emigrated a decade ago. “I gaze at the bell towers and mansions to make myself believe I am no longer here,” she says, a little melancholic. But immediately she points out with a laugh, “Haven’t you noticed that even the street vendors in that area say ‘popcorn’ instead of ‘rositas de maíz’ and hawk ‘news’ instead of ‘periódicos’?” Many Havanans like her have found, in these newly reconstructed sites, a place for strolling, taking their children, sitting in the shade of a bougainvillea. What was, a few decades ago, a neighborhood in ruins, today is a true island of comfort and beauty, although thousands of its residents still carry water in buckets or live among the timbers propping up their roofs.

The day before yesterday, I went to this other city, cute and touristy with churches everywhere and cobblestone streets. I stayed for a couple of hours in one of its most distinguished sites: the San Francisco convent’s lesser basilica. A vaulted room where musical instruments sound as if they were playing inside our own heads. The place was full and at six on the dot Bach’s concert in E Major for violin and orchestra began to play. Then, the talented musicians of the Havana Chamber Orchestra played Mozart, and, to end, the Simple Symphony of Benjamin Britten. The best part of the evening was the presence of Cuban violinist Evelio Tieles, who had just arrived, full of energy, from Tarragona, Spain where he lives and creates.

When I returned from this journey to another dimension, my Yugoslav-model building seemed uglier and grayer. The shouts of people from the balconies sounded out of tune and instead of eighteenth century towers the view was dominated by the huge cast concrete water tank. I entered the elevator trying to preserve the last notes of the bass and cello, the brilliant baton of the orchestra conductor. I thought of my escapist friend and just then the door opened onto the 13th floor and an illegal vendor shouting “Eggs! Eeeeeeeeeggs!” and I knew I was back, back in my other Havana, so hard, so real, so suffocating.

20 September 2011

I heard the news of the death of Eliseo Alberto, Lichi to his friends, at the very moment when the coffin of Bishop Pedro Meurice was being swallowed by the grave in the cemetery of Santa Ifigenia in Santiago de Cuba on July 31 of this year, 2011. A radio station called me a few hours later to comment on the matter, but I literally had to hang up the phone because I wasn’t able to utter a single word. I made an attempt to write my impressions about the loss of my friend and, unable to do that either, I waited for his remains to rest in Cuba.

The family, completely within its rights, decided to give him a final send off on August 29, in private for family only. It occurred to me to write something under the title of “Lichi between ourselves,” but nothing went as I expected. This September 10 he would have turned 60 and I let the date pass.

This morning Fefe, his twin sister, called me, to tell me the details of how they carried out Lychee’s will.

At the old entrance to the Arroyo Naranjo neighborhood there is an iron bridge over the railway line. It was built over 100 years ago by Eliseo Giberga, who was president of the Autonomous Party, and uncle to the poet Eliseo Diego. The family had a small farm nearby, later seized by 
“the avenging thirst of the Revolution.” That turn in the road occupied a privileged site in Lichi’s nostalgic memory. There he played with his friend, there he cultivated his fabulous imagination, that treasure that no one could confiscate, and it was there that he wanted his daughter, Maria Jose, to scatter the contents of his urn when he took his last flight from Mexico.

The bridge, located in a neighborhood now known as the Wheatfield, is called “Cambo” because that was the name of the French village where the great uncle who had it built had lived in exile. That is still exists is a pure miracle, all around it is filth and neglect, but this is in a really rough area. In that other dimension that is fantasy, there are unscalable cliffs amid lush vegetation, the wrecks of pirate ships, caves inhabited by dragons, castles in whose towers some princess is waiting to be rescued and where a boy, a prince, a hero, is training to save the world. Just as childish naivete began to fade, perhaps on a rainy afternoon, Lichi closed his eyes and promised the goblins of the place that he would never forget them and that, when he had finished the work of whatever profession the future put before him, he would return here to continue the game, the better to say: This is the life.

*Translator’s note:
The title of this post — The place where it is so good to be — is the title of a poem by Eliseo Alberto’s, father, Eliseo Diego. Here is the poem in Spanish.

19 September 2011