Translating Cuba

I was born in one of the central eastern provinces. Cuba was recognized by many as the beautiful pearl of the Caribbean from the very first day of its discovery by Christopher Columbus, who expressed that this was the most beautiful land ever seen by human eyes. I was born in nineteen hundred and fifty-eight, one year before the triumph of the revolution. My parents were religious, they educated me in accordance with their principles. My father and my older brother were detained on various occasions, and completed sentences of deprivation of liberty; my brother on three occasions and my father on two. Mistreated and abused as you might imagine.

I was the fourth son of seven that my mother had, we lived in a coastal town. My father owned a candy store and dedicated the better part of his time to his work and to preach the Word of God, as is common with the “Jehovah’s Witnesses”. He never wished to mix in political problems nor give opinions that were not about his religion, this was known by the whole town, where he was very appreciated for the help he offered to many people.

In that time, to be religious, homosexual, or dress in the latest fashion was to be considered counter-revolutionary. They were persecuted or causes would be invented to detain and judge them.

One day several uniformed men appeared at the house bearing large arms, they broke down doors and windows, one group entered brusquely and another surrounded the house outside, as if they had entered a haunt of criminals or terrorists, though my parents had never had troubles with the police or justice. They handcuffed my father, they took him out of the house beating him, and by force they took him into detention. I am never going to forget what they did before our eyes, I was already around seven years old and was there with three brothers younger than me.

My mother took us all through town by foot, and we went to the police station where they were holding my father. When we arrived they were taking his statement, they wanted to accuse him of counter-revolution. He refused to sign, he told them he was a religious person and that his beliefs did not permit him to mix in political matters.

After several hours of interrogation, of personal offenses and physical mistreatment, right in front of is they took him down with blows and shoving him, put him in a cell together with other common prisoners. One of them helped the policeman, and as a result, they fractured his ankle as well as left many marks on his body. That day they did not take him to the doctor, instead on the following day, then they could make out a certificate about the lesions that was useless; they never made a case based on the denunciation of my father.

My father remained firm and offered resistance to being detained, because that was an arbitrary act, it was illogical to think that they were dealing with a counterrevolutionary or something like it. If he signed those documents he was recognizing his participation in something he had not done, the entire town was a witness to these facts, I remember having seen many people meeting in front of the police station.

After several days of detention and without proof, the police decided to set him free. Our family looked for lawyers, we presented proofs, the medical certificate but they never accepted the complaint. With time we finally realized the impossibility of carrying a criminal complaint forward against the police and we left it all in God’s hands.

On another occasion, they used Maturranga, a poor town drunk, to make him pass as a Jehovah’s Witness. I was small and don’t remember his real name, what was important was the trauma they raised around him. The police would get him drunk, they’d give him matches and fuel so that he would appear in a sugar cane field as if he were going to set it ablaze. The man followed orders and in those moments the police showed up, faked having been advised to stop this man — whom everybody knew well for his alcoholism and not as a religious type — from setting the sugar cane field on fire.

Meanwhile in town the other part of the plan was being cooked up. The raising of a public show trial in the park. They had the circus set up, cars with amplifiers installed, to announce that they had surprised a Jehovah’s Witness trying to burn a cane field. They got the whole town together to give him a show trial, in the middle of a park in town; but as everyone knew it was a farce, very few attended.

The only thing they succeeded in was being the town joke, which as always they invent stories and jokes around anything that happens. I remember some verses in the form of a popular satire which came out of that happening:

In God’s Armaggedon
According to the prophet Maturranga
There will be a lot of taro,
Butter, wine, and rice

June 10 2011

I would almost dare to ask the regular readers of this blog, to leave it this time. To not read a post not directed to them: a post that is not directed at democrats, the quick-witted, the open-minded. It is not for the readers who do credit to this space, or for those for whom nearly a year I have written texts with high pretensions (false modestly doesn’t prevent me from saying so), where I have reviewed every sentence, ever metaphor, every idea with obsessive rigor.

This time, it’s different. I am driven by a clear and unambiguous response. And a rather temperamental response, to not out of tune with my unredeemed Latin character.

A few months ago there appeared in this space a response addressed to the agents of State Security of my country. To the hounds of power who tried to blackmail me, using all the methods at their disposal to stop me from writing from my house at Parada 204 with all the passion of one who knows himself to be free.

Now I respond to the other repressors, the other hounds… although these are powerless. I dedicate these words to the poor troglodytes who roam the magnificent city that is Miami, and that in spite of them, in spite of their bold efforts, does not suffer the least stain or loss of status as a mythical city.

Where does this come from? Well, due to certain publications in this blog, (first, Blockade vs. Embargo: Reason Hijacked; then Uncomfortable Freedoms; and finally, Another Stretch of the Sea Between Us), and after my television appearances in recent days opposing the proposal of Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart to revive the restrictions on travel and remittances from the Bush years, some of these Cro-Magnons have readied themselves and dedicated anonymous telephone calls to me and sent me emails with their feverish irritations, their subtle tones of offense, because “I have dared” to not go along with them.

Very well.

In the first place: I did not confront the government of my country, the servile wretches who sustain it, and every kind of adversity that this implies in Cuba, because my life lacked excitement. In other words: It was not a cause chosen by rebellious inner adrenaline that said, one fine day, “My goodness, my life is very calm, let’s go look for problems.”

I faced it head on, without mincing words, because I will not allow anyone to restrict my individual freedoms. Because I will not permit a bunch of idiots (“Locusts” the great Oriana Fallaci called them) to put locks on my freedom of expression. And above all–forgive me readers of my other texts: I tried to divert you right at the beginning–because apart from intellectual pretensions, I have the balls necessary to say what I think when I’m asked.

Unlike you, poor bitter locusts; you do not realize that you lose more followers every day, every day you make less sense to them; instead you are dying, day after day, out of fear, even in this country of freedom.

Yes, I repeat: you are dying of fear. When the light turns red you think, “Horrors! A Communist stoplight!” When a shadow appears at your side, “A Communist is following me, I’m being stalked by a Communist!” And when you run out of arguments and have nothing to say, you are like babbling babies repeating the same word over and over, “Communists! Communists!” with trembling jaws and a shameful lack of strength.

No, poor devils, you are not this great nation. This nation is so rich, so vast, unique, among other reasons because it has also sheltered you, who think yourself great democrats, but democrats in a totalitarian style, “If you think like me, bravo; if you don’t think like me, enemy.”

Do you realize, Manichean locusts, drivers of bankrupt steamrollers, do you realize that you have no fucking idea of what democracy means? Do you realize that you repeat the word and in your mouths it sounds hollow, empty, because in your infinite ignorance you don’t know that a Utopian named Rosa Luxemburg said something so simple and convincing like, “Freedom, freedom is essentially those who don’t think like us”?

And you will find out, as if no one has already told you: the only thing that separates you from your presumed enemies, the only thing that divides you from the darkest functionaries of the Ministry of the Interior, do you know what it is? A strip of sea. Ninety miles. You throw the bones of the dissidents in jail just like they do. They, there, will throw your offensive slogans, star in your incendiary marches. In some modern idiom your most recurring slur — Communist — should rhyme with their most recurring slur — Mercenary.

And do you know what else most differentiates you, Locusts of Miami, from those repressors for whom, even more than hate, you feel a lethal fear? It is this: unlike your “colleagues” of State Security, as opposed to Party officials on the Island, and the infinite gamete of dictatorial hounds who populate it, you don’t have one iota of power. The share you had in decades past, thank God — really: thanks be to God — has long since slipped through your hands. You exercise your right to protest, to shout your slogan — Communist! Communist! — and everyone else exercises their right to laugh at you, and to ignore you.

It is the price of living in a country that exceeds them, poor devils. A country that has not known dictators, and when the bitter name McCarthy appeared in its History, it was erased without mercy so that it would never be reborn. Indeed, note the fact: the darkest man in American democratic history, Joseph McCarthy, today detested, reflected something in you: he accused Charles Chaplin, Raymond Chandler, Dalton Trumbo, of being traitors, communists.

Well, that lack of power you suffer today, that lack of determination, that having nothing more to do than to shout, “Communist! Communist!”; that lack resonance you must feel–I feel sorry for you–to live in a nation where freedom overwhelms you.

At times you would wish for a few hours of repression. Right? In your darkest dreams and desires you have come to yearn for a single day, barely twenty-four hours, of total impunity for stoning the houses of those who say things that offend your tender ears; to lynch–like the Castro mobs against the Ladies in White–your enemies, while singing the usual nervous chorus: “Communist! Communist!”

Let me tell you something else, ludicrous locusts: the dialectic wasn’t a Marxist fantasy. The dialectic is a social evolution, and it is this which every day crushes you more. The evolution of freethinkers like me, like my friends on the Island, like so many honest and educated exiles, true democrats whom I have met in just the six months that I have been here. The evolution of those of us who don’t work for the sake of hatred, but for love of Liberty. And do you know why, poor headless ones? Because the alternative it so follow the doctrine of a presumed enemy of yours: That Che Guevara whom you detest so much, but who said the ultimate thing by which all of you are unknowingly guided: “The only sentiment stronger than love of liberty, is hatred for those who would deny it to us.”

Because you know what? I make you a gift of this hatred, Miami Locusts. Cubans of today, those of us who haven’t resigned ourselves to the snake’s nest that the government of our country has become, prefer to work for the sake of love of liberty, rather than because of hatred for those who repress us. Hatred is a bad fuel, only useful to jump-start broken steamrollers, not to move broken-dictatorship ideas.

And as an individual being who knew freedom in Cuba–where to be so is a thing of heretics–who knows freedom in the United States, and who will know freedom wherever I go, I say in Spanish of course:

I do not support the embargo that offers such an excellent excuse to the ruffians of the Island to justify their excesses; I hate the division of families, of friends, and it’s all the same to me if it is because of those who administer the Island like their own land, or if it is because of a congressman who believes in the right to tell me that seeing my mother once every three years is enough, and doesn’t understand the sweet favor he does to the Cuban satraps, dividing us more every day. And I don’t sympathize with Luis Posada Carriles, as I don’t sympathize with anyone who defends his beliefs through shedding the blood of innocent people.

Period.

From an honorable exile, from this Florida I have already learned to love, with humility, as a second homeland; from the same earth that welcomed Félix Varela, Martí, Heredia, persecuted and repressed Cubans; from this Miami that slanderers of my Island have tried to distort–with your invaluable help, of course: what would the Cuban defamation apparatus be without your collaboration, dear locusts; and from colorful, festive Miami, hybrid between the best of the Latinos and the spirit of the Land of Lincoln, I, a recent arrival with much to say and much to learn, dedicate my sovereign indifference.

At the end of the day, no matter how much racket you make flapping your arrogant insect wings, it will not be more audible.

June 27 2011

I turned the corner located half a block from my house and I heard somebody yelling to another neighbor, ” Mercedes, they are giving out chicken instead of fish.” The piece of chicken that the Cuban State sells us at subsidize price and by their orders we must consume it in one month, is only a pound per person and anybody can eat it in a single meal. When they send chicken (I prefer this) in substitution for fish, the amount is eleven ounces per person for the same period of time.

Cuba is an archipelago and for this reason seafood shouldn’t be scarce, but because of the State’s indifference and ineptitude, we are suffering of shortages and rationing of these and other essential food items. Moreover, is it (the Yellowtail, the one always offered) the only marine species in the sea? And the lobsters, and the shrimp? And the high seas fish like the louvar, the kingfish and the tuna, etc? And the fish raised in the aquaculture dam lakes? And the freshwater ones?

It is like suffering from a prolonged and antagonistic irony of living on a poultry farm and keeping to a fish diet. In addition we are assigned half a pound of ground beef a month — it is more like a paste mixed with soy — half of mortadella (if we put it on a piece of bread, we can eat it as a snack) and 10 eggs per capita monthly. And the beef and the pork? And the lamb and the goat? So much inefficiency and manipulation didn’t affect our memories, because we know that there are a lot of species in the seas, and there are also varieties of poultry and different types of edible quadruped mammals.

It’s true that there is a parallel State market which retails some of the released products in national currency. But the prices are abusive and only a minority can acquire them. Also coexistent are the ones selling in foreign hard currency — the workers get paid a salary between 500 and 600 cuban pesos — where there’s a variety of meats, and a kilo of chicken costs $2.75 and a kilo of beef $9.50, but these prices are equally high, therefore out of reach for the average Cuban, who has to acquire the hard currency at 25 pesos for one CUC (equivalent to a dollar) in the currency exchanges. On top of this we have to add that not all of the stores sell these type of products and moreover, they are not always available.

It looks like beef and other delights, are lacking because of “the bad governments” preceding them; thus the leaders “screwed it up” so concerned are they about our health that they got rid of it to insure our quality of life. Therefore, it is an acquired reflex that we must prioritize the color red only to digest politics and ideology. These nutritional limitations awakened our voracity for this vital food, because all these years they tried to implant in us, with neither Yin nor Yang, a vegetarian diet or macrobiotic without the right to respond or to choose it; but as with the problems with the seafood and the fact that we are an agricultural country, we also have difficulties with vegetables, grains and cereals, they couldn’t completely tame our taste and eating preferences.

For that reason a lot of nationals don’t care if the chicken is genetically modified, if the fish was floating “meekly” on a black scum and they assumed it was a donation from the British Petroleum; if we women start growing beards or our husbands start having high voices, as Evo Morales, the homophobic Bolivian President, said. Maybe some fellow citizens, who look like they have their stomach in the frontal lobe and their intelligence in “the elbow”, when it comes to food, stress that ” it doesn’t matter if the chicken has scales or the fish feathers, the fact is that it is meat”.

Translated by Adrian Rodriguez

June 27 2011