MAIEUTICS OF MAY / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

MAY 666

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

In May I always remember the death of José Martí (I forgot it on a test in elementary school and, since then, I never forgot it).

I don’t sympathize with this character at all. Christs always terrified me. But at the same time fascinated me. They are ipso facto ethical sources (only the ethics is inexorably violence against others). Their destinies are tragic by definition. And it makes me imagine them with compassion (I know guys like that among my ex-friends). Then, to top it off, all gospels will be vulgarized to the point of ridicule by the surviving manipulators and the manipulators yet to come. This make some of the failures greater in the reach of their immortality. And in the Cuban case, Martí would be a kind of a superclimax in this respect.

Every time I dream about the missing pages of his campaign diary, perhaps his most sincere writing (not to say the only sincere, free at last of his brilliant demagoguery and of those lapidary sentences although tinged with the gift of despotic democracy).

At the same time and date that I am writing these lines, Marti would be writing other curses in the morning of May 6, 1895. Some lines and drawings or listed or testament of imminent suicide or mea culpa or who could guess what. Lines about the worst Maceo or Gomex or Marti. Intolerable lines that died out from the same cradle as the idyllic idea of the Revolution. Lines walking barefoot (without the Levite of laborious exile, and the most free, and also spiritual and fornicator), complaint of dead man walking.

That Marti, of course, would also be betrayed by the hypocritical men immediately around him. These leaves from the diary were plucked as soon as Martí died. It would seem that the same hand that slanted his most sacred intimacy, may well be the one that earlier pushed him into the bullets, perhaps it got off the first shot in the middle of the least important skirmish of all the so-called wars of liberation.

I’m not accusing anyone. I prefer the non-existent theory of an existential conspiracy. Let’s say that meteorological relations between the mulatazgo Cuban-in-chief were not the best with that big mouth white boy. History is based on myth, not truth. Martí was much more than that: a mystic and a spiritual counterfeiter. A poet greater than any mess of a fatherland. And it was unforgivable that in a fit of flat realism, our evangelist par excellence dotted the i and crossed the t in the word dictator, for example.

Any Cuban with half a brain (and only half a brain, like most of the generals who won the war: Martí had too much on the ball) he was acting like a thief, ripping and probably burning the unfortunate personal pages (the first not published of the Apostle). This mutilation was a foundational collective lynching against future emissions of national truth. This lie makes us better than any Article One. That lack made ​​us accomplices as collateral to generate a new social consensus, be it Republican or revolutionary.

From time to time I dream about those pages perpetrated by José Martí. The most startling is that in my dreams I can always read them, blurred by the effort to decipher the little letters. Then I swear to remember them even if in sections, because it’s already happened that when I wake up I don’t remember even one syllable. But it is an impossibility. I awake from thirsty and gasping.

That instant amnesia is a kind of curse that persuades me that I was actually reading cannibalized pages. My recurring dream is actually an original vision of Martí. And in each dream I am more convinced that if one of these mornings, if I have to sell my soul to the devil, I will overcome the amnesic curse and upon waking transcribe this writing from May 6, then in my hands will be the original disaster of the same concept of Revolution.

I suspect the deadly miracle will be in May, at dawn with the first rain of the month. Like right now in Havana.

May 6 2011

Cuban Baseball on the Edge of a Precipice / Iván García

For 20 years baseball on the island has been going backwards. Apart from the more than 300 ball players that have deserted to play as professionals in different circuits of the Caribbean and the Major Leagues, the sports authorities have caused a flagrant decline in the quality of Cuban baseball.

When in 1991 the right-handed pitcher from the town of Regla, René Arocha, abandoned the gathering of the national team that was training in the United States and for a little while played in the major league. It was the beginning of a constant drip of ballplayers that jumped the puddle with the illusion of earning six figure salaries.

In Cuba, a baseball player earns a worker’s salary for playing all year round as a professional would. The absence of many of the best talents has accentuated the crisis that exists in the national pastime.

Also, the complete nonsense coming from management. In the mid 90’s, they forced more than 100 great players with outstanding performance in the national season to opt for retirement.

This ‘voluntary’ retirement continued in the first decade of the 21st century. Supposedly, it was to clear the way for new recruits to baseball. In Cuba a player of 35 years is often seen as a useless eyesore.

The statistics in any league that is respected show that it’s precisely after 30 years that a baseball player matures and has a stable performance. Another phenomenon that has lowered the standard of local baseball is that in the ranks of juveniles and cadets, many prospects jump the fence and leave for the United States.

Right now, the worrying thing is not what we’re seeing in the current Cuban season. Which is awful. If not what awaits us in the near future. Look, if in the 80’s the national classic was categorized with a Triple A status, in this winter of 2011, the national campaign shows numberous ghosts to reveal a severe crisis.

Take note. In the so-called ‘Golden Series’, the 50th after Castro took power, the collective offense of the 16 participating teams is 293. Pitching exceeds 5 earned runs per game and with teams like Metropolitan and Las Tunas are around 7 points per game.

To this nefarious pitching, add in a defense of schoolyard level. The gloves are ripped. It is fielding for 972. In a decent league, is often hitting 260, the pitchers work for 4 runs per game and fielding to 980. These numbers confirm that baseball is played today in Cuba is jungle.

Jose Dariel Abreu, Cienfuegos team’s slugger, about 6 feet tall and 260 pounds, looking like a big leaguer, is averaging a homer every 5.75 at-bats. Joan Carlos Pedroso, a black first baseman in the ninth Las Tunas usually sends the ball regularly over 500 feet, and connects a home run every 7 times at bat.

Not even Babe Ruth hit with the frequency. But the worst part of Cuban baseball is the pitching. It’s laughable. You can count on the fingers of your hands–and you might have fingers left over–the high level pitchers.

On average, the current Cuban pitchers do not exceed 85 mph. Their repertoire is complete with a mediocre slider. And counting. To this add the alarming lack of control. In Cuban baseball, pitchers usually give 5 bases on balls per game.

Then, of course, that hitters are having a field day. With 22 games remaining to conclude the regular season of 90 games, 5 rookies are collectively batting over 300.

The usual markers of a baseball game is 10 runs for 7.15 for 11 and so on. It looks like water polo. The solution of the hierarchy governing island baseball is to bring in Japanese trainers to impart accelerated courses in the backyard techniques.

One more mistake. Japanese baseball, of undubitable quality, has little to do with the idiosyncrasies of Latino baseball. I can not imagine running a Cuban pitcher running 15 miles and throwing 100 balls every day in their preparation, as is common in Asian baseball.

In general, a pitcher of that part of the world has a sporting life of seven to eight years. The baseball that we should look is closer, 90 miles to the north. With scientific training methods, a vast technical literature and careful statistical headings that include all of the games.

But the Castro brothers don’t want to open the door for the young stars to compete in the Majors. While they continue in their mistaken policies, the local ballplayers will climb aboard anything that floats with the objective of being able to play in the best league on the planet.

And the local fans are quitting going to the stadiums. They would rather see a European soccer match. That’s what’s happening.

March 27 2011

Neighborhood Spokespeople Receive Answers to Citizen Demands / Silvio Benítez Márquez

Weeks ago the Neighborhood Spokespeople sent a group of citizen demands to headquarters of the People’s Power National Assembly regarding public opinion about the measures of December 2010. These were gathered over months by the different bodies and no response has been received.

This disinterest shown by the different channels of the People’s Power with regards to the Neighborhood Spokespeople petitions led the activists to decide on a legal remedy, faced with the exhaustion of the channels established in the law.

The idea of filing a formal complaint against the People’s Power mechanism is motivated by the immediate signs and fears among officials and agents, recalling the bitter case of Vallin and the Law Society to remain silent as in the previous response.

But to repeat the dose with the spokespeople’s petitions would make no sense, to run the experiment again could be fatal to the aspirations of the General. He knows the urgency of institutional credibility and also the needs of the unicameral assembly, where abstentions and no votes could be points of departure for new processes.

So the logic is not to err again but to gain time feigning that the institutionality is a sacred act of this mechanism. Of course, that this is not the highest authority who is accountable to the spokespeople of the District, but the establishment of the base which is responsible for offering a rhetoric of little death to these people and ending the problems for the time being.

The trite ritual this Saturday was revealed when the President of the Popular Council of Punta Brava after months in limbo and without the slightest importance to the issues raised called on one of the spokesmen of the District to give an accounting of significant advances in the areas of high demand. Demands now being followed in the same path but disguised with a different political hue.

Silvio Benítez Márquez
Promoter of the Neighborhood Spokespeople Project

April 10 2011

Cuba: Another Orlando Zapata? / Iván García and Laritza Diversent

I’m afraid that General Raul Castro’s government has done it again. In the early morning of May 8th, the death of the opponent Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia, 46, is the worst news that the Cuban mandarins could have received, as they focused on their timid economic reforms which are being realized at snail’s pace.

There is something real. Even though Castro II has not signed any document neither compromised publicly, and the law keeps floating over the air of the republic, his strategy has been to free the political prisoners of the island.

If the olive-green hierarchy, which governs Cuba’s destiny, released more than a hundred dissidents in the last few months, it was simply to inhale “political oxygen”. After the death of peaceful opposition Orlando Zapata Tamayo, from hunger strike in February 2010, the General made truce and pretended to raise a white flag.

The mediation from the catholic church and the Spanish ex-Chancellor Miguel Angel Moratinos to soothe the inflamed Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White), and the release of 52 opponents at a time, sentenced to long criminal sanctions, was an unpublished moved from the Castro.

In a way, it dislocated the fragmented internal dissidence, and won approval from a large part of international public opinion. What Castro II needed to implement moderate reforms was less internal tension. They remember that more than a million workers are going to be put out into the street and subsidies and free services will be eliminated within three years.

For ordinary Cubans to see that the future was not a science fiction word, began with the opening for self-employment. Those who have money under the mattress or relatives in Miami who were sending them dollars, could sell cheese pizzas, juices and soft drinks without any worries.

But while the General was implementing his new policies, he launched a message of fear to peaceful dissent. “The streets belong to the revolutionaries,” he said in his report to the Sixth Party Congress. For a while here, the nervousness is clear among the ideological Taliban, veterans of wars associated with paramilitary groups and police and State Security.

For any advance call to the opposition in squares and parks, the tough guys from intelligence expect to angrily block possible celebrations, rallies or street protests. Such polarization often raised tempers.

The death of Soto Garcia is one example. According to opposition sources in Villa Clara, 270 kilometers from Havana, the confrontation began with a discussion between Soto and law enforcement agents. The dispute heated up. The opponent decided to shout slogans and police decided to suppress him with an excess of violence. Forty-eight hours after the beating, Wilfredo Juan ceased to exist.

The causes of the death are unclear. For a sector of the opposition, Soto’s death was due to the brutal beating. Official government bloggers rushed to deny the news, asserting that the cause of death was due to pancreatitis. The government subsequently issued a press release.

The question is not to justify it or to blame each other. A man has died. And in my opinion, the concern is the enormous capacity for hatred that is brewing in Cuban society. A lack of dialogue, insults. If you protest against the government, you get a beating. This escalation of verbal and physical violence must stop…

Nothing is gained. The government should and must accept that there are people who think differently. The street belongs to everyone. The ideological differences can not, do not have to unleash the fury of those who hold power, or its followers. Let’s be civilized. If there is no space open to reconciliation and negotiations, the future of Cuba will always be fraught with hatred. It is not a side issue. It is a problem of maturity and respect for the rights of others.

Sooner or later, Cuba will be governed by democratic rules of coexistence. The cheap bluster and bravado, as heard on the street, of a military retiree who threatens, saying, “Let them take care of the ‘mercenaries’, that if the uproar, the dead are going to be them,” I left a bad taste in my mouth.

If the government of Raul Castro does not take action on the matter and urge caution to police, deaths like Juan Wilfredo Garcia Soto’s will recur.

Iván García

The Final Goodbye

Wilfredo Soto Juan Garcia was secretary of the Commission for Assistance to Political Prisoners of the Central Opposition Coalition, chaired by the prominent dissident Idania Yanes Contreras. He died at dawn on Sunday, May 8 because of acute pancreatitis, three days after four uniformed police officers beat him for refusing to leave Vidal Park in Santa Clara, city.

The beating led to the Soto being taken to the emergency room in the intensive care ward of Arnaldo Milian hospital. The clinical picture was complicated by illnesses suffered by Soto, diabetes, heart problems and hypertension, all compounded by injuries to internal organs. “Doctors said the beating he was given was on his kidneys, that caused fluid to be spilled affecting the liver and pancreas,” confirmed the opponent Guillermo Fariñas.

Known as “The Student,” Soto Garcia had served three sentences for political reasons, the first when he was just a teenager. He leaves two sons, 14 and 20 years. “The family is affected,” said Farina from the funeral home, where 45 opponents came to say their last goodbye.

Laritza Diversent

May 10 2011

Sovereignty and Independence / Fernando Dámaso

To defend the sovereignty and independence of the nation, has been turned into the basis of all the arbitrary and absurd bans that have oppressed the Cuban people for more than half a century. We forget that, for a country to be sovereign and independent, first each of its citizens must be so. José Martí raised this in the nineteenth century, although it was muted and, as with many of his approaches, somewhat uncomfortable for the national reality.

The current stagnation also relies on the same basis and attempts to frighten us with the loss of something that we really haven’t had for a long time. Allied for over thirty years to the former USSR (a fact endorsed in the original Socialist Constitution), bartering our sovereignty and independence for large subsidies, which allowed the survival of an inefficient and unproductive model. Then there was talk of brotherhood and social solidarity. Today, funded by Venezuela, history is repeating itself, now with Bolivarian and Latin American solidarity.

In a world always in transition, at a time when words meant something, and even were the cause of bloody wars, they have lost effect since the second half of the Twentieth Century. Now integration and globalization (despite their problems), generate the drawing together of countries and not their confinement behind old walls. The revolutionary is to get in tune with it and not cling to the outdated and already overcome by humanity.

To change attitudes, sedimented by years of inertia, is not easy. It takes will and a clear mind and being open to challenges and disappointments and being willing to sacrifice, and even to be misunderstood by many, but it is an inescapable necessity.

Today, at the beginning of the 21st Century, much has changed in the world, both materially and spiritually. I don’t consider it for the worse, as some doomsayers and sacrificers proclaim to the point of exhaustion. In our case, after losing so many years we, once and for all, just joined the countries marching in front, and have proven in practice, the correctness of its truths.

Translated by RST

May 5 2011

Insomnia / Ernesto Morales Licea

Sometimes I think it could be a dream. A bad dream, of those who start with innocence, stealth, even taking certain perverse nuances and making us wake up in the middle of the night, the sweat sticking our skin to the sheets. And then, a taciturn happiness that leaves us breathless, thinking, between horror and gasps, “It’s just a nightmare. My God. Nothing more than a nightmare.”

Sometimes I think we are all dreaming. All this couldn’t be happening to us. We don’t deserve it. No people can be hypnotized without end. Spells are fragile, they break down. And so I believe: sometime people will wake up, look around, feel a common shame, a common happiness, for having been in such an undignified sleep.

And they forget, also by common agreements, that while this evil dream lasted they were harming others: brothers in the Fatherland and of blood; brothers in faith, language, race. They forget, to relieve their consciences, that they once called out “To the wall!” as forgiveness is claimed, they demanded death with the music of their hands, their rhyming choruses, their laughing lips.

They forget that they bit like the worst cannibals: not those who go out to eat the flesh of other tribes, but those who stuff their guts with the flesh of their own; who once made an effort to curse and offend, to beat and exclude. To send a million of our brothers to the other side of the sea, condemning them to exile where many had to die with their hearts awash in grudges, never healed nostalgia, longing without peace.

After pulling off the sheets, at last, the country of sleepwalkers is about to wake up trying out a smile badly taken as a universal apology: the apology of the innocent Catholics on remembering the Inquisition; the apology from the Germans when their Aryan and racist nightmare finally came to an end.

One of those apologies that carried within itself the lack of decorum of many men over many years. Including those who don’t believe the apology to be necessary. Those who don’t understand the meaning of the word love: truth, sublime, the most sung and told: the love that doesn’t conceive of good for some and evil for so many others. Those who do not understand the meaning of freedom: for everyone, for those we love whom we don’t know we love, and without which some would end up bleeding to death in agony like some character of Borges, who begs his children’s forgiveness to dying so slowly.

In the name of those who know not of decorum nor spiritual superiority, the people also apologize

In the name of those who die perverted by hatred, thinking they did much good: that it was necessary to massacre the enemies of the State (may God not let you rest in peace, General Pinochet), that it was necessary to be done with the frauds (may you rot behind bars, Mark David Chapman), and who divide a dwarf country, rendering the bitterness of a dwarf country–eleven million natives: a provincial palenque–to segregate them in the name of an chimeric ideology, was the supreme duty to achieve immortality.

God does not love you, Comandante. I pity your senility and your inevitable mortality. Poor dried-up grape.

And after the pathetic dream, the end of this long night, so foul, so diluted in amnesia; this night with so many fragmented families, so many children without parents, so many Virgilios with fear and Cabreras without peace, so much hopelessly lost love, so many drowned seasoning the sea with their bodies… After this illusion of dollars and sharks, a return to real life.

The real life of a people segmented between worms and Party members, prostitutes and association members, communists and communitarians, officials and anarchists, bloggers and State security, beginning to gain strength, to lose the weakness of arrogance, the debility of the cruel, and to stroking their own heads like a kid afraid of a scolding: “It was just a prank, it won’t happen again, please.”

Sometimes I think I am the one who is dreaming. It could be. But I’m not the only one. And within me, in my brain full of real surrealism, naive and childish happiness, my floating Island is about to open its eyes after half a century’s slumber. And I want to be wide awake, like an inveterate insomniac, so that nobody has to tell me about it.

March 29 2011

Juan Wilfredo Soto, in the Parque Vidal / Angel Santiesteban

Juan Wilfredo Soto

For Mother’s Day the Cuban government gives exactly what can cause the most pain: the loss of a child. And the Great Mother, the Nation, is mourning another of its sons who, like the long-ago freedom fighters, the Mambises, decided to die rather than be abused, expelled from his own land, a park, Vidal Park, where he took his first steps in life and from where some thugs tried to evict him.

Juan Wilfredo Soto was a man of principles. From his youth he presented his ideas against the “revolutionary process” and, therefore, at age 17, was expelled from school and imprisoned, for which he was known as the “Student.” Then followed other convictions for the same alleged “crimes”, rights that the Constitution of the United Nations itself recognizes as inalienable for all human, but which the Cuban government considers violations of its “iron fist” policy.

One day we will also have a “Wailing Wall” and there we will carve the names of those who have been dying in silence for over fifty years, without an electronic medium that could deliver the news and break the jaw of censorship, reaching the new era thanks to satellites, where they cannot stop the names of Orlando Zapata and Juan Wilfredo Soto escaping, men who will be together because they chose to take the path of freedom and become the pride of their countrymen.

As always, the Cuban press keeps silence or publishes the official version, drafted by the leaders of the State. Wasting words justifying a cruel murder, without offering more space in their newspapers than they allot to the whining of bin Laden, the “prodigal son” of Fidel Castro.

Perhaps this is the revenge of an eye for an eye. The Americans took away the most hated terrorist and the Cuban government, in response, bludgeoned to death a righteous man, although at the time he was defending merely the principle of being able to walk in the park in his city.

We have just buried John Wilfredo Soto, who is now a star blazing in the firmament, watching us.

May 10 2011

Lino, The Habanero Who Heals With His Fingers / Iván García

Nothing can stop the man’s perennial belief in miracles. Not even the most advanced sciences that seek answers to the unknown. People are always going to believe in something. Or in someone.

Be it God, Mohammed, Sai Baba or the newly beatified John Paul II. And also in the healers. The cure that medical science can not always give makes sufferers of AIDS or malignant tumors, not content with waiting to die in bed, go to seek remedies from anywhere.

They run in pursuit of a miracle. In Cuba there are several amazing healers. But the best and most famous is called Lino Tomasén. Near La Guardia paladar, at 410 Concord Street between Gervasio and Escobar, Centro Habana, Dr. Tomasén has his office.

There, in the marginal black neighborhood of San Leopoldo, in a room with about 40 seats, Lino greets his patients. It is a blend of science, spectacle and mysticism.

Daily, over a hundred people are treated by Tomasén. The consultation is cheap: 20 pesos (less than a dollar). From the early hours of the morning, people come from all over the country, lining up to be one of the first.

The seriously ill, with advanced cancer, AIDS or a brain tumor, take precedence. In the waiting room, the people are not holding back praise for the man who heals with his fingers.

Ana, a woman with three children who suffer from chronic asthma, would erect an obelisk to him if she could. “Thanks to Lino my children are no longer asthmatic. After four visits, the asthma disappeared as if by magic. Now I come to thank him and give him a box of Cohiba cigars”, she says, sitting on the narrow path in front of the Tomasén’s clinic

What is said about Lino is lined with fable. Carlos, a white-haired and robust man, shows a photo of a wrinkled guy with death reflected on his face. “That was me six months ago, when doctors diagnosed my case with no solution. I had advanced cancer in my bones. With his treatments, Lino cured me. At the last scan I did, the doctor was speechless and asked: Carlos, what drugs have you taken?. I told him of my sessions with Lino. He took note and wrote down the address. And said that from now on, patients that science could not save, are going to be referred to Tomasén Lino”.

So it goes. When you await the start of the consultation, listen to the endless stories of patients who were on the verge of death or could not walk and now are healthy.

At about 8 o’clock in the morning Tomasén Lino arrives. He has the ways of a prophet. And not the occult. In therapy sessions he constantly repeats: “I am the best, the foremost in the world. I can cure anything, even AIDS. I’m the height of healing”, Lino repeated like a refrain.

Tomasén is black, tall, overweight, full of necklaces and with a cigar that never leaves his mouth. He was born on December 4, 1961, the day of Santa Barbara, who in the Afro-Cuban religion is Changó, one of the most powerful orishas. He is a doctor by profession. According to some physicians, has been banned for his non-traditional methods of healing.

In quick sessions that do not exceed 5 minutes, Tomasén attends to each one of his patients. By sight, without a medical history to hand, he tells them their condition. Right now, with incredible force, he is lifting a man of 120 kilos and with the tips of his fingers he touches various areas of his body.

He recommends that he returns. “Your case is complicated, but I will cure it”, and prescribes him green medicine. Of the hundred or more people in the room, almost everyone waiting their turn is sick. But there also is the curious, the doubters, and even foreigners with health problems who, passing through Havana, and through the Internet have seen the miraculous cures of Lino, decide to go to his clinic.

Osvaldo, an old friend of the physician-healer, tells that Tomasén came to the world marked by a lucky star. “Several spiritualists predicted to his mother that she was going to have a child prodigy. The portents were confirmed. Since childhood, Lino has had a knack for predicting things. He played sports and was never physically exhausted, he was a marvel. Then in college, only by passing his hand over his friends he cured them of certain ailments. Tomasén is an inexplicable example, for now, of the extraordinary abilities that some human beings have”, said Osvaldo, a graduate in biology and with doctorates in various scientific fields.

Meanwhile, Lino continues on his way. Serving in turn his patients, to whom he often applies a technique known as chiropractics, based on massages to different parts of the body combined with acupressure, reflexology and an Asian method known as Chi Kung.

Of course, Lino Tomasén has many detractors. Many see him as a weirdo. Something that borders on an entelechy. But there are no few Cubans who when science has labelled them to die, race to find solutions in the clinic of 410 Concordia Street.

Video: From the documentary ‘Aborto de la Naturaleza’, by Felipe Vergara Vargas

Translated by: Araby

May 8 2011

What is Real, Possible and Desirable / Miriam Celaya

The recent Congress of the CCP, with all its greyness and its whiff of pre-epitaph – since it is probably “the last” where the so-called historical generation will be in attendance — has clearly demonstrated some issues that, until now, were cause for speculation among the Cuban reality analysts: behind the charade reform of the “new” Cuban President, only the conservative nature of the regime is concealed, something that should not be a surprise or a mystery to anyone.

The quasi-Shakespearean essence of the Cuban government’s dilemma (to change or not to change) lies in its very controversial and intractable nature: a totalitarian system cannot change, because change is precisely the genesis of its own destruction. The contradiction is compounded if we consider that, irrefutably, it is urgent to introduce changes to allow a breathing space for the Cuban economy and to make allowances for a grace period for the lords of the manor to consolidate the permanent control over the territories, already distributed among its heirs and acolytes.

At this point, one might wonder whether those in power really believe in the possibility of the “renewal” of an obsolete model, or if they just seek to sow this ingenuous belief among the slaves of the plantation, to encourage hope in them in the midst of an infinite wait. I favor the latter. This will keep the rhetoric of “revolutionary”, touched up with critical nuances that literally fall in a no-man’s land. In the official discourse there is a disembodied group of defendants on the bench: “bureaucracy”, “the inability of those in charge of enforcing the above guidelines”, “a lack of knowledge about the functioning of the economy” and a lengthy and timely “etcetera” which, once again, serves to cover-up under a pious cloak the sins of the olive green caste and its responsibility in the precipitous national ruin.

The surprise statement by the General of a breach in the agreements arising from each of the five previous congresses has been interpreted by some analysts as a veiled criticism of his older brother. Whether this conjecture is true or not, no official document has been disclosed that reflects changes in the original guidelines of the order to the VI Congress, the agreements stemming from that event are unknown, and no clear strategies were offered to guarantee that, this time, the new phantom accords will be met in five years, a period of time established by the statutes of the PCC of holding the single-party new congress, and the time appointed by the General to start to reap the fruits of his work as head of the government.

An interesting aspect to analyze, beyond the formal requirements and the undeniable will to cling to power — as it is reflected clearly, for instance, in the structure of the Politburo, where calculating radiocarbon age is more practical than calculating the ages of those in charge — would be the real ability of controlling an eventual “reforms” situation within the Island. They have at their disposal the monopoly over all the economic, social and political structures, regardless of their obsolescence, with an almost total orphan Cuban civic society and the whole repressive apparatus at their service, ready to be fully activated at will. Against them is the time factor, the failure of half a century of experimentation – with its undeniable decline in people’s conviction — and an international panorama not favorable to dictatorial repression.

When viewed from the perspective of the possible, the next five years could mean an opportunity for alternative groups that have been generated within Cuban society since the last decade of the twentieth century, with a slight upward trend in the increase of new civic phenomena in the last ten years of this century. A slow process, as befits societies under totalitarian regimes, but a progressive sign that could constitute a major breakthrough in the promotion of democratic venues if political opponents, independent journalists, bloggers and dissidents of all stripes would take advantage, with their intellect, of the scenarios that could be drawn from an influx of new economic and relatively autonomous factors, in which might underlie the seeds of new interests and the beginning of a long-restrained social mobility.

In this case, the challenge of the various groups seeking more radical and effective changes than the government intends to implement, if they really intend to gain space and mobilize wills, is to try to reconcile the interests of broad social sectors found in the alternative proposals, a road to long-lasting collective and self-realization, a difficult task to accomplish under current conditions in Cuba, and whose platform signage should be the broad and inclusive nature of its proposals. In this regard, we must not neglect the role that some groups could play in the face of eventual change processes, those groups that have reform propensities, that today are among the “revolutionaries”, and that are sending interesting signals. In the next five years, dissidents must seek consensus, alliances and strategies that will allow them to overcome the status of survivors in a hostile environment, for which they will need to explore real growth. Beyond ideological trends, most of these groups share minimum essential elements: hopes for a democratic Cuba, the vision of the need for changes in order to achieve it, the commitment for a peaceful and gradual transition, and the will to continue to work towards these goals. That could be a start.

The Sixth Congress has been the consecration of the stagnation of the Cuban system, a goal in itself, perhaps the swan song of the Antillean communist experiment. No renewal is possible within the old structures of the regime. The so-called irreversible socialism is nothing more than a meaningless slogan, and it has aptly proven its failure after half a century of setbacks. Now it is the duty of the citizens to transform what is real and possible into what will be desirable for most Cubans, a dictatorship-free Cuba.

Translated by Norma Whiting

(Article originally published in the Diario de Cuba dated April 4th, 2011)

May 10 2011

A Digital Library / Miguel Iturria Savón

The young emigrant Sergio de los Reyes (b. Havana 1978), is based in Toronto, Canada, where he alternates his work and his passion for literature, has just launched an SOS to his countrymen on the island and exile who have Internet access, to ask them help on his personal project for a digital Library specializing in Cuban literature.

He points out that “The goal is that we all collaborate in one way or another and manage to create a fairly decent library where we can access our literature without charge. All the books are in the public domain … ”

To that end, he sent us a link http://bibliotecacubana.net) and 8 pages with authors and books available, in hopes of proposals and comments, without which it will not be possible to meet his personal, comprehensive, interesting and even necessary commitment, to delve into one of the most authentic and fascinating demonstrations of national imaginary.

In the pages sent by Sergio de los Reyes, we see that the new Digital Library Poetry includes (9 authors and 16 works), Theater (3 and 6), letters (4 and 7), biographies and autobiographies (3 and 5), fiction (8 and 19), Philosophy (4 and 15), essayist and journalist (8 and 15), Sociology (3 and 9) History (9 and 17), Natural Sciences (1 and 8), stories and customs (3 and 4) Bibliography (2 and 6), Dictionaries (1 and 2), Geography (1 and 3) literary magazines (only El Almendares, the executed poet Juan Clemente Zenea y Estrada).

In just a few months the young bibliophile’s effort is considerable, more than 60 authors and 113 digitized works is like a drop in the ocean of literature from Cuba, where after the music literature shines, but it is a good start. Maybe with perseverance and collaboration he will achieve his purpose.

The subject areas show that Sergio knows his stuff, but beyond the breadth of themes and times, the complexity of the search inside and outside the island, and the difficulty of accessing funds and institutional publishers, requires coordination work to occur in Havana, Mexico, Miami, Madrid, New York, London, Paris and other cities that hosted authors who created in exile, such as José María Heredia, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, José Martí and the many writers of the diaspora (second half of the 20th Century to the present), including Gaston Baquero, Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, Jose Triana, Lichi Diego, Raúl Rivero and dozens more.

I suggest patience and contacts, search by genres and stages, merging fiction with stories and customs (Narrative), separate essays and journalism, exclude history, natural sciences and other disciplines of printed media, that are far from the literary expressions. The story would force him to crawl almost infinitely to obtain and digitize the books of James Pezuela, Ramón de la Sagra, Miró and Argenter, Ramiro Guerra, Moreno Fraginals or Levi Marrero, plus testimonials from our newspapers and military strife (Figueredo, Céspedes, Maximo Gomez, Torriente Brau, Carlos Franqui, or Huber Matos).

I suppose that Sergio, a voracious reader, is disposed to reference works such as the Dictionary of Cuban Literature (two volumes) and the recent history of Cuban Literature (3 volumes), both the Institute of Literature and Linguistics, and the main catalogs, bio-bibliographies of major authors and indexes of journals, publishers and institutions in Cuba and Cubans outside the island, between these books published by the generation of Mariel and by the Center for Cuban-American Studies from Florida International University. The contact is essential because these entities digitize their bibliographic heritage, especially the publishers.

The effort to post on the Internet, regardless of state or institutions, a Cuban Literature Library, increases its value by its citizens connotation and the rescue of so many diverse and dispersed spiritual values. The proposals help to shake the dead leaves, discern, compare and display one of the areas of greatest creativity of the children of the largest island in the Caribbean.

May 4 2011

Coffee’s Bumpy Road / Fernando Dámaso

It’s no secret to anyone that for many years now, Cuban coffee production has been falling sharply. It’s not a problem exclusive to coffee, but one of all production, as a consequence of the original economic model. These days the subject of coffee has been on everyone’s lips, not because of an increase in its consumption, but because of new regulations about it.

For many years the public was given one envelope per person per month, one hundred and fifteen grams, at the subsidized price of twenty cents. A few years ago it was officially acknowledged that it was mixed with peas (something that everyone always knew, as it tasted bad) and it was said that henceforth it would be sold one hundred percent pure, at a price of five pesos in national currency (a 24 times increase). It was clarified that, even at this high price it was subsidized. With its variable quality, doubts were created about its real purity, which remained until last April.

At the beginning of May, through a press release, it was communicated that starting this same month, the delivery would again be mixed coffee, now at the price of four pesos in national currency (the same envelope, 115 grams). The reasons: the high price of coffee on the international market (explicitly discussed) and the deficient national production (noted by two lines, as if in passing). that is, the envelope that a few years ago sold for twenty cents, is not sold at four pesos (a 19-fold increase). In addition, it is clarified that the mix is about fifty percent with a substitute (variable component?), and that it is still subsidized to the tune of 190 million pesos in national currency. If this is so, one might ask: What does it cost the Cuban State to produce a bag of mixed coffee of 115 grams? Given that they are still selling it at four pesos, they should dedicate around 190 million pesos to its subsidy. I think it’s the most expensive coffee in the world.

What is happening now with coffee has happened in recent months with other products, both in national currency and in hard currency.Two of ours: liquid washing detergent which was distributed at one liter per family (when they had it) at three pesos national currency, is now for sale off the ration at twenty-five pesos national currency (8 times more), and a liter of sunflower oil that was sold in hard currency at two pesos and fifteen cents, is now two pesos forty cents. The list is endless and grows with each passing week.

If the path to perfecting the economic model requires each product to be steeply increased in price, the situation of the ordinary citizen will become increasingly untenable because wages do not increase but are frozen at poverty levels. The average wage, looking at it optimistically, doesn’t exceed twenty dollars (480 pesos in national currency), and the minimum does not exceed ten (240 pesos national currency). The future is as dark as the present.

May 9 2011

The Manipulated of Little Note / Angel Santiesteban

Foto: Karel Poort

For many it came to be the program with more viewers, but far from looking at it for ideological reasons, they took it as simple entertainment, assuming it was another fictional series, very bad indeed, but at that time on the schedule there was nothing more entertaining than baseball. Those who had satellite channels in their neighborhood had the option to watch other things on TV, but the majority, with no other choice, chose to wait for the surprise. It could be any program, the least expected, and hence the appeal of “Cuba’s Reasons.”

There are those of us who remember the serial, “It had to be in silence” (1979), which marked our generation. It was about the Revolutionary hero who risked his life to foil the plots against the lives of Cuban leaders or to sabotage of national industry. Comparing that to the new series, “Cuba’s Reasons,” leaves us no option but to make fun of so much ridiculousness.

But the last thing we should do is underestimate the creators of this media show, because there was something surreptitious about it which was their true intention: to create paranoia. To instill more fear; to make people afraid of those closet to them, be it a family member, a friend or colleague of a lifetime. At a time when revolutions are starting in Egypt and other countries, they need to reinforce the justification that we are a country under attack in case demonstrations happen in Cuban demanding that the dictatorship open the doors of Democracy.

The Ladies in White were the spark, the detonator of an awaking of national dignity, because then they, the fascists, could defend themselves in their own way and ensure the manipulation of the rest of the population that remains naive or is unwilling to see the truth; and to beat, as on other occasions, these Ladies, whom the men of Cuba envy for their courage, and to call for marches of “reaffirmation,” which are nothing more than blackmail, where people are forced to attend because they don’t want to lose their “stimulation” (monthly cash), or even their jobs, and even students, independent of their grades, they won’t give them the political endorsement that allows them to attend college. So they have taken up once again, the slogan, “the universities are for revolutionaries.”

So the viewers have no other choice but to wait for a second season that will improve, if possible, the quality of the scripts. Meanwhile, others, those who have no bosses, nor masters, nor gentlemen to whom they respond in exchange for their gives and rewards, nor who receive payment in hard currency for labor and political behavior, but whom the honesty of feelings compels, we are left to construct for the Nation a dignified history of shame and modesty.

Returning to My Planet / Rebeca Monzo

Once I’d passed the personal and luggage check I could sit down and rest a little while waiting for the time to board the plane that, with a stopover in Panama, would finally take me back to my planet.

It was the first of May and all the shops, except for the snack bars, were closed. I approached the gate to avoid having to run at the last minute. A Chilean man, sitting in one of the seats connected to mine, upon hearing my accent when I asked what time it was, immediately identified my origins. He too was going to the same destination. Then, out poured the usual questions.

In another seat, nearby, there was another gentleman who immediately and without waiting to be invited, took part in the conversation. He turned out to be an official of my planet who traveled constantly to Chile, to conduct business related to the importation of mackerel, as he explained in his brief introduction. The Chilean, very surprised at such a presentation, asked why Cuba, being an island, had to import fish from so far away.

The official, very ceremoniously, offered a dissertation on the clear waters of our beaches, the whiteness of their sand, and so on, attributing these virtues to the absence of plankton, and thus the lack of fish in our waters. I was discretely maintaining my silence, but couldn’t continue and took advantage of a brief pause spoke up and said that as a young girl I’d never noticed the absence of these little beings. On the contrary, there had been a huge variety to choose from and never any lack, despite the fact that our beaches were as famous then for the same qualities previously mentioned. I added that I knew it was simply the disappearance of the former fishing fleet, which had fallen apart with abandonment and neglect, as happened with nearly everything on my beloved planet.

May 3 2011