Translating Cuba

Sometimes I suspect that blogging in Cuba is like a scream from the depths of a cave that is lost in the void without finding any listeners. The echo comes back to me in an irascible silence, making me uncomfortable, thinking that outside the cave there are no inhabitants, we are alone.

The scream simply fades in the air. And we continue to roar in vain. We only manage to exorcise the impotence of knowing ourselves helpless and insignificant. The danger of posting is a personal matter, although to do so signifies, in some way, restoring the Nation to millions.

Death in Cuba is like a card game where the loser is well aware that given the rules and the ethics he must accept the facts and leave satisfied. And history doesn’t contradict me, and I remember some of the most significant tragedies:

A tugboat with several families, including children, one in arms, women, the elderly, is assaulted by another shuttle and with water hoses they are swept from the deck and thrown overboard to their death by suffocation. And the official press pays little regard to the incident.

They shoot some teenagers for the crime of attempting to cross the Straits of Florida, after ticking them and guaranteeing them life, without the blood splatter.

A man dies of hunger in a dark and dirty cell without the guilty missing a minute of sleep. Only his name remains in the anniversaries: Orlando Zapata.

Recently they expelled from the National Assembly, and closed the workshop of the artist Pedro Pablo Oliva, because he publicly expressed his personal ideas of democracy, and called for a multiparty system.

In recent days, they beat an opponent in the most central park of the city of Santa Clara, and hours later he died from the aftermath of the blows. The news becomes know through the willingness and courage of many who run at risk for others, and in just a few days, the news is diluted like a flash on the horizon.

A few hours ago, the Superior Art Institute (ISA), revoked the registration and grades of the student Henry Constantin, because he reported in his blog the news of the dissident murdered in Santa Clara. The young artist decided “not to leave the school on his own two feet.” The government understood it as a direct confrontation at his design, and nothing more dangerous could happen.

There are several possible sequences of what could happen:

1 – They could assault the student, threaten him, the State Security officials could abuse him and forcibly remove him from campus.

2 – They could manipulate a group of students disposed to “defy” Henry’s position, and in the end the young, emboldened by official pressure, will want to punish and beat him.

3 – In any of these variants a fatal accident could happen: a fall down the stairs, a slip in the struggle and he could receive a serious blow.

I know I’m being tragic but after reading the beginning of this post is there room for any possibility of naiveté or optimism? Does he have to endure another abusive attack before it happens? Why more lives to remember? What will we conquer by allowing them to add more pain to that we already possess?

The silence of those who raise their eyebrows on reading the horror and then turn the page, is direct complicity with the Castro dictatorship.

May 27 2011

Between March 8th and 9th in the eastern city of Holguín, the First Meeting of Women Iyaonifá in Cuba was held. During the event the association the “Universal Sisterhood” was established, the first organization of its kind in our country. During the meeting, of a universal character, 31 delegates from La Habana, Matanzas, Morón, Holguín and Santiago de Cubawere directly involved, and attending virtually were delegates from Venezuela, Mexico, Panama and Spain.

The opening, coinciding with International Women’s Day, began with a drum ceremony to honor ancestors and prominent figures. In particular, Àgbàyé Arábìnrin Oluwa — the first Iyaonifá known in history, who lived about 200 AD in Nigeria — Fermina Gomez, Latuán and Maria Moserarrate, among other priestesses of the cult of Ifá and women important in the history of Cuba like Mariana Grajales and Celia Sanchez Manduley. On the second day the session founded the international Universal Sisters association and priestesses were chosen to develop legislative and executive policies for the fledgling institution.

As announced, the two key objectives of Universal Sisters are: (1) Regain the position that corresponds to the female gender in the African religious context, and (2) To contribute, by their example, to the reduction of distance between different families and institutions of babalawos that exist in Cuba.

The Constitution of the Universal Sisters is the result of an effort directed as repositioning women in the religious Afro-Cuban and Afro-American context in Cuba which started nine years ago, when the Ìranlówo Ifa Temple House (Salvation is Ifá) led by Víctor Omolófaoró, consecrated with the rank of Iyaonifá, equivalent to Babalawo for men, the Cuban women Maria Cuesta Ifachina and Nidia Aguila Ifabiola in March 2002, and the Venezuelan Alba Marina Portals Ifayeni in June 2004, who became part of list of women on the continent led by Patri D ‘Haifa, the first American woman consecrated in New York City in 1985.

For Victor Omolófaoró the consecration of women is justified: because essential knowledge in Yoruba traditions is received at a great age and male slaves who arrived in Cuba, because of their youth, did not have it; because African women arrived on the island with the knowledge required for performing initiations; because until the third decade of the twentieth century women existed in Cuba with these characteristics; for the religious activities of the House that she directs are copies of the ceremonies performed between 1860 and 1930 in Cuba and those undertaken by the Yoruba peoples of old; because the initiation performed corresponds to the international movement of the signification of women; because they have received visits from several Nigerian Iyanifa; because Professor Wande Abimbola Awise Agbaye, Ifa Inspector in the World, makes no distinction between men and women, as both can study and receive a hand of Ifa through knowledge, study and practice; and because the spiritual leader of the Yoruba religion in the world, Chief Awoyemi Aworeni Adisa Mokoranwale, said that women “can undertake Itefa to be converted into Ìyáonífá or Iyá-awo, a priestess of Ifa …. ”

The solo work initiated by the Ifa Ìranlówo Temple House is followed today by several babalawos of the country and the number consecrated has risen within Cuba to 58, demonstrating that gender equality within the Yoruba religion is on the road to consolidation. A fact that recalls what happened in 1857 with the first abakuá oath of whites in Cuba, for which Petit (Andrés Quimbisa) was accused as a traitor and of having sold the secret to whites. Likewise, the consecration of women priests and the birth of Universal Sisters is an important moment in the history of African religions in Cuba and of gender equality.

April 11 2011

According Dannys Montes de Oca Moreda, curator of Whirlwind II, exhibited from 9 May to 9 June in Havana Gallery, “it is in order that that object that hasn’t told a story before,” a maxim contradicted by the young artists who presented The Whirlwind in the capital last fall, a continuation of the show in the Antonio M. Claret Cultural Center in Santiago de Cuba, where the logic promotional showed an emerging group that looks at nature and reality from the expressions of art.

Whirlwind II brings many “intellectual games, transporting and interchanging, representatives of one or another direction,” as a “spaces of friction between one artist and another, a work with another and the possibilities of interaction” between architects, although each production has its own standards and individual poetry that integrates the whole and “embraces a kind of epochal sensitivity and different ways to build their imagination.”

The whirlwind of the Havana Gallery becomes the pretext that “rising in the middle of chaos, is the possibility of a subsequent order,” as “dispersed particles, riots, which then settle into a new and different structure.” It includes novels, from known thirty-somethings in the provinces and temporal intermedia whose methodological diversity defies “sectarian logic” between painting, video, new technologies and the post conceptual, indicator of a claim of advocacy and partnership.

Everything fits into this mapping or visual imagery, except the possibility of classifying it. They are works that bring intensity and technical deployment of original art scenes, and poetic, philosophical and human sensitivity, marked by the social dynamics of creation, far from extreme positions around the “autonomy of the aesthetic” or “the re-politicalization of art.”

As “only art can accept disorder without reservation,” counterpoint artists converge in Whirlwind II such as: Pavel Acosta (Camagüey, 1975); Yunior Acosta (Villa Clara, 1978); Nadal Antelmo (Cárdenas, 1968); Kevin Beovides (Havana , 1978), Carlos Caballero (Camagüey, 1978), Alejandro Campins (Manzanillo, 1981), Susan P. Dalahanate (Havana, 1984), Lisandra I. Garcia (Havana, 1989), Marianela Orozco (Sancti Spiritus, 1973), Levi Orta (Havana, 1978), Michel Perez Chicken (Manzanillo, 1981), Harold Adislen Reyes and Vazquez, both born in 1984 in Havana.

Pavel Acosta presents photos of the Stolen Talent and Stolen Spaces series in which a sense of time and history is condensed that seems to translate into film and video, which alters or disrupts the caught identity. He also uses the photography of Harold Vazquez, whose analytical and deconstructive structure proceeds through the image as a document recreated with slogans in the X-Places series and “Jeló mai frén,” printed digitally. Photo printing tied to the acrylic is centered in the offerings of Lisandra I. Garcia, a friend of the portrait as a pretext of artistic reflection in Seven Days, where she infers moderation and balance.

Yunior Acosta highlights concerns about the ecological as an essential element of human subsistence. His caustic look at our natural condition nests in Good Luck (gypsum, rabbit’s foot and bird feathers), Finding Heights (taxidermy and bones of birds) and the woodcut Horse Frolicking in the Meadow.

Video and audiovisual configure the offerings of Susana P. Dalahanate, able to philosophize about the rituals of life, significant in the metaphorical Untitled (28 minutes), where someone takes earth from a bed with a shovel. Chela, by Lisandra Garcia; Self-management and Time Off from the Spaniard Orta Levi Nuria Güell; and even more the memorable Directed Dream of Marianela Orozco, who ventures into the everyday through video. Orozco surprises with Accession, digital printing and poetic construction.

Nadal Antelmo and Kevin Beovides start from new technologies. The first with Networks (2007-2010). Word in Progress, a photographic installation for space and for the web. The second offers Greek, digital storytelling, or cyber-literature; landscape Zen and Deadhead, the three from 2008.

Philosophical concerns and aesthetic pleasure are found in the offerings of Carlos Caballero, creator of the paintings On the Other Side of the Meadow, and Untitled (Ray); Alejandro Campins, author of The Son, Keep Out and Suo Chang Mountain (oil-canvas from 2010 and 2011); Michel Perez Pollo, whose paradoxical and animist look in The Shore of the Beach and Model for the Shore of the Beach. While Reyes Adislen offers scenes of childhood as a boundary between the naive and the twisted, given in the series League, made with acrylic, tempera and collage on cardboard.

May 27 2011

Racial discrimination in Cuba goes back to the slavery system introduced by Spanish colonialism. Given the demand for sugar in world trade, the Creole oligarchy freely engaged in the slave trade and the massive importation of slaves from Africa, a trade in human beings that took off with the British occupation of Havana, to the point that by the mid-nineteenth century the proportion of blacks exceeded that of whites on the island. From the economic, social and cultural relations between slaves and slave owners, or between blacks and whites, sprouted the roots of racial discrimination that continue today.

The vast majority of slaves went to the sugar plantations, prisons with a high male composition where the concept of family disappeared for blacks. A spiral of violence developed that had among its significant moments the uprising led by José Antonio Aponte, the first Cuban who structured a national conspiracy in order to abolish slavery and to overthrow the colonial government; it peaked with the famous Conspiracy of the Staircase, in which thousands of blacks and mestizos were involved. In these difficult conditions the black slave became Creole, but different from the white Creole, which prevented the development of the sense of belonging and common destiny that characterizes nations.

Along with whites, in 1868 blacks joined the struggle for independence. The first, seeking economic and political freedoms; others for the abolition of slavery. The Pact of Zanjón that ended the war did not achieve either of these two objectives, but instead yielded a set of freedoms that blacks took advantage of to associate legally. In 1886 slavery was abolished and at the beginning of 1890 Juan Gualberto Gomez, one of the champions of racial equality, outlined several principles for civic struggle, similar to those employed six decades later by Martin Luther King in America. Also, in 1892, he founded the Central Directory of Societies of Color to claim their rights and prepare for the resumption of the struggle for independence.

If in the Ten Years’ War blacks and mestizos participated as soldiers and reached high ranks, in 1895 they came to occupy the most senior military positions. Equality and solidarity was imposed on racial prejudice in the expertise in machete charges and life in the jungle, which allowed blacks to move from a sense of inferiority to be thought of as heroes. Upon arrival of the Republic in 1902, the skills demonstrated in the war were of little use in competing in the labor market, for which training was required and economics, two requirements almost entirely absent in the black population.

From this state of inequality emerged the idea of fighting evil on their own. To that end, in 1908 the Independent Party of Color (PIC) was founded, the first of its kind in the hemisphere, and in May 1912, the PIC took up arms to enforce their claims by force. The Government’s response — less than a century ago — was a horrible slaughter against the “inferior race” that claimed the lives of thousands of dark-skinned Cubans, hindering the process of identity and common destiny.

After this event, thanks to public debate and the labor movement, blacks made some progress. Prominent figures from Cuban culture and politics, from the press and radio, participated in discussions on racial discrimination that helped the social and cultural development of black consciousness and strengthened the common destiny. One result was the inclusion in the 1940 Constitution of a fundamental anti-racist principle; any discrimination on grounds of race, color or class and any other cause which offends human dignity was outlawed and punishable by law. However, the law itself was never enacted to achieve its implementation.

The Revolution of 1959 dealt a severe blow to racism, but was wrong to consider discrimination a result of class society, and in thinking that by removing the classes, it would automatically disappear. This approach led to the suspension of debate. Thus, together with the benefits of the Revolution, blacks, like other Cubans, lost instruments and civic spaces that had led to the progress already made. Racism expelled from public spaces took refuge in the culture, and blacks — who did not emigrate — were excluded from family remittances. The result is the current pattern: a decreased proportion of blacks in management positions in companies operating in foreign currencies and on television, and also their high representation in the prison population in the country, the growth of prostitution and of school dropouts.

This, combined with the failure of the economic model, and the problem of unemployment, as the majority still live in the poorest districts of the country, becomes a potential danger that can not be dismissed. This picture of social injustice was partially recognized in the recently held Sixth Congress of the Communist Party, which raised the systematic issue of insufficient political will to ensure the promotion to decision-making positions for women, blacks, mestizos and youth as well as the difficulties, after 52 years of the Revolution, of improving the racial composition within the ranks of the ruling party itself.

In short: the colony had no interest in solving the problems of blacks; the Republic recognized the problem, allowing association and public debate, as reflected in the Constitution and made some progress, but unaccompanied by institutional arrangements; the Revolution took educational and institutional measures, but dismantled civil society and limited rights and civil liberties that had served as the basis of the slow progress made. Now it requires strong political will to: recognize the failure of racial integration and in consequence spaces, civil rights and freedoms to restart the public debate on the issue, providing in some cases necessary priority to the most marginalized and taking on the problem within the education system, including free access to information, until the social differences between blacks and whites shrinks and definitely settles into a common destiny among all Cubans.

Currently the issue is being debated in some small spaces, such as the Brotherhood of Negritude, an association that still lacks legal recognition. The essential fact in the Cuba of today consists in the minimum freedoms that underpin human dignity and the status of citizen do not exist and so they must be implemented. There is a need to remove all restrictions to freedom, responsible for hindering the civic education and participation in addressing major national issues such as racial discrimination, a problem that continues to hamper the formation of the Cuban nation and calls into doubt the Cuban model of socialism, if we can call it that.

(Published in http://www.diagonalperiodico.net)

May 27 2011

Indubitably most of these testimonies will be about the spiritual liberation of many Cubans. I will join them, but I would like to take the opportunity of this brief space to also thank God for the physical liberation of an elevated number of prisoners that before the celebration of the last three campaigns, and mainly for motives of conscience, had no hope of being set free for many years. They, with their first and last names, were intense prayers of petitionthe testimon that were raised to the Lord and in this Campaign of Celebration we can not fail to include the gratitude for the answers to our prayers.

This can be verified simply by reading the press release published in the newspaper Granma on Thursday, July 8, 2010, page 2, to confrim that that which for many was impossible became reality. The Catholic magazine Palabra Nueva, of the Archbishop of Havana, was giving an account of each of the releases in its issues. The Presbyterian Christian Herald Publication No. 4, July-August 2010, on page 5, appealing to Luke 4.8 and Hebrews 13.3, recognized and appreciated these releases and “the end of the hunger strike kept for that cause by Mr. Guillermo Fariñas.”

More than human efforts this was an authentic divine miracle granted by fasting and intense prayer of Cubans of good will. This large group of prisoners and their families have known of our intercessions and are now more willing to listen to spiritual liberation that, above all, Christ offers and many have also been received. Glory be to God!

Pastor Mario Félix Lleonart Barroso

April 18 2011

Only sometimes, when a beam of light penetrates her neurons, Francisca Herrera Cuellar, 95, acknowledges her granddaughter Maritza Cruz León Pérez, who fought, on her behalf, an eviction order the Municipal Court of the Plaza municipality, to try to protext her from the imminent collapse of the small family apartment in upper floors of Linea 1060 between 12 and 14, Vedado, where she moved into the rooms vacated by the officer Francisco Martínez Blanes, beneficiary of a new house Ayestarán between Capdevila and Concepción from the Ministry of the Interior.

Before moving to a space in better condition, Maritza Cruz León Pérez, 50, lived in two rooms with a barbecue together with her grandmother, her mother of 72, an uncle of 68 and her daughter, 21. The building dates from 1920 and was declared uninhabitable in the mid-eighties by the Municipal Department of Housing, whose shelter commission has no means to accommodate the tenants of the old residence, one among many in Vedado to be demolished, anticipating the abandonment of each family, forced to shore up their area while awaiting the collapse or transfer to another house, because in Cuba the government controls the housing and prohibits its sale.

The history of institutional harassment against Cruz Maritza and her family includes previous claims against the Housing Department and the Shelter Commission of the Plaza municipality; it continued with the legal placement of Francisco Martínez Blanes, who months after her departure accused the elderly Francisca Cuellar Herrera of usurping her unoccupied property; it continues with the rallying of local officials, because the building belongs to the so-called “frozen zone” of the Ministry of the Interior; it is entangled with the secrecy of the ministry; it is widened with the summons for postponed trial and with the attempted arrest and eviction order, which the police considered inappropriate.The housing challenge between the granddaughter of the apoplectic old woman and the guardians of the space that was left empty, had its final at the trial held on 18 May. Maritza Cruz Leon went with the documents that proved the state of necessity of her relatives, the medical certificate of the vegetative grandmother, the technical report on the property and requests made to move her family to two less deplorable rooms. Fortunately, the court ruled that no crime was committed in this case.

If the authorities did not respond to their complaints or show interest in apartment vacated in order the return to place of origin by “arbitrary exercise of law”, the alternative would be to wait for death in the collapse; a regrettable episode, but a common one in our island reality.

May 25 2011

In these April days while the communists of the government party met for four days in the Palace of Conventions, to the west of Havana, newspaper vendors had a party.

Bartolo, a nearly blind old man, doubled sales of Granma that he offers every morning in the dirty doorways of the Calzada 10 de Octubre. Azucena, a thin lady with frog eyes, also is smiling again. He sold some 150 newspapers a day, three times what she usually sells.

The paper selling business offers meager profits. All these old people get up at 4:30 in the morning, just as the prostitutes and pimps start going to bed. After standing in line for three hours, they buy fifty Granmas and an equal number of Rebel Youth.

They buy them at 20 cents and sell them for a peso (a nickel on the U.S. dollar). They usually have clients who pay 40 or 50 pesos a week (almost two dollars), for them to put the morning papers under their doors.

That’s not the end of their suffering. Under a blazing sun, they walk daily between 5 and 10 kilometers to sell 100 copies of the boring local news. If they sell them all, at the end of the day will have earned 70 to 75 pesos. And believe me, they have to work miracles.

The Cuban press is pure lead. A pamphlet in the style of Pyongyang. Therefore, to sell a hundred papers every day they have to call on their ingenuity. In bad times, when baseball and news of interest is distinguished by its absence, these old men put all their skills into it.

In July 2010, when Raul Castro negotiated the release of political prisoners with the Catholic Church and the then Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, the vendors cried: “Hey, the abuse ended. The political prisoners aren’t going home. They’re off to Madrid.”

In their effort to boost sales that even invent news. Many people on the island do not read newspapers and they just buy Granma to read the TV schedule or the sports page.The sheets also are used to wrap garbage or for toilet paper.

So to call out a striking headling is the hook so people don’t pass by without putting a paper under their arm. And the news of the Sixth Congress was a good excuse to increase sales.

On Sunday, April 17, there was no way to find a paper in all of Havana. Some vendors were offering them at three pesos. They loudly announced, “Elections are coming to Cuba, within ten years,” or “Elections for president every 5 years,” or “Starting tomorrow, sales of houses and cars.”

Bartolo prefered to shout a more complete title: “Don’t wait to hear it from others, find out for yourself, elections in Cuba, Raul Castro retires in 2021. The Yankees have nothing for us to envy.”

People flocked to buy Granma. At the bus stop, readers wondered if the ten years that the General announced as a maximum time to stay in power started in 2008, when he took over the country, or at end of the VI Congress. It did not matter.

The important thing for all these poor elderly Cubans was not the ‘good news’ they hawked, it was the winning streak they were one over the four days the Congress lasted.

The first day of the event, Bartolo ‘went to bed’ early. After 12 hours of walking and shouting out newspapers, he eats, for 20 pesos, a boxed meal with rice and black beans, yucca and pork steak and drinks almost two liters of rum bully. When it got dark, he prepared cartons that serve as his bed in a doorway of Calzada de 10 de Octubre. Until tomorrow. Good night and good luck.

April 22 2011

WHEN I WAS WILLIAM SAROYAN…, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

vercuba.com/index.php/archives/402

April 6 2011

Insolencias instintivas…, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

idl-reporteros.pe/2011/03/21/el-insolente-oficio-de-ser-u…

March 23 2011

When Castro says that Cuba is the most democratic country in the world, I am uncertain if he is being serious or it is black humor. I can understand that a lifelong guerrilla, fiercely opposed to the capitalist model, does not appreciate at all the system of representative democracy in the Western world.

But from there to setting up a series of institutions, silent and obedient to the government, where the three branches of State are controlled by one person and to tell us that this is the only true democracy, confirms to me that all autocrats have that pathological mania to appear as democrats.

A dictator should state clearly that he is going to rule until his death, because he considers himself a superior being. Or because he does what the hell he wants.

 

I’m sick of the lies. Perhaps true democracy does not exist. In countries where universally accepted laws operate and human rights are respected, failures occur in bulk, but people shout what they want against their government and no one will look at you with a mean face.

Also, there are independent courts and parliament is like a madhouse, where everyone disagrees with the package of measures released by the president. That’s what I mean by a democracy.

In Cuba, when the Castros talk nobody can go against them. Publicly, no one has ever been seen raising their hand to tell the comandante that he is pondering a load of nonsense.

On the island, everyone is wrong. The infallible are the Castros. If things in Cuba are crooked it’s not by their misrule. No, the ‘guilty’ are the negligent workers and certain talentless ministers.

General Raul Castro wants there to be disagreement. But when they end their speeches and the president of the dull and monotonous Cuban parliament asks the members whether they agree with the words of the leader, everyone, absolutely everyone, raises their hand.

I will believe in the Socialist democracy, as advocated by the regime in Havana, when you see a negative vote.

March 21 2011

For some time I’ve wanted to talk about the media series on the Cuban “agents”, a completely carnivalesque show where they invent records with long years of service, unfortunately I was damned surprised to recognize the two of them.

I recognized him from being part of a fraternal organization to which I belonged for twenty-four years, and despite his reaching the highest levels within the organization, and his recognized facility with language to communicate, I never maintained a close relationship with this person. Something strange in me, that I’m given to fraternize with the majority of my brothers, but something in his particular case made me uneasy. Without explanation, I was unjustifiable overcome with a rejection of him, until his obvious anti-Masonic acts began. Ultimately, for his disdainful underestimation of the fraternity, he was first sanctioned for several years to lose his Masonic rights and be separated from the organization, and later he was expelled by the Supreme Court of Justice, confirmed by the Most Serene Upper Masonic House. He was the only Grand Master ever expelled from the organization. Quite a feat!

We knew that Mr. Collera Vento had businesses, illegal in the eyes of the government, and he survived in this way, because not even he himself remembers the last time he treated a baby in his pediatrics office. What can one infer from the fact that he was sought out by State Security, typical of their modus operandi, and blackmailed to cooperate for whatever they offered him. Once you respond affirmatively, all is lost. And Mr. Collera thought, like the great manipulator he is, that he could emerge unscathed from this blackmail, and they were squeezing him, threatening him until he was filled to the brim with excrement.
Not only did he sell his Masonic family when he sowed division among his brothers, but he betrayed his son, also a Mason, and they say that he now hides, for shame or for fear, in some part of the United States and doesn’t want to hear any news of his father, not forgetting that he deceived his mother and ex-wife, who left for Miami. Mr. Collera lied to his brother Masons through the oath that he took with his hand on the Bible, and the worst thing is that he betrayed himself. The final sad thing about this gentleman is that he has run out of land, they don’t want him over there and much less here.

The other “agent” I know is a fellow writer whom I called more than a friend, brother, supposedly, a gift life had given me. Mr. Raúl Capote also had been caught at some point, or he just gave up. Several times he wore me out asking to take his kids in my car to high school, where they were harassed over the counterrevolutionary activities of their father: they weren’t given credit for tests even though they passed them, they marked them down for misbehaviors they didn’t commit, they stole their things, obviously with the knowledge of the school officials, among other abusive practices.

It seems to me that therein lies the weakness of Capote: his children. Through them they conquered him, broke his will. We parents know that we don’t have the right to ruin our children’s future, who hasn’t felt the same? The biggest shame was that they lived off Capote’s mother who, from the United States, kept sending them remittances, at times ignoring her own welfare to give them a decent life.

Capote never thought he’d end up like this. Knowing him, he thought he could play both sides with State Security, and take one side and the other without ever knowing their treachery. In fact, he sold me my laptop for five hundred dollars’ possibly it was some donation, because he told me that he had received several for his Cuban Pen Club project.

His daughter was baptized by Dagoberto Valdés, then Director of the magazine Vitral, and I can still hear the sweet sound of the girl calling her “padrinito” who loaded her up with presents and attention purely from his feeling and particular affection for her, because to my son, who participated in the same activities when we worked on the magazine as jurors of its contest, he never felt obliged to go beyond his duty as a friend and host.

For both “agents,” their greatest punishment is their conscience, above all at night when they lay their heads on their pillows and remember that they are cowards and mercenaries.

A shot in the temple would be their only relief, only to do it they would have to have what they couldn’t find when they should have said “no.”

May 25 2011

Among the many other losses, our architectural patrimony is a constant throughout the island. Years of lack of maintenance, general apathy, and the actions of leaders and officials with an excess of initiative but a lack of a citizen’s sensibility, have led to this. Every day we see buildings that one constituted the hallmarks of our towns and cities disappear, some demolished, others no longer in the uses for which they were built.

So we have a Capitol with no practical use, a Presidential Palace in use as a museum, a rundown Single Market of Supplies, historic ruins where once there was the Trotcha Hotel, a Campoamor Theater destroyed, residences turned into rooming houses, vacant lots where there were palaces and colonial home, a Marti Theater in eternal virtual repair, a park without public access where once was the Alaska Building, cinemas recycled as housing, etcetera. The Historian of the City has saved some in the old town, but the city is not only the historical district and some isolated buildings.

Now they say that’s what they’re going to do with the Pedro Borras Astorga Children’s Hospital in El Vedado, a valuable art deco building, due to its deplorable condition (lack of maintenance) and its having been seriously affected by the explosions they used to build tunnels in the vicinity for the shelters (this they do not say), and the Hotel Internacional in Varadero, the building that is emblematic of the beach. Many voices of responsible citizens are rising up to prevent their being demolished, but a lot more should rise up, so that these barbaric acts do not go forward, and there are already other buildings that face the same risk .

For some people, to destroy what they didn’t build is easy: no feeling or memory binds them to these buildings. It would be desirable, when someone intends to demolish something, that they be required to substantiate the need for demolition and submit the draft of what they plan to replace it with, and that this be discussed and approved by experts and authorities, prior to authorization for the first sledgehammer blow. That would avoid the proliferation of vacant lots, dump sites, and shabby parks, that don’t even deserve to be called such.

Our architectural heritage is an important legacy of our ancestors, our grandparents and parents. Our duty is to preserve it for ourselves and for future generations, not demolish it. To talk about aging is ridiculous: with that criteria the pyramids of Egypt wouldn’t exist nor any of the ancient works carried out by mankind which today are the pride of the world. Since we failed to maintain and prevent systematic deterioration, we should at least be capable of not letting them destroy what little remains standing. It is a simple act of civility, respect and love for what is ours.

May 23 2011