Translating Cuba

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

If you want to know the soul of the Cuban people, you must live in a solar or tenement building. That’s where you’ll find diversity. Stories of prostitutes, pimps, gays, hustlers, thieves and dissidents.

I invite you to visit a building in the Havana neighborhood of Lawton. It consists of a ground floor and an upper floor with a total of with apartments, some larger than others. Four interior and four exterior terraces on the street.

It was ordered built in 1957 by Rosara, a pharmacist originally from Galicia. After saving coins and crumpled bills under his mattress for years, the Galician decided to take a leap in his life and become a landlord.

The idea was good, but times were bad. It was inaugurated in 1958. A year later, Fidel Castro and his bearded ones took over and did not take long to nationalize factories, sugar mills, refineries and buildings. Rosara could never recover the money he invested.

It’s been 53 years. The facade of the building has not been fully repainted. The letters R and O have fallen off and it reads now only SARA. But compared with the 19-century filthy tenements in the old part of Havana, which collapse under a passing shower or medium-intensity winds, Rosara is a five-star hotel.

I present to you its tenants. Along a narrow hallway four families live. A mother with three children, unemployed and mentally imbalanced, eating whatever comes along and living like a gypsy.

In another apartment, a neighbor devoted to Santeria. Above, a couple of old people loyal to Castro. In their old age they survive on their retirement checks and remittances sent from the United States.

Next, a family maintained by their daughter. From Europe, she sends euros, so they can eat two meals a day and sleep with air conditioning.

In one of the apartments on the ground floor with a terrace, lives a couple with good manners and a son in college. Next, the classic generous type, who constantly disturbs the neighbors to offer his various trades. On the top floor, a specialist in sports statistics, serious and quiet.

It is a building where people usually say good morning, something rare in the island. And they do not ask for money, or to borrow sugar or rice, as is customary in most rooming houses and buildings of the capital.

Nor do they often have violent family quarrels over trivial matters like who ate the bread the brother got on the ration book, or who sold the parents’ egg ration, which have occasioned more than one bloody encounter in the country.

The building Rosara is a piece of Cuba today. Neighbors who have gone into exile, people who disagree publicly and good workers who answer summonses from the government.

The final tenant lives in one of the apartments above. He is a freelance journalist and has two blogs. For two years he’s trying to repair his floor. One day he wants to live with his daughter and his wife.

February 26 2011

Right now, the personal enemy of Edna is an Xbox. A single mother of 43, she thought to resolve by great problem of few recreational opportunities for her son, so she asked her relatives in Miami to send him a superb and sophisticated computer game.

“I thought my son Michael, 11, could spend more time at home. He was addicted to video games and in one month and he would sometimes pay up to 50 convertible pesos (60 dollars) to play on the floor of a neighbor who rented his equipment for a “chavito” (one dollar) per hour, “says Edna.

The good idea has turned into adversity. The boy is connected to Xbox from the moment he comes home from school. He has no social life. With his friends, who come in bunches to sit in the room, they take the controls to compulsively play the ultra-violent games proliferating in the market.

Michael has little interest in school. During class hours, he doesn’t concentrate on his school work but spends his time talking about the latest version of a bloody game. Or he escapes to the house, to improve his assassination skills as a virtual killer.

Michael’s aim to be the best ‘killer’ among his peers in the neighborhood. According to Edna, she’s gotten up in the middle of the night and found him stuck to his Xbox.

Her child’s manias greatly concern her. She has taken him to see a psychologist, who unsuccessfully tried to wean him from the addiction. Such virtual violence is taking its toll on Michael. He has become impulsive and a boy of few words.

Video games are not a serious problem in Cuba, as often happens in first world countries. But it is a phenomenon to consider.

The entertainment industry is a shocking business. They take in 48 billion dollars a year, which leaves the eight billion spent on movies in the dust. And they want to earn more money.

According to think tanks, analysts and experts in the field, in just five years the industry could become the seventh-largest, surpassed only by arms, drugs, prostitution, casinos, food and medicine.

Geographically, Cuba is closer to the United States than Fidel Castro would have liked. Despite being a nation commercially embargoes by the Americans and ruled for 51 years by an authoritarian government that denies freedoms, the latest in American technology comes to the island immediately.

Such is the case of Apple computers, the iPhone or the next-generation Xbox. The worst and most violent video games also arrive. Many children and teams eat them up.

Some parents do not believe that virtual fanaticism is harmful. Maybe not. But addiction to games of blood and death has led to many tragic events in America.

In Cuba, youth violence does not go that far, but it has quietly been increasing. Due to the many material shortages, there needs to be a sharp eye on the harmful consequences addiction to violent video games can have on children.

Edna does not think her son is capable of taking a sharp knife from the kitchen and stabbing anyone. But when she sees his aggressive behavior she has her doubts. You never know.

February 28 2011

One morning in 1958, in intricate landscapes of the Sierra Maestra, after a heavy bombardment by dictator Fulgencio Batista’s air force on defenseless villages, the guerrilla leader Fidel Castro wrote a note to his secretary and friend Celia Sánchez. He vowed to her that after the air raid and verification that the bombs used were made in the USA, from that moment on, he would begin his real war against the United States of America.

And so it happened. The support in arms, logistics and military training which the United States provided Batista, was the starting point for his personal crusade against the gringos. As a lover of history, the young lawyer from Biran had antecedents. Since the island was a colony of Spain, the imperial cravings of the colossus of the north were clear.

After 1898, the U.S. military occupation and the outrageous Platt Amendment–which was like a sword of Damocles over our fledgling sovereignty–were the breeding ground that increased the hatred and frustration of many, given the foreign policy of their neighbors on the other shore.

Castro’s political enemies had seen signals of his war against the Yankees in the letter he sent to President Roosevelt in 1940, while studying at the Colegio Dolores, Santiago de Cuba:

“My good friend Roosevelt, I do not know much English, but I know enough to write. I like listening to the radio and I’m very happy because I heard that you will be President for another term.

“I am 12 years old (which was not true, because he was born on August 13, 1926 and the date of the letter is dated November 6, 1940, so he was already 14). I’m a boy, but I think a lot and I can’t believe I’m writing to the President of the United States.

“If you would like, give me (or send) a real American greenback of ten dollars because I’ve never seen a real American greenback of ten dollars and I would like to have one.

“If you want iron to build your boats, I’ll show you the biggest mines of iron of the country (or world). They are in Mayarí, Oriente, Cuba.”

Roosevelt neither answered him nor sent the money. Castro opponents believe that this was the real beginning of his anti-imperialist crusade. I think not. Before the triumph of his revolution, Castro’s relationship with the United States was not incendiary.

When the July 26 Movement needed money to buy weapons, Fidel took a trip to New York and Florida in search of the greenbacks of Cuban immigrants. It was from the start of the bombing in the eastern mountains, that he saw for the first time what his future campaign would be.

It is also likely that after his extensive U.S. tour in April 1959, where he visited universities and monuments, chatted with the press, organizations and personalities, and met with then Vice-President Nixon, but not with President Eisenhower, who refuse to meet him, giving an excuse for not receiving him that he had a date to play golf, that Castro decided to open fire from his island of reeds in the Caribbean.

Castro would explain his motives one day in his memoirs. The truth is that since 1959, Fidel has held an aggressive verbal duel with 11 leaders of the White House. And he even put them on the brink of nuclear war in October 1962. He has done everything possible to arouse the ire of the Americans.

The United States has had its share of blame, with its dirty war and its surplus of stupidity. I think it was a senator, Jeff Bridges, who once said that to Castro’s stupidity, the United States responded with a greater stupidity.

But in January 2009, Barack Hussein Obama came to the presidency. Castro was not ready for Obama. With his mind trained to the presidents of the Cold War, he could not decipher this mestizo with the strange name.

Looking for clues, he quickly read two books by Obama, Dreams From my Father and The Audacity of Hope. But he found nothing. In them, Obama never mentions the Cuban revolution and Castro and Che Guevara. In The Audacity of Hope, he mentions only Cuban Americans and their success.

Cryptic Obama, Castro would think. Perhaps because the young Barack lived much of his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, the coming to power of the bearded one didn’t make his stomach jump. Castro has tried to seduce him. But Obama did not answer, not even the insults of old commander.

The point, in my opinion, is that Castro does not understand Obama. He can’t even understand how it was possible that this skinny black guy reached the White House.The reason is simple. The one and only comandante is still stuck in the Cold War period. United States and the world have changed. And Castro suspects that this is impossible.

March 26 2011