Translating Cuba

Long ago I read that the acid test of a poet was to write a sonnet. The straitjacket of meter and cadence of its composition drew out the worst and best of whomever had already tried their hand in battle with assonant rhymes. I confess that with my irreverent seventeen years it seemed that those hendecasyllables, grouped in two quartets and two triplets, were only for those who had not been able to prove themselves in the freedom of modern poetry. Displays of novelty that I flaunted until I read Francisco de Quevodo, and the theory of rejecting the combination of “cuidado” and “enamorado” blew me away.

Well, I have to tell you that, like a sonnet, there is nothing harder to write than a technical manual. I know, you’ll laugh, and say that anyone can manage to produce a leaflet for a medication or explain how to use a washing machine. Try it and see if you can, experiment and you’ll see how difficult it is to create an instruction booklet that isn’t full of the same boring and graceless prose of so many others. You’ll realize, then, how hard it is to avoid sounding dully didactic or petulantly professorial, to avoid boring your readers to death.

I am telling you this because I just finished a manual about WordPress with the title, “A Blog to Speak to the World.” When reviewing the more than four hundred pages I composed, I wondered how I found–in this unstable Cuba–the time, the peace and the skill to finish this book. Some friends tell me I’ve been sidetracked into a minor genre… and that makes me laugh. I fact–I reveal to them–I have just composed my own delicate sonnet, with twenty chapters that are like fourteen lines and some technical advice instead of declarations of love. My book, in one of life’s coincidences, will be presented in Madrid this coming May 21, the birthday of the poet with the round pince-nez and the aquiline nose. The same insolent who wrote, “my flame can swim frigid water and will flaunt so cruel a law,” as if instead of eternal romance he was relating the act of managing a blog from a country drowning in censorship.

It has cost the historic circles of power in Cuba a great deal of work to maintain a balanced discourse with regards to their sensitivity and solidarity with the terrorist attacks on the United States, or any country with which they have marked differences. It’s part of a rhetorical double standard to both accuse the U.S. administrations, and to do the same thing here.

There is no point in sending messages of condolences on the one hand to antagonistic governments and the victims of terrorism in their societies, and to defend, in a veiled way, the perpetrators based on the old saying, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This behavior has become so common in Cuba, sadly, become the style as it is pervasive.

Perhaps that is one of its objectives. Every time they send a condolence message in the name of the Cuban people, they ride roughshod over and later question, as an automatic protocol requisite, what they say is the concert of democratic countries in the world.

At the same time we have witnessed the ambiguity with which they refer to the Taliban and Bin Laden on the TV Roundtable show–a program whose reason seems to be to constantly criticize Washington and the fierce and endless battle against their successors–of allegations that the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers was a deliberate internal action, and long snake of et ceteras, that hangs from Cuban fundamentalists like a long tale of falsehoods. I’m not saying I have a monopoly on the truth, but this conduct seems like media terrorism.

The Cuban government claims that the United States consistently applies, with respect to Cuba, a double standard of good and bad terrorism according to their interests. And they themselves don’t?

I would add that in our country we annually commemorate the death of the revolutionary martyr Sergio González, The Band-Aid. A man known for planting bombs before 1959, who established the record of a hundred in one Havana night.

The arrogant hypocrisy of “do as I say, not as I do” from the spokesmen of the single party echoes the speeches and propaganda like “plastic explosives,” and offers feedback and bombardments of hate and injustice, but what really worries me is that I am splashed with that rotten stew.

It seems that as a Cuban citizen I am not being represented fully by those in power for over five decades in my archipelago: leaving me no option but to save my anti-terrorism reputation by placing these little media firecrackers to draw attention.

May 9 2011

The predictions for the development of internet in Cuba added to the darkness, after the coming of the fiber optic cable to Cuba collided with the political interests of the Communist government which, in the last decade, developed a legal and technological infrastructure, to control the flow of information to and from the island, via internet.

The majority of independent bloggers are expecting to see what will happen, this upcoming July, the structure of the web on the island, connect to the optical fiber cable, in the beginning of February, came to the island from Venezuela.

The anticipation will multiply by 3.000 speed of data transmission, but also serve for the government to confess its fear using individual virtual tools of information.

In 1996 Cuba officially connected to the internet, but the government left sitting, legally, its political respect to full access of the services that are offered. Ever Since the “internet of internets” is administrated centrally from the Telecommunications Company of Cuba S.A., ETECSA, and exploited by authorized state institutions expressed by the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC).

At the end of January, the government announced the sale of foreign actions by ETECSA, and the purchase, in $706 million dollars, for part of RAFIN, another Cuban company. The possession of the major part of the actions, Cuba allows the primary provider of public service of “Transmission of Data”.

“Increasing the sovereignty technology in the development of the infrastructure of telecommunications” one of previous strategies in the Alignment of the Political Economic and Social that adopted in the event entry of the next quarter.

In late March, the daily Granma said, according to statements by Justice Minister Maria Esther Reus, that “Cuba will adjust the existing legal rules to the decisions that are adopted as a result of the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba.”

Motivated by the arrival of fiber optic cable to Cuba, the deputy minister of MIC, Jorge Luis Perdomo, referred to the development of the first Telecommunications Act to regulate the sector and to “promote in an orderly way” the services it encompasses.

Since 2000 the Cuban government implemented, legally and technologically, an infrastructure that allows it to control access by Cubans to the Internet, through a hierarchical network of state agencies, identified as providers of “public Internet access.”

That same year, it legally established an international common access point to the network (NAP), ensuring that all international outgoing Internet goes through this connection. Thus it assure that the interconnections between domestic internet users are routed through national means of transmission.

Providers of Public Service Internet Access can not accept requests for installation for a person who is not authorized by the MIC. However, the regulations governing the activity requires them to accept as users “all natural or legal persons who want it.”

However, the laws themselves have the reservation. Suppliers offer their services “… with no other limitations than those imposed by the laws in force in the country. ”

Since 1996 the government declared that “… access to the services of the worldwide information networks will be selective” and “will have to be approved by the Interministerial Commission, composed of five ministers and chaired by the head of the MIC.”

The strategy was “… full access to the internet … but in a regulated manner.” The line was drawn “according to national interests, focusing on the connection of legal persons and institutions of greatest relevance to the life and development of the country. ”

Among other legal commitments, these Providers “are required to define the authorization to persons and entities who need to use services to access national or international Internet,” including “… remote access … from the home or anywhere in the country … and from the exterior.”

They also have a duty to report the number of users with full access to the Internet, those who have email accounts and IP addresses. They also demand the number of computers that access the network from places of residence and access for the public. A provider who fails to comply with the regulations of the MIC, loses its operating license.

In 2004 the government named an “Internet Zone”, with spaces in hotels, Internet cafes, etc., which provide navigation services of the Internet and e-mail to the public, at prices between 1.50 and 10.00 convertible pesos (CUC) for one hour of access to the web.

and in 2008, they fully regulated service these centers, after president Raúl Castro announced that the Islanders could receive services in hotels, and were authorized to buy computers on the retail market in hard currency.

From that time the alternative Cuban blogosphere began to develop, currently composed of 40 blogs of government critics, belonging to a group of citizens, especially young people, who update their sites from the hotels, embassies and with the help of friends abroad.

Providers must also block “access to sites whose contents are contrary to social interests, ethics and morals as well as the use of applications that affect the integrity or security of the state.”

One of the jobs of the Interministerial Commission created by the government in 1996 was to ensure that information disseminated “… is accurate, and that it is obtained is in line with ethical principles, and does not affect the interests or security of the country.”

On the eve of XIV Informatics Convention and Trade Fair 2011, held in Havana in early February, the government opened access to the Cuban Voices Portal and to the blog of Yoani Sánchez, Generación Y, on Cuba servers.

The government is mainly concerned that the new generation of dissidents is using Twitter, Facebook and other online social networks. These websites were used to organize protests that led to several revolutions in the Middle East and Africa, earlier this year.

The possibility that the government, at the upcoming party congress, would adopt measures restricting the use of new information technologies and full access to the network, added to the concerns of those who use it as a means to exercise freedom of expression.

The advance in technology development, represented by the arrival of the fiber optic cable from Venezuela to the island, has been overshadowed by State Security’s consideration of the “Network of Networks” as the new “battlefield” and the official media’s demonizing the use communication equipment. Faced with these developments there is no doubt that the future of the Internet in Cuba is uncertain.

April 26 2011

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

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

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

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