Translating Cuba

SOON, “CITIZENS’ REASONS (4)” ABOUT INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM IN CUBA…!

28 April 2011

MANY FRIENDS HAVE written me to ask why my posts are postponed when the always turbulent Cuban reality, unfortunately for us, requires direct and constant attention. My closest friends demand a commitment to my readers. Others, most of them strangers, have approached me in the street to tell me that they are aware of my blog and miss new writings.

On reading the emails or hearing the words I couldn’t help but feel a certain irresponsibility and, at the same time, an infinite pleasure, because to demand my opinion is a sign of recovery of the social health so lacking in our society, the need for information, and the search for it no matter what.

Something is changing in the minds of Cubans, perhaps because we have begun to lose our fear, others because the blinders have fallen from their eyes. They know they were misled. There is nothing left, now, of what was so much promised in exchange for the sacrifice of several generations. They have been cheated of their lives, and the only thing left is to search for the truth, then to tell it to those close to you, because they need it, and urge them to share it and to feel the relief provided by it. Knowing the truth is like a virus that, after an incubation period, runs through our bodies, and at the instant of filling them, is contagious.

I owe my readers an explanation: my work as a writer, these days, occupies all my time and I don’t believe I’m able to write all the literature that, emerging from within me, kick with anger because it is the moment of their birth. I finished two books of short stories, started a novel, halfway, and happened to have another almost finished. I am preparing an anthology of my stories to be published in Europe. A publisher asks me for a noir novel that a wrote for amusement some years ago and haven’t looked at again, and so I have taken it up again lately.

I have also been regularly summoned by and met with the police authorities of the country. Since I haven’t received any new denunciations after their accusing me of being a “rapist,” “assailant,” “thief,” “murder suspect,” “threatener of a stranger,” “running over a child with my car,” etc. without any victims nor witnesses coming forward; in short, the years the Prosecutor is asking for these supposed crimes, exceed fifty.

As I wrote in a previous post, after the presentation of a hidden camera video where a supposed “witness,” who never came to testify against me, confesses the pressure and offers made to him to agree to discredit me, that haven’t continued this line of government blackmail.

Now there’s a new variant. They’ve referred me the Havana Psychiatric Hospital (Mazorra),where they make me write, draw cartoons, answer questions from doctors who tell me secretly that they like my books. In a way, there’s nothing for it but to enjoy it, I know that in some way I have to collect this experience, and it is a post I have to write, because I looked for the pavilion where, last year, they killed the elderly left unprotected.

At this time I add my duties to a fraternal organization which I have belonged to for twenty-three years and which I love with a passion, where I hold positions of importance. Add to that, due to an accident, I lost the phalanx of a finger. But all is well now, the rest of the fingers type. Anyway, I have lost other spiritual pieces that were more important to me.

But nothing is overwhelming when I think that “something is changing,” I’m sure that’s the salvation of our country. This is a silent “re-evolution,” an insubordination in the minds of people that leads to postponed resolutions.

These days I write the posts I owe, it’s my duty, because “something is changing” in the Cuban population, and it’s for the better.

April 29 2011

She has a five-bedroom house that is falling to pieces. She got it in the seventies when the family for whom she worked as a maid went into exile. At first she went through all the rooms each day, the interior patio, caressed the marble banister of the stairs to the second floor, played at filling the basins of the three bathrooms just to be reminded that this neoclassical mansion was now hers. The joy lasted for a while, until the first bulbs burned out, the paint started to peel, and weeds grew in the garden. She got a job cleaning a school, but not even six salaries for such a job would have been enough to maintain the ancient splendor of this house that seemed increasingly larger and more inhospitable.

Thousands of times, the woman in this story thought of selling the house inherited from her former employers, but she would not do anything outside the law. For decades in Cuba a market in housing was prohibited and it was only possible to exchange properties through a concept popularly known as a “swap.” Dozens of decrees, restrictions and limitations also arose, to regulate and control this activity, making moving an ordeal. An all-powerful Housing Institute oversaw the completion of a string of absurd conditions. With so many requirements, the procedures were strung out over more than a year, such that before families could go live in their new homes they were exhausted from filling out forms, hiring lawyers and bribing inspectors.

Such anxieties raised hopes that the Sixth Communist Party Congress would raise the flag for real estate. When, in the final report, it said that the purchase and sale of homes would be accepted and all that remained was to legally implement it, hundreds of thousands of Cubans breathed a sigh of relief. The lady with the mansion, at the moment it was announced, was sitting in front of her television avoiding a drip falling from the ceiling right in the middle of the living room. She looked around at the columns with decorated capitals, the huge mahogany doors, and the marble staircase from which the banister had been torn out and sold. Finally she could hang a sign on the fence, “For Sale: Five-bedroom house in urgent need of repairs. Wish to buy a one-bedroom apartment in some other neighborhood.”

30 April 2011

It’s not the first time an article by Fernando Ravsberg, Cuban correspondent for the honorable BBC, left me feeling frustrated, bittersweet, as a result of, in my judgment, certain skin deep and inconsistent analyses established by him.

But it is the first time I’ve decided to comment in writing. Now, after reading his last blog post, I break the ice.

Of course I knew the wide acceptance “Letters from Cuba” has among some readers in my country, including among my personal friends; and I knew, also, the notorious discredit this journalist has among the community of independent bloggers, and among many Cuban intellectuals who, in addition to exercising their right to disagree with official dogma, take the written word as a fundamental means of expression.

His well-read blog, also followed by those who see in him an approach different from the national daily’s, is criticized by others who brand it complacent and vaguely hypocritical, the velvet glove with which Fernando Ravsberg draws the reality of the Island for the world. Let no one doubt it: a blog hosted on the BBC has readers of course, and this implies a responsibility in capital letters.

In which of these two factions — if that is the split — do I include myself? Well from time to time I pass through his website, “hearing” his particular view of the facts, agreeing or disagreeing, and always I respect, as a colleague, the intellectual exercise implied in wanting to reflect a country as convulsed as Cuba, in just a few paragraphs.

To be perfectly strict I have to say, also: I’m sure that the BBC could find better professionals to send to the Caribbean nation. Fernando Ravsberg is not a significant journalist in our language, today, and serves in one of the most complex and challenging theaters (Cuba) that can be found in the world today.

On my personal scale, he’s a craftsman of words, someone with an academic style, grammatically correct, but without something inherent in every practitioner of memorable journalist: a refined style. His writings, even the best and most poignant, exude a clerical preparation, that of the report. Fortunately they always have the virtue of brevity.

However, this is not so now, after reading “Honeymoon, the virtual war, real life,” compels me to write about the Uruguayan journalist who has wandered, for a long time, slowing and with pen in hand, among the ruins of our singular Havana.

Fernando Ravsberg does not understand why independent bloggers, or classic opponents, need to encrypt their messages to send them off the Island, or even to communicate within its walls.

To this I, a Cuban as he is not, add: not only the disaffected, millions of ordinary citizens also need to compress and encrypt their communications, if they want to keep a minimal personal privacy.

I quote Ravsberg unfortunate text, “The dissident bloggers have reason to say that in Cuba privacy is not respected and so encryption techniques are criticized. It could be, but I bet that in these times encrypted messages raise suspicions even in the most democratic nations of the world.”

And then he adds, “Maybe it’s that I know few people but there isn’t a single one of my friends who uses encryption keys to communicate on the Internet.”

Carefully considered, analysis such as this is what generates my lack of confidence in the intelligent thought of this communications professional. Or, still worse, his commitment to the truth.

Because supporting such a thesis, Fernando Ravsberg forgets, doesn’t know, or hides, a great truth: in democratic nations individuals not only don’t encrypt their dissident messages, but they wrack their brains looking for ways to make them public.

I will never forget my fascination, three days after stepping on American soil, seeing an old man at a stoplight with a sign — Republican — that read: “How much more will it take for Obama to understand he’s not eligible to be President, let alone for a Nobel Prize.”

In democratic nations, only those who place bombs in metro stations, smuggle organs and drugs, or harm society with their criminal acts, need to protect their electronic or telephone communications. Not law-abiding citizens.

And if the BBC colleague says that not one of his friends uses encryption keys to communicate online, his statement leads to two possibilities:

1. The man chosen by the British to sniff out the essence of Cuban society, doesn’t have among his acquaintances a single “ordinary” Cuban, of those who set passwords for their archives using WinRAR to communicate privately with a family member living abroad, or to arrange a trip to escape.

2. The man chosen by the English doesn’t have the slightest idea of what it is to use a clandestine Internet connection with protective passwords or anonymous proxies to hide the sites he wants to visit.

And he doesn’t know for a key reason — the essence of my disagreement as a colleague and as part of the burdened nation he has decided to recreate — because Fernando Ravsberg seeks to establish well-informed judgments about a country which, in its essence, he does not know.

To give him the benefit of the doubt, to not tar him with the brush applicable to so many journalists who, in order to continue their stay in this Jurassic and exotic scene which is Cuba decide to use the soft tones of a tourist watercolor to paint their written portraits, I prefer to call him a poorly integrated foreigner. Not an opportunist.

But the same tropical Cuban oxygen isn’t breathed by the person who emerges from a debate sponsored by the magazine “Topics” in the narrow Strawberry and Chocolate room in the capital and runs to his page to post cheers to a perceived tolerance, to progress on freedom of expression, on the same day that Stephen Morales was expelled from the Party for criticizing corruption and I lost my job for dissenting from the national information policy.

Serious in a journalism of respect: shortly after a new post, backtracks from his raucous joy, and admits the gag imposed by the organizers of the civic debate, which banned him if he wanted to continue attending, from writing about what happened there.

More serious still: Week later, the correct Ravsberg accepts the rules of the game, and in order to preserve his permission to enter the little debate in the capital room, he publishes a post as a wink, about “nothing happened” there. The wink is this: “It’s agreed that I say nothing, they don’t close the doors, right?”

Above and beyond my very personal opinions, above and beyond my true respect for his way of exercising our so complex and subjective trade, and above and beyond my transparent evaluations with regards to his basic handling of the journalism tool, the written word, Fernando Ravsberg posits an ethical and moral view that, if he is an honest man — which I think he is — needs to be addressed very soon, and sharply: “The Cuba that I describe, is my Cuba — that of a semi-assimilated and well-favored Uruguayan, or is it the Cuba that a demanding and truthful journalist should write about?”

There is no intense journalism without conflicts. Anyone who wishes to remain on good terms with God and with the Devil should change their profession. Or, merciful alternative, move the context and write a blog entitled “Letters from Switzerland.” I’m sure that there they will not know citizens who need to protect themselves from the great eye that sees everything, encrypting their messages.

Pardon the absolutism, but writing about Cuba is far too much for them — those who do not respectfully suffer the ailments of an aching country, or those who have not engaged themselves in an extra dose of commitment, ethics, and bravery.

March 23 2011

Translator’s Question: When a bush or a tree starts growing out of the roof of a building in Havana, whose job is it to cut it down and uproot it before it looks like this?

They travel in groups around Havana neighborhoods. Hundreds of Chinese students who learn Spanish in Cuba and add color to a reality where other foreigners barely stay a couple weeks as tourists. Thanks to them, the city once again has those Asian eyes that were so common in the first half of the twentieth century, that Asian gait which gives the impression of feet barely touching the ground, has returned, for a time. They crowd around Chinatown, giggling in front of some restaurants with paper lanterns and red curtains where the menu offers more local and Italian food than plates of spinach and noodles.

One morning, I met several of them lost near the Central Rail Station. They had empty bags, tired faces, and walked slowly. One of the girls asked me, after consulting a small dictionary, where they could buy lettuce. It was one of those hot months where the only green on the market pallets is cucumbers. But there they were, waiting for the agricultural miracle that would put some soft leaves on their plates. I explained that the sun was very strong and the vegetables were harvested just in roofed areas, that the lack of packaging hampered their arrival in the cities, and when they appeared it was at very high prices.

After a few minutes, those almond-shaped eyes rounded in consequence of my strange explanation. “Lettuce! Lettuce!” they insisted, and one of them translated it into every language he knew, “lettuce, laitue, Kopfsalat, alphas ….” I smiled, it’s not about not understanding the word, I said, it’s that I don’t know where, right now, where they could find vegetables to eat. It was clear, they didn’t believe me. “Go to Four Roads Plaza and see if you can find them there,” was the final thing I thought to tell them, so as not to kill hope. And off they went in that direction, their steps already exhausted, empty bags blowing in the wind, with their oriental elegance faded somewhat, lacking vegetables to revive them.

27 April 2011

The webmaster has been on the road and unable to get to the site…

Since that time on one of the campuses of the University of Havana when I raised my hand to express a doubt about the Marxist categories of necessity versus chance, the concept surrounds me. I have come to the conclusion that human needs are complex enough that the specialists must abrogate the right to “suppress” some of them in our lives.

We have Elaine, Cuban blogger, who assumes her grandfather doesn’t need the Internet. Sadly, she’s not alone. The other day someone assured me that for a Cuban farmer the Internet is not a priority. What is the priority? Undoubtedly in the Middle Ages electricity was not one, and for Cro-Magnon man what we now call “staple products” were in short supply. Why do we insist on establishing boundaries to human welfare? I wonder why it’s a problem to assume access to the Internet as a 21st Century human right. Whether the farmer is connected so he can study the market for new fertilizers for the earth, or so he can chat on a boy-meets-girl site is immaterial; what matters is his right to access the World Wide Web and what it represents for his personal life. Any “supposition” about what a farmer should do on Google, or in the furrow, is called control over the free actions of another, personal choice and individual freedom.

Of course reducing world poverty is an imperative, but I honestly don’t see the connection between that and the right of Cubans to have private accounts for Internet access. Social inequality in the world does not justify Raul Castro getting to decide that I can’t open my Facebook whenever I want. Isn’t it obvious? Or am I going crazy?

26 April 2011