Translating Cuba

If the political administrative division of 1977 increased the number of Cuban provinces from 6 to 14, the bureaucratic reshuffling of 2011 raised it to 15, because it reduced the size of the capital, cutting the urban environment in two, and distributing the 19 municipalities of Havana between the new Artemisa and Mayabeque provinces.

As in similar readjustments the State’s reasons for uprooting thousands of inhabitants in Havana and Pinar del Rio, we assume that offices, tensions and expectations grow while the regional boundaries are configured. They change the provincial boundaries but not the municipalities.

As we discussed, the configuration of Mayabeque, composed of 11 municipalities of Habana province, with San Jose de Las Lajas as the top; we will refer to Artemisa, a province cut and pasted from three municipalities from Pinar del Rio (Bahía Honda, Candelaria y San Cristóbal), plus the remaining eight of the extinct Habana province: Alquízar, Bauta, Caimito, Guanajay, Güira de Melena, Mariel, San Antonio de los Baños and Artemisa itself, which was in Pinar del Rio province until 1976, along with Guanajay and Mariel.

The new Artemis, the largest municipality in size and population of the old structure, becomes the thirteenth province in the country by size (4004.27 square km), the eleventh in population (502,392 inhabitants) and the third in population density, preceded by the capital and Santiago de Cuba. Bordered on the south by the Gulf of Batabano, on the east by Havana City and Mayabeque, on the west by Pinar del Rio and the north by the Straits of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.

Of its current territory, the oldest are Alquízar (1616) and Guanajay (1650), followed by San Cristobal (1743), Bauta (1750), Mariel (1768), San Antonio de los Baños (1775), Guira de Melena and Bay Honda (1799). Artemis, founded in 1810, flourished with the development of coffee and the regional sugar industry. The region was the scene of struggles against colonialism and the dictatorships of Machado, Batista and the Castro brothers.

From the geographical point of view it is dominated by the southern carcásica plains, the flood plain at the western end, given the presence of several rivers, the Sierra del Rosario and the red soils and natural features (caves, sinkholes, lakes, coasts and three bays). Within Mariel Bay we find the Majana cove at the narrowest point of the island (31 km).

For its forest reserves, bays, rivers, reservoirs and agricultural potential, livestock and manufacturing, the new provincial structure raises expectations of development that depend on investments, initiatives and freedoms essential to modernize industry (cement, thermal power, textile, agricultural), maintain the road and rail networks, and promote the tourist attractions (Soroa Natural Park, Las Terrazas, Hotel Moka).

The territorial culture evokes illustrious names such as the novelist Cirilo Villaverde (1912-1894), composers Maria Teresa Vera (1895-1965) and Luis Marquetti (1901-1992), trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, the tres guitar player Pancho Amat, singers Polo Montanes (1955-2002) and Alex Puente, the historian Manuel Isidro Méndez (1882-192), the geographer Antonio Núñez Jiménez and cartoonist Eduardo Abela (1889-1965). A tenth of the improvisational peasants, political cartoons, and other expressions of art and literature nest in the region, coexisting with the centers for military training, pedagogy, sports and science.

If all territory is an ongoing identity with urban, geographic or economic elements that characterize and differentiate one from the other, it remains to be seen if there is a convergence between the municipalities of La Habana and Pinar del Rio added to Artemisa. The changes the nation needs can dynamite, reduce or strengthen the political-administrative intentions designed by the current military bureaucracy.

March 1 2011

Photos: Francis Sánchez.

I have the excuse of two children so I can play outside. At home I say I’m going with them to please them and keep a close watch over them, the reality is that I escape, in this way, the tensions and the routine, or it might be, the idiotic world. Sometimes we just go out in the sun and kick a ball around. If it’s raining, we make goals in the street, with two stones on each side, and carry on like we’re in a swimming pool. But on the weekends, because school is out, we aspire to drastic solutions, one in particular: we take the road out of town. This we call “The excursion.” Usually then we add some boy from neighborhood, sometimes three or four if their parents give permission.

Clearly within the city there aren’t that many choices, nor within the family budget, to go looking for better options in other cities or resorts. However, we don’t think about that, we simply enjoy what we do. Riding bikes, in fifteen or twenty minutes we’ve “changed the channel” and are enjoying another landscape on our big screen. Instead of the chipped and stained colors of the houses, out there it is predominantly green, strongly speckled with flowers or chopped by the sharp gray of the rain, depending on the season.

We go looking for surprises. So we avoid the pastures which are almost always empty with their fences separating us from a slightly tentative plain. It’s more exciting for us to suddenly get visual pleasure, or that of the other senses, touch, smell and taste. We go after any dazzling fruit.

We get up to the most amazing things. Children are, of course, those who take on the most. I’ve brought only a knife, a pair of containers with water and little else. But Fredo de Jesus, for example, wants to live in a country where animals talk, where they filmed Alvin and the Chipmunks making it on the music scene, so he still has the ability to hear or believe that he listens to talk to animals when they are, or believe they are, alone. Perhaps a bird that has migrated from there… He also wants to be like Legolas, the elf from The Lord of the Rings and also use, to perfection, the bow.

Francito, like the magician Merlin, wants to invoke the spirit of fire with a spell and nothing else, putting the palms of his hands to make a flame rise from the ground. His cousin, Enmanuel, older and without whom they can’t imagine a happy day, says, “the fire is beautiful.”

Fredo asks me if the shops don’t sell torches, and is this the time, when his mother isn’t watching, to make one. We share out trees and crannies in usufruct, between good and evil, pure and simple: everyone is good and has the right to believe that the others are ogres, trolls who must be expelled from the forest. We ride with care not to get a puncture. Francito makes the observation that in the paradise landscapes of movies you never see the spines, nor the ants, nor the tiny ticks!

Coincidentally, they all plan to graduate some day as explorers or conservationists. They collect amazements while I give a score on a scale of one to five. Almond shrubs in a sea of marabou weed and West Indian elms; Three points. Rundown bull without horns: four. Giant centipede — any creature whose capture is effected without the use of a cap earns extra points — maximum score. Mashing and eating almonds by the ton ends up being our version of the coming of the dinosaurs to the green valley after the great cataclysm.

I let them talk when they get tired. This is the part where they share their experiences. Above all I keep quiet while it seems they cross the forest of social reality or rub against the dangerous edges. I learn. In particular I learn about the innocence that I would like to preserve even at the cost of my life, if it were possible. Today they travel the world freely and return.

Fredo offers his point of view: the dream consists of a great solution to all constraints. In dreams he has the freedom to be and do whatever he pleases. He says that when he wants to have adventures like Harry Potter, he uses his powers, the dream, and there you are. They agreed, but another notes that the ideal is to be able to leave, to earn money and get all the things necessary to live.

I remember a friend, a poet who spoke of the country as if it were a landscape that one passed through on the way to exile: the day you left you could come to visit, you could know it. They are happy to live in a healthy country, where there are no poisonous animals, where boa constrictors don’t swallow people, nor lions, nor crocodiles as in the Florida swamps and in Australia…

I think about what happiness is theirs, ignoring other environments which also grow at the expense of imagination and the Utopias, the literary the worst of all, and the morbid politics. My deepest desire unconfessed: that they not grow up. That they be good men, too. But that they walk among the snares of the world with firm step and not fall into the fallacy of being “useful to society,” where many end up turned into efficient deplorable instruments, those who become the long tentacles of injustice, like the opportunists, sycophants, snitches, bootlickers, always crawling under the dark cloud of power. That they avoid being poisoned by jealousy and the fear of living openly. That they never abuse, corner or humiliate another human being.

To Francito the argument of a harmless endemic fauna is especially appealing, as he is one of the few children who has been bitten by a Santa Maria Cuban boa, the almost extinct Cuban cousin of the viper that has a reputation for stupidity. (See photo above.)

It wasn’t too stupid, or it was tired, the sad specimen they use at the Cayo Coco resort for the visitors to take pictures, he took him out of a suitcase and even hung him around his neck. I insisted that he, ten at the time, not be left without an Indiana Jones souvenir, with such bad aim that, in the fraction of a second it took me to turn on my camera, the boa decided to attack. Fortunately — as the doctor on duty at the hospital explained, there was no poison — but he refused to believe it. The photo, along with my regrets, would bring the victim an unexpected popularity among his friends in the neighborhood and at school.

“Watch out! How scary!” they exclaim running their eyes over the bushes. By now we’re at a natural pool in the bed of what was once a stream and should have become a canal according the Utopian agendas and absurdities of the bureaucracy, but they still don’t know that. Water collected since the last downpour remains among the stones.

They go swimming. Fear ties me to the rock from which I watch them. Splashing and laughing. What amuses them most is fleeing from a crocodile or an imaginary boa.

January 20 2011

SHE’S CALLED RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

She’s called Rigoberta Menchú. And, with her pre-Colombian bird’s voice, wreaked havoc on the recently closed Havana International Book Fair.

Rigoberta Menchú wanted to enjoy the presidential suite at the Hotel Habana Libre where they housed her. Addressed not only as the Prizewinner or the Plagiarism Peace Nobel, but the address of Obama. Rigobarack Menchú. And as such, demanded more seats for her uninvited entourage, unbalancing bureaucratized nerves and, of course, the hard currency budget of the organizers of the 2011 Cuban Fair.

Then they showed her book. The book to justify her trip to the land of Martí. And our ancien terrible did not like the object at all, despite being in what is known in the Cuban literary field as a deluxe edition.

The photos of the little Indian children were not democratically representative of all the ethnicities and multicultural et cetera. And for this her enemies will surely accuse her of Menchuvianism. In addition, the ALBA letterhead of the collection politically compromises its port-Norwegian neutrality. And so she would lose credibility as a Noble Savage mediator in the face of the civili$ed and guilty Europe. Fortunately her Cuban book wasn’t authorized for distribution. And run away, Communist so-and-sos! The book should be pulped. But please, Miss Menchú asked that they give her some hundred copies as a trophy for her bourgeois leftist arrogance.

The Casa de las Americas invited her to hum her tunes at the right hand of Roberto Fernandez Retamar. The Cuban press made a fool of itself once again (as it has done for such a long time now). And the presenter Modesto Milanes was left as the New Boyfriend of Our America, with a speech but without a work clucking with hype.

I wonder why this rude rebuff was not news on the Internet or at least in the Inter-nos. Why the narrative homogeneity that becomes so makes our little subnational life so tedious. Why Randy Alonso and his rapid response messengers, for example, don’t urgently call an International Menchú Round on Cuban Television or on TeleSur. Why we continue to cover this jetsetting fraud as if she were the populist Grande Dame. Why the secrecy and the shit swept under the worker’s carpet. And I wonder why the scoop is always left to me.

March 11 2011

Oscar, 73, remembers the rainy dawn on which he left Havana on a tiny, broken-down fishing boat. Fifty long, hard years have passed. Now, seated at a bar located on the 36th floor of the Focsa, the tallest building in the capital, drinking a daiquiri and contemplating an impressive view of Havana’s harbor, he feels he’s missed a lot.

“I’m a dollar with legs, a kind of King Midas. But with respect to historic memory, you can’t forget all the abuse from the government of Fidel Castro towards those who emigrated”, he comments.

When one has lived so long a time far from their homeland, the slightest detail whatsoever brings a knot to the throat or a tear. The barkeeper asks him if the cap he wears is from the Havana Lions, one of the four clubs from the professional baseball league before 1959.

Proudly, Oscar tells him yes and during the next half hour converses with the barkeep about the ball that used to be played on the island. They finish, like they always conclude their chats between Cubans of the two shores, drinking rum and crying.

After the nostalgic bath, the Cuban-American stops in front of the immense picture window that shows the beauty of Havana. “Nothing has changed. It’s dramatic. When I got to Florida in 1960, Miami was a desolate suburb. There was only one restaurant for creole food, ‘La Cubanita’. After 10 at night, it seemed like a ghost town. There was a strong racism, with buses where the blacks traveled standing in the rear”.

He pays the bill and asks me to accompany him to walk through Luyanó, the neighborhood where he was born. Meanwhile, he continues, “In 52 years, Miami has grown in a spectacular manner. Every day a new building appears. Architecturally speaking, nothing has been done in Havana. It’s the same, or worse — the same buildings are there without having given them proper care. It’s the brutal difference between two systems. A capitalistic one in constant renewal, which throws aside what it doesn’t need, and a Marxist socialist system that in theory can be very humane, but in practice, doesn’t work”, and he points out a group of houses in danger of collapse.

The emigration that has in 52 years provoked the departure of more than a million islanders to the Florida coast has many explanations. According to Roberto, a 55-year-old economist, it’s not easy to explain how it is possible that those Cubans in the US produce goods and services that triple the gross domestic product of Cuba.

“You can spend hours trying to convince a listener that the embargo is to blame, or what have you, but the real figures are forceful. Cubans in a climate of democracy and a free market evolve efficiently. We aren’t a gang of unproductive bums. When people see the result of their work, they strive and generate wealth”, the economist points out.

Among the thousands of his compatriots who fled the island when Castro took a turn towards communism, there are two who are a paradigm. The USA isn’t a panacea, but it is a country of opportunities. If you work hard, dreams can come true.

The same as Oscar, Mel Martínez abandoned his homeland in 1961. He was 14 years old and traveled alone on one of the flights of Operation Peter Pan, a program supported by the Catholic Church that brought 14,000 Cuban children to the United States. He ended up a Senator and became the first Hispanic to arrive in the Upper Chamber. Years later, Mel relates that he lived with a family in Orlando and couldn’t be reunited with his parents until 1966. He learned the language and the customs, and was able to have a successful career in exile.

Roberto Goizueta also arrived at the top, if by a different path. He was a director of Coca Cola and today, after his death, he is considered an example of a good administrator and an upright man.

The majority of Cubans who leave don’t earn millionaires’ salaries, nor do they have residences on Miami Beach. They have as many as three jobs, they don’t forget to help their families in Cuba, and there always exists the possibility of progressing and getting ahead.

Let’s share the ideology. Enough of looking at current photos of Havana and Miami. The social justice and equality preached by the Castro brothers’ revolution are attractive ends.

But they haven’t allowed Cubans on the island to live at the height of their expectations. Neither has the utopian argument brought enough food to the table. People aren’t stupid. And because of that, they leave.

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Translated by: JT

March 6 2011

Last Saturday, the 5th of March, with the deployment of a strong political operation, the trial of US citizen Alan Phillip Gross ended, ready for the verdict. The 10th of October Municipal Court, located at #501 Carmen on the corner of Juan Delgado, in the capital neighborhood of La Víbora, was the scene for this process.

Mr. Gross was accused of the crime “Acts against the independence or the territorial integrity of the state” and the prosecutor asked for a sentence of twenty years imprisonment. The representatives of the foreign press that waited there from the day before to get images and I, an independent national reporter, were present; we were frustrated by waiting for hours and losing the opportunity to photograph him. Apparently he was transported in a white van, from the side door, and left at full speed.

Now we are left to wait for the outcome and the “trial of the trial” that ordinarily we cover fully with regards to the guarantees of the judicial process in general.

March 7 2011

When I was an office clerk I would have nothing to do with March 8, International Women’s Day, finding it false and ridiculous. That day in all the workplaces the men would act like clowns wanting to seem nice and friendly. The same ones who, on the other 364 days of the year, would push past you in the line for the bus so they could board first. The same ones who would undress you with a look, considering it their right to besiege you with compliments, some of them quite racy, making you feel uncomfortable. Fortunately not all of them were like that, but those were the exception.

But on this day they would approach to offer you a flower and prepare (I don’t know if they still do it) a surprise party, arranged by the union, which afterward they would mark “complete” in the activities plan.

This time International Women’s Day has another sense. In the United States, the State Department paid tribute to ten brave women from different countries, whose daily work for freedom, gender equality, and their struggle for a better world made them worthy of such a distinction. To our great pride, Yoani Sanchez was among those selected. I felt happy for her and very flattered to be able to follow the emotional awards event, through Radio Marti on the shortwave. They aired a telephone interview with her, because she was prevented from traveling, having not been granted the required travel permit without which it is impossible to leave our beloved planet.

March 11 2011

The Florida media commented on the details of the flow of musicians and writers that travel from Havana to Miami or New York, where they perform in clubs and theaters or speak in universities and conference rooms.

Among the literary figures the writer Miguel Barnet, the President of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba and the Deputy to the National Assembly, whose presence in New York resulted in opposing opinions of his official chanting, his signature of support for the quick execution of three young men who tried to hijack a boat to escape the island, and his declaration of support for the convicted spies incarcerated in the United States.

I know that someone should unveil the masks of the accomplices of the dictatorship that utilize the springs of the democracy to promote their works and earn money, but I don’t believe that the writer-functionary deserves that much attention. In Cuba barely anyone speaks of him despite the re-releases of his novels (Cimarrón, Gallego, Canción de Rachel) and poems, though sometimes we see him on TV talking about identity or speaking in sessions of the National Popular Power Assembly.

If Barnet wasn’t a simulator accustomed to excluding the creators who challenge the rules of the game, he would not be leading UNEAC nor enjoying awards and invitations to foreign countries. But our grand intellectual commissioner removes the mask at times and reveals his way of thinking, which is very different than the things he says publicly out of fear or convenience.

I now remember my professional contacts with Miguel Barnet in the Fernando Ortiz Foundation towards the end of 2005, while editing my book The Basques in Cuba, still unpublished even though it was approved by the team of investigators and the Board of the Directors, presided over by Barnet and an annoying Trinidad Pérez,

In the first contact Barnet gave me his assessment of the book, talked about its ethno-historic and cultural contribution and weighed data on the confluence of the Canary Islanders, Galicians, Catalans, Hebrew and Chinese, many of whom fled with their descendants, “Frightened by the measures of the Revolutionary government and by its affiliation with Eastern Europe.”

In the second meeting my host exchanged erudition for the proposal to introduce some changes suggested by the UNEAC editor, hired by the Foundation to edit and redesign the work, which I opposed from the ideological suspicions of the specialist. Barnet agreed I was right but insisted on the need to look after the institution, because, “The elite who run the country fears anthropological studies and that would be pretext enough to close the Foundation.” He added that on two occasions he’d had to sit down with Abel Prieto — Minister of Culture — faced with absurd interpretations of the magazine Catauro. “Imagine what would happen if a book like yours were to make value judgments that put the hunters of phantoms on their guard.”

Given his fears I said something about freedom of expression that bothered the writer, who felt the need to talk about himself.

“I was one of those young men of the bourgeoisie who bellowed against the Batista dictatorship until they arrested me and I spent a night in a dungeon, listening to the screams; at dawn the minister of education too me home, my family sent me to the residence in Tarará where I didn’t leave until 1959. I joined the militia and undertook the different tasks of the time, coming to the point of throwing an ashtray at Paulita Grau and distancing myself from Lidia Cabrera during Operation Peter Pan, but years later I went to Miami and asked their forgiveness, and for that State Security called me in; for them it’s all about ideology. I’m not brave but I know the barbarians. They still haven’t apologized for the craziness of the 1968 Revolutionary Offensive, nor for the Congress of Education and Culture of 1971. What can we expect from those gentlemen who deny Doctor Hilda Molina permission to travel to Argentina and reunite with her son and meet her grandchildren?”

When I met with Barnet for the third time, in January of February of 2006, the book was ready for printing and we talked about the question of the check in hard currency for my foreign sponsors. That day the conversation was brief and relaxed, but the book hasn’t been released although they paid me for the copyright.

I don’t know if Barnet is one of the Bourbons the Bourbon Eusebio Leal recently spoke about, but for the last five years I understand a little better the caste of the gentlemen who shepherd the country’s intellectual flock.

February 15 2011

The meetings of all the country’s social sectors to define what the economic model of the future should be like, is described by the newspaper Granma was an unprecedented and unlikely event in the modern world.

The official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba is delivered in body and soul to make us feel that we live on another planet and galaxy. Sometimes I have trouble understanding the form of expression of Cuban socialists. Is it irony or simply mockery? I can’t get it in my head to call it ingenuity.

Who thinks of mentioning the word “to define” to characterize the supposed debate of the economic guidelines for Cuban socialism for the next 5 years? It would be very demagogic to say that the policies proposed by the political leaders are analyzed.

It would be very unrealistic and exaggerated to say that 15% of the guidelines will be refined after discussion with the population, in a system based on State planning and control, where the only economically favored actor is the state and its socialist enterprises.

Let’s assume the guidelines in their current formulation with an authentic and radically revolutionary vocation as advised by Granma in its propaganda work for the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party. Take two points of the guidelines: They do not allow the concentration of properties in native persons and the non-state sector, and they apply higher charges to the highest incomes.

Let’s consider the problem: the island needs economic recovery and the Cubans want change, for example free enterprise and abolition of the dual currency. Logic says that if the state sector has more than one million excess workers who, in the new circumstances, must live on their own, the administration must take advantage and facilitate new entrants who have the responsibility for generating the jobs and income that many families depend on.

The guidelines ignore these aspects. In contrast, they contain obstacles that impede the economic development and social progress of Cubans themselves. If they ask for results, vis-a-vis the public debate, I see numerous prosecutions for tax evasion, corruption fattening its tentacles, and the administration making confiscations for illicit enrichment.

None of these issues will be on the agenda of the Communist leaders this coming April, the planned date for the Sixth Party Congress. The policies are defined by the interests of those who now direct and control the country. Not to mention that the majority have already been recently adopted by the Council of State.

In short, living in Cuban society today is like a vulgar play, where the majority looking contemplate the work as mere spectators. Yes, it is unlikely that elsewhere in the world the fate of more than eleven million people depends on the will of a few. Undoubtedly, there will be no debate, just demagoguery.

March 9 2011

A week ago National Television aired repeatedly a new chapter in the serial incorrectly titled “Cuba’s Reasons,” from the eagerness of the authorities to always appropriate the voice of the nation, to monopolize it. In reality it should have been called “The Cuban Government’s Reasons.” The chapter, directed against some peaceful opponents and the Ladies in White, was full of images recorded with hidden cameras and intercepted telephone conversations, things illegal in any democratic country but common in ours.

In addition, it included declarations of two agents who in effect broke their cover, having finished their missions of infiltration. One was a fountain of derogatory epithets and even demonstrations of how he lied, discovering his true nature. The other was more parsimonious. There was no shortage of the usual sentimentality, melodrama and even patriotism, summarized in the final scene with the happy ending of them walking toward each other in slow motion. Yesterday they aired another chapter, even more boring, because it was based on images and events from twenty and thirty years ago.

Definitely more of the same. It seemed to me like seeing chapters of “It Has Had To Be In Silence,” that mythical serial. The important thing, however, is the reason for presenting this material now, and with so much coverage. Does it have something to do with the events taking place in the Arab world? It is a call to arms?

There is concern that, at a time of declared strength of the regime, with an upcoming Party Congress, which would be a healthy environment of civic tranquility, to analyze calmly the problems and seek solutions with the participation of everyone, unleashing this new campaign only demonstrates intolerance, one more time, and brings absolutely nothing to the needed national unity, under the principle of respecting a diversity of opinions, something raised in recent speeches by the president.

It is expected that, if the same mistaken path is followed, some upcoming chapter of the serial will be dedicated to discrediting the bloggers, independent voices, without owners and without salaries, that only express their opinions, misguided or not but in any case honest, on the web, as they cannot in other media, being responsible for them as Cubans who adhere to no party nor political organization, with the one objective of participating in the solution to national problems with a new perspective, taking into account what has been tried over the last fifty years has not been successful.

The ex-president, in a meeting with intellectuals at the recently ended Book Fair reasons: The most self-sufficient and incapable creatures that ever existed: Us, the politicians. Without a doubt, he’s completely right. Ours are a magnificent example.

March 8 2011

10 March 2011

A friend told me something unusual happened recently in a sugar mill, one of the few left on my planet:

The Director of the mill was on the verge of a heart attack because the transmission belt required for the mill to crush the canes had broken and there was only one technician in the whole province who could fix it, as this was a rare failure. The official in question sent a notice to the province saying that if someone didn’t come to fix the belt they would have to stop the mill without having finished the harvest.

That afternoon he received a telegram saying: The Ambassador of Korea is coming at 10:00 this morning. Right then they forgot about the belt and preparing for the bash. They started whitewashing all the tree trunks bordering the roads where the Ambassador would travel. The prepared a group of school children to welcome the important visitor, although they had no idea where to get some Korean ditty for them to sing.

They mobilized all the women millworkers to get old covers from Bohemia magazine, and to decorate the room where the ceremony would take place. The nearest art instructor was urgently sent for to teach the kids a Chinese dance, but it was closer than it seemed. They put false sisal braids on the children and used old files to make Chinese hats. The girls were all given folded paper fans to make the whole thing as authentic as possible.

Despite all the difficulties, they overcame them with great effort and on the following morning everyone was ready for the ceremony to welcome the distinguished visitor.

At that moment a battered old car arrived, kicking up dust, and the children began to wave their flags and fans. Heard in the distance were the first chords of the anthem when out of the car came a tall man, stocky, sideburns, dressed in greasy blue overalls.They say the recent arrival shed some emotional tears at such a reunion: Just arrived was the empatador de correas!*

*Translator’s note: The joke in this post is that “ambassador of Korea” and “fixer of belts” (empatador de correas) sound very similar in Spanish.

March 10 2011

Friends from Spain have appeared with a bottle of rum and gifts of books. In addition, they have left us a copy of El Pais, El Pais Semanal, Babelia and a provincial newspaper that taking into account all the national newspapers, these don’t even make up half.

I sat down to read them with the greediness of someone reading fresh news — OK it’s fresh news to me — with the widest coverage of the insurgent wave in the Arab world, in which I read over and over again the word “kleptocracy.” I read a very eloquent speech by Libya’s dystopian clown.

Lacking proof that it’s an apocryphal transcription, it’s a sad omission on the part of the Cuban press not to mention the threats the Dear Brother has made to his distressed people. Another piece of news was the defection of Libya’s senior military officials.

Aside from the stock market news, the obituaries and the weather, I read it all, and found a mountain of interesting things.

Meanwhile, here the news is saturated with the history of moles from State Security infiltrating the Cuban Human Rights Commission and the Ladies in White, and another where I’m not sure what they infiltrated. They talk to me about the “mercenaries of the Empire,” but no one says a single word about the mercenaries contracted from Chad and Niger for “our friend” Gaddafi.

Hopefully no international force will intervene in Libya and the dictator will be brought down by his own people. One less.

March 9 2011

The official media’s reporters are illusionists of the word. Magicians of rhetorical and hollow discourse. Professionals in hiding reality. Experts in disinformation. And the result is a bland, boring press.

Pick up the daily paper or watch the TV news to get informed about Cuban reality and the information people need is not covered. Having absolute State control over the media, they design the daily news at their pleasure.

Everything’s just fine. Or almost everything. There are more bananas, rice and malanga. Even though the market stalls are empty, the national news announcer, with his poker face, reports it all with a satisfied half smile.

The tepid critiques from the official press must be authorized from the censorship office at the Plaza of the Revolution. When the leaders decide, you can reprimand with a pen the sellers of industrial products outside the shops. Of the intermediaries for agricultural products. Or the bus drivers who appropriate part of the money in the farebox.

The most daring strike out against some administrators or people of little importance. City Managers irrelevant in the chain of command. Some mid-level Party functionaries who the higher-ups have given the green light for their crucifixion.

Government journalists are not a cynical and shameless group. They are good professionals. But they are trapped by a network of brass that stops them from doing serious, strong work.

From their classrooms at the universities of communications they become editors who want to conquer the world. Then they realize that, except for traffic accidents or baseball scores, the news is precooked by specialists from the Department of Revolutionary Orientation.

Their function is to serve the public by writing a note. Without deviating from the established norms. As the years pass they become experts in saying nothing. Sanctimonious genuflectors. Savvy in pleasing the leaders.

“Don’t look for trouble,” is the golden rule in the official newspaper. The reward for obedience can range from foreign travel, an internet account at home or your own television program.

Though they say little and what they say is of little interest, most government journalists master the current journalistic techniques. They know what is happening on the island and the world. They sneak a read of the foreign press and what bloggers and independent journalists write.

Almost all suffer the many scarcities of any ordinary citizen. They lack food in the cupboard. Money in the portfolio. And suffer from the bad service of urban buses.

They take off the disguise of simulation when they get home. As night galls, they talk to their wives about how long the histrionics will last. They are tired of faking it and keeping quiet. And being disciplined amanuenses.

March 10 2011

I was just a babe in the arms of my militia mother, an unformed chip of a New Man, when Fidel Castro traveled to Libya in the spring of 1977. Received with full honors by Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, he awarded him the Medal of Valor, a distinction conferred for the first time on a foreign personality. In front of the cameras the commander-in-chief rewarded the recently named leader of the revolution with a handshake. They looked at each other and recognized their similarities. Later, in a closed door meeting away from the television cameras, they strengthened the foundations of an alliance that would last more than thirty years.

Cuba and Libya embarked on parallel paths that would join on more than one occasion. The point of major overlap centered on their leaders, in the sympathy the two caudillos expressed for each other. Thus, in 1980, when our island was shaken by the mass escape of more than 100,000 Cubans, Qaddafi officially extended his hand in solidarity. In a message filled with praise, he congratulated Fidel Castro for having been reelected as First Secretary of the Central Committee at the 2nd Communist Party Congress. The military academy man had been at the helm of that vast North African territory for more than a decade, while we exceeded that with twenty years of listening to the interminable discourses of the Maximum Leader. Both based their rhetoric in part on the free social services they offered their people. It was the way they reminded us — day after day — about the birdseed, without ever mentioning the cage.

Jamahiriya — a state of the masses — is the term Qaddafi coined to describe the political system he adopted in 1977, a kind of republic in the hands of everyone, very similar to the slogan, “The power of the people is indeed the power,” that they repeated to us on this side of the Atlantic. If things didn’t work in Libya, the citizens themselves were to blame for not knowing how to lead their nation; if the economic collapse took hold in Cuba it was because of individual laziness and people’s wastefulness, cracking the face of Utopia. Both leaders waved before their subjects’ eyes the specter of foreign invasion and a return to political dependence, the worst of threats. Anti-colonialism became the big bad wolf of the eccentric Berber leader, while the Caribbean leader scratched around in the mud of anti-imperialism, turning the metaphor of David and Goliath into a perennial reference to Cuba and the United States.

The nineties found them both scorched by the fires they had built with their stubbornness and belligerence. Qaddafi needed to clean up his image with the West, while urging Fidel Castro to raise foreign exchange to allow him to remain in power after the collapse of the socialist block. The eccentric Libyan president paid compensation, timidly opened his country to foreign investment, renounced — at least publicly — terrorism, and was even invited by Barack Obama to the G-8 Summit. The commander in olive-green was more cautious, beginning a process of economic reforms which he then tried to control with a return to centralization, qualifying his bellicose speech with phrases alluding to the ecological damage suffered by the planet, and ending the first decade of this millennium by presenting himself, now, as an ancient wise man publishing his illuminating reflections.

The official Cuban press slipped in his first criticisms of the performance of the brother-leader of the great Libyan revolution. He questioned the radical reform of the socialist regime which, according to him, could lead to “popular capitalism.” It seemed the roads that had intertwined over and over again were beginning to move along completely different paths.

But with my then 23 years, I had witnessed the affectionate grip the two caudillos shared. Unlike in March 1977, my mother didn’t want to hear anything about her militia uniform, and the Libyan leader was hard to recognize under the make-up, head cloths, and sunglasses. In 1998, when Fidel Castro participated in the Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, he was honored with The Muammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize which came with a whopping $250,000. It was clear that the exchange of awards constituted — along with economic and military cooperation, declarations of solidarity, and the absence of condemnation — another form of mutual support in one of those ways that, over and over again, power recognizes and supports power, just so long as it sees the shine of its own reflection.

10 March 2011