Translating Cuba

Here is an archive of Pedro Argüelles’ recent posts on Translating Cuba.

I started reading from the last page, where the graphic humor and the occasional caricature of a famous person appeared. I then turned to the crossword puzzle and when I reached the articles, I started to fear that my reading would soon end. I would have to wait another seven days for the seller to shout its name under our windows, a name with distant connotations in pages smelling of ink. My grandparents sought to curb my enthusiasm, saying that the weekly magazine, which they used to buy at the kiosks, was a shadow of its former self.

Bohemia, the oldest magazine in Cuba and in Latin America, was born in 1908 and now it’s the living dead. Though it continues to pile on the years, the fact is that for more than a decade it has ceased to be a reference point. The 1959 Bohemia of Freedom issue, where they showed the bodies massacred by the previous dictator, has been replaced by a boring, triumphalist, insignificant publication. It shrank and lost pages. Its articles repeated the same old sugary stories as the rest of the official press. Even its cover could be confused with those of other magazines, like Sea and Fisheries or the prudish, We’re Young. Its whole personality slipped down the drain of censorship as it was re-educated by a system that doesn’t like uncomfortable magazines nor incisive journalists.

Every day I walk near the building that houses Bohemia, home to the most beautiful of all the busts of José Martí I’ve seen in Havana. I try to explain to my son that dozing there is one of the most important journals once enjoyed in this country and the entire region. For those of his age, that area near the Council of State is simply a place where water collects when it rains, a natural pond that blocks the passage of cars after a shower. “Bohemia Lagoon,” they call it, but I explain that before being known for its floods, in that site beat the heart of the press; there they prepared the pages for eyes like mine to enjoy.

The guilt under the skin, in the air, in a look, in a walk. The guilt that bounces off the guilt of others. The guilt of no one of each one of everyone. His guilt, grandpa’s, the coma’s, the unnameable’s, the reflector’s, the beardedpapa’s… his great guilt.

The guilt for the broken streets, the heat, the sea. The guilt for the nonsense and the olive-green. The guilt for staying, for leaving, for running, for fleeing, for dying. The guilt for the Malecón, the heat, the joy, the grief. The guilt for living, surviving, returning, starting, never ending.

“What’s happening with Cuba, when will they rise up?” a friend from Spain asked me, as she eagerly follows the events that have shaken undemocratic regimes in North Africa. I reply that in our island disturbances can occur, but the government still retains the ability to govern as the opposition is weak and most of the population sleeps in fear, indoctrination and indifference.

According to my friend, thousands of people around the world “await the awakening of the Cubans.” I warn her how risky it is to predict insurgencies within different contexts, but she emphasizes possible comparisons and asks me “to compare the tyrants.” I limit myself to “comparing” the Libyan autocrat his Caribbean counterpart.

It is true, in less than two months riots happened from Tunisia to Yemen, from Egypt to Lebanon. Some despots boarded a plane. It remains to be seen what the Libyan Colonel Muammar Gaddafi will do. In power since 1969, he blames foreign television channels that are “working for the devil,” as if he were God. “I’m not leaving in this situation. I will die as a martyr.”

As the Libyan leader will not follow in the footsteps of Ben Ali and Mubarak, he ordered th protesters to be deterred with helicopters and fighter bombers, while hiring mercenaries and denigrating “the dogs that deliver drugs and money and distort reality.”

“I am not a president, I am the leader of the revolution” warned Gaddafi, as if such leadership turns him into a vital monarch and immunizes him against the changes demanded by the crowds who claim their rights and freedoms in ancient Phoenicia.

Colonel Qaddafi, like comandante Castro in Cuba, justifies its hold on power by blaming all the problems of his country in imperialism. Both are allied to the former Soviet Union and survived its debacle. They go so far as to appoint their heirs: Fidel Castro appointed his brother Raul in mid 2006, while Gaddafi chose his son Saif Islam, who is now trying to appease the opposition.

Gaddafi is as eccentric as his tropical counterpart, but he is pragmatic and has oil. The first came to the throne in 1959, shooting thousands of people, dismantling the Cuban economy and society, arming guerrillas in Latin America and intervening in military conflicts in Africa. The second wanted to become the scourge of Europe and the United States, supported the guerrilla movements who raised the Koran against the West and promoted terrorism by Bin Laden.

The Libyan despot dynamited discos in Berlin dynamited and brought down airplanes in flight. The Cuban tyrant committed similar atrocities, supporting by totalitarian regimes and promoting the mass exodus of the population. Both criminalize political dissent and violate the human rights of their peoples.

The popular uprising in Libya intends to shake up the medieval state restored by Gaddafi in 1969. Opponents want to build a modern, democratic state that promotes freedoms and rights. So far, Gaddafi prefers to “burn it the ground rather than surrender.” The death struggle is being waged in cities across the country.

In Cuba, Castro retains governance, but the powder keg can explode at any moment, but increased unemployment and rising prices of commodities suppress expressions of freedom, as a national despair spreads. The majority sleeps on, focused on survival and indolence, but in this island the carousel of history has always been driven by a bold and enlightened minority; this minority exists. Hopefully it will seize the moment.

March 3 2011

We had not been together on a bunkbed for more than twenty years. My sister preferred to sleep in the lower bunk for fear of falling out in the middle of the night. I, more daring, climbed to the heights of those squeaky bunks at the schools in the countryside. Taking refuge in the fact that I was younger, I jumped on my battered mattress which, with every jolt, threw out a dust cloud of the husks over the recently occupied sheet. My sister complained that I dirtied the pillow with my shoes, muddied from the furrows where we cultivated the tobacco that put us to sleep. With the patience of the elder daughter, she also tolerated that I talked in my sleep all night.

Two decades later we were once again together in a bunkbed, this time without so much as a mat. My sister and I, with one bed up and one bed down in a dark cell at the police station at Infanta and Manglar. We who were once mobilized for agriculture were arrested years later by State Security agents who had also spent nights in those camps at Güira, Alquízar, Los Palacios or Batabanó. A woman next to use asked why we were prisoners as I lay on the plywood of the upper bunk. The stink of the toilet permeated everything and outside, instead of a bell calling us to work, was a grim-faced officer guarding the door.

Memory has certain pitfalls. Now when I recall those hostels full of teenagers they merge in my mind with the image of a cell at the 4th Police Station on the evening of 24 February 2010. My sister and I sharing a can of condensed milk with our classmates, suddenly being thrown into a hallway where the police scream and knock us around. My sister and I, on perpetual bunks, exactly the same amid Pinar del Rio’s red earth as in a damp basement of El Cerro. We went from sheltered girls to arrested women, from Little Pioneers harvesting bananas and oranges, to citizens forcibly pushed into a paddy wagon. My sister and I, one bed above another. She trembles, her voice strained, because she can no longer protect and defend me.

It’s been a year since my sister and I were victims of that arbitrary arrest as we were on our way to sign a book of condolences for the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo. After filing a complaint with the Military Prosecutor, the Attorney General of the Republic, the National Assembly and the Director of the National Police, I have received no response from any of these institution. Here, once again, is the audio recording I managed to make that day with my mobile phone.

Translator’s note: These videos have no “images” other than the transcript of the words and sounds. Even to the non-Spanish speaker, however, they powerfully transmit the screams, the blows, the voices of Yoani’s sister and others arrested that day as they try to protect her from abuse. An English translation of the transcript can be downloaded here.

Watching events unfold in Egypt, I felt envious. The people took to the streets, shouted euphorically and showed the rulers whose hands really hold power. How much I wanted the citizens of my country to interpret that reality! However, to my regret, I feel that the day is very distant when something like this happens in Cuba.

Why not do the same? What prevents us from going outside and saying “Enough, this is our path”? Why not protest when they increased the retirement age, cut social spending and continue laying off workers? I wonder.

Why don’t workers go on strike over low wages and rising prices for food, gas and electricity service? Any of these events would lead to social unrest elsewhere in the world. In Cuba no, here come out with placards and loudly support the Revolution. So it seems we are not of this world.

“Work more with less” is the slogan used by leaders, who call us lazy, “kept people” and pigeons. These modern cars riding in the city, wasting fuel on account of the state budget, meanwhile workers are crushed into and hung out of the doors of public transport to avoid being the ones who are put on the layoff list.

Why not demand justice, rather than commenting in the hallways about corruption among government cadres with impunity to enrich themselves at our expense or with their mistakes and negligence, causing death by starvation of the mentally incapacitated?

Why are we silent when our leaders present a list of deficiencies and reproach us, demanding more sacrifice, when they should congratulate us for working with virtually no resources? Too many questions for a single answer, which is a debate between guilt and fear.

Who does not know the omnipotent and omnipresent machinery? Who feels the breeze and does not breathe, but knows that inhaling improperly constitutes a violation or a crime? Who does not know that breathing is a matter of survival? Who voluntarily seeks death by asphyxiation or strangulation?

Who does not steal? Who does not violate the law? Who ignores the punishments meted out to set an example? Who does not know the work of secret operatives and the neighbor’s capacity to save his own skin? Who is able to defend, above all, their own interests? “Silence of the Lambs” should be the title of the movie Cubans star in daily.

Apart from the envy, the determination of the Egyptian people forced me to question the reality of my country, but also to understand it. An island surrounded by sea where escape is healthier than argument. A place where you have guilt by obligation and also the duty to hide, where fear, the father of resignation and conformity, immobilizes.

March 2 2011

After being closed for too many years, the door to self-employment has opened and you can see the activity on the streets of our towns and cities. The Cuban has always been an enterprising person with initiative. These aren’t unique qualities as many other people also have them. Because of this, however, Cubans were able to take a country devastated by the wars of independence into a republic and a prosperous nation in the historically short space of 56 years, despite political tensions, violent clashes, a banking crash and two dictatorships, placing it in the top ranks globally with regards to health, education, social and labor security, culture, sports, urban development, transport and agricultural and industrial production, which can be easily proven by browsing historic documents and letters.

Starting from the early sixties, private initiative was suppressed by absurd laws, decrees and regulations, and everything began to be considered and decided at the highest level of government, implanting the inertia and stagnation which brought with it, as a consequence, a profound and accelerated process of involution, partially mitigated for over thirty years by the millions in subsidies received from the extinct Soviet Union and other socialist nations, but in the end leading to the current crisis and misery, where agriculture and industry have disappeared, more than 80% of what is consumed is imported, there no longer being producers of sugar, coffee, and other items.

The other side of the coin is the city of Miami and the Florida peninsula where, before 1959, it was mainly a resort of bored elderly, and otherwise an area of swamps and crocodiles, but today, thanks mainly to the initiative and entrepreneurial spirit of Cuban immigrants, it has become a crowded modern city, one of the richest in the United States.

The initiative and entrepreneurial character came to us from our roots, of those immigrants who came as employees of businesses and farmers and, in a few years, working with determination, themselves became owners of the same, making Cuban families.

It would be healthy if the open door was opened to all, and if private initiative and the entrepreneurial character of our citizens was not restrained. This would, despite the many limitations that still exist, breathe a little life into the Cuban reality and we could begin to emerge from the abyss in which we find ourselves.

March 2 2011