English Translations of Cubans Writing From the Island
For you all. For me. Today we all will sing the well known song, clapping our hands and Malaletra will blow out the candles. 11-11-2011. Begin with one, continue with one and end with one! Good luck and good vibe.
Translator’s note: Today is the anniversary of Regina’s blog. (Congratulations!)
Translated by: Meg Anderson
November 11 2011
It was 6:30 in the morning and we rode on a cart pulled by a tractor that shook from the uneven dirt roads.
The guardrail moved and didn’t offer any guarantee that it would support our weight–moving involuntarily as if we have neurological problems–we sat on the floor so that at least the rustic planks of the guardrail would protect us from the dew and cold of dawn. It was the first “school in the countryside” for everyone, except the responsible teacher who traveled with us. I was twelve years old, a girl who had still not had her period.
Our breath condensed in the air and the silence overcame us the night before, when a melancholy student from our shelter fell prey to the mockery of the group because she missed the privacy of her own room and bed when it was time to sleep. They began to call her “coward”, “weak”, and with these “little bourgeois attitudes” she wouldn’t be a good communist. One of the tests of stoicism that we “autoimposed” (as an policy and a political guide common to all schools), was that of spending the 45 required days in the countryside, without leaving no matter what happened–unless it was a compelling reason–and to be an example by working the furrows, which amounted to working like a beast for a simple and invisible recognition–that no one could confirm–in the school record. Breakfast that morning, in a little aluminum jar as hot as the scorching midday summer sun, consisted of burnt milk. Washing our faces in the washtubs with icy water from the tap–at Camp “La Concordia”, like in others, sinks did not exist–had the advantage of waking us up as if we were in the Siberian tundra and we had the “high honor” of forming part of the Komsomol.
On our inexperienced expectations, the day arrived, and even though the thick fog robbed us of our view of the landscape, we watched the faces in silence, listening to the song of the rooster, the moo of some cow, the warble of the birds, and the rumble of the tractor. We dressed in androgynous clothing that the revolution had “fatherly and generously” provided for us so that we could freely accomplish hard agriculture work during the next month and a half. To break the mist and the muteness that we dizzy and inexperienced aspiring communists were suffering from, the teacher in charge of our group sang a chant copied from from the indoctrination program made in USSR that she repeated over and over again so we could learn it.
I even remember the wet grass covering and moistening my canvas tennis shoes and pants to celebrate my baptism by fire and “our battle against the softness and hereditary diseases of capitalism”. We looked like test tube girls abandoned in the laboratory of the New Man. They lost us in the winding literary paths and we jumped from fairy tale to political fable. To the schools in the countryside, I thank you as I thank the revolution: the deep deception and thanks to the voracious appetite that I had from working the earth, I learned to eat peas with weevils; this eagerness has transformed over the years to a hunger for freedom. That was my “collision” in the Cuban countryside, my baptism by the colored earth.
Translated by: Meg Anderson
November 8 2011
11 November 2011
When I heard through the BBC that Amy Winehouse had been found dead in her house in London, the first person I thought about was my niece, Yania. I’ll explain.
It’s because in the choir of her secondary school, in the year 2006-2007, her teacher not only selected Yania to be a soloist, but she proposed a song much heard at that time: Rehab, written and sung by Amy Winehouse.
Yania’s teacher thought that with Yania’s deep voice, she could sing a good version of Rehab. And she did. Her grandmother – my mother – told me that a rumor spread throughout the school, based only on the choir practice, that there was a student (13 years old at the time), “who sang like Amy Winehouse”. Apart from the typical adolescent hype, she had had to sing Rehab dozens of times, requested by school mates, teachers and relatives.
The first ones who were surprised when they attended the school concert were her mother – my sister – and her grandmother. She came on at the end and as soon as she was announced, applause broke out. And when she finished, people were stomping their feet, whistling and yelling “Black Power”: Yania, my niece, was not only black and pretty but was also a good girl with her head well-adjusted. This is something her family, friends, and neighbors of La Vibora, the neighborhood where she lived in La Habana, are proud of.
At this effervescence of enthusiasm for the ‘Black Power’ in Lucerne, in some way influenced by the fact that, thousands of miles away from Switzerland, in the United States for the first time an African-American had a chance to win a presidential election, that he eventually won.
I have not had a chance to hear the full version of Rehab that Yania sings, only one verse, which she sang to me over the phone. It’s a shame that my mother or my sister didn’t have a digital camera that day. Or, better yet, a video, to record it. Although in the photo gallery of the high school you can still see it, so Tania told me. If it is possible, I will ask that she put the link here (it is one of the rehearsals, with Yania in the purple and white pullover).
From the chorus of eighth graders, she became a soloist, but refused to be typecast with Winehouse, and, with the approval of the music teacher, she interpreted Hometown Glory, by Adele, the British singer-songwriter who then wasn’t as famous as she is now. In ninth grade, the third and final year of high school, she sang Sunny, which had its greatest popularity in the years when her mother and I were born in a hospital in Havana.
After that one day when she was able to gain a foothold in the difficult and competitive world of music, my niece Yania has had her feet on the ground and now strives to finish high school and college in Switzerland, her second homeland.
Photo: Jutta Vogel. From the interview conducted by journalist Dominique Schärer and published in September 2004 in Amnesty magazine with the title “Ich habe eine grosse innere Freiheit” (I have a great inner freedom). It was taken at a playground near her home in Lucerne. Yania appears between her mother, Tamila Garcia and her grandmother, Tania Quintero.
Note from Tania Quinero: When Ivan sent this account, I did not know that Yania had dedicated a post to Amy Winehouse, in my blog. On June 3, 2009, the day she turned 15, Ivan wrote The 15 years of Yania. He left it that day on the blog ‘From Havana’, but all blog posts published in 2009 ‘mysteriously’ disappeared. It will be reproduced in his new blog. Meanwhile, I copy them from the beginning: “My niece is a black girl, almost as tall as Michelle Obama, and with a voice like Amy Winehouse. She is called Yania Betancourt García and her 15th birthday is on June 3, 2009. Since 2003, she has lived in the peaceful city of Lucerne, Switzerland, with her mother and grandmother. She studies in eighth grade in a secondary school, with students with better grades. In her spare time, she sings with a group of teenagers, where her deep voice has the unmistakable stamp of her African ancestors. The band, her classroom and her friends are like a mini UN: Tamil, Serbian, Croatian, Filipino, Swiss … and she, a Cuban, born in 1994 in the special period, in the neighborhood of La Vibora, La Habana.”
Translated by: CIMF
July 25 2011
Cuba’s baseball team could not take the title in the recently ended World Cup, which took place in Panama, the honor going to the Netherlands. This is nothing new, as the same thing happened in the two previous Cups and in other events. Those times when the Cuban baseball team – always manned by professional players, whose only responsibility was playing ball and collecting their salaries (very meager) for it – defeated teams manned by students and true amateurs from participating countries, are gone. Then it was a contest of a lion against tied-up monkey, and we would boast proclaiming that we had the best baseball in the world, something totally untrue.
When the participation of professional ball players was authorized, even though the best never came – those active in the American Major Leagues – the myth of Cuba’s invincible team started to crumble.
It is symptomatic that once professional sports were prohibited after the triumph of the insurrection, for being considered not consistent with the new political postulates, soccer, basketball, volleyball, gymnastics, track and field sports and others, where professional teams and athletes participate are well promoted and even have fixed slots on television, radio and press, while professional baseball and its players don’t have the same coverage, and Cuban ballplayers are not allowed to play in teams in other countries, much less in the Major Leagues, the personal objective of any one of them.
The absurdity reaches the extreme of the banning coverage of the Major Leagues from local sports news shows and even from Telesur (a Venezuelan state-affiliated television station broadcast in Cuba), not allowing sports writers to speak or write about them, even of teams to which Cuban athletes living outside of Cuba belong, who are considered by the model as traitors to the Fatherland, when they should be the pride that were in previous times Adolfo Luque, Miguel Angel González, Orestes Miñoso, Conrado Marrero, San Noble, Adrián Zabala, Fermín Guerra, Sandalio Consuegra, Edmundo Armorós, Pedro Formental, Roberto Ortiz, Héctor Rodriguez. Willy Miranda, Camilo Pascual and others, who played in the Major Leagues and were also national champions, being part of the classic teams of Havana, Amenendares, Cienfuegos y Marianao.
We Cubans have for years been prevented from enjoying the performances of Orlando Duke Hernandéz, Liván Hernandéz, Cansecu, Tartabull, René Arocha, Rolando Arrojo and others in the best baseball in the world, and our ballplayers have been mutilated in their development by not allowing their participation in it, as has happened to Marquetti, Vinent, Huelga, Mesa, Muñoz, Kindelán, Lazo and others who, once their active career is over, either have died or wander about making a living however they can, remembered only on some convenient date, without having been able to play in big baseball and make it to the Hall of Fame, which would have made them recognized world figures.
It would be convenient that, in the so-called actualization — or updating — of the model, we kept in mind to actualize also this erroneous policy, and our ball players could self-actualize without dogmatic and obsolete political meddling that, by the way, doesn’t apply to other athletes. Though soccer is considered a universal sport, in Cuba baseball is the national sport, and we Cubans have the right to enjoy the performances of our players, wherever they play and irrespective of the team they belong to, and not have to learn about their successes outside of Cuba in a clandestine fashion, as happened a few years ago with the music of the Beatles.
Translated by: lapizcero
October 19 2011
In Cuba we have all very carefully followed, in one way or another, the 2011 Panamerican Games in Guadalajara, not so much for the love of sport, but because there are no other entertainment options. But it hasn’t gone unnoticed that Cuban commentators politicise them heavily, which is bordering on indecency.
The government and the broadcasters have glorified the standing of our athletes in the medal count and categorised this ‘as an achievement of the revolution’. Fidel Castro issued ‘thoughts’ which have been read to the nation several times in all the radio and TV media operating on the island. In it, he makes unbalanced comparisons in terms of population, size of the territory and the number of medals won.
That’s when I remember the case of the silver medalist from the Special Olympics that took place in Beijing, China, in 2007. I’m talking about Rauler Castellanos Moreno, a black youth from Pinar del Rio who, despite his victory in this competition, now lives in inhuman conditions.
His house, with dirt floors, has a rudimentary table with very few utensils and no food to cook whatsoever. He has a small hotplate for an “electric stove”, his closet is an egg crate. His mattress is made of jute sack stuffed with dried banana leaves. His windows are improvised from a badly constructed palisade as protection from wind and rain.
This is the reward for bringing the HOMELAND a silver jewel which was – like those of the Cuban team that travelled to Guadalajara on this occasion – loudly celebrated. Meanwhile, Rauler Castellanos and his life were forgotten by everyone.
Rauler Castellanos got to know other places, made new friends, and upon his return was greeted with a certificate of recognition given by The Cuban Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation (INDER). Today, he shows in dismay the photos of that event to his friends, and shrouds himself with the country’s insignia recalling his efforts and success. However, he went, like so many others – from glory to misery.
Translated by: Branislava Vladisavljevic
2 November 2011
Some years ago I had a verbal tic that I interspersed between sentences. A repeated, “You know what I mean?” capable of annoying even my most understanding friends. I said it at the least appropriate times and one day someone gave me a lesson, “Why do you think I don’t understand you? Isn’t it you who doesn’t know how to explain?” Language has this ability to undress us and leave us open; words reveal what we hide under a veneer of good cheer. Social networks in particular have become a gateway through which we travel in our undergarments before the scrutiny of readers, friends and a vast legion of critics. Each monosyllable we write for these conglomerates of opinion give us away and strip us bare.
I remember when I started with Twitter my voice was more awkward, less familiar with the plurality that a space like this harbors. Since August 2008, when I opened my account on this microblogging service, every slice of 140 characters published has made me a more tolerant and respectful person. Hence my surprise when Mariela Castro responded to the question I posed in a tweet: When will we Cubans come out of the other closets?
The personal attack with which she responded stunned me. I did not expect a hand extended in dialog, certainly, but neither did I expect arrogance. It’s true that I need to study, as she suggested, and I will do so and continue to do so until my eyes can no longer distinguish the lines in my books and my rheumatic fingers can no find the keys on the keyboard. However, I have learned that to evade a question by attacking the other’s lack of education borders on arrogance. Faced with such a reaction, what kind of onslaught would a peasant who barely finished sixth grade receive, were he to address the director of the National Center of Sex Education?
I believe, however, that in the manner of that silly catchphrase I once had, verbal attack is a habit that can be cured. The voice can be trained, tolerance acquired, the ear opened to listening to others. Twitter is a magnificent therapy to achieve this. I suppose that as the days pass and as Mariela Castro continues to publish, she will come to better understand the norms of democratic dialog, without hierarchies, where no one tries to give lessons to anyone. When this time comes, I hope we can converse, have a coffee, “study” together — why not? — the long and difficult road that lies ahead for us.
These days, I have been working hard to earn a little money to be able to go shopping, not to buy food, like always, but to buy some garlands for Christmas, because each year I have to update them, because most break very easily. I imagine that they are made that way on purpose: for a single season.
In spite of the persistent drizzle, I wanted to go, but really, I needed to distract myself a bit. Upon arriving at the department store La Puntilla, I ran enthusiastically to the place where they sell the decorations for the holidays at the end of the year. When I approached the garlands and checked the prices, I could do nothing less than show my amazement to the sales lady, because in previous years it always that place where I got the lights for my tree. The same ones, that in previous years I could buy for a little more than 4 CUC (Cuban Convertible Pesos, 1 CUC = 1 $US), now cost 11 and up to 14. To my amazement, the employee gave me an explanation, that according to her she is used to giving to her clients: The problem is that we buy large packages, hence the prices, you should try to look for the ones that come in small packages, those are cheaper. I didn’t understand anything, but also I didn’t insist on clarifying the concept, I preferred to watch an old movie repeat of Cantinflas.
I went by the shelves where the china and housewares are, and that is where I had to have intensive therapy; they had some china, square, oriental style, with a simple printed design, and they were marked 61.80 CUC. I thought that was for a dinner service complete with Sushi, Japanese Chef, and everything! But the store clerk explained that it was the price of each plate. Immediately I understood why the employees were yawning, there wasn’t anybody buying, all the departments didn’t have any customers, and the few that went by, looked and continued on. And this was Sunday!
Translated by: BW
November 7 2011
Yesterday was payday for retired people and active workers who collect their pay by debit card. The wandering to and fro by people of various ages, in search of a Cadeca (a place where money can be exchanged), a bank that doesn’t have long queues (lines) or for an ATM that works, arouses disgust and some heated remarks between the neighbors of our neighborhood. It should be noted that the payments to retired people don’t happen at the end of the month as was custom some time ago. One fine day in one blow, they changed them to the first few days of the following month, bringing with it the agony of being without a penny extended, therefore, a couple of days more.
But this was not the case for my neighbor, who still works, and collects her pay by debit card. She was very needy the same as the vast majority of people collecting, even more so because she had to make a payment that had a due date. She went in search of an ATM and that’s where here odyssey began. The one at the Ministry of Transport was broken, the one at the Cadeca didn’t have any cash, the same thing happened at the Bank of the Ministry of Agriculture, finally, she went through all of the ATMs and banks in the neighborhood, and couldn’t get cash at any of them, because the only same was working and had available funds, but had a long line that wasn’t moving. She joined that very line and a little while later she overheard a conversation between two people.
One, an older person said to a young person: I don’t know what’s going on, I just went by the agricultural market of the YLW (Youth Labor Army) and they didn’t have anything, nor did the one on Tulipán, nevertheless, the self-employed individuals in their trucks have everything. How is it that the State is not able to supply their farmers markets and but the self-employed can!
The young person, without getting upset, answered: Lady, you yourself just answered your own question, because the State, as you rightly said, is not capable, at least that is what it has demonstrated so far.
The woman, without answering back, moved in the line to move away a little from the young person. Meanwhile, the rest continued complaining to each other about the slow way that they advanced. Finally, my neighbor, abandoned the line protesting without being able to achieve her objective, walking to her house frustrated and indignant, to use a word that is so in style.
Note: the photo had to be taken from far away, because the guard at the Cadeca at Panorama and Tulipán wouldn’t let me get close with camera in hand, he told me that I couldn’t take photos there, and I told him that he should show me documentation of the prohibition, and he answered that it didn’t exist, but that it is forbidden.
Translated by: BW
November 7 2011
A reporter for an official press agency, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the literacy campaign in an article, emphasized that it was undertaken to end four and a half centuries of ignorance in the country. It appears that she, despite the campaign, remained ignorant, as evidenced by her making such an absurd and irresponsible claim.
Without underestimating the importance of the campaign, it should be noted that illiteracy was progressively eradicated in Cuba from the establishment of the Republic and even before, during the years of U.S. intervention, when a modern system of education was organized and thousands of classrooms were created.
In 1958 the overall illiteracy rate was only 18%, one of the lowest in Latin America, though in rural areas it reached as high as 46%. It’s worth noting that, different from other Latin America nations, in Cuba 75% of the population lived in cities and towns (currently the percent is much higher) and only 25% in the countryside, so that this latter percentage affected a minority, which was not entirely abandoned because there were rural schools and traveling teachers, who visited the remote homes of peasants and taught them. This rural illiteracy was also affected by the fact that many parents preferred their children to join them in farmwork and housework, instead of sending them to school or providing them with an education.
The literacy campaign, in fact, was able to eradicate in one year, with the concentration of huge resources and efforts, what could have been accomplished in five or more years with less material and human expense. This focus on a single task to complete it, regardless of cost, to the detriment of all other endeavors, seems to have been a constant of the government authorities. Examples abound.
November 7 2011
Alas! Zoely is now in worse shape, because she went to see the original owner of her Aleko-make car to agree on the terms for the transfer of ownership, but it seems that someone whispered into the retired old man’s ear that the current value of the car is much higher and that he should get some compensation, the kind that is not satisfied with some little old shopping bags of goods. He drove Zoely to the edge of a nervous breakdown because, surrounded by the foul smell of his cigar and with indifference, he cut to the point that has Zoely not just sleeping badly, but not sleeping at all. The owner said that that car… now with the new law… that as she will remember the registration is under his name… that his signature is worth something. Zoely argued that she had bought a corpse and had invested a lot in order to get it to its current condition, to which the old man responded by pointing to the splendid creation parked in front of his porch with the hand holding the cigar and finished off: “Then there is no transfer”.
¿How will it end? It’s like the soap operas on the radio: … and don’t miss the next chapter of… (the announcer pauses and continues in a higher and pompous tone)… Zoely’s Insomnia.
Translated by: Espirituana
November 2 2011
It struck me that this yacht moored at the Cienfuegos marina is the same one that workers for the magazine Cuba International toured the bay on in 1975. That was a courtesy of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in the then province of Santa Clara*, in recognition of a special issue about the territory, prepared by a group of journalists and photographers, that was triumphantly distributed at the commemoration of the XXII anniversary of the assault on the Moncada barracks.
I could not forget that tour shared with my colleagues, now scattered throughout the world. I had told Yoani the story so many times — she wasn’t born yet — that she could repeat it in all its details: the gargantuan buffet, the open bar and, especially, the illusion that this privilege unquestionably put us momentarily above the rest of Cubans, something which we truly deserved.
It had to be the same yacht because my fantasy wanted it to be and because to board it together with my wife to relive those events in a new light was something I didn’t want to miss. So we went to an office with the suspicious name of “the operation” where we paid the fare and they gave us a receipt to give to the captain at the dock of the Jagua Hotel. A group of tourists (Canadians or French?) boarded the boat smiling, while we made our way to the best corner of the upper floor from where we could take good photos of the voyage. I remember that from there, 36 years ago now, the singer Pedro Luis Ferrar enlivened that mythical journey I made with my colleagues from the magazine.
Solicitous and gallant, the captain asked us our nationality. “I’m from Camaguey, she’s from Havana,” I said, with a touch of pride. The man maintained his smile and said something about the drinks being included in the voyage. A few minutes later he returned to say that he’d been obliged to inform headquarters that there were two Cubans on board, “and if gives me great pain to say this,” but it is absolutely forbidden and, in consequence, “we very much regret” that we would to leave the ship.
Yoani demonstrated the enormous superiority of not telling me “I told you so” and stood up, but not before spitting out to the amiable captain something that made him uncomfortable. I managed to offer up a little speech in French (my poor and mangled French) to the astonished tourists who suddenly felt themselves in the South Africa of apartheid. Once on the dock, I asked Ramiro Torres, the official from headquarters who came to enforce the order that we get off, if he knew that this had been Communist Party’s yacht in the former province of Santa Clara, but the man was very young at that time and knew nothing of an era in which another kind of segregation predominated, one in which this humble servant was a beneficiary.
Translator’s note:
In 1976 Santa Clara province was split up into three provinces: Villa Clara, Cienfuegos and Sancti Spiritus.
7 November 2011
On my planet much has been spoken about bad things or criminal acts, where one can see children involved, happening elsewhere in the world, excluding in fact, with this phrase, any allusion to our own children.
However, these reports do not appear to have taken into account that which has been so much insisted upon by international organizations dedicated to the physical and mental health of children: keeping them at a distance from politics and certainly not using them for political ends.
It seems that the director of La Colmenita — the Beehive — has ignored this precept; the group’s program on a tour of the United States includes a work called Abracadabra, where these child actors are utilized for ultimately political objectives.
If they continue down this direction on their artistic path, soon the innocent little bees will end up becoming wasps. I don’t believe that the children deserve to pass through this unpleasant metamorphosis.
Translated by: BW
October 20 2011
On Tuesday, November 1st, the Granma newspaper announced on its front page something that may constitute the ultimate Cuban surrealism. “The Cuban economy will grow 2.9% this year”. Page 2 displayed the same triumphant tone in two other petty articles whose headlines bear happy and misleading portents: “FIHAV 2011*. Growing Spanish Interest in Commercial Interchange with Cuba,” and” Investments in Construction Material Industry Guarantee Sector Growth.” All very funny, really. Granma has become the funniest publication in this country, only in most cases it’s black humor.
However, though just in the two blocks encompassed by Árbol Seco, between Estrella and Sitios (Centro Habana) every day there are between four and five carts with about the same products –- onions, green beans, bananas and plantains, garlic, peppers, avocados, papaya, tomato and beans — produce prices are not only excessively high, they are higher than last year’s prices.
Just yesterday I stopped in to do some shopping at the market on the corner of Jesús Peregrino and Santiago, also in Centro Habana. Eleven tiny tomatoes, a bunch of plantains and three small taro cost me 30 pesos. Next to me, an old man in his seventies watched the price board with an incredulous and concerned look in his face. He smiled at me bitterly. Nothing doing, honey, we came in second in the Pan-American Games, so now we will eat medals. And he left, talking to himself, with an empty shopping bag.
And while the official party mouthpiece wallows in such economic recovery inexplicably born out of fiction in a country where for so long nothing is produced, ordinary people feel their pockets increasingly depressed. In recent months, for example, my neighborhood has filled with produce carts. The proliferation of “wagon pushers” is such that, according to one of them, “no more licenses for this activity are being issued because the ones they had planned on have been exhausted.” You’d think that agricultural production would have increased under the reform momentum of our General-President. Produce stands and agro-markets, meanwhile, seem to compete only in terms of prices, a “contest” among sellers that seems determined to show who is able to set the highest price for his products; markets where, in addition, the quality of what’s offered leaves much to be desired.
*Havana International Fair 2011
Translated by Norma Whiting
November 4 2011
