Suicide in the winter. Suicide to win the marathon against the doctors and politicians (often indistinguishable) and also to kick his reading public (which did not exist then) to cuss it out twenty years later. In other words, today.
Suicide when beauty does not reach. Opening the mind when the brain no longer helps us to imagine our war in absolute freedom. To eject our delirium from our paranoia, the pamphlet and the plot. To put the rope around one’s own neck, the gun to the temple, or the soft palate (under the plastic prosthesis), to throw oneself under the train, rush the pills down the the throat, balance feet on the rough edge of the roof — not of Havana but of New York, the city that never sleeps away its nightmares while in the tropics we snore away our nap or our hangover.
To kill oneself in development. Annihilate one’s young and spirited self, whore with a furious desire to fornicate. Argh. With gonadtropical irrigation and damp intestines and semen to donate to the “heinous sinners” of the Third World, according to the Old Testament of the New Man.
To kill oneself without love. In a single bed. Not I, not yet. Another limited Cuban did it for me. He left the world in one go on December 7, a venereal Friday in 1990, while Cuba was about to dynamite its triumphalist discourse and impose another (no less despotic) to palliate the debacle: Special Period, War in Times of Peace, Option Zero, State of Exception, Death or Death, We Shall Overcome…
I’m talking about Reinaldo Arenas. The writer. The curse of mediocrity.
His death coincided with that of a mulatto not as brave as this little white guajiro. Anniversary of another shot to the temple that is celebrated even on the front page of the newspaper Granma. Antonio Maceo and olé, who didn’t care for traitors, poets nor faggots (often in distinguishable). And Reinaldo Arenas hit a trifecta. He was proud to inhabit these unowned wastelands, these unclaimed niches of our nation, this materialistic marginalia bordering the madness of ass whippings and lucidity. ARGH. Zen phallusophy.
Correspondingly, the Isle of Ill Will burned him. Cuba vomited out Reinaldo Arenas and neither the accomplice guilt nor the Cardinal saved him. His biography was the only thing that generated hate and envy (and the pain of those least known, like his mother). His work was the only thing that generates a spasm in the hands and eyes, an arched, “How did this son of a bitch to write so well?”
Reinaldo Arenas came from the future and he knew it. And he said it. The loneliness of his mission was self-imposed, because a wounded wolf cannot avoid vengeance even to see the blood flow (more than milk). There are spirits which crystallize anger and laughter, sweeping the rest of local literature that lacks it, dulled between court and court, among the hymns of a kamikaze comandate and the operetta or the tantrum of a key proletariat of a Revolution. Phooey.
He died on this day in 1990, no one around me remembers the anniversary of his suicide, with AIDS in the U.S. (this Friday the 10th my first 38 Decembers killed themselves). Nor can anyone of my generation name the exact title of a single one of his novels except Before Night Falls, which is not a novel but a lousy movie, not as cartoonish and Castroesque, and to make it worse I believe it was Made in Hollywood.
Personally, my soul rejoices. Reinaldo Arenas did not deserve to be part of academic curricula that classify all “isms” into themes. Reinaldo Arenas has earned for his tin drum (a lieutenant on horseback ate the bronze) the medal of national amnesia, a trophy better than the cultured and complacent appointment of a long-haired minister, or even worse, of the thousand and one good little girls with enough time and goodwill to get his doctorate at the cost of his original manuscripts and a library of exile. Grrrrr.
Reinaldo Arenas fell first that Cuba, like those gods displaced by brutes which are the clinical signs of the fall of the rest of their civilization. There is not Cuba after Him, no one should consider themselves deceived. His suicide as sacrificial, sacred. He sacrificed himself to imagine an island the congenital immunodeficiency of an impossible, or at least breathable, island.
His work is apocalyptic and accelerated as this column and, as such, naive. It was bigger than the wise. It was a rotten atrophied limb, chaotropic (mushrooms poisoned against the demagoguery of the dragon).
Today it has been twenty years and still there is not the least sign of his resurrection. Reinaldo, this is done (!!), when one is convinced in life to be immortal. Defeated by the mass for being immoral. Dry quicksand where you fermented your blood in this archipelago of swamps or the initials GULAG/UMAP.
Cubansummatum est!
(Forgive me, for your sharp planes of light like precious jewels. Reading is the eccentric experience of an ahistorical horror. All my text is photophobic.)
Yesterday, while waiting outside the Supreme Court for the results of the hearing on the case of the Cuban Law Association versus the Minister of Justice, I reflected — in the original sense of the word — about my ups and downs since that distant August day when I was also waiting outside another court, that time for the results of Gorki Aguila’s trial.
I never would have imagined that a few months later my blog would appear, that I would speak freely into a microphone — for less than a minute, but it’s the intention that matters — that later I would have to defend my right to enter a movie theater, an exposition, a concert. I remember that dark afternoon of November 6 and the Tweet I sent, thanks to which State Security was robbed of its impunity as it kidnapped Yoani, Orlando and me. I think, again, about Reinaldo at 23rd and G, like in a Russian film where the hero sacrifices himself at the end, facing a primitive stomping horde. I saw the faces — always the same ones — of those who over these last three years have lent their hands to repression, their tongues to perjury, their souls to hatred, and I sensed their unease.
I am a pessimist. I refuse to think that things are going to change tomorrow so as not to be disappointed later, and I repeat, over and over, “Even if it lasts twenty more years, I will keep writing.” But suddenly I made out a long road of freedom traveled. Torturous it has been, to be sure, but not more so than the satisfaction of seeing the man who once dared to lead a repudiation rally condemned to sitting on a park bench talking like a robot on his cell phone, his hands that once served only to beat people useless, now, to this ogre faced with the power of words, the power of friendship and faith in a democratic Cuba. That repressor who once screamed in my face, “This street belongs to Fidel!” looked at me, at me and my friends, walking along Boyeros. He learned that the street no longer belongs to a delusional old man. Like it or not, it belongs to me, to him, to all Cubans, and we are obliged to share it.
He bought a box of strong cigars though he doesn’t smoke, a cloth bag for errands, though he already had one, and two boring copies of Granma on the same day. He did it to help the trembling ancients with their bloodshot eyes who sell endless bits and pieces on the streets of Havana. People with legs stiffened by arthritis, hair gone gray years ago, a cane to complete their spindly anatomy. Old men and women thrown into the informal market exhibiting their meager goods in the doorways of Reina, Galiano, Monte and Belascoain Avenues. Septuagenarians forced to sell their constantly dwindling ration quotas, sad-faced grandmas who eat thanks to the candy and peanuts they themselves sell outside schools.
Thousands of Cuban seniors — at the end of their lives — have had to return to work, this time facing illegality and risk. Hands shaking with Parkinson’s offer sugary snacks at bus stops, wrinkled faces offer razor blades for only five pesos. Their pensions are extremely low and the well-deserved rest they planned to enjoy has turned into jittery days hiding from the police. The system they helped to build cannot provide them with a dignified old age, cannot spare them from misery.
That ungainly octogenarian, dragging his feet to the corner, hawks sponges to scrub with and tubes of crazy glue to stick everything together. A passing girl checks the contents of her wallet. She doesn’t have enough for either one, but in the morning she returns to buy something, if only one of those national newspapers in whose pages the faces of the elderly are always happy and satisfied.
I met Pedro Cruz Mackenzie when we were both taking university prep classes. It was during those difficult years which came to be known as the Special Period. In between classes we would entertain ourselves by collecting oranges, bananas, and any other source of food we could get to ease that hunger which was so common at that time. His academic talent and his skills for “sneaking” into math and chemical experiments earned him much fame in that place. Upon finishing the course, he was one of the recipients of a Medical scholarship.
Many years later, our paths once again crossed. He did not become a doctor, and he was not able to become a faculty member of any university. He soon grew tired of so much misery, of getting to class with ripped shoes, and of not counting on any real support to inspire him to study. He abandoned his strictness midway through his Cuban university career. Now, he clandestinely sells merchandise on the beach, he gets his hands on any souvenir that he can, trying to sell them in order to purchase clothes for his kids. Whenever the opportunity arises, he runs errands and delivers merchandise from one place to another.
However, he has also joined the struggle to denounce Human Rights violations in Cuba. While the police have him under constant watch, he denounces Cardet, the chief of the Police Sector in the neighborhood of Melilla in Santa Lucia, Holguin. Cardet is a soldier in charge of prosecuting disaffected youths, and Pedro tells me that, in conjuction with the president of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) of Yamagual, he has taken note of all those young people who “don’t want” to work agriculture or construction for 8 hour days for just 6 Cuban pesos. The officers claimed that such youths will shortly go to trial.
“I don’t have the list of all the names, with myself included,” Mackenzie tells me on some notes written on a yellowish paper, “some are too scared to give me their names. But as soon as I find them out, I’ll send them to you or tell you over the phone — you can be sure of that,” he concludes.
The thing is that my friend from back during the difficult years, Pedro Cruz Mackenzie, lives at the entrance of the Tourist Pole of Guardalavaca, in Holguin. This Pole is a special reserve for foreigners who decide to vacation in this area of Cuba. The strict police control, the lack of employment for those who are not trustworthy enough in the eyes of the regime to be able to work in their hotels, along with the sharp contrast in lifestyles between hospitality and tourism employees and those who do not have access to such currency or tips given by tourists is a very difficult and incomprehensible fact. “If something happens to me (he is referring to being jailed) please denounce the situation quickly so that my wife and kids can be visited by some of the Human Rights people,” that is one of the final phrases written in the letter by my friend Pedro, another one who has decided not to wear the shackles of this modern slavery.
A teacher showed us very old photos of my town. None of us could recognize the majority of the places in them, although most were the most central of the town. Images of buildings such as la Casa de la Tertulia, the old wooden mansion that served for a long time as a school, stores and private businesses (as many as two or three in a single block), and the park with its gazebo that the grandparents miss so much.
Someone was impressed with the quantity of goods in a store, and the professor, one of those people who has a justification for everything, said yes, there were many things but they weren’t for everyone, those were bad times because the money didn’t stretch far enough to eat, but thanks to the Revolution everything changes. It’s true. Everything changed.
Today my town doesn’t shine as it once did. La casa de La Tertulia changed its name, and now sports a large sign that says, “in danger of collapse,” and all that is left of the old wooden house is the floor and an enormous vacant space that has been turned into a trash dump. Some of the old stores remain, of course, but only the old building, there’s no longer anything in them for anyone.
When I am a grandmother, I will also show the photos that I am taking now of my San Cristóbal and when my grandchildren ask, I will also tell them that things were bad.
The Research Center on Aging (CITED), located in the Surgical Hospital Calixto García in the capital, conducted an analysis of the Economic Guidelines, at 3:00 pm on January 13, setting off an explosion of statements from the medical corps working there.
Once the introduction of the presentation was underway, Dr. Horacio Tabares, orthopedic specialist, interrupted demanding an explanation for the support and insufficient pay for the medical personnel working at this national center, “I need someone to explain to me why children over seven cannot have milk and why as doctors we have no right to breakfast unless it’s a sip of coffee, while we have to face five, seven and even eight hours of surgery where we are playing with human lives. When you explain these points to me, then we can go on to talk about the economic guidelines.”
Dr. Erick, a resident in geriatrics, commented on the lack of nursing personnel in the critical care ward, where the nurses work 48 and even 72 hours without any relief. He also asked why the menu consisted of peas and cornmeal every day.
The analysis of the document was delayed because the participants left the session.
In the first half of the 20th Century and up to the decade of the seventies, December was a month of joy and January a month of hope. It was the beginning of the new year, in which we made resolutions to improve over the past, and in this effort, very humane and just, we always aspired to do better. The year that was leaving was represented by an old man with a scythe, and the one coming by a baby in diapers. It was the transition from the old to the new.
This allegory, for unknown reasons, hasn’t been used in my country for many years, and January has become a month of uncertainties, a month with a “jinx.” I don’t know if it’s planned or coincidence, but the bad news is always announced in January. This has dampened Christmas eve and Christmas, and their celebration is limited to the immediate circle in those families who persist in maintaining the tradition. Epiphany brings even worse luck. We can’t be happy in December when January is looming with storms in the forecast.
This year, to not break the chain, they have announced massive layoffs that will reach, in the first stage, one million two hundred thousand unemployed. These are not the official words used, but they’re the real ones. If this is what awaits us in the first month of the year, the rest doesn’t seem very hopeful. There are other measures, also announced, that will further complicate the survival of each citizen.
It’s a good thing that they’ve set aside the habit of naming the years and now they are only numbered by the number of years that have passed since the insurrectionists’ triumph. Otherwise, they would have had to call 2011 “The Year of the Unemployed,” or, perhaps, repeating past experience, “The Year of the Sixth Congress.”
Despite everything announced for January and the subsequent months, on the personal and family level we are healthy and have positive life projects for the new year on which we will focus our major efforts. This is the only way we can escape pessimism, and bring needed happiness into our lives, to survive this dark and closed reality.
Since the last week of December, the Cuban news media turned the propaganda time chart on the 52nd anniversary of the Revolution, whose reviled founders stayed in power and in the disgust of the population, submerged in silence and the routine of a half-century of slogans and promises.
There was a Revolution but at these heights nobody remembers when it lost its way. Perhaps from 1961 to 1968, on eliminating private property, imposing the state monopoly on the means of production and adopting the tropical version of the Soviet model. Maybe in the middle of the seventies, on institutionalizing the socialist process, sending troops to the African wars and following orders from Moscow, whose regimen fell in 1991.
But it’s not necessary to highlight the matter, for January 1st isn’t any more than a date associated with an imaginary Revolution of Castro-communism; on whose legitimizing calendar other anniversaries of fighting actions are revisited, like 26 July 1953, evoking the failed assault on the “Moncada” and “Céspedes” barracks, which happened in Santiago de Cuba and Bayamo; and 2 December 1956, which commemorates the landing of the yacht Granma in the south of Oriente, considered afterward as Revolutionary Armed Forces Day, founded by decree in October of 1959.
For the past half-century they have been exaggerating the size of the traces of these events, of such indubitable influence in the country’s destiny, crammed down our throats by the attackers who prepared the ill-fated expedition of the Granma, whose survivors started the guerrilla focus which carried out the rural skirmishes of the so-called Rebel Army, one of the forces that fought against the tyranny of General Batista, who fled Havana at daybreak, 31 December 1958.
These facts, retold to the point of exhaustion by the historians and the government’s communication media, have as a common denominator the violence and the necessity of imposing the leadership of the manipulator, Fidel Castro.
To assault the barracks in the eastern zone of the country, the participants bought arms, practiced marksmanship in various places around Havana and crossed the island, besides risking the lives of people who were enjoying the Carnival in Santiago de Cuba, killing dozens of soldiers and exposing their own men. The failure complemented the adventure, but it is worth asking: What would have happened if they had taken it? If the idea was to climb the mountains, why didn’t they just do that?
If we leave behind the problems created by the attackers, the punishments after trial really were benign, the Castros and their followers only spent a year and a half locked up. On getting out, they went to Mexico “to prepare the insurrection,” instead of just climbing the mountains without spending on travel, yachts, fuel, nor violating the laws of a neighboring state.
Behind the expedition of the Granma, bought from the American Robert B. Erikson in Tuxpan with the money from the ex-president Carlos Prío Socarras (1948-1952), is hidden Castro’s proposed inscription in history of imitating the independence fighters of the 19th Century, who armed themselves in the United States and disembarked on various points of the island.
The map of their crossing reveals their irresponsibility and their headstrong nature. If they had left from the furthest point of Yucatan, in only hours they would arrive at the mountains of Pinar del Rio, closer to Havana, without having to cover almost all the Gulf of Mexico and the south of the island to the eastern end, the setting of confrontations just like the hills of Escambray, headquarters of the guerrillas of the Student Directorate, who defied the agents of tyranny in the capital and other towns in the east.
The legitimizing crowing comes to a head with the propaganda about the victory on that faraway first of January 1959, an anniversary that, paradoxically, is associated with the longest dictatorship in our history.
Just less than eight years ago, in April of 2003, one of the most notable intellectuals of the Latin American left, Eduardo Galeano, published what he called, “Cuba Hurts,” about the wave of repression unleashed against dissidents, and in particular about the execution of three young men desperate to escape their own country.
It is impossible to synthesize in one short sentence such a symbolic and emotional charge.
To say that Cuba hurts, is to summarize in just two words a whole set of generally imprecise, ethereal sensations experienced by everyone who sees the reality of this narrow country not as something distant, like a Jurassic phenomenon that floats in the middle of the Caribbean, but rather as something very close to them. Or as themselves.
And today I have dusted off Galeano’s grim phrase because Cuba, again and again, hurts us. This journalist who until very recently lived there. And the news that comes to me from there sometimes arouses anger and sometimes laughter; at times it’s hilarious, or outrageous. But almost always, invariably, with maniacal precision, it ends in pain.
This time it comes in the form of an Official Declaration, and has the signature of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They chose not to cross their arms and their hold their tongues, but came out shields in hand to defend the principles and precepts of the glorious Party, the ecumenical Revolution.
What is it now, the wrong they will right, the mess they will clean up? What is it this time, my friends? Well, very simple: It’s the pronouncement of Cuban diplomacy, with respect to the new measures just taken by the American government with regards to the Island.
Let’s see: 1. Authorize Americans to travel to Cuba for academic, cultural and religious purposes. 2. Allow American citizens to send remittances to Cubans in limited amounts. 3. Authorize international airports in the U.S. to request permission to operate direct charter flights to Cuba.
Has anyone noticed the most-repeated term in these three new measures? Authorize, Allow. The three offer new opportunities in different aspects; the three lift restrictions and prohibitions; the three are undeniably positive, although yes, it’s true, they are insufficient — seen through certain lenses — but they are undeniably larger and more satisfactory than all the measures taken by the government of the Island in its relations with the United States.
Ah, but no: Do not, ever, give an inch. This is not about recognizing positive things that come from Washington. Why? Can someone help me out here? Because it would disassemble the pyramid of lies on which the national and international policy of my country is built.
To say to Cubans, without snickering, that Americans only lifted the harmful barriers for people in the arts and sciences — thinking Americans — to visit their colleagues on the Island, was to move to the ideological ground of those who are indoctrinated to think of the gringos as the cause of every kind of tension in our land. Ergo, you would have to add the ominous tagline:
[The implementation of these new measures] “is an expression of the acknowledgment of the failure of U.S. policies against Cuba and a search for new paths to manage their historic objectives of dominating our people.”
And also:
“Though the measures are positive, they are far from satisfying the just demands, have a very limited reach and fail to modify anti-Cuba policies.”
To those who don’t understand why the triumph of Barack Obama lifted the veil of so many of the Castro-supporting politicians of my Island, to those who still refuse to lift a fossilized and ineffective embargo, there you have it: Barely a handful of timid, nearly-insignificant measures have put Cuban diplomacy on the defensive, stewing in its own sauce, while Uncle Sam gives no signals of goodwill.
When this happens, when the Unites States boasts of easing relations, they have to worry. And fight. They must be twitching, getting hives. No matter what it is: “If they ease travel restrictions for Americans we’ll scream about the blockade; if they lift the blockade we’ll scream about freedom for the Five Heroes; if they return the Five we’ll demand the return of Guantanamo Base; if they give us back the base… we’ll think of something.”
But there is one aspect these diligent strategists don’t take into account: our intelligence. The common sense of Cubans, on and off the Island — and it’s clear we haven’t been lobotomized — tells us, “Fine, it’s abundantly clear who wants to ease frictions and who wants to sustain them, no?”
Still, I have to admit, it’s not enough to coldly digest this Official Statement with ordinary patience. I declare myself incapable of it. I try to think in the spirit of Tibetans, who don’t read the newspaper Granma, and wonder if they have better methods of self-control. And I end up envying them.
But Cuba doesn’t only hurt, it also is humiliated. And it should be humiliating to every thinking, fair, honest human being who reads sentences like these from my belligerent country:
“The measures only benefit certain categories of Americans and do not restore the right to travel to Cuba to all American citizens, who continue to be the only people in the world who cannot visit our country freely.”
Tell me who doesn’t notice, please. Tell me who doesn’t feel embarrassed, who doesn’t feel the small sting of shame at the capacity for hypocrisy and political opportunism that the spokespeople for the government of this country appear to have.
It requires an inordinate impudence to defend the right of Americans, of all Americans, to travel freely to the Island, while saying nothing about the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who, thanks to the owners of our land, cannot return to Cuba.
There they are, those who have never blown up an airplane, or even introduced a flue virus. There they are, those who have never lifted a finger to assassinate, to threaten lives, who have never put their dirty money in Swiss bank accounts. And they cannot return to their homeland, because the same government that throws out tearful words in support of the poor, burdened Americans who would do anything in their power to visit Cuba if they weren’t prevented by the Evil Empire, this same government will not let its own people return.
Scattered to the ends of the earth, Cubans walk like zombies, numbed by nostalgia. They die, like Cabrera Infante and Jesús Díaz, tormented by a melancholy they can never conquer. They live, accommodating themselves to exile that some didn’t even choose, like the novelist Amir Valle, who they sent off to Berlin, raising the drawbridge behind him so he could never again enter the castle.
The same drawbridge that was lifted, also, behind the salsa bandleader Manolín, behind the TV personality Carlos Otero, after countless names, public and unknown, and that — hopefully I am wrong — they may also have lifted behind me.
And now, Cuba supports the legitimate right for Americans to step foot on the Island. There are moments when words fail me. And the impotence I feel on my lips is worse than the arsenic of Madame Bovary.
So every day I am less tolerant of the “friends of Cuba,” the dear foreigners with pink cheeks, to whom, months ago, I dedicated the post, The True Home of All. Those who spend their magical vacations on the sunny streets of Havana and never tire of saying, to Cubans, that we live in the best country in the world.
And so every day I can justify less those who, from a presumed intellectual fairness, approve with their speeches, or their silences, what happened today on a small island owned by a few, so few. This is not the time to shut up, dear intellectuals, dear think tanks of the middle world:
“There are times, in life, in which those who are silent become guilty, and to speak out is an obligation. A civil duty, a moral challenge, an unmistakable imperative from which one may not excuse himself.”
So said an Italian whose name, so sublime, so worthy, I intend to give to the daughter I want to have in the future. So said Oriana Fallaci when, after September 11, she could no longer sustain her silence.
And if, after eight years since the talented — and yet inconsistent — Eduardo Galeano wrote his cathartic text, Cuba still hurts; it’s because it excludes and censors, because it represses and silences. If Cuba still hurts because it violates the rights of us, its children, and yet defends the rights of foreigners to stand on our blessed soil, then may the docile be shamed alongside the guilty, the silent next to those responsible, and remember that History — contrary to what many think — rarely absolves anyone*.
Translator’s note: “History… rarely absolves anyone” is a reference to Fidel Castro’s famous closing statement at his trial for the 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks, “History will absolve me.”
Yesterday in a conversation among friends, fed up with such serious topics as the layoffs of more than one million workers and wanting to lighten up the conversation a little, we ended up telling anecdotes that, although sounding like jokes, are pure reality and make us laugh by being so absurd in themselves.
Look, Marta was telling me, I had to see it to believe it. It turns out that on G Street, after they furiously decimated the busts and statues of the Cuban presidents from the republican era, not taking into account that they are part of our history, there was a statue that became famous, because when it was knocked down, the shoes remained on the pedestal, and for this reason it continues to draw many visitors. However, it’s not that statue that I want to talk about, but the one they made of Salvador Allende, with a colossal out-of-proportion raised arm with the hand pointing to the horizon (in this case the sea).
Well, my friend continued, someone noticed that the hand could be unscrewed and separated from the rest of the bust, and he removed it as a joke. It was lost for several days until one night it was rejoined with the rest of the sculpture. Then, occasionally someone would remove it again, and days later it would reappear as if by magic. For that reason they had to assign a guard to the bust.
Like with John Lennon’s!, said Wilfre. It’s a fact that now there is a person assigned to guard the Chilean president twenty-four hours a day. The same thing happens with the most famous of the Beatles. The caretaker keeps the eyeglasses in his pocket and puts them on the now popular bronze figure when someone wants to take his picture next to it. Once the picture is taken, he puts them away again, until the next occasion.
One thing I am sure of, I told those who were present, is that neither of these two guards is going to be laid off with these new labor readjustments. And wouldn’t it be more economical, interrupted Verónica, if they put contact lenses on the subject statue?
Photo: Aroldis Chapman, Cuban pitcher who has already broken records in the Cincinnati Reds.
A storm is coming to the national sport in Cuba. In the last session of the monotone parliament in December, against all odds, the government maintained its strategy of not allowing ball players and other athletes to compete in foreign leagues.
Since 1991, more than 350 ball players have fled the island. By maintaining the absurd policy of not allowing baseball players to contract with foreign clubs, in a few years the figures could double.
Not only would ball players jump at the chance to sign contracts. Boxers would bet on winning money on professional tours in the U.S. or Europe. Volleyball players would look greedily at the prestigious Italian league.
Track and field athletes would try to become Spanish citizens, Czechs or even Sudanese (no wonder: the Cuban triple jumper, Yamilé Aldama, competes for Sudan), to be able to enjoy the money they earn in athletic clubs.
Even players of handball or basketball, not big sports in Cuba, would give a sideways glance at the market for these disciplines in the Greek and Iberian circuits, and, of course, the fabulous NBA.
The sports myopia of the Cuban leaders is colossal. Their position is childish and capricious. In a country where you need state permission to travel, there are institutions like the Ministry of Culture, which for over a decade has freely permitted intellectuals and artists to contract for work in other nations.
This has not stopped the exodus from this sector, but it turns out to be an option for talented artists, who can sign contracts and earn enough hard currency to permit them to live comfortably on an island of extreme poverty. An example is the actor Jorge Perogurría.
However, in sports, they don’t want the latch to be opened. So the athletes, especially baseball players, jump the pond and enter the Major Leagues by the back door.
Cuban baseball, moreover, is in its lowest hour. Quality has taken a dive. Everyone realizes this. Official journalists and retired stars agree that the baseball that is played now in Cuba is that of the “jungle” (low quality).
The journalist Gilberto Dihigo, living in Florida, son of the illustrious Martin Dihigo, the first Cuban player who entered the Hall of Fame in New York, is convinced that Cuban baseball is in crisis.
The repercussions from these bad moments in baseball are reflected in newspapers and blogs published in Miami, home to around 800,000 Cubans, who follow this sport in “the green crocodile” with interest. And the specialists don’t exaggerate. It’s true: the march of stars and young talent has diminished the quality of Cuban baseball.
The tactical and technical ideas of the current pitching and batting coaches are also outdated. The strategies of the managers show shocking gaps in the subject of baseball. Nor do referees escape from this decline. Their reduced zone of calling strikes is one of the factors in a brutal batter clobbering a defenseless pitcher without pity. Seventy percent of National League pitchers are on the verge of tears.
It’s terribly out of control, with an average number of bases walked that is childish, an average speed no greater than 84 miles per hour – in a baseball that deserves respect, pitchers should reach 90 miles per hour – and a reduced repertoire that includes only two pitches, fast and curve balls.
Bad things follow. The swing technique of many hitters is from the middle of the twentieth century. The players’ gloves are ripped. And the numbers don’t lie. The defense in the current season is 967. In a decent league, fielding is around 980.
Despite the shortages that hinder the main pastime of Cubans, baseball is still the biggest show in the country. And its players, with their natural talent, are candy for the scouts.
It’s true that to reach the highest level they have to overcome the deficiencies. But the promising young on the playground are losing the dream of the million-dollar salaries they pay in the U.S. Major Leagues. They know that the sooner they leave, the better the chances of someday playing the best baseball in the world.
In contrast to expectations – it was rumored that the government would make changes in its sports policy – General Raul Castro dropped the ball, and the illusion that Cuba would allow the free recruitment of athletes went up in smoke. A response to the unrest prevailing in Creole baseball could be the increased exodus of ball players. From time to time.
I am grateful that you sent me the debate. I don’t know how to get involved in the analysis but I think that I need to.
If you can, send this opinion to whoever you want.
Although I have to confess that I find it difficult to express myself and to organise my thoughts in this form, I don’t want to not do it as I think that the TV’s resurrection of those ideas that we thought were dead demands a reaction of repulsion. I want to add my thoughts to those who have offered their analysis so far. There have been some profound and well-argued reflections, and it’s important that they don’t end here.
I was studying design when Pavón was president of the CNC and Armando Quesada was head of Teatro y Danza, and I remember perfectly well the tragedy of the “misfits” and the almost total destruction of some theatre groups, just like the censorship in the field of literature. I lived the period up close, involved as I was in university TV, as one of the screenwriters and assistants for the TV program,”6:30 pm”…These “orientations” had a cultural character with relation to the treatment of art and literature on TV, with personal comments added by Papito Serguera.
I will never forget the impression almost of conspiracy that one felt when reading Lezama or Dulce Maria, the sad memory of meeting Cintio Vitier and Fina García Marruz spending hours in a cubicle of the National Library explaining to you that they would consider you as ideologically divergent because you liked the Beatles and not Casino or Mozambique, the possibility that your friends would snub you in the street or that they would make you lengthen the hem of your skirt to attend school.
Someone told me that some months ago Armando Quesada was working in television, and I didn’t want to believe it. Now he is resuscitated as a main character on programs along with Serguera and Pavón. I didn’t see the programs, but what I have heard here is enough for me.
I think that it’s really unfortunate, and more than unfortunate, worrisome.
I think we are in an internal ideological confrontation between Marxist and revolutionary thought versus thinking lacking any intellectual interest, demagogic. So I also believe that the debate should not remain only in this exchange of mail. As Zenaida says, it’s time to raise our voices so they hear us.
Belkis Vega
Another message from Belkis Vega
Looking at the past from the present. I think this has been a first for the greater part of us Cubans who have been participating in this debate.
For as long as I can remember I have been hearing the same paralyzing phrase repeated over and over: “This is not the time, this is not the place.”
How many of us say in our defense that to be revolutionary is to be someone who transforms, someone nonconformist and critical. We have also allowed ourselves to abandon the hope of this time and place that never arrive. And always for the supposedly noble and unifying but also paralyzing end of not giving arms to the enemy; without taking into account the fact that the paralyzing status quo is a very efficient arm.
It occurred to me again last week when I tried — naively? — to bring up some of the worries that we are exchanging about the theoretical debate that was developing in the Festival of Television.
It happened that it was neither the time nor the place.
I now think that many of us are not prepared to hope for more. I think we’ve lost many things in this waiting, our life has been in this waiting.
I remember that during the most critical years of the Special Period, a friend told me that they would have to ask every Cuban, man and woman, if they wanted to continue living in Cuba, and if the answer was affirmative, to give them the Party card directly. It seemed to me a very sensible idea.
I think the majority of us who continue here have proved over and over that we are interested in the social project of the Revolution; in its most ample meaning, as a humanist project that tries to recover and defend human dignity and develop a society that satisfies the growing needs of its men and women. This appears elementary, but many have forgotten it. Our society is not perfect; none of us are either. It’s essential to speak of errors, to assume them, reflect on them and try not to repeat them.
I’ve always questioned who has the right to decide who are the guarantors, the censors or the classifiers of what is or what is not revolutionary.
It’s very simple to look in a dictionary and remember the definition of “revolutionary.” Sheep are not revolutionary. Men and women who act like sheep would never have assaulted the Moncada Barracks. To propose this, you have to want to transform the world. It was necessary to dream big to assault the sky.
I read the writing of Colina and reviewed the list of Cuban films that were not shown on TV. I remembered also how many of the film-makers who started to direct in the workshops of the Asociación Hermanos Saíz in the ’80s are not here. And I remember my recent sleepless nights when I tried to find out why the analytical, reflective and critical works of some of the young Cuban film-makers wouldn’t remain in a show, so that those young people would find their space in our Cuba — the one for all Cubans — and they wouldn’t have to search in other latitudes like so many do.
It hurts me, it lacerates me. I don’t understand the politics of exclusion.
Knowing errors, analyzing them, learning from them. To be nonconformist, to want to be better, to criticize the bad in order to amend it, to respect and take into account differences. Is this “not revolutionary”?
A few months ago a Miami TV channel showed part of the documentary, “Divers, Lions and Tankers” by young Cuban filmmakers who attend the ISA. This documentary had been recognized in some festivals in our country and selected by critics as being among the most significant films made in 2005. Channel 41 TV in Miami had a manipulated discussion of the content. The film’s director wrote to the station saying that he considered this manipulation a violation of his rights. Many people in Cuba learned from the comments about this show in Miami that this documentary existed, and they have tried to see it, but the documentary is not displayed publicly. It circulates underground. Something similar happened with the fictional short by Eduardo del Llano, “Monte Rouge.” And with other works; these are just two examples.
And I always wonder if it is not much more beneficial to bring these works to a public debate. Display them on TV, have a panel where the creators of the works can discuss views with journalists and others. In short, are we going to continue postponing the controversy over our reality, which we live every day, until we get a right time and right place that never appears?
There are many works made within the revolution by Cuban artists and writers who are HERE and who have every right to have their own voice and to call attention to aspects of our reality to those who SHOULD find a solution for themselves.
Criticism, self-criticism, jumps from the quantitative to the qualitative, unity and the struggle of opposites, these words and phrases now sound like Martian to many in our country.
Where have the principles of dialectical materialism gone? Which now our young people aren’t even studying.
Nor has the fall of socialism in Europe made me think that Marx was wrong in his formulations. History has proven that it is much more complex to apply Marxism to everyday life than to theorize about it. But out of curiosity I would like to know how many people in our country today know what characterizes a society as socialist. Any of us at any time can be exposed to questioning by some officials who flaunt the right to classify what is revolutionary or not, and who confuse dogma with being revolutionary.
It is no secret that all this generates self-censorship, and I think we all have self-censored a lot. There are battles we’ve won when we’ve defended our work and our positions in a brave, energetic manner, with solid arguments. The examples Colina gives, referring to the film Alice in Wondertown or the refusal of the directors of ICAIC to be unified with the ICRT, are proof of that.
The polemics should come out of our emails. I think it’s fundamental to find a way to publicize these debates and open up participation. I think the analysis of the Five Gray Years that has begun here and that will be deepened with the Ambrosio Fornet conference and the subsequent exchange should serve as a starting point for taking back our own history, moving forward and finding many ways here and now where we Cubans can reflect on our reality in order to transform it.
Belkis Vega
Reflections provoked by the “affectionate” letter written by Paquito de Rivera for Fefé Diego.
Some people would be better off shutting up…
And I’m not saying that because of intolerance, much less because I don’t respect differences in thinking.
I say it simply because I think it’s better to be quiet when you don’t know how to express your thoughts coherently and with respect for others.
It really hurts to confirm such a great contradiction between musical talent and the ability to express ideas with a minimum of argument and depth.
Some years ago I was at the International Film Festival of Miami, exactly the year in which the festival bravely decided to show Fernando Pérez’ film, Life is to Whistle, with the possible punishment of losing part of its funding for showing the work of a Cuban “over there.”
After the films you could attend a jazz concert at a hotel, I think it was the Sheraton. So there I was, ready to enjoy the musical talent of Paquito de Rivera and imagine my surprise to hear him tell distasteful and vulgar jokes about the situation of the child Elián González, whose family in Miami did not want to send back to his father.
Never in Cuba did I hear Paquito oppose UMAP or criticize Marx or question the socialist definition of the Cuban revolution.
As much as I’ve tried, I cannot remember any “brave” position Paquito de Rivera took against the terrible things that according to his list have occurred in our country.
I don’t even remember if he tried to criticize the Stalinst stage of the USSR, nor if he dared to criticize the terrible things that happened around it.
It seems in that epoch he assumed the same attitude as the rest of the Cuban artists and writers “who so irresponsibly have supported such a bloody regime,” according to him.
I don’t know, then, what bravery he’s talking about. Or his bravery is to insult in a public letter an exceptional musician like Carlos Santana for deciding to wear a t-shirt with a picture of Che Guevara.
I also never knew that a guy as brave as Paquito de Rivera opposed the invasion of Iraq or protested the lack of attention given to the victims of Katrina. Or perhaps he felt worried about Africa. It’s more probable that all that seems okay to him.
I agree with Boris Iván that it would be better if he used his head for musical scores since it would appear that language is not his strong point. Perhaps if he had remained in Cuba he would be capable of reasoning and writing in a more consistent and less vulgar manner.
However I do remember other voices that raised questions in the time of that stage of Cuban culture that has been the object of debate these days with the participation of many Cubans from here and there.
Some voices are more timid, others stronger. There were not many, there were not enough. But there were voices.
As there also have been voices at other times that, for example, supported the performance artists of Street Art, the filmmakers of Alice in Wondertown or Guantanamera, and the actors of Manteca, when these artists and their works were questioned.
Luckily there are more voices participating in this analysis of part of our recent history, which is so necessary. And by luck this debate has motivated the participation of people with different positions and opinions.
Of course something very important is missing, and it’s the opening up of the debate outside the circle of writers and artists who have email.
Now I know, Paquito, that you don’t know who I am nor what I do.
I also know that with this letter I’m exposing myself to your insults.
It doesn’t matter to me. I believe that now the only important thing is to tell you that, luckily for both of us, I’m not interested in being your buddy.
Around midnight I arrived at the bus terminal in Havana, a three-story building, painted blue and white. It was built in the late 40’s and inaugurated in 1951.
It takes up a block, and more than 100 buses a day leave for the 14 Cuban provinces and major cities across the country. Before 1959, the average for these bus trips, coming and going, was 1,500 every 24 hours.
As I was taking only a backpack and a briefcase, the luggage department told me I could take them on board. They checked my ticket and I went to a circular room with air conditioning and plenty of seating in black plastic.
It’s the waiting room. Two hours later my bus leaves for Ciego de Avila, a province located some 400 kilometers east of the capital.
The independent journalist Pablo Pacheco was born there. He’s now in the Canaleta prison. I am bringing him some gifts that my mother sent from Switzerland to his wife, Oleyvis, and his son Jimmy.
Pacheco is one of the 75 arrested during the Black Spring, in March 2003. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and he has served 6. Of the 75, 57 still remain behind bars.
All are in prison for thinking, writing and saying aloud that their country urgently needs political and economic changes.
Note: In a 24-hour trip in April 2009 that I took to Ciego de Avila, I wrote 10 articles. The Waiting Room is the first. The others are: Obama at Dawn, For a Fried Chicken, A Natural Guajiro, Highway Police, A Cuban Sunrise, Blind on Sight, The Pimp of Venezuela, Dr. Oleyvis, and From a Pedicab. All the posts published in 2009 on the blog From Havana were accidentally deleted. Since we have the originals, we are going to post them again here, or on Tania Quintero’s blog.
Pablo Pacheco and his son Jimmy discover snow from their exile in Spain.
In recent months, when the economic crisis and the crisis in values dramatically coincide in their most profound moment, people — coalescing around an idea that is not a political movement, nor one of parties or opposition political organizations — are preparing documents with alternative or complementary options to ease the crisis, without discarding the economic guidelines developed by the Party, clearly insufficient to solve our serious problems.
Thus, we have the Heredia Project, coming from the same platform as the Varela Project, with the Civic Manifesto to Cuban Communists, and with A Future for Cuba, to cite only two that I have read. Cubans knew of the Varela Project from James Carter’s backing it in the University of Havana auditorium, and we also recall the shoddy way they squashed that initiative. The signers of “The Country Belongs to Everyone” paid for their boldness with years in prison.
These new documents contain valuable insights. But they do not have official blessing, and therefore are already demonized with the apocryphal charge that their paternity is the CIA and Imperialism. There is no internal possibility of amplifying any independent initiative.
Unthinkable a few years ago, the virtual space has become the platform for freedom of expression in Cuba. The government reluctantly tolerated this space that has given the world a national vision far removed from the pages of Granma, because the internal impact is minimal; it rests on our family and friends overseas to be the correspondents who share all these ideas with their relatives and friends in Cuba who don’t have Internet; often they have only seen a computer from a distance.
The proposals are in our hands (the people, who are sovereign! which they must be to any government that wants to be considered democratic). I ponder whether or not to speak at community meetings like the neighborhood assemblies and the People’s Power.
Almost everyone who has lost the fear of expressing their dissent has, paradoxically, distanced themselves from these gatherings, marked by the lack of spontaneity and the timidity with which a few people dare to mention a complaint. Those who participate and leave with a booklet already have their own ready-made answers at the neighborhood level full of phrases and slogans.
It would be worthwhile to stop using the bus or waiting in line as a chance for anonymous catharsis, and to reformulate “the street belongs to Fidel” to “the street belongs to the people.” Surely we could approach a true Battle of Ideas, always preferable to a real — and fratricidal — battle.
ARENAS FRIDAY
Since the last week of December, the Cuban news media turned the propaganda time chart on the 52nd anniversary of the Revolution, whose reviled founders stayed in power and in the disgust of the population, submerged in silence and the routine of a half-century of slogans and promises.
To assault the barracks in the eastern zone of the country, the participants bought arms, practiced marksmanship in various places around Havana and crossed the island, besides risking the lives of people who were enjoying the Carnival in Santiago de Cuba, killing dozens of soldiers and exposing their own men. The failure complemented the adventure, but it is worth asking: What would have happened if they had taken it? If the idea was to climb the mountains, why didn’t they just do that?
