Translating Cuba

There are different ways to travel on my planet: one is through official channels, this is the most expeditious, the passport in this case is red, just by chance. Another is scientific or cultural exchanges. This is currently the most common way, given the great number of artists and scientists who travel, and the passport is blue. Another, the most hazardous, is the personal, the most difficult and expensive. Perhaps there is another but I swear I know nothing about it.

I want to talk to you about cultural exchange, because as an independent artist, this is the one I’ve used the most. For this, the first thing is to find an institution dedicated to art or related and get an invitation, addressed to you and sent to the agency that represents you, where it specifies that you are invited and they will assume all the cost incurred, including a round-trip ticket. So begins the journey.

On receipt of this letter of invitation you must go to the institution to which you belong to complete the rest of the requirements: The consent of the institution, accompanied by a passport (if you have a current one), photos, stamps, effective for the paperwork etcetera, and most effective, cash for what you need to do. Once approved, you will go to the next in the chain of command where you will also must be authorized by the director of that institution. If you are a plastic artist, or artisan-artist, you will also have to pass through the Ministry of Culture. Once you are found to be in conformance with them, you take your papers to Immigration which has the final word regarding whether or not you will fly. If you are accepted, your application will now take the same route, but in reverse. Once you’re back to where it all started, they will contact you by telephone to tell you that your request is now pending approval from the country you plan to travel to.

Then, you should take a deep breath, if you are a believer you should pray and pay attention to your purse to cover the cost of the visa and the airport exit fee. These are, irremediably, in hard currency. Of course maybe you will be lucky and can get some pocket money, in case you have any little problems. You will travel nervous and scared, because you know you don’t have so much as one peso for anything extra. Once the ship ascends to the heavens, and you see the clouds out the window, you will know with certainty that after three months of procedures and paperwork you are finally travelling.

March 13 2011

Punta Brava, La Habana

After several weeks of communication and interaction with the different segments of Cuban Civil Society, the Neighborhood Spokespeople decided to call a working meeting Saturday morning, with the aim of analyzing and evaluating the results of the first stage of the proposed modification of the current Electoral Law.

Through admirable effort, the Neighborhood Spokespeople outlined the first piece of the initiative, despite the usual schemes of the totalitarian State. However, the promoters assured that in the coming weeks the proposal will arrive at the rest of the provinces, thanks to the tremendous efforts of the collaborators in the interior of the island.

The meeting also offered a chance to analyze and discuss the lack of response by Cuban parliamentarians to the citizen petitions from the 14th of December activists of the Voices of the Barrio Project, delivered it the headquarters of the Popular Power National Assembly in the hopes that the highest chamber can be relieved of its characteristic morass and produce a viable solution to the ever more chronic problems.

This indifferent attitude of parliamentarians and officials of the mechanism of People’s Power leaves the Neighborhood Spokespeople no option other than filing a lawsuit against the figure of Ricardo Alarcon de Quesada, President of the Assembly.

Finishing on that topic, the activists went through other agenda items to define new strategies for the second stage of the proposal: The phase that will begin at the beginning of March with the massive collection of signatures and that will conclude at the end of November presenting the population’s support with the Citizen Proposal to the same Assembly that today ignores the petitions of the Spokespeople.

At the end of the meeting, the Spokespeople spent several minutes to honor the memory of the martyr Orlando Zapata Tamayo who died a year ago after a long hunger strike.

Silvio Benítez Márquez
Promoter: Voices of the Neighborhood Project

February 23 2011

People of the black race are those who live the worst in Cuban. Also, the descendants of Africans are the majority of those in prison. Despite the fact that blacks and mixed-race exceed 50% of the population, they occupy the hardest jobs and earn the lowest salaries.

On the social scale, there are a minority of AfroCubans in important positions. They tend to be pigeonholed. They are famous or well-known in music, sports, the Santería religion, and of course sex, as in the case with hookers and pimps.

According to Fidel Castro in a speech from eight years ago (and the last known statistics), 88% of the prison population in Cuba — estimated by dissident sources to number 100,000 common prisoners 00 is black or mixed.

The most violent crimes are committed by people of this race. And this is the sector that receives the least hard currency from family remittances. As far as we know, the Castro brothers aren’t racist. In Geneva, the vice chancellor Albelardo Moreno recognized before the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination that “certain” racial prejudices persist on the island.

Within Cuban society are worrying indices of hidden racism. A casual observer may not see it. However, it’s latent. A dangerous Pandora’s Box. Whites and blacks accept each other. Ride the same buses. Talk together. Sit together on the wall of the Malecon and shoot the breeze while sharing a bottle of rum.

But we know there are differences. Ask Ramiro, a manager, about subtle racism and his mouth curls up in disgust. He’s white, tall and blond. He runs a cafe that sells French pastries in the center of Havana.

“I’m not racist. But in tourism and businesses serving foreigners, almost all the employees are white. Among the bosses the predominance is almost absolute. The strongest racism isn’t white towards blacks, but blacks toward mixed-race and white. They always think the whites want to fuck them over,” says the boss.

It’s true that there are phrases and disgusting attitudes among black and mixed-race people. But in terms of racist insults, the large-caliber bullets are fired by people with white skin.

With few exceptions, a white Cuban man would be willing to marry a black woman. “Sex, whatever you want but marriage, not even a joke,” confesses Heriberto, student.

Young white women don’t think the same. Because of existing taboos, like the supposed body odor, enormous penises, or the tendency to beat their wives, they don’t usually like blacks. “But if I fell in love with a black man, there’s no doubt I would marry him. As long as he wasn’t too dark,” says Noemí, cashier.

Elsa, a sociologist, is concerned about a number of symptoms and signs of racism on the island. “It’s about a hierarchy of economic power that does not hide its segregationist behavior. They see blacks as a threat. Where there is no racism is when it has to do with sex. Something that we inherited from the Spanish colonizers, who liked to go to bed with black and mulatto women. Between whites and blacks in poor neighborhoods there is no racial prejudice.”

Veins of racism also occur in children. In schools or when they play each other, at the first sign of trouble, even if the child is a mulatto a while boy shouts scornfully “black piece of shit.” For Lucia, an elementary school principal, “It is a problem the kids bring from their homes, where they hear their parents refer to blacks in a pejorative way.”

Ana, a black student of international relations, feels marginalized in her class. I’m the only brown one in the group. They don’t go so far as to offend me for the color of my skin, but they ignore me and don’t invite me to their parties,” she says.

Still, to be black in Cuba is not a serious problem. Laws punish racial discrimination. And the Constitution says that everyone has the same rights.

Dark-skinned Cubans don’t see it like this. They live in the worst houses, are the majority in prison and don’t occupy important jobs. The blacks in Cuba want things to change. They aspire to be leaders some day.

March 10 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 1 2011

Photos: Francis Sánchez.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 20 2011

SHE’S CALLED RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 11 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share on Facebook

Translated by: JT

March 6 2011

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

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

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

March 7 2011

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

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

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

March 11 2011