Translating Cuba

Sterilized, depersonalized, inexpressive, emotionless, difficult to describe: that’s the image of the teacher of the Ministry of Interior officials circulating lately through a video conference, mysteriously leaked and quickly spread through the networks. The figure distantly brings to mind that French movie villain of the 1960s, Fantomas, eternal antagonist of the late comedian Louis de Funes in a saga of intrigue and persecution that delighted the kids of my generation.

Sure, I liked that Fantomas, the authentic one; not this sadly blurred copy who with his coarse language, extreme poverty of vocabulary and uninhibited vulgarity, tries to present a lecture on computer technology to a group in uniform that, bored and yawning, tries to maintain expressions of serious interest amid the tacky verbal diarrhea of the “prof.” So as not to profane the memory of Fantomas, I’ve decided to call this plagiarizing imposter The Clone.

Almost all readers have seen the celebrated video, available on several sites that have identified the pathetic puppet of the day with name and surname, year of graduation, speciality and other details. Ergo, The Clone exists, is real, which, I confess, I find surprising. People with much more expertise in the details of technology than I, have already commented about the crazy string of fabrications the “specialist” spins and have offered evidence of his clear intention to demonize the alternative blogosphere, mainly through attacks on its most recognized figure, Yoani Sanchez. Nothing new. But some of the details are of interest and lead to certain inferences, if the material in the presentation is genuine. For example:

It shows that these officials-cum-disciples have not the slightest knowledge of communications technology in the information age, rather scandalous if–to judge from The Clone’s verbal dysentery–they must be prepared for “a dynamic of permanent war” where “the Internet is the battlefield.” Clearly they have already lost the war.

It shows that the government not only lies to the Cuban people with the greatest audacity, misrepresenting reality, but that they unmercifully unload on their own officials charged with State security.

It establishes–building on the experiences of the Orange Revolution and especially the Iranian Green Revolution–that the permanence of the system, the government and the Revolution are hanging by a thread: the bloggers or any young troublemaker with “uncontrolled” access to the social networks could generate a conflict. That is, the outbreak of conflicts could prove that the Olive-Green legend doesn’t depend on sociopolitical reality, but on the possibility of access to Twitter, Facebook or YouTube, which says a lot about the supposed strength of the Revolutionary process, of popular will to defend the Revolution, and the absence of real links with the country’s youth.

It recognizes that the United States government has the perverse intention of “permitting a free flow of information between Cuban citizens and the world.”

Cuban immigrants in the United States “are trying to present a new face,” so they have proposed a scholarship program for young people on the Island with the purpose of educating them in the latest information science technologies. Therefore, the Cuban government’s response was strong and highly characteristic of its wisdom: Don’t let the young people out.

Several months after the tirade, however, we are still waiting for the army of bloggers, mentally bound and uniformed by the Ministry of the Interior, to emerge victoriously on the battlefield and crush us with their technology and arguments. Apparently their standard-bearers, such as Yohandry Fontana and his feminine version, Tina Modotti–who despite having the full support of the majestic power dare not post under their own names and faces–haven’t turned out to be very convincing. They don’t really rank, the truth being that the charm of blogging lies in the purest exercise of freedom of expression.

We could carry on at length about this extraordinary display of failure, but I don’t think it’s worth the trouble. I’m sure that readers have more opinions than I mention here. I could almost be thankful for some of the touches of comedy in the video, for example when The Clone sucks up to Chavez with his ridiculous flattery (“Chavez doesn’t look like anybody,” he says with delight and admiration). Thank God! I’d like to add. I don’t believe the earth could bear the weight of another such specimen. And here The Clone allows himself an anecdote with tender detail: the Venezuelan president, Twitterer par excellence with an overwhelming half million followers on the site, responds to calls for help from his people through the social networks and assigns his subordinates the task of meeting the demands of the population.

Perhaps this explains why the little Castro brothers don’t open Twitter accounts… They would collapse in the first minutes faced with the accumulation of demands from Cubans.

February 15, 2011

The village graveyards are picturesque and sad: whitewashed tombs with the sun beating down all day on their stones, and the dirt roads packed hard by the feet of the mourners. But there is a graveyard in the town of Banes that has hosted unusual cries in the last twelve months. Crosses around which intolerance has no shame, where it has not lowered its voice as one does before a headstone. For several days, moreover, the entrance has been guarded as if the living could control a space dedicated to the dead. Dozens of police officers wanting to keep Orlando Zapata Tamayo’s friends and acquaintances from coming to commemorate the first anniversary of his death.

Those who now patrol the tomb of this bricklayer know very well that they can never accuse him–as they have others–of being a member of the oligarchy seeking to recover his property. This mestizo born after the triumph of the Revolution was not the author of a political platform nor did he take up arms against the government. Yet he has become a disturbing symbol for those who, themselves, cling to the material possessions that come to them through power: swimming pools, yachts, whiskey, bulging bank accounts and mansions all over the country. A man raised under political indoctrination escaped through the door of death, leaving them on the other side of the threshold, weaker, failing more than ever.

Sometimes the end of person cements his name in history forever. This is the case with Mohammed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian who set himself on fire outside a government building because the police confiscated the fruit he sold in a square. The consequences of his immolation were completely unpredictable, the “domino effect” he set off in the Arab world immense. The death of a Cuban on 23 February 2010 has created an uncomfortable anniversary for the government. Right now, when Raul Castro is about to celebrate his three years at the helm of the nation, many are asking what will happen in Banes, in the small cemetery where the dead are more strictly guarded than prison inmates.

Though they surround as much as they can, this week the political police can’t stop people–from within their homes–invoking the name of the deceased Zapata Tamayo much more often than the long string of titles of the General-cum-President.

22 February 2010

Cuban Communist Party VI Congress Draft Economic and Social Policy Guidelines

Source:
Translation: Marce Cameron. Corrections: Paul Greene. The Spanish original can be downloaded here: http://www.cubadebate.cu/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/proyecto-lineamientos-pcc.pdf. These draft Guidelines are the basis for public debate in the lead-up to the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) 6th Congress, to be held in April 2011. Please note that this is an unofficial translation.

It was mid-afternoon, the door half-open and rumor was alive from a distant and hopeful Egypt. All of a sudden some shouts flowered in the rusty railing. Bobby was a guy with luck in the art of negotiating and the black bag who, one fine day, decided to leave and try his luck in cold Russia.

Out of the blue, you couldn’t make out his face, he’d changed so very much since the last time we’d crossed paths. His visit took me by surprise. At the end I didn’t understand what the motive was for his sudden visit if we were both on diametrically opposed roads.

I open the door and invite him in. Later, I offer him a cup of coffee to cut the tension level down a bit. I notice he’s really disturbed, the movements of his eyes alone give away the young man’s unease. I was doling out the words of welcome drop by drop. In the end I didn’t understand in the slightest what this guy was carrying in his hands. I asked him to please leave his apprehension aside and cut to the chase.

Finally he decides to calm down and tell me the reasons that generated the unexpected encounter. On the Internet he’d found the other — hidden face — of Cuba and he wanted to bring something although it was useless to the cause of freedom.

After having said the moving words, the conversation starts to flow lazily. He narrates in detail the excuses and stunts to which one exposes oneself on each trip you take to the Russian city of Stalingrad, earning in the best of cases a minuscule percentage which isn’t nearly enough to live together with your family in Havana.

He also alleges having been accustomed to tough luck despite the irrefutable pain that being separated from one’s loved ones and the land of one’s birth provokes.But that which no one can forgive Roberto for is the time he wasted living with his back turned to the Cuban reality. Now he is another person thanks to the distance and the diaspora itself. Soon his aspirations are to correct his errors and help in the construction of a new Cuba without the Castros.

February 17 2011

It’s been many years since I saw an Australian film whose title I chose for today’s post. It told of a romance between a white city girl, lost in the middle of the desert, and a young native. I don’t agree with how the story ended, but I haven’t forgotten the distress of those characters in having to interact with someone so different.

Last Friday, the 18th, the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) for the upper floors of the building where I live invited all residents to attend the discussion of the Guidelines for the VI Congress of the Cuban Communist Party. The summons emphasized the need for Party members and members of the Young Communist League to attend. I was the first attendee to arrive at the 10th floor lobby where the meeting was to take place. The only ones there were the CDR president, the Party head for the zone, and two instructors from the Party Municipal Committee. Bit by bit more people came, eventually making up a group of thirty.

I will not try to recount my contributions here, which were few and moderate, nor the combative spirit with which they were energetically rejected, as if they were attempts at provocation. I am obliged, however, to say that everything transpired without violence, civilly, one could even say in a democratic spirit. What I wish to relate is the sense of a “meeting of two worlds” that characterized the two-hour meeting.

I must confess I was surprised by the vehemence with which a young man demanded to add the concept of “free” to education, in Section 133 of the Guidelines which touches on this point. He was vividly disturbed, fearing that this accomplishment would disappear. I was seized with a strange feeling seeing a neighbor worry about Guideline 162, which provides for the eventual elimination of the ration book that, to him, “guarantees a minimum every month,” and I was absolutely sure that neither the uniformed officer from the People’s Revolutionary Army (FAR), nor the one from the Ministry of the Interior dressed in plain clothes, were faking it when they invoked the irreversibility of socialism in Cuba.

I wonder how either of these people would feel if they accepted an invitation to the regular gatherings we have from time to time in our home, or in that of other friends, to discuss alternatives and possible scenarios for change in our country. What would be their astonishment to see the ease with which we talk about a possible transition and the unviability of socialism in Cuba.

No one should be unaware, much less deny, that on this small island there are at least two worlds coexisting, each convinced of its prevalence over the other, its numerical or moral superiority. The first to understand this reality should be our leaders who continue to insist that all opposition is mercenary and pro-imperialist, and that all those who are against official policy are enemies of the fatherland, anti-Cuban. But nor are we who distance ourselves from the official doctrine entitled to believe that on the other side there are only opportunists or thugs in the pay of the dictatorship. This is the time to realize, if we really want to find a solution to our problems, that we need civilized dialogue.

This dialog, of course, will be impossible as long as difference of opinion is not decriminalized and that step must be taken by those who govern.

21 February 2011

Normally, the #27 bus picks people up at 23rd and 12th, just outside a building where Cubans learned, one day, that the Revolution was nothing more and nothing less than communist. Sure, they called it “The Declaration of the Socialist Character of the Revolution,” but bearing in mind that behind every character was the Soviet Communist Party, everyone knew what was coming.

Fifty-plus years later the benches of the monument serve only to wait for the Old Havana-Cerro route and this with some uncertainty, because two balconies have already fallen off the building. A few weeks ago–perhaps fearing that some balcony might fall on the head of a passenger and create a cursed atmosphere around the proclamation–they started to repair it. The #27 bus now stops in a new place at 21st and 12th. As none of this is published anywhere, except for neighborhood residents and regular riders, everyone think the bus stops wherever. Lately there have been two lines, one that is visible from my window and the other in the midst of construction debris.

The driver complains that he has to stop and open the doors twice and yells at people, “The stop has changed! It’s at 21st and 12th now!” An offended woman responds, “Everything in this country changes and no one hears about it.”

The driver is surprised, “Did you change something lady? Because I think nothing here has changed at all.”

Right about then, I, who can’t pass up the opportunity, put in my two cents and said, “Don’t worry, change is just around the corner.”

The woman looked at me, smiling, and the driver added, “From your lips to God’s ears, Sweetie, from your lips to God’s ears.”

With seventy-five years on his back Leslie Chan never imagined he would take his bones to a police station. Barely a week ago he was sitting on a public bench waiting for some friends to have a little chat as he does every morning since he’s been retired, but a police officer interrupted the day.

The cops told him to thew were going to search the home of a family living very near to where the septuagenarian were seated and they needed his presence as a witness. He told me they approached him without any preamble and he refused outright. “I don’t want to,” he told the police firmly, and added, “I am not a snitch.”

When they clarified it and explained to him that it was his “civic duty” he repeated what he said and added that he’s retired, he suffers from high blood pressure, and added other excuses for what he would consider being an “accomplice” to the search. The police asked for his identity card and spit out that he could look for it at the town police station.

I am a witness to the fact that for four days he went, helped by his sister, also in her seventies, to the police station to look for his ID card. Every time the clerk explained that it was true he had a right to claim it, and even the head of the military post told him that when the uniformed officer returned he would be reprimanded.

Still unknown is if there was actually a fine but he’s sure of what he knows very well and that is according to the Cuban penal code no one is obliged to attend a home search as a witness unless it is “a question of life and death.” And in this case it was just about “looking for some bills in Cuban convertible pesos” in the house of dealer so that requirement does not apply to this seventy-five year old.

Leslie flatly refused, like Rosa Parks he clung to the truth. As she did, grabbing onto the bars of her bus seat, Chan refused to cooperate with an absurd policy. It is a gesture, a small action like those that set off any social revolution.

“They returned the card to me after four days,” he told me, “but they now know they can never count on me.”

February 21, 2011

The issue of layoffs has gained force, as the rumors that so worried us late last year are coming to pass.

Talking with a friend who works in the tourism company, she told me of sad scenes she had been a witness to. But what affected me most strongly when she told me that last week, crossing through the cemetery as a shortcut to Vedado, she was stunned by the immense number of people waiting for a funeral. She thought it was for someone in the government or perhaps show business. On inquiring, she learned the sad news:

Two administrators of the former nightclub complex Johnny’s Dream Club, now called Club Rio, had been killed by an employee who, on being told he wold be laid off, got a knife and returned to assault them both, causing their deaths. All the employees of the place were shocked at what happened, because they all agreed the aggressor was a quiet-looking young man whom no one could imagine doing such a thing.

We had already been commenting on the possibility of painful events relating to the layoffs, because although there are situations like this the world over, in our case there is nothing to fall back on nor any chance of claiming compensation, because the labor union, along with the administration and the Party, is on the expert commission that is making these decisions.

One of the most notable differences between living and growing socially in a democratic country versus doing so in a country governed by totalitarian precepts, is the respect for freedom to make one’s own decisions. The sovereign freedom to choose in each moment what to do with one’s own life.

“Great freedom implies great responsibility,” a friend told me on my arrival in the United States. Let’s simplify those words to the most elemental: If no one–not institutions, nor political police, nor the State–controls your religion or ideology; if no one curtails your freedom of expression or decides how much money you earn and what you spend it on, all the responsibility for these acts rest with you.

And how good that is.

When governments or state officials forget their limits and begin to decide what kind of religion its people should practice, or what television they should watch (in Cuba today they broadcast a nightly program called “The Best of Telesur,” where they select, with tweezers, what Cubans should see even within this “friendly” channel), when the government begins to regulate, for example, where its citizens can or cannot travel, the foundations of democracy, by definition, are cracking.

This basic premise, it seems, has been forgotten by Senators Marco Rubio (Florida), and Bob Menendez (New Jersey), in their attempt to block the Obama administration’s expansion of travel to Cuba.

And I stress “attempt,” because, fortunately, when there is great nonsense there will always be great common sense to contain it: Their proposal has just been rejected, and at least for now Congress won’t even discuss it.

What was it about this time? Stopping the expansion of flights to Cuba for certain purposes to which the White House has given a green light–academic, religious and humanitarian travel–and dismantling the prohibitions that George W. Bush, in his infinite litany of mistakes, implemented against Cuba during his tenure.

The argument of the Republican Senator Rubio seems to be taken from the same discourse as the former president’s, when he argued Cuban-Americans should not be able to return to the country of their birth more than once every three years: “To increase direct commercial or charter flights to state sponsors of terrorism is totally irresponsible.”

And in addition: ““There is no reason for the United States to help enrich state sponsors of terrorism.”

Before analyzing the veracity or accuracy of these words about Cuba as a country that promotes terrorism in its most direct sense, before even calculating how much wealth the government of the Island actually accrues through these flights, we should look at the matter through the following prism:

How is it possible that the United States itself, which, in the name of supreme democracy, for example, respects the presence within its borders of Muslims hostile to the foundations of this nation (and I’m speaking here of those Muslims who did not hide their joy and praise to Allah at the time of the 9/11 massacre), can then seek to curb the freedom of people to travel wherever they see fit?

From another perspective, one can believe that some people make poor spending decisions when, for example, they devote their lives to alcohol. But the state does not try to stop them by force, with laws that prohibit spending money on alcohol. We already saw what happened in the United States alone when the absurd “Dry Law”–Prohibition–took effect in 1919.

So, if the founding framework that sustains this nation is democracy in its most basic sense, Senators Rubio and Menendez may well believe that travel to Cuba and help to Cuban families is oxygen to the government of the Island (an argument that from my point of view is ridiculous), but they must NOT restrict the rights of Cuban Americans to decide what they want to do with their own money earned through honest work.

Above all, they should not decide this when it is not the stomachs of their mothers or children who are finding sustenance in these trips or remittances.

And on this point, I will raise my flag: I am not willing to believe in the purity of intentions, the moral honestly of those who allegedly advocate for the welfare and full freedom of Cuba, but who at the same time ignore their families and don’t interest themselves in whether they are able to eat twice a day or are clothed in rags.

The truth is that in the vast majority of cases, those who argue vehemently against financial aid for Cuban families, and against family visits, meet one of two conditions: (1) They have no one on the Island, or (2) They are terrible children, terrible parents, terrible siblings; and in that case their opinion means nothing to me.

As a matter of policy, it is quite possible to have civil liberties that make certain interests uncomfortable. Interests that are fair and justified, or interests that are petty. Individual freedoms which, if they didn’t exist, could greatly facilitate the implementation of measures which in the long term could be beneficial to a particular end.

But it’s important never to forget that the narrow line that separates democracy from authoritarianism is always crossed by a single first step–believing in the power to decide, for example, how often people can travel to a certain country, or who can travel there and who cannot–and it is the responsibility of those who grow up in fully free societies to never jeopardize their foundations.

Link to recording of Pedro reading this text.

For the members of the 2003 Black Spring Group of 75 who still remain as hostages of the Cuban totalitarian regime, this February 18 will mark 7 years and 11 months since their having been kidnapped by Castro’s political police. Five days later I will turn 63, and the same day will be the first anniversary of the infamous murder or the martyr of democracy, our beloved brother of ideas and civil struggle Orlando Zapata Tamayo, left to die on his heroic hunger strike to reclaim the rights and freedoms inherent in the dignity of the human person. But Zapata lives and will live forever in every man and woman who peacefully fights for respect for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to achieve the long-awaited democratic transition toward a new Cuba where the ideals of Marti and Christianity reign: Truth, Freedom, Justice and Love. Amen!

Pedro Arguelles Moran
Prisoner of Conscience
Canaleta Prison, Ciego de Ávila

Last Tuesday afternoon we were at a birthday party for Ronaldo, who lives on a very high floor in one of the microbrigade buildings in Nuevo Vedado.

As always happens when we get together with some friends, the mono-theme emerged. We were all very animated sharing our opinions about how bad things are. Someone said, “Come to the table to blow out the candles and sing Happy Birthday.” Suddenly we started to hear very strong and continuous explosions. We paused the celebration with Happy Birthday stuck in our throats, and we all ran to the balcony to see what was making that deafening noise.

There we noticed a profusion of fireworks, but for what? Some present thought–we know because they confessed it later–that it was an attack. One of them even whispered, “The Yankees are coming.”

Dying of laughter, but intrigued by these displays, because even on New Year’s Eve there weren’t any like that, we relaxed and continued the celebration.

The following day I set myself the task of finding out the what and why of the event. Talking with some young people, they told me a musical group was giving a concert in the university stadium and had brought, from a trip abroad for that purpose, the famous fireworks.

February 19 2011

Machiavelli established that in order to rule a powerful external enemy was needed, with an internal link to it. In this way citizens will unite around those that hold power. The formula has been applied at every era with different shades but without changing its essence.

For many years the foreign enemy had its own name: Barbarian, Bolshevik, Capitalist, Fascist, Nazi, etc.. Over the years some names fell into disuse and new ones appeared, and there was even a time where in one part of the world there was only the capitalist enemy and in another part of the world there was only the communist enemy. This has produced a bipolar simplification.

With the demise of so-called socialist camp and the formation of a unipolar world marked by globalization, the scattered remnants of the Marxist Big Bang, grouped under different flags, began to call the external enemy, real or virtual, simply “The Empire.” Under the slogan of fighting it, there are demonstrations of all kinds, speeches are delivered, articles written, and deeply thoughtful broadcasts aired. The enemy within, as would be expected, is identified as a lackey of it, responding to its interests rather than national ones. Thus, he is disqualified to oppose the national holder of power.

Some, even more simplistic than others, simply referred to it as “the enemy.” This makes the work easier. So the responsibility for all problems and difficulties lies with the enemy. If the economy is bad it is because of the enemy. If the artist did not receive a national award it is through the machinations of the enemy. If health care is a mess, it is because of the enemy. From someone with a proper name, however absurd it may seem, the enemy has become an abstract entity, which serves any purpose.

It would be helpful to forget Machiavelli and his old-fashioned followers, and to stop using the term “enemy” irresponsibly, while facing the problems that affect us with commitment and sincerity and calling them by their real names: underdevelopment, poverty, violence, corruption, intolerance, etc., and to seek their true causes: our own inability to exercise good governance.

February 16 2011