The racket wakes me up. On the corner a heated discussion spreads throughout the neighborhood. Nobody knows for certain what happened. I begin to get impatient and go to see what fuss has provoked such a tumult. A few meters away an indignant neighbor is exchanging swear words with a neighbor… coño… how much longer will we take this communist shit… compadre... not even over the dead grandmother’s tomb will they accept it. Now several items have been removed from the ration book, and at what prices, there’s no one that can put up with this… mi hermano…
At last I arrive at the corner where the hot debate was generated. I start off like someone who is unconcerned to ask about the day’s agenda. I’m running behind on my itinerary and need to gather better information. Ariel — the little liar — comes over and in a frightened voice whispers in my ear the latest news, la china (Raul, whom we call “the Chinese girl”) took refined sugar off the ration book at a price of 8 cañitas (Cuban Pesos, CUP) and unrefined sugar at 6. My friend, how tough they’re making things, I don’t earn enough in one day to make myself a lemonade. I breath deeply and walk off toward the grocery to make certain.
Arriving I wait in front of the pizza stand and check if the rumors are true. I take a spin and head back to my home when a buddy calls me a bit suspiciously, I thought that it was to talk about the same theme. When I got close to him I saw that his face was transformed in sync with the news. My brother, how it pains me about the Industriales — our baseball team — and with your kid at every stretch of the competition the pay goes down. Today in Guantanamo they turned on the talented Armadito Ribero, one of the best pitchers of the team, you know how they’re going put things so they don’t even let you get to shore. I give him a wave and continue the march looking at the tenuous clouds thinking that it was the night before Valentine’s Day and I didn’t even have water to offer my sweatheart Alicia.
I returned to my cell after the visit with my soul afflicted. Ole, Jimmy and Ale had traveled almost 250 miles to see me, and we could only spent thirty minutes together. My family was angry because they weren’t allowed to bring me food to alleviate the hunger inside the prison and let me regain some weight. The police decided it would be a visit to only receive personal hygiene items.
Oleivys insisted that I try to eat everything or I could become seriously ill. They returned home with all the prepared food they’d brought. I tried to eat the prison food and couldn’t, a lump in my throat prevented me.
After arriving in my cell, I updated my three companions in “Poland.” I summarized for them the high points of the family meeting.
Of all the news we received, the most momentous for us was the international campaign for our release. We learned to share the information, analyze it and draw conclusions.
Two weeks had passed since the family visit and I still hadn’t written my first letter. The news I had to tell was irrelevant, at least so I thought. Eventually I understood my mistake, nothing is more important in captivity than communication with loved ones.
The police chose to deny us access to the press and this showed us their objective to isolate us to the maximum extent. This brought us together to work as a team as we proceeded to find ways to ruin their plans. One afternoon I received a note from Miguel Galban suggesting we ask for an interview with the director of the “Agüica” prison or with an official from State Security. The idea was to ask for the daily newspapers and a radio for the section. The years in dissent had taught us how to read between the lines and we should capitalize on that.
After repeated complaints to the prison director, the official of the Political Police for “Agüica” and all the guards who visited us, we managed to achieve our principal objective. One morning we noticed speakers installed throughout the section. Suddenly we feel the melody of a popular artist, which cheered our hearts. We had won the first victory in “Agüica” and the common prisoners congratulated us with euphoria.
For inmates, the news is of little importance, they live cut off from what happens outside the bars. The only logic to this phenomenon is that they’ve spent years in confinement without hearing even one continuous hour of music.
The police set up a schedule to listen to the radio; from 6:30 AM to 10:00 PM and they chose the national baseball series and the news. Many of the common prisoners didn’t want to hear the news reports and there were some incidents, but fortunately nothing serious.
With my mind more clear and on the advice of my brothers in the cause, I decided to write to my wife for the first time in captivity. For several weeks we’d had no communications because the only available method was letters and we suspected this might be a double-edged sword.
We lacked confidence in the police who violated the mail and in the worst cases confiscated it, which affected our families and the psychological factor played a fundamental role. I took a chance and started to write a few lines.
NOTE: Pablo Pacheco was one of the prisoners of Cuba’s Black Spring, and the initiator of the blog “Behind the Bars.” He now blogs from exile in Spain and his blog – Cuban Voices from Exile – is available in English translation here. To make sure readers find their way to his new blog, we will continue to post some of his articles here, particularly those relating his years in prison in Cuba.
Yamil Domínguez Ramos has just been freed, the imprisoned blogger of NOTORIOUS INJUSTICE, sentenced to ten years in prison, and who through many hunger strikes has demanded his rights, while his family has fought and fought and fought tirelessly to overturn the tragedy of a vicious and vindictive sentence handed down on whim. LONG LIVE FREEDOM! LONG LIVE LOVE!
I adore coffee, I stopped smoking years ago, but my early morning small coffee can’t fail me, if I don’t have it I pass the day lying down with a headache. A few years ago a package of four ounces of mixed coffee, acquired through the ration book cost ten cents. I can’t be exact, but it was not any more than three or four years ago that they announced that the coffee would stop being mixed with other ingredients and the same package of four ounces came to be worth five pesos. It was so-so coffee, Vietnamese they said, but still it was coffee. Now, in February we brought back mixed coffee again. However, there was no change in the price and for five pesos I am drinking an ambiguous brew, and it is what I offer to whoever visits me. At least it does not give me a headache.
Josefa, 67, retired, never imagined that sugar, always one of the cheapest products there was in Cuba, could reach such high prices. When she went to the market, she saw at the counter the notice of unrationed sale: 8 pesos for a pound of white — or refined — sugar ($0.40 U.S.) and 6 pesos crude — or brown ($0.30 U.S.).
“It is an insult of the government, selling sugar that’s more expensive than on the black market. My pension is 200 pesos (9 dollars). Six months ago the electric rate went up, and every time they sell a product freely, its price multiplies by ten with respect to the same product in the ration booklet”, she says with disgust.
In the underground market, sugar customarily costs between 3 and 5 pesos per pound ($0.15 and $0.25 U.S.). By the ration card, a person gets 5 pounds a month, three refined or white and two raw or brown.
Average Cubans like Josefa are hopping mad. And they’re right. Besides sugar, unrationed sales of rice went up from 3.50 to 5 pesos per pound ($0.15 to $0.20 U.S.).
The measures to make the economy healthy and bring about its takeoff affect the retired and those who live from their salaries the most, those who don’t receive dollars or euros from relatives abroad. Around 35% of Cubans don’t receive hard cash. It takes a miracle to get two daily meals to the table and make the end of the month. These are the people who breakfast on coffee without milk and eat only one meal a day.
The poorest sectors of a country which has socialized misery, they also owe the State considerable sums of money for electric domestic appliances, like refrigerators (iceboxes), televisions and rice cookers, all bestowed by Fidel Castro in exchange for ancient appliances — some from the 1940-50 decade — with high electric energy consumption.
For Ricardo, 78, retired and an illegal seller of peanuts and cigarettes sold at bus stops, the high cost of living and the gradual disappearance of the ration booklet concern him a great deal.
“The government says that social cases and the elderly without resources won’t be unattended. But the truth is that for some time, coffee, cigars, beans, rice, and now sugar have gone up too much and at my house, no social worker has shown up. To top it all off, I owe the bank 12,000 pesos (500 dollars) for the television and the icebox (refrigerator) that they traded out for me six years ago. Of course, I’m not going to pay that debt. I receive a pension of 213 pesos (8 dollars) and I don’t have either children or relatives in Miami”, notes Ricardo.
The high price of sugar in the free market is intolerable. It can’t be justified by the stale excuse of the US embargo. For centuries, Cuba has been one of the largest producers of sugar in the world. When we were a Spanish colony, between 4 and 5 million tons of sugar were produced. We were self-sufficient and the sweet plant was the principal area of export.
Then came Fidel Castro with the discourse of a new nation, justice and equality for all. In his development strategy he thought about diversifying agriculture — the country was a producer of one product only — and creating robust industry. Neither happened. For a decade now, sugar production hasn’t exceeded two and a half million tons. And the internal consumption of 700,000 tons has a notable deficit.
Nobody can understand that on an island with a tropical climate — with huge extensions of land — fruits, vegetables, legumes, and sugar — seals of national identity, should be scarce. The retired Jofesa doesn’t think about paying 8 pesos a pound, “because it’s robbery and an abuse by this government”.
By eliminating the ration card, as the regime wants, Josefa and Cubans like her who depend on their pension, only have the option of sugar in the free market. Or drinking bitter coffee.
The gross behavior of numerous gays provokes ill will in a sector of the Cuban populace. There isn’t a ferocious homophobia on the island, but the priority that they want to give the subject from the highest spheres of power disgusts many.
In a country where two meals a day is a true luxury, and from when someone gets up to until he goes to bed, he suffers a fistful of material shortages, slow and inefficient services whether its to deal with some paperwork or catch a bus, to present the subject of gays as a national debate is to avoid the real problems that affect the common citizen.
In a poll of 30 people, 21 accept a legal space and respect for homosexuals. In return, they insist that they comply with basic norms of social conduct.
The 9 others don’t accept that doors should be overtly open to gays. To them, there are more important problems than a marriage between queers or sex change surgery.
Marisol, 24, has nothing against ”poofs”, as she calls them too. “I see with my own eyes that they’re passing laws to support them. But I don’t believe that sex change operations should be more important than raising the quality of life or having free access to the Internet. The gay matter is a smoke screen to give the world the appearance of liberalism”.
Recently, on the program “Passage to the Unknown”, conducted by the journalist Reinaldo Taladrid, Cuban Television broadcast a documentary debate on the subject. It was titled “Taboo”, and was preceded by an interview with Mariela Castro Espín, daugher of the Cuban president and director of the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX).
The documentary gave its viewers a rash and unleashed a full interchange of opinions among average Cubans, who reproached the docile position of the journalist vis-a-vis his interviewee.
In international forums, Castro Espín is the promoter of legal and public initiatives, from instituting the 17th of May as Gay Pride Day, to asking for a repeal to the regulations that impede homosexuals from enlisting in military service, legalizing gay marriages, allowing gays to adopt children and to have sex change surgery.
Oscar, a 32 year-old professor, resident of Santa Clara, understands that gays have legal rights and should be tolerated by the populace, but considers it unacceptable that they spend millions of pesos on media campaigns in favor of homosexuals, when the country has broken its budget and decreed policies of saving.
He also sees as a contradiction that one would want to fill different clinics with sexual surgeries, when in actuality the majority of Cuban hospitals present a desolate sight, with bad food and dangerous conditions, which oblige relatives of admitted patients to bring buckets, blankets, and fans.
According to Oscar, that money should be spent in the repair of hospitals or expanding in vitro fertilization services. For him, procreation among infertile couples is more useful than having homosexuals change their sexes.
The 30 questioned agreed that the gay subject is a secondary concern. There are more urgent freedoms, such as how to elect one’s leaders in free elections; eliminating the requirement to have a travel permit to enter and leave the country, and the ability to buy and sell houses and cars.
Renato, retired, 72, asks for a harder hand against homosexuals. “They shouldn’t go to jail for being queer. But the government and the authorities should isolate them from public spaces they’ve taken over. Children and neighbors don’t have to look at the indecencies of those perverts”.
A full segment of the populace grew up listening to homophobic and repressive talk. Forty-five years have passed from the era in which gays were incarcerated or sent to forced labor camps for having a different sexual orientation — to today, where the homosexual tide occupies places and parks, they show themselves off cross-dressed and organize spicy parties in the open air.
It might seem like a long time. But in Cuba there exists a nucleus of ideological Talibans who won’t adapt to the acrobatic rhetoric of the Castro Brothers.
Yesterday, they say, they were talking of severity towards queers, emigrants, and private workers. Today, they permit the self-confidence of gays, applaud private businesses, and adulate the old ‘worms’ (exiles), a principal source of hard currency coming into the country.
The old revolutionaries, fighters in the African wars and defenders of “socialism or death” think that the Castros have changed shirts. They’re raising buzzards, and they’ll pluck your eyes out.
Foto: Laritza Diversent. Gays and transvestites have turned the Malecon into a nighttime meeting spot.
Until Sunday, February 20th, the San Carlos de La Cabaña fortress is the initial site of the International Book Fair, held annually in Havana. In the month following, it will travel to other Cuban provinces.
Since its inception in 1992, the public attendance has been spectacular. Every day, an average of 80,000 people visit the enclosure, an old military fortress, and one of the most severe prisons during the first years of the revolution.
Now everything is different. The old cellblocks have been transformed into meeting pavilions, where Latin American and European printers sell books like hot dogs.
When La Cabaña opened its gates on Friday the 10th, an impressive avalanche of people filled the Spanish and Mexican pavilions, among others.
José Ferrero, a representative of a Spanish printing house and attending the Fair for the third time, called attention to the great demand for books about anything, in particular, novels and children’s stories.
“In times of crisis, when book sales have fallen in Europe, it’s healthy to see a poor country, people with an incredible eagerness for reading”, said Ferrero, while observing an extensive queue which was waiting its turn to visit the Spanish stand.
Other publishers couldn’t say the same. The booksellers of Cuban political themes were chatting in a relaxed manner in the cool Havana afternoon breezes. The visitors didn’t seem interested in the volumes recompiled with the thoughts of Fidel Castro or his work about the guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra.
The pavilions of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Iran were also desolate and their representatives, with appropriate faces, were looking at the public hustle and bustle that popped in — and, on seeing the titles, fled to sites with more attractive offerings.
The books exhibited by the countries of the Boliviarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), to whom this fair was dedicated, are political bricks with the fragrance of a pamphlet and an unpresentable design. Despite being sold in Cuban pesos, their sales were extremely low.
People in Cuba are weary of books with political content. 52 years of a discourse with a marked ideological tint have forced Cubans to take refuge in more refreshing subjects.
And that’s what happened at the last Fair. Children were the big winners. Together with their parents, they left the compound loaded with issues in vivid colors and appealing illustrations.
The sales of these books are in cash. Expensive for a country where the average salary is 10 dollars a month. Even so, they sold in bulk. Robert, 34, an engineer, was accompanied by his wife and child. “We spent 28 dollars, but it was worth it. The rest of the year, you can’t get such beautiful and high quality children’s books in Havana”.
In Cuba, high book sales are customary. They aren’t expensive. But their quality, variety, and content don’t fulfill the expectations of demanding readers. The government censors authors whom they consider “counterrevolutionary”, such as the laureates Mario Vargas Llosa and Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
Occasionally, some prohibited authors and liberal texts that don’t line up with the ideology of the regime manage to make fun of censorship. People hunt for these ‘mistakes’.
On the back patio of the fortress, where in days gone by Castro’s enemies were shot, children, adolescents and youths read recently bought books, seated on the soft lawn or on the walls alongside ancient cannons.
The biggest prize of the Fair is the extraordinary panorama of the city on the other side of the bay.
I feel sorry for people who come up to me to offer an opinion about my country after they’ve been here 72 hours. Especially when they sum up the reality in three sentences and a “harmonic” vision of the island, acquired after a national tour that includes, of course, Varadero, Trinidad and Viñales. I count to three, then twenty, then fifty. I don’t know Trinidad, I detest Viñales — especially because a mile from it there’s city without electricity and drinkable water — and Varadero, obviously, is not Cuba.
What can one reply to an observation that it’s preferable to maintain the government as it is and not start a transition in the midst of a crisis in capitalism? How can you explain to a person that the Communist crisis never ends? How can you establish that if there’s one thing worse than a monopoly it’s a state monopoly? How can I summarize my 27 years on this island in a two-hour conversation? How can one talk about corruption if there’s no proof? How to recount the purge within the Communist Party since Raul Castro took power if we don’t know what’s happening other than that the heads are rolling? How do you explain to someone — without offending them — that after the Special Period, polyneuritis and vitamin A deficiency, the world’s global economic crisis seems like a first world joke?
I don’t know if it’s worth even trying. I wrack my brain and I’m always left with the feeling of not having done very well, of not having said everything I feel, of not being able to respond and feel good about myself later. I was puzzled by the question, “And you, what are you intending to do with your blog?” I don’t know what I intend. I don’t know where I’m headed. What are the concrete objectives of freedom save to be the master of one’s own destiny, free? Why is it so hard to imagine that a person decided, one day, to be free?
“Politics is the business of the dead”, said a Cuban mother in The Initials of the Earth, the masterpiece by Jesús Díaz that in its time aspired to be branded as the novel of the Revolution.
It seems a wise statement. Domestic politics of someone who had seen from his bedroom the irrepressible carnival of cadavers that our pathetic poets at the time called Republic. The fictionalized scene penetrates an early 60’s Havana night. With the Revolution there would be no reason to be different. Violence is the only plausible vox populi between neighbors. The wise one lives off the fool. The cemetery as the source of secular law. The Cuban mother as a fierce animal that defends her brood from the distressing enthusiasm of the blind masses. Who would know how to read like this today…!
A national stage empty of spontaneity becomes ipso facto an outdoor puppet show. All institution is imaginary. One must be wary of the other precisely for being puppets. Secrecy as the way of all things. The smallest public act of free will compromises nothing less than the security of the State itself and deserves the maximum penalty, and to make the horror even worse, with some semblance of legality. Under these conditions the street is only for the mob. They seem morphologically–although it would be immoral to ask pears of an avocado–as if they harangue themselves suicidally inside or shamelessly outside of our little post-Siboney farm.
The consequences of a posthumous peace prolonged so long is surely harmful to our notion of civil society and other fanciful concepts, but perhaps also there are some side benefits. We Cubans refuse to kill ourselves like fish in barrel before cameras and microphones who get bored on the island with their high euro-salaries. We Cubans have lost the innocence of clucking slogans believably (polyphonic voices under their sleeves are beating the choir). We Cubans have lost our politicization and in the struggle of everyday life we don’t miss it at all.
Already in the spontaneously terminal phase of a long and torturous totalitarian state, we’re in no hurry to pay the price to turn it into dust with the tap of a grim steering wheel, bloody revolution. There is a constitutional distrust of any attempt to change control. It’s not fear, it’s memory. And that’s why we delegate the misfortune to our crude gurus of our government. That they grind themselves up there on top with their thousand and one ministerial mutations. That they err and rectify and enjoy and wear out in their own triumphant demagoguery. That they feel like materialist Christs created from the podium of their octogenarian biology. In short, the time of our private novel is eternal (he who hopes for much, expects little). Luckily, we Cubans are like that Cuban mother that no one will read again in a forgotten little scene in The Initials of the Earth.
Business. Death. Since our childhood historically we have matured as a people in spite of everything. The resistance in Cuba passes these days by clinging with futile faith to life. Renew this fleeting sickness called hope. The best insubordination would be then to survive the Consejo de Estado intact. No need to go into the streets, without calls more or less charismatic or criminal, that plebiscite of the future Revolution has already lost unanimity.
Demonstrations in Egypt. Photo from the Internet
Sometimes it is hard to calculate how far the media can achieve fictional expectations. The process for popular uprisings that has been taking place in some North African countries against their dictatorial governments, particularly the prolonged protests that continue to occur in Egypt, have inevitably brought to the foreground the case of Cuba, which sadly holds the record of having the longest dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere. Thus, the hopes of an undetermined number of Cubans abroad have been stirred into believing that the moment has come (it’s now or never!) to convene a peaceful people’s uprising within the Island.
The strongest proposal seems to come from two Cubans residing in Europe, who have launched a call for the uprising, which would presumably start between February 19th and 26th, advertised by them through social networking sites (Facebook or Twitter). The commotion the proposal has caused in the media interested in the Cuban situation, primarily in Florida, but also in some areas in Europe, forces us to reflect on the issue. The time is right to establish certain considerations that, without a doubt, will not be shared by the most avid “pro-uprising” groups.
Let’s discreetly review how questionable it is to call for civil demonstrations in Cuba from abroad, given that the masterminds (or “cyber-messiahs,” as befits the information age) have not given us their confirmation that they will land in Cuba to place themselves at the head of the imaginary uprising; ergo, we would contribute the bulk of the massacred bodywork here. Readers who have placed their faith in this new “now’s the time!” that has arrived from afar, forgive me, but if the matter were not this serious, it would even be laughable. Just look a few small details, like the fact that there is virtually no Internet access in Cuba or that not too many Cubans have access to social networks. This makes it almost impossible for the democratic liberation to start via the virtual channels, through the use of computers — or perhaps simply through cell phones — by today’s experienced cyber-leaders of ours.
Let’s also make obvious a trivial circumstance (I am referring to our orphan internet), let’s politely suppose that uprising orders came, even if — in a fit of mambí* nostalgia — it was rolled into a cigar, and let’s analyze its impact objectively, not from the standpoint of our wishes and hopes, but from the Cuban context. It is true that practically all conditions exist in Cuba to produce a social explosion: persistence of a dictatorship in power for over 50 years, permanent economic crisis as a result of the failure of the imposed system, high majority of the population surviving in that precarious balance between poverty and misery, loss of faith in government, uncertainty about a potentially devastating future, and all the rest which almost every one of us knows. Paradoxically, in our country, the absence of demonstrations is not due to the conditions that exist, but to those that DO NOT EXIST and are critical:
– We do not have independent civil society organizations capable of coordinating an uprising of this kind in Cuba.
– The Cuban people, ignorant even of their squalid rights and generally apathetic, are helpless against the repressive machinery of a system trained in resistance to retain power, possessor of an efficient repressive apparatus, of the mass media experienced in misrepresentation. Thus, there isn’t an effective vehicle for weaving, in the short term, a citizen network able to paralyze the country and force the government not even to abdicate, but to just negotiate in search of a pact. This is so true that there are still almost a dozen political prisoners remaining in Cuba who should have been released since this past November under the government’s commitment.
– Contrary to what happens in Egypt, to name the most conspicuous example, in Cuba there is no known opposition program able to present effective resistance against the government (this resistance transformed into positive action). In the case of an uprising, opposition parties in our country cannot offer the people a modicum of social order guarantees nor agreement proposals that address the broader interests to push for change towards democracy.
– The Cuban people, the vast majority of whom does not know the opposition parties, their members, or their platforms (in those cases when they have them), nor has the work of independent journalists and bloggers been sufficiently disseminated through the Island to influence the opinion of “the masses.” No wonder the government keeps a tight monopoly on the media.
– There isn’t even a set of popular claims, properly structured or at least rooted in the social spectrum, capable of bringing together a critical mass of different social sectors willing to face the consequences of a supposedly peaceful rebellion.
Looking at other considerations, it is more likely that, in our case, the ranks of the “rebels” will be nourished by some of the opponents and dissidents in general, who represent the limited sector truly determined to confront the authorities, which would give government a golden opportunity to lock them up on a charge of “attempting to subvert” or some other similar charge, and thus weaken the resistance cells inside the country. It would be a devastating blow to the nascent independent civil society in a time when disgruntled sectors of the population are increasing, when spontaneous popular consensus on the need for change is beginning to emerge, and the breeding ground needed to guide these feelings of frustration and dissatisfaction towards democratic gains for the Cubans begins to form.
We could cite many other circumstances that threaten the success of this controversial “peaceful” uprising, such as the long accumulated resentment in society, the result of policy differentiation, mutual surveillance, betrayal, and mistrust among Cubans, which this regime has systematically planted for over a half a century. A popular revolt in Cuba, without known civic forces or a mass media that would control by calling to order (as the Polish, and even the Rumanian process fortunately had) surely would lead to violence, settling of scores, looting and destruction similar to what took place during the Haitian Revolution 200 years ago, with the subsequent final destruction and possibly the end of a Nation. Because it would end in that: a rebellion of runaway, blinded slaves without direction; the condition to which the dictatorship has reduced us by virtue of the proverbial indifference of generations of Cubans. There currently isn’t any reason to feel superior to Haitians of that era; and we don’t have the solid national civic tradition of the Polish or the self-esteem and awareness of the Egyptians, able to protect, in the midst of protests and violence stemming from clashes between rival groups, the treasures of their rich historical and cultural heritage.
This does not mean that social upheaval is not possible in Cuba. Unfortunately, reality indicates that the country is heading towards a dangerous point of impact. It is no coincidence that some pockets of rebellion in specific regions have already been brewing. These are the first practical signs of general nonconformity that will worsen as the government’s layoff plan, the elimination of “subsidies” and other problems that can already be perceived over the medium-short term scenario. It is no accident that the government is intensely preparing anti-riot forces equipped with new weapons and newly acquired techniques.
In spite of all this, I am one of those who insist on seeking peaceful and negotiated solutions to conflicts. I believe we must keep the pressure on the system flaws, build bridges with sectors that favor organized changes, take advantage of the weaknesses of the system and seek to expand civic spaces as much as possible, because, without people, no democratic change in Cuba will be possible or permanent. In this, Cubans living abroad in democracy and those of us who have found freedom inside ourselves will play an important role. Someone once said, brilliantly, that there are only losers in war. I would add that there are only winners in dialogues and negotiations.
Translator’s note: Mambí is probably derived from an indigenous word meaning the rebellion against the chiefs living in hiding in the forests. Spanish soldiers, noticing similar tactics of the revolutionaries in the use of machetes, started to refer to them as “men of Mambí”, later shortened to mambís. (www.wikipedia.com, Spanish edition)
Health care is one of the two flags of socialism most flown on my planet over all these years. The other is education. Both are faded and frayed. The first thing lost was the color, then the credibility.
There are many stories told by ordinary citizens on the subject of health. Each one more horrifying than the last. Take care! It’s not about the doctors. They also suffer. I’m referring to the services, the facilities, the medicine.
A few days ago my niece was admitted to the old Sacred Heart clinic, today called Gonzalez Coro hospital. They had to give her a cesarean section after working a full day to induce labor. That same night I went to visit her. The only bus route that lets me off nearby never comes, and when it does pass it doesn’t stop, so I decided to walk. Unfortunately at this hour the cemetery, which is the shortcut to Vedado, had closed its doors. I had to go through La Timba neighborhood, but with the evening still light it wasn’t too dangerous. The return would be by 23rd St.
On arriving at the hospital tired from the walk I saw that only one elevator was working and it had a lot of people waiting so I took a deep breath and climbed the stairs to the 5th floor. It was partially illuminated. There was only one light bulb every two floors.
Looking for my niece’s quarters, I stuck my head in every room until I found hers, number 15, handwritten on paper stuck with glue and almost coming off, marked the door. Hugging my niece, still in pain, I saw Laurita at her side in a cradle, pretty, healthy, pink. I reached out my hand to turn on the light and I realized that the electric switch was balanced in a hole almost without plaster. Then the image of that beautiful clinic of the 50’s came to my mind. Only the green granite floor was left intact. It had born the brunt of abuse although now it no longer shone.
My niece, very content, when saying goodbye told me in a conspiratorial tone: Aunt, see how far we’ve come, now when babies are born they no longer need to be spanked to stimulate a holler, they only say to them, “You were born in Cuba, and just like that they start to cry.”
There is no way the Cuban government is noted for civility and good manners in sharing the country, the land, the public space with its peers, though they be adversaries in the social or political arena.
For several years, over her, as the level of civil disobedience grows, the repressive forces, propping up the unsalvageable, prohibit any public act, any gesture of public participation and the popular imagination has fabricated the idea that the “the streets belong to the revolutionaries,” or “this street belongs to Fidel,” as some of the partisans and those sent to repudiate dissidents scream.
To place flowers on Marti’s monument, a wreath on the statue of Martin Luther King, Gandhi or Lincoln, becomes a suicidal act ending in beatings, taunts and arrests that last from hours to days. The recent twenty arrests in the east of Cuba when the distinct independent civil society groups tried to commemorate the birth of Jose Marti last January are the most recent proof. The public space has been usurped in the name of national security, on the pretext of maintaining public order, leading to beatings and arbitrary detentions.
Public space and civic action are hostages of a law is a dead letter, but needs more voices claimants. The scenario is there.
By Silvio Benitez
Stand by for more news!
I feel sorry for people who come up to me to offer an opinion about my country after they’ve been here 72 hours. Especially when they sum up the reality in three sentences and a “harmonic” vision of the island, acquired after a national tour that includes, of course, Varadero, Trinidad and Viñales. I count to three, then twenty, then fifty. I don’t know Trinidad, I detest Viñales — especially because a mile from it there’s city without electricity and drinkable water — and Varadero, obviously, is not Cuba.
