Translating Cuba

In the subject Political Culture, my tenth grade son has been assigned to analyze the work of Karl Marx from the point of view of Lenin. The specific theme that Teo must develop with his team is referenced in an article Vladimir Illich titled Marxism and Revisionism, published more than a century ago.

The first problem to be overcome was to find the book, because in the school library the three volumes of the Selected Works of the Russian author had a long line of readers undertaking similar assignments. As I’ve lived in this 144-apartment building for 25 years, I more or less know who has books at home and, among them, who is likely to possess this kind of political literature.

It seemed that the eleven neighbors whose doors we knocked on had all agreed: “Me, I already go rid of that, nor do I agree with what’s in those books. Lenin, who agrees with him?” was more or less the common response. Finally I had to leave the neighborhood and cross the city to find a copy at the home of my friend, the blogger Dimas Castellanos.

With complete good faith I helped my son understand Lenin’s jargon, full of labels and epithets. We searched the encyclopedia for the names of almost all the thinkers mentioned and even dusted off Rodental’s old philosophical dictionary to “clarify” the concepts. At the end, a terrible question overshadowed the effort: How is it — in the light of the explosive concept — that the new elements of the revolutionary pantheon of our times are so far removed from the old doctrine? How would Lenin classify the revisionist Hugo Chavez with his unknown “Socialism of the 21st Century”? What would he say about the indigenous coca farmer Evo Morales, or about Correa’s Citizen’s Revolution? Even more, to what basement would he relegate the economic reforms of China or Vietnam?

Two possibilities: Either the revisionists won the battle, or the label did not have the eternal durability of philosophical category awarded to it by its creator. It will have to be dialectical, or better yet ambiguous, so that no one feels offended. As it’s never known with what one gains or loses, when I go to return to my friend Dimas Castellanos the book he lent me, I will put a cover over it, as we both are already too ideologically suspect to want to add more fuel to the fire.

14 February 2011

There are things that have become clear to me at the end of the protests in Egypt. With genuine emotion I stated: its absolutely spontaneous character, the use of new technologies such as Twitter was determining, and the role of the military. This will not happen in Cuba. Not now. It does not seem that I could articulate a mobilization, despite the similarities between the Cuban and Egyptian situations. One initiative that I saw circulating around Facebook condemned the failure, because the power to call a strike through social networks is very limited, and because it could be about a provocation. If, as they say, each people has the government it deserves, then this is the government that gets to us through the ration book. But we do not forget that our veteran ration book is on its way to disappearing.

February 14 2011

14 February 2011

When in October 1998, Luis Cino, 53, came to the small house belonging to the reporter Mercedes Moreno, an independent journalist who for years worked on Cuban television, he thought twice before knocking on her door.

Small, skinny and shy, Cino thought to try his luck as a journalist without a mandate at the agency that Moreno directed. After chatting with her less than ten minutes, Mercedes studied him in silence and said, “You look like a junkie or a freak, but write something, then we’ll see.”

Thirteen years later, he doesn’t remember the subject of his first article. He says this sitting in a room in the neighborhood of Lawton, the seat of Primavera de Cuba (Spring in Cuba), a site that is updated weekly and has a quarterly newsletter, produced entirely from the island, where Cino is the editor and star reporter.

“I was a piece of shit with affected pretensions. I had taken two or three courses in literary workshops, and I read about 50 books a month. I reread the books of Vargas Llosa and García Márquez so much, the pages shredded in my hands. All I know is that I have an immense debt to Mercedes Moreno for giving me the opportunity to try my hand at journalism. It’s not easy to accept a guy who stammers and has no backing, who wants to be a correspondent in an illegal agency,” says Cino smiling.

Mercedes knew how to recognize talent. After crossing out with red ink half the sheet and making some quick observations, she knew that the “guy who looks like a junkie” was a potential journalist.

And she was right. His style became more refined, and, by 2000, he was one of the best Cuban independent journalists. Raúl Rivero, a giant of poetry and prose, and a talent scout, after reading a text by Cino, knew he was facing a writer of caliber.

Rivero recruited him for the team, which together with Ricardo González Alfonso in 2002, published the first issue of a magazine produced entirely on the island by independent reporters.

His impeccable command of language and lively style, agile and photographic, gives the illusion of watching a newscast on TV. It’s so graphic, that if you put your imagination to work you can see what he’s relating.

Luis Cino doesn’t believe that he’s a classy reporter. “At best I’m a man who writes without spelling errors and who talks about the real, daily life of my country,” he says, sitting in front of a computer, where he edits a half-dozen notes.

But in this February of 2011, without doubt, Luis Cino is the best freelance journalist who currently exists in Cuba. Dissidents, alternative journalists and bloggers, who rarely agree on anything, agree that not only is he the best writer, he’s also a great person.

His small attempt to be in the limelight and his stubborn vocation of working anonymously on a draft suggest that his talent is understated. He doesn’t think so. “In journalism, what matters is the news. Whoever writes the draft is a driving force. If you get the reader to fully read your story, you’ve accomplished something. If it moves and creates a state of mind, then you’ve succeeded. But a reporter is not a Hollywood star,” he says, while smoking the third cigarette of the afternoon.

He’s allergic to fame. He creates blindly at work every day. He says that the worst enemy of a reporter is flirting with politicians. “Politicians always try to use you. If you want to do the most objective journalism possible, you have to keep a distance from them.”

In these thirteen years, Luis Cino has suffered arrests and harassment by State Security. When the March 18, 2003 raids began on the 75 dissidents and independent journalists, Luis was working at the home of Ricardo González, one of the 27 reporters sent to jail, and who, thanks to the efforts of former Foreign Minister Moratinos, now lives in Spain.

“It was around 4:00 in the afternoon when the officers arrived in droves from State Security. They did search that lasted eight hours. They detained me for one and a half days in a stinking cell with no ventilation in the 6th police unit of the municipality of Playa. I was lucky, I was not indicted,” he recalls.

Although fear gripped him, as it did everyone, in the following days he continued to report on the arrests and the situation in Cuba. Despite much good writing, Luis Cino has been forced to take on a number of parallel jobs to earn money to support his three children.

He has been a postman, demolished old buildings, been a brick-layer assistant and a watchman at a dairy, where at dawn, by candlelight, he wrote his formidable chronicles and stories.

He usually is left with a few pesos in his wallet, after a breakfast of black coffee, at 6 in the morning. He takes a crowded bus that brings him to the house where the Primavera de Cuba office is located.

He has never thought of leaving his homeland. His dream is simple. He will continue writing chronicles from Havana, and in that future that is upon us, when journalism in Cuba is a profession without ideologies, he will continue editing a cultural column in a city publication. He asks no more.

Translated by Regina Anavy

February 2 2011

National Identity is the unity of the different. It forms, over the years, through a process of assimilation and rejection, in which what is assimilated, in its original form or transformed, is deposited, given body. It is a continuous process, that passes from generation to generation, and that makes identity a living thing, always being enriched. Every country has its own, which makes it different from the rest.

To be different from the rest is not to be unique, but to constitute an element that taken as a whole expressed the character of a geographic region. So we can talk about a western identity or an oriental identity, one that is European and another American, of a Latin identity of Slavic, and so on. It is always produced in a process of uniting, where the different sheets fit together like a puzzle, giving a whole vision, without which it would be incomprehensible.

When, in supposed defense of national identity, attempts are made to isolate the country from the world, and to close the paths that continuously nourish the country with every kind, what results is social paralysis and the establishment, first, of immobility, and later of involution, losing the previous gains without access to the new.

To act in this way constitutes, more than a mistake, an economic, political and social suicide. It’s to condemn the nation to misery and tie its hands and feet, to prevent reacting to and resolving an absurd situation, that can only lead to its demise as such.

National identity is defended by allowing the active participation of all citizens, without exception, in the creation and realization of a national project, rooting out forever intolerance of any kind and adding instead of subtracting.

February 10 2011

Cuba, since 1878, was divided into six provinces, with their governors and provincial governments. In these provinces, over the years, municipalities with mayors and municipal administrations were constituted. This structure was kept running during all the years of the Republic, and part of the socialist stage, but with adjustments to provincial and municipal boundaries, and changes in their names.

Starting in 1976 the provinces were broken up to create fourteen from the six, plus a special municipality named Isla de la Juventud (in practice another province). As expected, this also increased the number of governors (now called presidents of the People’s Power) and their administrations. Moreover, they added the first secretary of the party and its political apparatus. This was repeated in every municipality.

It was argued then that this was done from a need to improve the administration and make the economy more efficient and productive. However, the political and administrative bureaucracy grew enormously, complicating rather than facilitating the smooth functioning of the provinces and the municipality and, as a consequence, the country. Where before there was a governor with his administrative apparatus, now there are three or four, plus more corresponding to the Party. What’s interesting is that the country’s territory hasn’t grown, it’s continued to be the same but now it’s chopped up into hamburger meat. Nor have they resolved the administrative and economic problems, rather they have worsened.

Changes in policy, presented today, are expected to reduce bureaucracy, along with the previously stated goal. Let’s call attention, then, to the new division called the Havana province, already divided in two earlier (La Habana and Ciudad de La Habana), and now divided again with two more parts: Artemis and Mayabeque. The original province has now become four provinces. In other words, the provinces, with their bureaucracies, increased to fifteen, plus the special municipality named.

It would seem the real objective of so much chopping into pieces has been not to make the economy and the administration more efficient, but to increase control of every kind over the citizens, multiplying the organs and institutions dedicated to that, and surrounding them with more and more of the same at their homes and jobs. These tightening geographies, every more numerous, seem to have given good results, and so they carry on with the scheme.

February 1 2011

For many years, it has been government practice to take most of the measures that affect the population without entrust themselves to God or the devil. Just show up one day with a brief press release or, if it relates to commodity price increases, we find out the store when go to we pay. It is assumed that the prices are fair and should be obeyed without protest.

Now, with those it’s hope will ease the current crisis, their application passes also for the most part in an endless maze of studies and discussions that ties them up for months. It turns out that everyone has to study, discuss and approve them before they become laws and decrees, and start their implementation and realization in everyday reality. And it seems that there is plenty of time.

The other day, without going any further, I needed to change five convertible pesos into moneda nacional — Cuban pesos — and what was my surprise to a handwritten placard at the Currency Exchange that read verbatim: “Closed. We are studying the Guidelines.” I remembered the year 1970, when factories and businesses put up little signs that read: “Closed. We went to the sugar cane harvest.”* It seems that things are repeated after forty years. Hopefully it is only the little signs that are being repeated, and not the failures.

Returning to the theme: It would be healthy to accelerate, if possible, the implementation of measures that may alleviate, albeit minimally, the chaos that the massive layoffs are going to create, which has already begun. The layoffs are starting this month, and the measures will have to wait until April (when the Sixth Party Congress is expected to adopt them) and beyond. We know from experience that after the Congress, the implementation of the agreements will take time.

One way to ease tensions, no doubt, which has already been created and will increase this year, would be to speed up the pace of implementation of the measures most directly related to citizens, enabling them, of course, to develop their initiatives and potential. They can leave for later, or write at the same time, the relevant legislation to assure them. The latter need not be an obstacle to the exercise of the former.

*Translator’s Note: All of Cuba devoted itself to Fidel’s plan for the biggest sugar cane harvest ever, which failed.

January 23, 2011

My brother, the writer Felix Sánchez has decided to go public with his resignation from UNEAC (Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba), which he submitted in early November last year. Everything indicates that it became effective, although no one will contact him. In an email circulated recently, he said: “To whom it may concern: In the final days of 2010 I gave the president of the Ciego de Avila UNEAC the document attached. Given what has happened between the November 4 and today, I decided to make this known to other people, especially members of UNEAC, cultural institutions and colleagues with whom I share concerns and dreams. Greetings, Felix Sanchez.”

Ciego de Avila, 4 November 2010

To: President of the Provincial UNEAC Committee, Ciego de Avila

Esteemed comrade:

The reason I am presenting this is to ask that the Provincial Committee, by my own request, remove me from the membership of UNEAC as quickly as possible.

This has not been a rash decision, nor part of a grievance or a particular event. It is the result of a long meditation on the role of UNEAC in our society, its function, its consistency with what I consider should be the role of an organization of artists in vanguard of creating and thinking, its commitment at any cost to the truth, and with the ancestral values of our identity, cultivated by an intelligentsia that made us proud with its attitude of fighting everything that did not have the people at the center of its concerns, that did not recognize that the people are the highest authority and the measure of legitimacy of any dream, plan and result.

In recent years I have waited to see UNEAC assume this civic, cultural and political responsibility. But I exhausted my willingness to wait, and I believe it is dishonest to continue to belong, for advantages of any kind, to an organization which which I now disagree in more than one essential way.

Please undertake the steps involved in this process and keep me informed of their progress.

For a Cuba that is authentically socialist!
With the highest consideration,

Félix Rodríguez Sánchez

Ciego de Avila, November 4, 2010

February 2 2011

The American citizen Chris Walter Johnson, a prisoner in Combinado del Este since August 2009, went from uncertainty and depression to euphoria when on Wednesday, 2 February, two guards helped him get into his wheelchair in the ambulance which drove him to the Havana airport, from which he departed to Los Angeles, California, on the day on which the sentence of 18 years imprisonment was supposed to have been made final by a Provincial Tribunal of the capital.

During his oral presentation, which occurred on 27 December 2010, the defense lawyer presented the summary of the clinical history of Chris Johnson, in which he demonstrated that his state of health isn’t compatible with the regime of penitentiary life. On passing sentence in the middle of January, the judges expressly rejected the document, tacitly accepted two weeks later.

The case had a happy ending, but it could have been disastrous for this 58-year-old sailor, who in a decade traveled 50 times to the island, where he had lovers and a daughter before they detected a kilogram of marijuana in a jelly container, for which he was accused of drug trafficking and attempted bribery. He was locked up in the La Condesa prison for foreigners, from which he had been transferred to the prison’s hospital located in Combinado del Este, but for him the bars and the stress accelerated the ailments of an old maritime accident.

Chris Walter Johnson survived more than a year in a wheelchair in Cuba’s largest prison. He needed an operation on a tumor in his spinal cord which put his life in danger. He also suffers from vertebral compression which obstructs oxygen access to his brain. The standing position made him lose consciousness.

Before Chris’s surprise release from prison, the defense lawyer commented to this reporter that he was happy because “it is an extensive but just decision, although we still don’t know if it was because of furlough, by expulsion from national territory dictated by the Minister of Justice, or a special exit permit from the Minister of the Interior, in accordance with to Special Instruction number 9 from the Government Council of the Supreme Tribunal.”

According to the jurist, “In normal conditions, there could have been an extradition, but no such bilateral treaty exists between Cuba and the United States.”

Johnson’s case illustrates other processes discussed by neither the Cuban nor foreign press. Dozens of tourists are paying behind bars for the habits, customs, and activities that conflict with our rigid, slow, and severe penal system.

February 12 2011

In the late 1960s I was on the point of changing my career. Extremely excited by what I’d read in the magazine Critical Thinking, I decided to enroll in the Department of Philosophy. But it was a closed shop and I lacked the qualifications. At that time, Fernando Martínez Heredia was the director of that publication, which was finally closed by Raul Castro in 1971.

Thanks to Fernando I learned there was another way on interpreting Marxism, especially from reading Louis Althusser, that brilliant intellectual who “spoke the language of Marx.” On more than one occasion I wondered what his response to Heredia would be on this or that issue, attributing to him, although without any proof for it, a clear anti-dogmatic tendency and some level of personal courage.

This year I’ve become reacquainted with that court philosopher because he is one of the personalities to whom the XX Havana Book Fair is dedicated. I have him on my TV screen giving a speech at the opening session. At one point he says we are, “A people formed during a heroic act, a people who were living with next to nothing, neither employment, nor public health, nor schools, caught between disbelief and apathy…” and I have to ask myself if I was wrong about Fernando, or if perhaps they gave him a lobotomy.

How can a respected intellectual say that there had been a time in Cuban history when there was no work, no public health, no schools? Had he studied abroad? Or did he only learn to read after the Revolution? A statement like that is something not even Randy Alonso could accept, though as director of the Roundtable program he can be expected to come up with all kinds of nonsense. In fact I’ve even lost my desire to visit the Fair.

February 13 2011