Translating Cuba

Let it be known that I am one of those who are pleased with the changes in Cuba. I even think that some minor things are already starting to change. That said, what I’m not convinced about is the pace, because, while it isn’t fitting to rush to immediate solutions in a fragile socioeconomic situation like ours, and in the absence of a coordinated and consolidated civil society, neither is it healthy to maintain this slow pace as if we were to live as long as a freshwater tortoise. The reticence of government actions that have taken place reveal the government’s fear that things might get out of their control; the implementation of measures (reforms, adjustments or whatever they are called) indicates the inescapable need to find a way out of stagnation and out of the critical state of the Cuban economy.

It is more likely that the government intends to show some accomplishments in Congress next April and, consequently, one would expect some progressive momentum in the small-time economy, among others. It is remarkable how many Cubans are already breaking the ice and have embarked on the adventure of applying for licenses. Those engaged in the sale of food (cafés and restaurants popularly called “paladares”, the latter with a maximum capacity of 20 seats) stand out, as do some lessees who have legalized their rooms for rent, primarily for hosting CUC-paying foreigners. It is clear that people need to survive, and not a few believe that being first at this initiative will ensure a good position against the competition they expect will come sooner, rather than later.

The picture is interesting, more so because — as seen in this first phase — there is an obvious service-market primacy of goods production, and because in such a depressed economy investment recovery becomes slower and more difficult, while “allowances” are simultaneously being eliminated, and some products are unrestricted and become more expensive, which affects the entire population as a whole, and diminishes the purchasing power of those who use these services… at least in theory. We must not forget the number of layoffs that will occur in the coming months either, a sure source of social tension. We will have to monitor this process of experimentation, taking into account that — as my colleague Dimas Castellanos has posed in his controversial blog — the pace and depth of changes, in the absence of other enforcing agents, are determined by the very government that dragged us to our demise. And, so far, we are moving at the rhythm of a bolero.

Taking just some general examples, we see, in panoramic view, that:

– At least two years elapsed before the General realized that it was feasible and even necessary to expand the size of lands given in usufruct to the farmers who make them produce.

– At least 34 years elapsed since the establishment of the latest political-administrative division and the organization of the Popular Power to discover the monstrous bureaucracy that flows from the system, and to propose — also experimentally — the division of a province in two, which began with a new administrative style in 2011 (makes more sense, they say) and a minimum outline in the structure of their governments.

– At least 50 years elapsed since a novelty was revealed: the ration card, far from being an achievement, is an anachronistic and obsolete ballast that produces an incalculable burden on the State… and must be eliminated.

– Over 50 years elapsed before the government understood that the Cuban model doesn’t even work for us, and started to look to transform it, though, to avoid such a public confession, it labeled it as “a renewal of the model”. Now they are inventing a primitive capitalism of castes, with no middle class.

Given that each small local experiment that Raúl Castro is implementing involves at least two years of waiting for its results before going on to the next small step that will lead nobody knows exactly where, we must have more patience than a Buddhist monk to finally get to enjoy the proclaimed benefits. Unless,somehow magically, Cubans start winning civic spaces that will transform slaves into citizens (as a reader friend likes to say) and we manage to impose our own rhythm and complexity on the changes we want.

January 14 2011

The souvenir and craft market near the port vibrates, full of life on this day. It’s Sunday and the tourists circulate among the wood carvings, leather briefcases and beautiful mahogany humidors for storing cigars. On one side of what was once San Jose wharf, are now displayed paintings, landscapes in acrylic, portraits of voluptuous mulatas, and drawings of towering palm trees against a blue sky. There is a lot of cheesy art here for quick sale to the tourists who will take a piece of the Island with them to hang on the walls of their distant homes. If you look closely, if you get past your initial infatuation with coconuts painted with gaudy oils, there are true works of art here.

But what calls your attention are the symbols of national identity repeating themselves from stall to stall: conga drums, the rounded dome of the Capitol, rickety old Chevrolets, bottles of rum, men — and it’s only men — sitting around tables playing dominoes, the rounded hips of Creole women, enormous Cohibas, and coffee that steams in the center of the composition. This last element, the brew that is an inseparable component of being Cuban, dark and bitter — like our roots — has been with us for centuries.

To have a sip of coffee in the morning is the national equivalent of breakfast. We can lack everything, bread, butter and even the ever unobtainable milk, but to not have this hot, stimulating crop to wake up to is the preamble to a bad day, the reason for leaving the house bad-tempered and fit to burst. My grandparents, my parents, all the adults I saw as a child, drank cup after cup of that dark liquid, while talking about anything and everything. Whenever anyone came to the house, the coffee was put on the stove because the ritual of offering someone a cup was as important as giving them a hug or inviting them in.

With the eighties, came the struggle to stretch the meager offering from the ration market while not leaving visitors without the expected brew. In reality, to comply with the formalities and also have enough to be able to have a cup on waking, we had to add something to the black powder to make it go further. The most common ingredient was peas.

I can no longer count the number of hours of my childhood spent grinding the blackened peas roasted by my grandmother. We then mixed them with the real thing — those green or red berries picked on the coffee plantations. The result was an unusual infusion far from the original flavor, but even so we took a leisurely sip and enjoyed it. This practice was not unique to my family, almost all Cubans were experts in extending the 12 ounces a month which was the coffee ration.

People made surprising discoveries — using roasted wheat berries, using the residue from one brew to make the next, and even adding some crushed toasted herbs that barely changed the flavor. All that and more so as not to give up the espresso or cortadito — espresso with milk — to savor that magic moment when with family and friends we would sit over our cups, whatever they might have in them.

A few weeks ago the President, General Raul Castro, announced publicly to the National Assembly that they were going to begin mixing other ingredients in the subsidized supply of coffee. It was nice to hear a president speak of these culinary matters, but mostly it was the source a popular joke, that he would say something officially that has long been common practice in the roasting plants of the entire Island. Not only citizens have been adulterating our most important national drink for decades, the State has also applied its ingenuity without declaring it on the label.

So the former Minister of the Armed Forces is, in fact, just warning us that from now on the labels will no longer say “100% pure coffee.” Nor will they use the adjective “Cuban” in its distribution, as it’s no secret to anyone that this country imports large quantities from Brazil and Columbia. Instead of the 60 thousand tons of coffee once produced here, today we only manage to pick about six thousand tons.

The reasons are many, but the most basic one is the lack of motivation for the peasants in the mountains to harvest the precious grain. Very low wages and difficult living conditions in rural areas have encouraged migration to the provincial capitals, slowing agricultural growth. In addition, the producers would rather sell their crop on the black market than to State companies, which pay badly and after months of delay.

The result of all this has been, in recent weeks, a greater scarcity of “the black nectar of the white gods” — as the indigenous people once called it. Housewives have had to revive the practice of roasting peas to ensure the bitter sip we need just to open our eyes. Whether it can be called coffee is a matter of debate, but the paintings sold to tourists still present it as such, as if that symbol of national identity were still with us. A steaming cup stands in the middle of many paintings, and fortunately many of the foreigners who buy those paintings don’t have to smell what’s really in that cup, much less drink it.

Having just got his hands on the hard disk in its protective case, he mentally reviews his fixed clients whom he will have to alert. It’s a kind of reflex conditioned by the rush to make money. But all that later. Now, the first thing is to pay the bus driver who carried this portable hard drive from Havana to the other end of the country, with a treasure consisting of many gigabytes of information.

Three convertible pesos to the driver (75 Cuban pesos), as thanks for his reliability. On the other end of the Island, from the west, his business partner brings the device to the bus station every week and there he contacts the driver whose turn it will be the transport the goods this time. He gives him the contact details of who will collect the package, and as a precaution notes the license plate of the bus and the driver’s name. The same procedure is followed at the other end to send it back to the capital.

Now he slips the device into his backpack, and rides his bike through the deserted streets of the city.

What’s he looking for? Perhaps a secure telephone from where he can alert his customers, “The package arrived, will you take it now?” But before starting the transaction he has to be sure the merchandise is of perfect quality and complete. He pedals home, connects the hard disk, and verifies, yes, the 110 gigabytes are there, in a file with the date of the last week.

Then he does a superficial check — he doesn’t have time to watch everything — to make sure the quality of the video is good, or acceptable. No one wants to pay if they can’t see it well.

Finally, the contacts. He goes from house to house, connecting the hard disc, copying the designated folder, and pasting it in the space the client assigns for it. Never less than 100 gigabytes, never more than 120. That’s the average.

What is contained in that device, which occupies so much digital space and that is so tremendously in demand by society? Information of various kinds. One of the most acute scarcities for Cubans anchored on their floating Island of Silence.

The same news from America TV and Mega with TV shows in high demand among the Hispanic community in the United States. From football games broadcast live by ESPN, to the chapters of specialty Mexican soap operas on Univision. New films, documentaries from the Discovery Channel, musical concerts of some star — especially anything Latino — appearing on glamorous world stages.

In total, 110 gigabytes can capture a week of cable television, and for 4 convertible pesos it’s downloaded to the personal computer of a Cuban who otherwise would never have access to this multimedia diversity.

In some of the more affluent cities in Cuba, these weekly packets cost 10 convertible pesos. In others, especially in the east where less money flows, they vary between 4 and 6. It depends on the place and the provider.

How do the local distributors get this mass of information and entertainment into specific hands? Through semi-suicidal risks, primarily in the capital, where they install a satellite dish on their roof and make offerings to the Orishas that none of the neighbors will decide to inform the police about this serious violation of law.

The antennas, like artifacts of war, are hidden with every kind of trick: a leafy grape-vine, a cement overhang, sometimes painting it so it blends in with a background of the same color. Ingenuity is never lacking in Cubans in their eternal effort to survive.

These parabolic kamikazes expose themselves to exorbitant fines and much more serious penalties (they can lose their homes or even end up in prison if they are repeat offenders). They record all the programs of popular interest on their computers. And sell the packages to street distributors throughout the country.

Thanks to such methods they can read the independent blogs in Cuba, the incendiary texts that appear on the web, daily publications like the Nuevo Herald or the BBC. A person privileged to have Internet access — legally through their work, or illegally installed in their house through the black market — downloads the articles and distributes them to his acquaintances free through the miracle of flash memory. Sometimes they charge for it. Otherwise they do it out of basic solidarity.

But one thing I am sure of: I do not believe these renovated pirates of the Caribbean, Creole pirates who make a living smuggling gigabytes and copyrights, are aware of how much their commercial efforts form a part of a Cuban democratization that must begin with one basic element, access to information.

Behind its censurable illegality — looking at if from the viewpoint of international standards of respect for intellectual property — lies a blunt reality that is not too hard to elucidate: there is no worse enemy to the Cuban regime in its more than half a century of existence than technology. There has been no enemy more mortal, subversive and uncontrollable than the Internet.

This is an army — of flash memories, of computers armed with bits and pieces, of DVD players which until very recently were also illegal — that has destroyed a deep isolation suffered by a country disconnected from the planet. And it is a proven fact that against this army the totalitarian regimes of today do not know how to, and cannot, fight.

Thanks to piracy, Cubans today know that beyond the water that encircles them lies another distinct world the TV informs them of. Thanks to contraband music, newly-released movies, audiovisuals with other ways of looking at reality, they have discovered, bit by bit, timidly, the real reasons why they are not allowed to travel.

It would not surprise me if — like the Beatles were banned from the national scene in the past — today the Spanish series Travelers’ Streets, with its globe-trotting journalists and a fanatic clandestine audience in my country, would be declared material non grata by any establishment in Revolutionary lands.

To my friends, the pirates of my Island country, let me say that unfortunately I am not yet an author of any work whose rights are worthy of being violated. But I aspire to be one. If, sometime, a single word of mine, the smallest bit that comes from my keyboard, is worthy of being downloaded from the Internet, plundered by publishers or legal commitments, or in some way is distributed by the brothers of my muted land, don’t ask my public approval, because I would not be able to give it.

But cynically I say to you: Know that internally I support you, with the same conviction and vehemence with which I turned over, in the past, four convertible pesos for a small breath of freedom. Because the real crime is not piracy. The real crime is disinformation.

January 15 2011

 

SOLIDARIDAD CON FERNANDO DELGADO EN SU SUPLICIO EUROPEO A FALTA DE CUBA…, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.
January 16 2011

Far from clearing out any doubts, the recent speech given by the President of the State Council, Raul Castro, just created more confusion and worry among the population.  Cubans fear that the rationing/supply booklet will be removed.  The man who is also Prime Minister says that this supplement is confused with a “social achievement that should not be abolished.”

The subsidized quota, which in the past year was significantly reduced, contributes to the feeding of most citizens for a part of the month. Since early this year the government took some of regulated products off the ration, with the aim of gradually extinguishing the ration card. This happened with potatoes, peas and cigarettes.

The fears are not unfounded. The measure primarily affects elderly people in a population that has aged considerably. In doorways and street corners, retirees sell some products  from their ration quota, such as toothpaste, cigarettes and coffee, matches, soap, laundry detergent and pasta.

Most wonder if Papa State will be able to keep the markets supplied to meet demand. Another concern is whether the price of deregulated products will exceed what they can now be bought for in the black market. Can a nation of workers acquire what they need with their current salaries, or will they have to steal?

Concerns increase with the number of family members. Josefa, my neighbor, is a 48-year-old homemaker. She was born under the Revolution and its system of rationing. Her husband is a custodian, and his salary is the only one coming into their home to support their three young daughters. She cannot imagine how she will feed them, without the aid of products on the ration card.

Joaquin, an old man of 73, in the debate on the issue at the butcher shop while waiting for his turn to buy the soy “ground meat.”, asks: “With the 200 pesos monthly pension paid me, after paying for electricity and my loan on the appliances from the Energy Revolution, how many pounds of chicken can I buy at 23 pesos a pound?

In the end, the liberalization of regulated products leave few happy. They do not believe the scarcity, which has been with the Revolution since the beginning, will end, or that the government has measures to combat it. Anyway, the point is made, the renewed Cuban socialism has nothing to do with subsidies and freebies.

Resolution of the Ministry of the Interior to take controlled products off the ration system.

January 10 2011

The hands move with confidence and speed, having barely 30 seconds to slip the cigars that will go to the black market under the table. Two cameras pan the room where the fragrant leaves are rolled and put in boxes with names like Cohiba, Partagás, H. Upmann. Each glass eye rotates 180 degrees, leaving — for a very short time — a blind spot, a narrow stretch of unguarded rollers. Just enough time to put that Lancero or Robusto — to be sold later outside the official market — out of sight of the supervisors. Another employee is charged with paying the guards to let them out of the premises and within twenty-four hours a strong aroma will already be on the streets.

When my Spanish students asked me about the quality of the cigars sold “outside,” I would joke with them saying that inside those boxes they might well find rolled-up copies of the newspaper Granma. But I also know that a good part of the clandestine supply comes from the same institutional places where they make the ones exhibited in the legal stores. Three out of every five Habaneros, if challenged, would brag about knowing a real roller who can get them authentic and fresh puros. The business of nicotine involves thousands of people in this city and generates a network of corruption and earnings of incalculable size. The challenge is that the final product looks just like the one the State sells, but costs three or four times less.

Among the most common proposition a tourist hears is, “Mister! Cigars!” or “Lady! Habanos!” shouted from every corner. At least it’s not as shocking as when some pimp sidles up to whispers his catalog: “Girls, Boys, Girls with Girls.” So the sequence that starts in the factory, in those thirty seconds when the lens of the camera is looking the other way, ends with a foreigner paying, for twenty-five cigars, what would otherwise be enough to buy only two. Everyone leaves happy: the roller, the guard, the illegal seller and… the State? OK… but who cares?

He’s 90. He climbed unsteadily onto the P4 bus, a cane in one hand and a nylon bag in the other. It was ten at night. He didn’t want to sit down because he was only going three stops and his voice sounded so sad it made me want to carry him. As we crossed 23rd he was telling me what every street and every house was like before 1959. Most of this information was inaudible but I was too embarrassed to admit it. At times it seemed like he was talking to himself and not to us.

We got off together, or to be exact, we got off at the same stop at 23rd and 10th and walked up to 12th. He lives on Marianao but always makes a stop at the bakery to buy bread. “I have an egg in the house and I don’t like it by itself, with bread it’s better.” He wanted to go to the “Ten Cent” store but it was closed.

“Granpa, what are you doing at Coppelia at ten at night?” I ventured to ask, though I imagined the answer. “I sell wafer cookies to eat with the ice cream. Today I have a lot left.”  And he showed me the little five-peso packets. “Now I have to wait for the 55 because the other buses leave me off too far away.”

I imagined his house with yellow walls, a beat-up roof, rickety doors and broken windows. I thought of his loneliness in front of the stove frying up an egg and warming the bread. I wondered if he might at least have a radio or television to entertain himself. I saw him getting up at six and filling his bag with wafers and leaving for the bus stop, getting off at one of the entrances to Coppelia and spending the whole day calling out in his dying voice, “Wafers, wafers.”

When we said goodbye he left me his sad certainty of final misery, of survival to end, of an abandoned death. “Take care in the cold,” I shouted, looking at the hole in the back of his vest. With tiny little steps he made his way and I wondered, once again, what will socialism be.

EL TIEMPO SE ACABA PARA FERNANDO DELGADO…, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.
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By this date in 2009 the martyr Orlando Zapata Tamayo was very ill.

We cannot allow another tragedy to our already so injured people

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January 15 2011

The year 2011 has begun and Cuba continues to be prey to a dilemma; a government of more than half a century, led by the same old men, who have given themselves another opportunity to correct their mistakes before leaving this world. So the president of the State Council, Raul Castro, expressed in his most recent speech.

History repeats itself. The Third Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, held in February 1986, started the historic stage of “correction of errors and negative tendencies”. In that time, the communists were focused on eliminating the tendency to imitate the Soviet model, principally the application of political and economic reforms that Gorbachev had established in the USSR, better known as perestroika.

25 years later, a new process of correcting the Cuban formula for socialism for the 20th Century has started. The redesign will probably be in the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, scheduled to be held between the 16th and 19th of April 2011, when the 50 year anniversary of the proclamation of the socialist character of the revolution and the victory at the Bay of Pigs will be observed.

The interesting thing about this case is that they have nothing defined, despite affirming that they won’t go back to copying anyone. They are certain that they will not permit the free market as did the Chinese. In fact, the new intent is plagued with contradictions. They recognize that they turned the principle of state ownership of the fundamental means of production into an absolute, but they won’t allow the private to grow.

The veteran Cuban leaders are convinced that the biggest and most important error committed in the past was to believe that someone knew what socialism was and how to build it. However, the principal problem of the old guard isn’t the uncertain search for new formulas to redesign socialism — a la cubana — before the Grim Reaper cuts down their long lives. The mistake for which we all are paying is the stubbornness of maintaining a hard and unviable state capitalism.

In 2011, the sad thing isn’t that history is repeating itself, nor that they might recognize their mistakes after so much time in power, nor that they feel themselves the only ones capable of mending their faults. What is inconceivable is that they keep following the same policies that led them to failure.

They’re not even getting the foundations of the new attempt right. They allege that, despite that Marxist theoreticians have scientifically proven the system, the building of the new society in economic order is a trip into the unknown. However, they assure us that the guidelines of the policy for the next five years show the course towards the socialist future. Moral: not even they know where we are going.

January 16, 2011