Estrada Palma and the Re-election / Dimas Castellanos

estrada-palmaThe current state of Cuba confirms the impossibility of social progress without civic participation of citizens. The structural crisis in which we are immersed and the obstacles to overcome it, are closely related to the absence of popular participation as a dependent of history. A reality exacerbated by the fact that our country, in terms of freedoms, has receded to the point where it was in 1878. Therefore, changes in the economy are as unavoidable as changes in human rights to promote civic participation from civil society in the decisions of the nation.

The importance of the political — the scope of social reality referred to the problems of power — is that it provides a vehicle to move from the desired to the feasible and from the feasible to reality, an area that implies the State as much as society. The attempts towards progress that ignore this truth, as has happened so far, are illusory.

The relationship between what is happening right now in our country with the public reappearance of the ex-chief of the Cuban State — phenomenon which is unsustainable in the short-term for the ungovernability that it generates — has as a common denominator with previous eras of Cuba the absence of the Cuban as a historical subject. To demonstrate that continuity, I will take this opportunity to look at the first attempt in Cuba of a presidential re-election bid.

The 1901 Constitution, in Article 96, referring to the duration of the presidential term, said that the office will last four years, and no one may be president in three consecutive terms. Therefore the conflict over the re-election bid in 1906 is not in the illegality, but in something else.

Tomás Estrada Palma (1835-1908), joined the Ten Years War from the beginning, where he received the rank of General. In the Government of the Republic in Arms he served as Secretary of War, of Foreign Affairs and President. In 1877 he was taken prisoner and released after the Zanjón Peace. He emigrated to the United States, where he founded a school for Latin Americans. In 1895 he was appointed minister plenipotentiary of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Cuba in the U.S. and was the center of the Revolutionary Council in New York. In 1901 he was elected President of the Republic of Cuba.

Estrada Palma concentrated in an important enterprise, the austerity in the management of public assets. However, while he considered that the people had no training for living in freedom, he did not endeavor to strengthen the spaces and institutions to achieve it. That decision, conscious or not, is a manifestation of Messianism, a pious hope in the ability of an earthly being to lead a people to salvation. In the absence of the general public, his administration was limited to a political elite devoid of civic culture. For example, the enactment of laws became very difficult because for approval it required the presence of two-thirds of the congressmen, whose attendance, since it was not mandatory, was exploited by political parties (Liberal and Moderate) to hinder the work of legislation in their struggle for dominance in Congress. In this situation, President Estrada Palma, who had refused to join any of the existing parties, decided to join the Moderate Party, to try, together with the work of the Executive Branch, to obtain a quorum and to enact laws and necessary measures.

With regards to the theme of re-election, Estrada Palma created the War Cabinet to guarantee victory and get a majority in the Senate and the House; he pushed it to use all governmental force, including the use of violence and fraud against the Liberal Party, which responded with the abstention, and consistent with our culture of intransigence and machete, took up arms. A process that caused heavy damage and loss of life before and during the conflict, among them the killing of Colonel Enrique Villuendas in Cienfuegos and General Quintin Banderas in Havana, whom I shall address in my next article.

The rebels, in a manifesto dated September 1, 1906, proposed, inter alia, the cessation of hostilities, the restoration of peace, freedom for those detained or prosecuted for activities related to elections and declaring vacant the positions of president and vice president of the republic, provincial governor and provincial council, covered in the last election period. Estrada Palma for his part required them to lay down their weapons first and then talk. The intransigence of the parties and accordingly the failure of the mediation of a group of veterans, among whom were the generals Bartolome Maso, Mario García Menocal and Cebreco Augustine, who rose to confirm the office of president and cancel the rest of the elected offices.

The intransigence led to the outcome. Between 8 and 12 September, Estrada Palma suspended the guarantee, requested the sending of warships and intervention; a request that the U.S. president himself considered inappropriate. According to Hortensia Pichardo, Theodore Roosevelt exhausted all available means to avoid that step. Among these the media quoted his letter to Gonzalo de Quesada, 14 September 1906 and his telegram to Estrada Palma, on the 25th of the same month. In the first, Roosevelt reveals, among other arguments, that:

“Our intervention in Cuban affairs will be realized only if it is shown that Cuba has fallen into the habit of insurrection and lacks the necessary control over herself to realize peaceful self-government, and so that its rival factions have plunged into anarchy.”

In a letter to his friend Teodoro Pérez Tamayo, dated October 10, 1906, Estrada Palma argues that the settlement through the pact with the rebels was the worst thing that could have been thought of, as the secondary problems that would arise later — so many and so difficult to solve — weakening, of not losing, the moral force of legitimate power and no authority other than the settlement of disputes, which I repeat would be so many and so difficult, these problems, which would lead to the country being kept for many months amid constant agitation, as pernicious as the effects of the war itself. So, he says, he decided to irrevocably resign the Presidency, to completely abandon public life and look within his family for a safe haven from many disappointments. His ultimate sacrifice, in his words, to make it impossible that the Government should fall into criminal hands. A decision that led him to notify the Government of Washington:

… “of he true situation in the country, and the lack of measures by my Government to provide protection to property, considering that the time had come for the United States made use of the right conferred by the Platt Amendment. So it did” …

For these reasons, on September 28, together with the Vice President and the secretaries, he submitted his resignation to Congress and the country came under a provisional government headed by the Secretary of War the United States, William H. Taft, which constituted the second American intervention in Cuba.

The lack of civic culture, the absence of the citizenry in the decisions regarding the destiny of the nation, the tendency to violent solutions and Messianism, demonstrated itself in the work of the Cuban political elite. A portrait put forth magisterially by Carlos Loveira in his republic of “General and Doctors. ”

According to Hortensia Pichardo, the first Cuban republic had been killed by its own children. I would say that at the hands of a handful of its children, because the vast majority, as in other political events, was absent from those decisions. The teaching of this episode in our history, and of others we attempt, indicates that the preparation for political participation is a long and difficult, but much safer than we have traveled so far, where the majority of Cubans have very little to do with what is happening.

Translated by uncledavid

August 2 2010

A Superfluous List / Miriam Celaya

In late November, a kind reader wrote to me suggesting I prepare a list of all dissident groups and political parties on the Island. Since the proposal has appeared publicly in the comments on more than one occasion, I propose –in turn- to answer publicly and take the opportunity to share some impressions, given that other Cuban friends inside and outside the country have shown interest in the subject.

I, for one, decline the privilege and the overwhelming responsibility of that task for many reasons. The first and strongest one is that I am part of this varied set that is grouped under the generic name of dissidents, truly diverse in interests, proposals, projections, performances, stories, successes, failures, etc., not to mention the human components and personal nuances that dot all these aspects. It is against all ethics to be judge and party to any process. It also happens that, in order to compile a list of this nature, basic concepts would have to be defined, such as “political party”, “opposition group” or “independent civil society” (in all its manifested forms today in Cuba). This omission also involves risks that could hurt feelings, or carry value judgments that may be subjective.

I have personally heard criteria that overestimate the strength and organization of Cuban dissidents, and others that undervalue it. In fact, after two decades of what we conventionally call here “the surge of the opposition” — characterized by the emergence of some peaceful organizations under the influx of transformative ideas that swept the former socialist camp, and amid the general crisis known as “The Special Period” — the different groups have yet to achieve enough visibility or roots in Cuban society, despite the efforts they have made and the repression suffered by many of their leaders. The causes and ratings for this phenomenon will be properly analyzed in a conceivable immediate future by political scientists and historians better able to do it than this blogger, so I will limit myself for now to say that –- beyond their successes and failures — movements and opposition groups that have existed and still exist in Cuba have set an important precedent in the struggle for the rights and freedoms of the Cuban people through peaceful struggle, and have also demonstrated the existence of a large segment of the population of the Island that does not share in the ideology imposed by the dictatorship and is demanding changes. Breaking the idyllic image of a false unity and the highly publicized “the people united with its government” was a titanic chore that these opponents had to fight against in the last 20 years, at a high personal cost. At some point, its true value will need to be recognized.

Another factor that undermines the development of a reliable list is the instability of some groups. Many of them have had or have a short life, i.e., they surge around a leader’s nucleus but quickly disappear, either by the loss, incarceration, or departure of the leader, or the lack of strength, civic, or political culture of their members. Sometimes they group under one name and then change it when they merge into other groups, or groups split and give rise to lesser groups in continual multiplication. At times, there seem to be lots of opposition groups or political parties, and there are people abroad who cannot imagine how, if this is so, the groups have not been able to overthrow, or at least weaken the dictatorship. In fact, not even peaceful means can be effective unless parties are consolidated and venues for moderation are found, both among social actors who promote change and society as a whole, as well as between them and the government. The old vices of Cuban culture that push us over and over again toward immediacy, improvisation, the search for the limelight, and leaders who are more or less charismatic are key difficulties that have fragmented basic problems and have weakened opposition movements for many years, hence they have not managed to become alternatives to power or even observers of political processes of interest in half a century, as happened with the recent (and as yet without complete results) talks between the government of R. Castro and senior Catholic hierarchy of the Island. This is so true that the very Cuban government, in the midst of the most serious structural crisis of the system that he introduced, allows itself the arrogance to launch insufficient and ridiculous economic reforms that guarantee him more time in power, at least time enough to finish divvying up the piñata and parcel out the spoils of this poor flattened out hacienda. I believe, therefore, that a “list of opponents” at present, far from contributing, could become another element of discord among some jealous and restless spirits. I really don’t think it appropriate or a priority.

But opponents are not only grouped in political parties. There are also civic organizations, for example, The Ladies in White, the Latin American Federation of Rural Women (FLAMUR), the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, headed by Elizardo Sánchez; the website Desdecuba.com, where multiple blogs share space, including Yoani, and several portfolios that can be considered the cradle of the Cuban alternative blogosphere, the blogger platform Voces Cubanas, with a large group of people of all ages and diverse views and interests, as well as the digital magazine Convivencia, which Dagoberto Valdés manages from Pinar del Río, among other civic groups. The importance of these stems from gradually creating venues for free, open and spontaneous debate, without belonging to any political party or answering to any ideology. Political parties and citizens of the future might someday emerge from these groups, without excluding any current groups. Life is always richer than any human forecast, but some of us Cubans are convinced that developing citizens to democratize Cuba is an inescapable and foremost task. The end of a dictatorship would be of little worth if the danger of an escalating one is sustained. We mustn’t forget that it was we Cubans who placed ourselves in the critical point where we are today.

In conclusion, I believe that Cuba is set to create different venues that will encourage the growth of the alternative civil society, which will, in turn, give way to the emergence of institutions capable of upholding the rights and freedoms of citizens. It’s important to create citizens rather than political parties; to create civic culture, accentuating within it the ethical and juridical culture; to convert complaints into requests, into claims, into positive actions. The Ladies in White, Orlando Zapata and Guillermo Fariñas are the most visible evidence of this. It truly is a very long and arduous road that we will have to travel simultaneously toward the eventual extinction of the dictatorial regime. This imposes the dual action of pushing and forcing the government as much as possible, and, at the same time, of creating civic conscience in millions of slaves. However, it has been plainly shown that when it comes to a common destiny, improvisations are useless. Over one century of being a Republic without citizens has been lesson enough.

Translated by Norma Whiting

December 22, 2010

Bonsai / Fernando Dámaso

Bonsai was the last and smallest cat in a litter of three born in the garage of the building. From his early days was surly, hiding from people, to the extreme of only eating his meals after you moved away. Thus he grew and his mother died and his siblings were adopted by other neighbors, and he has stayed with us as a collective cat. He slept in the garage or in the nearby kindergarten and, later, at the opening of the door of the building, he became the owner of the premises on the fourth floor. Breakfast, lunch and dinner on the landing of the stairs, at the entrance to our apartment. There also we kept a pot with fresh water. He adored milk and after breakfast he waited patiently. Then he would wander around until lunch and repeat the process with dinner. At night he had his adventures and often returned wounded and abused, becoming an odyssey to be able to cure him.

So he left behind one and then another of his lives and so became more sedentary. One day a small black and white kitten turned up at the garage and we baptized her Wampi, and after he accepted her they became great friends. They played, ate and slept together. Wampi breathed new life into him and he would look for her in her hiding places when she disappeared. They acted like siblings. One day Bonsai disappeared and with the help of Wampi we found him crippled, unable to use his back leg. We fed and cared for him against all odds, and he recovered and impetuously climbed the stairs of the building, the same as always, even though we knew that he maybe only had one life left.

Time passed and one day I found him in the garden, without the strength climb the stairs to eat. I picked him up with care, as he was always so surly, and put him in the room on the fourth floor. I fed him, but every day he was weaker. I realized that he was living his final days. So passed two and then a third, cherished by me, he purred weakly and died at noon. I wrapped him in the cloth that served as his bed and dug a hole in the ground of the hall of the building, where he’d played with his siblings as a kitten and put him in it. This is his grave. Born, lived and died, with us. I think that, although he was small in size, hence his name, he was a cat who enjoyed his seven lives happily. Now, in cat heaven, he must have met his mother and siblings and greeted Putica and Falcor, his close neighbors, in dog heaven.

November 20, 2010

Garrincha’s Talons / Luis Felipe Rojas

Raul: Now go and tell the people why they are going to be laid off. Labor Union: I thought my job was to defend the Revolution, not explain it.

I was born in 1971. My generation grew up under the imprint of “Revolutionary” humor. I never knew about the Comics, except for those by Cecilio Avilès and Blanquito, the weekly Palante, and the late DDtè. I didn’t enjoy the ones by Quino and Fontanarrosa until I was over 20. I couldn’t see the magic behind Charlie Brown. After I was 25, my passion became Garrincha. I did not enjoy the lombricillas, little worms, that appeared in the military magazine Verdeolivo (Olive-green), but I began to collect every one of their comic strips from the Cuban newspapers starting from the beginning of the ’90s of the twentieth century.

I think we lost them from our national life about two years ago and later found them again in the graphic opinion section on Cuba posted on Miami´s EL Nuevo Herald. Garrincha is a character who exudes the best of humor from all sides. I think that he has, in abundance, the sarcasm that the Cuban press has lacked for a very long time. The lombricillas, his depressed men, super-light women, “cool dudes,” “hot chicks” and bureaucrats are the best of creole satire since Castor Bispo, Gaspar Pumarejo and the best of Enrique Nuñez Rodrìguez when he wasn’t being professorial or excessively pro-Castro.

Every month someone sends me the Garrincha vignettes from that Florida newspaper, and though we know that living in a village like San Germán in Holguin province might cost me my objectivity — given the apathy of the major media that surrounds me — my joy in good Cuban humor remains. Neither far-right and vulgar, nor from the center, nor moderated by luxury, it is simply him, humorous, sarcastic, and without loyalties to dull his sharpness. I celebrate my ignorance in front of my readers: I imagine he has a website or collaborates with various digital publications, but for now I’m content to know that every week I can expect to see him, re-posted from the press, copied on CD, or in some newspaper that managed to slip through the bars of the General Customs of the Republic of Cuba. This is good enough, while this mischievous boy who answers to the name Garrincha sticks out his tongue at the stiff-necks who think themselves safe from a good “raspberry.”

Just what we need to begin to be a real country.

December 24, 2010

One Year for “Crossing the Barbed Wire” / Luis Felipe Rojas

Photo/Luis Felipe Rojas

I would have liked to have a public celebration in an internet cafe because in every respect this blog is not mine alone, but it also belongs to my readers and friends. But reality imposes itself and I know I am far from such merrymaking.

The generosity of a group of people has allowed me to post from a physical and technological distance, living in this little town in the center of eastern Cuba.

The kindness of some kids (I am nearly double their ages) have made it possible to have my work read in English, French, and, God willing, in a few days in Polish, and this, for a writer whose books haven’t sold 500 copies, is an unbelievable celebration.

It’s been a year and writing this diary, this road map of the Cuban reality has given me a passport to some police cells, a gang of outlaws who watch my house every day (they make a living out of that), and has placed my name on the lists of various highway checkpoints. That is not a record, or even a good average, just the response of a wounded animal: the absolute power that does not permit fingers to point out its stains.

A balance sheet of the road taken reassures me that the whippings for not bowing down have been greater than the awards and nominations, but this will serve as a reminder of what happens in my country, not a wailing wall or a tourist postcard. Those who seek to discredit me: thank you for the time that you dedicate to me, the actions of the regime you defend give me reasons and strength to continue. To those who encourage me: “Rosi de Cuba,” “Armienne,” Lory,” “Gabriel” and everyone else, thank you, I humbly say, thank you, I will try to be more objective every day, you’ll see.

The interest of Yoani Sanchez so that I could open this weapon against the human rights violators and those who think they own this country has made this part of the blog possible. To her, I express my gratitude.

Finally, my faithful administrator, that person who from the North Pole will continue being a guajira, and a good soul beyond compare, thank you.

What I can say with all the pleasure of the world is that this is a blog that is made in fragments, between the horror that I see, and that my countrymen tell me about, the little I know about writing to put these stories together, and the commentary of the readers, for all that, applaud yourselves. Greater efforts will come. Congratulations.

Translated by Rick Schwag

December 26 2010

100 Years of the Fat One of Trocadero / Iván García

Jose Lezama Lima (1910-1976) is not gone. This is the feeling you get when you visit the museum of the master of Cuban prose in Trocadero street, in central Havana.

You don’t need to be supernatural to sense the weary, asthmatic breathing of the fat Lezama while you pass through the halls of this house, residence of one of the greatest authors of this green island.

The Cuban intellectual was born on December 19, 1910. And like nearly all the geniuses, he was misunderstood in his time. His father, Jose Lezama Rodda, of Basque heritage, founded, and eventually lost, a sugar business in Cuba.

Rosa Lima Rosado, his mother, formed part of a family of independent thought. At the end of the 19th century, she felt obligated to leave the island. she knew and collaborated with the national hero of Cuba, Jose Marti, in his exile in Florida.

Lezama Lima had two sisters, Rosa and Eloisa, who both died early in their lives. From when he was a boy, like every good Habanero, he played baseball and caused trouble with his friends from the neighborhood. He was an infielder, and had pretty good hands.

But one day when he was an adolescent, his friends went to find him for game, and Lezama told them “I’m not coming out today, I’m going to stay in and read.” He had started reading Plato’s Symposium. He was fifteen years old, and since he was eight he was a voracious reader of Salgari and Dumas, Cervantes and his Quixote.

He became a lawyer, and began to work in a simple post of the secretary of the Superior Counsel of Social Defense, in the jail of the Castillo del Príncipe, the main jail in Havana. And from this date forward, he was a great man of letters.

In 1937, his collection of poetry The Death of Narciso, was published, which was written in 1931. In his day, another giant, Cintio Vitier, affirmed: “All the poetry of Mariano Brull, Emililo Ballagas, Eugenio Florti, like witches riding brooms, flew out the window when I read ‘Danae wrote about the golden time by the Nile,’ the first verse of the Death of Narciso. Cuban poetry changed overnight.”

Later, he began to circulate in cultural reviews of high esteem, edited in Cuba in the decade of 1940-1950. It was in Origins, perhaps, where Lezama Lima made his impression as a writer.

In 1959, el comandante Fidel Castro arrived, along with his hurricane of radical reforms. So much machismo and testosterone; the caudillo style and an Olympian disdain for the free thinkers, caused more than a problem for the massive Jose Lezama.

Despite being married since 1964 to Maria Luisa Bautista, a noted literature professor, the fat Lezama was a closet gay. We already know how the Castro government treated homosexuals in this time.

They were turbulent times. Whoever had different sexual orientations was sent to prison or to a type of concentration camp called UMAPs (Military Units in Support of Production). And even though Lezama never received a punishment that severe, he suffered. The greatest scandal arrived in 1966.

The name of the scandal was the supreme novel of Cuban literature: Paradiso. It had a limited edition. It put in check the iron censorship of the state, that always held literature suspect, bourgeoisie, and counterrevolutionary. The sexual adventures of Jose Cemi disquieted the Criollo hierarchy, who saw in the gays, and sodomy, a latent danger to the concept of the New Man, dreamed up by Che.

In spite of everything, the Maestro never wanted to abandon his country. In Cuba he found his muse. His house on Trocadero was his heart, he came to say. And there he shut himself in amongst his writings. Tightly.

Difficult years. The economic shortages affected the population. And Lezama, an incurable luxurophile, suffered from royal hunger. He made up for it, and then some, whenever a friend invited him to dinner. It was said that at receptions in Western embassies, on certain nights of ferocious appetite, Lezama devoured an army of croquettes and canapes.

He died in 1976, his fame faded due to censorship and official acknowledgment of a low profile. They then turned him into an exquisite cadaver. A common thing for Fidel Castro’s government with critical intellectual figures or those with little loyalty to the regime. Once they’re buried, of course.

The big guy who would have been one hundred this year died in house No. 162 on Trocadero Street. His thick anatomy permeates the house turned into a museum. If you feel, as you tour the grounds, the coughing and asthmatic wheezing of the Master, don’t be frightened. It is Lezama who would like to greet you.

December 16, 2010

Promise Keepers / Iván García

They are already arriving and being noticed. Afternoon comes to Santiago de las Vegas, a town south of Havana, with low houses and dusty streets. The followers of Saint Lazarus move along the road, dressed in clothes made of jute bags and dragging huge stones.

A person with a bunch of leaves goes before them, making a gesture as if cleaning the road. In a rough wooden cart, a good sized image of the saint of lepers. And a piggy bank for the curious to put small coins in.

They are the promise keepers. People who feel they owe their life and happiness to the miraculous saint. Anecdotes abound. A fat lady does an act on the road. She has dragged herself from a neighborhood of Marianao to El Rincón, where the church dedicated to the worship of Saint Lazarus is found.

The woman walked over 15 kilometers. According to her, she was condemned to die from cancer. She entrusted herself to “to the old Lazarus,” as he is known in Cuba, and the cancer disappeared.

From that moment, she promised that every December 16 she would crawl on her knees to offer her tribute to the saint. And today is the day. It is freezing.

During the week in that area, the thermometer fell to 44 degrees Fahrenheit. An unusual temperature in Cuba. If you add the high humidity, the wind chill is 33 degrees or less. But those who are fulfilling their promises are not stopped by cold or by distance. Ubaldo comes from Bayamo, a city over 500 miles from Havana.

On arriving, together with a few with relatives at the train station in the old part of town, he put together a great four-wheeled wagon. He placed a dazzling portrait of the saint inside. He put on a pair of short pants made out of a sack, and without a shirt, at the risk of catching pneumonia, began to drag himself towards el Rincón.

At times he stops and takes a big swig of cheap rum. People encourage him. One of his sons says the old man had suffered paralysis in his legs. The doctors assured him that he would never walk again. Ubaldo went to the parish of Our Lady of Charity in El Cobre, Santiago de Cuba. There, as he made his pleas, a pious man commended him to Saint Lazarus. “In a few months my father could run.”

Since then, every year he makes the pilgrimage from Bayamo to el Rincón. On the way to Saint Lazarus you always hear miracle stories. The atheists, who go out of curiosity or snobbishness, don’t believe all the legends heard in the journey. It is admirable to see so many people, many of them elderly, making a considerable physical effort to keep their promises.

Thousands of Cubans show up spontaneously for an appointment with St. Lazarus. They arrive in Santiago de Las Vegas, and along a narrow dark road about a mile long, they walk towards the temple. Along the way they sell soup, a broth made with vegetables and pig’s head. Also corn tamales, bread with pork and hot chocolate.

The government does not interfere. Nor does it encourage. The official media do not publicize this. Nor invite the followers that attend the parish. Although it attempts to pretend otherwise, the State does not agree with the Church. Of course, it does reinforce public transport and schedules a train at three o’clock in the morning to facilitate the return home.

It was not always like that. Romelio has been going to Rincón for thirty years. “At that time, we had to manage as best we could. The police were always on alert and watched us like dogs,” he says sitting on the tarmac after walking a long stretch on his knees.

As tradition dictates, the promise keepers rush to arrive before 12 pm in the sanctuary, to deposit their contributions and listen to the Mass. Outside, a concentration of pilgrims sing and warm themselves with mouthfuls of rum from a plastic bottle that is passed amongst them. Every time someone arrives crawling, they open a path, yell and cheer him on like a marathon runner reaching the finish line.

Sweating despite the cold, the promise keepers throw themselves on their backs almost breathless. No wonder. They have fulfilled their vow to Saint Lazarus.

Translated by Rick Schwag

December 19, 2010

Guidelines* on Christmas Eve / Rebeca Monzo

Today, on the night before Christmas Eve, the farmers markets are full of people looking for pork, yuca, and vegetables, trying to put together, as best as possible, tomorrow’s dinner.

When I came back from the market with heavy bags (that I had to take there, since, there aren’t any), two pretty, young girls were walking ahead of me, talking loudly about the topic of the moment: the January lay-offs, what people here are calling the month of terror. One was telling the other about the injustice of laying of, now, the great number of people who are going to be unemployed. The other said, emphasizing: “As always it’s going to get out of hand for those who are left, who are going to have to do the work of of the two or three people who’ve been fired from their department, for the same salary.”

“Imagine,” said the other, “It’s not our fault they inflated the payroll, so they could tell the world that there’s no unemployment on our planet. So now, not only do I have to type, clean the bathrooms, hand out the papers and update the bulletin board — how wonderful! — and all this for a salary that isn’t enough to begin with. AND, I have to do it on Christmas Eve and New Years! Already those guidelines* are making me feel bad, really bad!

OK my friend, now you know, take it easy and Merry Christmas!

*Translator’s note: This post contains a play on words that is not directly translatable. “Linimentos” (used in the original title) means “liniments” — that is ointments. “Lineamientos” means “guidelines.” The Guidelines (Lineamientos) for the 6th Communist Party Congress have been released, and the pun in the text is based on the fact that Cubans are apparently pronouncing “lineamientos” as “linimentos.”

Translated by Rick Schwag

December 23, 2010

One Family, One Tragedy / Ernesto Morales Licea

Just a few hours ago a shocking even took place in my semi-wintry Bayamo: at approximately seven at night this Wednesday, December 22, a young man of 34, Alexander Otero Rodriguez, appeared at a central corner of the city, accompanied by his wife, Aliuska Noguer Tornés, 18, along with their baby, born 48 days ago.

Accompanying them, a relative and a friend.

In a few minutes they built a fiber-cement hut from fragile boards, in a vacant lot once occupied by a grocery store. They spread out on the floor — surrounded by weeds — the rickety mattress they brought on their backs, and got ready for the storm.

Alexander Otero just took the riskiest step of his life, the most desperate: publicly claiming the right to adequate housing for him and his humble family.

Side view

It took no time at all for the public officials, the police, the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) to come and question that blackish den where suddenly two people with a newborn baby had installed themselves. The answers from both young people were the same: “We’re not moving from here until someone puts an end to the way we are living. We have spent months wandering from place to place, we don’t have a home, and now that our son is born we are sleeping in the streets.”

From the front, with neighbors all around

Not late in coming, either, were the curious, the supportive neighbors, who were suddenly left speechless by what these people were doing; nor was the informant late in coming, a member of the intelligence services who, unhappily, tried to avoid my filming the event and taking photos of him.

I repeat: unhappy man, who never imagined — as I could never imagine — that a crowd of dozens of Bayamese would turn against him, almost expelling him, and showing an enormous contempt for his sudden “coming out of the closet” as a citizen repressor.

According to the words of Otero Rodriguez, this action was the culmination of an inhuman waiting that started 11 years ago, when he first asked for a small space to build himself a home. Since then, the Housing Department continues to ask him to wait while, he said, they allocate huge amounts of land for houses for government and military officials in the area.

Alexander Otero and his family. In his hand, the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba

“For months Aliuska and I have lived as nomads, renting at night in a small room or sleeping in the Bus Terminal. When our son was born, we asked the authorities to pay attention to our situation (homeless and with a baby), and they only thing they did was to sell us these fiber-cement boards and seven bags of cement, without giving us authorization to build a house.

After leaving the Maternity Hospital, the three had continued to sleep in the open.

“In parks, in terminals, in doorways. We have knocked on the doors of the Housing Authority, we have been to the Party headquarters, and all, absolutely all, have shown no interest in our case. They tell us their help — selling us the boards and the cement — ended there. So here we are unable to move on with our life.”

Aliuska Noguer, and her small newborn

At nine at night, with a considerable crowd in strong support, both parents challenged the bureaucrats of the Housing Authority and the President of the Municipal Assembly of Peoples Power, and the handful of officials who dared to pass through the circle of neighbors.

Otero Alexander’s words were always the same, “As long as I don’t have in hand some land where I can build a house for my family, they won’t take me from here alive, and I charge them with the life of my child if they try to take me by force and pull down this roof.”

Another view from the front

I want to make clear the most exciting part of this, which at four in the morning got me typing like one possessed, and I am still excited by what I witnessed: the unyielding support of thirty, fifty people surrounding that place, who not only give them blankets, food and drink, but in an act of public spiritedness — never seen by me in my environment — they do not hesitate to denounce the corrupt officials, they don’t hesitate to back up with their own fists the decision of this young man, and they didn’t even feel gagged when a crouching repressor tried to block my camera.

I believe it’s time for me to reconsider what I published just two days ago in this same blog, about the ancestral fear of Cubans.

“Enough of lies, of thieving leaders. Enough of the only escape route in this country being emigration. I am Cuban and I do not want to leave my country,” were other words of Otero Rodriguez. “It is not I who should leave this country; those who should go are those who cause things like this, injustices like this.”

Interior of the improvised shelter

One of the options the young parents had rejected was an ambulance, sent by the authorities, to take the mother and baby to the hospital.

“My son is not sick. The illness my son has is to not have a home. The one most ill is me, I have a huge stomach ulcer, and I will not move from here.”

Arturo Pérez Sánchez, President of the Municipal Assembly of Peoples Power, also went to the site in person, stating that “acts like this are very damaging, they bring down the Revolution,” and then asking the people to retire so he could speak to Alexander Otero alone, a request that the masses disapproved and denied — and so he tried to evaluate the case in the early hours of the morning.

“Anyway,” repeated Otero, “without a signed document I’m not leaving here. We know too well about false promises. The second I leave they will knock me down, and I’ll be sleeping in the street again.”

From this morning of Thursday, December 24, I am sure that the life of this father, strangled by inefficiency, laziness, and the misery to which he’s been condemned, will change drastically, in one sense or another: he will, perhaps, receive a poor site where he can “legally” erect this same shack; or he will be expelled in some way from his scrap of ground and be punished for his act of rebellion.

I intend to follow this event, in the future, as the best way in which I can squeeze the hand of this brave Bayaman, along with so many supportive neighbors, and tell him he is not alone. From now on, he is not alone.

December 23, 2010

The Only Celebration / Fernando Dámaso

  1. Soon we will celebrate Christmas, the only celebration capable of uniting the majority of human beings, despite their ethnic, religious, political, and other differences. Increasingly, most countries embrace it as a day of love and tenderness, in a process of cultural integration, where traditions are mixed to form one, with births, illuminated trees, wreaths, Santa Claus, reindeer, sleighs, bells, snow, palm trees and everything imaginable. Here, Christian and pagan traditions form a whole, to the delight and joy of the whole family and friends.
  2. In my country it is traditionally celebrated. At first purely Christian, brought by the Spanish with cribs and Baby Jesus, and then over the years, expanded with illuminated trees and all the pagan symbolism. It went beyond the home and spread to shops, shop windows, streets, avenues and even buildings. I still remember the giant tree of lights on the front of the Havana Hilton, and the immense natural pine illuminated at the entry to Fontanar. But in the late sixties, by government decision, it was abolished on the grounds of the effort needed for the sugar harvest, and only restored when the Pope visited.
  3. Those were years of sad Decembers, trying unsuccessfully to be substitute the date of the victory of the insurrection. Even pens were complacent, writing two articles against it, denying its tradition and accusing it of being Americanized and commercial. They forgot, for convenience, that the traditions of the people are formed precisely by the addition of influences, and constitute a living process of constant renewal and enrichment, discarding the obsolete and adopting the new. Our Christmas is well-formed and, having continued without this absurd decision, now we will be like most Western countries, of which we are a part.
  4. Despite its official restoration, nothing has been officially done to revive it, quite the opposite. Shops and buildings are not decorated, let alone the streets and avenues. For the written press, radio and television, it’s as it didn’t exist, all the news is concentrated on the January victory of the Revolution. Small little islands of Christmas appear only in hotels, primarily to please tourists, and in some shops in Old Havana under the influence of the Historian of the City. Those who maintain the tradition, and try to revive it, place lit trees and nativity scenes, and we decorate our homes with garlands of lights. Although each year more people do so, we are seen as aliens. Still, neighbors who do not dare to publicly celebrate Christmas, congratulate us for doing so. It’s an interesting situation, where fear weighs more strongly than true feelings.
  5. Like every year, I will celebrate Christmas with my family and friends gracing my home and keeping it thus from the last Thursday of November until 7 January. It is a time to fully enjoy, which my neighbors would also like to be able to enjoy, think what they may. A Christmas greeting, with all its symbolism and the sum of multiple traditions, sooner or later will return to form, along with the Christmas, New Year and the Day of Kings, the most important holidays of my country. Part of the true national identity. To my readers: A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR WHERE ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE.

December 14, 2010

The Holidays Return / Yoani Sánchez

To go to work on December 25, to have school on New Year’s Eve or to be called to “voluntary labor” as the year drew to a close. All this was possible in an ideologically fervent Cuba, with its false atheism and disdain for festivities, that left us with grey Christmases, celebrated in whispers. The last weeks of 1980, 1983, 1987, so identically boring, lacking in color, run together in my mind. I spent many of those days sitting at a desk, while in other parts of the world people shared them with their families, opened gifts, celebrated in the intimacy of their homes.

It seemed that the Christmas vacations were never honored in Cuban schools, the students only had breaks for patriotic or ideological celebrations. But, little by little, unannounced, and never approved by our peculiar parliament, students themselves began to reclaim these holidays. In the beginning, each classroom would be missing about a third of its students, but slowly the absence virus began to infect everyone. Until finally the number of students missing in the last two weeks of the year left the Ministry of Education no choice but to declare a two-week break in classes. It is these small citizens’ victories, reported by no newspaper, that we all understand as terrain wrested from the false sobriety they try to impose on us from the podium.

Today, my son Teo got up late and he won’t return to school until next year. His classmates haven’t been to high school since Wednesday. Watching him sleep until ten, make plans for the coming days off, helps to make up for my boring childhood Christmases. I can forget all those Christmas Eves I spent without even realizing there was a reason to celebrate.