Translating Cuba

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.

In my house in Mantilla, Christmas Eve was always a feast of family and friends. It was the most anticipated date and for days ahead of time we started the preparations, buying nougat, marzipan, figs, walnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, wine, cider and cheese. We looked for black beans and soft yucca, and well-threshed rice. The pig was sacrificed the day before and marinated and then taken to the oven at the bakery in the early hours. The same day we bought lettuce, radishes and tomatoes for the salad, to ensure they were fresh. The whole day was given over to preparing for the big dinner at night.

In the cement patio at the back of the house, we set up a big table made of boards on saw-horses. All around were benches, also wood. The table was covered with huge white tablecloths. My uncles made sure there was a barrel of beer, soft drinks, apples, pears and grapes, and an occasional bottle of wine. The dessert pancakes and coconut and guayaba candies were made by Joaquina, our neighbor, a black cook who was part of the family.

The children spent the day playing and helping out with whatever they told us to do. We also visited the homes of friends who were preparing their dinners. My neighborhood was modest, but the majority of the houses celebrated Christmas Eve with more or less comfort. The joy was contagious and all the shops were decorated, and in the houses were lit trees and manger scenes. It was a day of happiness. And music accompanied us the whole day.

At nine at night the dinner started. The whole family participated, along with friends we invited and those who dropped in to surprise us. We made enough food and always had room and a plate for whoever came. Rice with black beans, yucca with a mojo sauce of oil and garlic, pork roast and salad were universal. There was wine and beer for the grown-ups and soft drinks for the kids. By dessert we were drinking cider. The dinner lasted until eleven, when we went to the Rooster’s Mass* at the church facing Route 4. When we got home we continued the party into the wee hours of the morning.

Despite everything that has happened in these years, and even though we lack almost everything, we always try to celebrate Christmas Eve. Our family is dispersed through mass exodus, and the practice is officially frowned upon, but we gather those who are left, along with our friends, and around the lit tree and the creche we share this unique dinner on the best of all nights. We can not let something as important as our national identity be taken from us.

*Translator’s note: In Latin American countries the midnight mass on Christmas Eve is called the Rooster’s Mass because the belief that the only time the rooster crowed at midnight was the night Jesus was born.

Spanish post
December 19 2010

This is the Hotel International they are planning to demolish in Varadero, the photos are from July 2010.

The Sun Cabañas, designed by the architect Nicolas Quintana and annexed to the Hotel, will suffer the same fate.

Photos courtesy of Martha Aquino

December 23, 2010

Albert Einstein used the say that God doesn’t play dice, but the Cuban government plays at being God and sets up the table of intolerance in any corner against those who don’t understand that the initiatives come out of the Palace and not the citizens, considered by the Owner-State like minors, incapable of enjoying Human Rights, more appropriate for Europe and North America than for an island in the Caribbean.

Friday, December 10, the game board was located around Villalon Park in Vedado, where Dr. Darsi Ferrer called for a silent march with banners, to evoke the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved by the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 1948.

This document is barely known on our island, and was ignored by Batista, from 1952 to 1958, and from 1959 by the Command of the Castros, still today clinging to military orders that contradict the articles of the Declaration, with which peaceful opponents to the regime identify, organized in turn around small political parties that promote democratic changes.

The struggle between democrats and the military is a common fact, but at times it touches on the absurd and reveals the unusual. Friday we watched the game of hundreds of cats against dozens of mice. The main command was located in the mansion occupied by the digital portal La Jiribilla, alongside the former mansion of Generalísimo Máximo Gómez, perhaps to frighten the ghost of the independent warrior and, incidentally, the officials of the UNESCO Regional Office, the musicians of the Amadeo Roldan Theater and the pedestrians of the area, where the arrests were a la carte.

There were guards in uniform and political police on adjacent corners, from Linea all the way to the Malecon and between A Street and the Park at Calzada and K, where those who are getting the immigration paperwork from the United States Interest Section in Havana wait, besieged by soldiers every day of the year.

Although most of the walkers don’t know the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, many are aware of the arrogance and audacity of the young agents, who pretend to listen to music with their right hand on their pistol, while watching possible suspects and following orders they receive.

Last Friday morning I witnessed the military deployment to block potential attendees of the celebration at Villalon Park. The scheduled time was 11 a.m but at 7 the SS boys were already at their posts. I went down first to the Malecon and D as far as Calzada, with a friend who was taking his children to the school located in front of the Superior Institute of MINREX. We returned at ten to avoid the hunters and their patrols.

They completed the harassment and arrests of Friday with early morning warnings, it’s common for them to knock on the doors of the opponents while the family is sleeping. They hide in the shadows of the night and in the anonymity of the agents, one of the tactics of the troop of Warlocks who throw the dice of intransigence and disregard the freedoms and rights of citizens.

December 16 2010

The hospitable accommodations were built on land where pre-fabricated parts were once assembled to create a city for the New Man. As this chimeric individual never emerged, nor were there resources to build new housing, the site remained vacant for decades. When the so-called Battle of Ideas unfolded, they began to lay the foundations here for a hotel with more than a hundred rooms. The cranes and trucks arrived at an astonishing speed for construction in Cuba, and in barely two years they had raised the walls, installed the aluminum windows, and opened the place up. With the resources stolen from that project, many area families painted their facades, installed air conditioning in bedrooms, and remodeled bathrooms.

Known as the Little Tulip Hotel, it was intended as a shelter for Latin American patients who came to our Island for a cure. During the heights of the so-called “Operation Miracle,” its wide entrance was packed with buses discharging dozens of patients every week. Later, when the number who came for health reasons was shrinking, other groups came to receive political-ideological preparation to implement the “Socialism of the 21st Century” in their respective countries. The neighbors — from beyond the wall — were curious about the transformations taking place in those accommodations and ventured various hypotheses about what its final use would be. Some even placed bets on whether it would be given to the military, or if victims of the last hurricane would be brought to live in it.

However, a few days ago, a poster appeared with an offer of a “Christmas dinner” in the formerly exclusive dining room of the small hotel. A few weeks earlier, neighborhood youth had been invited to watch the match between Barcelona and Real Madrid from the plush lobby seating, for a two convertible peso entry fee. Now, the employees in reception say that anyone can rent a room and it’s no longer necessary to be a foreigner to enter the beautiful central courtyard. Undoubtedly, a clear sign that the Battle of Ideas has been laid to rest once and for all and that the real “miracle” proposed by the government, now, is to raise some foreign currency to earn enough profits to cover the costs. To see if the country does not sink into the abyss, as Raul Castro feared in his last speech.

An anecdote not often shared relates that, at the end of a meeting between Fidel Castro and Cuban artists in 1969, where he pronounced his polysemic “Words to the Intellectuals,” a discordant — and unexpected — voice spoke up.

It was Virgilio Piñera, perhaps the most immortal and lacerated playwright our Island has given birth to. A frail man who, facing the Commander in olive-green with his six feet and more and his gun in his belt, must have seemed like an insignificant blade of grass.

They say that, once in front of the microphone, pale due to his natural color and because of his nerves, the interjection of the effeminate Virgilio took less than ten seconds.

“The only thing I can say is that I feel very frightened,” he said. “Only that. I don’t know why, but I am afraid…”

His tortured life didn’t allow him to know that he wasn’t wrong that time, that fear would be his destiny.

I think of Virgilio when I hear from the mouth of another intellectual, and friend, very similar words. The only difference is that this teacher, this young writer knows perfectly well why he is afraid.

His name is Francis Sánchez and, like me, he lives in a little provincial city, Ciego de Ávila, where exercising individuality implies more risk than in the cosmopolitan capital. For a long time his name has been known among professionals of letters for his literary laurels, and his publications in the country’s diverse magazines.

Anyone who sees him, with his nicely fleshed-out body and his well-trimmed mustache, would think he was the most complacent and docile of citizens. A perfect pater familias who, like any ordinary Cuban, deals with the shortages and dissatisfaction. And shuts up.

But Francis Sánchez bears a cross of ashes on his forehead: he has never consigned himself to renouncing his condition as a free man, his condition as a non-conformist Cuban who doesn’t know how to close his eyes against the reality he doesn’t like, that doesn’t suit him.

Like a good man of letters, knowing the absolute impossibility of publishing his questioning articles in any institutional media, the personal chronicles about the country that he longs to have and doesn’t, he decided, like many of us, to open his personal blog. If I remember rightly, he just opened it with the excellent name: Man in the Clouds.

But Francis Sánchez is afraid, and doesn’t hide it. He tells me:

“You are a single boy, Ernesto. We are four. It’s not the same.”

And suddenly I feel very small, devoid of reasons before a circumstance like this: an honest Cuban has decided, knowing the risk, to endanger the stability of three people other than himself: his wife and their two children. And he has decided not how we choose one option ahead of another, or how we shuffle the possibilities on the negotiating table. No. Rather, he is someone who cannot contradict his abiding spirit, and who knows that it may cost him very dearly, and be very hard, but still he crosses the thin line.

One of his phrases has left me trembling like a leaf. He told me, with subtle indignation:

“I feel very afraid, not for myself, but about what could happen in the future to my family. And this fear only irritates me more. Because the fear is the most incontrovertible evidence that I must confront the country in which I live: I don’t want to feel afraid! I shouldn’t be afraid if the only thing I am trying to do is to express what I think!”

His rationale is scathing. Absolutely no one should fear for his integrity, social stability, if what he wants to do is done everywhere in the world of free people: raise his voice against the imperfect, the deformed, what he considers unacceptable. We should fear terrorists, pedophiles, those who corrupt. But men with their own voice, never.

But, that is the daily life of Cubans.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard, from the mouth of one person or another, “I would love to do what you are doing, but I can’t.” And then, a long or short list of reasons that sweeten a painful reality: fear is stronger than the need for expression.

And so the mask never fails to hide the unpleasant features of our personality, and to camouflage the fear that takes hold in the most varied pretexts.

What are the most frequent arguments I hear in this regard? In the first place, the impossibility of survival without the employment offered by the State. Some say, “If, like you, I had at least one family member outside this country who could help me economically, I’m sure that I would have founded a Party, I would no longer go to the polls, I would say what I think in the assemblies at work, I would have opened a blog.”

Others say, “If I didn’t have a family to support, I would have exploded long ago and would have screamed at the officials everything I think of them.”

There is something undeniable, beyond ethical and moral judgment, that these words prove: There has never been a better partner for totalitarianism than naked fear. If this century’s technology has been the worst enemy of those who would like to control the minds of men, since ancient time it has been fear that has provided the fuel to sustain the machinery of the dictatorships.

What do people really fear in my socialist Cuba? It’s worth asking. It’s not the fear of death or disappearance, as used by tropical dictators like Trujillo or Somoza. The Cuban people’s fear is more ethereal: the fear of disintegration as a social being.

Losing a job without any possibility of finding another livelihood; the constant defamation surrounding a person; the exclusion from spaces and organizations that you used to frequent, and as may be the case, being refused admittance even to public cultural institutions. Add to that suffering constant harassment not only against yourself, but worse still, against your loved ones and your friends. And, depending on the strength of your positions and your consequent activism, physical repression and prison.

So the more I think about cases like that of Francis Sánchez, and so many others who once broke their chains and decided to play according to their own rules, I remember the vibrant words I heard from the mouth of Father José Conrado: “We are all afraid. The essence of the totalitarian system is precisely to provoke a response of paralyzing terror. The problem is when one has to conquer it in the name of a great responsibility.” And there are many more examples, dignified, beautiful, which make me believe more and more that to rely on presumed accommodating arguments is an irresponsibility that is even more costly, in terms of the eternal weight on one’s conscience.

After listening to Pedro Luis Ferrer quote his favorite phrase — “Nobody knows the past that awaits him” — I discovered what is in truth the greatest of my fears, the supreme terror I could not face: the fear of facing, in the future, my children and my grandchildren, and having to explain to them where I was and what I was doing when my country was suffering so much fear.

Now that President Raul Castro has said, with regards to the 6th Communist Party Congress, that from this point forward the only necessity is that each Cuban speaks the truth, whatever that might be, and that everyone must do so without fear (his exact words, confirming an open secret: Cubans have a sense of raging panic around expressing their truest opinions), I think it is the perfect time for all of us to dedicate five minutes to self-examination, and of taking the President-General at his word, lest we soon repent our failure to do so.

December 21, 2010

On December 10, Human Rights Day, my 15-year-old son came home from school and said he had been summoned to go to park centrally located in Havana, exactly the same place where, each year, a group of dissidents and non-conformists demonstrate for improvements for Cuba’s citizens and political prisoners. The students of all the high schools in Havana were called to make up one of those painful repudiation rallies against people who peacefully protest, exercising their power as citizens to complain.

It was the director of the school himself who told Teo and his classmates to come dressed in civilian clothes so people would not know that they were students, called to defend their homeland against the provocations of their enemies. Several teachers announced that if it was necessary to beat up the Ladies in White, or other opponents, they must do it “in the name of Cuba.”

When Teo told me about this it was as if I were transported back to 1980, witnessing the shouts, insults and eggs thrown at those people who chose to leave the country during the Mariel Boatlift. I remember one day 30 years ago, as the excitement spread through the halls of my tenement, while I, barely 5, looked on in terror at the aggression against a neighbor whose two sons had decided to emigrate.

My grandmother gestured furiously for me to get back inside, with no explanation of why the mob was shouting phrases like, “The scum wants to go, let them go!” We were never the same after witnessing such an act of militant fanaticism; the mistrust settled deep under the skin of the residents of that humble place.

So when they called my son to make up the shock troops I was as horrified as I was three decades ago, when I first witnessed that intolerance through the eyes of a child.

This post appeared originally in The Huffington Post

December 22, 2010

When I read or hear the opinions of citizens who worked in radio, television or publicity before 1959, earning great salaries that allowed them to own their homes and cars, travel and live comfortably, railing against the hands that fed them, and criticizing everything done, as if something that was against the state and the people had been manipulated, I feel embarrassed for them.

If there is something that ennobles a person it is knowing to be grateful. Also, and much more important, not to lie. To write and say silly things and to use their past like floor mats, doesn’t seem to worry these characters, as they reaffirm their political legitimacy and stay afloat, despite the vagaries of life and the passing years.

They remind me of some acquaintances who, having been brought up in wealthy families, studied in good private schools and enjoyed a pleasant childhood and youth, present themselves in their memoirs for popular or institutional consumption, as poor from birth, almost the children of beggars, uneducated, and having to work from childhood to survive in an exploitative society, where their families were the most exploited and miserable.

Some other cases seem to come back into fashion. In hard times it is like a return to roots, and also like a closing at the end of life. It seems as they intended to leave a palatable vision for other generations, filing and polishing here and there, looking for a false perfection.

Writing this depressed me, but I see it repeat itself so much in our media, that more than a personal catharsis, it seems to me like a collective insanity. Who was rich was rich and who was poor was poor, and neither one nor the other should be ashamed, as it determines neither the good nor bad feelings.

November 11 2010