A Hope that Doesn’t Fade in Cuba / Iván García

On the eve of Three Kings Day, Melanie Garcia, 7 years old, feels that the hours take years. At 5 pm she wants to go to bed, to shorten the time. Intensely she lives the hope of getting up before dawn and discovering what new toys the Three Wise Men from the East brought her.

In spite of everything, the tradition has been maintained for centuries. It’s been a dangerous crossing. Families wanting to keep the custom have fought against an atheistic state that decided to bury it five decades ago.

Fidel Castro struck the first blow to the magic world of children in the ’60s, when he distributed three toys per child by state decree. He decided to become the only Wise Man.

He even changed the months. He exchanged January for July, a month where they sold toys by the ration card. Just five days after coming down from the Sierra Maestra, he sent a message round to all segments of society.

From a war plane he dropped thousands of toys to children living on the hillsides of the eastern provinces. The idea wasn’t bad. They were kids who were dirty and full of parasites, whose only toys were chickens and pigs.

But after the altruistic gesture he sent a coded message in red: from now on, the State would appropriate tasks hitherto performed by Catholic and social institutions. Then you know what happened.

January 6 disappeared as a holiday. In his 52-year-long journey through the honey of power, Castro sought to undermine the religiosity of the population. Temples were closed. Some priests were expelled and others disparaged.

In pursuit of building the first communist society in America, many things had to be changed. And Three Kings Day was one of them: they considered it a petty bourgeois backwardness. More important than the toys, U.S. imperialism was to be buried in the dustbin of history.

Boarding schools prepared children and young people to be future soldiers of the country. The theme was “study, work and rifle.” Five decades later, the same government decided to sweep under the carpet part of its original sins.

Long ago, toys were removed from the ration card. Now they sell for hard currency, available only to families that receive remittances. These days, shopping at the Commodore Center, west of Havana, is a madhouse of parents buying toys.

The offers vary, but the prices go through the roof. A game is over $100. A bike, the same. A doll with a battery that says three sentences costs more than $60. Barbies, which you can have for $50, are piled on one part of the counter. The cheapest toy is equivalent to two months’ salary for a worker.

January 6 is just one more date to the Cuban authorities. There are no parades through the streets of the city. But if you wake up early that day, in the neighborhood you will hear the din of the little ones, finding a toy in some corner of the house

There are other happy moments for children on the island. But the Day of the Kings is the icing on the cake. If you have any doubts, just ask Melany Garcia.

Photo: Havana.

From Tania Quintero: “My granddaughter Melany with the toys that the Kings brought her on January 6, 2009. See, on the left, the cradle of wood, there are still carpenters in Cuba who make them, just like 60 years ago, when I was a child. I am glad that this tradition has not been lost in a world of increasingly sophisticated electronic toys.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

Originally posted: January 7 2011

The Knots in the Gag / Reinaldo Escobar

Havana, January 8, 1959.  The dove had already defecated on his shoulder; the other bearded one had already answered the question, “How am I doing, Camilo?”; Habaneros had already started to worry about such a long speech warning them that things would be more difficult from now on.  So comandante Dermidio Escalona ordered the unruly capital crowd to shut up.

No one could calculate, then, the significance of that gesture, no one could suspect that half a century later the performance artist Tania Bruguera would recreate the scene in her production “Tatlin’s Whisper,” in which we had one free minute before the microphone, dove included.

I leave you the image here, and this link conjured by technology and nostalgia, so that we can assess what could have been and was not, and calculate what could be if we were less obedient to the order to shut up.

January 10, 2010

The Country of Long Shadows / Yoani Sánchez

There are two men on the corner. One is wearing an earphone while the other peers into the door of a building. All the neighbors know perfectly well why they are there. A dissident lives on one of the floors of the building; two members of the political police watch who comes and goes and keep a car nearby to follow him wherever he goes. They don’t try to hide because they want this person, who signs his name to his critical opinions, to know they’re there; they want his friends to distance themselves so as not to end up caught in the network of control, in the spiderweb of vigilance.

It is not an isolated case. Here, every non-conformist has his own shadow — or a whole group of shadows — who follow him around. The so called “securities” also use sophisticated monitoring techniques that range from bugging phone lines and placing microphones in homes, to tracking the location of their targets through signals from their cell phones. The effects on the personal lives of those who suffer these operations are so devastating that we have come to refer to State Security by terrible names such as “The Apparatus,” “The Armageddon,” or “The Crusher.”

But not even these soldiers dressed in civilian clothes can escape popular scorn. Several jokes are making the rounds about the inordinate number of “securities” surrounding each individual opponent. Whispering and looking over their shoulders, many comment sarcastically, “There is so much manpower needed in agriculture, and look at these guys here, spending the whole day watching someone who thinks differently.” Because, indeed, what a contrast it would be if, instead of criminalizing opinion, they devoted themselves to productive labor; if instead of projecting their long shadows over the critics of the system, they let them fall over some lettuce or tomatoes, over the furrows — now empty — that they could help to plant.

The Revolutionary Counteroffensive / Regina Coyula

In an early hatching of 2011, my city is full of tiny businesses selling useful and useless things. Some sidewalks in Havana these days remind me of the nervous and chaotic pulse of an Asiatic city. Many people with a doorway on a more or less busy street have taken out a license to survive on their own; others set up a rough metallic shed coarsely made, the ugly and poor version version of a container to sell pizzas for eight pesos. Everything that disappeared during the so-called Revolutionary Offensive in 1968, the little that was left in private hands after the nationalizations of 1960.

But nothing productive.

On all the streets — Carlos III, Ayestarán, 42nd Street, Diez de Octubre and Avenida 51 — you can find clothespins, eyeglasses, dye, plastic cups. And disks, disks and more disks. Predominantly rough shelves with disks when you pass through these emerging businesses. National music, foreign, children’s, TV series. The success of this business isn’t strange, a celebration of piracy in a country used to seeing cartoons, soap operas and movies on national TV where they “modestly” cover the logo of the originating broadcaster.

Watching this winter hatching, I surprise myself thinking about the layoffs that have begin and the available options for the “available.” It’s difficult to undertake these activities in the already congested streets of my city.

January 10 2011

Half a Year / Voices Behind The Bars / Pedro Arguelles Moran

The Ladies in White below the Capitol steps in Havana

Six months have passed since I turned down the opportunity to go into exile. During all that time, the communist Cuban regime has been breaking its own promises of releasing us—the members of the group of the 75 who have decided not to abandon our homeland. On numerous occasions during this half year they have moved away from shattering the infamous gates that separate us from our family and social environment. Clearly, the totalitarian Castro regime does not have the least will to free us and they intend to banish us at whatever cost. There is simply no possible justification to hold us hostage as prisoners.

There is no pressure that can possibly force me to abandon my country, and much less to abandon the exalted and dignified civil struggle for the respect of human rights and freedoms inherent to the dignity of all human beings. In a very stubborn way, these rights and freedoms are being systematically and institutionally violated, from the very moment the government seized power by force of arms, intimidation, and terror in 1959. We will continue working peacefully to achieve the so yearned-for and suffered democratic transition to a state where rule of law, civil society, and social justice all thrive.

Pedro Arguelles Moran
Prisoner of conscience, Canaleta provincial prison in Ciego de Avila.

January 10, 2011

Looking For the Guilty / Laritza Diversent

Heaven and earth came together for Danay when Lester, her ex-spouse, confessed to her with tremendous calm that he didn’t love her. He tried everything to save his 10 month-old marriage. The young lady, until yesterday a Christian, lost faith in God and in man. Today she is looking for the guilty party who left her with the bitter aftertaste of feeling used.

Danay de la Caridad Gonzales is 17-years-old. Since she was little her parents raised her in the dogma of the Protestant Christian religion. Today she resides in Mantilla, a marginal neighborhood of Arroyo Naranjo, the poorest area in the City of Havana.

Lester Martinez is 23-years-old and is a native of Palma Soriano, in Santiago de Cuba. He’s been living in the capital illegally for three years. The biggest test of his love for her was that he should convert to her religion, despite the scant grace that God gave her and her bony body, which gives her away as a legitimate child of the “Special Period”.

God put them together in a simple ceremony before the parishioners of her church. They lived together in one of the rooms of the girl’s parents’ house. A housing unit constructed on what had been, years before, a garbage dump. A few meters away, the streams of the neighborhood’s sewers run. The authorities declared the area unhealthy.

To conform to the laws of God and man, it only remained to legalize Lester’s situation in the capital. His having come from another province in the country required that processing take place according to what was set out in Decree 217/97 of “Migratory Regulations for the City of Havana.”

There was a detail the youths didn’t count on. According to the rules of the decree, the local authorities don’t recognize a home as having a “permanent character” when the housing unit located in the capital is in an unhealthy zone. The unconditional love of Danay could not prevent Lester putting an end to the relationship. It wasn’t known if God or the rules of Decree 217/97 wanted it that way.

“Why did you marry me?” asked Danay. The young man arrived at the capital in search of better living conditions. However, it was impossible for him to get the 150 pesos of convertible currency together that they charge for making the change of address official. Because of this, he couldn’t continue his studies nor could he work legally.

Lester was tired of living the gypsy life. Avoiding the fines imposed by Decree 217/97, he spent three months around Bejucal, and another three in Mantilla, in the house of the cousins who’d helped him get settled in the big city, the one he couldn’t know nor enjoy for fear that he might be recognized by a policeman and be deported to his place of origin.

Nothing justifies deceit, Danay decreed. She looked at the sky and asked “Where were you, God, that you didn’t spare me this deception? Why did you permit me to be used this way?” Then she looked at the ground and, with irony, said to the young man, “Until death do us part, or until you realized you couldn’t change your address?”

The Lord lost a sheep from His flock and Lester, despite his guilt, learned that it wasn’t enough to marry a resident of the capital to make his change of address official, and with that to exercise his right to free circulation and residency.

He’s still reluctant to return to his home province. In the future, he will remember that his future wife must reside in a healthy zone and in a housing unit with minimum conditions insisted upon by the migratory regulations of the City of Havana (more than 25 square meters of livable space plus 10 for each co-resident).

Danay feels victimized by everyone, at least by those who put Decree 217/97 into effect; a rule that turns a Cuban into an illegal in his own country. The same one that lets Lester, as a means of legalizing his situation in the capital, marry with or without love.

Translated by: JT

January 8 2011

These Peculiar Guidelines / Claudia Cadelo

Photo: Claudio Fuentes Madan

At the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution they are talking about the guidelines for the next Communist Party Congress. Despite the fact that, according to the Official Gazette, some of the proposals in the guidelines have already been passed as laws and the parliament hasn’t had its chance to display its unanimous approval, here in the neighborhoods we’ve already begun to stage the play and recite the script. After a ten-year gap since the only legal party in my country met, it would seem that the communist ideology is the last imperative of the meeting. There’s even a joke going around saying they’re going to change the name of the party.

But people are tired. People stopped recognizing socialism, even in books, long ago, because the history of the Revolution seems too much like the history of a 19th century capitalist monopoly. In parliament no one has been classified as “unqualified” or “unreliable” (as they have been on the layoff lists), and not one delegate to the National Assembly has been laid off under the concept of inflated payrolls. It is in the neighborhoods where 500,000 CDR members are going to be left “unoccupied.” So the spirit of the meeting is tense; even the poster announcing it reminds us: “Attendance will be taken.”

My friends tell me (the meeting in my neighborhood hasn’t happened yet) that things got hot. One retiree said it was time to see young people leading the country, another said he was tired of discussing planning and reforms that never changed anything, a lady announced she is retiring because as long as they aren’t talking about raising wages they can’t count on her, and the Party member murmured, ending the meeting, which would be the last time the core would be called together. Raul Castro’s government has reached out to a people who are tired and skeptical, and bored with seeing the same movie over and over.

The blindness of power has no limits. The other day I heard that the son of a high-ranking military man (he doesn’t want me to say his name) complained that disposable diapers are expensive and hard to find. His father then asked him, “But son, aren’t they given out in the ration book?”

January 10, 2011

News of Yamil From His Family on Twitter / Yamil Domínguez

Top: The hours are endless for someone waiting behind bars for his FREEDOM.  Yamil and family demand his RELEASE now!!

Middle: There is no reason that justifies keeping Yamil even one more minute in the Security pavilion of the hospital.

Bottom: Today Yamil marks 12 days on hunger and thirst strike. Before he began the strike he weighed 80 kg (176 lbs.), Friday he weighed 66 kg (145 lbs.).

Link to Yamil’s family’s Twitter account.

Translator’s note: “Following” Yamil  on Twitter shows that the world is watching.

How You Can Sign the Civic Manifesto

Since The Civic Manifesto to Cuban Communists was made public in this space, we have received, by different routes, requests to join in on this document. Although the initial intention of the promoters was not to collect signatures of support, the opportunity for people to sign it electronically has been created through the following email: manifiestoaloscomunistas@yahoo.com , or by personally contacting any of the original signers.

January 10 2011

Daddy State and His Frightened Children / Yoani Sánchez

Self-employed Watch Repairwoman in Havana

For weeks they were afraid they would appear on the list of layoffs on the wall, the list of names of those who — at that hospital — would be left without a job in the new reorganization of labor. The doctors, nurses and health care technicians put in more effort and avoided walking the halls during office hours so that their heads would not be included among those who would be laid off. The unusually high attendance and punctuality of those days surprised the manager, but even so they could not avoid the cuts. One afternoon in the dining hall a meeting was held to announce the list of the newly unemployed. Many of those present would not be returning in the morning, they’d been put out in the street as a consequence of the downsizing process that is causing so much anguish on this island.

As odd as it seems, the Cuban Workers Center (CTC), the only legal union in the country, has supported the reduction in payrolls. Instead of calling a general strike and confronting the government and its shock tactics, the CTC announced it would help raise awareness among its members about the need for layoffs. Meanwhile, State television is airing reports of high unemployment in Spain, the United States or Great Britain, while it is silent about the drama that one in four workers in Cuba will soon lose their livelihoods.

Instead of addressing the topic in a serious way, the news throws around triumphalist phrases about the “improvement” taking place in the manufacturing and service sector. Behind every slogan is a family whose meager wages are threatened, hundreds of thousands of people who have no preparation for making a living outside the State, the employer of 90 percent of all workers.

In theory, self-employment is supposed to absorb many of the newly unemployed, but the path to private enterprise is still strewn with obstacles and controls. Just 178 authorized professions are open to independent workers and very few are directly linked to production. Options include bizarre choices such as “button coverers for ready-made clothing,” but exclude more promising professions such as “auto-body repairer” or “ironworker.”

Those brave entrepreneurs who decide to try their hand at small business must pay license fees and taxes starting on day one, and follow strict restrictions on the origin of any resources used. For now they have no access to wholesale markets for raw materials while taking out a bank loan can take months, or years. For those hoping to go into food service, a health inspection is required and can take weeks, waiting for the nearest clinic to get around to sending someone. The entire network of support for private enterprise is fragile and dysfunctional. Thus, the newly self-employed need a strong dose of patience and significant capital to endure the initial stage before they turn a profit.

We should not discount, however, that despite these constraints the cumulative creativity and widespread practice of violating the law might serve these emerging entrepreneurs well in overcoming all obstacles. If this is coupled by growing demand for products and services there could be important dividends. But the lack of business experience and the long years under State paternalism cast doubt on the efficiency of and growth in successful self-employment.

To be pushed into making an independent living is almost like jumping in the void for those who have grown up in a country where, for decades, the State has been the monopoly employer. Fears race through each workplace when the publication of the dreaded list is announced. Not only do fears flourish, but so do opportunism and favoritism. The decision about which workers will stay and which will go is made by the director of each workplace, and we already know of cases where the most capable have not kept their jobs, rather it is those closest to the director. The places they try to conserve tend to be undervalued, and the loss of a quarter of the workers does not mean, for now, any increase in salary for those who remain.

So this afternoon, in a small hospital in a municipality of Havana, the employees know something more than a monthly salary or a place at a Public Clinic was going to be decided. It is also time to open their eyes to a different Cuba, where the promise of full-employment is no longer proclaimed to the four winds, and where working for yourself is a bleak and uncertain option. Some will exchange the white coat for a barber’s scissors, or an oven where they will bake pizza and bread. They will learn that economic independence inevitably brings political independence, they will fail or prosper, lie on their tax declarations or honestly report how much they have earned. In the end, they will embark on a new path, a difficult one, where Daddy State will not sustain them, but neither will he have the power to punish them.

A version of this article originally appeared in Peru’s El Comercio newspaper.

January 10, 2011

A Typical Day in the “Cuban Way” / Laritza Diversent

A typical Cuban day is synonymous with a journey full of dangers. Not because of the gain or loss of a business, nor the ups or downs of market prices. Instead, because one must resort to illegal activities in order to survive.

The Cuban population tends to instantly consume whatever they get their hands on. For those who tend to be thrifty, one month’s salary could last them a week. As for the rest (which is the majority), between contracted debts, electricity, and the purchase of rickety subsidized food quotas, that salary is spent in less than 24 hours.

So then one is forced to live off of “inventions”– a word which in Cuba means “to live from whatever appears”. Or from whatever can be found daily, whether it be legal or illegal.

To live “the Cuban style” means to buy and resell absolutely anything, keeping in mind that such an action could be considered a crime of “reception of stolen goods”, speculation, or monopolization. It also means to turn to the black market, which always has a better stock than the state market and which always has more affordable prices.

It means to keep your eyes wide open because in each block there are eyes which are constantly watching, even though those eyes (which belong to the members of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution) are very well aware that no one can live off of the earned salaries.

The “watchers” tend to be suspicious of neighbors with higher economic income. They automatically think that such wealth comes from remittances sent by relatives abroad, or because they live off of “inventions”, or in other words, illegalities.

For the authorities, such a presumption is valid. The improvement or increase of quality in a citizen’s life is a sufficient cause to unleash a confiscation process against them under the pretext of “illicit enrichment”. In this case, the charge of the proof is inverted. It is the individual who must prove to the authorities that their assets do not stem from illegality.

Besides, Cubans have the duty of denouncing the events which transgress the law. The failure to fulfill such an obligation is listed in the Penal Code as a crime. It is all designed and arranged very well. In order to facilitate its job against illegalities, the government created a complex network of anonymous denunciations. Such denunciations are usually products of envy, personal grudges, or low levels of ethics.

The prosperity of one neighbor may worry or bother other neighbors who have accumulated years of frustration and find themselves in a stagnant kind of life. And the thing that pushes one to “snitch” could be something like an argument due to music being played very loud, a dispute among children, a disagreement over the limits of an adjacent property, or simply if someone does not like another person because they are rude and does not say hello to anyone.

In other instances, snitching is used to obtain impunity. People who think like that exist in every neighborhood, and their philosophy is something like this: “I engage in illegal business, so that’s why I take part in denunciations and snitching on what others do, so that I am allowed to continue my own illegal activities.”

It’s a very difficult and twisted concept to grasp, especially for foreigners. But it is something that has become normal in Cuba. In a matter of necessity, of survival. It’s one of the main sources which inform the authorities and it is known as “operative secret work”. For revolutionary justice, a denunciation is proof of irrefutable culpability.

There is one reality: daily life not only forces you to violate the law, but it also offers you some “paths” to take to lighten your own load. It doesn’t matter if it’s to achieve impunity, but it is a necessity to give out information about the lives of others.

In sum, “my stuff comes first” is the maximum slogan of national survival. It is essential for living “the Cuban way”.

Translated by Raul G.

January 7 2011

12 FESTIVAL/ALAMAR OF OMNI ZONA FRANCA / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The future is fossil.
The future is foul.
The future is a mist before the cameras.
The future is a noise in the microphones.
Biographies that shrink, not chosen.
Swollen little lives in the rain and pain.
Calcined memory like the columns with osteoporosis and the
facades with vitiligo in this city.
The future is faith. A faith if followers, without Fidel.
The future is fascism or at least an outlaw.
The future is bliss, territory of the impossible imagination.
The future is me.
When the present becomes precarious, when the illusion is invisible,
when the word doesn’t reach nor stop repeating words when
speech is all demagoguery,
when the silence begins to widen, to drown us,
surrounding a posthumous peace, pristine.
Clarion listening to the silence.
The future is a tantrum adrift.
The future is to pedal the defeat: pedicabs, machines to sew or
deconstruct, ball bearing rafts, computer keyboards,
paddling fingers, horns, speakers, walls, pottery of the Revolution
after the Revolution.
The future is gushing reaction.
The future is a Havana beyond too much History.
The future is lack of histology.
Our Havanada in the mire, nationalized
always be your name, avenge us in our ruin, rain thy violence on earth as in his memory, film your future that never was, and deliver us from everything except your sea.
The future is putrid, stone, native humor.
The future is a hole. An echo.
The future is smoke. Humiliation of humility.
The future is ouch. Hologram of today.

December 17 2010