Five Prisoners of the Castro Regime (2) / Miguel Iturria Savon

Five of the 11 young Cubans who attempted to divert a passenger boat across the bay from Havana to Florida on April 3, 2003, remain in prison. In a summary trial held on 8 April, three of them were sentenced to death, a sentence carried out on 11 April. Given life imprisonment were Harold Alcalá Aramburu, Ramón Henry Grillo, Yoanis Tomás González and Maikel Delgado Aramburu, held at Combinado del Este prison. While Wilmer Ledea Perez, 19, was given three decades in the prison of at Guanajay.

The sentences are excessive because the attempt failed and there were no deaths or injuries. The rulings of the Court and the urgency in the executions coincided with the so-called Black Spring of Cuba, which put behind bars 75 peaceful opponents, 15 for each of the Castro spies convicted in the United States, which demonstrates the subordination of Island’s legal system to the opinions of the warlord who has ruled the destiny of the nation for half a century.

In the United States, the five Cuban spies were tried two years after being arrested, with all guarantees and independence of the American legal system, which agreed to several reviews of the cases, while the five prisoners of the boat Baraguá are still denied their requests for review. The spies are represented by lawyers paid by the dictatorship and their families travel, undertake campaigns on their behalf and enjoy official patronage.

Who are the youth who attempted to escape the island? Under what conditions do they remain behind bars? Why are they kept in the prisons of Combinado del Este and Guanajay, where they have been from the spring of 2003?

Last month a an Open Letter to Ricardo Alarcon de Quesada, president of the Cuban Parliament, circulated on the Internet, in which Julia Estrella Aramburu, mother of Harold Alcala and Maikel Delgado’s aunt, described the hardships suffered by the convicted five. The document, signed by the rest of the family, blamed the government of Cuba for the lives of these children, who remain in narrow cells two-person cells in each of which live four people, with no sanitation, no running water or access to sunlight they are made to eat on the floor, a porridge of rice and corn; they are visited only every two months in a room where they are restrained and chained at the waist.

Maikel Delgado’s case is compounded by the lack of appetite, hair loss and the death of his mother, who “died for God’s destiny,” said Dr. Ofelia, Fajardo Hospital pathologist, where she went on foot for a routine checkup and three days later she was dead. The family still awaits the outcome of the autopsy.

Of the five prisoners only Ramon Henry Grillo was not from Havana. He emigrated to the capital from the town of Mella, Santiago de Cuba province, and lived with his sister Maritza, who says that he joined the boat at the last minute because he was tied to an oil business and he didn’t want to work for the State.

Yoanis Thomas Gonzalez, 32, is the only one who had a criminal record, but he had served his time, he is not violent and is characterized by his warmth and happiness. He only receive visits from his wife Yudaisi Berita War, though he shares space with Henry Grillo and is supported by the mother of Harold Alcala.

Harold is a Vedado boy who worked in the restaurant located at Gloria and Aguila, in Old Havana, together with the boy from Guanabacoa, Wilmer Ledea Perez, and the late Lorenzo Enrique Copello, the one who used the gun to hijack the boat, but later gave it out without hurting anyone. Harold loves swimming and is a voracious reader. Wilmer lived in Barreras with his mother and brothers and went to the weekend dances in the social circles of Guanabacoa.

In reviewing out the pieces of the pie ordered by Fidel Castro the Court threw out the alleged crimes of terrorism, which does not justify long sentences faced by young people who attempted to escape the island. Relatives of the five prisoners of Castro await justice. Hopefully soon.

September 21, 2010

Five Prisoners of the Castro Regime / Miguel Iturria Savon

On Saturday September 11th at 11:29 a.m. Cubacel sent me a message to my cell phone: “To love justice is to defend the five …” As Cubacel is a communications company the slogan seemed too political to me, almost surreal as it is referred to the Cuban spies of the Wasp Network, convicted in the United States in 2001.

Since that time the island government has imposed on us a fictionalized version of the life and miracle of the spies, converted by the media into “heroes imprisoned by the empire” where “they fought terrorism and the Miami mafia.”

I will not comment on the amazing metamorphosis of secret agents turned into “pacifists”; the publicity campaign is too expensive for the national economy and for the public’s intelligence. I will refer, however, to five prisoners of the Castro regime who are serving sentences in Havana, although they neither persecuted nor killed killed anyone, nor used state resources on futile missions against our exiles in the United States.

I am speaking about 5 of the 11 youths who, on April 3, 2003, attempted to divert the boat Baraguá from Havana Bay to Florida. When they ran out of fuel at sea they were surrounded by soldiers who ordered them back from the port of Mariel, where were delivered along with the frightened passengers, who were unharmed and moved by the adventure.

There they received a surprise visit by the Commander-in-Chief, who asked some questions and assured them: “This is a cake and everyone is going to eat their little piece.” The cake was distributed five days later by the Havana Provincial Court, which sentenced to death Lorenzo Enrique Copello, Barbaro Lodan and Jorge Luis Martínez Iza, who were executed on 11 April.Wilmer Ledea Pérez, 19, got a 30 year sentence, while Harold Alcala Aramburu, Ramon Henry Grillo, Yoanis Tomas Gonzalez and Maikel Delgado Aramburu are serving life sentences in Area 47 of the Combined del Este prison, known as the Corridor of the Dead.The rest of those involved have already left prison.

The chronicle of the event is more complex and even goes through the race issue, as the three who were shot were black, although Ramón Henry and Yoanis Tomás are also black and they survived. The summary trial, ordered by the Commander-in-Chief to intimidate those who plan a maritime exodus, did not take into account that those involved were neither criminals nor opponents of the government. Of the 11, only 2 had criminal records, one for “a siege to tourism” and another for a drug case.

Last week I spoke by phone with three of these young prisoners, the mother of two of them and the aunt and sister of Maikel Delgado and Ramon Henry Grillo. None of the five have been made into heroes and martyrs, nor are they proud they tried to divert a ship to escape the island, but they think are victims of intolerance and the subordination of the courts to the Party and Government, which has been led by the Castro brothers since long before they were born.

In the next article we will see what happens to these five prisoners of the Castro regime.

September 20, 2010

A VENEZUELAN IN VOICES 2 / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Havana Impressions of a Yuma Adrift

Leo Felipe Campos

To JJ and Adin

MUSIC is intermittent and also intemperate when the sun sets, almost always in the nine days I have been walking all over Havana.

Across its entire waterfront, its 17th, 21st and 23rd; its G and its J; if O and its streets with noble names and people hanging over the railings of their balconies. San Lázaro, Infanta, bicycles and taxis at hand.

Its center and its old side, more wrinkled and touristy. Its Marianao in two double buses, buses with an accordion belly and a lot of people, talking, its typical Central Park with Jose Mari again in the center; the splendor lost in dreams diluted by hunger, injustice and time.

Havana has the brightness of rust and the salty smile. You can smoke anywhere and everyone looks for the shade.

When you pass a couple of foreigners, who are multiplying like flies, the eyes of the Cubans seem to sail back and forth, constantly, and then I think they have all been mariners, or will be someday.

It is the city with its gaze lost on the horizon and its head set in its memories, it moves and moves well, with so many lives, and dances slowly until silence comes and it settles.

It’s not like this in Havana, like a question, but not a desperation, an outburst, a prank that wets its customs in the transparency of white rum, while living its forgetfulness with the rumor of the waves in the background.

If Havana has no money it is because it has taken the hard way, the dignity of its heroes and the resistance of its rocks and enormous arms, ancient and sinewy, embracing the possibility of a striking contradiction: Sad happiness.
For example, the city yields to the Milanese of pork between two widowed slices of bread, and fish wrapped in a slice of ham and another of cheese, but long ago it forgot beef, who knows if it is out of fear of losing milk, because in Cuba, I am told, one of the achievements is that every child up to age seven is assured a serving of milk.

Havana talks of what was and what could be, but rarely of what is, its laughter is eloquent escapism, its composure remarkable. It comes with resignation and stoicism to a common place reserved by the tourists, the re-vindication of the authentic as a weapon in the form of a postcard: A cool-night of red-European restaurants with photographic flashes in the black man’s house, a kind man, on the point of devouring in one sitting what the majority of its citizens have dreamed for some decades, rather than years, is measured in faith. It must be said that in this place the owners of the house eat standing.

In the champion boxing match that in the world’s imagination never ends, Havana assumes the place of David without stones, palm open and unthreatening to tell the foreigner: here we need just a little of what you have plenty to spare, but we, let no one doubt it, we will win.

I have seen thousands of people here, although I know few. All I spoke with for more than two or three continuous hours, or four or five days time, have the tattooed virtue, are respectful and charming, very intelligent. The street fills with people and they don’t seem to notice it, walking there, resolving their days as best they can.

Havana, safer than the other capitals I’ve known on the rest of the continent, is a kaleidoscope of confronted faces, a necessary burst of impossible responses. The heat is staggering, a past that never goes away, the loneliness that gives fame, and the ruins, the debris. It is a tastefully sung lament. A beautiful dress pierced by the light that overwhelms the seams.

I still haven’t had time to see its bare chest, leaving its clothes on the floor, and I still haven’t looked, but I have been watching closely, as closely as I could, and now I think I am sure of one thing: I would have preferred to find it naked.

September 29, 2010

Intellectuals: Between Loyalty and Complicit Silence / Miriam Celaya

Haroldo Dilla, Cuban historian and sociologist. Photograph from the internet.

A few days ago, a friend of mine gave me an interesting opinion piece by Haroldo Dilla Alfonso, entitled “From Loyalty to Complicity.” I can’t tell the readers where it was published, because I don’t know, though it is dated Tuesday, September 14th, 2010, but it is a core article that puts back on the table a tricky issue: the role of Cuban intellectuals on the Island during the past 50 years and in the face of changes taking place in the country.

I must declare, for honesty’s sake, that I usually chase Dilla’s writings, because they are always illuminating and marked by moderation, sober analysis, synthesis, and a deep understanding of the Cuban reality. The article referred to has the additional benefit -which is appreciated- of being as full of energy as it is devoid of passion, a truly rare thing when it comes to debate among Cubans.

Its plot is not, in itself, a novelty: the characters are Cuban intellectuals, those who remain on the island and those in exile. The argument is based primarily on the debate –which took place ten years ago- about what Jesús Díaz called “the silent complicity” of intellectuals inside Cuba in the face of the negative traits of the system, defined by Aurelio Alonso, in turn, as “loyalty on the side of the more genuine revolutionary program.” The scenario in which the theme develops, about which Dilla is commenting now, is the current Cuban reality, not a new theme, but a lot more complex than what it used to be 10 years ago, hence the importance of his article.

Dilla’s piece has also brought me back to the memory of another debate between intellectuals, which took place during the months of January and February 2007, following a TV show in which several individuals responsible for what, in the decade of the 70’s was known as the “gray quinquenium” (and “the gray decade” for others), an act that sparked true and spontaneous virtual discussion that went as far as to include strong questions about the cultural policy of the Cuban revolution. Since the debate took place through e-mails among many Cuban intellectuals inside and outside the Island, the phenomenon transcended into “the little e-mail war” and slowly faded away, after the Culture Minister held a closed-door meeting at the Casa de Las Americas with a group of intellectuals and other personalities in the field of culture, by previous invitation only and with strict controls that prevented entry to a multitude of interested people and participants in the debate itself, who were swarming outside of the meeting place.

Those events, which I experienced personally as part of the editorial board of the magazine Consenso (later Contodos Magazine, both at Desdecuba.com web page), had a kind of expectation that Haroldo Dilla calls a “little ray” of enthusiasm, because we then believed that –finally- Cuban intellectuals would join in the push for change in Cuba and, as opinion leaders, they would generate the thinking guides necessary to equip the ideas of the aimless dissenters or the fed-up and disoriented “masses.” We were hoping that the voices of many renowned intellectuals, who at times had even lent some prestige to the revolutionary process with their talent, would also rise against the lack of freedoms of Cubans and of their own group. It did not happen that way, with some exceptions.

There are special cases, like the poet Ena Lucía Portela, writer Leonardo Padura, actors Pablo Milanés and Pedro Luis Ferrer, and director Eduardo del Llano, among others, who dare to express concerns about the Cuban reality. Others, younger ones, are representatives of a generation that has broken ties with a system alien to their interests; they might represent hope if we could bridge the schism that often characterizes the alienating and escapist stances slowing down their self-consciousness about civic responsibility.

After that memorable virtual revolt of 2007, silence and luke-warmth again dominated. Official counsel returned to its ivory tower retreat, fear silenced almost all the protesters, and many of that time’s lost sheep tamely returned to the fold. The burning fires in some of the more illustrious were placated through small favors granted by the magnanimous power: some of their minor works were published or some others were edited. Some trips and other little perks were granted, and those who could have become prestigious tribunes or promising compasses were, once again, silent.

Our best social scientists in dozens of institutions, witnesses of the critical social situation in the country, have been silent (silenced?) for too long, and, when they have spoken, it has been quietly and asking shyly and humbly, for permission of the authorities, like someone who fears to offend. Now the most devious insist that they are most useful remaining in their respective research centers, “discovering” the truths that we all know and suffer daily. They allege that they are waiting for “the most opportune moment” to bring their proposals to light. Perhaps some of those are good intentions, but who is better served by that silence? I know about what and of whom I am speaking, because I was trained in a social research center where some valued researchers denied in the courtyard what they did not dare to disclose at an event’s podium.

Today, we are faced with the dilemma of a Cuba that is divided between a capitalist government and a country suffering the rigors of a failed socialist project. The banquet among the elite of the ruling caste has intensified; discontent and uncertainty among modest Cubans pile up, and a death silence seems to reign among intellectuals, packed away and untouchable in their Parnassus. They, the ones with tribunes and microphones, with the authority granted by the knowledge, choose the silent complicity in the face of government corruption and the total absence of civil rights.

I fully embrace Haroldo Dilla’s denouncement, when he insists that “there is no reason to be complaisant with the Cuban political elite, including the outspoken octogenarians who have labeled themselves “the historical leadership.” There is no room to believe that the silences, the cryptic criticisms and the requests for excuses are the price of loyalty to the revolution, socialism and the motherland, as the old slogan goes.

And, indeed, in Cuba, the revolutionaries of yesterday are the burden of today. They represent the most reactionary class society. The Cuban Revolution died decades ago. It is time to break the comlicit silence of which Jesús Díaz spoke, and which researcher Haroldo Dilla has brought to the debate arena recently.

Translated by: Norma Whiting

September 28, 2010

Long-Distance View / Regina Coyula

There are people who cannot look forward. It’s not about them being dispossessed or abused after 1959, it’s not even about their refusal to support the ideology that dominated the country. It’s about their personal philosophy, a feeling of inevitability, because I have talked to people who have been heavily affected by the revolutionary laws yet their major interest is not getting back their worldly goods but getting back freedom.. the country !<em>Patria</em>! the poor country, so worn out. Looking at one’s past is more about personality than the magnitude of loss.

There is also the idea of punishing those who collaborate with the government. In a country where the State has been the sole employer for the last 50 years and where any kind of job with responsibility, at any level require political endorsement, everyone turns into a collaborator. Those who didn’t adapt or refused to applaud, have paid for it.

This is not my case, nobody had to convince me. The hardest part came later, when I started raising doubts, when I felt I was betraying my ideals and the memory of my father.

I know that this political process failed by having all the defects of socialist countries in Eastern Europe. The only difference, the one that prolonged the agony of this corpse, is that the leader of the 1959 revolution is still alive; and while Stalin imposed friendly governments in the countries where the Red Army defeated the Nazis, nobody put Fidel where he is.

I’ve already been in the Communist Party and for that now I feel immunised against joining another party, not even one for the protection of flora and fauna. I like the idea of having this space to criticize the current administration and the future ones….but also for talking about friendship, tv series , and what happens to me, because we can’t live only for politics.

ps. Miriam de La Vega thank you so much, I’ve already sorted things out.

Translated by David Bonnano

September 29, 2010

Blockade vs. Embargo: Reason Hijacked / Ernesto Morales Licea

In my judgment, few issues of the Cuban reality are more complex to objectively analyze than the controversial economic, financial and trade blockade-embargo which, since 1962, the United States has maintained against the Island’s government.

While there are topics that we can dissect almost surgically, separating their components with pinpoint precision, on this topic there will never be a last word; there will always be one more argument up someone’s sleeve that merits further discussion.

The conflict is born from the etymology itself: whether someone calls it a blockade or an embargo implies, per se, taking sides. The same thing happens with the name of our former leader: it is enough to call him Fidel or to call him Castro, for an interlocutor to divine the political affiliations of the speaker.

I will take a stab at the definitions: it is not an embargo in the strict sense, nor is it a blockade. A simple embargo, speaking literally, would not include pressure on third countries to prevent trade with Cuba: it would apply exclusively to the transactions with the United States, and it is an open secret that this isn’t the case.

On the other hand, the term “blockade” that the Cuban government uses to define these sanctions, is even less relevant. A true blockade implies military maneuvers so that nothing, by land, sea or air, would be allowed into Cuba from other countries. It might be worth asking the inhabitants of Gaza if they know what a true blockade is.

Despite this double inaccuracy, I see the “embargo” as closer to the truth, although the other term is much preferred by the official sensationalists of my country.

It’s clear: this is not the fundamental issue of a subject that has generated heated debates, by both detractors and defenders of the Cuban Revolution, and even among ourselves those of us who reject the totalitarianism of the system that governs us have not been able to reach a consensus.

Why? Well because to evaluate a measure like this, in my opinion, three fundamental questions would have to be defined, each of which is more complex and subjective than the last. The first: whether its origin, its initial application, was justified or not. The second: its objectives today. The third: the results achieved.

Approaching an analysis with these three premises helps to satisfy a criteria based on a method that separates the issues, which, luckily for us, Aristotle inaugurated many centuries ago.

Genesis

No one doubts the true origin of this severe measure: the outrageous expropriations by the Revolutionary Government after their triumph in 1959.

Hundreds of American citizens and companies were dispossessed, in a flash, of their investments and properties with this Revolution that wanted to change even the water table of the Island. Capital invested according to the laws in force up to that moment was vaporized by the new leaders.

Small national proprietors suffered the same fate: anyone who owned a pharmacy, a barbershop, a candy store, lost his personal achievement at the hands of a collectivist dream that was, also, barbaric and thoughtless.

For these Cubans, however, there was no option but to adapt to the new rules of the game. They could leave the country, live cursing the bearded ones, grow old filled with an understandable hatred, or get aboard the triumphant train, with faith in the promised future. I prefer not to speak about other cases I know of: those who could not bear their helplessness in the face of such arbitrariness, and who took their own lives.

But the U.S. citizens and investors had a government response that sought to impose pressure in return for justice. The embargo was born. The date of its full implementation takes us to February 1962.

At this point, I can’t but admit the validity of a coercive measure that tried — today we know unsuccessfully — to reverse these angry and capricious interventions, disinterring the hatchet of war from the very beginning of the process.

Revisiting Machiavelli

Starting in 1992, after being in place for thirty years, the embargo against Cuba changed its principles and purposes. It ceased to be, first, an effort to pressure the Cuban authorities by calling on their sanity; it ceased to be, then, a robust vengeance in kid gloves; and it became, at last, a premise to reestablish diplomatic relations with the Island.

As reflected in the “Cuban Democracy Act,” these sanctions would last as long as the Cuban government refused to take steps toward “democratization and showing more respect for human rights.”

And here was born the first hurdle to determining the fairness and legitimacy of the measure.

I don’t believe I need to repeat that, personally, I have few desires more deeply embedded than to help in the real democratization of my country. I do not want to die without evidence that this land will distance itself from the intolerance, the hate and the exclusion, to build a just nation in which all its children can find their place. This blog is my microscopic contribution to that.

But not to know if these new demands to lift the embargo were already approaching interference in the internal affairs of an independent country, would not be honest. All possible arguments to that effect do not change the ultimate truth: the blockade is a clear interference in Cuba’s own affairs.

I think that little could answer those who approve of fire and brimstone, against a fact as against a lie: but in the last decade, there have never been more than seven countries that have supported the blockade at the United Nations (in 2004), and never fewer than 155 that have voted against it. On the last occasion, in 2009, only Israel and Palau joined hands with Uncle Sam.

Not even nations frankly, and justifiably, hostile to the communist system, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, or U.S. Allies in its war efforts like Great Britain and Australia, have accepted the role of explicitly and publicly defending the embargo.

Why, one wonders. Because in no way is the Machiavellian precept that the ends justifies the means acceptable, in democratic and reasonable international politics.

That the Cuban government deserves to be rejected in infinite aspects, especially with regards to the human rights of its citizens, is an almost universal axiom. That it is worth the trouble to exercise pressure — as recently happened with the releases of the prisoners of conscience — to get at least the smallest signs of flexibility: one hundred percent agreement.

But it will never be valid to violate the sovereignty of a state with economic sanctions, in order to achieve such purposes. At the instant in which such crude measures to reclaim the nationalized properties were resorted to, while wielding the precept of democracy, the validity of the embargo cracked.
Especially because, the house itself, at times, was glass.

Would it have been acceptable for countries like China and Russia to approve economic sanctions to force the United States to close the shameful prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo? On the other hand, could anyone explain how the United States government adopted this policy against Cuba for being a communist and totalitarian country, yet is a strong trading partner with China and Vietnam?

Snowball is to blame

With each day that passes, the embargo sets new records for longevity. It has outlasted all known members of its species. It even exceeds the record for the longest stay at the helm of a western country, held by ex-president Fidel Castro.

It has had a few touch-ups. The Helms-Burton Act (1996) which reinforced its punitive character; the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act (2000) which turned the United States into the principal supplier of agricultural products to Cuba (6.6% of imports in this sector come from the country of Lincoln). Data that is, of course, deftly hidden from the Cuban people by the official media.

But the question arises, speaking objectively: does anyone get anything from this policy of sanctions?

Of course they do. The Cuban government gets the perfect excuse to whitewash their economic failures and their authoritarian methods. In the book Animal Farm, by George Orwell, when the pig Napoleon wants to justify the excesses and incompetence of his administration, he resorts to the enemy: Snowball. The renegade pig, according to Napoleon’s propaganda, is equally to blame for the crops failing to thrive, as for the water mill that broke for lack of resources.

For the Cuban establishment, the embargo could be renamed “Snowball.”

The “cruel and inhumane blockade” justifies everything from the decrepit economy, to the astronomical debts to foreign firms, to the shortage of drinking water. The “genocidal blockade” guarantees, according to official propaganda, that Cuba cannot allow democratic openings such as a free press, or lifting the restrictions on Cubans traveling freely throughout the world. The blockade carries the melancholy blame for a hurricane that hits us, a drought that makes the earth crack, the pollution in the streets of Havana, and the hunger in the Cuban countryside.

What has been the affect of this policy? On the ordinary Cuban, the dispossessed? The government has used it to justify its excesses and incompetence, and on the other hand, to keep the population from clearly understanding who has been the cause of the ruin that has overtaken the country. It has, also, made the existence of the poor even more difficult, because though the official figures of the losses caused by the blockade are, at times, scandalously hyperbolic, still there is a share of truth in them.

The powerful have never felt its impact. The corrupt have managed to carve out a living standard that sticks out its tongue at the ineffective embargo. But the workers, the lowly ones, they know its consequences.
Has it strangled the government of the Island? No. Has it succeeded in democratizing our battered country? No? Has it achieved international support? No. Has it affected Washington’s credibility with respect to a humanitarian willingness to help Cubans in need? Yes.

Too much time hijacks reason

Even those of us who argue that the centralized economic model, as opposed to the market and foreign investment, cannot achieve the individual prosperity of a man, and that the malformed creature they are presently trying to install can only result in an archaic and dysfunctional economy, even we have to admit something: while the Cuban government continues to be burdened by the embargo, we cannot measure with any exactitude its inefficiency in providing for the welfare of the nation.

When not competing on equal terms, it is unfair to proclaim winners and losers.

To minimize the importance of the embargo, as its partisans tend to do, collecting figures of trade agreements with other countries in the world, traps them between a rock and a hard place: If, then, it is so ineffective, why keep it?

To not admit that it has been a damaging and prejudicial policy for the progress of this country, to not admit that the iron fist of a totalitarian system has found in the embargo a loathsome ally, is to kidnap a reason too obvious in the conflict.

Let me close these particulars and discuss opinions with an anecdote that is strictly true:

When Barack Obama won the election, in November 2008, I had been working for just two months at the radio station in my hometown. I attended, as a curious spectator, an emergency meeting of all the journalists at the station with the top management.

The government concern, this time, was not the ridiculous possibility of an invasion, or a new “destabilization campaign from the Empire.” Now what was keeping the Party up at nights was the possible flexibility on the part of the new president with regards to the antagonism toward Cuba. The bottom line could be summed up very simply: “He is a charismatic and intelligent leader and he might lift the blockade!”

Behind the somber faces of these officials, lay a frank concern: “How can we guarantee the continuity of our Revolution, or our ideology, if Obama allows Americans to travel freely to the Island, and lifts the blockade all at once?”

September 24, 2010

Chaplinesque / Yoani Sánchez

The Water Seller of Seville: Diego Velázquez

The man in the threadbare suit, bowler hat and huge shoes carried pieces of glass on his back. His sidekick, a boy of about five, tossed stones through the windows of shops and houses so the glazier could sell his services to desperate clients. Together they formed a duo of survival, an “emergent” work team, that still yielded barely enough to keep the fire burning in their home. The story, described in the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film, The Kid, has returned to pass in front of my eyes as I read the list of self-employment activities published in the newspaper Granma. Like a repertoire of destitution and dependency, this enumeration of private work seems more in tune with a feudal village than a 21st century country.

Reading through it in one sitting — containing my disgust — it is obvious that there are hardly any occupations directly linked to production. Entrepreneurs would need to be able count on a wholesale supplier to provide raw materials, and the possibility of access to bank loans has barely been mentioned, and without any details about what interest rates would be. Nor is there any talk of the self-employed being able to import merchandise directly from outside our borders, as this continues to be an absolute monopoly of the State. Of the 178 eligible activities, many are already carried out without a license, so being included in this list changes only one thing, being required to pay taxes. Hence the skepticism that accompanies the announcement of these “flexibilities” to let private ingenuity contribute to solving the serious problems of our economy.

What will come as a consequence of this slowness in applying the necessary changes? Citizens will continue to swell the long lines in front of consulates so they can leave the country, or they will fully immerse themselves in illegality and the diversion of resources. If our authorities believe that this trickle of transformations will keep the system from falling apart in their hands while they try to update it, they are underestimating the sense of urgency that runs through the Island. Such a half-hearted approach to applying long-delayed openings weakens the social situation and no one can predict how the frustrated “kids” — those disadvantaged by the massive layoffs and lack of expectations — will react. Hopefully they won’t end up breaking out all the windows.

September 29, 2010

Enriquito, a Good Man, Much Loved, and a Dreamer / Juan Juan Almeida

My name is Ramón Enrique Ferrer Yero, son of Enrique Ferrer (an electrical engineer) and Elisa Yero (a homemaker), I was born on 6 September 1941 in Cuba’s Oriente province, in my dear Palma Soriano, in a home located on Cisneros Street, number 4, top floor, between Martí and Maceo Streets. You can imagine that, with that kind of address, I was born a patriot.

I went to a Catholic school of the Claretian Brothers, then studied at the Sanderson Institute, and later, in the Sinai Baptist school. I didn’t make it to college, due to my views, openly contrary to the evil Revolution, the government didn’t allow me to continue exercising my right to study and chose to cut short my professional life.

In 1962, they started to make my life impossible. They summoned me to the offices of State Security, they pressured me, they tried to blackmail me, they surveilled those who visited my house. All of these things I’m telling you would provoke a discontent in me that I shared with many people.

I’m a practicing Catholic, and I used to attend the church of the late Father Cayo Simón, the parish priest of Palma Soriano. One June day of 1964 or 1966, during a celebration of Saints Peter and Paul, after so much pressure, several of my friends and I agreed to meet in the church to go out and protest, with pots and pans. State Security found out, and together with the Communist Party, brought out many people armed with planks with nails to repress our march. The echo of their cries of “To the firing wall! To the firing wall! Down with the gusanos*!” still sound in my ears… all of a sudden a mob removed me from the church, dragging me before a rudimentary tribunal that they had organized for such needs. I don’t know how I got out of there. The mob that chased me took it upon themselves to stone my house, yelling those stupid chants that struck with the same force as rain against sheets of zinc. Someone I knew well, whose identity I don’t wish to reveal, got me out of that severe nightmare through the patio of my house, put me in a car, took me to the province of Holguín, and, from there to Havana. After some time in the capital, I decided to return to Palma. Immediately after, I was called up to conscripted military service, which wasn’t even military service at that time, but rather the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAPs, by their Spanish initials). There, there were students, doctors, engineers, lawyers… it didn’t matter if they were for or against the Revolution.

They cut the lights off on the town, put us on trucks, and took us, after stopping along the way and picking up youths in Contramaestre, Baire, Jiguaní, Bayamo, Holguín, Tunas… to the stadium in Camagüey, where it rained unceasingly. After registering us, they put me on a cart and sent me, together with a group of lads, to these camps bordered by barbed-wire, in the town of Vertientes, that looked rather like the concentration camps of Hitler’s Europe. Trenches, mud, beatings, torn Bibles, mistreatment, drowning victims, suicides, long walks, early mornings, bad nights, rotten food, thirst, fasting, heat, cold, sickness, skin infections, shivers, rain, sun, forced labor, sugarcane fields, beatings, lost teeth, bayonet-stabbings… Who could forgive such an atrocious thing?

When all of that ended I started looking for work, but I was now labeled and no one wanted to hire me. I got caught by the Slacker Law and they took me to work at a stone quarry, breaking up gravel. On returning to my town, they put me to work sweeping all the parks of Palma Soriano, from where I kept conspiring in activities against the evil Revolution.

The constant threats, disrespect, and summons were my inseparable companions. In 1995, I was taken in by the refugee program offered by the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.

A long while later, and after offering various bribes, they finally allowed me to travel. Upon reaching my destination, I was received with an admirable and emotional welcome that left me speechless. But, to tell you the truth now, in that precise moment, my body was here in the U.S. and my mind over there in Palma, from where I never departed. I want to be among Cubans, so I came to Miami. I could not, nor can I, abandon the cause of Cuba. Here, I signed up with all the different organizations to which I belong to today.

I’m an only child, and my mom wanted to see me after such a long absence. I attempted to go back to Cuba to give her my last farewell, but they denied my entry. That has been the worst punishment. My mother died of sadness; you can imagine how much family separation can hurt. Today I live here with my Virgin of La Caridad del Cobre, with my St. Jude, and with my little dog, Niña. What I most wish for, when that horrific tyranny falls, is to fly off to Palma even if I have to live on the banks of the River Cauto in a house built of palm fronds and timber. I want freedom and democracy in my country; maybe that’s why, each time I lay down in my bed, I can’t fall asleep without first going for a stroll, in my mind, all over my Palma Soriano.

* Translator’s note: although less in use today, gusano, literally “worm”, has been the political epithet historically used by the state, its media, and its supporters in post-1959 Cuba to denounce counter-revolutionaries and citizens who wish to leave the country.

Translated by: Yoyi el Monaguillo

Subtleties of the Jaw / Claudia Cadelo

 Photo: Claudio Fuentes Madan

The line for the bus at Coppelia is a special place, one of the corners so eloquent that if it disappeared one day Havana wouldn’t be the same. Yesterday at ten at night I was waiting for my P4 bus when a woman standing next to me with her daughter commented how “alive” the city was for the anniversary party for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). “Is that a joke, ma’am?” I asked, and she gave me a serial killer look.

The driver swore that not one more person could fit on the P4, so I got on through the back door. A drunk behind me was pushing to cut the line, but he was staggering around and trying to hold onto his bottle of alcohol at all costs and he lost his balance and fell. The driver started while the man was still trying to get on and he was almost killed in the attempt.

The woman of the “lively party,” at my side started screaming, and me, I answered, “He’s so plastered he won’t even make it to the corner!” She added, “He had to be black, all blacks are the same,” and started a lecture all about “those blacks” which if Martin Luther King had heard he would have died a second time. I looked around embarrassed. Everybody nearby was white. No one opened their mouths and I realized that they would all remain mute rather than defend the blacks. I got hysterical, I regretted it later, but at the time I wanted to strangle her, especially since her ranting was quietly being listened to by her young daughter, what a great example!

“Madam,” I said to her, “if I scream ‘Down with Fidel!’ you would be the first to jump on it. May I ask, then, why I have to put up with you talking like you’re the president of the Ku Klux Klan? And if I scream, ‘Down with Estaban Lazo!’ are you going to jump on that too or is it not the same?” The phrase came out rather awkwardly. She said nothing. People were staring at me and soon I felt like I’d stepped out of a tomb at the Colón cemetery, with worms crawling out of my half-gone skull.

I knew I couldn’t stop myself. That should not be the approach to dialog but sometimes dialog is simply beyond my capacity for tolerance. I got off at the stop at 23rd and A and walked the half mile home, talking to myself.

September 29, 2010

Who Will Bell The Cat? / Fernando Dámaso

  1. Exhausted from accessing power through armed struggle, a typical method in the ’60s and ’70s of the last century, the Latin American left reorganized itself and adopted a new tactic: using the institutions and instruments of democracy. Consistent with that, populist leaders outlined politically attractive programs, offered solutions to accumulated social problems, and launched mass media campaigns to capture power in elections.
  2. The new tactic yielded good results and leaders on the left, both democratic and totalitarian, adopted the same. The first, once in power, respected the democratic institutions they used to get there and ruled their countries without political or social trauma. The latter, once in power, have taken on the task of dismantling democracy with the objective of keeping themselves in power, considering themselves chosen by history as the only capable leaders of their nations.
  3. This reality has been ignored by regional and global institutions, based on the criteria that they are democratically elected governments who came to power through elections.
  4. It is generally assumed that these governments were elected by the people. In reality, no government is elected by all the people: it is chosen by a portion of them (fifty percent plus one, or sixty percent, or sixty-five percent of those who voted; there is another forty-nine percent, or forty-five percent, or thirty percent who did not vote for it). It should also be taken into account that a certain percent abstained from voting, usually quite a high number, between forty or fifty percent. All of these taken together would really constitute the people.
  5. It seems that the fact of being elected gives them carte blanche to do and undo whatever they like, forgetting that they should govern for the whole nation, and not only for a part of it, with a cooperative attitude, or at least taking the world into account.
  6. Before the new tactics of the totalitarian left, the democrats, always ready to confront the totalitarian right, have not known how they should react, and have allowed the expansion of evil to become a real epidemic. What can be done with a democratically elected government that, once in power, dismantles democracy? Should one respect their anti-democratic actions. Should one stand by with folded arms because they emerged from the ballot boxes? The answers to these questions either don’t exist, or there is no consensus on them.
  7. It is time to adopt a tactic of confronting these totalitarian leftists governments in power, and not allowing them to go on forever. Not to do so, out of respect for established democratic principles, is to defeat democracy.

September 25, 2010

A Visit to Hard-Core Socialism / Regina Coyula

The day classes started, my son came up with the bomb that he did not want to continue going to his sports school. This is his last year of high school, so I advised him not to make any move and spend six months of classes taught in grade 12 and then start preparing for entrance exams to college. As my son stood by his decision, on Friday, I had to go find his file at the school, and do the paperwork to move him to a school newly opened near the house. Back, and with the record, my son suggested we go for the P-3, the bus route that leaves us closer to home, the first stop, for which we came to a place called Alberro. Alberro is a horrible accumulation of buildings and dusty microbrigades. Unlike Alamar, it has no consolation of being on the coast. I was impressed by the number of stray dogs, so in tune with the place. While my son took several glasses of strawberry soda in a seedy beach bar, I was looking across the balcony railings, each according to its possibilities, and a spot of color in the grayness without form, of a family that decided to brighten up their own facade. On their own, I also saw several signs of a locksmith, an electrician, and Mavys, a hairdresser, but even those signs were as ugly as the environment.

And at the bus stop, of a very good concrete, large, with benches and urine smell, a man with four 40-watt fluorescent bulbs piqued my curiosity. I’ve searched these bulbs for months, they are the same that the workroom of my husband uses, so loudly, and with astonishment, I asked the man where he got them. The man approached with a smile: “Madam, that question should not be said aloud.”

So with the right tone, close now, the man was standing beside us, I repeated the question.

Are you interested?

Sure, I am interested!

40 each and they are yours.

But I am not going to buy them without testing them first.

Do you live far?

Too far. Almost at the end of the bus route.

Oh, that looks good. I have a meeting in Vedado, and if you want, you can give me your address and I will come to your home, you test them so you can see they are fine.

I gave the address rushing because the bus was approaching. I was glad to get away from that place with the firm intention of not returning. It is not contempt for the people living there, many have worked very hard in the construction of their apartments. But why so ugly and badly made? The movement called microbrigades did nothing salvageable. This is socialism, I thought.

I lingered with the procedures of the school and when I got home, my husband had installed not one but two lamp bulbs and I did not remember since when it had operated with more than one. This is socialism, I said.

Translator: Luis Rodriguez

September 26, 2010