Ivan The Terrible / Luis Felipe Rojas

Photo: Luis Felipe Rojas

I met Ivan de la Nuez one day in February of 1998. It was in Holguin, and he wasn’t present but someone gave us a catalogue of an exposition which he had displayed over at Barcelona. I had quickly read it on the Cuba Gazette multiple times. But now, I’ve received three of his colorful books wrapped in nylon: “Three Messages, Three Suggestions, Three Literary Cartographies to live without Fear, or to at least hold hands with someone who will guide you through the anxieties we live with today”, “Where do we live?”, and “Who brought us to this catastrophe known as post-communist Cuba”. They are answers that are found attached to the pages of these books. Out of all them, the one which most interests me is the boldest of publications, the book called “The Map of Salt”, now nearly ten years after its publication in Periferica. After a decade of circulating through the hands of readers all over the world, it has arrived in a dark provincial corner of this island. And that’s how the paradoxes are, the pretexts, the destinies. Since Ivan has proposed to dismantle the myth of insularity and the supposed national identity, to dismount them in the sense of discovering them, removing the veil, the sequin, and the false hieratic pose, he has then attempted to build over the very salt and ruins of what we are today.

They are a set of magnificent essays. Matias Perez, the legendary character from Havana, the National Anthem mixed with individualistic insinuations (not as a warlike march), and an imported reference to Che Guevara, all parade before the cynical and sarcastic prose of Ivan. The expressions of those identities, in the words of Hanna Arendt, go beyond any physical marks — I’ll remember that always.

The Map of Salt which De la Nuez would return to the world a decade ago was intended to continue showing us the path of new discoveries of disillusion, apathy, and the rejection of a unitarian national mark of being Cuban, and has returned today, with much more strength. This is the map of an observer who has been left awestruck before all the events of the last 20 years, and has changed the iconic Korda photo with a hairy Che amidst the breezes of Havana in the 1960’s with a dead guerrillero in a laundry room of La Higuera. The socialist world, eaten up by its own rodents, the New Man that Guevara himself wanted, forced to fill out immigration papers which deny a world open to everyone, and a socialist youth, supposedly limpid, forced to eat at McDonald’s (symbol of “wild capitalism”) because of the rationing.

It’s a good attempt by Ivan, trying to recover his life right at the point where his dream was crushed. It’s the best possible reason to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of a book we could barely find in Cuba, that Map of Salt that we couldn’t taste back then, but which is given context by the deficiencies of our nation. For now it’s enough to be able to read his Red Fantasy (published by Debolsillo, 2010) and Floods (Debate, 2010), with the certainty that one is attending a first act. Half a year is nothing compared to five centuries of delay.

I invite my readers to reach out to Ivan (who isn’t so terrible). To read his books, which are a reconstruction of that traveler we all are, carrying the island on our backs… or maybe to just ignore him. Who knows.

Translated by: Raul G. and Xavier Noguer

September 7, 2010

Empty Hallways / Yoani Sánchez

Ministry of Agriculture building in Havana

Ten in the morning. In those hallways where last week people gathered and chatted during working hours, today not a soul passes. What happened in the seventeen floors of the Ministry of Agriculture that no one steps foot outside their office? The answer is simple: Many fear being on the list for the next cuts, so they avoid appearing away from their posts and thus seeming to be dispensable. Where before they roamed around the office, arms crossed, the strategy now is to look busy, even if it means having to sit behind one’s desk for eight hours.

This scene is not an exaggeration. A friend who works in one of these state agencies, where over-staffing is a chronic disease, described it to me. She explained that there’s not even a long line in front of the water cooler like there was in the past, but that not even that will save them from layoffs. The institution has told them that only those who are indispensable will remain and some have already been notified of their dismissal. My friend squints her eyes and laughs. “They are certainly not going to kick out the director, nor the secretary for the nucleus of the Communist Party, and much less the woman who runs the union,” she concludes, sarcastically.

I’m surprised by the mixture of fear and disdain with which Cubans have taken the drastic reductions in personnel already implemented. On the one hand no one wants to lose their job, but on the other there’s a feeling that unemployment can’t be worse than working for the State. When I recommended to my friend that she take out a license to become a self-employed button-coverer, or a coat-hanger maker, she jumped up from her chair waving her hands, No! No! “If my name is on the next list,” she said, “I’m going to create a scene that will be heard in the office of the minister and every hallway.” But I don’t believe her; like many others she prefers to hide her protest.

October 29, 2010

Orphaned From Journalism (Part 2, Almost Final) / Ernesto Morales Licea

If someone were to ask me, what is the principal weakness, the most glaring problem suffered by Cuban journalism today, I believe I could summarize it without hesitation: It doesn’t resemble Cubans.

It doesn’t resemble anyone. Neither the audience to whom it is addressed, which recognizes less and less these triumphalist news items they read and hear everywhere, nor does it resemble even those who fabricate it. I, along with Leonardo Padura, also believe that there are great journalists in this country — as there are great practitioners in nearly all our social spheres — but they lack a medium in which to practice.

Bearers of the word are not lacking. What nobody sees around them is a democratic platform in which the word is free.

A first element to consider is the distance between the reality reflected in the media, and what every Cuban knows from his own experience starting from the time he opens his eyes in the morning.

The newspapers talk about exceeding targets, labor efficiency, clever methods of cultivation in agriculture, and the same reader who follows the news with his eyes, then has to ask himself through what loophole did the food evaporate, that food the media promised would not be missing from his table.

Cuban Television has patented a macabre cliche it repeats every year with manic precision: All the conditions are guaranteed for the start of the new school year.

We’re already coming to the end of August; it’s only a question of days until the phrase is heard on National Television News.

The journalists, adapting their rigorous questions to comply with the directives of whatever sphere, without going into great detail, without conducting an interview, reproduce the complacent (and often false) words of some officials who announce the upcoming opening of Cuban schools will occur without any mishaps.

What then do the hundreds of thousands of students who walk the halls of the high schools, the universities, find on the first day of the school year? They find a desolate landscape lacking chairs, tables and blackboards; unmotivated teachers discouraged by the lack of current literature needed for the curriculum.

The list of similar differences is endless.

But I think there is a central issue that, in my view, is the principal fault of Cuban journalism, and its professionals.

Zero coverage

How many issues vital to the public welfare and national public opinion have been ignored by the journalists in this country? How much information has been withheld from the citizens who consume what the media tells them as their only possible way of understanding the national and international reality? How unprotected have national analysts left a people? People whom they should defend and protect with their questions, faced with their totalitarian leaders entrenched in power for life?

A perfect example of this would be the uncompleted history of an event that is taking place on the Island today, and about which the rest of the world possesses much more information than the people who live where the event is taking place.

This is the release of prisoners of conscience imprisoned during the Black Spring of 2003. The well-known 75.

What has been the media coverage inside the country of this event which would be socially important in any country in the world? None. Zero. The totality of information available to Cubans from the officially controlled media, has been the trifling note published by the Catholic Church in the Granma newspaper, when the prisoner release was made official. A note, to paraphrase Garcia Marquez, whose wording served not to tell but to hide.

The international media reported extensively today on the release process — and later the exile — of these independent journalist; and in Cuba, the country’s owners continue to speak of apocalyptic nuclear threats, the tension in the conflict with Iran, and books about the guerrilla adventure in the Sierra Maestra.

Stunning, startling disinformation.

Three Examples of the Information of Bewilderment

Taking as a reference point that note published by the Cuban Church on page 2 (inside) of the newspaper Granma, we can deconstruct a trend in the media that has been verifiable for too many years.

Something we could call information about the confusion.

It would be presented something like this: an incident takes place on this Island of Events. The official media (which is all the media there is) look elsewhere, and Cubans, well trained in the exercise, must appoint themselves — it’s never been said better — to clandestinely ferret out the desired information.

However, later, for reasons of political expediency, the establishment decides to respond to some kind of international media pressure. And does so from its media. That is: from ALL its media.

But as connecting to the Internet is an impossibility for the reader, he can only read Granma or Juventud Rebelde (Young Rebel) every morning, sometimes wondering what they’re talking about in these articles which, logically, make no sense.

Here are three recent examples.

1. One day young Eliecer Avila from Las Tunas, from a packed room at the University of Information Sciences (UCI), challenges the president of Cuba’s National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada. First the BBC and then the whole world are talking about it: a young computer science student had the unfathomable courage to ask uncomfortable questions, and to publicly demonstrate his disagreement with the head of his parliament.

Who heard about this in Cuba? Only owners of a computer, with a USB port-connected DVD player, the friends of friends who could access the video. The Cuban press remained absolutely mute.

When they wanted to “disprove” before the whole world that there had been any dissent from this young peasant activist, National Television headed off at full speed to his eastern hometown and stood him before the cameras where he confirmed his support for the Revolutionary process.

The problem was, he was providing follow up to an event that had never been reported on national television.

2. In 2007, a prominent intellectual signing himself James Petras published, together with Robin Abaya, an essay entitled Cuba: Continuing Revolution and Contemporary Contradictions, a serious analysis of the Cuban reality.

Both Petras and Abaya are recognized as comitted intellectuals of the Left. But like so many academic progressives, they tried to defend a social model which is impossible to subject to rational thinking.

Ignoring the stagnation of a country that, like the pillar of salt going back to Sodom has not advanced for decades, is something that requires great persistence from mentally handicapped people, but not from men with their own ideas.

But we all know that admitting criticisms, wherever they come from, has not been a tradition in this land of dreams.

A few days later, Fidel Castro reappeared on the front pages of all the newspapers, and made speeches on all the radio and television newscasts, with a Reflection entitled The Super-revolutionaries, which was an apparent reaction to James Petras’ and Robin Abaya’s article.

The huge percentage of Cubans, completely uninformed about what he was talking about, totally unable to access the original article, could not understand what this exposition of the Comandante was all about.

3. Last, but not least: A poor man dies a grisly death in a hospital in my country. He dies of hunger. Having begun his strike from Kilo 8 prison in Camagüey, 86 days later he stops breathing in the General Hospital of this same city. His name is now sadly famous, Orlando Zapata Tamayo.

Of him, of his martyrdom while he was still alive, very few Cubans knew anything. A few activists from opposition parties knew of him, as did the privileged ones who have access to the Internet. No one else.

The rest of us Cubans living on the island learned of this painful case more than a week after his death, when National Television received the order to counter the huge wave of international protests that were beginning to spread with an awesome force.

I was one more of those taken by surprise, one more of those dismayed with what seemed like something taken from a horror fantasy; and this had just happened right under our noses without a single decent journalist being able to inform his people of the disgrace. A national journalist delivered an embarrassing report on primetime news which simply slandered Zapata Tamayo, manipulated his story and bent the news to the will of the journalist.

The reporter told us that Zapata had been treated at the hospital, never mentioned that he had been on a hunger strike, nor even that he was a prisoner. It was a story that began with the last days of a man whose previous acts we were not given to know.

A journalistic aberration

I cannot describe today the feelings of pain and overwhelming impotence that overcame me after contemplating this material. Minutes after seeing it I wrote an article titled The Death That Never Should Have Been, which is still circulating on the web.

I believe that was the decisive article that led to my expulsion from Cuban institutional journalism.

Julito’s Dream / Rebeca Monzo

My friend tells me that he arrived late and tired to his house, and he leaned back on the living room sofa.

Then his usual friends started arriving. He led them to the basement, where his cellar was. Three spotless rustic tables and benches were all the furniture of the room, which had a very pleasant ambiance thanks to the Spanish bodegón decor.

Soon the three tables were taken. On the tables were various kinds of tapas, full of ham slices, cuts of Galician chorizo, anchovies, eel al ajillo, and delicious Spanish tortilla. All of these were paired to the excellent wines.

Cachita, a regular at the place, possessed maybe by the spirit of a Spanish dancer, left the bench and started dancing and applauding between the tables. Soon everyone was singing in unison. As the bottles emptied, the heat went up. Everyone laughed, singed, and partied, expressing all the joy that a Rioja wine can give. Suddenly, two police vehicles arrived, called maybe, by a resentful neighbour who wasn’t invited. When the police officers opened the vehicles’ doors to push the cheerful guests in, Julito, shaking his head and leaping off the sofa, woke up: Everything had been a dream.

“Only in dreams,” he told me. “How could I have a small business at home, even if I were authorized? Where was I going to get the hams, the wines, and everything else ? Maybe I could have the tortilla, but sometimes you can walk the whole city and not find potatoes. If they liberalized private businesses for real, I could import the wines and the charcuterie. But they will never do that, at least not during this regency. Anyway, for as long as I dreamt, I had fun. Dreaming doesn’t cost a thing!”

Translated by: Xavier Noguer

October 28, 2010

Orphaned From Journalism (Part 1) / Ernesto Morales Licea

Just recently I discovered with regret that I had only one task pending in my passage through the institution of Cuban journalism. A yearning that had been building since my feverish college days maybe five or six years ago.

That is, to attend as a delegate a National Congress of the Union of Cuban Journalists. A difficult undertaking for someone who was not linked to this organization of the Cuban press, and who was not a member of the Union of Young Communists.

It so happens that these congresses stir in me an irrepressible curiosity which, clearly, I can no longer satisfy first hand. Like secret organizations, like the rituals of mystical sects, this meeting where specialists would gather to discuss or analyze a profession that does not exist in their country, seems to me an exotic thing worthy of having lived through and immortalizing in marble.

It would be the same to me if Cuba decided to hold a National Symposium on Eskimo Culture.

To speak without shame about journalism, in a country that has killed its essence, can only be understood as a cruel irony. In any case, it has not lost its attraction for me, nosy person that I am.

I think had I been able to get myself a seat I would have played an amusing game of suppositions. The game would have been this: guess, behind the poses of the meeting, which of these royal colleagues were the ones who thought of themselves as the paladins of information in Cuba, the ones who slept soundly thinking themselves the defenders of the public truth; and which only played the role to survive, knowing in their heart of hearts that real journalism was much more than obeying directives without any opportunity to ask questions.

Because yes, contextualizing a phrase by Pedro Luis Ferrer, there is a question I haven’t stopped asking myself from the moment I became a communications professional in Cuba: are many of the journalists of this country aware of the past that awaits them?

Are they aware of what it will mean, in the future of conciliation that I want to imagine without bitterness or violence, to read what they wrote, full of lies or hiding the truth, repeating the slogans of the tabloids; hearing themselves on the radio energetically supporting decisions which, in the privacy of their own homes, they criticized just as much as everyone else? Seeing themselves applauding in front of the television cameras while listening to speeches they didn’t even want to attend?

I’m speaking not from the point of view or distance of someone who has long since lost contact with our reality. I speak with the knowledge of someone who knew the circumstances, who until just a few months ago talked ad nauseum with my journalist colleagues, believing in our bonds of friendship and listening to revealing testimonies about the blatant and cruel hypocrisy that surrounds journalism in my country.

Any time you evaluate a phenomenon as complex and diverse as communication, in a country of exceptional conditions, multiple possibilities always present themselves, inviting us to dissect the various parts of Cuban journalism. Looking inside one of the leading causes — I say this without hesitation — of the strictures of thought that the society in which I live suffers today.

Just a starting point

I don’t have to make any special effort to remember the initial event that made me question, honestly, the world I was about to join. It happened in an editing booth at the local television station in my province. The year was 2004. I had just turned twenty.

A well-known colleague was editing some material about the single comparison most recreated and manipulated in our national history: Cuba, gray and weighed down, before 1959, vs. Cuba resplendent after 1959. The voice over emotionally narrated the transition, from darkness to light.

But an unforeseen delay threatened the program: the presumably ancient images of the impoverished nation were nowhere to be found. They had looked through all the files, in vain. The documentary had to air the following day.

That journalist’s solution is something I will never forget. She probably will.

She extracted a cassette from among her things. She mounted it and told the editor to capture what came next. Before us was a succession of images of malnourished children with distended bellies, ruined houses threatening to collapse on the camera itself, mud and misery, hunger in hundreds of faces, people in rags, skeletal dogs eaten by scabies.

I was struck dumb. Not by the gruesome impression of the scenes before me, but by my sense of what the journalist was about to do.

The images had been taken (I believe for internal consumption within certain political circles) a week ago in a rural village called Rio Cauto in the province of Granma. The color of the DVC Pro camera they had been taken with revealed their currency. This was no problem, however, for the cubicle with the latest editing software.

Removing the color was the work of seconds. The editor said nothing. Soon the same hungry faces emerged, the same third world landscape, but now in the black and white of a distant past, to which, according to the material, we should never return.

The voice overs of that journalist, now an icon in the local press, spoke of the misery of living on the island before 1959, while images taken just a few miles from home the week before, flashed on the screen. Minutes later, the montage displayed the rebirth of the country in colorful scenes of smiling healthy children and the openings of new buildings.

I didn’t have the courage to watch the film, the following day, when it aired in primetime.

August 22, 2010

Hot Promotions / Regina Coyula

If you live in Havana, are between the ages of 18 and 35, and have completed the tenth grade, you can enroll in an eleven month course during which you will receive a stipend of 280 Cuban pesos (~$11.00 USD) during the first half and 310 (~$12.50 USD) during the second half, with additional payment incentives, promotions, seniority and opportunities to go to the university. Tempting, no?

Well, enroll this course for traffic police and get the great features described.

My son’s classroom was visited by an Interior Ministry official, who gave a presentation on the advantages of studying at a military center and having a career working under MININT (Ministry of the interior). You don’t have to do your Military Service, you can enter with low grades, receive a good stipend, increasing while you study, and get vouchers and reservations for recreational facilities. There were the “aces” in the offer. However, the boys weren’t tempted, preferring to compete for a career that requires high grades, because they omitted to mention it, but most of the boys know, that if you give up a university career for the military life and then decide you don’t want to spend your working life in this institution, you have to serve eight years or they withhold the title.

At a time when a million people are on the verge of losing their jobs, the Ministry of the Interior not only is NOT reducing its workforce — as they have assured their employees – but they are offering hot promotions to recruit staff.

October 28, 2010

Homage to Coco Fariñas / Claudia Cadelo

I met Boris by an odd coincidence. One day he came to my house to find some music and we ended up talking about literature. I discovered that we had a world in common: the desire to be free, to know the truth, to dream about another, less battered, Cuba.

He left me this text and I never knew where or how to publish it. “It’s old,” he told me it, “I wrote it when Fariñas ended his hunger strike, but still I want you to read it.”

Boris knows, as I do: Coco carries the history of Cuba on his shoulders. With his martyrdom he is writing the heroic deeds that we have not even been able to dream of.

I offer you this text now because although Guillermo Fariñas has been eating since July, his body still carries the pain of such a long strike. And because there are men and actions that last forever.

“The Responsibility of Guillermo Fariñas” by Boris González Arenas

Less than a week ago I had begun to write an article about Guillermo Fariñas. Just days before, on Saturday July 3, the Granma newspaper had published an interview with one of Guillermo’s intensive care team. At the end of it made it clear that he was already in serious condition and could die if things didn’t go well for him.

I was unwilling to let his death pass without something more.

Suddenly, yesterday, Friday, the Cuban government made a commitment that within less than four months they would free the rest of a group of Cubans who had been disgracefully arrested years ago and condemned to outrageous sentences. I learned from friends who had read the news that Guillermo Fariñas had abandoned his hunger strike.

My joy could not be greater. The political prisoners will be released and Guillermo Fariñas, who has won the admiration of all for his unswerving commitment, will live.

I envy the feeling a generation — my children — will have when they read about this episode where the tenacity of a handful of men and women overcame a huge repressive apparatus and the totalitarian arrogance of its beneficiaries.

No one can read about this episode without a minute’s silence for Orlando Zapata Tamayo, whose death we know about not because the Cuban state chose to communicate it, but by the universal indignation of the best of the citizens of the world. A man whose death we also found out about because of a cowardly article published in the official Cuban press, four days later, full of bombastic and disrespectful language that still has not been moderated, despite the fact that everyone is repelled by it.

Is the freedom of those condemned the long-awaited pivot point of the Castro regime, with its decades of failures? Now, in a fit of common sense, has it decided on a slow but irreversible process of change in our country?

I’m sure that’s not the case, that the Castro regime would rather see this nation burn than facilitate its revival from the death it has imposed on it. I want to be wrong, my mistake would be the good fortune of a country that has suffered enough.

Fariñas and Tamayo are symbols of the Cuban resistance and the determination of our country to achieve the social and political freedom that has been so elusive. Both have shattered the perverse policy of presenting the opposition as a handful of men paid by external enemies for chanting what the national and foreign intellectuals have failed to bring to light.

Because is he not tired of the things of life, but only of death, Fariñas is now one of the leaders of the Cuban opposition; his victory has become a foundation of the new Cuba, of a country perpetually under construction. Not of a tiny opposition that aspires to see the entire structure of the Cuban state blown up, and along with it thousands of compatriots in a fratricidal confrontation, but of an opposition of all Cubans who have suffered under decades of the Castro regime’s immobility and irresponsibly and who now demand the reconstruction of our state based on our own free will. Who demand the reconstruction of a Cuba of plural decision-making, one that will not be stopped, by fearful and cruel despots, from the greatness of the task that our citizens have never hesitated to undertake.

Guillermo Fariñas and Ciro in March 2010. Photo: Claudio Fuentes Madan

Not to build our country to surrender it to the enemies of humanity, whose presence in sovereign nations and whose arms impose an authority over the lives of children, men, women and the elderly. Although today the United States is governed by a progressive leadership no one should forget that in former times it led a genocide and nothing prevents a similar process from overshadowing its present work in a few years.
Nor to build our country under the shadow of credits committed by the Latin American political class, inflamed traditionalists whose treacherous background we Cubans know all too well.

The inordinate challenges facing Cuban society are a consequence of the greatness of its mission, and the severity of obstacles presages a prodigious generation of men and women from the whole world coming to the only conceivable conclusion, a full realization of our humanity.

These are times when we must look at Cuba with new eyes, to feel the force of its breath and the strength of its people. The breath and strength of unsuspected resonances and vigorous inspiration. Guillermo Fariñas is the peak of its virtue and the awakening of its hope.

It is not a small thing that he has asked of his deteriorated body, but men and women like him, those who decide to pull the world toward the dawn, cannot falter when they see the first light.

Sunday July 11, 2010

Posted to Octavo Cerco: October 27, 2010

From The Other Side of the Ruins / Ernesto Morales Licea

Every time I’ve heard the stories of prolonged trips and family separations from some foreign friends, I have come, inevitably, to the same question: why does it affect us Cubans so cruelly to be separated from our friends and loved ones?

I know cases of young Europeans who study at universities abroad, or Latin Americans who are working in the United States and stay to live there permanently. I’ve never felt in their testimony the same yearning, heartrending, suffering, the same agony, that the exiles from my country share.

To analyze the causes of this fact takes us along complex routes where the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of our nation’s history played a decisive role.

However, one of the practical reasons that I constantly return to could also explain it: we Cubans have lived so long together, so close to each other, always in the same house, that the concept of family and homeland has a very narrow scope for us.

Cubans in this era, with rare exceptions, are born and live their entire adult lives in the same household. There are two, three, sometimes four generations under one roof.

Moreover, from our earliest consciousness, we take for granted the almost total inability to move within the country or to know other parts of the world. And so part of what we take as “ours” — part of what is restricted in so many cases — is the portion of the universe we see around ourselves every day.

Moving house, separating ourselves from the family we were born into and shared all the years of our lives with, has a devastating impact whose scope would be incomparably more limited if Cuban existence were different.

That is why the phenomenon of housing in this country has a connotation that goes beyond what is normal at times. To talk about a home in Cuba, carries a heavy weight of meanings that make the issue an abyss of possibilities.

It is remarkable, the efforts, submissions, blackmail and suffering that are withstood in this land by those with access to the divine privilege of four walls to sleep within; and even the extent to which there is an absence of furniture has conditioned Cuban society as we know it today.

This, however, is not the particular point that I want to discuss. That is, I will not try to describe the situation of an area that constitutes one of the cornerstones of the misery that has overwhelmed my country. Others, with notable success –filmmakers, writers, photographers, fine artists — have already taken this on.

I prefer, rather, to turn my head in another direction, looking across the ruins and asking myself where have so many resources been spent, the materials, the labor, that could have been used to solve, or at least alleviate, the Dantesque condition of Cuban homes.

In what fantasy world of the absurd, and of government mistakes, are the resources of thousands of families invested? Resources that could be used to build decent housing, or to repair their battered walls?

I wanted to make a “leaflet,” an incomplete and epidermal record of my surrounding reality. Every Cuban, from his environment, could provide their own testimonies of governmental irresponsibility in managing resources, however, those that I refer to highlight, in my city, not only the shocking callousness, but also provide a clear reference for how strong the habit is, on this island, of thinking of anything and everything except the real welfare of the population.

THIRTEEN MARTÍ HOUSES, ONE WITHIN REACH OF EVERYONE

About four years ago an event took place in Bayamo that transcended the boundaries of silence that the State imposes on such happenings: the regular and brutal eviction of “illegal” settlements in semi-rural areas of the city.

It affected hundreds of people who, without the possibility of a dignified life in the country, tried to come nearer to the provincial city in search of better working conditions and livelihoods. They had constructed shacks. They had adapted old walls of warehouses and sheds, as a starting point to began building their houses through shear hard work.

One morning, after stern warnings about the impossibility of remaining there, the authorities woke them up with bulldozers and police cars. They were firmly evicted and their third world homes were torn down.

Then, at just that time, a project had been approved in this province which I believe holds the laurel of being the most disconcerting waste of recent times.

It was to build a replica of the birthplace of our Apostle, in each municipality in Granma province. That’s right: 13 Martí cottages; one within reach of everyone.

The idea, as I heard it, came from the then First Secretary of the Communist Party in the agricultural town of Yara. This innovative manager decided to go down in local history as a contributor to an educated and sensible idea. Unfortunately, the most insane and incomprehensible projects, always arise among the party leaders and their enthusiastic followers.

Some are not even finished. Half were abandoned for various reasons. Others were inaugurated with great fanfare (read: with television cameras and partisan applause), and now nobody knows what to use them for. And others, such as the notorious case of my city, varied from the original idea for the sake of the necessary “savings”: instead of the entire house, only the facade was erected. The door opens inward to a semi-vacant space, where it rarely some cultural event is held; it also serves the neighbors for midnight mating, and for an overnight shelter for drunks.

PREPARATIONS FOR THE WAR OF ALL PEOPLE

Bayamo must have, in all of Cuba, more shelters per mile than any other area. It’s a fact about which I would like to sure, but I venture to advance and affirm it.

I greatly doubt that smaller cities can boast a greater number of underground pathways for refugees of war, as are hiding today in this city of three hundred thousand inhabitants.

According to the Chief-of-the-Works of one of the most comprehensive and extensive shelters of this provincial capital (who, of course, requested complete anonymity), investors could not even give me the exact amount of cement, iron rods, wood and aluminum used in construction of these underground passages.

“It turns out that building this whole thing started in the early ’90s – precisely when it was said that during The Special Period, the Yankees were going to attack, and so much time has been invested that the workers and supervisors have changed so we can’t measure the cost in the real sense. ”

Because yes, that’s the point: according to the official talking points our Cuba is the permanent target of a U.S. invasion, ergo we must prepare for a “war of all the people.”

To this end, and under that slogan, million in resources have been devoted to testing military readiness in the famous “Days of Defense.” And millions of pesos in materials are used, in addition, to build these “tropical bunkers” which one day may be photographed or filmed, to reveal the size of the belligerent folly of those who made the decisions.

MEN OF STONE FIRST, MEN OF MEAT LATER

In 2005 a natural phenomenon known as Hurricane Dennis was merciless, among others, to the poorest inhabitants of the south eastern region of Cuba.

In Granma province, residents of coastal towns as Pilón, Niquero, Media Luna (damp villages where a simple glance reveals the thinness of men and animals) savagely lost their homes at dawn on the day Dennis chewed everything in his path.

It happened in July, a vacation month, and I preferred to spend my days to contribute what I could to the recovery of my fellow countrymen who were living in an inferno of insane proportions. I knocked on the doors of the bishop of my city and introduced myself as a young non-Catholic who, in his life, had entered the parish perhaps twice, but who wanted to join in the Church’s efforts to help the homeless.

Two days later I was in a truck surrounded by young Catholics, armed with tents and clothes collected from everyone, and donated by American churches en route to those villages that nature had destroyed without mercy.

I remember the yellow fields, tree trunks and fences pulled out of the ground. I remember the faces of the dispossessed who were on the road, and looks of sadness that exhibited even by the stray dogs. I remember the despair, the terrible feeling of madness, suicide, starvation, which weighed after each image that we contemplated from the car.

However, something caught our attention in a special way, to the point of asking the driver to stop.

Some of us got out: we wanted to prove that our eyes deceived us. Before us, on one side of the highway to Pilón, surrounded by ruined dwellings and peasants sleeping outdoors, a brigade of builders, obeying orders from above, were using large quantities of cement to re-erect hundreds of plaques with the faces of those who had assaulted the Moncada Barracks.

Before the cyclone, they had “decorated” the road with images of revolutionary heroes, and large billboards with ideological messages. Now that those affected were sinking into depression they had to rapidly erect the fervent propaganda.

I remember asking one of the buildings, containing my outrage under a dismissive tone, why couldn’t that same cement be used to manufacture homes for the homeless who watched them work in silence. His answer made me bow my head:

“I wish I could, muchacho, I would first build a house for me. My wife and my three children are sleeping under the boards that were my ceiling. I also lost my home.”

Even today, five years later, an unknown number of those affected have failed to repair the damage. Some have raised their shacks again, but never managed to get hold of another TV, another refrigerator. Many have not even been able to raise the shack of wood framing, cement and zinc where they spent the nights before the fury of Dennis in 2005.

But the highway to their devastated villages in the eastern Pilón, displays with an embarrassing pride, hundreds of immense billboards, hundreds of rectangles of cement from which the face of a martyr looks into infinity. The face of a man who probably would never have allowed his image to steal the materials from which a worker, a farmer, someone mistreated by life and by their bosses, might manage to find a bit of comfort for his bones.

October 25, 2010

S.O.S. Varadero / Rebeca Monzo

Last night, at the home of some friends, where some architects were gathered, one of them, very well-connected, told us that he was very sure that they were going to demolish the Varadero Hotel International, to use its grounds to build a very dull one, certainly, just like any of the thousands spread along the different tourist beaches of the world.

I think I felt pressured, because I was indignant, impotent, sad and my face turned red, thinking that this was imminent.

I thought then of the marvelous art deco hotels I knew as a child when we went to Miami, and on returning to that beach, fifty years later, I saw, shining, as if it had just been built, emerging proudly between its two younger siblings, but much larger in size. I felt a deep satisfaction to see how reasonable people were able to defend more than the monetary value of the land, the historical memory of a country.

Just like Miami Beach would be like any beach, with hotels like you can find in any resort in any country, except that there is a but that distinguishes it and sets it apart: it’s art deco hotels and its Fountainebleau from the fifties, far from devaluing it, it made it more valuable.

From here I call on everyone who, like me, would like to preserve the architectural values and memory of a country, write to the authorities of my planet, call for the salvation of the Veradero International Hotel, its flagship hotel. This beautiful beach has already lost too much to let apathy do away with its beautiful bungalows that so distinguish it.

October 12, 2010

I Don’t Even Have a Television and for the Police I am A Subject With A High Standard of Living / Iván García

A couple of days ago I was walking with a friend to my daughter’s house and a cop car stopped us and asked for our IDs. Dog-faced like the usual Cuban police. They frisked us on the public street like common thieves. They wanted me to open an envelope with some magazines a Brazilian friend had sent me.

Accustomed to this, one sees it as something normal. If you are young, have a backpack, or are black, you have all the characteristics the cops look for to ask for your ID.

They check us out and call us into the central computer to see if we have records. We come back clean. But in my case I hear one of them say, “The subject has a high and worrying standard of living.”

The officer looked be over carefully, on good and dressed in cheap and sensible clothes. Maybe he thought he’d made a mistake. When he handed me back my documents I asked him what that term meant.

“It signifies people who live well but don’t work.” And is that a crime, I asked. “It’s against the rules of this society,” said the official sitting in the latest model Lada.

Before leaving I wanted to know: And what if the person receives money from abroad? What it they follow the same absurd laws despite the government’s call for self-employment and a million people who are going to become unemployed?

Now his face showed contempt. “And why do you want to know so much? Maybe because you are a lawyer and a journalist?” He put the car in gear without waiting for my answer.

In their control of the citizens, the agents of authority blatantly violate the rights established in existing laws. It so happens that neither the police or the ordinary people know what they are.

Ignorance with respect to Cuban laws is proverbial. It disturbs me that the police open a file on someone because they are able to maintain an acceptable standard of living without stealing or violating the laws.

According to the island’s owners, anyone who doesn’t work for the State and who eats lunch every day and who, on the weekend, spends time with their family, calls attention to themselves and needs to be watched and investigated.

The rigid police bureaucracy keeps their accounts. Those who work receive some 20 euros a month and with this salary they cannot afford these “luxuries.” According to the authorities, someone who works 8 hours cannot drink name brand beer, eat at good restaurants, fix their house or buy a plasma TV.

If you receive money from abroad, even if it is justified, but you’re not working for the State, you’re always on a knife’s edge. The suspicions of the police and some of the informants of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) fall on these people, whom they think of as possible suspects, for supposedly having a higher than average purchasing power.

Nobody on the island may have a high standard of living if it is not authorized by the regime. This causes many people to live surrounded by paranoia and phobias.

I know a friend, a ministry consultant, who advised me throw trash in bags of nylon that are not so transparent, so that neighborhood informants do not know if I use products purchased in foreign currency. He gave me a camouflage manual. Participate in activities of the CDR. Give soap to the snitches on your block. And never drink beer or eat at places near your home.

I refuse to live with that guilt complex. I’m a journalist and I make money with my work. My family lives in Switzerland and sacrifices sends me money.

Only in a closed and sick society like Cuba’s could it be dangerous to eat twice a day, take private taxis for ten pesos, and try to make sure your daughter lacks nothing.

So I’m living all wrong. The Russian TV I have in the living room broke years ago. If I have not thrown it out it’s because I use it as a place to put the books I’m reading. In the photo you can see that. Next to it, the old fan.

I aspire to live better. But above all I consider myself a free man. And that is where a person can be dangerous in Cuba. Precisely that question.

Iván García

CLARIFICATION

Since October 2009 Ivan has received money for his contributions to the on-line edition of El Mundo/América, most of which goes to the apartment where he has lived since 1979, which is in very bad repair. He need to fix it so that his wife and daughter can come to live with him (currently they both live in her mother’s house). He needs to fix the wiring and kitchen, and purchase materials to fix the bathroom. A lengthy and costly process, delayed now for several years, because in addition to the kitchen and the bathroom, the apartment has a living/dining room, three bedrooms, a hall and a terrace. After it’s all fixed and painted he will need to buy furniture, little-by-little, as poor people in Cuba do these things. The rest of what he earns goes to support his 7-year-old daughter; so that his mother-in-law, a cook, can buy food; for internet cards (every two hours costs 15 CUC and he needs an average of three to four a month because, as you can see, he is an independent journalist who writes from Havana), and to change 20 CUC for pesos to pay the rent, light, telephone, gas and water, and to be able to take a private taxi costs ten pesos. When I can I send money from Switzerland (I receive the minimum pension of a retiree and political refugee), which goes to help my granddaughters and my 90-year-old uncle. (Tania Quintero)

October 27, 2010

The Cuban Way? / Miriam Celaya

As everyone knows, the tendency of many Cubans to magnify the qualities of the Island’s nature and its natives, as if we had been chosen by divine grace, is proverbial. There are a few written works – some of them real satiric gems – whose sole purpose is to satirize this peculiar habit of ours to “be the bestest”: the ones who dance the most, the most mischievous, the best flirts, the bravest, the best lovers, the most loving, the ones who drink the most (and best cheaters), the funniest, the most caring, the most generous, the best hosts, the best baseball players and a long list of others that, of course, only include good things. To be even luckier, we were born in “the most beautiful land human eyes ever saw,” so the most beautiful beaches in the world are in Cuba, and the most fertile lands, the gentlest climate and the best tobacco, best rum, best coffee (here, an etc. similar to the one before). As if so much perfection were not enough, we are, in addition, touched by the gift of wisdom: we know about everything and we know it all. We are, therefore, something like superior stock, the result of a sort of celestial magma placed in this world to the wonder, amazement and envy of mankind.

It’s unfortunate that, seemingly, so many virtues turn out to be useless when dealing with the harsh reality that we have been dealt, especially what we have been living through for the past half a century, and in particular, at this juncture. Since last October 4, 2010, the volcano of the layoffs previously announced entered its active phase and – to my knowledge – in meetings that have already been taking place in some workplaces, such famous Cuban qualities as solidarity and empathy have been relegated to second fiddle, and true camp battles are taking place among and against everyone to hold onto their jobs. Of course, the more attractive those positions are, like those related to tourism and others with similar opportunities for access to “convertible” currency, the bloodier the attacks and stronger the accusations against each other: “Why am I going to get fired and not what’s-her-face, who is corrupt and accepts bribes?” “Why me and not whosie-face, who’s always late?” In the midst of so much moral decay, there have been revelations of bedroom secrets: “Sure, they are not going to fire You-know-who because she f…ed the head of the commission.” It is said that, in recent days, the meeting of the dismissal commission at Terminal 3 of the International Airport was a real scandal that brought to light so much dirty laundry and corruption of work “companions” that even the District Attorney will take action in the matter.

Definitely, at the moment of truth, too many Cubans put aside their love and their famous sense of humor and tear each other apart mercilessly, and the worst thing is that this is not a new experience. They did the same thing during the meetings of the 70’s and 80’s, those in which they “assigned” electrical appliances in the workplace, and more than 500 workers had to compete in revolutionary merits for a single Soviet refrigerator; or when it was time to hand out twenty or so apartments in a new micro-brigade building among hundreds of candidates – who had been working in the sun for years on its construction – and the officials in their guayaberas – who remained in their air-conditioned offices all that time – and suddenly all that hatred and the most acrid accusations came unleashed, not among the system’s managers, but among those who had, up to then, while they worked together side by side, shared their snacks and their hopes.

At the zero hour, no Cuban – or almost none, to avoid being absolute, although I have not known any exception to this rule – has the wisdom to discover where his real enemy is. At the zero hour, a Cuban on the island, instead of closing ranks with his fellow prisoners and staking the flag and saying, “either nobody leaves or we all leave”, instead of saying one thing and feeling another, vents his anger and frustration against his companions in a despicable, opportunistic and aggressive attitude that only defends the precariousness of his own survival. No Cuban here will leave with a placard that reads with at least one sentence begging, “don’t get me fired, I have family to support”, neither will he point his finger at his long time boss. These days, any Cuban will turn tormentor against one another, stupidly believing that action will save his neck. The myth of the native kindness breaks down because, deep down, if there is one thing this system has stamped on the national conscience it’s fear, with its eternal maximum expression: cowardice. Today, that is the most visible characteristic of a Cuban. The government knows it well, and it has the advantage of power and strength. That is why it has leisurely laid off with impunity half a million workers in barely six months; that is why it allows itself to decide the moment, the rhythm and the depth of the so-called “reforms” to “update” a model that for 50 years has already demonstrated its ineffectiveness and that, thanks to the proven “courage” of Cubans, threatens to maintain the sultanate until the end of time.

Photo: Orlando Luis

Translated by Norma Whiting

October 22, 2010