The host country of the Second CELAC* Summit proclaims on its public billboards the principle of accepting diversity within unity. The invited guests should know that the main purpose of the Cuban government is that the other members of the Community should accept a peculiar feature of Cuba which makes it different from the rest: that within the Island political diversity is not accepted, and much less are those with political positions distinct from the ruling party able to meet in an Alternative Forum to debate in a parallel way the issues of concern to the Summit.
Cuban writer sends message to the attendees at the CELAC Summit.
Ángel Santiesteban, sentenced to five years in prison, asks the leaders invited to the meeting to not convert their visit into an act of support for Raúl Castro’s regime.
The writer Angel Santiesteban is sentenced to five years in prison (Cortesía).
Luis Leonel León / Special
The Cuban writer, Ángel Santiesteban, sentenced to five years in prison, asks the presidents and international political figures invited to the Second Summit of the Community of Latin Amerian and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Havana, that they not convert their visit into an act of support for Raúl Castro’s regime.
“The Castro brothers have been the most skilled manipulators in the hemisphere. Their political astuteness has kept them in power for more than half a century. To support relations with the dictatorship is a shameless act that the attendees will add to their curriculum vitae,” Santiesteban declared, in a message sent from the Lawton Prison Settlement in Havana.
Santiesteban, one of the most prominent contemporaneous writers of the island, affirmed that Cubans could never resolve their internal problems by way of civic protest, since any popular demonstration would be suppressed in hours, as happened on August 5, 1994. continue reading
“We don’t have the possibility nor the way to decide our future. All of us who have taken this step find ourselves in prison or obligated to abandon the country,” the intellectual pointed out.
The CELAC Summit will take place in Havana on January 28 and 29, with the attendance of some 20 heads of state and governments, including the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, and the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, José Miguel Insulza.
Santiesteban, 48 years old, was condemned under charges of “violation of domicile and injuries” against his ex-wife in a controversial judicial process. He entered prison on January 28, 2013, and since then has gone on hunger strikes to protest the conditions of his detention and “a fabricated trial.”
“My crime has been to write what I think about Cuba and its dictatorship, something that I’m not going to stop doing,” said Santiesteban in an interview granted from prison to Diario Las Americas.
A few days ago, several officials violently ransacked his cell, since they presumed he could be preparing to make a statement to the foreign press.
During the search, they confiscated the magazines and books they found, among them the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the by-laws of Amnesty International and a story that he hadn’t finished writing.
Although other Cuban intellectuals have been interested in his case, the government continues to keep him isolated “hoping that they forget about me.”
During the beating that a group of agents from State Security gave him before he was sent to prison, one of them warned him that he could have something happen to him like the opposition leader Oswaldo Payá, who died in a controversial accident in July 2012.
“When you get out of prison, you could die as if it were an accident,” Santiesteban remembered an agent warned him while they were beating him in November 2012.
That year Santiesteban also wrote an open letter to Raúl Castro, in which he accused him of intensifying the repression against the opposition. Days after sending it, they charged and condemned him for the supposed crime of domestic violence, which under a normal proceeding would have been sanctioned only with a fine.
“Since I began my blog they always told me to give it up and occupy myself with literature. As I didn’t stop, they fabricated a case of domestic violence in which they alleged that I entered the house of my ex-wife, the mother of my son, to beat her. They used false witnesses, hoping to silence the true reason they were prosecuting me, which is my dissidence,” argued the writer.
Amnesty International
Intellectuals, activists and human rights organizations have requested that Amnesty International recognize Santiesteban as a prisoner of conscience, but up to now the organization hasn’t responded.
However, he considers that “something strange has happened.”
“I don’t know what purpose those lists serve,” he declared. “Except to support a cause and offer cover to someone in the claws of a totalitarian power, to more or less assure his life.”
He remembered that two days before going to prison he received a call from Amnesty International assuring him that they recognize his cause, but that they couldn’t add his name to the list until he was in prison. Later he learned that someone in Cuba had bothered to puruse it, because the organization had placed his name on the list of political prisoners without consulting him.
“However, it doesn’t make me lose sleep. I can’t turn back from the road I took. Everything started when I expressed ideas that were adverse to totalitarianism. My crime has been to think differently.”
False proofs, manipulations and silences
To reveal the falsity of the judicial process they planned against him, Santiesteban used the collaboration of a friend who pretended to be a prosecutor and demanded that the false witness tell her the truth about what she maintained about the accused.
“The conversation with the supposed prosecutor was recorded,” he said. In it the witness confesses that she had been pressured and bribed to testify against me.”
He described that during his presentation in court, searching for arguments to condemn him for the supposed maltreatment of his ex-spouse, they ordered him to write a sentence extracted from the newspaper Granma (the official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba).
“After analyzing my handwriting, a proficient calligrapher dressed as a soldier certified my guilt, saying he found a certain inclination and a suspicious size in my letters. It would be a joke if I weren’t in prison,” he commented.
Six months ago, the request for review of the case was delivered to the Minister of Justice, where they allege that the documents have been lost and that they don’t know who removed them. Recently the attorney who represents Santiestbean discovered that some of the documents had been extracted from the file.
“The regime is hoping that they will forget about me, in order to kill me later,” reported Santiesteban. “They’ve threatened me with that on multiple occasions,” he pointed out.
Published in Diario las Americas
Ángel Santiesteban, a victim of the repressive politics in Cuba
The Cuban writer is in the Lawton Prison Settlement, in Havana.
Ángel Santiesteban, Cuban writer. (otrolunes.com)
Iliana Lavastida/Special
@IlianaLavastida
Destroying the image of their political adversaries is a tactic of regimes that want to control the masses. The same as the Nazi ideologues, who achieved the manipulation of the minds of million of followers, totalitarian governments like the Cuban one use the method to destroy the figures who oppose them.
Ángel Santiesteban, winner of various Casa de las Américas prizes and winner of such prestigious competitions as Juan Rulfo and Alejo Carpentier, is recognized as one of the strongest voices in contemporary Cuban literature. However, his decision to dissent and to dare to question the repressive methods of the regime and open up through his blog on the Internet, which he considers “a space for constructing free thought,” implicated him in a judicial trial, after which he ended up being condemned for a common crime.
After a rigged trial, the prosecutor came forward with an order of 15 years of privation of liberty against the intellectual, who was accused of rape, robbery and attempted murder against his ex-spouse, the mother of one of his two sons, and they also prohibited him from approaching her for two years.
In these moments, the writer is in the Lawton Prison Settlement, in the Cuban capital. From one of his cells, thanks to the collaboration of activists inside and outside Cuba who support the dissident, the photos of Santiesteban behind bars accompany as graphic testimony the interview he granted to Diario Las Americas.
The five years of prison he is serving, according to the figureheads of power, are intended to make him desist from his interest in writing about the truth, but the same declaration of principles published by Santiesteban while he awaits sentencing define exactly what he has chosen as his lifeline.
“Since I undertook my journey with the blog, I felt the energy of a liberty that I didn’t know. And once it’s tried on, now it can’t be missed. It’s as essential as oxygen itself.”
Community Communicators’ Network on the ground floor of the building — Courtesy of Marta Beatriz
HAVANA, CUBA — This last Wednesday, I was walking quickly through Belascoain, disgusted by the odor of urine from the doorways. Every once in a while a peddler called his wares. On arriving at Zanja, crossing the street, the area was deserted. Three men in plainclothes blocked the door of building 409, where Marta Beatriz Roque Cabello lives.
I tried to ignore them and continued. The door was locked.
“Where are you going?”
“Who’s asking?”
The man, with an eastern accent, responded while putting in front of my eyes an identity card with initials in red: DSE.
“State Security Department, my dear,” he said with that lack of professionalism that one cannot imagine.
He did not clarify what it was all about. He again asked me the first question, and I told him that I was going to see Marta Beatriz Roque.
He took my identification and led me inside the building. He called one of his minions, a black man about two meters tall and more than 50 years of age, whom he called “brigade-ist.” And he told him, “Keep her here, she cannot go up to see Martha Beatriz.”
A thermos of coffee on one of the steps of the wide staircase betrayed the complicity of some neighbors with the political police. Two uniformed policewomen appeared on the scene. The “brigade-ist” charged one of them with watching me. continue reading
I tried to find out what had happened to the boys of the Communicators Network, which was supposed to meet like every Wednesday in the home of Marta Beatriz, director of the group. The answer could be assumed, but getting a statement from the authorities is always the most difficult. I did not get one.
Beginning last November 19 there has been a police blockade around Roque Cabello and the group of community reporters who from their locations in 9 provinces report on events that affects the lives of common Cubans: collapses, evictions, disasters in medical care, and social security. All these testimonies absent from the massive official medial, monopolized by the State.
In all, the members of the Network come to 127. They have a common denominator: They are not afraid; at least this situation has not managed to paralyze them. They have managed to get people to tell their stories with their complete names and photographs! Sometimes even their personal address.
They have a bulletin entitled Hairnet which is published every fifteen days. Hairnet is printed and distributed clandestinely within Cuba.
Other digital sites like Cubanet, MartiNoticias, Diario de Cuba, Miscelaneas de Cuba and Primavera Digital publish their accounts. They have served other independent reporters by identifying items of interest.
Precisely, I had gone there in order to write about the boycott, the physical attacks, acts of repudiation, arbitrary detentions of them; perpetrated by the political policy with the collaboration of some neighbors of the building. The only thing that I could do was try to obtain more information.
I again asked the uniformed policewoman about the members of the Network.
“Are they detained?”
“I do not know. I cannot explain it to you.”
“Can I make a telephone call?”
“No.”
I asked her if she had no doubts that what she was doing was correct.
“You’re going to convince me that what Marta Beatriz is doing is fine?” she asked me.
It seemed to me that she doubted.
“What do you think that Marta Beatriz does? It’s not going to be the bad thing they have told you,” I said at my own risk.
I got no answer. I went on to explain to her that citizen journalism is a right protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that if she was not familiar with the document, I told her that in the civilized world anyone can express his opinions, even against official policy and not be bothered for it. Much less by the police, charged with protecting the tranquility and freedom of citizens.
She ordered me to shut up. A commotion ensued that made the second woman police officer come down the stairs. Until this moment, she had been on the landing obviously in order to impede Marta Beatriz from leaving her home. The two policewomen and I were arguing with raised voices when we saw Marta Beatriz taking photos on the stair landing. One of the women ran after her, jumping the stairs. She shrieked, “Stupid, get in the house and don’t even stick your head out!”
They opened the door each time some neighbor entered or left. The terrifying thing was seeing how the tenants greeted the police or simply moved along.
That made me think that, indeed, we would not have to wait to become a majority in order to obtain constitutional recognition.
Marta Beatriz Roque Cabello directs the Cuban Community Communicators Network.
After about 30 minutes, they took me to a patrol car. On arriving at the traffic light of Calzada del Cerro and Rancho Boyeros, they handed me my identity card and I understood that I could go home, when the same policewoman who argued with me said with gritted teeth:
“Freed today.”
On arriving home I called Marta Beatriz. She told me that that day they had detained 16 people at the door of her home; 15 journalists plus a server. But those were freed in places as distant as the “La Monumental” highway or the municipality of Caimito in the former Havana province (today Mayabeque). They left me, I do not know why, at the corner of my house.
I don’t belong to the nomenklatura, I don’t receive remittances, I’m not self-employed, I don’t work in any foreign firm not in the tourist sector, I don’t operate in the black market, for me the New Year celebration is as modest as for the majority of my countrymen. But when one thinks things couldn’t get worse, the Devil shows up and breathes on you.
Do you remember in the previous post I had strictly domestic plans? Right. My mom at 97 tried to stand on leg that went to sleep; she fractured her femur, operation included, and I became a nurse. A brief stay between 20-24 December at the Fructuoso Rodriguez orthopedic hospital let me see the lights and shadows of the healthcare system first hand.
And for three weeks I moved to my mom’s house. She didn’t have to worry, it was divine, walking from the second day after the operation, and up and down the stairs of the house. All under the supervision of the little old people who are the candle that creates things and when they come and have to go back to the surgeon it’s for being intrepid.
I didn’t feel well on 24 December and was sick the whole week, but at with both my mother and all because my sister — also — had a blood pressure crisis and had osteoporosis so she couldn’t lift even a bucket of water and my niece was traveling.
Dragging my feet and dying of fever, I took care of my mother and crawled back to lie down in bed. On the 30th my son, extremely worried, insisted on taking me to the doctor and it turned out I had dengue fever.
Tremendous alarm, I didn’t want to infect my mother, but without mosquitoes there is no infection, and in my mother’s house there are no mosquitoes. When my niece got back from her trip I went home, on January 14. Can you imagine a house with two adult (and unconscious) males adrift for three weeks?
In a fit (having nothing to do with the state of the house) I grabbed the scissors. With hypothyroidism, menopause, and red dye, all mixed up, I made my hair a dull crown on a brilliant mind. Now, in addition to ugly hair, it’s badly cut. In the meantime, I broke a tooth and haven’t been able to go to get it fixed. More? Yes, more. The refrigerator, that essential, stopped chilling, and for 25 CUCs, in less than half an hour, the mechanic opened it and injected gas. I think I’m beat.
Plans for this year? Visit the endocrinologist and the dentist and measure the view for new windows. That’s what I want, I leave the rest to you.
HAVANA, CUBA – In Cuba, every year hundreds of people die from alcoholism. A recently published study on the issue of alcoholism in the Americas, in the magazine “Addiction,” says that the mortality indices affect mainly Cubans between 50 and 69 years of age.
The information, gathered by the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization, is hugely useful in looking at a phenomenon that affects every social strata. The issue could be more dramatic and shown in the study, and also affect youth. It’s well known that alcohol consumption among young people is increasing.
A tour around any area of the capital, especially the neighborhoods in the outskirts, is sufficient to feel discouraged about a solution to the problem.
In addition to the ever increasing amount of alcohol consumed, there is also the constant decline in the quality of the product. There are many clandestine factories where adulterated alcoholic drinks are produced. Whatever drink comes out of these places is full of dirt and rust and it sells like hotcakes.
A good part of the market is supplied by these producers. Even the dollar stores take advantage of the illegal supply of rums and liquors, made with raw materials stolen from the state companies. continue reading
In addition to the painful deaths that result, the addicts who consume these low quality products can suffer long-term neurological and digestive damage over the long time. Assistance programs lack a systemic focus and only reach a tiny part of those affected.
The proliferation of poverty, the increasing spiral of traffic infractions, and the standardization of violent events associated with alcoholism are the affects, apparently irreversible, of a process of political, social and economic collapse.
“Getting drunk is the only way to endure the problems,” I hear from Roberto, a 60-year-old man, just before he takes a plastic bottle filled with cheap rum in a part where he gets together with other alcoholics.
The lack of housing, of fairly-paid work, and the absence of any perspective of the future, are some of the causes of this problem for the majority of Cubans who can’t live without alcohol.
“I have work, and what? My salary doesn’t support me. To live in a house that is on the verge of falling down with nine other people and without any hopes of anything,” says a woman called Marlen, who works as a cleaner at a Ministry of Transport company.
“Alcohol takes the weight off a little. I drink every day I can’t sleep without a swallow. My life is a dead-end with no exit,” she adds.
According to the report, Cuba appears along with Argentina, Canada, Costa Rice, Paraguay and the Unites States among the countries with the highest rates of addiction among the age-ranges cited at the beginning of the article.
This data never appears in the official press. Much less the number of deaths related to alcoholism, the numbers confined to asylums, and those who roam the streets like zombies.
Diario de Cuba, 23 January 2014 — The Ladies in White will seek a meeting with Jose Miguel Insulza, secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS), during the CELAC Summit in Havana, according to what their leader, Berta Soler, told the AFP press agency this Wednesday.
“We will request a meeting with Insulza, OAS Secretary; tomorrow we will submit the request,” Soler said.
The office of the OAS office in Washington reported Friday that Insulza “responded positively” to the invitation to the Second Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), on the 28th and 29th of this month.
This will be the first visit by a Secretary General of the OAS to Cuba in half a century, since the island’s membership was suspended in 1962; Cuba refused to return in 2009, when the organization lifted its veto.
At the 1999 Ibero-American Summit in Havana, heads of state and government, foreign ministers and senior officials from Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Uruguay, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, held meetings with dissidents in Havana.
The activist Elizardo Sanchez, head of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, said the visiting statesmen’s agenda is “very limited” and his organization does not foresee any meetings.
“Other times we talked to dignitaries (who come to Havana) but it was on their initiative,” said Sanchez, one of those most active at the summit in 1999.
He said that “there is some nervousness on the part of the government and there is a police presence on the homes of active opposition” to avoid demonstrations at the meeting.
For his part, former political prisoner Jose Daniel Ferrer, who from Santiago de Cuba leads the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) told AFP: “I will participate on Tuesday the 28th in the second Democratic Forum on International Relations and Human Rights,” which will be held in Havana, sponsored by Argentina foundation Center for Opening and Development of Latin America (Cadal)
He recalled that the first forum took place in Santiago de Chile, in January 2013 , prior to the CELAC-European Union Summit.
He said the venue of the meeting as het to be decided, but he expects the participation of other opponents.
It’s almost obligatory to write about the Second Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), to be held in Havana on the 28th and 29th of the present month. To demonstrate efficiency, the organizers have already prepared the installations for the Summit, repaired and decorated the roads by which the participants, guests will travel and taken all the corresponding security measures. As always, those affected have been the citizens, who for some days have collided against the prohibited access, rerouted transit and many other regulations applied by the authorities.
CELAC, as we know, does not have among its interests the economic integration of the region; rather it is an instrument of coordination and agreement for Latin American and Caribbean cooperation. Thanks to this, the United States and Canada –possessors of great natural resources and developed economies — have been excluded from membership. That is, from its beginning, its principal promoter, the late Venezuelan president, applied the politics of his master, the ex-president of Cuba. It seems Canada was excluded so that the United States could be.
Although CELAC doesn’t interfere with the politics of each member country, it’s absurd to proclaim respect for the uniqueness of each individual,for diversity and differences, when the member countries don’t do so and harass people within their own territory. At least, respect for individuals should constitute a moral imperative.
Thirty-three countries are members and it’s notable that the majority — although the most radical criticize the politics of the United States — have continued to belong to the Organization of American States (OAS), headquartered in Washington, with the exception of Cuba, expelled in the early years of the sixties, for not sharing the organizations democratic principles, and its inclusion has been proposed for some time, declined by the Cuban president, perhaps not wanting to support a new expulsion, its political interests not coinciding with those of the organization.
Despite these absurdities, the idea of regional cooperation at all levels is positive, whenever the Latin American and Caribbean presidents are capable of putting the ideological and political interests of the region ahead of their own, and engaging and respectful and responsible relations among themselves and with their close neighbors and the rest of the world. On an ever more globalized planet, its impossible to develop in isolation.
HAVANA, Cuba – Around 9:00 last night two officials from State Security’s Department 21 presented themselves at my house to warn me that the Second Democratic Forum on International Relations and Human Rights (independent) would not be allowed to be held in Havana this coming 28 January.
The opposition forum is scheduled parallel to the Second Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), to be held in the Cuban capital on the 28th and 29th, with the presence of heads of state and governments, as well as high level officials from the 33 member countries.
The meeting that the political police are trying to block has among its objectives to put into perspective the incompatibility of the one-party political system in Cuba with CELAC’S Special Statement for the Defense of Democracy.
One of the agreements made at the founding meeting of that organization, held in Caracas on December 3, 2011, says, and I quote:
“We agreed on a clause committing to promote, defend and protect the Rule of Law, democratic order, sovereignty of the people, Human Rights and fundamental freedoms, including among others the right to life, liberty and the security of the person, not subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, arbitrary arrest, detention or exile, or to make them objects of summary and arbitrary executions or forced disappearances, and [to respect] freedom of opinion and expression.”
A brief review of what is stated here is enough to question the regime serving as a host for the summit. continue reading
The systematic arbitrary arrests, acts of repudiation and trials without the minimum procedural safeguards, against pro-democracy activists, express a behavior that contravenes international standards that guarantee the exercise of all the rights of citizens, regardless of the politics and ideologies of governments.
In addressing other points of gross human rights violations, we should highlight the appalling prison conditions and the chances of being detained without having broken the law. The offense of “pre-criminal social dangerousness” contemplates imprisonment without evidence. Dozens of opponents have gone to prison under this legal (?) provision.
Moreover, it is ironic that the Cuban government carries out many humanitarian actions in several Third World countries, sending health professionals to areas of extreme poverty, while engaged in inciting mobs to beat the Ladies in White in the street, forcing its citizens to work for about a dollar a day in state enterprises, and maintaining full prisons, where, incidentally, more than 80 political prisoners languish.
The worst of this nightmare is the impunity. There are no legal means for the protection of citizens. The life of an ordinary Cuban passes among the misery and repression. Alternatives to escape the suffocation are in reality to leave the country by any means or to risk one’s luck on the black market. To survive through honest work has become a utopia.
In over 50 years of Real Socialism, inefficiency, lawlessness, lack of control, apathy and state terrorism have been regularized
Pavel and Pedro, the two agents who visited me, were emphatic in their warnings.
What else can one expect from the executioners who sometimes present themselves as teachers of tolerance and decency?
I know the names they gave me are false but that’s not important. What is beyond question is their determination to prevent, by all means at their disposal, our meeting of 28 January.
A crowd was waiting outside the mansion in Vedado with a statue of Abraham Lincoln in the garden. The language school opened its doors to new registrations and in the days that followed tested the attitudes of those interested. Everyone waited nervously, thinking that they would be evaluated on a pronunciation here… a mastery of vocabulary there. To our surprise, the main questions weren’t about language, but rather alluded to politics. By mid-morning a young woman who had been rejected warned us, “They’re asking the name of the first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in Havana.” We stood there mouths agape, who would know that?
A few decades ago the leaders of the so-called “political and mass organizations” were figures known throughout the country. Whether through their excessive presence in the official media, long tenure in their jobs, or simply because of personality, their faces were easily identifiable, even to kids in elementary school. We relentlessly heard talk of the secretary of the Young Communist Union, saw on every newscast who was leading the PCC in a province, or overdosed on declarations from some president of the Federation of University Students. There they were, clearly recognizable. Some even came to have nicknames, along with numerous jokes about their quirks and inefficiencies.
This morning on national television they mentioned Carlos Rafael Miranda, national coordinator for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). And it started me thinking about how blurred these positions have come to be, posts that before seemed to have so much power to decide the fate of so many. People now unknown leading institutions that every day fall deeper into indifference, are more forgotten. Leaders whose led can no longer remember their exact names and surnames. Figures who came too late to stand in the flashes of the camera, to be included in the analyses of the Cubanologists, or — at least — to be the targets of some joke. Mere shadows of a system where charisma is increasingly scarce.
Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet was arrested this morning near his home in the Lawton neighborhood, according to his wife Elsa Morejon’s Twitter account. Cubanet called the home of the opposition leader and was surprised when Biscet answered. He had been released.
Biscet told us that early in the morning two security officials came to his house and warned him not to go out into the street during the preparation for the CELAC summit, that is, from now until the presidents invited to the summit leave the Island. The meeting of the 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries is scheduled for 28-29 January.
The opponent protested that he was not going to abide by that dictatorial measure. And he would go where he had to go. Half an hour later they grabbed him in the street.
He was walking four blocks from his home when a civilian car stopped and two individuals identifying themselves as State Security got out. One of them asked Biscet for all his documents, keeping them. And told him he had to accompany them. That is, they took him into custody.
They drive about two blocks to what looked like a workplace. There one of the officials — according to Biscet — called his superiors on the phone to ask them what to do with the detainee. Evidently they told him to let him go. They returned to the car and took him back to his house. Repeating the warning that he was not to go out into the street or he would be arrested.
Oscar Elias Biscet told us that the headquarters of the Union for Cuba, on 100th Street near Fortuna, is surrounded by forces of the regime. No one can come closer than two blocks .
Last November, the Cuban government was prevented Elias Biscet leaving the country, after he was invited by President Barack Obama to the White House ceremony for the award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in Washington. His wife, the activist Elsa Morejon, attended the celebration. On that occasion she visited Cubanet.
For a Cuban reporter, in addition to mastering the narrative techniques of modern journalism, it’s good to have in hand Oriana Fallaci’s book. To read the chronicles of Gay Tallese or Rosa Montero. These days, seems essential to own a laptop, tablet, and a digital recorder and camera.
But, please, keep in mind you are engaging in journalism in an autocratic country, where according to its laws the professions of spy and unauthorized reporter are almost synonymous.
Yes, we must learn to use 21st century tools, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, but in Cuba it’s ore useful to have a network of friendships located in different strata who can give you first hand information.
Not being able to confront the information, or verify it through other sources, we have to have confidence in our intuition. We’re always going to lack a specific date, or a concrete figure that could round out the note.
Not having access to official statistics, it’s impossible to contrast the news and look for other points of view to balance the story. In my experience, after working as an independent journalist for 18 years, on the island we have to throw in the trash certain rules established like canons of the profession.
Let me give an example. If we try to have a hooker tell you about her life, it’s advisable not to show her a microphone or camera. Or she’s not going to tell you a story. Then the most sordid stories flow. continue reading
Not being able to record, take notes, or take photos, a good memory is fundamental. When an interviewee quotes outside the law, what is important is to get across the essence of their opinions.
To do journalism inside Havana’s marginal world comes with its risks. One journalist note can bring down a police operation on a guy who sells drugs or a girl who sells herself. So you have to be very careful to camouflage the identity, place of residence or where there person usually operates.
I’ll tell you an anecdote. In the past year, Diario de las Americas published a story of mine about transvestite prostitutes. Every night they sit in a doorway on 10 de Octubre avenue. After I published the work, the police discretely evacuated the place.
These unadorned stories carry a risk in Cuba: any person mentioned could be arrested and end up behind bars.
An old butcher told me about a common method among the DTI (Technical Investigations Department) officials when they detain someone, to avoid a conflict, is to say they got the information from an article by an independent journalist.
Although at times the publication of a story helps the affected. In December, as a result of strong downpours assaulting Havana, a neighbor, living in a destroyed room in a tenement, told me he’d been asking for decent housing for his family for 20 years.
“After you mentioned my case, the authorities talked to me. They told me that if I stopped offering statement, they could resolve my problem,” the neighbor said.
On Friday, 10 January, the independent journalist León Padrón Azcuy published on Cubanet a report about the private restaurant Starbien, owned by José Raúl Colomé, son of Abelardo Colomé Ibarra, Army General and Minister of the Interior.
On Monday the 13th, Colomé Jr. visited the journalist at his home. He told him he was very annoyed with what was reflected in the article and promised to take charge of the matter personally. On 15 January Cubanet revealed that the minister’s son’s restaurant had been entered on Spain’s Merchant Register as Starbien Investment SL.
When you do journalism outside the State, you have to be well-informed and can’t try to wield the “journalistic stick” or compete against the international news agencies stationed in the country.
A journalist, according to Kapuscinski (Poland 1931-2007), above all must be a good person. To do good reporting work and, in the case of Cuba, to describe this reality hidden by the regime with objectivity.
Iván García
Photo: All the independent journalists who live in Havana, at least once a week go to the Esquina de Tejas, by foot, bus or taxi; this is where four of the most important streets of the capital meet: Monte, Infanta and the Calzadas del Cerro and Diez de Octubre. Taken from Primavera Digital.
That house had a protective fence bristling with iron spikes, and the one next door had a huge gate and double locks. On the doors of certain offices signs warn, “Authorized Personnel Only,” and around the Council of State the armed guards are stationed every ten yards. Protecting themselves from others, avoiding contact, keeping strangers out, are the objectives of these physical and legal parapets. They are just like what the masterful Ryszard Kapuscinski described in his article, “Chairman Mao’s One Hundred Flowers,” during his trip to China.
In this vivid and sharp text, the Polish journalist brings us the human mania to construct obstacles to separate us from the different. The perfect example is that serpent of bricks, stones and various materials that snakes across the geography of the great Asian giant. All to defend itself — or isolate itself — from those who were left on the other side of the wall. In the Cuban case, it has been simpler, because the sea distances us from the rest of the planet. A strip of salt water that has marvelously served the political discourse of a “people under siege” and “the enemy” on the other shore. All out of fear, out of pure fear of diversity.
Kapuscinski reflected on the human and material costs of the construction–real or discursive–of walls. An exercise we could try in our own country. How much has isolation cost us? How many resources have been spent on trenches, tunnels for war, aggressive diplomatic campaigns, indoctrination in schools to foment the idea of a foreign enemy? How many lives have been destroyed, diminished or terminated because of these walls erected for the benefit of a few? “The wall serves not only to defend oneself… it allows one to control what happens within it,” reads Travels with Herodotus, and it’s painful that sixty years later it continues to be a reality in so many places.
The official media recently reported on the situation in Thailand where the authorities have declared a state of siege, prohibited meetings, established censorship and eliminated several citizen rights. Without the slightest shame, the announcers on Cuban Television News declared themselves shocked by these horrors.
Right now in Cuba, on the eve of the celebration of the Second CELAC Summit, no official institution has decreed any type of special situation, however they have unleashed a wave of arrests and threats against all those who try to gather between the 28th and 29th of January, which are the days the great event will take place.
With complete certainty, the Cuban delegation will happily show its guests a peaceful country where no one protests about anything, even though there is no decree of a state of siege or anything like it.
The truth is, it’s not necessary to take any kind of extraordinary measures. Here there is a permanent Thailand (as that country is now), and if the leaders attending the Summit support fighting against poverty they will admire the Cuban example where not a single beggar will be seen (they’ve all been relocated), nor will they encounter any prostitutes or pickpockets.
I dare say they can be sure that they won’t even see a teenager wearing the school uniform incorrectly, because here we have all been warned… be careful of what you say in the bread line, don’t even dare sneer at a police officer, nor sell anything on the black market. If you suffer from gas, hold it in, knowing that any alteration to the public order could be extremely suspicious.
“Reagan wears a skirt, we wear pants, we have a commandant whose balls roar!”(Revolutionary slogan made famous by Felipe Pérez Roque)
Sunday, January 19, 2014 | Miriam Celaya
Havana wakes up early, and before 8:00 am and there is a swarm of voices and movement. Old cars and buses rattle around the city, people crowd at bus stops and at the curb, the new day of survival sizzles. Just one block from Carlos III, a main avenue, dozens of teenagers huddle around the “Protest of Baraguá” middle school staving off morning classes as much as possible. Regardless of gender, lively, haughty, irreverent, almost all speak loudly, gesticulating and shouting from one group to another, from one sidewalk to another.
A neatly dressed and beautifully groomed student stands on her toes while she places her hands on either side of her mouth, like a megaphone:
“Dayáááán … Dayáááán ! Hey, you, don’t pretend you can’t hear me…I’m talking to you, what the f… is it with you?!”
The kid in question, half a block away, turns to the girl and laughs:
“Hey, Carla, what’s the problem? Did you catch the hash? Now you can’t stop itching and I gotta go and “scratch” it?”
“Oh, honey, you wish! You aren’t man enough for that!”
The brief dialogue is accompanied by exaggerated, lewd gestures.
Dayán approaches and they greet each other with a friendly kiss and much fondling. They join an adjacent group of classmates chattering among themselves. Every once in a while, strong words fly, like the morning sparrows in nearby trees. I look carefully at the big picture. Greetings among these young people can be a spank on the bottom, a kiss, or an expletive straight from a tavern of pirates, with an ease borne of habit. continue reading
I approach the group and identify myself as a reporter. I want to ask them some quick and simple questions before they have to go through the school gates. I make it clear to them that I will not need their names, that I will not record their answers and that I will not take their pictures if they don’t want me to do so. Some move away a little, just in case, but stay in close range, as if to hear everything. None wanted to be photographed.
Where did you learn to express yourself like that? Do your parents allow that at home and your teachers at school? Have you been brought up in a violent family environment? What is your interpretation of rudeness or cursing? How would you define the language you use? Is your vocabulary found in any of your Literature or Spanish Language books?
After some hesitation, it’s Dayán himself who breaks the ice.
“It’s OK, nuttin’, auntie, it’s normal. Everyone speaks this way and everyone knows what those words mean. At home, you have to be careful, because parents get upset if you swear a lot, but they do it just like nuttin’. Teachers rarely butt in. There is nothing wrong with that. Look, at home, there is no violence like that. I have never been hit. OK, so maybe I got smacked when I was younger and did something bad, but ‘normal’ like everybody else”.
Then others jostle to talk and offer their opinions, interrupting each other. All agree that what is happening is that in “my era” they did not talk this way because they were behind the times and there was less freedom, but “that was before”. Cursing is now “normal” (let’s say very advanced). It is true that our vocabulary is not found in books, but books are one thing and real life is another. The same is true of TV, for example. I dig a bit more and discover that not a single one of them has ever read a novel. They don’t even know about poetry. To sum it up, vulgarity is not so vulgar for them, and foul-mouthed expletives are the norm.
The school bell warns that morning classes are about to begin, and the kids push each other as they go in, laughing, having fun. I am obviously “over the hill”, kind of a brief anachronism for that day. Some, very few, say goodbye to me before turning their backs and walking away.
But just as not all young people are vulgar, the vulgar are not all young. The epidemic of rudeness that has become endemic is not a generational thing, but a systemic phenomenon.
In the afternoon, I go to a nearby avenue and skirt the lateral passageway of the Carlos III Market, by Árbol Seco Street, where taxi drivers hang out to gossip daily between fares. They drink espresso or refreshments for their parched throats. Every once in a while, profanities sprinkle the talks, especially in the friendly, loud discussions about national baseball series or car prices, whose sales were recently allowed by the State. Adolescence is far behind them; many have some gray hair to comb, others have even lost their grays.
I ask the area’s septuagenarian parking attendant if the regulars always use such foul language or if it is only in the thrill of the moment. “That is normal here. They always curse, even in the presence of women and children. There is no respect, and if you say something to them, it gets worse, so it’s better if you keep quiet”. I make it clear to him that I will not say anything to them.
Indeed, if I tried to complain to all those who express themselves using profanity, my whole day would be spent doing so, and would have gotten smacked more than once. In Cuba today, correcting someone’s manners and language is considered unjustifiable prudery: aserismo* prevails . But how and when did it all begin?
¡Asere, ¿qué bolá?!
Hey,you, wassup?
While it’s true that there have always been people who are vulgar and people without manners, only lately has rudeness invaded Cuban society, so much so that it is impossible to avoid. Contrary to the official discourse that advocates for education and culture of this society, vulgarity as a particular form of violence seems to be here to stay. From using the most foul language to the very masculine impudence to urinate in public and in broad daylight, our daily lives are becoming ever more aggressive.
If we were to explain the history of the empire of vulgarity on the Island using some of the prosaic words that have been incorporated into everyday speech at different times in these 55 years from vulgar egalitarianism imposed as state policy, probably only a Cuban brought up in this environment could understand something of the lexicon. Perhaps the story could be summarized as follows, and readers will forgive me, as I only intend to illustrate:
I just put them in my ears to protect myself from all the bad words you hear in the streets.
At first it was a guy who stormed a barracks with a group of ecobios, although when he left he was on fire when the shooting began. It became pretty bad and lacking in cold, and the ones who went to prison were better off. But, since they were such crazy dicks, at the end, they and the other cuties who joined them along the way took the bunch here, by their balls, gave Batista, who was a weirdo, a good poison, and that is how this dark affair began since here everyone is the same salsa, so whoever has an itch should scratch it, and if not….tump tu tum tump tum, bolá. Politeness and sentimentality ended, and shake it so it goes off* which one is it?
The spread of foul language and loss of good manners is already a feature of the Cuban society of the times, to the point that the general-president himself, Castro II, has publicly expressed alarm at such vulgarity. Social vulgarity, that sort of bastard child that the regime now refuses to recognize as its own, has passed out of the masses and reached the sacred threshold of its parents. And it scares them. What if one day such uncontrolled crudeness becomes violence against the throne?
Diligent criers, meanwhile, have responded immediately to the master’s whistle. Language, Did Good Manners Take a Trip? is an article where the official journalist Maria Elena Balán Sainz, after lamenting about the rudeness of speech and manners currently governing Cuba, especially among the young, delves into an analysis of the origin of the Spanish spoken in the Island and its lexical relationship with other countries in the region, on the evolutionary theory of language, its importance in human communication and care, about which she insists that, “Although it seemingly may fall on deaf ears, we cannot stop the battle for the proper use of our language, although there are marked tendencies in recent times toward popular slang language, occasionally with vulgar ingredients”.
Even she could not escape the clichés that in Cuba each issue becomes a “battle” and where all “official strategy” gets shipwrecked in sterile campaigns, though we can recognize the good intentions of her article. However, her article seems to imply that the vulgarity and crudeness emerged suddenly and spontaneously among us without cause or reason, as naturally as if it were fungi on animal feces in a pasture. Balán Sainz does not mention, even once, the coarse rusticity of revolutionary slogans, swearing in repudiation rallies, vulgarity in assaulting and beating by those who think as indicated by the olive-green creed, or rudeness stimulated and wrapped from power to try to nullify those morally different.
Those waters brought this mud …
Now, using my own words for the review, I’d say that, at first, it was the violence of a social revolution that came to power by force, which expropriated, expelled, sowed exclusions, for political reasons, of religious faith or sexual preferences, which imposed egalitarianism, condemned traditions, separated children from their parents’ home in order to indoctrinate them, fractured families, condemned prosperity, kidnapped rights, stifled the creative capacities and independence of individuals, standardized poverty, pushed an infinite migration that plagues and cripples us. I cannot imagine greater vulgarity.
Now, when Cuba looks like a scorched land, her economy ruined and her values misplaced among old slogans and constant disappointments, the regime is perturbed by the rudeness and poverty of speech, which move along proportionally with the system’s general crisis.
But Balán Sainz is somewhat right when she reminds us that our lexicon is a reflection of our social reality. Lowly, vulgar and violent language belongs in an impoverished country, where each day we can feel more and more the frustration, the precariousness of survival and the tendency for violence. It is part of the anthropological damage, so masterfully defined by Dagoberto Valdés.
Are there solutions? Of course, but they will not be spontaneous. Only the end of the rude Castro dictatorship could mark the beginning of the end of aserismo in Cuba.
*Kimba Pa’ que Suene : a raunchy Reggaeton (Latin Reggae) glorifying masturbation. Such music is currently outlawed by the government of Cuba.
