When Cuba Had No Christmas / Ivan Garcia


The first time Juan Carlos saw a Christmas tree, he was 43-years-old and working as a bricklayer inside the house of a top counterintelligence officer.

“That was 19 years ago.  Those were the harsh years of the so-called Special Period. People had nothing to eat.  Avocado was a luxury and a pound of rice was 60 pesos.  Due to all sorts of vitamin and nutritional deficiencies, men and women succumbed to illness and some even lost their natural teeth.  Back then, I was a civilian worker for the Department of the Interior and our crew was asked to work on painting and remodeling the home of a State Security bigwig.  The guy was living at full throttle luxury.  His kitchen was a quarter size bigger than the tenement room where I was living.  That was the first place I ever saw a Christmas tree.

Cubans are not atheists or Muslims.  No, sir.  Before Fidel Castro’s autocratic regime, the poor and rich celebrated Christmas if on different budgets.

The same could be said for Three Kings Day (Epiphany), and Easter celebrations.  But our radical commander launched a crusade against reproducing the slightest hint of the bourgeois lifestyle.  He opened fire on the Church, on free thought and on abstract painting.  Down with the Three Kings.  Now, our New King Magus dressed in olive green fatigues.

In 1959, Fidel climbed aboard an aircraft and made it rain toys for children of the Sierra Maestra who’d never owned such a thing.  But in one fell swoop, by the end of the 60s, he eliminated all mom and pop shops and Christmas.

Gustavo, a 72-year-old retiree, remembers, “Only New Year’s Eve parties were left standing, and even those came to be used to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution.  The pretext used to eliminate Christmas and the Carnivals of February was that such events shut down sugar cane production.  In his madness, Castro had invested all of Cuba’s resources to attempt the production of ten million pounds of sugar per year.  The effort failed.  Cuba’s economy payed dearly for such folly.

Just like the State openly frowned on the Afro-Cuban and Catholic religions — Castroism was the only acceptable religion — Christmas had to be suspended until further notice.  Of course, you can’t really change anyone’s beliefs by edict.

“Some neighbors would very discretely place Christmas trees in their family rooms.  They’d also shut the windows so neighborhood whistleblowers who patrolled for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) couldn’t see any of the tiny Christmas lights.  When pig was roasted, the aromas were carefully masked and Christmas Carols were barely audible,” reported Aida, a 69 year-old housewife.

It was a long journey through the desert.  Even parties had to be authorized by the state.  The government tried to micromanage every detail of your life.

To avoid being singled out as a counterrevolutionary, you had to attend political meetings and participate in government parades.  If you aspired to housing, a Soviet TV or an alarm clock, you had to list accumulated merits in the workforce and enumerate your revolutionary accomplishments.

You gained points if you’d fought in Angola or Ethiopia, if you were militia, if you worked lots of volunteer hours, and if you could quote good chunks of the Maximum Leader’s (Fidel’s) speeches by heart.

You lost points, if you owned a Bible, went to church, got mail from relatives in Miami, listened to the Beatles or Led Zeppelin, liked Levis blue jeans; with these characteristics you did not qualify to buy an Inpud refrigerator or two-speed Karpaty motorcycle.

To blacklist you, any envious neighbor or political extremist could turn you in to Special Services if you were caught celebrating Christmas or giving your kids any toys on January 6 to celebrate the day the Three Kings (the Three Wise Men) arrived at Jesus’ manger.

To keep himself in power, Fidel had to do all kinds of ideological backflips.  In Europe, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the U.S.S.R. — the mecca of Communist looney wards — had disappeared.  Somehow, he had to cling to whatever branch could sustain him.

The regime eventually sealed a pact with a docile Catholic Church.  People who once professed a belief in Yoruba syncretic spiritualism (Santería) again nailed old and familiar amulets on their doors.

In December 1997, Pope John Paull II visited Cuba and Christmas returned.

But all along, the official Nomenklatura never stopped celebrating Christmas if you take into account all the roast pork, all the traditional sweet Spanish nougat and all the wines consumed.

Maybe those folks could indulge because they thought of themselves as being above the rest.

Iván García

Photo Credit: Front cover of winning lottery number sporting a Criollo Christmas image and published in the magazine Carteles in 1959.  Up until 1959, we had Christmas cheer on the Island.  You could find the popular A Cuban Merry Christmas postcard celebrating the Cuban book and reading fair, and the advertising sign for A Boy’s Cuban Christmas printed by the Ministry of Culture and with pictures of the Three Magi done by René Portocarrero.  The Book of Cuban Recipes, launched for Christmas and edited by the Ministry of Education, carried a special introduction: “This Christmastime, a book of traditional Cuban recipes was especially created so every young city-dwelling housewife can come to know and enjoy the traditional cooking that forms part of our national heritage and still endures in various parts of the country.”

But during the 60s, Christmas started to disappear from the life of Cubans, and only a few kept up with the tradition from behind closed doors (Tania Quintero).

Translated by: JCD and others
17 December 2013

Communique: Castro, The Guardian Of Human Rights In The United Nations, Returns To Harass And Threaten Angel Santiesteban

Detention of a Woman in White, Havana, 10th of December 2013. (EFE)

                    

The detention of Antonio Rodiles.

A few days shy of ten months of wrongful imprisonment, after a show trial in which they have never proven one of the crimes brought against him because he never committed them, and without which the prosecution hasn’t responded to the appeal for a review of the case which submitted by the lawyer Amelia Rodriguez Cala on July 4th of this year, in the Lawton prison settlement where he is now detained since his birthday (August 2), Ángel has started being harassed and provoked by his jailers, in what we consider a clear strategy to push him to commit any misconduct that would justify a new transfer to a stricter regime of prison or which would allow his accusers to prove his supposed violent nature in the retrial, after which, if the Cuban legal structure works, they will be required to release him.

These are not isolated events: the re-educator had already tried to set the other prisoners against Ángel and told them he would put him “in a box”. Inmates assumed he was referring to a coffin, but another reading could be that Ángel would be “tamed with dirty or violent methods.”

Then on Friday the 13th during the night, the settlement was visited by the new head of CETEM, the Major Cobas, along with the aforementioned re-educator. Ángel recounts that: “The other night they searched me, there was the head of the camps, as the Chief re-educators, and I did not permit him, he opposed me then threw my stuff on the floor and kicked it so that I could not touch it. They told me that it was a serious breach of discipline and that they would make a record of it immediately. Then they took all of my belongings and searched them.”

How far do you plan to take the abuse dictator Raul Castro, now shelterd by the Human Rights Council of the UN? Shame is what all the member countries of the UN which sit on the Council should feel towards this systematic violator of all rights and freedoms of the Cuban people, who only seeks to extend his archaic but deadly reign of terror to the rest of the continent.

All international press with dignity, last December 10, the International Day of Human Rights, showed the world what the pathetic UN Council was trying to hide: the Cuban government celebrated that day by repressing its opponents in what is considered one of the darkest days of repression in Cuba. But the truth always triumphs, Mister Dictator. And Justice too, of that you should not have the slightest doubt. But if you do however, study some history.

I repeat what I have told you many times, you and the whole army of thugs at your service are absolutely responsible for the life and safety of Ángel Santiesteban-Prats. And remember that while the world is watching in horror as you send paramilitary mobs to beat up peaceful Ladies in White carrying gladioli as the only weapon and as you use children as shields in acts of repudiation against those who think differently and also serves as a witness of the most abhorrent scenes of physical violence against activists who, moreover, weren’t even demonstrating in the streets, as was the case in the door of the headquarters of Estado de Sats; that same world continues to recognize the talent of Ángel, rewarding him, as happened in September when he was awarded the Franz Kafka International Prize for Novels from the Drawer, and they paid tribute to him, just as he received a few days ago in Montreal. Oh how it hurts! Doesn’t it?

So do not forget this: You are responsible for what happens to Angel, and for the orders which you give to your henchmen. The world is watching.

The Editor

Translated by: Shane J. Cassidy

18 December 2013

URGENT: Angel Santiesteban Harassed And Threatened In The Prison Of The Regime Which Is A Member Of The UN Human Rights Commission

The incommunication problems because of our lack of internet connections in Cuba have prevented us from offering, as it should have been, the inside scoop on the harassment and threats that the writer Ángel Santiesteban-Prats is suffering since early this month at the prison in which he is currently located. We were hoping to offer firsthand reports narrated by Angel, to those witnessed by the family who related this to us by phone.

But not even these communication problems have gotten the regime off the hook: the journalist Dania Virgen García sent from the island an article denouncing this new violation of the rights of Angel. It proves once again that there are many who are willing to stop the injustice committed against Angel from going unpunished.

We publicly thank Dania Virgen García and all those who have already reproduced this article in their blogs and other digital media.

The Editor

Here is Dania’s article:

Lambasting in the prison of the writer Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

by Dania Virgen García

Havana, Cuba, 17th of Decebmber 2013, Dania Virgen García/www.cubanet.org.-

In the penal settlement of MININT (Ministry of the Interior), in Lawton, in the Havana municipality of Diez de Octubre, where the writer Ángel Santiesteban-Prats is held, the re-educator tried to use the common criminals against him, this past 11th of December.

In the ten months that the writer has been held in the settlement, he has never participated in the physical countings, inspections or political activities.

On the day in question, Santiesteban remained in the barracks, when the prisoners were called to be counted. The re-educator, not seeing the writer, was annoyed and began to shout insults against him.

Then, from the mouths of the prisoners themselves, he knew that the re-educator had said he would put him “in a box”. The inmates assumed it was a reference to a coffin.

The reeducator said, moreover, that he would make a report to his superiors for his misconduct and that Santiesteban was not a political prisoner.

The inmates realized that reeducator had lied, because some of them have seen the writer’s ID card which has a green stripe that crosses from one side to another, and over it are the letters CR (counter-revolutionary), and under his picture the is the word “Warning”.

On the night of Friday 13, the settlement was visited by the new head of CETEM, Major Cobas, who tried to provoke and question the writer.

Since entering prison, the writer Santiesteban-Prats has never eaten prison stew; instead he eats the provisions which his family has sent him. He is never seen dressed in prison clothes and he has never accepted the personal supplies which are given to the prisoners.

He was withdrawn on April 9th this year, from the camp of forced labor known as CETEM, La Lima, located in the town of Guanabacoa, to Prison 1580, with the intent that he will not be present during the visit of international journalists who were manipulated by the regime officials.

Currently, the Casa de las Americas Prize for narrative maintains the same denial in the settlement.

Santiesteban thinks it was naive of the jailer or else that the new boss wants to provoke him, thus causing a prison indiscipline, accusing him of a crime to be able to send him to a closed prison. He suspects that the guards are being manipulated by the repressive Department 21 of the State Security.

Rest assured that whatever the intention, he will remain with his principles and ethics, which he has maintained in the 10 months he has been held for an alleged domestic assault that the trial could not prove.

Translated by: Shane J. Cassidy

17 December 2013

Living in a Shelter: The Tragedy of Thousands of Cubans / Lilianne Ruiz

HAVANA, Cuba, December 2013, www.cubanet.org – The poverty in which most Cubans live — and to which they adapt, thanks to the meticulous mechanisms of power that 54 years of State terror have imposed — is not an insurmountable fate.  It would be enough for the Cuban government to respect all human rights, opening the political and economic game, in order to improve the living conditions of the island’s inhabitants.

Misery is aggravated when one has neither a place to live nor economic resources to rent, build or buy a house.  It is estimated that, in the Central Havana municipality alone, 6,201 families (24,584 people) are affected by the uninhabitable condition of their dwellings.  Of that number, only 125 families are located in the so-called transit communities: collective shelters, as they are known in Cuba.

But those figures do not shed light on what it means for a family to live sheltered. One must cross the threshold of figures in order to see up close the true face of the tragedy.

The “Collective Shelter” of San Rafael 417 in Central Havana

According to those who live there, the building previously housed a factory for sanitary napkins (intimates in the Cuban language).  Decrepit posters with some communist slogans are not missing. The hall is divided into different rooms where the belongings of those who have come to stop in this site are grouped. What seems to be the bathroom is in fact a latrine. Nor is there seen anywhere a sink with running water.

Iverlysse Junco is 29 years old. The door of the little room of wooden planks where she lives with her husband and four children creates a false illusion of privacy. Everything looks poor and ugly, but it is impressive to see the white of the diapers that cover the cradle of her baby born a month ago. She has not neglected her personal appearance in spite of the fact that she is not expecting anyone; she keeps her dignity in the cleanliness and order that she maintains in the 4 x 4 meters where they live.

Six years ago they left a tenement in danger of collapse. The room has not a single window. The first thing that she shows us behind a curtain is another sliding wooden plank that gives onto the street.

“When we came it was completely closed, but one day I could not endure any longer the lack of air and I grabbed a saw in order to make that opening,” she says.  “The bad thing is that now my husband and I cannot leave together, because one of us two has to stay in order to make sure no one enters and takes our things. They came to assess a fine against me, for nothing less than for altering the facade.  But I told the district delegate that they are very familiar with my situation.”

On an improvised kitchen counter is a pair of electric burners where she does everything: from cooking to boiling the diapers, as is customary among Cuban mothers who have no way to pay for the luxury of disposable diapers, which involves a greater cost than a month’s salary.

The baby is cold as a consequence of the humidity: she has to hang out clothes there inside. The water she asks of a neighbor on the block. He lets them fill the buckets that they then carry to a little tank in the corner of the room. That limited water has to serve them for washing, mopping, cooking and bathing in the same room. Part of everyone’s routine every day is to keep the deposit full. But with other needs there is no arrangement; they have to urinate and defecate in a bucket dedicated to that purpose and then go out to pour it down the drain in the street.

“Everything is hard here. The most difficult is getting up in the morning and having to be watching the people to be able to go out to dispose of the bucket. I cannot not have the bleach for cleaning and the freshener.”

Her husband works in demolition, which is why she is aware of the quantity of collapses that occurs, especially when it rains.

“When do I leave here? The collapses are going to continue because Havana is falling down.”

Although Iverlysse and her husband work a lot, they see themselves reduced to total dependency on the State. In a collectivist system, which condemns private property and the free market, the hypothetical solution is that, not with one’s own effort, but with collective work, the Junco family will get a house in which to live.

In practice, society has submitted to state control and planning.  The happiness of the Junco family depends then on their file being privileged in the eyes of the official, who next December 20 will have to decide if, among the 900 cases that are presented in the whole of the Havana province — after prioritizing the “cases” that have spent 20 years sheltered, hoping — theirs qualifies as sufficiently affected by an extreme situation.

“I have already gone to the Province (Office of Dwellings) and to the government. Three times I went to Revolution Plaza and seven times I wrote letters to the State Counsel.  On all those occasions the answer was:  You have to wait.  There are worse cases than yours. What can be worse than this?” Iverlysse asks herself.

The statistics about the numbers of sheltered people and those waiting to become sheltered, were offered by the Municipal Unit of Attention to the Transit Communities (UMACT) of the Central Havana municipality by a person who requested anonymity. The number of the 900 cases that will be presented next December 20 was provided by a housing worker who also wanted to withhold his name.

December 15, 2013/ By Lilianne Ruiz.

From Cubanet

Translated by mlk.

Images of the Day Before / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The image of the island has been abused in our national imagination.

The island as isolation, as continental abandonment, as lyrical gentleness, as the least firm of the earth, as origin and teleology, as unsinkable (unbearable) cork, as poetic cause of the measure of all things.

Cuba can be this and much more, surely. But Cuba is, above all, illusion. An endemic disease called hope. And, more than illusion, Cuba could be pure instinct.

We can violate the etymology of “instinct” and define it starting from “instant.” The instantaneous, the snapshot. What can not be re-read a moment later and therefore must be fixed before it disappears. The precarious.

And we are talking, then, about photographs: the most common of household objects, the most commercial, the most immobile of genres, also the most democratic (like with firearms, whether we have a license or not, we can all go out and shoot: click, flash).

Each frame is a part of the same film, a documentary trailer of socialized dreams that nobody is in a hurry to wake up from. Half monstrous dreams meant to engender reasoning, but they ended up engendering rationing and cynicism.

Involuntary snoring to sustain our own voice. Free tracheotomies with which the system tattoos us voluntarily, perhaps before birth. Artificial respiration of the broken motor of a thousand and one horizontally positioned generations: the pose that attracts the least attention from authority. The fetal posture, which is still what most protects us (that other illusion of returning to the womb where the social damage still hasn’t touched us).

Pedestrians in peace, lying on the metropolitan dirt, at risk of being trampled by the flows of desire and urban footwork of the capital. Self-capitalism, a minimal market whose geography is so incipient.

Barefoot and decrepit, against the columns, as befits an uncivil citizenship. A country cannot be commanded like an encampment, of course: it’s as if every countryman were in his own encampment. Anyway, in the end we are discovered because Havana is exactly the impossibility of an interior space. Everything is open, everything exposed, political promiscuity where the forbidden rules, sites of maximum visibility. Paternalistic surveillance childish punishment, while we change our make-up every day so that no one or nothing changes us from year to year.

And also a touch of animal tenderness. And another bit of humor, as a reminder of the human condition misplaced in some legal loophole. The Cuban Constitution as a gag, a shroud, a memorandum of the equitable death by official decree. In the photos, the ephemeral becomes eternal, glance becomes matter, either by an inspired stroke of composition or by a miracle of chance (or by both).

Be it a nightmare or be it human sorrow, be it civil abandonment or be it solidarity. But a snapshot is always a climax of intensity. Impromptu, almost unbearable for its unexpected character, often intolerable.

In a desert climate like that of Cuba (red hot ideology by day, by night masses chilled between hypocrisy and idiocy), in a claustrophobic atmosphere, of hysterical enthusiasms and national apathy (with blind lines of flight to an outside, an outside often suicidal), in a landscape of cracks that boast of their rudeness, a landscape reduced to a wasteland where even repression is boring and God seems a yawn, there is nothing more inviting than intensity. Nor anything more impossible.

Without this accelerated raw material, there would be no event nor creation. The intensity of the caught instant lifts what was just a mute act to its most inconceivable symbolic resonances. The intensity is a vector that goes from the physical to the metaphorical, from light to illumination, from earth to air. Ultimately, from the political to the poetic. The intensity can even be invented, and in the end always contains traces of truth.

Instant, stop: you are so beautiful … What are the symptoms of such beauty?

The fall, the scaffold. Emerging make-believe, unknown forces in secret tension, momentum (which in physics is connected with mass and velocity), commonplaces on the point of disequilibrium (the instant as an announcement of the unusual), Cuba as collision.

After decades of decaying bodies, erased by mass statistics, suddenly Cuba is conceived as recovery. The urgency of motion erases the vocation of eternity of the image. Diaphragms wide open, provocative. Temptation of a liquid light, dripping. Humidity of a story already without histology. Sensuality confronting censorship. Eros, rather than heroes. Reflections, more than rhetoric. Revelation, rather than revolution.

And amid the chaos, the fragmentary not so much as an aesthetic solution, but as a strategy against the notion of  absolute. The fragment as private ethic of the individual: the part against the total, anti-fractal theory, post-metonymy, implausible versions of the truth, the incomplete as fragility but also as resistance to the tabula rasa that is the legacy of all totalitarianism at its terminal phase. Rewriting of official iconography. Iconoclastic revenge, long overdue for art in Cuba, and long penalized for its artists. The palimpsest as the antithesis of the very monolithism of any wall. It is, in the end, the discarding of a tradition that was announced to us as perennial.

The accumulation of layers of meaning begins to outline a kind of archeology of wiping the slate and starting new. The great wall of Havana is now open like a large mural. Amnesia is friendly like a benevolent madness that takes us back to childhood. I suspect we socialize in the style of a senile zombie.

In this new narrative the residues and sketches predominate. In this new no-narrative contamination in its beneficial sense predominates: the dilution of the grandiloquent speeches, the minimal disseminating deeply without anyone noticing it, while the pictographic ruins of our stateless Pompeii will become ever more difficult to decode.

Inhabitants of barbarism, syllable by syllable, we can still recognize a certain sense of meaning, but in practice we have forgotten how to read: today the words and phrases give us the impression of having been emptied of content, of being chiseled from an obsolete language, sometimes obscene. Havana as a dead language, a Martian tongue, a kind of Latin argot taken to its very limits. Paradoxically, this illiteracy in Cuba is our only guarantee of access to the future. Not understanding protects us from participating, for example, of the ridiculous despotisms of the propaganda. Of the verticality and outbursts of power. Not understanding, too, is a supreme act of insubordination, of subverting the signals of  consensus, to be ultimately, subjects beyond all logic and all governability.

Abandoning the tired habit of interpretation can be the unpredictable first step towards freedom. More than a vocabulary, we depend on a vocabul-arid. Dryness of repetition, patterns of argument that are repeated ad nauseam. Invisible verbal violence, not so much through public offence as through the secrecy that provokes panic and terror. It’s those innuendos that threaten and grip the Cuban soul, beyond the myth of insularity and its exception exiles. More than a vocabulary, we hang by a voCUBAlary.

Even love and desire are based on these synthetic ambuguities, accumulated privileges, phobia of the other. Not only phobia of the different but phobia of the identical. Homophobia, in its universal sense:fear of the other, the drive to annihilate.

Sometimes one is tempted to accept that language exists because communication is impossible. There is no message now that could overcome the force of gravity, everything tends to precipitate. The ground prevails here above the ideals. There is no ideology which at these times doesn’t look a bit idiotic. Paradise, fortunately, is lost, not so much deserted as defected. Perimeter marks were left, rigid limits for being already so sclerotic, the bars that define the magnitude of the trap: the panopticon as orthopedics so that the intellect does not insist on existing as such.

Mercy will be left, which was mistreated by the glance, the urgency of a gesture of salvation that restores the prestige of naivety. Cutting of silhouettes, Cubanesque shadows on the claustrophobic backdrop of the horizon. Straitjackets, forgetfulness that obliges the posthumous to prevail over the probable, where a perfect past prevents the uncertainty of all futurity. Time coagulated, achronological. Architecture understood as archeology.

Maps, elementary geometry, recurring itinerary like the dreams we don’t dare to stop dreaming. Theory of the labyrinth. The art of waiting. Audiovisual coda of those who have lost hope for a new signal. Counterlight to countercurrent. The image of the Island is inexhaustible in our national imagination. The island that rises from its own ashes, like a Phoenix or maybe a malephic Aleph, magic object of the multiplicity, where all the times are still possible, schizophrenic at the same time. The spontaneous reaction against decades of paranoia could be hidden over there: to lose one’s face, to be others in another place, not belonging, giving up a national grammar that called no one and for the good of no one. We elude ourselves right on the day before: if the transition will be just a theatrical trick, then we Cubans today choose not to play on the day after.

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

From Dissidence (in English)

Is Cuba Now Celebrated by UN As Custodian of Human Rights Despite Blatant Violations? / Angel Santiestebad

Detaining of a Woman in White, Havana, 10th of December 2013. (EFE)

We are all too aware Cuba’s dictatorship does not possess the slightest modicum of remorse or self-reproach, so we cannot ask such a State to behave honorably. The Cuban dictatorship is not worthy of respect.  Time to stop looking in vain for something that is just not there.   Best we just resign ourselves to reality.  If anything, the serious question that begs asking is why certain governments keep close ties to our two warlord brothers.  Not easy to stomach how some apparently respectable and democratic nations accept having Cuba take on the presidency of CELAC.*

Before allowing Cuba to become a bona fide member, the proper thing would be for the UN to kick Cuba out of the Human Rights Council.  Just how on earth has it become possible for the Castro brothers to — without any trace of unease or embarrassment –  shamelessly mock the international community of nations under the auspices of the UN?

In Cuba, on Human Rights Day what the State commemorates is the opportunity to violate as many human rights as possible.  On that Day, all manner of human rights are violated in a proud and peerless display of the Regime’s totalitarian access to military and judicial might. Dozens of women from the honorable roll call of Ladies in White (Damas de Blanco) were beaten and arrested in front of people who remained silent for fear that any alliance to the voice of opposition — no matter how humane or reasonable — would spell reprisal from oppressive government forces.  Once again, people did nothing to stop the abuse and humiliation of their fellow citizens.  At the home of Antonio Rodiles — a.k.a. the SATS headquarters for open thought — Calixto Martínez, Kizzy Macías and Rodiles were all taunted and later arrested in order to contain the initiative for Human Rights meetings that openly challenge the regime and its totalitarian laws.

I am convinced and pray to God that one day soon we will be able to celebrate the Rights every human being born on this planet has the right to enjoy in order to be protected from Fascist states.  The very fascists states shaped after WWII but unknown in Cuba.

When that day dawns, we will exalt those brave enough to suffer mental and physical abuse under this regime.  And those who keep silent or feigned support to the current dictatorship will only feel shame.

Fair to say that despite the State’s hatchet men and the well-oiled machinery of repression, Human Rights Day on December 10 was still felt on the Island archipelago.

Down with Dictatorship!  Nation and Freedom!

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Lawton Prison settlement. December 2013

Translator’s note: CELAC – Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.  An organization created to promote deeper intergration within the Americas.

Translated by: Shane J. Cassidy and JCD

16 December 2013

North Americans Eye Opener in Havana / Miriam Celaya

norteamericanos-dusfrutan-bandera-cubana-al-fondoHAVANA, Cuba, December, www.cubanet.org – During the days when the cruise ship Semester at Sea was anchored on Cuban territory, over 600 visitors, including students and teachers -mostly Americans– carried out a tight schedule of “meetings” with Cuban university students and toured “sites of historical and cultural interest”.

The December 11th edition of Granma published some of the opinions of the young northerners during “a brief meeting with reporters”: “I had never been so well received by the population as we were here,” commented a student from the University of Nebraska, while another one from the University of Virginia said that “Cubans are very welcoming”.
CUBA- UNIVERSITARIOS NORTEAMERICANOS DEL CRUCERO SEMESTRE AT SEA VISITAN LA UNIVERSIDAD DE LA HABANABut according to some in Havana who tried to contact the visitors, there was a strong undercover operation, with agents dressed as fruit vendors, pedicab drivers and even “pompously attired mulatto women” -those who dress in costumes around Old Havana to entertain tourists- monitored the area the whole time the cruise ship was anchored at port.

Other undercover individuals were posing simply as regular Cubans. However, Cubans’ sense of smell was not fooled when it came to identifying members of the pack of hounds.

Cubans who were interviewed by the visitors in each of the official program activities were selected among the most loyal communist militants, while Castro journalists covered the visit with their usual triumphalism, as if this were about another one of Castro’s achievement.
Norteamericanos-escalerilla-cruceroBut despite the careful planning of the visit’s programming by the Cuban authorities in the interests of the government’s political promotional agenda, and despite the students’ lack of contact with the population or with the diverse independent civil society, a group of them, despite controls of the political police, attended songwriter Boris Larramendi’s concert offered at the home of Antonio Rodiles (Estado de Sats), where they held a live dialogue with those in attendance, according to testimony of blogger Walfrido López, who was later detained at a police station after being violently arrested along with Rodiles and other activists and dissidents.

These students heard first-hand testimonials from those who are vying for a new Cuba, and they learned of repression and terror. They were also witnesses of the repudiation rally organized outside the home of Rodiles, in which the authorities had no qualms about using elementary school children, high school teens, and musicians who are eager to keep their perks and travel privileges, as in the case of Arnaldo y su Talisman. Arnaldo may need a huge talisman someday to explain his criminal complicity with those who repress other Cubans.
norteamericanos-morro-al-fondoThere may probably be other trips and exchanges with these and other American students. Many of them reported the lack of information they have about the Cuban reality and about the true nature of the dictatorship. Hopefully these visits, laden with messages to the free world will recur. Totalitarian regimes don’t have antidotes against openness, and the satrapy will definitely not be able to keep hidden any longer the slavery and repression it has imposed upon Cubans for 55 years.

Miriam Celaya.

Translated by Norma Whiting

From Cubanet, 15 December 2013

The Rice Boobytrap / Rosa Maria Rodriguez

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia.org

Count on earthworm remains, bits of assorted garbage, tiny jaw-breaking pebbles, and the odd piece of moon rock mixed inside the minute ration of the people’s rice being offered by the State; this is the quota for December which was released for sale November 30 in the bodegas (ration stores) in Vibora and everywhere else.  Go figure why the government chose December — a time when many families celebrate various Christmas or New Years gatherings and meals — to get rid of a large portion of dirty and off-color rice more fit for bird than human consumption.  All that the store manager at my “designated” bodega could say was that the grain crop available was from Pinar del Río (West of Havana) and was the only rice supply being distributed to consumers in the Tenth of October (Diez de Octubre) municipality of Havana.

I went to another local bodega and got the same song and dance.  My gripe upset a neighbor to the degree that I got scolded for taking a stance.  I was soon reminded how some brownie point seeking official would be chomping at the bit for the opportunity to nag us for hours on end — and pep-rally style — about the great job the State does for the people by providing free rice.  Beyond that, we would also get some impromptu group shouting slogans thanking the Department of the Interior for poultry, pig or any other State farm for giving us such piss poor quality products.  Fine.  But nearly inedible State products are unnerving: Cuban family members trying to put decent food staples on the table are forced to endure unbelievably time-consuming and exhausting hardships just to make a meal edible.

Most exasperating of all: Why can’t rice ever be “deregulated” so restrictions can be lifted and we can buy whatever we would like or can afford to pay?  Instead, like helpless slaughterhouse pigs, we always get the same condescending mantra: “Eat the stuff or eat the stuff.”  For consumers, the outrage ultimately becomes subsumed in listless apathy — or oddly enough — a pact of collective silence when the State decides to run roughshod over our rights.  Almost imperceptibly, people do murmur. Many are alarmed the local rice crop might suffer the same fate as our potato production when a substantial Cuban government subsidy to Bolivia all but eliminated potatoes from our sight for most of 2013.

An elderly neighbor tried to console me by saying, “Listen: If you cook it, it’ll taste O.K.”  But honestly, after wasting three whole hours sifting and washing rice to clean the grain, I could care less about the flavor, the quality, or whatever the rice’s appellation of origin might be.

Translated by: JCD

3 December 2013

Elderly Protest Lack of Medical Specialists in Santa Clara / Yesmy Elena Mena

SANTA CLARA, Cuba, 13 December 2013 Yesmy Elena Mena / www.cubanet.org.- Yesterday morning, at the 20th Anniversary Polyclinic, a group of elderly patients protested before the clinic management because of the cancellation of clinic hours, according to Adelaida Salazar Reyes.

Salazar Reyes, 68, lives on San Miguel Street in this city. She reported that for the second time the cardiology clinic at the 20th Anniversary Polyclinic was cancelled because of lack of specialists.

The nurse who worked alongside Doctor Carlos Torres, whose clinic it is, told the patients that he will not be working this coming year, according to Mrs. Reyes.

Edilio Llanes Fonseca, affected by the situation, told this newspaper that the center’s management responded, “There are no doctors.”

This reported called the Office of Municipal Health and was able to talk to Dr. Ana Maria, who works as a secretary to the director, Juan Jose Pulido, who was in a meeting, but the secretary said she don’t know anything about the matter.

The Cuban government, in its State policies, states that Cuba is a medical power and guarantees medical care in every corner of the island.

The 20th Anniversary Polyclinic is located on San Cristobal Street at Jesus Menendez, in the Raul Sancho neighborhood, Santa Clara, Villa Clara.

Cubanet, 13 December 2013

Girl Forced to Paint a Boat With the Five Cuban Spies / Rosa Maria Naranjo

HOLGUIN , Cuba , December 16, 2013 , Rosa Maria Naranjo Nieves / Cuban Community Spokespeople Network / www.cuabanet.org.-  On Tuesday 10 December, Human Rights Day, at Pedro Rogena Camay elementary school, in Holguín, Tahimí Miranda Rodríguez, age 7, was forced by her teacher to paint a boat with the name of the five Cuban spies prosecuted in the United States, and to include a heart that said “They will return.”

The teacher threatened the child that if she did not paint the boat and take it to her mother as a gift from the school, she would earn bad marks in her drawing class.

The child had been transferred from Paquito Gonzalez Cueto school, located in between Cable and Aricochea Miró, also in the provincial capital, because the teacher Yolennis Amaguer had attacked her with her fingernails.

Tahimí is the daughter and granddaughter of Ladies in White. Her grandmother is Maidolis Leyva Portelles and her mom is Adairis Miranda Leyva, both residents of No 307 Libertad Street, between Colosseum and Peralejo.

16 December 2013, from Cubanet

Obama – Raul Handshake Overlooked On The Island / Ivan Garcia

Obama-Raul-castro-SudafricaIn Cuba, most news reaches us via Miami.  Look, given such limited access to the internet where one official hour puts us back a whopping 4.50 convertible pesos (i.e., the equivalent of one week’s pay for a laborer), people resort to foreign short wave radio or whatever illegal cable connection the neighbor down the street managed to set up but charges 10 cuc to let you listen to the news.

Don’t ever think you’ll get any real news about Cuba from local newspapers.  Out of the six pages of dull newspaper made from sugar cane pulp, the national press only publishes Pollyanna stuff and overly compliant economic indicators.

Out on the street, we think of our newspapers as pure science fiction. Good for nothing except to help keep track of the baseball season, to get a peek at the TV guide, or as a good substitute for toilet paper.

The cut and paste ordeal to get information is a lengthy process.  While Barack Obama and General Raúl Castro were shaking hands in the Johannesburg soccer stadium, Rebel Radio a.m. (Radio Rebelde) went on and on about the sugar cane harvest and the great and successful efforts made by our cooperative social service units.

Moraima, a 29 year-old housewife found out about the event because she’d been watching TV through some illegal cable connection.  She comments, “every day, I watch channel 23 News and a few Oscar de Haza programs.  That’s how I get a whiff of unreported local Cuban news ranging from the latest crime, to another dissenter arrest, to the North Korean ship in Panama or to the handshake between Obama and Raúl.”

While the Obama-Raúl thing sent a large part of the exiled Cuban-American community living in Miami into an uproar, in Havana the whole thing was little more than just another bit of news.  Gerardo, a 74 year-old retiree thought the encounter was positive, but his main morning concern was being able to buy a leg of pork.

“Pork meat is sold in agro-markets for 24-25 pesos per pound.  But I was hunting for the 21 peso bargain I’d get if I could find a state slaughterhouse carrying it.  I was in line for an hour and a half, but I finally got my pork leg for Christmas Eve dinner.  Maybe the handshake will bode well for the future — I’m not really certain — but the good news is that I’ll have food to last me for a few days.  Politics is a dirty game.  Government reforms do not benefit retirees.  I don’t have relatives in Yankeeland, so no one sends me dollars. Whether those two shake hands or tell each other off doesn’t really matter to me.”

Common folks in Cuba are just tired, that’s all. Tired of a bunch of stuff.  Of bad government.  Of the now ancient embargo used as a pretext by the regime to justify depriving us of scarce goods and services.  And worst of all, tired of not having any political voice or say.

A 38 year-old teacher, Zoila feels like a pawn for the State.  “Whatever we think about the future we’d like to have is nothing the government cares to take into account.  Any one act like Obama’s handshake can easily morph into cheap and superficial politics. Our government leaders don’t want to change.  All they are doing is stalling for time.”

In Parque Central located in the heart of Havana, people could be seen rushing around stuffing plastic bags with whatever they could find.  A loaf of bread.  Two and a half pound of tomatoes.  Maybe some dry fruit.

On baseball hill just next to the statue of José Martí, countless fans argued over baseball or predicted results for the European Champions League soccer matches.

At the Payret, about fifty people queued up waiting for the movie theater to let them in to see an Argentine flick brought in by the International Festival of New Latin American Film.

Meanwhile, beggars were sorting through garbage cans.  And a pair of very old people begged for money right next to the Inglaterra hotel.  And workers hired to repair the Capitol building were selling their own lunch for 25 pesos.

Obispo street was a beehive of pedestrians swarming in and out of stores.  Some discreet street vendors offered cigars.  Others, girls.  Blondes, mulatto, black. Young men were also an option.

Our bus service is still in crisis.  Bus stops are stuffed to the gills, and people feel antsy and are upset about not being able to get where they need to go.  And even at the cusp of winter, temperatures in Havana still hover at unbearable 86 degrees of Fahrenheit humidity.

When people are forced to live like this, it is logical that a greeting between two heads of State might be overlooked.  That’s a fact even if the two men happen to be Barack Obama and Raúl Castro.

Iván García

Photo Credit: Martí Noticias.

By request, we are resubmitting the article, “Nothing To Do With Mandela” taken from Spain’s newspaper, El País on December 11, 2013.

At Nelson Mandela’s funeral service, more world leaders came together in one fell swoop than world history can recall.  Despite rainy weather, one hundred world leaders collectively sat on bleachers at Soweto’s soccer stadium to pay tribute to a man of principles.

The man had the strength to fight in the name of freedom, the level-headedness to redress his thinking, the courage to disagree among his own rank and file, the empathy to step into his opponents’ shoes, the magnanimity to embrace forgiveness, the brains to build bridges, and finally, the decency to accept a timely retirement.

In light of Mandela’s track record, why would leaders stomping on the core ideals of the South African leader wish to render tribute?  Case in point, the three ogres: Raúl Castro, Robert Mugabe and Teodoro Obiang.  Front-row-center, the fearsome threesome certainly hardened the mood and turned all the magic in the air sour.

Right on cue, Obama drove the point home: “There are leaders here today who praise Mandela but silence protest.”  The words were intended for iron-fisted leaders who gravely overstep to crush human ideals, religious beliefs or the acceptance of gender preference.  Only official protocol could possibly explain how despots were invited to attend and got the opportunity to grandstand for absolution under Mandela’s glow.  Tyrant and apprentices filled the gallery.  Simply review the list of shameful human right violators from anywhere: All were in Soweto.

Well, almost all human rights violators went to the funeral.  A few hardliners stayed at home.  For instance, the President of Sudan, Omar al Bashir was absent, but probably due to the fact that the International Criminal Court is hot on his trail.

Fortunately, Caucasus strongmen ignored the news and the event.  Also absent (for reasons of their own) were big human rights abusers like Russia, China and Iran.

But it was Czech Prime Minister, Jiri Rusnok, whose silent microphone was on long enough to record him saying that a full agenda made going to a funeral out in the “boondocks” inconvenient and something for which he was not in the mood.  No way to save face with mourners after that kind of faux pas.  Rusnok apologized, of course.  But he, at least, certainly expressed an honest opinion.

Translated by: JCD

14 December 2013

Old Lazarus / Yoani Sanchez

Saint Lazarus

At the entrance to the house is a life-size sculpture of a man with a beard and crutches. Everyone crosses themselves before him. Also of wood, there are two carved dogs as his side: skinny submissive strays. The image of Saint Lazarus plays a special role when the festivities for his day approach. He is one of the most venerated saints in our country and generates widespread displays of popular devotion. His sanctuary, in the town of El Rincón, is busy every December 17th with pilgrims, promise payers, flower sellers and police. All around him gather the hurting, the neediest, those who have tried everything to no avail… those abandoned by luck, science, or love.

When I approach El Rincón I feel this energy that comes from pain and faith. The leprosy asylum with its sad stories, the illegal settlements that have grown up on both sides of the railway line and the whiff of the always burning candles. It is not a place for smiles. At times I’ve accompanied some friend bringing an offering promised for a favor that has been fulfilled. Other times, I’ve gone with that curiosity provoked in all of us that we can neither understand nor explain. On at least two occasions I’ve arrived under the roof of the temple at midnight on the 16th and have experienced moments difficult to forget. Someone is crying, screaming, and many are praying, the heat is tremendous and everyone is sweating, it smells of open sores and poverty. There isn’t room for one more soul in the Church.

Today I left the house and very near by they have placed a purple cape and an image of old Lazarus. An old man who passed in front of him leaned over to whisper something in his ear. He had a rough beard and his clothes were from the time of the Soviet subsidy, when the ration market offered manufactured products. Looking from his parched face to that of the saint I noticed a similarity. Both were in the last stages of their lives with only the clothes on their backs and few reasons to laugh. The two of them so close, but one on the altar and the other in the street. One surrounded by promises to keep, the other knowing that all those they had made him are already broken.

16 December 2013

Reinaldo Arenas’ Nest of Suffering and Partying / Jose Hugo Fernandez

An interior room on the second floor was
An interior room on the second floor was R. Arenas’ nest of pain and parties

Havana, Cuba, December, http://www.cubanet.org. In Havana, at the corner of Prado and Dragones streets, the regime affixed a plaque to honor the memory of a foreign fascist: Manuel Fraga Iribarne. But not even the tiniest plaque or sign exists in this city that invites us to remember the most notable among those Cuban authors educated during the revolutionary period: Reinaldo Arenas.

Although he was born in the eastern part of the island, Arenas came into his own as a writer in Havana and it was this city that witnessed his most joyful and painful experiences, insofar as he was ingenious, rebellious, Dionysian, irreverent, a rabble-rouser and dead set against obeying any rule that wasn’t that of his free spirit and his insatiable flesh.

Many are the sites through which we could trace the footprints that he left in this city. Someday, in a democratic future, when the cultural authorities decide to honor themselves by revitalizing the memory of this man by means of a tour-homage to the places where he created, reveled, and suffered in Havana, it will be enough for them to use as their guide the descriptions from his book, Before Night Falls, a work as dramatic and simultaneously funny as its author.

Precisely in that book, Arenas dedicates an entire chapter to the Hotel Monserrate (corner of Monserrate and Obrapía Streets), a former whore’s den in whose second story he managed to carve out the tiniest private space in Havana, a room that he was to buy secretly. In that Hotel, according to the author himself, there lived a veritable cornucopia of misfits who lived outside the law. “If the police would come,” he comments jovially, “the only thing they had to do was put up some prison bars across the main entrance to the building, the only door in the place, and everyone inside would be held prisoner.”

A few days ago, curious to know if anything had changed, I visited the Monserrate, more than thirty years after the details described by Arenas.

There are no substantial changes. The building remains as dilapidated as always. The same atrocious front door. The dark hallways, the walls and ceiling with chipped paint, that hasn’t been retouched in more than half a century. The ancient elevator, which inspired in Arenas such great jokes and so many furtive sexual adventures, continues its astonishing balancing act, while contemplating a fall without ever actually falling. The clothes hanging on the lines on the balconies…

My name is Bebita, Reinaldo Arenas’ friend. Photo by José Hugo Fernández.

With respect to the “wildlife” that is the neighbors, the old whores have all died by now, after their conversion to the Communist Party, but it’s still possible to find there several of the recurring characters from Before Night Falls. A few have left (for Hell or God knows where) and others remain the same, stranded in time, only now so much older. But almost all of those that remain couldn’t be photographed because, as if they were Hollywood A-listers, they demanded that I pay them in CUC (convertible pesos) for appearing in any photos or for affording me a brief interview. One exception was Bebita, who not for nothing had also been an exception when she gave her friendship and her generous help to the writer. “I am Reinaldo’s friend,” she told me, while she opened the door to her room to offer me a seat, very willing, and even enthusiastic about the possibility of bringing me up-to-date, for free, on life and miracles in the Monserrate.

Through her I learned that the character who sold the room to the novelist (he calls him Rubén) continues to be as warped as ever and that he charged him for using the bathroom, 50 centavos a pop, according to Arenas, but Bebita clarifies that it was 50 centavos for using the toilet and a peso for taking a bath. With some help from Bebita, who allowed him to put a waste pipe through the middle of her room, Reinaldo was finally able to have his own bathroom. Later, the room would revert back to the aforementioned Rubén.

“On the first floor lived Bebita with her friend; they were two women who played the drums and who would get all caught up in problems caused by jealousy on a daily basis,” wrote Arenas. Well, she still lives there, also with a friend, perhaps not the same one as before, since she is much younger than Bebita. But now peace reigns in Bebita’s room, although her personal saint is still the same: Shangó, the orisha of storms (thunder and lightening).

“Some day if they decide to put up a monument in honor of Reinaldo,” she said to me, “no other place would be more ideal than the Monserrate Building, nest of his suffering and his partying. And I assume that the monument ought to be in the shape of a phallus.”

The ancient elevator of Arenas’ sexual adventures and tricks.

 

Dark hallway on the first floor of the Monserrate.
Dark hallway on the first floor of the Monserrate.
They pay homage to a fascist, while they relegate Arenas to oblivion.
If the police would come, the only thing they would have to do would be to place prison bars across the main entrance to the building.
If the police would come, the only thing they would have to do would be to place prison bars across the main entrance to the building.

Photos and article by José Hugo Fernández.

Note: The author’s books can be bought here.

Translated by: K. Rauch

Cubanet, 11 December 2013

Mandela: My Belated Personal Tribute / Miriam Celaya

Photograph from the Internet: No Comment.

Time goes on and the funeral of the famous first black president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, still occupies the pages of the press. Almost everyone feels indebted to praise the infinitely glorious Madiba, re-editing, in countless paragraphs, the deceased leader’s life and seeking to enhance his virtues persistently, to the point that we no longer know for sure if Mandela was a human being or a saint on earth. It is praiseworthy to remember with admiration and respect people who have realized valuable deeds, but I don’t personally react well to icons, paradigms or however they are defined.

Well, then, for all good things Mandela did for his people, for his example of relinquishing power when he could have retained it, due to his charm and charisma, his ability to forgive, so necessary and lacking among us, and all the good things he did throughout his long life, but I prefer to remember him as the man he was, an imperfect individual, as all of us human beings are, which puts him in a closer and more credible position in my eyes.

So, in the presence of so many stereotyped speeches and so much politicking brouhaha deployed at the funeral of a deceased who may have wished less fanfare, I decided to honor him in my own way: celebrating his existence because he lived to fulfill such lofty mission as freedom and justice for his people, during the pursuit of which he suffered repression and imprisonment, just as Cubans aspiring to the same ideals for their people are still suffering, as those who have lived in the confinement and injustices of a dictatorship not just for 27 years, but for over half a century.

But I will allow myself a special tribute to Madiba by modestly imitating him in forgiveness and reconciliation: I forgive you, Nelson Mandela, for the friendship with which you paid tribute to the vilest dictator my people has ever had, and for the many instances on which you exalted him and gave him your support. I forgive you for having been wrong in granting privilege to the oppressor instead of the oppressed, for placing your hand –redemptive for your people- on the bloodied shoulders of the one who excludes and reviles mine. I forgive your accolade to the myth that was built on violence, although you were a symbol of peace for humanity. I forgive you for having condemned us though you hardly knew us, forgetting the tribute in blood that my people made in Africa for which you, like a fickle mistress, thanked the satrap, who has never had the dignity to sacrifice himself for us, for you, or for your kind.

I forgive you, then, and I am reconciled with your memory to keep remembering and respecting the best in you. I know many, with vulgar hypocrisy, will demonize me for questioning you, but they won’t hurt me, because my soul is hardened by virtue of having been attacked and criticized before. It is my hope that this time my detractors will be so consistent with your preaching of kindness they seem to admire so much that they will eventually forgive me. May you also forgive this Cuban’s audacity and irreverence, who believes in the virtue of the good works of men, because she has no gods, but I was not able to resist the temptation to also utter what’s mine in the hour of your death.

And if either you or the mourners of the day won’t forgive me, I don’t care. At any rate, it will be further proof that, deep down, you’re not perfect; at least we’ll have that in common. Don’t take offense, in either case, you were a great person, and I will never match any of your many merits. Rest in peace, sincerely.

13 December 2013