Last night, once again enjoying the Spanish silent film Snow White, directed by Pablo Berger and masterfully played by Maribel Verdú, winner of several Goya Awards, an article published on Friday 25 of this in the newspaper Granma came to mind, where the journalist Castaño Salazar, suggested with great seriousness that is time to stop using “dwarf” to refer to people who have osteochondrodysplasia, the disease that shortens the extremities and spine, and to call them “people of short stature.”
I find this a very good idea and I totally agree, it is not healthy to use terms that mark differences, when this is done with a sense of separatism, derogatorily or in jest, whether it is about race, stature, disability or simply ideology. The human being is one, whatever their physique or way of thinking, what counts is what is inside of him, his moral, civic, ethical and intellectual values .
Those who now ask us and engage a crusade to get us to remove the term “dwarf” from our vocabulary the term, as valid as “giant,” both present in the Spanish language without any pejorative connotation, but simply to name a person of short or tall stature, are the same ones who for years have considered the word “tolerance” to be dangerous, and who even today continue to use, in a disparaging what, the word “dissident.”
They are the ones who created the UMAP (Military Units to Aid Production) network, within which they concentrated all the people then considered “different,” and also forbade us to listen to the songs of the Beatles or the glories or our own singers such as Celia Cruz and Olga Guillot, who are still prohibited in our media today, considering them ideologically harmful.
Now if we apply the absurd proposal, then any mother or grandmother reading the story of Snow White to their children or grandchildren would be forced to change the title and text to refer to the “dwarfs” as “little people of short stature,” or Gulliver would not be in the country of the dwarfs, but of the “achondroplasia,” and even to read our Apostle Jose Marti, we would have to change the text , when he says in his beautiful poem dedicated his son: “For a dwarf prince this party is held…”
Gentlemen, let us be more sensible and not fall back on extremism and devote our efforts, energies and work to improving the lives of our citizens, leaving these idiomatic subtleties to our academic language specialists and the United Nations who have the money and personnel to devote time to these issues.
Yoani Sanchez from Stanford University: LIVE STREAM
Reporting from Cuba: How Pixels are Bringing Down the Wall of Censorship
Program on Liberation Technology Special Seminar
Date and Time:
MONDAY, October 28, 2013, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
(California Time Zone: Havana Time will be 7:30 to 9:00 PM)
Speaker: Yoani Sanchez – Blogger “Generation Y”, Journalist and Publisher in Cuba
A livestream will be available for this event. To watch please click here.
Co-sponsored by the Association for Liberation Technology, the Center for Latin American Studies and the Stanford Human Rights Center
Yoani Sánchez was born in 1975 in a tenement in Central Havana and, on starting school, she proudly put the Little Pioneer scarf around her neck, vowing to “Be like Che!” Fourteen when the Berlin Wall fell, her adolescence was marked by what Fidel Castro called “a special period in a time of peace,” a time of terrible scarcity and broad disillusionment.
At the University of Havana Yoani’s incendiary thesis, Words Under Pressure: A Study of the Literature of the Dictatorship in Latin America, eliminated the idea of an academic career. Already married—to Reinaldo Escobar, an ousted-journalist-turned-elevator-mechanic—and a mother, she cobbled together a living as a Spanish teacher and tour guide. In 2002, Yoani decided to emigrate, but in 2004 she returned to Cuba. “I promised myself that I would live in Cuba as a free person, and accept the consequences,” she said. All of her work since then has been a keeping of that promise.
Yoani launched her blog, Generation Y, in April of 2007; later that year a Reuters article brought her to the attention of the world. In 2008 she won Spain’s Ortega y Gasset Prize for digital journalism and Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Recognition and awards followed, including an interview with Barack Obama, posted in her blog, and nomination by the Norwegian government for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize.
Yoani is now the journalist she always wanted to be, one deeply immersed in technology. She started The Blogger Academy in her apartment in Havana and runs frequent courses in Twitter. She has published a manual on WordPress, and she works as a correspondent for Spain’s El Pais newspaper. Yoani plans to launch a newspaper in Havana, and is currently working toward that goal.
A livestream will be available for this event. To watch please click here.
Daniela killed herself. She burned her brain; this is what I’m referring to.
In the bathroom of the theatre, they said. When the power went out. She broke open an outlet, grabbed the cables, and peeled them back with nail clippers. After, she stabbed her skull with scissors twice, then put the cables through. Into her brain. They say that this doesn’t hurt, and neither does a quick bite to the brain. Then she sat on the toilet, they said. And when they turned the electricity on again, the voltage and the amps came and went as they desired. You should’ve seen it, they said. You could see into her skull through the holes in her head, can you believe it? And her underwear was wet. And all of her makeup was still intact. Daniela wasn’t one of those fairy faggots that cried, they said. But she’s the one that pissed herself, they said.
None of them were there, but they keep talking about it. And I believe them. I thank them, and I walk down the sidewalk in the shade because the red-blue police carnival is already driving me crazy. It’s a beautiful day. A little bit of sun, little clouds, an incredible transparency.
“Hey, they told me that a crazy chick killed herself in there.” Gloria jumps toward me, with her eternal smell of trash. “Were you there? How was it? Hey, what the fuck are you laughing at?”
“It’s a beautiful day,” I said dodging her hand trying to grab my arm.
“That happened because someone wanted it to and he pressed a few buttons in his office.”
It’s true. It’s horrible. It’s like remembering that my stomach is full because a calf was butchered a few days ago. No. It’s worse than that. It’s like being the butcher who dismembered the calf. Gloria insists: “How was it? Was it because she was having an affair? Or did they tell her she had AIDS? Tell me you faggot.”
“It’s not important to you,” I said. “Stick your tongue up your ass.”
She spits on my feet and heads toward the mountain of trash that spills over the buildings’ trash bins. I stare for a few seconds while she begins to sniff, to rummage, to salvage. I’m tired of looking at it. Every day the same corners, the same trash bins. This is Gloria of the neighborhood. She who eats what you shit. She who wears anybody’s clothes. She who collects cigarette butts at the bar. She who enjoys this city as a free supermarket. You know, Jesus, so young…
Broken spandex over her butt. Tan skin with no cellulite. Skinny and harsh body. Spiked and ashy hair. So young. I turn my back and I continue toward Barcelona St. I walk around the Capitol. I continue going down toward Brazil St., until I catch a glimpse of the bay in the distance. I walk, contemplating my shadow which walks ahead of me, until there’s no shadow to think about. At some moment, I don’t know when, the whole sky was cloudy. I tend to be slow at noticing these kinds of things.
People always told me, “Don’t go around breaking girls’ hearts. And certainly not the hearts of young girls. The younger, the worse.” Ten years ago, Daniela was seven years old and I was seventeen. Ten years ago, we were both hungry. Like siblings, we slept in the same bed in our poor building lot; it was her fault that I was late to discover nocturnal masturbation, serene and solitary. But I never reproached her. I never reproached her for anything. Not for her slaps or for her tantrums from her nightmares. Instead, I said to her:
“Imagine that, Dani, my dove. Can you imagine? Harley Davidson. You know what a Harley Davidson is? A bike like the one uncle Patricio has. But bigger, like a sofa. And you and I on her, on the road, can you imagine? On a freeway like in the movies, you know, Kansas, Arizona, Omaha, Salt Lake City, sun, big sky, straight, always straight, into the cloudy horizon, into the horizon where lightning always falls, you know, can you imagine, my dove? You see the bolts cut the air, but the motor of the Harley won’t let you hear the thunder, and then you go ahead and it never rains, because the clouds are running from us, and there is almost no weed, and all is quiet, the motor of the Harley, and you laughing, and I accelerating and accelerating, can you imagine?”
“Yes,” she answered, “and we’ll do that one day?”
“Just as I said it, my dove, one day, one day we’ll do all of that.”
Yuri sometimes came. He listened to us for a while and then left. Yuri was a very boring older brother, because he was never hungry. He left the university to sell marijuana and PC components. Yuri was the one who pushed mom to send me to the weekday boarding school. “We’re very cramped here,” he said. “My clients come here, they see all of these people, and then they get nervous.”
After, somehow Yuri found a husband for mom so she could leave too. “And don’t you worry about me taking care of Dani. She’ll be better fed and attended to with me than she was with you two.”
Mom left under pressure. I can’t blame her. I left feeling pressured. Daniela never forgave me. Seven years. Daniela was seven years old when I broke her heart, and she never sent it for repair. She started liking the bubbling of her broken teapot. Dandling it through the nights, she put a different rhythm in her life.
When I came to visit, I laid beside her, just like before, and I talked to her about the festivals at the Dunlop curve, during Mardi Gras, and in San Francisco. “Quit talking shit,” she said to me, and turned to the other side. Yuri sometimes came, and he looked at us like we were pathetic.
Yuri is sitting at his desk, alone. The Sergeant is standing up, leaning on the wall, smoking. But he doesn’t count. Yuri builds a domino wall. He knocks it down with his finger:
“I’ve already heard.”
I sit in front of him, gather some dominos, and make them look like Stonehenge. These type of things always intrigued Daniela. Dolmens, menhirs, whatever. Neolithic drunkenness, all of that shit.
“We have to move on. You heard me, Omaha. You have to get rid of the burden,” he says, as he raises his head. “What do you got there?”
A man enters the room pushing a child ahead of him:
“You can stay with him tonight, but tomorrow I’ll be here early to pick him up. Give me the usual.”
“And what’s the rush?” Yuri measures the boy with his eyes, and the boy smiles at him.
“He’s my sister’s nephew. So that’s the hurry. The usual, I told you.”
The man leaves. Yuri gets up and tells the child:
“Come here.”
I follow them. In the back room, Yuri sits the boy on the bed, and puts a ham and cheese and TuKola soda in front of him, on a small table. For a while, Yuri watches how he eats and drinks, and then he gives him a Nintendo DS.
“I hate it when they bring them to me like this,” he comments. “They don’t even last for a night.”
I shrug my shoulders and return to the living room. The Sergeant is in front of the table, roughly groping a domino. He blinks like a boy in trouble, drops the domino, and returns his three hundred pounds of muscle and fat to his spot.
I put any DVD into the player and throw myself on the couch. It turns out to be Wesley Snipes, with glasses and a sword. Just what I need. It begins to rain outside.
We walked down Tulipan Street toward Calzada del Cerro. Victor had said that Manual Sanguily, who I only remember from story books in elementary school, had lived at No. 14 Tulipan and received Maceo there. Tulipan is not that long of a street. After Calzado del Cerro it ends at another street called St. Teresa.
The house was the most beautiful there, despite being in ruins. Luz took photos.
It was then that the lady sitting in the destroyed doorway called out to us. I think she was anxious to tell her story. She let us enter her home, in what would have been, before, one of the rooms in the mansion, and let us take photos. The roots were hanging from the ceiling. That was impressive. The same vitality of the house, where the seeds prospered, is what led to its end. But with people inside, who have nowhere to go.
And to our surprise, people are convinced that this is the same house we were looking for, Sanguily’s house.
Victor works wonders. He invented a XIX century periodical, he prefers to call it an apocryphal libel. And on page 2, there is stamped an image of the house, the house in the resurrection of the image. Great, right?
HAVANA, Cuba, October 2013, www.cubanet.org – Amid the ruins, the people living in No. 216 Tulipan, in El Cerro, are convinced they inhabit the same house where Manuel Sanguily lived.
“Sanguily lived here. On the terrace he had coffee with Maceo,” they’re heard to say, excited.
Beyond the myth or the truth, the house is falling to pieces with its inhabitants inside.
Leonila Mirtha Cruz is 61 and was three when she moved into the house. “My grandmother was the rent collector for the rooms.” Her eyes light up when she says, “Indeed, I know the history of this house.”
When it rains she leaves the one room to which her ownership has been reduce, and takes cover with a nylong bag under the eaves of the house across the street, until the rain passes.
If there isn’t too much water, she puts the bed in the corner by the door into the room, where there is still a good piece of roof and falls asleep there listening to the sounds of the stones falling in the false ceiling. “The only place that doesn’t get wet is this little corner.”
Cruz explains the reason for the falling fragments of the roof:
“What I have up there is a grove of trees. A yagruma, a paradise tree, a capuli, and the roots grow at night.”
The roots hang down through the roof and the walls of the abode. Even more than its extravagance for the perception, the growing vegetation of the house, which retains the majesty of the ninetheenth century, contains the exact path to its end.
Uninhabitable patrimony
With the imminent danger of collapse, the house has a demolition order, but the authorities haven’t offered a way out other than eviction.
Cruz relates that, years ago, “they gave homes” to some families living in the rooms of the old mansion. But the bad luck of not having been on this list is to blame for her being alone. Her children left as rafters in 1994 and she hasn’t heard from them. “They left because they couldn’t take it any more,” she says.
According to her account, the house was to be declared a heritage site in 1979. On that occasion, they were told the property couldn’t be touched.
“I’m content with a tiny little room like this,” she says, bringing together the tips of her index finger and thumb. And she adds, “Sometimes I tell myself it’s better to live in a cardboard box, because it’s less dangerous. Living here, a stone could fall on you and kill you. When the dead person has no one to mourn them, it’s worse.”
To shake off the sadness that has overcome her for a moment, Cruz says impishly, “Sanguily, get me out of here please. Find me a better room.”
“A coffin is cheaper”
In another room of the house a family of three gneerations lives together. The children, 10 and 11 years old, were bornthere. When the roof collapsed, they built a small house of roof panels and shingles inside the room.
The two children attend school. The clothesline with clean clothes and a few pots and pans, give a homey touch that speaks of humanity, which resists misery.
The children’s grandfather tries to fix a chair, straightening some nails with a table knife. He breaks the silence, “We have asked for help to fix the house, but it seems a coffin is cheaper.”
He points to the street, “The bosses come by here, the Housing boss, the Sector (police) boss. They say they’re going to tear it down, but without telling people where they’re going to take them.” He concludes, sadly, “This is abandonment, and they treat us as if we were animals.”
Tulipán 14
According to historic data, Manuel Sanguily received Maceo in the No. 14 Tulipan house on the latter’s visit to Havana. Both had fought in the Ten Years War.
In the pause before the War of ’95, specifically in 1889, they organized gatherings at this house, where the patriots discussed the future of Cuba. Sanguliy was considered by Maceo to be the exemplary figure of democracy.
With urban growth, the street numbering changed on Tulipan. What was once No. 14 Tulipan, now might be No. 216. But they no longer speak of democracy there. Its inhabitants are content to have survived the last downpour.
The Cuban cartoonists, who publish their cartoons and works in the official media, seem to have signed an agreement, by which eighty percent of their satirical darts are directed against the empire and its lackeys, and the other twenty are partitioned between the treatment of general topics (peace, war, hunger, climate change, etc.), that does make anyone cringe, nor cause them personal problems or complicate their existence, plus some things and cases about irrelevant administrative leaders, bureaucrats, service employees, and so on.
“Liborio” – a character similar to “Uncle Sam”
Never has any politician at any level been touched with so much as the petal of a rose, although they have systematically demonstrated their ineptitude and incapacity to fill the jobs they occupy. They seem to be included in some clause of untouchables, together in a signed agreement. It is often said that political satire has been and is an important part of humor because it is a thermometer of politicians’ rights and wrongs.
In Cuba it was like this until the liquidation of freedom of the press by the new regime. The Liborio character created by Roberto de la Torriente, later the Bobo (Fool) character created by Eduardo Abela, and later, in the fifties, Loquito (Wacko) by Rene de la Nuez, showed, with salt and pepper, what was going on in our national life.
Bobo
Other cartoonists did the same, having among the characters in their cartoons and work all the public figures, from the president of the day down to minor figures. Then, political humor was not persecuted nor punished. To review the thousands of caricatures published during the years of the Republic, is to take an interesting and instructive tour through this part of our history, which is impossible with the most recent, where reality has been kept hidden and distorted by spurious ideological interests.
Loquito
To be able to do this, we have had to turn to publishers outside of Cuba, for the magnificent Cuban comedians living abroad.
Now that some pro-government journalists have dared to respectfully request a loosening of the current secrecy, it would also be advisable for some of these humorists to ask, also respectfully of course, to be allowed to reflect, from the humor side, the sad national reality and the many responsible for it.
The lady counts the coins before leaving home: she has fifty-five cents in convertible pesos. It is the equivalent of a full day’s pay and barely fills a corner of her pocket. She already knows what she is going to buy… the same as always. She has enough for two chicken bouillon cubes and a bar of bath soap. So eight hours work is just enough to flavor some rice and work up a few suds in the bathroom. She belongs to that Cuba that still calculates every price in national currency — the Cuban peso — a part of the country that doesn’t receive remittances, has no special privileges, no family abroad, no private businesses, nothing going on under the table.
Just before arriving at the store to buy her Maggi cubes, she stops to stare at those drinking beer at a snack bar. Every can of this refreshing drink is the equivalent of two days’ pay. However the place is full, packed with couples and groups of men who talk loudly, drink, try some of the food. It is the other Cuba, with hard currency, with relatives abroad, with their own businesses or some other illicit source of income. The abyss between the two is so great, the divide so major, they seem to be running in parallel, never touching. They have their own fears, different dreams.
When the beginning of a timeline to eradicate the dual currency was announced this week, the two countries that converge on this Island reacted differently. The Cuba that lives only on its miserable wages felt that finally they had started to put an end date to an injustice. They are those who cannot even have a photo taken on their birthday, pay for a collective taxi, nor imagine themselves traveling anywhere. For them, any process of unifying the currencies can only bring hope, because it couldn’t be any worse than it is now. The other country, in convertible pesos, received the news with great caution. How will the exchange rate change relative to the dollar or the euro? How much will the buying power of those who live better today be devalued? Their thoughts were pragmatic.
In a society where the social abyss is increasingly unfathomable and economic inequalities grow, no measure helps everybody, no relaxation will make life better for each person. Twenty years of monetary schizophrenia have also created two hemispheres, two worlds. It remains to be seen whether a simple change of banknotes can bring closer these two countries that comprise our reality, these two dimensions. If it can make it so that the lady who — almost always — eats rice flavored with a little soup cube, can one day sit down in a snack bar and order a beer.
A brief summary of topics that describe the situation of Cuba in late 2013 could be summed up in two words: reform and repression.
The reforms have been directed mostly in the right direction, but in a superficial way and excessively slowly. In addition to trying to alleviate an economic situation caused by years of volunteerism and contempt for the most basic economic laws, the reforms try to formalize the assignment of minimum space to entrepreneurs who were already earning from the illegal activities, perhaps so that they don’t feel incentives to leave the country or join the opposition.
The repression has been characterized by increased brief and arbitrary arrests and systematic maintenance of the acts of repudiation in which a portion of the population is driven by pressures and incentives to attack and insult to other citizens who peacefully express their disagreement with government policy. This undoubtedly constitutes incitement to commit acts that qualify as hate crimes. One of the objectives of repression is to isolate and terrorize malcontents who have not yet dared to cross the fuzzy line between loyalty and opposition.
A Reform to Delay “The Change” and Encourage Entrepreneurs
The list of the substantive reforms implemented by President Raul Castro since he formally took over the country in early 2008 is well-known:
Access to cell phone, permission to stay in hotels, buying and selling of cars and houses, expanding the list of jobs allowed to the self-employed, expanding the leasing of land under the concept of usufruct, the abolition of the exit permit and the concept of Final Exit, opening the Nauta network for connecting to the Internet, the so-called non-agricultural cooperatives, the ability to hire labor, the tacit acceptance of professionalism in sports, and other measures of greater or lesser importance. All of this could raise a wave of optimism to make people believe that the changes could ultimately anticipate The Change.
The limit that hampers this platform of changes is that it doesn’t touch the essentials. By not explicitly accepting private ownership of the means of production, nor merchant activity in the broadest sense, it impedes the emergence of small and medium businesses that would generate the appearance of a middle class country. It lacks a political commitment to make it clear that prosperity will not be criminalized. The decision not to allow the concentration of ownership, clearly raised in the Guidelines of the 6th Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, leaves a very narrow framework and becomes a straightjacket for the development of the nation to emerge from the exhausted paths of socialism.
The country’s economy remains a stronghold of State decisions, especially foreign trade, industry and banking. The debts between companies, inflated payrolls, lack of productivity, lack of diversity, the absence of initiative, are still hallmarks of what is known bureaucratically as the “State sector.”
Moreover, the dual currency, the lack of a living wage, excessive taxation, the unaffordable prices of staples, and widespread corruption create an atmosphere of mistrust and insecurity that drives away potential foreign investors.
As long as there is no sound legal basis that enshrines the right to property and provides guarantees to domestic entrepreneurs, the reforms will seen be with suspicion and mistrust, as mere instruments to gain time and to keep the ruling elite in power. However, these reforms have no significant effect on the life choices of the population. The fact that around 400,000 Cubans are engaged in self-employment and no longer depend on the State, opens sociological perspectives that were unthinkable just a decade ago. continue reading
In this dynamic of reform and repression, self-employment is seen from the more radical sectors of officialdom as a necessary evil, far from the utopian aspiration of the “New Man”; a noxious weed that the 1968 Revolutionary Offensive of 1968 tried to eradicate and that now resurges as a new class to emphasize the inevitable inequalities. Paradoxically, from the most radical opposition sectors, the self-employed are often described as “complicit with the dictatorship,” people who neither protest nor collaborate with any opposition activities, in order to keep their businesses afloat. Indeed, with their lights and shadows, the self-employed are the most dynamic sign of this time. Their existence and growth belies all the political discourse of half a century.
In mid-2013 , as part of these reforms, the Cuban government announced the opening of 118 Internet access points throughout the country. Under the name of Nauta, the new service includes email and browsing at prices ranging between 1.50 Cuban Convertible Pesos (CUC) and 4.50 CUC per hour of connection time. The measure, insufficient but welcome , enabled more than 100,000 Cubans to become users of this service in just two months. However, such flexibility does not live up to expectations for the fiber optic cable between Cuba and Venezuela. The majority consulted on this issue said they had hoped to allowed Internet access, without ideological considerations and priced in Cuban pesos (CUP), from home.
Still, one can speak of an increase in new connectivity alternatives promoted by the development of technology rather than by government permissiveness. The emergence of wireless file sharing; the consecration of USB flash memory as a mechanism for transferring information; the so-called “combos” or “packages” of videos circulating in the self-employment market; and the illegal satellite dishes to pick up the television signals from nearby countries, among others, are some of the parallel paths used by the Cuban population to access news, documentaries, digital books and information taken from websites.
The official media have opened some spaces for criticism and debate in the last five years. Among these are the letters to the editor pages of the newspaper Granma. Analysis segments have also appeared on national television news programs, pointing to an intention to approach the reality but without mentioning either the lack of legitimacy of the rulers or the infeasibility of the system. Consequently, there remains a strict Party monopoly on the mass media. There have been no legal advanced with regards in allowing the existence of a press not associated with the Communist Party. However, in the last five years, there has been a great increase in the number of websites, newsletters, periodicals and blogs created without official permission and from the critical sector.
Repression as a Means of Control of Citizens Without Rights
The main unresolved issue of the so-called Raulista reforms is in the field of political and social rights. Freedom of expression and association are the most violated, but the effects on freedom of religion also persist and, despite modest advances, signs remain of discrimination with regards to race, gender and sexual preferences.
Members of the Ladies in White, members of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, the activists of the Citizen Demand For Another Cuba – demanding that the government ratify the United Nations covenants on rights – and numerous independent journalists and librarians, have all been victims of police harassment. There have been verbal aggression, threats, beatings and abuse of all kinds. According to data documented by the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, since January of this year to the date of this report, arbitrary arrests are hovering around the 4,000, data to which must be added to the 12,800 cases reported since 2010, the year the release of political prisoners from the 2003 Black Spring began.
The spiritual life of the Cuban people, rich in nuances and traditions, was terribly damaged by decades of official imposition of atheism. Only after 1991 were there signs of some tolerance, but rigid control exercised from the Office of Attention to Religious Affairs of the Cuban Communist Party was still maintained. This entity, despite being legitimized as a partisan branch, exercises governmental functions over religious hierarchies or fraternal associations, regulates permits for repairing churches, the import of goods, the licensing of bank accounts and other administrative functions, whose main purpose is to put political conditions on the development of spiritual life.
The issue of racial discrimination in Cuba cannot be reduced to a simple comparison with the times before the Revolution. In conflict with partisan agreements and ministerial resolutions, the Cuban prison population remains predominantly black and the same can be said with regards to people with less income. Prisoners are also those who are less likely to have a presence in academic, scientific, diplomatic and political environments. In the media, in commercial advertising (rare, but it does exist) the presence of racial diversity does not match, or even come close, to the mixture that defines us.
With regard to discrimination based on gender or sexual preference, it should be noted that the role of masculinity remains predominant, with a discourse in which virility is expressed as a virtue. There is only one authorized women’s organization that functions in the classic way of being a mechanism to impose on women whatever is convenient for the State according to the circumstances, whether with regards to work or breastfeeding. Only in recent years, timidly and late, have they been promoting acceptance of diversity of sexual preferences, but it is recognized that these proposals come not from within the LGBT community, government institutions dictate what should be done and how far it should go.
The national educational system, taken over by ideology, turns the most innocent elementary school reading class into political indoctrination that parents cannot prevent. The motto that “the universities are for revolutionaries” is not a simple slogan of a student organization, but official policy. Even today there are cases of university students expelled with no recourse for political reasons and many more who are forced to wear a mask of simulation to finish their studies.
Citizen Responses to Reform and Repression
In all this time, neither alternative civil society nor political opposition groups have managed to articulate an effective response against the deficiencies of the reforms or the excesses of repression. The Party-Government that rules the destiny of the country, or at least tries to lead it, had a platform no longer based on ideology but rather a single chorus, repeated endlessly: Order, Discipline, Demand. In the midst of a panorama of deterioration and loss of ethical and moral principals, the delayed struggle to rescue these values is now an indissoluble part of the government slogans. This battle is the result of a hijacking of the discourse of the opposition, and the same can be said for the migratory reform and most of the measures taken by the government, applied, that is, in a superficial media-focused way, without the depth proposed by the opposition.
The challenge now for civil society and the peaceful opposition is not to deny the existence of these reforms, but to take advantage of them in creative ways. It is not about uncritically applauding them, but exposing their inadequacies and unmasking their traps, which are many. Only peaceful citizen resistance can confront the repression: the timely and accurate denunciation of every event in solidarity with those who can make sure your message is heard by others.
There is great diversity among the projects undertaken Cuban civil society and a slight but growing tendency to find common ground, although in principle there can be only minimal consensus. Among these the most important are the need for respect for all the issues listed in the Charter of Human Rights, the call for democracy, full respect for the plurality of opinions, and renunciation of violence.
This first report, which doesn’t pretend to cover everything, is a modest attempt to understand problems from a shared perspective, and is an invitation to debate and find solutions.
My writings reappear now that circumstances allow me to return to publishing. It has been more than fifteen days — I don’t know if it was a technical problem or one of censorship — that I haven’t been able to administer the blog. Now, thanks to a friend, we resolved the problem and I’m going to continue my democratic psychotherapy, draining my freedom of conscience through the blog.
My apologies for the outdated texts; it’s as I said once before, I want to express my opinion or position vis-a-vis certain topics.
The issue of solidarity among artists is complicated. Each guild has its own characteristics. A case that comes to mind is that of the painter Bejerano, who lost a lot of solidarity; I remember there was even mention of a maneuver by the CIA and the Miami mafia before Bejerano was declared guilty.
Angel Santiesteban
In the case of the writer Ángel Santiesteban, the immense majority of his colleagues within the guild in Cuba preferred to look the other way; only the Ladies of UNEAC — the Cuban Writers and Artists Union — joined forces to turn him into a negative symbol of the campaign against violence against women (no one dared to defend his innocence, but I say they could have at least asked for a fair trial).
Robertico Carcassés divided opinion within the musicians, angry voices in favor of his requests for few, although some hit a high note; the majority of those who scolded him did it not knowing how to find where along the space-time curve they should position themselves on the “updating of the socialist model.”
Robertico Carcasses
But far beyond the déjà vu of those twenty (?!) years known as “The Five Grey Years,” things with Robertico soon returned to normal; it’s that he raised questions like they fell from the tree, so to speak, which — save the one about the girl María, who nobody knew who she was, and the evil thoughts related to another thing — almost the whole world thought it good that he asked, even those who don’t have a permission letter to buy a car.
Miguel Ginarte
I was surprised by the reaction around Miguel Ginarte, accused of corruption, embezzlement or whatever crime “of-the-day” thought up by the Comptroller General of the Republic. The actors guild, through the social networks, has been set in motion; Ginarte is so beloved, that he’s considered a priori an object of dark manipulation, when those of us who live in Cuba know how thin the line between legality-illegality usually is, so much so that sometimes just an out-of-place comment is transposed; and an unwise comment from Ginarte (close friends with his neighbors as was common knowledge — and well-regarded in the area of his little farm), could cost him the hard times he’s now experiencing.
