English Translations of Cubans Writing From the Island
Passing by way of the iron bridge I see a soldier on his motorcycle waiting for all the pedestrians to cross so that he can fit through the narrow passage left after the bridge was closed for repairs. After allowing everyone to pass he finally went through on his bike. As this was happening I looked under the bridge. There I saw a group of kids fishing. They were extremely engaged in their fishing techniques and didn’t even see me watching.
23 August 2013
The composition is almost circular, compact. The eyes follow a spiral line that starts on the shoe of the man seated in the foreground and ends at the rooster held by another. There is peace, vestiges of good conversation, and in the background a village of wood and palm leaf huts. Six Cuban peasants have been represented in this painting by Abela, as well known as it is plagiarized. Their faces are tanned by the sun and vaguely indigenous. They are magnetic, irresistible. Our gaze takes us to the details of their clothing. “Dressed to the nines,” impeccable sombreros, long sleeves, perhaps with the fabric starched for the occasion.
Infected by the familiarity of the painting, I go to the countryside, put myself in the furrows where so many times I have picked tobacco, beans, garlic… I go in search of the primordial unity of Cubanness that is rural man However, under the scorching sun of August, instead of “Abela’s guajiros,” I find people dressed in military garb. Olive-green pants, shirts that lost their epaulettes long ago, old berets from some battle that never happened. They don the uniforms of the Armed Forces or the Ministry of the Interior to face the rigors of the fields. They don’t have many choices.
In the informal market it’s easier to buy an official jacket than a shirt for farm work. A police cap costs less than a straw sombrero. Belts made out of cowhide are also a thing of the past; today it’s easier and cheaper to find those used in the army. The situation is the same for shoes. Rubber boots are scarce and instead the men and women of the land wear shoes designed for the trenches and combat. In a militarized country, even in the smallest details the military prevails over tradition.
State centralization was drying up the autonomous production of clothes designed for farming. Not even the recent relaxations for self-employment have encouraged this production. It is not just an issue of economics or supply, this situation also affects questions of our national idiosyncrasies and popular customs. A current version of Abela’s painting would leave us with the impression of a looking at a militia group in tattered clothing posing for the painter in the middle of an encampment… about to sound the reveille.
23 August 2013
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Photo source: http://www.jmpingenieros.es
Note: This post is from before the new Internet centers opened.
The Cuban authorities are ready to one more investment for the society that will bring them good dividends: opening navigation centers so what we Cubans can access the Internet away from our homes and with the computers of others. This is further evidence that we should bear up after years of our right to receive and send information and opinions being violated, and wait for government leaders to prove we can sail in cyberspace without their having a heart attack.
To this we have to add the situation with transportation to get to these internet places, there re 118 in the whole country, which is the equivalent is one cup of coffee per municipality.
Among the prices of the navigation services that the Telecommunications Company of Cuba (ETECSA) has offered foreigners residing in the country for years — not given to any citizen of another country who is a simple tourist — the cheapest is called the “Night Plan” which establishes a quota of 11 hours daily between 8:00 pm and 7:00 am the following day, costs 70 hard currency pesos (CUC), for thirty days.
That is, 330 hours a month for 70 CUCs. But with the new service that takes effect on June 4, 11 hours of internet in these centers would cost 1,485 CUC per month. If the workday for these cyber centers is 12 hours a day — as in the hotels — they would earn 1,620 CUCs. These results are just for a computer to navigate the Internet. What rogues!
According to a journalistic work appearing on the front page of the daily Granma, a functionary from ETECSA affirmed that there would be a total, nationwide, of 334 machines in those establishments that would provide a chance to surf the web a few days from now. This figure, multiplied by 1,620 hours, is 541,080, which is more than half a million convertible pesos every months. The deal of the century!
I want to clarify that I am in favor of public internet services. What burns me is discriminating against individual users who could afford — and they have the right to it — a connection from the comfort of their home. My well-founded fear is that some leaders are accustomed to fattening their wallets and will continue enjoying this right, either via computers or cellphones.
It’s worth noting the deteriorating logic of computers for the systematic exploitation of what usually in Cuba is the facile evasion of the authorities when they want to avoid the people’s doubts and find a quick out of their questions: “every computer costs the Cuban state I don’t know how many dollars on the international market,” etc etc. They will omit, of course, they every 120 hours of use (five days) of each machine will more than recover the cost of the machine.
In an interview the deputy minister of communications, the engineer Wilfredo Gonzalez Vidal, who libelously said in the official newspaper Granma, between flattering the Cuban State and ambiguous answers, which shows his limits on making decisions in this field, among many issues, said:
“We are aware that the initial fee for this service, in particular, is high and that, to the extent that ETECSA could recover its investments, mainly in connectivity infrastructure, computer platforms and the cost of international connections, we will gradually increase the access points and will study the behavior of the service to lower the rates, similar to what has been done with cell phone service.”
If ETECSA has to recover the investments it’s made, wouldn’t it be better to bring this benefit to users in their homes? The economic gain would be greater and the investments minimal. Why not start there?
It calls to mind the time when, publicly, the previous Cuban president said that not everyone could read the cables, that “had to be prepared” — always discriminating against and disrespectful of the rights of others — because the enemy spreads its poison through the media, blah blah blah…
So they crush us Cubans of the archipelago and violate our freedoms over and over again. We never stop exercising our right and civic duty to denounce such arbitrariness and to fight this State monopoly over the communication media. This official trust or consortium, two-faced and double standards, show their generosity in offering as a perk to their spokespeople a service that is everyone’s right.
But we shouldn’t be surprised at such attitudes and practices from a government that shows a humanist face to the world and after more than 54 years still oppresses its countrymen, and ignores often and with impunity, the principles that should govern the legal system in Cuba.
Nevertheless, we are pleased that technological development has forced — finally! — their taking the first step. We hope that the paralyzing mentalities of forever don’t obstruct the development and the freedoms that new technologies offer to the people.
30 May 2013
Requested review of the trial against the dissident writer Angel Santiesteban Prats, we make available the documents from the same.
At a month after the presentation of the review of the trial against Angel Santiesteban Prats, last July 4, not only has no judicial reply been received about it, but, as is already public knowledge, on August 2 he was moved for the second time, in an illegal manner from the 1580 prison to an unknown location until day 7, on which even if his whereabouts were known, he continues incommunicado, with no right to calls or visits.
Angel Santiesteban Prats finishes five months in prison, sentenced in a judicial farce prepared by the political police of president Raul Castro with the clear objective of silencing one of the few intellectuals of international stature who has decided to lift his voice, his active journalism and literature in order to denounce the dictatorial situation prevailing on the island from his blog The Children that No One Wanted.
Crimes that were not proved because he did not commit them, false witnesses used on the part of the accuser, refusal to accept testimony that demonstrates the innocence of the accused, scandalous links among the political police and the judicial organs that violate the separation of powers, and juridical irregularities throughout the process, have been the reasons put forward by those charged with defending the writer in order to interpose the judicial review fulfilling all the elements set by existing law.
This is a new challenge for Cuban justice which — as the case of Angel Santiesteban Prats itself demonstrates, and as has been denounced by many opponents over the last ten years — is a system bound by the political and ideological interests of the government.
In this case, in a method that is a systematic practice against the opposition on the island, the Cuban government tries to publicly discredit another dissident. This is not the first time that the tactic is used to portray important writers as “mediocre writers,” “drunk losers,” “trashy journalists,” and other derogatory labels (remember the cases of the poets and journalists Raul Rivero, Manuel Vazquez Portal and Ricardo Gonzalez Alfonso, sentenced in the so-called “Black Spring of 2003″).
Now they criminalize, accusing Angel Santiesteban Prats of a common crime of family violence, a writer well respected by the intellectual and artistic classes of his country and of other nations. The objective is very clear: detract validity from the force and reach of his international denunciations about the human rights violations that this regime commits every day against Cuban citizens. One of the most shameful links in this strategy, as the writer himself denounced on his blog before entering prison, is the fact that the sanction was communicated by an official of the political police, weeks before the tribunal gave its verdict.
Since he was thrown behind bars, on February 28, from the La Lima prison, from an open regime that corresponds to his sentences, the writer has not stopped his denunciations. When at the beginning of April the Cuban government selected a group of the best jails to show to a Commission of National and Foreign Journalists, in a visit preceding the Report that Cuba had to present to the UN”s Commission on Human Rights in the month of May, Santiesteban Prats was moved in a violent and illegal manner to another maximum severity prison in order to isolate him from any possible contact with said Commission.
In the Petition for Review presented officially in July, the lawyer, Amelia Rodriguez Cala, analyzes exhaustively all the violations and judicial irregularities committed during the prior trial, which sentenced the writer to five years for supposed crimes in spite of the extenuating legalities that according to Cuban law only permit imposition of sentences of fines or a year of deprivation of liberty. In addition, new elements that demonstrate the innocence of the writer are provided in the File of the Petition for Review.
The complete story of this crude maneuver that the Havana regime carried out in order to silence an intellectual that made it uncomfortable, is summarized by Amir Valle, another prize-winning Cuban author who suffers exile in Germany, on his blog A título personal (Personal Capacity) and can be read here: General Chronology of an Outrage.
The Editor
Translated by mlk
10 August 2013
CLEAN ME! Car Washing, Vacuuming and Shining.
In spite of negative propaganda from the official media, a large segment of the population, especially young people, have imagined some sort of eventual return to capitalism, the only system that allows one to dream.
Twenty years ago, when they first started issuing the first licenses for small private businesses on a restricted basis, these dreams took some effort. Small home-based restaurants, known as paladares, led the way along with homes and bedrooms rented out to tourists as well as old cars made before 1959 which served as taxis. Only the strongest of these survived due to, among other things, the large number of restrictions they had to sort through as well as all the various pressures they had to endure.
Since then the country has seen a proliferation in the number of small private businesses with an ever-increasing thematic focus. They include paladares, sweetshops, daycare centers, carwash and auto detailing shops, gymnasia, hair salons, barber shops, copy shops, small boutiques, party and wedding planning services, formal wear rental, 3D movie theaters and even the occasional spa, to name but a few. All of these are in the service sector; none are in manufacturing.
Now, what has been the common denominator hindering the development of all these initiatives? It is first and foremost the absence of wholesale markets and the dearth of laws authorizing the importation of consumable goods to help create the proper infrastructure for the establishment and expansion of these businesses. Another significant issue is demand, which in the case of paladares is far below the level of supply. This is not the case, however, when it comes to the well-known timbiriches, or street vendors, who swarm through the streets offering sparse light snacks, some of questionable hygiene, at a relatively low cost commensurate with the salaries and pensions we receive.
On the other hand, the best placed businesses exist where strong investment is seen. They are, mostly, supported by start up capital, which can be provided by FE (family in the “exterior”), the foreign investment union or the children of some high directors who possess the best residences in this country, due in part to the relations of their progenitors, and a lot of money “saved” during this half century of their families in power.
Now appears a not so new method: cooperatives of a new kind (services, artisans and others), where they group together to offer their services or sell their products. But first of all, they almost always suffer from the lack of products, so it is the client who must bring them to be able to receive the benefits. This is the case of the old garage at Mayia Rodriguez and Santa Catalina Streets, which is now called “New Cooperative,” a better name for a hardware store and not for an establishment of this type, without respect to that other more appropriate, by which it was always known.
In this case the client must bring the wax, the lubricants, etc., even the detergent.
Anyway, to my view, more than a solution this is entertainment and a way that the government has to gain time, because they are not deep measures that can change or restructure the now exhausted economy of our country. So let’s keep “Playing” at this savage capitalism, since from an optimistic perspective, we can assimilate it as a necessary entertainment for a not so distant future.
22 August 2013
Havana, Cuba, August 2013, www.cubanet.org- Armando Sosa Fortuny has turned 71 in the prison known as Kilo 9, in Camaguey province.
In the photo, which was secretly taken by a member of the Committee for the Liberation of Political Prisoners (CPLPP) who visited him this past January, you can see that he looks like someone’s grandfather.
He has been in prison for 18 years. He was sentenced on April 25, 1996, to 30 years in prison on charges of “infiltration”, “illegal entry into Cuba” and “other acts against the security of the state.”
He is a man from another time, from a time when armed struggle was presumed to be an acceptable alternative for overthrowing dictatorships. So he seems left behind, obsolete in this age when civic struggle and nonviolent resistance garners greater sympathy.
Recently, in a telephone interview from prison, he told this reporter: “It was a different era. If I were in the streets now I would be struggling for recognition of the civil and political rights of the Cuban people.”
His diabetes is being controlled with insulin. Ironically the poor prison food keeps his blood-sugar levels stable. After having gone from bad to worse for years, he says candidly:
“The food is OK.”
A sister who used to visit him died in Miami. Now only the members of the CBLPP come to see him, once a month. They bring him a box with the food that they are allowed to bring in, and talk with him for a few hours.
As he tells it, early last month, July, he was taken to an office where an immigration officer was waiting to tell him that he and his comrades-in-arms were included in the Cuban government’s immediate-release program, on the condition that they left the country at once.
“That’s what I want. It’s been many years,” he said.
Then, State Security came to visit him later that month, two weeks after the first visit, to tell him signs were appearing, written in crayon, saying “Free Fortuny!”, or “Castro, free Fortuny!” on the walls in some parts of the city of Camaguey. Paradoxically they told him that this was not much of a problem, because it was a simple matter for the CDR to cover over the posters.
Sosa Fortuny interpreted both visits as “a psychological game, maybe because they wanted me to tell the boys not to put up any more posters.”
Other causes from the early Castro years
This is not the first case for which Sosa Fortuny has spent prison time. In 1960 he was tried on similar charges for having come with 25 men to fight in the mountains against the recently-established dictatorship. Many of those convicted on that occasion were immediately executed by firing squad.
That first case ended with his release in 1978, as part of an amnesty that benefited over three thousand political prisoners, accomplished through international pressure in the face of human rights violations in Cuba.
He only spent 15 years in freedom in the United States, returning on October 15, 1994, when he decided, in his words, “to create an Eastern Front to overthrow tyranny.”
But the night of the landing, a member of the infiltration team fired a shot that killed the Party Secretary of Villa Clara Province, and that provoked a firefight in which he and some of his companions were wounded.
“We saw the car coming from the causeway and our intention was to get the occupants out so we could go down the Yaguajay road to Escambray. But as Humberto motioned at them to get out of the car, it was so dark that when I passed between them the noise startled Humberto, who fired the shot accidentally,” says Sosa Fortuny.
Regardless of the responsibility that they blamed him and his companions for, the punishments — imprisonment of up to 30 years, and a sentence of death by firing squad for Humberto Real Suárez — were excessive.
Until 2012, when they commuted Real Suárez’s death sentence to 30 years in prison, he suffered for 17 years the torture of attending the mock firing squads of those who came back shouting anti-government slogans, as related by former political prisoners who shared a cell with him.
In the Cuban prisons there are many testimonies of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment to which the prison population is subjected. Everything indicates that the guards are given carte blanche to carry out beatings and abuse that have come to infuriate many.
Sosa Fortuny and his companions have not accepted the government’s political-ideological re-education:
“In Kilo 7 we’ve had to scream a lot against beatings of other prisoners. They abandoned a boy in a wheelchair. There you have to take a stand, and cause a problem. That cost us punishment cells, but I’m not sorry. I always express my ideas, wherever,” he added.
Finally, Sosa Fortuny hopes to convey a message to Cubans inside and outside the island:
“That I send a hug. On my wounds I bore the pain of the Cuban people.”
He also says he is awaiting a decision by the Cuban government to release him.
Others who are still prisoners from Sosa Fortuny’s case are Miguel Díaz Bauzá, age 70, and Humberto Real Suárez, 42. We will be updating them in the next few days.
From Cubanet
Translated by Tomás A.
22 August 2013
In Cuba there are no institutions that guarantee the rights of the most vulnerable. Prostitution is not even mentioned as a problem by the Government.
It is said that prostitution is the oldest occupation in the world. There aren’t any cultures whose histories have not recorded the practice of sexual services in exchange for money or something of value. Other forms of prostitution are fashioned in exchange for favors or privileges.
Prostitution’s time-worn persistence throughout the ages offers an almost infinite variety of forms, circumstances and considerations, sociological and psychological as well as historical, economic, gender-associated and even political. The darker margins of the phenomenon today refer to the trafficking of women through international networks specializing in human trafficking for sexual means –- victims of which are illegal immigrants and young people in impoverished areas — slavery and, specifically, the trafficking and sexual exploitation of children.
Prostitution in ‘Revolutionary’ Cuba’
Recently, the Miami newspaper El Nuevo Herald published an article about the so-called prostitution’s “hustling” (George Porta, El Jineterismo es una Forma de Genocidio [Prostitution is a Form of Genocide] ), which brings into discussion the issue of prostitution in a country that was considered a territory free of the sex trade in the decades following 1959.
“Hustling” is the expression in the marginal vocabulary that defined the prostitution that started to proliferate more strongly in Cuba since the decade of the 90’s of the last century, fueled by the economic crisis after the collapse of the former USSR and the socialist camp, and the increase of tourism as an alternative, developed by the government to generate foreign exchange income. Thus, it is all the more controversial because Cuban prostitutes in the last 20 years don’t stem from — as often happens in other underdeveloped nations — social sectors hit by illiteracy, ignorance and other similar afflictions, but are members of generations formed and indoctrinated in supposedly superior moral principles of “the new man” and many of them hold significant educational levels.
The image of the poor naïve country girl, deceived by some wily suitor who “disgraced” her and ended up exploiting her in some brothel in a provincial city center or at the capital was left back in pre-1959 history. Today’s prostitute is usually a young woman who has completed at least the ninth grade and who consciously uses her sexual attributes to achieve, in a brief time, the material benefits that she knows she cannot achieve from a salary or from the practice of a technological or professional university career.
The “hustling” does not represent a homogeneous caste either. This is a well-differentiated phenomenon in layers or strata, by category, age, physical attributes, qualifications, aspirations, relationships and other factors, of the young woman in question. Thus, there are different types, from the cheap street “jineteritas”**, that satisfy quick sex in a car or in a hallway or small room in a hovel to the spectacular and expensive prostitutes at gyms and spas, beautiful and refined, providing a more “personalized” service, many of whom dream of an advantageous marriage to a dazzled foreign tourist or to some executive at a mixed-capital firm, or to accumulate sufficient funds to emigrate by themselves.
Between both extremes is a world of prostitutes of the most diverse conditions and goals, many whose minimal objective is to survive day-to-day, with no plans or ambitions, dependent on a reality without expectations for a future.
However, the causes of prostitution in Cuba, though they relate to the ongoing economic crisis and the rise of international tourism, are deeply rooted in the deterioration of other values not necessarily linked to the issue of gender inequality, sexism or oppression of women. The phenomenon is much more complex and has deep surges, a legacy of the vulgar egalitarianism that prevailed in the years of subsidized socialism.
Sometime after, there was an inversion of values in Cuba in the social appreciation of the prostitute. Many of these women who used to sell their sexual services to foreigners in the 90’s – previously a reason for disdain and social stigma – turned into a sort of popular heroines, when they became family providers and sometimes even benefactors of their distressed neighbors. In particular, the “class” prostitutes who often provided medicine, hygiene products or food to the most destitute, significantly changed the perception of the profession: to prostitute oneself was not only more lucrative, but could be considered as a source of solidarity and prestige. By the way, by then, we Cubans were not that “equal”.
The same transformation did not take place with the lower-class prostitute. Segregationist prejudice gained momentum starting in those years, stemming from differentiations in purchasing power which spontaneously settled among prostitutes as well. Before Castro, the poorest prostitutes were popularly known as “coffee with milk”. Today’s are “sugar water.”
Having said that, could a jinetera always be defined as a victim of gender and of poverty? Does jineterismo, as in prostitution in Cuba, adjust itself to the definition of “genocide” that the article in El Nuevo Herald proclaims? Personally, I prefer to turn away from the hype. It is a fact that prostitution as a social phenomenon favors the proliferation of related crimes: pimping, human trafficking, gender exploitation, drug trafficking, etc. It is also axiomatic that the material shortages, coupled with the moral crisis, stimulate the spread of prostitution in Cuba.
However, beyond social “tolerance”, experience shows that there are survival options not associated with prostitution that were adopted by most of the women in Cuba, even in the worst moments of the crisis, and that a high percentage of prostitutes voluntarily elected that profession as the most expeditious, for profit and not just for “reasons of survival.” Thus, a large number of prostitutes do not feel the need to be “liberated” from an activity that offers them what, in their perception, is defined as “freedom”: purchasing power above the Cuban medium.
It isn’t about denying the existence of prostitution either, or the importance of anticipating its consequences, but about more accurately interpreting the facts. Assuming the inevitable, everything points to the certainty that prostitution has returned to stay: there is no tourist destination that doesn’t attract this type of profession. So what will matter is how we’ll deal with it.
In principle, any adult of sound mind is the owner of her own body and of her acts, as long as she does not undermine the rights of others, so being a prostitute or not would be – in the first place – a matter of choice, depending on whether the law determines if it constitutes a crime or not, and whether they pursue related criminal activities. Another issue is when a person is forced into prostitution, in which case it is a flagrant violation of her rights as a human being.
It is reprehensible that there are no institutions in Cuba capable of guaranteeing the rights of vulnerable social sectors, that prostitutes are unprotected, that the prostitution of minors is not prosecuted and condemned severely, that the roots of evil are not confronted, and that laws are almost always limited to punishment (the so-called “re-education”) of the prostitute, the weakest link in the chain. Cuban prostitutes, especially the “street” ones, are more likely to be victims of violence, whether by a pimp or by police extortion. On not few occasions the pimp and the police are the same person.
The issue of prostitution is hot, and it’s even part of the political agenda in many developed countries. Some current proposals focus on the regulation of prostitution, previously legalized, though a strong trend has also developed in favor of criminalizing the purchase of sexual services and not their sale.
In Cuba, unfortunately, we are very far away from instituting an effective strategy on the subject. It is known that the first step is to recognize the existence of the phenomenon, submit it for public debate and study its scope and social consequences, which requires the political will of the government: all of it a chimera
In any case, this could well be an important point on the agenda of many independent Cuban organizations interested in problems with a civilian edge. So far, there are no thematic programs on the issue in the emerging civil society. Starting and sustaining the debate will be the initial stimulus that will unleash the proposals.
*Jinetera: female jockey or horse rider, used graphically in the context of hustling.
**Jineterita: diminutive form sometimes used to describe an unimportant, insubstantial, or young prostitute.
Translated by Norma Whiting
21 August 2013
“I am being punished without their having proved that I committed a crime.” That phrase is most common among prisoners who approach me. Suspicious, only after reading the prosecutor’s request and the sanction of the court, I believe them. No proof is needed for a punishment, that’s the reason te processes are so weak. They just assess your social-political behavior, and then make the final assessment, and as the powers in Cuba are not divided and everything comes from the totalitarian regime, they simply follow orders to take off the street those who don’t show confidence in and unconditional support for the dictatorship, criminals or not, evidence or not.
Government policy is that it is better to have them prisoners, working without pay, or to give a paltry symbolic salary to a few, and in this way to possess an army of working slaves, always on hand. I suspect there’s another reason — and God forbid — which is if there is a war they can offer them freedom in exchange for fighting, and I’m sure that “troops” would accept, no matter the political issue, the reason or personal gain, which is none other than the immediate release.
One of the latest who told me he was unjustly punished, after giving me his legal papers and reading them, I learned had been condemned for receiving a 200 dollar bonus, which was sent from abroad by the owner of the firm that he worked for, as a year-end bonus.
In his work, as an economist, they found no violated. After a thorough audit the statistics were found in perfect order; even so he was sentenced to seven years in prison. A man over fifty years old, who never had a reprimand in his work sheet, on the contrary, however, nothing was worth so much sacrifice, so much offered for such an insufficient and ridiculous salary.
The sanctioned such as these abound in the barracks, incredible allegations, improbable processes, and painful penalties.
A reality that would be laughable if it were the cause for so much fear and pain in the separated Cuban families.
Ángel Santiesteban-Prats
Prison 1580, July 2013
21 August 2013
It happened in Chile. A sadistic Chile. No one should forget it.
It was in a criminal Chile which was Castro’s gift to Chilean communists, forcing that country to choose between the intervention of the military or a perpetual communism, Cuban style. Typical of Fidel: the Comandante’s options have always been the same, those two, indistinguishable: death your way, or death my way.
In the seventies, the Cuban Revolution had to make one thing very clear when it came to international intrigue: the Chilean way was a piece of shit, the only option for communism was a battle to the death against democracies.
Allende was the happy puppet of the Island and of Moscow: a mad and half blind lawyer, with even a little Garcia Marquez in his build, who at the end must have faced some ultimatum from Cuban security itself at La Moneda, so that he would not accept the exile with which Pinochet wanted to humiliate him.
She was called Alejandra.
Alejandra de la Muerte. She was more than a communist, she was a criminal. Like all of them then.
When she fell in the hands of the military thugs, she didn’t risk being able to stand even the very first of the torture sessions. She also didn’t know how to kill herself (normally it’s much easier to kill others).
She was brave. She surrendered and that was that, in advance. She accepted everything, paid the price of being a human rag-end, so long as she could reach the future, so long as she could reach the democratic Chile of today and then dynamite it all over again. She gave up false names, and names it made no sense to name, because death had reached them before her naming. But here, some malevolent mind looked her in the eyes and said: skinny girl, cookie, you will be our exterminating angel.
And they would take her for rides, on outings. To take the air through a cemetery called Santiago de Chile, between the mountain and the ocean, in ice and desert, between death and death, just as Fidel asked of his colleague Pinochet.
Horrifying that this occurred in America, in the plain light of day, in the twentieth century.
They would put skinny Alejandra in a car and take her out like a hunting dog on a chase, to name accomplices, to destroy the destinies of survivors. Alejandra de la Muerte had to recognize her old comrades, had to condemn them to death with a finger: that one, that one, that one…
That one, that one and that one, Alejandra, you killed them, you did.
The assassins only stalked them by conviction, because that is how dictatorships render judgments, even the Cuban one: by pure conviction. And they killed them thanks to that angel Alejandra, who never died because she was an angel, and so she outdied everyone and everything, until she became a professional, even though she had been condemned to death by her comrades in clandestine worlds in Havana and Santiago, with the funerary bugle ringing between Washington and Stockholm.
A car crammed with torturers, a perfect red Lada. Alejandra surrounded by death and promoting the death of Chileans thanks to the Cuban Padre de la Patria. Death more death more death: the formula of fidelity. Alejandra recognizing her old friends walking free on the street, or some old lover, or sometimes, for the sake of pure humiliation, she would finger some innocent who was then condemned to die. All of it, everything, just so that her life could give testimony of what a human being can do to a human being in the sacred saintly name of Revolution.
How can one survive those limits and justify oneself? I tell the story suddenly and suddenly I want a suicide, for her, for all of Chile, for Cuba somehow, for me.
Alejandra, kill yourself now, my love.
21 August 2013
