Translating Cuba

The themes of the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC) congresses over the years could be confused in both their wording as well as their ineffectiveness and the subsequent failure to fulfill them. I remember one, “For a critical, militant and creative journalism,” and others that decency prevents me from presenting here.

Once again the professionals of the press are engaged in another congress. Obviously they didn’t invite any independent journalists or any bloggers. In any event, I offer a slogan as the title of this post, maybe they will even use it.

28 June 2013

Mr. Lázaro Expósito
First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party in Santiago de Cuba

Mr. Secretary:

I am writing to you in your capacity as the highest political authority in our province of Santiago de Cuba. I am aware that, given the hierarchical structure of the Church, by rights it is not for me to undertake this effort, but rather for my Archbishop, Mons. Dionisio García, and I have repeatedly suggested that he do so. But following the dictates of my conscience, and from a basic sense of personal responsibility toward our people, on the eve of my perhaps definitive separation from the people of Santiago de Cuba whom I love so much, I am addressing this letter to you.

In recent months we have experienced the tragedy of a people who have lost everything or almost everything they had to survive: as you know more than a hundred thousand Santiago de Cuba families have been affected by Hurricane Sandy. We have watched with amazement the delivery of aid for our people from so many countries.

And with amazement we watched how this aid was sold for hard currency, or at inflated prices, in flagrant violation of the the intent of the donors who gave it freely. We have received information from reliable people who have followed the trail of the transports and have seen how this aid, above all the roofs, were stored in State or military warehouses, while the population was informed that these materials had already been exhausted.

With amazement we have seen government or military installations repaired in record time, while the people continue without roofs over their heads, with their houses uncovered.

We are witnesses to the frustrations of the people, to their desperation and helplessness, to a voiceless and threatening silence that makes us think that at any moment they could explode with an uncontrollable and justified rage, which could have dire consequences for the coexistence of our citizens.

Many times, on going to offer them our humble aid, almost all of it sent by other Cubans on the rest of the island, poor as the victims themselves, we have heard, “You are the only ones who remember us, the only ones who have assisted us”!

Mr. Secretary, the people perceive you to be an honest man, who works hard to fulfill his obligations and who cares about the people. We have also heard that corruption and incompetence surround you on all sides and, much to your dismay, hinder your work. All of this saddens and worries us.

As a priest, I have renounced having my own family. Along with some of my colleagues, when our families, parents and siblings decided to abandon our country, we decided to stay to serve our people in their misfortune. These people are our family: our parents, our children, our brothers and sisters. We live for them and we are willing to die for them. If today we raise our voices, at whatever risk it might entail, including being misunderstood, it is to seek a solution to so much misery and pain, and because we are not inclined to stare at the bulls from the other side of the fence, but to commit ourselves and to help with all our strength.

I ask in the name of God, in the name of truth and justice, and calling on your true patriotism which I do not doubt, that you seriously investigate what has happened and quickly remedy it.

I also ask that you yourself communicate with the president of our country, General Raúl Castro Ruz, so that, with the full weight of the State, repairs can be undertaken on so many totally and partially destroyed homes, something so important for these families affected by Hurricane Sandy. The call to the solidarity of our people you have already demonstrated in your generosity and ability during the hurricane and in the face of its devastating destruction. Thus, we make possible the Nation José Martí dreamed of, “with all and for the good of all.”

Padre José Conrado Rodríguez

Translated from version appearing in Penultimos Dias

26 June 2013

No doubt you heard that last week, on June 13 and 14, representatives from Cuba and Bolivia met in Havana to take part in their countries’ first business forum and first round of negotiations to explore various possibilities for economic exchange and for strengthening bilateral relations.

It is a bad omen, I tell you, that such an important meeting took place in the Hotel Nacional, in the Tanganana Room to be exact, which coincidentally is named after the cellar that forms part of the aged facility’s foundation and where, according to legend, Franciscan monks hid valuable treasure.

The treasure is no longer there, only vestiges of the old legend remain and any business agreement between Cuba and Bolivia will last exactly as long as a Palestinian peace plan: one round.

But that is my very skeptical opinion. According to official sources, this transcendental encounter was led by important officials from both countries, who share a common enemy. The United States, Chile and the hole in the ozone layer would seem to be disconnected strands but they carry a direct message and a clear meaning. The meeting was more a political consultation than a business gathering.

Teresa Morales, the Minister of Economic Development, led the delegation from the South American country. You might remember her name from the very descriptive headlines of well-documented articles that appeared not long ago about the hundreds of demonstrators in the Altos district demanding her resignation for — and I quote — ”her inability to resolve the problem of access to staple foods and for exacerbating the shortage of basic goods and services.”

Judging from all the signs and signals, cooperation between the future partners promises to be unruly and counter-productive, which is typical of fraternal governments which ignore laws and citizen demands.

Cuba was represented by Estrella Madrigal, a fat, bland mid-level director with limited decision-making authority. She, like many, augments her diet with unproductive trips, presents from businesspeople and some small change here and there.

Other than a speech limited to the matter at hand — joint economic ventures — she spent all her time drinking mojitos, eating canapés and urging the participants to take advantage of the enormous possibilities offered by membership in the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). She expressed her support for SUCRE (Unified System for Regional Compensation), a proposed common currency to be used for all joint operations. In addition to speaking about investments, she referred to the siphoning off of goods on consignment.

With corrosive cleverness Cuba offered the Andeans one-of-a-kind, exclusive access to the thousands of empty shelves in its monolithic chain of stores so that they might sell Bolivian-made textile products, footwear and cosmetics. The risk would be all theirs; nothing would be paid for in advance.

The accord has stimulated the sparkling wisdom of Cuba’s people. Some have even dared predict, with some degree of fear, that Bolivia’s traditional multi-colored woolen shawl — the aguayo — will be become by decree the national attire. No matter what happens, it all depends on who pays more.

26 June 2013

Mirta Velasco Toledo found herself in serious condition in a hospital in Holguin after being hit by a stone as a result of street brawl, in front of her house, involving three dangerous and well-known thugs from the area. The incident occurred on Thursday, June 27, at seven in the evening and two hours later the police still had not appeared, despite constant calls from the family.

From the hospital Zusleydis Pérez Velasco, national president of the CID and niece of the victim denounced the lack of police interest:

“If they had been alerted to any kind of opposition activity there would have been a surplus of cars, fuel, police and State Security agents arriving to repress it immediately. But when it is a matter of protecting or defending the population they are not the least bit interested.”

This is one more symptom of the degree of disorder and inefficiency of this regime. All the Castro elite care about is anything they consider a danger to their own security, not the people’s. Meanwhile they use the resources of all Cubans for personal gain, while they continue monopolizing everything to sell it, or for their own use, and they do not care about anything else.”

The incident occurred at No. 14 Playa Girón Street, between  Bay of Pigs 14th street between 24 de Febrero and Avenida las Américas in Holguín.

28 June 2013

The University belongs to the Revolutionaries, says the slogan on a central wall of the University of Camagüey, the first opened by the government of the older brother, Big Brother, in the gray gray gray years of the seventies, on the northeast side of my city. But today, when sometimes we feel just half gray, we look around, a little sadly, to see that little has changed.

I haven’t woken up yet, but, like in a Monterroso story, I see the sign, the dinosaur footprint, is still there.

The 2012-2013 school year has ended, and the reforms in this country don’t touch the essential: respect for the other. Even Ignacio Agramonte University — as if The Older had once refused equality of rights to his enemies — displays the same discriminatory sign in front of which I was photographed 7 years ago, recently expelled from another university.

A dean of this place still shouts this little phrase at a meeting, and a rector, from ISA (Superior Art Institute), remembers the student he ordered out of the university. Still the university, like the armed forces, elected offices, political and business administration, the press, the diplomatic service, “solidarity” missions, and who knows how many more things on the island, are not for all Cubans: they are for the Revolutionaries. The country still is not with all nor for the good of all, but for the Revolutionaries — and even for them, to top it off, all they get is leftovers.

We all know today that the only requirement to be a revolutionary is to remain silent, smile and look away while Cuba is falling apart on us. The best revolutionary in Cuba is he who tries to revolutionize the least.

Ignacio Agramonte is the same university that expelled Harold Cepero and other boys at the beginning of 2000, when they collected signatures for the Varela Project. It is the same place where the freedom of other friends as turned bitter while they studied and worked there.

It’s where some who knew me have said, “Beware of being friends with Henry Constantin.” But this post is not only about the trip I took this afternoon to the University of Camagüey and its little sign stinking of apartheid; it was to talk about everything Cuban universities lack.

Cuban universities need not only to erase this sign. They also need to raise salaries and student stipends, reconstruct and modernize their facilities and services, de-politicize the internal rules, authorize free association among students and professors and remove all the partisan controls on their properties.

We also need to support non-state universities — because a single educational system is the best way to prepare us for the single command — to update the curricula, become more focused on technology and information sciences, eliminate military and political subjects, connect professors and students with the reality of the country and the word, and empower them to influence it, so that physical and spiritual exile are not the only options.

Cuban universities urgently need to become self-sustaining, modify subjective and imprecise evaluation methods, measuring only academic and creative performance, abandoning discrimination in admissions according to geographic provenance, increasing the evaluative demand, applying exposition and opposition of ideas in the classes, introducing the civic and human component in the curricula.

It’s a lot, but to eliminate the little sign would be a good step.  Or to change it so that we make it into a wall-museum, where our children and grandchildren will stop for a minute, and remember that that university and that Cuba should never return.

27 June 2013

Tall like a pine and genuine in his desire to express himself through art that is ephemeral and challenging, describes the young Cuban graffiti artist, Danilo Maldonado Machado — alias El Sexto (The Sixth) — who does not smile at the spring greenery nor the excess of tropical light, despite a love for the colorful trees and ocean breezes that cool the bustling night on the streets of Havana, the city whose walls are the objects his paints, as explicit and allegorical as the reality that he tries to capture with spray paint.

It’s not that El Sexto wants to beautify this bittersweet city that defies moisture and time and official apathy. More than embellish, his nocturnal murals call the attention of the bored capital pedestrians, accustomed to looking without seeing or listening without hearing in the midst of violence and the helplessness generated by the servility and cowardice induced by the despotism of the State.

And so he has problems with the political police and the other police, who control the order and carry out the order to arrest him on the public street for having a spray can in one of his pockets and later they made a search of his house and seized his works and painting supplies as well as fining him a thousand pesos without specifying the crime he committed.

In a short video shot by photographer Claudio Fuentes, El Sexto refuses to pay the fine because “I would demonstrate that I’m doing something wrong, that being an artist is a criminal act.” And he says: “I prefer to force the courts to make a judgment for me to demonstrate how and why I’m doing harm.”

We hope that Danilo Maldonado Machado, whose pseudonym satirizes the demented political campaign of the Castro regime to free to Five Spies convicted in the United States, comes out well in this new police hunt, one among so many detentions and searches to dissuade him from his “disturbing” street art.

For those who wish to know the urban odyssey of this Havana artists who exercises freedom of expression without permission, I suggest you go to his blog, located in the Vocescubanas.com portal, where there is the video made by Claudio Fuentes. You can also read the enlightening article from the writer Ernesto Santana Zaldivar, who recreated the last fight of Sexto against the police and legal harassment on this island of automatons dressed as functionaries and of intellectuals vaccinated against common sense.

In my case, I can attest to the personal, artist, and solidarity value of this tall boy who draws, with banned spray cans, stars and satiric cocks and naive and frightened faces. I met him several times at the house of Yoani Sanchez — famous author of the blog Generation Y — and at the residence of the physicist Antonio Rodiles, leader of the virtual program Estado de Sats; in addition to attending and commenting on for Cubanet the Exhibition put on by El Sexto in the apartment of the singer Gorki Aguila, on October 29, 2011. I brought to Spain the sheet that Danilo Maldonado Machado painted on my floor in Central Havana, days before we caught the plane to freedom. El Sexto converted this sheet into a protest my being held in police custody that is a testimony to denouncing and friendship.

21 June 2013

I leaned against the window carefully. The glass had a crack running through it and with each jolt it seemed likely to shatter. A few minutes, a roadway traversed by collective taxis, an arithmetic exercise: count all the people on the street who were smiling. In the first stretch, between Rancho Boyeros Avenue and the Maravillas Cinema, none. One lady was showing her teeth not for joy but because of the sun, which made her eyes squint and her lips open. A teenager in a high school uniform shouted at another. I couldn’t hear because of the engine noise, but there was no joking in his words. Coming to the Plaza de Cuatro Caminos, a couple was locked in a kiss at the corner, but there was nothing playful about it. Rather it was a carnivorous kiss, devouring, predatory. A baby in a stroller looked close to laughing, but no, it was just a yawn. Coming to Fraternity Park, I was barely able to calculate some three laughs, including one from a cop who was mocking a boy in handcuffs being shoved into a patrol car.

It’s an experiment I’ve carried out on several occasions, to see if we really are the smiling people so talked about in the stereotypes. In most cases, the number who express some level of happiness has not exceeded five in a trip varying between two to six miles. Clearly this doesn’t prove anything, unless it’s that in our daily circumstances laughter is not as abundant as they want us to believe. Still, we remain a people with a great deal of humor. But the jokes act more like the rescuing piece of driftwood that saves us from the shipwreck of depression, not as evidence of our happiness. We laugh to keep from crying, from hitting, from killing. We laugh to forget, escape, shut up. So when we see a comedy show that touches all the painful springs of our laughter, it’s as if the valves open and the whole of 10th of October Avenue starts to laugh, including the buildings, the street lamps and the traffic signals.

Last Friday something like this happened at the “De doime son los cantantes” show, presented at the Karl Marx theater by the actor Osvaldo Doimeadios. A tribute also to the best of our vernacular theater, the comedian offered magisterial interpretations and monologues. From the economic hardships, the migratory reform, the excessive controls on the self-employed, to the corruption scandals associated with the fiber optic cable, these were some of the themes that most made us roar. We laugh at our problems and our miseries, we laugh at ourselves. After the distraction ended, the audience crowded into the hot aisles to exit. Outside, Primera Street was packed in the late night. I took a bus home and leaned against the window… no one was smiling. The humor had been left in the seats and on the stage, we had returned to our sober reality.

27 June 2013

To demonstrate that diversity and true respect for differences exist in Cuba, the rights of ALL Cubans must be recognized, without excluding dissidents.

25 June 2013