London has come to Havana. During this week of British Culture that is celebrated from the first of June in our country, even the climate has decided to be in sync with that of the other Island. Grey skies, drizzle, mist at dawn. All we lack is the silhouette of Sherlock Holmes sneaking around a corner or a magician knocking with this staff on the wood of our door. They are days of great music and a chance to appreciate unusual schedule in the movie theaters. Since last Tuesday they have been showing a selection that includes the 2013 Oscar winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man, and also the biographical film Marley, about the life of the famous reggae singer and composer. The selection of cartoons for kids and teens will probably attract a good audience at a time when many are on vacation from school.
I have been enjoying some of the programming not only for me but also for many others. Especially thinking about those young Cubans , or forty years ago, secretly listened to an English quartet which the official media now play everywhere. The striking colors and the design of the poster for this “British Week” has evoked for me the iconography of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, and also the delightful adventurers in the Yellow Submarine. So some of us have also taken it as a tribute to those battered Beatlemaniacs from back then. These days, however, the greatest comfort comes from the window cracked open to let in this fresh air that comes to us from the outside. This gift of sensing that culture can make the Atlantic seem narrower, the passing years shorter, the losses recoverable.
From May 29th until today I could not open VocesCubanas.com, the alternative platform that contains my blog Island Anchor. As I thought the “closure” could be only be in the Spanish Levante — I live in the province of Castellón, in the community of Valencia — I called followers of my posts living in Zaragoza, Madrid, Canary Islands, but none could access “Cuban Voices” nor enter my blog, not even from Google by searching on the titles of the last texts.
Coincidentally, Wednesday May 29 was the last day of Yoani Sanchez’s stay in Madrid, where she delivered a speech at the ceremony for the Ortega and Gasett awards, given by the newspaper El Pais; the next day she was received in Havana by family and friends while the Spanish newspaper reproduced her words and pictures with former President Felipe González and other figures of the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE) and the media.
No one should be ready to think that the closure of the Voces Cubanas portal in Spain was a way to lessen the impact of her words and to annul any commentary on her extensive tour of Americanand European countries. But who benefits from the silence of censorship? Who gave the order to disconnect? Where and by whom was it executed? The answer points to the officials who monitor the news in the Cuba Embassy in Madrid and to the Island regime’s network of consulates in the Iberian Peninsula.
It is not the classical theory of conspiracy; the Castro regime tactic is very old and the order stands, the diplomats-cum-State-Security-Agents executed it based on a Guide to events that demystifies the Havana government’s propaganda. They simply overload the networks, hack pages, multiply the trash emails against some, and “take the offensive” against others, even in media such as El Pais. The rest is up to time and the naive who are silent before the long arm of censorship.
From an economic point of view Cubans have come to feel that they lack a future, it has been more than five decades and they have seen no fruits of their labors, which don’t even meet their basic needs of housing, food, clothing and a job with a decent wage.
The loss of motivation to study careers requiring a technical or university education comes from there being no economic advantage, nor even jobs to fill with these qualifications. The insecurity makes people look to the future and old age with fear.
There is no hope of prosperity. Every discourse has a political focus, with regards to the economy they only talk about working and being productive, about control and demands, not of new factories or investments or more employees. They talk about a primitive agriculture, subsistence level. An educated people can’t accept these miserable proposals.
Religious freedom is tolerated, but the system doesn’t like it. There is a lack of freedom of expression.
Cuban people are taught to watch each other, there’s a paranoia about being heard and being informed on to the authorities.
The State’s organizational structure is designed to convince us that all is well, or to understand what is wrong by looking for external causes, or in lower level management and not at the strategy of the higher ups who re never wrong. This limits the possibility of changes, all this is integrated into every Cuban citizen leading to a frustrated frustrated, hopeless personality, faking it, with no exit, looking abroad for an option, a hope.
The aspiration of every professional is to go on an international mission to earn a little money, have a house, buy a car, and have some comforts; when they can’t achieve it they want to leave even more to get away from their family, their country.
Emigration to the United States has also been an option, although risky, sad and cruel, when people use any kind of floating artifact to get to that country, to embrace a hope for prosperity and to help their family who with anguished hope said the magic words, “arrive safely” and then, gratefully, receive remittances that alleviate their economic stress.
In any event, the solution for Cubans is not outside, but within.
Having served eight years in prison of the 12 he’d been sentenced to, they granted him freedom because of his good behavior.
The prisoners said goodbye to him with a mixture of sadness and joy, everyone wanted to be in his place, it was a feeling that gnawed at them.
A few days later they saw him return and the annoyance was widespread in the barracks. He declined to explain, he just went to his bed and lay face down.
Someone said he’d returned to serve those twelve years, plus four more for fleeing.
Later he explained that the guards were to blame. The day he was supposed to leave, they brought him in around 10 at night according to internal regulations.
“There I was informed that they wouldn’t sign my release until midnight and one minute, not one less nor one more, the duty officer told me. And I looked at that door where I should be getting out. I had dreamed of this moment for eight long years, and now the door was in front of me, begging to be possessed, begging me to take her all night. She offered herself like a woman receiving me with her legs open, ready to be penetrated, and I was biting my nails, watching the dark impertinence of those open arms.
The guards weren’t paying me any attention, ignoring the lack of respect of putting me in front of a naked woman without the ability to touch her, and I stretched out my fingers, then my hand, stood up, and I don’t remember how, my legs — responding to their own impulse — started to walk.
And in that immense night, without receiving freedom, I was lost.
In 1993 Fidel Castro found himself on the ropes with the economic crisis and accepted the circulation of the dollar in Cuban territory. Until then, possessing foreign currency could cost you several years in prison. “The enemy’s money” came to stay, although years later it would be replaced by substitute called the “convertible peso” or CUC. Among the most notable details of the decree that authorized the dual currency — the CUC and the Cuban peso — were the motives for doing so. The Official Gazette recognized that this measure “contributes positively to reducing the number of incidents characterized as punishable which will relieve and support the work of the police and the courts. That is, it would save work for prosecutors and judges if people were allowed to carry dollars. However, the key lay in the date chosen for the new law to take effect: August 13, the birthday of the Maximum Leader.
Two decades have passed since that time and Cuban society is still gripped by monetary schizophrenia. Fidel Castro no longer holds the post of president but it seems that his brother is also given to mixing legal relaxations with the family calendar. On June 3 he commemorated not only the 82 years of his life, but he also put an end to a strategy of excessive control of Internet access. Just a few hours from the end of this day, the 118 cybercafés with public connections to the web opened. A somewhat bitter birthday gift for the General who had been delaying however possible the conversion of Cubans into internauts. Most likely this small step toward information flexibility will also happen with the legalization of the dollar: it will not be reversed.
Since this morning, Tuesday, the new public Internet sites began to operate with Internet and Intranet service. At a cost of 4.50 convertible pesos, a little more than $4.50 US, the user can access cyberspace for one hour. You can also choose to surf the national intranet for 0.60 CUC, or access “.cu” email only for 1.50 CUC an hour. In various tests performed — undetected, so far — none of the pages considered political were censored. With a minimum connection speed of 512 KBPS, the interface that welcomes the user as soon as the computer is turned on is called Nauta. Although all the workings and installed programs run on Microsoft Windows.
On opening day Internet portals accessible from the new locations included those such as El Nuevo Herald, news sites in the style of Diario de Cuba, and several blogs critical of the government written from the Island. The high cost of the service, in a country where the average monthly wage is around 17 dollars, seems to be the key constraint. This contradicts the deputy minister of communications who recently declared that “it will not be the market that regulates access to knowledge in our country.” To date, those who have hard currency — authorized to circulate by the former president — will be able to afford entry to social networks, to classified ad sites, and the tempting employment or scholarship sites where you can register to try to emigrate.
Curiously both measures — the legalization of the dollar and this timid opening to the Internet, have been the fruit more of pressure than the government’s desire for openness. To allow Cubans to possess convertible currency was a decision taken in the face of evidence that in the informal market the so-called “greens” circulated every day more strongly at the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties. A similar situation happens now with the information that flows from the vast World Wide Web. Pirate connections to the web on one side and the advance of the clandestine webs of audiovisual distribution on the other, confirm the futility of stemming the tide of kilobytes.
The first users who tried the cybercafés this morning were surprised at the speed of the connection, but lamented the excessive costs. Several official reporters hovered around the tables of a local center in the Vedado neighborhood trying to capture snapshots of Havanans throwing themselves en masse on the keyboards. Instead, they found a few cautious clients sizing up the limits of the new service. Each one had to show their ID card and sign a contract before seating themselves in front of a computer screen. A contract that clarified that the service should not be used for “actions that can be considered (…) harmful or detrimental to public security.” A sword of Damocles that could be interpreted also from political and ideological considerations.
From birthday to birthday, so go changes in Cuba. Twenty years ago it was the dollar… today the Internet.
This morning I went with my friend Magy to buy some bananas and ingredients for us to make a nice salad. We stopped at the EJT (Ejército Juvenil del Trabajo or Youth Labor Force) farmers’ market. We did not find anything worthwhile but we did overhear a conversation between two quite elderly men we recognized from our neighborhood.
One was saying to the other, who was dressed in military fatigues and boots in spite of being well into retirement age, how expensive and bad Cuban-made cleaning liquid was. The one in boots, raising his voice so those of us present could hear, replied, “No, it’s good. I just bought some here, and it came sealed and everything.”
“Listen, don’t be blind,” the other one said. “They dilute this stuff at the factory. And instead of the three pesos it used to cost when it was good and thick, it now costs twenty-five. Don’t you realize they are robbing you?”
“O.K.,” said the one in boots. “It’s true, but they only steal so they can give it to you.”
The other gentleman, who could not contain himself after such an utterly idiotic remark, said, “Look, my friend, I don’t want anyone stealing anything for me, much less the state. It’s like when they tell us they are giving us health care and education for free. It’s just one more excuse and a fable no one believes anymore.”
In the midst of this my friend came over, took me by the arm and said, “Enough of this. I have something more interesting to show you.”
She led me past shelves to a pushcart vendor, who was selling some very attractive avocados and enormous bunches of bananas. As we were shopping, we saw an elderly lady coming towards us. She was carrying a transparent nylon bag. Inside was a pair of pink slippers, which looked to be quite nice. She approached us shyly, offering them to us for only five CUC.* Suddenly the boy who had been waiting on us grabbed her package, turned to us and said, “I saw them first. And, besides, they are my girlfriend’s size. So, sorry, ladies, but the slippers are mine.”
We left, “our sides splitting” with laughter, but not before having to wait for the vendor to buy the slippers from the poor lady, who also wanted to buy some produce, before completing our transaction. “That’s socialism for you!” I told my friend.
*Translator’s note: Five CUC is slightly more than five dollars US at the official exchange rate.
Editor’s note: This post is in French and is only partially translated here.
Text of notice: In solidarity with the imprisoned Chinese writer Li Bifeng, the International Literary Festival of Berlin is calling on intellectuals and artists, schools and universities, media, theaters and other cultural institutions around the world to organize readings, June 4, 2013, on the occasion the sad anniversary of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and within the framework of the World Wide Reading Day on the theme of resistance.
In response to this appeal, the House of Writers and Literature, Biennial of Poets in Val de Marne, the French Pen Club, the Wandering Word and Poetry Market invited writers and poets living in France to support a writer or a poet “gagged in their own country,” by reading their texts.
Performance by Armand Gatti, Serge Pey and Chiara Mulas followed by readings:
Tahar Bekri (Tunisia) for Mohamed Ibn Dhib (Qatar)
Yves Boudier (France) for Li Bifeng (China)
Francis Combes for Mumia Abu Jamal (United States )
Jean-Luc Despax (France) for Angye Gaona (Colombia)
Marc Delouze (France) for Gao Xingjian (China)
Jacques Demarcq for Trung Nguyen Van Tuc and Phan Ngoc Tuan (all three of Vietnam)
Jean Pierre Faye (France) to Melissa Patiño Hinostroza (Peru)
Irene Gayraud (France) for Angel Santiesteban Prats (Cuba)
Jabbar Hussin (Iraq) for Bei Dao (China)
Werner Lambersy (Belgium) for Parviz Khazraï (Iran)
Mazen Maarouf (Palestine) for Rasha Awad, Haidar al-Mukashfi, Nur al-Ahmad al-Nur (all three of Sudan)
Jean-Baptiste Para (France) for Alireza Roshan (Iran)
Anne-Marie Garat (France) will also join the party.
[Angel Sebastian-Prats is included in the tribute]
“Among the readings that will be held, one will be for Ángel Santiesteban-Prats, unjustly imprisoned in Cuba by the Castro dictatorship, for the simple “crime” of expressing himself freely in his blog.
His story, The Moon, A Death and a Piece of Bread, will be read by the French poet and writer Irène Gayraud.
In my Cuban childhood, during the horrendous ‘70s, years of scarcity and closure, the United States was a mythical space. It was the unknown, the outside, the other, freedom, illusion: a chimera of hope in the midst of the sterilizing infirmity of Real Socialism. In my childish imagination, perhaps because the maps imported from Eastern Europe were painted that way, the United States was colored gray. And this cold gray stood out marvelously against the rabid red of the political banners of my country, perverse propaganda that still invades Cuba’s classrooms, with parents unable to avoid (or even complain about) this mind manipulation of their own children.
In myths, as in the promised land, the visionaries rarely get to live. I was lucky: I write these lines in the mute morning of Manhattan, where I am now after three months traveling from coast to coast to multiple universities and cultural institutions, the government and the press of this continental country.
I have no family in the United States. I came completely alone, direct from my eternal neighborhood of Lawton to the capital Washington DC. At the Havana airport they took my documents for an hour without explaining why: they wanted to see my reaction as takeoff time approached and I remained abandoned in the chilly room. In short, they played with me like a fierce feline that teases its prey before devouring it. The objective, perhaps, was to make my last memory of the Island a bitter experience filled with disgust. They almost managed, but no: my last memory of Cuba is a vision filled with pity for a people trapped in this belligerent logic, be they victims or executioners.
As soon as I got there, I was at the Tech@State conference, with the redemptive possibilities of the new digital media and social networks, but also the technological tyranny that authoritarian states employ to stifle freedom of expression. Thus, from the beginning I understood the full magnitude of how the repressive Cuban experience is common even in countries with democracy. The struggle for fundamental rights does not end when a dictatorship falls, rather it remains against the despotisms of control that are attempted from any power.
Next Yoani Sanchez, blogger of Generation Y, appeared with me at the New School of New York. In a packed theater, she and I discussed the free future of Cuba and the civil education of our citizens, today so ignorant about rights and so intolerant in social life. We were even subjected to “acts of repudiation” by a little group of Americans who escorted us around the Big Apple as if they were our bodyguards. We also suffered the anti-Cuban rudeness of the Cuban government, who with an official Protest Note blocked our presenting in a room of the United Nations, and we had to improvise a press conference in the hallway of some offices where very few from the public could fit. continue reading
Along with Yoani Sanchez I was received both by senators and the White House. I hallucinated on seeing the high level faces I’d seen only on a TV screen. The transparency of the institutions of government in Washington DC is impressive, as are its monumental spaces. My subconscious was waiting to see armed elite troops in the “heart of power,” but what I saw was an army of students who laughed as they crossed security barriers to get an early idea of who and what mechanisms lead their country. No police, for example, asked me for identification right in the street, as is common in Cuba without any reason: the oppressors there are bored and annoying passersby with impunity is the source of their authority. That is called barbarism.
Shortly after Yoani Sanchez left the United States, Rosa María Payá arrived, the young daughter of the martyred founder of the Christian Liberation Movement, winner of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize: Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas (1952-2012), who died violently in unclear circumstances, while the Cuban government offered the hypothesis of a “traffic accident,” which the surviving witnesses then denied as soon as they were deported from Cuba to their home countries.
With Rosa María Payá it was the city of Miami we inhabited. A Miami every minute more merciful to those who were tortured in Cuba and driven into exile. A commercial, cosmopolitan Miami where so many spies infiltrate who come to commit crimes and, yet, a Miami ever more tense but without forgetting its worthy pain. A Miami, fortunately, where 101% of Cuban culture is lovingly preserved, so that sooner or later it can be restored to the desert (and deserted) soul of our Island now in the materialist hands of an octogenarian clan.
We occupied there, together or separately, the major radio and television channels, each speaking our bit of truth to an audience of perhaps millions not only in the United States but in a great part of America. There I saw her return to Cuba in a strangely cold sunrise and I felt that, with just a 45 minute flight, I should also be there, in the land that I miss and that I do not want to be far from, but there are men there disposed to the worse so that there will be no democracy coming in a future of freedom, which will never come to Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Juan Wilfredo Soto, Wilman Villar, Laura Pollán and Oswaldo Payá.
In the U.S. I have given lectures on the Cuban blogosphere in universities in Pittsburgh, Princeton, Providence, Boston, Los Angeles, New Jersey, La Crosse, Madison, Durham, and other cities. On all the campuses I have been treated with respect by faculty and students, full of questions, sometimes so naive that it makes them vulnerable to the rhetoric of an expert from the regime who narrates the world of his image and convenience.
I have seen Cuban State Security agents dressed as diplomats and academics, as at the LASA 2013 event, where dictatorially it is Havana that imposes its mediocre monologue. I have met exiled families in every corner of America, each imagining a lost nation which perhaps very few will return to, not now, not ever, but a nation whose well-being concerns them every day and for which they would give the best of themselves. It’s a poignant diasporic homeland: an intimate unrenounceable homeland where the Castro regime is a nightmare from which they awoke to move the next generation to safety, so that the anthropological damage would not become congenital.
I have most loved Cuba under the snow and in a grove of trees as beautiful as they are unnameable. I have missed my dogs and cats. In return, I have tried to illegally feed a squirrel, but they are wild and fortunately don’t trust me: they don’t recognize me as Orlando Luis (nor do I).
I call my 77-year-old mother almost daily, thanks to a system of Cubacall that the Cuban government tries to block, because it puts a strain on their monopoly prices. She is happy that I am no longer in the post-communist cauldron, but sounds very concerned about what a perverse power can do to me. And it’s not the “long arm” of State Security: State Security has been located here for decades (the decency of democracy is fragile faced with the brazen). My mother María is of the generation of fear, but she is completely justified in fearing the death throes of the State establishment’s dying beast. Thus, when she says goodbye she always tells me, “Landy, don’t say anything.” And I carry the blame of never pleasing her, because her only son keeps talking and talking: words embodied in my throat that come from you and you, and you know it, right?
I do not want to stop breathing in the United States. The air is clear as midnight in the higher latitudes (I didn’t even sneeze). Here I saw snow for the first time and found it warm. Here I felt the emptiness of ancient and classical pieces in the Metropolitan Museum, for example, so often seen as reproductions in books, and I assumed that the originals are exhibited in Hollywood stage sets: tinsel as the flow of desire and a measure of the truth. Here I have been celibate rather than celebrated, because it is in the U.S. where I wait for the beautiful digital eyes of my intangible love to recognize me (in an afternoon after autumn: forgive the terrible poetry of the Southern Cone).
In addition, I wish to visit two destinations at the limits: Puerto Rico and Alaska. In many ways, Cuba fully vibrates here: that left on the Island could interpret it as an imitation kidnapping. We don’t need it. We lack nothing, Cubans in this university of opportunities called the United States, where everything is within the reach of a click and of our ability to be self-sufficient and good people.
We can leave the Cubag Archipelago in peace in the hands of an uncivil military that could already be in the majority, along with the corrupt and the marginal: the fabric of the nation must be mended from scratch, from the unknown, from the outside, from the other, from freedom, from illusion, from a mirage of hope on this side of the Malecón.
Hence, I sometimes fantasize with the idea of founding a new territory, a natural reserve of happiness, a micro-nation that could end up being an economic power and an example of respect for others and the natural environment. A little piece of land bought in the State of California, for example, where law would barely need to be imposed because no one would conceive of harming anyone. A planetary refuge with human values, where no power would mutilate our spirituality nor humiliate our biographies, be they inspired or not by some God.
A country not “with all and for the good of all” (that Marti demagoguery where no one fits, and that drags us from the Republic of the Revolution to the Counter-Revolution), but rather “with each and from the good of each,” because we are not a mass but individual people and we are born and we die individually, preferably privately. A Cuba without caudillos that doesn’t have to wait until the end of the Castro regime to be its antipode, even geographically.
Homeland is not Humanity. Homeland is behaving here and now with humanity.
arroba. com (Diptych) by G. R. Malberti Photo: W.L.R
When the new law of “expansion” of INTERNET service goes into effect tomorrow, 11 million Cubans will be able to go to cybercafes and pay $4.50 USD (115 Cuban pesos) per hour to surf cyberspace. I’m sure that with the average salary of 400 Cuban pesos a month, very few will do so, which will make the current digital breach between Cubans and the rest of the world wider and deeper.
But what those who can pass the first hurdle of price and seat themselves in front of one of the 334 computers available (nationwide) in the new State business probably don’t know is that they will be paying to enter one of the most sophisticated, invisible and exotic government machines for the control of the INTERNET that has ever existed. This is what I like to call the “Cuban Model” of INTERNET.
It’s quite possible that the new clients of “Nauta” (as the government telecommunications company ETECSA calls its cybercafes), will be nervous because while they type in their user names and passwords in social networks, review their email and visit online news sites outside of Cuba, a “cybercafe caretaker” or a camera will be very nearby, but that is pure distraction. continue reading
The reality is that from the moment they open the door of the cybercafe they will be inside the “Cuban Model” of INTERNET. Many are unaware that not only does the Cuban government own and have total control over all the Cuban cybercafes and computers where ETECSA’s new customers will type in their private information. The government also owns and controls the famous ALBA 1 fiber optic cable which connects the island to the world wide web, and all the satellite antennas that since 1996 have had the same function, and is the only provider of INTERNET (ISP) services, NAP, DNS, nodes, firewalls, proxies, routers, modems, switches, access points, hotspots, antennas, radio frequencies, NIC, IP, domains, .cu, hosting, telephone posts and wires, TIC services companies and computer stores.
But just when many think it’s too much, there begins the black list of dark forces that work in parallel doing their dirty work: web administrators, computer engineers, political police, cyber police, business security services, agencies of control and supervision, national security laws, gag laws, information security laws, price control laws, armies of trolls, pro-government bloggers, online news sites, television channels, radio stations, newspapers, etc.
While around world many governments and businesses promote free WiFi. While 4G becomes a standard. While every day 3 billion people connect to the INTERNET and a billion of them do it through their mobile phones. While the courts uphold data protection laws. While cyber-activists fight to maintain free, open and neutral INTERNET. While internauts battle laws like SOPA, PIPA, SINDE and HADOPI. Still today, more than 15 years after the arrival of the INTERNET to Cuba, 99% of the 11 million Cubans who live on the island are trying to get on the world wide web for the first time. It must be because Cuba, Cubans and the “Cuban model” of INTERNET don’t resemble anyone’s.
With the decline of sports facilities on the island, the Cuban government it taking drastic measures in order to keep sports alive, based on already failed communist ideals. A situation that corners the Castro government so that for once, it will open the doors to professionalism.
Havana province has the majority of high-performance sports facilities, which over time have lost the competitive fundamentals critical to the development of Cuban sports.
Some reference installations
East Havana, an area of the capital, benefited by being the site of the Pan American Games in 1991, with the construction of the “Villa Panamericana” (a sports complex that includes facilities such as the Velodrome (Cycling), athletics, tennis, pools etc). Currently it is here that we find the only stadium of athletics (Olympic) “still not over” that can be used for international competitions. The stadium provides high performance athletes — world champions or finalists, Panamericans, Central Americans — “comfortable rooms” located in the same building, where the bed can injure you or the ceiling can give you a shower in rainy weather.
“Bare Hill” as the capital residents know it, is the ESFAAR, Training School of High Performance Athletes. From the street people can see its damaged structure and contemplate the broken windows during practices for volleyball, basketball, fencing, boxing and other sports. continue reading
There is also the National School of Gymnastics, the youngest building, whose construction is the ongoing work of INDER, the National Sports Institute. Proof of this was the concrete sign that read 2000 for the start date and with completion date of 2004. Later they changed to 2006, until they decided to remove the information. Currently it is a facility that has not been fully completed.
Athletes are subjected to exploitation
The sacrifices of the athletes are part of the sporting life, but working without any recognition is essential affectation of the human stimulus that Cuban athletes lack.
All athletes who have deserted from the island have done so with the aim to seek prosperity in the future. Something they are denied in Cuba totalitarian and comprehensive political ideals, that take into account political fear. Individual enrichment is alien to the Castro supporting group, which would do anything to maintain power and which they have managed to do.
Many athletes comment on their poor earnings and mocking the government offers: “Crumbs they give us in return for great effort,” said an anonymous junior athlete.
They either open the doors to professional sports, or simply lose their best athletes
There are many dangers, loss of facilities such as EIDE (the Jose Marti Sports Initiation School) closed for lack of capital, ESPA (the Manual Permuy Senior School Athletic Improvement) closed for the same reason.
Stadiums and sports centers are in very bad condition, the only thing the government cares about is everything having to do with baseball for its political strategy. In short, if no measures are taken to slacken the reins over baseball and combat sports (boxing) and let the athletes be recruited by clubs, everything will go over the cliff. A situation that the government itself has created.
In the early hours of Sunday June 2, a tragedy visited a humble Cuban family. Luisa M. Isnaga Medinas, a young mother, and her daughter Idaisil Rivero Medina, age 12, died when their house collapsed in Trinidad.
The family lived at 460 Antonio Maceo Street between Rosario and Simon Bolivar, just two blocks from the tourist center where thousands of foreigners go to visit the World Heritage city, while the homes of the townspeople are in deplorable conditions.
The neighbors confirmed the numerous complaints made by the family to the People’s Power asking for help with repairs, because it was an old house with another on the second floor. Property repair inspectors were to do the assessment but it was not resolved. Instead they indicated that those who were living there living who had to do the repair because they had no resources to give them.
While all this was happening the regime installed an expensive and sophisticated system of video camera surveillance. In the face of the tragedy the locals wonder “why are they spending thousands of dollars to monitor the poor, while our houses are collapsing.”
Reported by Rene Lozano Maidin Carter and
Ombudsman of Cuba (CID)
Some 0.004% of the Cuban population will connect to the Web.
Starting on June 4, 2013, 472 people (maximum) will be the daily human traffic going to a NAUTA Internet cafe, approximately 0.004% of the Cuban population.
The state-owned telephone company, ETECSA, is expanding its Internet services to the “population” — 472 is the maximum that can be served daily. The navigation speed will be 2 Mbps (megabytes per second) which is equivalent to 2 mil, 48 Kbps (Kilobytes per second), a speed faster than the 50 Kb on telephone connections and better than the satellite connections can reach speeds on the Island of up to 300 Kbps.
According to the article published in the newspaper Granma, 118 rooms will be opened, more than the 99 previously. The internet rooms will be identified with the NAUTA stamp with which ETECSA is commercializing its navigation services in the country.
All this has arisen with of the activation of the fiber optic cable obtained from the Cuba-Venezuela economic agreements. Which brings a space of freedom to the “supervised” world wide web. Where the majority of users will be human rights defenders on the Island. Thus the government is certain to control the population’s use of this technology.
One measure that has come to light is the prohibition on voice traffic. But it reflects the free navigation as well as the ups and downloads with equal status. The cost will drop to 3 CUC (over $3 U.S.) equivalent to 75 Cuban pesos.
The Cuban population has unreasonably delayed access to technology, where all these technological changes itself bring social blockade. The aging of the population will be a critical factor, as older people will show little interest to the coming changes as reflected the inability of people to navigate cyberspace.
My suitcase is parked in a corner, the tiny gifts that traveled inside it already in the hands of friends and relatives. The anecdotes — for their part — will need more time, because there are so many I could spend the rest of my life parsing their details. I’m back now. Beginning to feel the peculiarities of a Cuba that in my three months absence has barely changed. The number of uniforms was the first thing that jumped out at me: soldiers, customs, police… why do you see so many uniforms simply on landing at José Martí Airport? Why is there this feeling of so few civilians and so many soldiers? After the dimmed lights of the halls, the none too friendly question of a supposed doctor interested to know if I had been in Africa. Where are you coming from, honey? She jerked her head around noticing my blue passport with the shield of the republic on its cover.
Outside, a group of colleagues and family waited for me. The embrace of my son, the most cherished. Then having again entered my own space and the unique pace at which life transpires here. Catching up with the stories, events in the neighborhood, the city and the country. I’m back. With an energy that the daily stumbling blocks try to cut short, but with enough left over to undertake new projects. One stage of my life is ending and another is emerging. I have seen the solidarity, I have felt it and now I also have the duty to tell my compatriots on the Island that we are not alone.
I have brought so many good memories: the sea in Lima, the Templo Mayor in Mexico City, the Freedom Tower in Miami, the beauty of Rio de Janeiro, the affection of so many friends in Italy, Madrid with its Museo del Prado and its Cibeles Plaza, Amsterdam and the canals running through it, Stockholm and the cyber-activists from the whole world I met there, Berlin and the graffiti that covers what was once a wall dividing Germany, Oslo surrounded by green, New York that never sleeps, Geneva with its diplomats and the United Nations headquarters, Gdansk laden with recent history, and Prague, beautiful, unique. All these places, with their lights and shadows, their grave problems and their moments for leisure and laughter, I have brought with me to Havana.
I am back and I am not the same person. Something of each place where I was stayed with me, and the hugs and words of encouragement I received are here today, with me.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published at time of Luis Pavón Tamayo’s reappearance on Cuba Television in 2007, and was translated to post here on the occasion of his recent death.
On more than a few occasions, those who analyze Cuba and even those directly engaged in the country, compare it to a game of chess. This practice has given us quotations that make clear our condition as mere pieces (and, thus, expendable) on a giant political chessboard. It is quite possible that those with good memories still recall the invitation that Spanish President José María Aznar offered to Fidel Castro at the end of the ‘90s: “Your move.” In that game —it pains me to remember— white won.
Understandably, the fascinating world of the sixty-four squares and its apparent simplicity —where things really are black and white— invites us to use its terminology to describe or simplify complex situations; however, I fear that those who make use of this shortcut perhaps do so in search of a quick and easy metaphor to create an image, while lacking a thorough understanding of the game.
There are several chess tactics that have always been present in the actions of the Cuban regime. And they have resurfaced with tenacity since it has been classified as a State secret that the royal intestine —Fidel’s— had a blockage.
For example, a little less than a month ago, in response to the Pavón affair —where Luis Pavón, a dark censor of “the five gray years,” was resuscitated on Cuban television after three decades of well-deserved oblivion and where, in response, a group of intellectuals on the island and in exile spoke out against him— a friend of mine asked what I thought about it all. To her utter amazement, I replied: “It’s a distraction,” a chess tactic in which an enemy piece placed in an important position is “distracted.”
Once a piece is “distracted,” it is possible to exploit the new scenario attacking other vital elements of the position of the adversary. Usually the job of the “distracted” piece is to protect another. Once it is “distracted” from its function it leaves the other piece unprotected and, therefore, vulnerable. This occurs with great frequency in chess. The same happens in politics.
In Cuba, the tactic of distraction is used systematically by the government in order to avoid reality. These distractions make it possible not to have to pay attention to what is urgent: the poor state of the national economy, the discontent of the population given the lack of resources, the lack of civil liberties and economic freedoms, the eternal repression and the right of Cubans to be aware of the health of the Chess Player in Chief.
Distractions on the island’s most recent chessboard are: the embargo (the champions of euphemism call it the Blockade), the child rafter Elian Gonzalez, the Five Heroes imprisoned by the empire, the government’s response to the Varela Project which does not mention the Varela Project, the Battle of Ideas (?!), the dismissal of several figures of the Castro elite, the plan to distribute rice cookers, the embargo yet again, the Pavón affair mentioned above, and the subsequent and much awaited declaration of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). This latter —in line with the amendment to the Cuban Socialist Constitution (2002) which declared Socialism irrevocable— says that “the political culture which is undogmatic, creative and participatory, consistent with the thinking of José Martí and with Fidel and Raúl (sic), founded with the ‘Words to the Intellectuals,’ is irreversible.”
Esteemed members of UNEAC: please be precise. What’s really irreversible in our recent history is the endless number of executions whose blood has forever stained the walls of La Cabaña and, incidentally, the Cuban soul; the irreversible is the political imprisonment of thousands of compatriots simply for disagreeing with the government; the irreversible is the Mariel boatlift; those who fell in the wars in Africa, the Maleconazo, the thousands of boat people who never touched land; the irreversible is the massacre of Canímar River, the massacre of the tugboat “13 de Marzo,” the death in exile of hundreds of thousands of Cubans; the irreversible is that in the quest to escape the island a group of suicides crossed the Caribbean Sea in a 1950s Chevrolet; the irreversible is for a woman to have sent herself to the United States in a DHL box so as not to have to live in the much hyped proletarian paradise. The irreversible is what is irreversible.
To paraphrase José Martí, our poet: “I lived in fear and I know its entrails.” And so, I do not pretend to judge those from Cuba who have raised their voices against the consequence of censorship —the pawn Pavón— nor does it interested me to criticize my compatriots in exile who admonish those on the island for not even mentioning in passing the cause —the king, now castled and one move away from losing the championship game. What I do care about is pointing out that the resuscitation of the old censor is once again designed to divert attention toward the unimportant.
I think the debate is healthy (and it is something that Cubans need to exercise), but I refuse to participate in an exchange about events that happened thirty years ago when, at the moment, as I write my chess-infused note, the number of prisoners of conscience in Cuba totals almost three hundred people.
We mustn’t forget that the so-called “five gray years” embarked on by Luis Pavón and against which a mass of intellectuals on the island have protested, are no more than a fraction of the five decades of our Iron Age, a period which, according to the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy is defined as: (1) Among the poets, a time in which all virtues fled from the land and all vices began to reign. (2) A wretched time.
Friends and detractors on both shores: beyond wearing ourselves out with talk and disagreements, there is nothing we can do about the past. Furthermore, there is still much to do for the present. When we have solved the problems of these —still gray—days, I propose an exhaustive review of the darkest passages of the last half century to prevent them from repeating themselves, like Borges’ fictions. Until then, I don’t know about you, but I promise not to be distracted and not take any loose pawn sent my way by the Machiavellian chess machine that is the Cuban regime.
***
Originally published in Letras Libres in March, 2007:
My suitcase is parked in a corner, the tiny gifts that traveled inside it already in the hands of friends and relatives. The anecdotes — for their part — will need more time, because there are so many I could spend the rest of my life parsing their details. I’m back now. Beginning to feel the peculiarities of a Cuba that in my three months absence has barely changed. The number of uniforms was the first thing that jumped out at me: soldiers, customs, police… why do you see so many uniforms simply on landing at José Martí Airport? Why is there this feeling of so few civilians and so many soldiers? After the dimmed lights of the halls, the none too friendly question of a supposed doctor interested to know if I had been in Africa. Where are you coming from, honey? She jerked her head around noticing my blue passport with the shield of the republic on its cover.