Translating Cuba

By Ignacio Estrada

Havana, Cuba — Some time ago I listened to a doctor from from Villa Clara narrate her life as a medical aid worker, in the Republic of Venezuela.

I listened carefully to each of her stories. Gossip that she perhaps told me in confidence between friends, but the mere fact of the imminent threat of the spread of red tide and the enthronement in Venezuela of Cubanization makes me see myself obliged to recreate one of these stories.

According to the doctor friend who served as a volunteer in Venezuela for more than five years and managed to become head of a Medical Mission to one of the parishes and that the role of the doctors was more than saving lives and, on occasion, they served as thermometers of Venezuelan society .

When I use the word thermometer, an instrument known for measuring environmental and body temperatures. It is because this also the work of the  majority of medical aid workers to provide services to measure the state of opinion of the Venezuelan people. Information that is collected and passed to the intelligence services and the government so that they know where they need to work and how to change that state of opinion.

Perhaps what for many is not important for others is novel and what a pleasure for it to be both, Important and Novel. Who can imagine the Cuban army of white coats doing intelligence work in a foreign country? Work is not unknown by the authorities in power who try to win converts.

According to what my friend told me things weren’t left there; during times of presidential campaigns they also had to work to win votes for the official President. And this vote is won by explaining to people that the benefit they receive from healthcare and other things is free thanks to former President Chavez and the humanitarian work of the government. These chats take place in the clinics and while traveling around the the neighborhoods to deliver medications, and the conversations also serve to threaten the beneficiaries that if Chavismo ceases to exist all the projects will cease to exist.

This work is repeated whenever Medical Mission Cubans are in Venezuela, many of them looking for what they can not achieve in their own country for their families with their profession. The Cubanization is one of the key factors and principle support and bastion of Chavismo Venezuela.

This same friend in one of our many conversations, also told me about where she lived with another compatriot in her profession. According to her, this other doctor was serving on a Medical Mission on Margarita Island, one of the opposition stronghold states in Venezuela. It turns out that the opposition mayor once visited the Diagnostic Center that was under her charge on this island. And seeing the poor conditions there promised to send help the next day to improve the waiting room, and fix the air conditioning and the consulting room.

The aid appeared quickly but the doctor could not receive it under threat of her superiors that she would be deported to Cuba and Medical Mission suspended for receiving help from the opposition. It would seem stupid but but it’s not, because on signing on the Cuban doctors would realize that not everything is like they say, and I am more than convinced that they exchange the improvements for their families for what they are forced to endure.

This doctor knew how to use one of the beneficiaries of her attentions and through him asked the Mayor that please not to send the aid the following morning, thanking him but he was sincere in the reason he attended and the opposition mayor heard her and didn’t fail to fulfill his promise to help the cooperative.

I do not advocate violence, or the witch hunt, but at times like these I sympathize with the Venezuelan nation and call for the social order and the restoration of democracy. I am one of the many Cubans who do not want to export the model that has failed our nation to another country in our America, I am one of those who wants Cubans to travel freely and conquer new areas and earn their livings with dignity but without trampling the suffering of others.

I apologize to God first and secondly to my friend, a doctor who for safety I don’t say her name name to reveal her stories, but just knowing that there are people who need to hear these truths is bigger than any secrets and I am convinced that someday she will be relieved by having used me to fix who knows what collateral damage that has been caused.

To say Enough is Enough of Cubanization in Venezuela, it not to close the doors of this nation to freedom-loving Cubans. It is to close off those who by deceit come to trample and usurp the rights that it is up to citizens to decide for themselves and that is the right to take back the future of our nation be it any of the existing models.

22 April 2013

According to Wikipedia, the Chinese in Cuba are the most prominent and largest Asian community settled on the island. History records that on June 3, 1847 the Spanish brig “Oquendo” landed the first 200 Chinese laborers from the port of Amoy; although long before the “Oquendo” there were already Chinese in Cuba who had arrived from the Philippines, the so-called Manila-Chinese.

The Ten Years War surprised these migrants in Cuba and they joined the liberation forces. Many of them mixed with Spaniards, blacks and even mulattoes. From there was born the Chinese-Cuban.

The relations between the governments of Cuba and China have been up and down over the years but mostly down; but sometimes things go smoothly. Several Cuban leaders drive Geely cars — made in China — models also used by the National Revolutionary Police automotive troops and the G2 – State Security. The “kitsch” Cuban progeny — offspring of those in power — venture in what they believe to be new routes and go shopping in Hong Kong, experts in social themes exchanging opinions of “change” with certain regularity, businessmen of both countries sign galactic contracts, and high level delegations visit with such pleasure that the Cuban president even sang to Hu Juntao in Mandarin.

The new surreptitious business is “solidarity” with groups of Chinese who land on the island with regularity with which water drips from a broken pipe, constant drops, stimulating black market springs that move the well enshrined chain of the underground economy.

Some authorized contractors assert they are very calm customers, they don’t take hookers home and barely leave their rooms. They don’t behave as tourists, don’t go to the beach, don’t buy maracas or visit museums; throughout their stay on the island they spend their time muttering, and eating.

So much so that the new culinary specialty in the rooms-for-rent homes is to make a cup of rice with two and half cups of unsalted water, which makes a hideous mass which is then allowed to dry, add curry, make balls, and after frying it it’s called Rice Croquettes are called.

This has given rise to traveling salesmen who used to go door to door selling flowers, condoms, lobster or beef and who now support themselves selling rice (the little balls). It’s not illegal and they earn more, hence the refrain, “Take advantage of good fortune, when it’s rare,” (which, of course, rhymes in Spanish).

But housing agent who leads foreign clients to rental housing, the former immigration official for the Playa neighborhood, referring to the development of this lucrative market and new line of work, assured me with sarcastic ingenuity, “Nothing changes. The government sees nothing and tomorrow will say they didn’t know; but up to today it goes on and there’s no lack of “curry” in the hard currency stores. Look,” he continued, changing to a secure line and French, “What they know they don’t question. The reality is the Chinese are coveted customers, they travel  in small groups, stay in Cuba for 13-25 days, but before leaving, hello, what is important here is cash, everything is original and well-done, they pay up to 700 CUC for a Cuban passport, 200 for an identity card, and a thousand more to be included in the official civil registry, thus becoming duly legalized Chinese-Cuban citizens.  And now nationalized, they continue traveling into the future destined to our larger neighbor, ready to be welcomed by the Cuban Adjustment Act.”

The illegal traffic of Chinese using Cuba as a trampoline is a forbidden business that, tolerated, accepts accomplices, not witnesses.

24 April 2013

And, finally, Miami.

After decades of Made in Havana propaganda, I could travel that explosion of expressways called Miami (the entire city is an airport), where every little house is a clone of a Cuba lost forever (with their flags and little virgins), where every generation has at least one family representative, where the food remains as intact as a five-day-old, or five-decades-back memory, where dancing and laughing and even making love hurts us deep in the soul, where God speaks our exile slang perfectly. Because everyone in Miami is us, we live there or here: the city was built like a dream from which sooner rather than later the nation would wake up, a dream to conceal the nightmare of never returning home (Miami, mercy).

I entered and left Miami through the magic mirror of its radio and TV stations. It’s a miracle against modernity this hypermedia Miami, so homogenous and yet so plural. As banal as it is true-to-life. It could be a first impression, but after the despotism of Havana, where there are no longer any live programs (even the speeches of the Maximum Leader are broadcast with a few seconds delay, for protection), Miami simply amazed me. From sadness, but it amazed me.

With the mordant and lovable Jaime Bayly, with the precision to the point of causticity of Juan Manuel Cao, with the impassioned chorus of María Laria and her glitzy staff, with the eternal solidarity of Radio República and, of course, with the heart in the microphones of Radio Martí, the only broadcaster of the Cuban exile that transmits almost from the interior of the country (its studies are not in Havana but they have much of Havana and the other cities and towns of our country), with all and for the ratings of all I said the first thing that came to mind, without agendas dictated by any imaginary mafia of the Ministry of the Interior, without mutual fear nor mediocre censorship, without adding not even a line to what I have always said from my Cuban cellphone in my native Havana neighborhood.

We Cuban social activists agree that “to think and live in freedom is to learn thinking and living freely,” a phrase of Rosa María Payá’s at the University of Miami that electrified even the tears of this second capital of all Cubans (perhaps the first capitalism of all Cubans), where she and I coincided, each in transit to our own democratizing destination for our repressive country.

I resisted indulging my appetite in Miami, I have witnesses to my austerity. The food didn’t go down my throat: some kind of anguished happiness made me ignore my old acquaintances, living their successful lives in a Cuba that in Cuba we couldn’t even imagine (or we didn’t dare to imagine, and so delayed our respective exiles).

I saw the sea of Miami, but I didn’t look out on it nor want to smell it. I didn’t want to imagine the Island on the other side of the horizon, 45 minutes to where the Cuban political police wait for us to put us in quarantine without charges.

I felt the heat. They offered me a job, I didn’t answer. I slept on a sofa. I slept in a suite. I slept almost in a closet, at the edge of the probing looks of our civil society where I was a first-timer and happy. I remained sleepless in an airport of flights cancelled en masse by American Airlines, with the intuition that Miami had cast a spell on me to not let me leave.

Finally, I came, I saw, and I went, because Manhattan is less desperately Manhattavana, and because to vacate the subways is the secret formula of my subterranean Cuban-ness that flees Cubans because we all have within a mini-ministry of the interior. Everyone, starting with the pro-democrats.

I moved in the free cars of Facebook activists whom I didn’t know in person, but who from the beginning of the chats we already liked each other, beyond political or geographic positions. I spoke in the mythical Calle 8 Art and Research Center as if I was very sure about what I was saying, while my spirit was then a tissue of pure emotion. I flew to and from Miami thanks to the generous pockets of Cuban entrepreneurs who want Cuba more than me, people of diverse economic strata who treasure the archives and the illusions that dictatorial laziness derailed, destroying not only our rights as citizens but, with the same idea, a nation.

And this will be the most sinister, but also the most sincere legacy of Castroism or the Revolution: the day after is already humanly impossible. Our present precariousness is perennial. The elite in power have taken the necessary steps for a staged transition (and this includes my presence here: Miami, forgive me), where the peaceful dissidence inside and outside of Cuba will have no more space than the scaffold and, in fact, we are disappearing drop by drop and without witnesses of interest to the world, because the world is only interested in the millions and millions who now promote this neo-utopia that exploits capitalism without freedom. Businessmen of all countries, unite.

I spoke with personalities from Cuba’s republican history and about our most intimate and tense relationship with the government in Washington. I saw fewer homeless than in New York where, in turn, I saw fewer than in Central Havana, although this does not alleviate the humiliation of seeing myself flying to American universities while a human being sleeps on the sidewalks of this permissive country.

I want to return to Miami. I would not want to return ever again. I’m still about to leave. But very soon I will return. Miami, look at me: do you want to be my love, at least while Cuba doesn’t fall?

From DiariodeCuba.com.

24 April 2013

Photo from http://www.elcomercio.com/

Again terrorism achieved its murderous aims when many innocents were killed at the finish line of the Marathon held in Boston, Massachusetts for more than half a century. Naturally, the bombing also erupted in the media, which sent us images of the two Chechen youths who were the authors of this act of terror that cost three lives and injured more than 170 people.

I sincerely sympathize with the pain of the families of the victims of this vile episode committed from a distance without showing their faces; and I also sympathize with the families and friends of all who perished in the same or similar circumstances.

So far, the Cuban press only referred to the event from the news perspective, with nothing of the usual sociological and super-politicized analysis — with a visible justifying subtext — of the reasons that in some regions, countries or social groups inclines people to violence as a means to express disagreement with certain policies, political or power centers, which is the same as using the lives of people to send messages to the “criminal complaints inbox.”

The official media in my country always mentions social injustice, poverty, the domination of foreign powers, cultural issues and religious fundamentalism, and uses and abuses the term “double standard” to demonstrate their disagreement with the treatment given to some known terrorists. Doesn’t that make them the same?

When their allies throw Molotov cocktails it’s a revolutionary activity, if other people do it they’re terrorists. Their allies, the FARC, don’t kidnap, they “retain”; but if the an antagonistic group executes an analogous action it’s kidnapping. The saddest thing is that these manipulations are not confined to the field of semantics, but are commonly conceptualized.

When it comes to something like the case of Bin Laden and action of the CIA, the media are supersaturated with criticism of the U.S. government and its imperial and interventionist methods of domination.

When they talk about governments partial to Cuba, like Russian and its two wars launched against Chechnya to prevent its independence, the immorality of the double-speak or the scandalous silence. Perhaps they are waiting for the trial of the young survivor “terrorized by the cruelties and injustices” involved in the massacre, to highlight the exaggerated punishment the judicial system of the United States imposes on the defendant.

I know that peace is fickle and threatened, at least by verbal violence, cultural differences, socioeconomic, geopolitical, strategic or hidden and diverse interests. From primitive times there were people trying to control others and governments or groups who, in the legitimate exercise of their defense, applied the laws as established — unlike dictatorships — in favor of maintaining peace and political and social stability. These values and rights of communities or societies remain today and we must respect, without interference, what is established in the legislation of each State when it comes time for justice.

The reasons that may predispose a person to choose the option of terrorism are dissimilar and complex to analyze in the personal space of a blog, which has its   communication codes for amenable and digestible reading; but I blame these acts contrary to human rights, proclaiming premeditated aggression against innocent civilians even outside, the objective pursued, in order to strike terror to a part of society through fear and achieve a political purpose or otherwise.

I repudiate these violent actions aimed at creating alarm and social instability, inciting ethnic hatred, religious or political, and that use of any weapon of war, explosives, chemical or biological weapons, to endanger the life or physical integrity and psychological health of people.

23 April 2013

The difference in vote totals was only about 300,000 people.

The votes of the Venezuelan people have brought to light an almost equal balance in the presidential decision.

With 50.66% for Nicolas Maduro and 49.07% for Capriles, the now elected president Maduro, looking at the final decision, said in response to the vote totals, “If I lose by one vote, or win by won vote, it has to be respected.”

Maduro knows that the fight is over, as demonstrated by the votes. Capriles, for his part, reaffirms that he followers and he’s capable of changing the destiny of Venezuela.

These are the days of a government where the actions will be taken by Maduro, the current president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Where his capacity as leader will be used for the interests of the Castro regime.

A Cuban intervention in the internal affairs of Venezuela that will intensify as the days go on until taking over, it becomes almost a colony of the Castros, but with this difference that this country has resources than can feel the wings of the ambition of the Cuban regime.

Today more than ever Capriles must be keep his eyes wide open as any slip by Maduro can open the doors of the presidency to Capriles.

22 April 2013

Havana, Cuba — The increase in youth violence and police lawlessness are issues constantly criticized by the inhabitants of the municipality of Cruces in the province of Cienfuegos.

According to residents of this southern municipality, youth violence constantly fills the streets and has already caused deaths, without specifying numbers. According to some, most altercations occur late at night and early in the morning. The main stage for these events is the centrally located Martí Park and the Paseo del Prado.

The use of sharp and cutting weapons known as “Armas Blancas” — a term for knives — is the most frequent in these tumultuous quarrels in which local police don’t get involved and when they do they arrive after the altercation. This has happened on a number of occasions at the Cosmopolitan discotheque which belongs to the Cuban chain Palmares.

The inhabitants of this town are afraid to go out into the streets and publicly blame the police for the lawlessness, along with the sale of alcoholic beverages and lack of security around the recreational facilities to prevent those who go there from bringing weapons on their bodies.

By Ignacio Estrada

14 March 2013

Havana, Cuba — The Cuban population living with HIV recently received nutirtional help from United Nations Global Fund to Fight AIDS/HIV.

The benefit is being delivered to the sick through the commercial network after several months of unjustified absence. According to a source who works as a representative of the agency in Havana, the previous assistance has been affected by the increase in new cases of carriers of the illness.

The source also said that the new aid that has already been distributed would only be renewed for twenty-four more months. For years the UN program has maintained this food aid to the island and at times this benefit has been affected due to poor management on the part of the Cuban authorities. They cleverly insert themselves into the plan for aid to new cases, causing a shortfall of aid ahead of schedule.

It is clear that this aid is distributed for free and in principle it covers the food needs of the sick population with products such as juices, cereals, canned meat and vegetable fat. The products have dwindled as the epidemiological situation of the island has grown, until the point where the aid only includes canned meat and vegetable oil.

The recently delivered aid only provides a total of 22 small cans of sausages which must last for a yea; the vegetable oil has not been delivered. One of the beneficiaries asked how it was possible to live with two cans of sausage per month, noting that each of these cans contained no more than six sausages.

People living with HIV/AIDS in Cuba who receive the UN food aid, receive a “basic food basket” that is described as inadequate. It is a diet that places this affected population at a disadvantage in terms of quality, quantity and weight, according to where they reside.

By Ignacio Estrada

22 April 2013

The “handpicked” successor of the late comandante Hugo Chavez was elected and is not the new president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro. Starting off, his first statements addresses the aim of radicalizing the revolutionary process. On the one hand he showed his fist and on the other he spoke of peace. All that was missing were the doves.

Later we will surely hear about the imperialist enemy, the assassination attempts, the bourgeois press, the economic sabotage, the counterrevolution, etc. etc. etc.

Any resemblance to the tactics of the Cuban Revolution to install “the dictatorship of the proletariat” is not a coincidence. But these are other times. A great share of the Venezuelan people know where they’re trying to take them and made their rejection clear in the recent elections. One can assume that half the population, or perhaps more, voted for liberal democracy. It is going to be very difficult for Maduro and his team to overcome the popular Venezuelan antipathy for totalitarianism.

In Cuba, at the beginning of the process, events were handled very discreetly, until control of the military, politics and the media was total. Then, then the convenient enemy was used even directed. The rest is history.

The point is that between the seven years of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista from Banes, and the 54 years of that of his neighbors from Biran, we have now had 61 years of oppression, poverty and despair.

Attempts to revive the economy through the so-called Guidelines, don’t appear to be having the promised results, in the face of the generalized corruption and the apathy of the majority of the people.

In many cases, it’s a return to the stages of the early years of the Revolution; but now without the material resources available at the time of the triumph, which were the result of a productive and prosperous capitalist system of production.

It’s like returning to the starting point, where on arrive we realize we have lost time. So it is with the new travel/immigration law. People have gone abroad and returned who, under the previous regulations, would have been forbidden to travel. And what happened? Nothing. The country is the same.

Years of restrictions, violating people’s rights on a whim, a caprice, or because it is the nature of the system called “real socialism.” And the inertia of that nature is so strong, that they still deny the rights of some citizens to travel.

Among these are many living abroad whom they group into different political categories. It’s so obvious that those people who have a judicial debt to the authorities are not going to travel here to face them, that it is absurd to maintain the requirement for a permit to enter the country for Cubans living abroad.

But it is also absurd to deny Internet access to citizens on the Island. As is discriminating against them for thinking differently. Or for the color of their skin. Or for their sexual differences.

There is the key: As long as they don’t respect differences, all of them, we will not begin to advance in a promising direction toward the future.

23 April 2013

The newspapers and TV news in Spain barely report on news from Cuba, where not everything happens between the orders and the execution of the orders, nor does the reality coincide with the political propaganda designed by the Powers-That-Be, as is clearly demonstrated in these days of the travels through America and Europe of the Island blogger Yoani Sanchez, who sat on the El Pais jury that awarded the Ortega y Gasset prize and responded to questions from the readers of that newspaper, for whom she is the representative on the Caribbean island.

Yoani, that chronicler of reality unaligned with the classic political definitions, has responded with wit, honesty and ingenuity to questions that they are just formulating in Spain, a nation plunged into economic crisis, unemployment and budget cuts in health and other social services, generating protests, uncertainties and challenges from citizens that echo in the media.

I am not going to summarize the questions and answers of the famous creator of Generation Y and  the Bloggers Academy of Cuba; those interested can read it in the online edition of El Pais from Friday April 19; but I do want to note Yoani behaves as a genuine citizen ambassador, beyond her divergent views she offers a look from those millions of voiceless Cubans who reject the endless discourse of Communist rule and who do not see their country in the inexplicable limbo of a  utopia conceived in the former Soviet Union and spread to Europe by the leftist parties complicit in the grotesque Cuban dictatorship.

For the situation in Spain is understood the tone of certain questions, in which also gravitate the effects of Castro’s propaganda and the pursuit of social chimera elsewhere. Maybe that’s why Yoani says that “in Cuba we live under state capitalism, a family clan deeply neoliberal”; she warns that “how to be free is learned by being free” and that for her “life is not elsewhere, but in another Cuba” where “to exercise independent journalism does cost one’s freedom or a media lynching.”

23 April 2013