Translating Cuba

If there is one thing I learned from being close to power, it was not to focus on explicit actions but rather on non-verbal messages that go unstated. It is precisely for this reason that today, while many are captivated by dreamy visions and hopeful about evolutionary developments that to me still seem embryonic, the Cuban government is approving and reaffirming steps towards a greater permanence, legitimacy and future for itself.

I have 103 reasons — three of them personal — for being opposed to what is called Revolution. But that does not mean that I cannot see the growing empowerment of an administration that on the one hand combines investments in key areas such as tourism, technology and education while at the same time guarantees the sustainability of the system by increasing the number and size of certain personal bank accounts and overseas investments. I will comment more on this at another time.

It is clear that the abuses, apathy, incessant propaganda, a surfeit of rhetoric and ongoing requests for martyrology-worthy sacrifice have caused the majority of the population to distance itself not only from the government, but from the opposition as well.

The housewife, the farmer, the worker, the doctor, the thief and the student are neither political nor apolitical, but rather anti-political. The government is aware of this and has taken concrete steps, pretending to bridge this gap between the leaders and the led by appointing executives who are younger… sorry, I meant to say less elderly, less corrupt and more in touch with the people, although in practice none of them have real freedom or executive power.

Last year there was an unusual freeze on the military budget. Several days earlier the General asked the armed forces community for its trust. Political ploy or not, it is one more thing to round out an image of a pragmatic leader aware of administrative and financial limitations.

The eyes of foreign investors, however, see a slow but recovering economy, open to foreign investment and eager for free trade. Since it is almost a rule that capital is unconcerned with ideology but worships opportunity, the swift negotiator quickly falls into the mix and ends up being fodder for the government, which uses him to advance its interests and pressure governments, states and monarchies. They learn too late that recouping investments is not a function of production levels or the labor market, but rather of avoiding the leaks in the very dilapidated state plumbing system.

Fluent in diplomacy and official propaganda, they know that today’s world is not about militant leftists or well-to-do rightists, but about people who lean towards one side or the other based on their own overall interests. Therefore, many agreements are facilitated, giving teeth to those who cannot smile and colors who those who cannot see. From an endless number of patients they humanely raise armies of the grateful.

The Cuban government is preparing itself by forced march to confront the future, which I can see upon crossing the street. I do not want to appear negative, because I am not, but I cannot help thinking of my astute grandmother, who possessed a wisdom without equal, when she used to tell me, “There are two kinds of people in this world — those who have power, and those referred to as ’the nobody bosses of nothing.’”

Juan Juan Almeida

28 March 2013

The Electric Utility, it seems, opens a hole in what’s left of the sidewalk to replace a pole, does its work, and leaves as a souvenir the broken sidewalk, a pile of dirt of prevent or hinder the passage of pedestrians and places, barely, a piece of a piece of wood from a cable spool, and eyes that saw them go.

The Havana Water Department opens a trench in some street, even if it’s newly paves, puts in its pipes, fills it with dirt and, barely, covers it with a thin layer of cement. In a few days the stretch becomes a pothole that prevents or hinders the passage of vehicles and eyes that saw them go.

You arrive at the door of a neighborhood store that sells in freely convertible currency (CUC) and, when you tries to enter, the guard tells you  to wait, that the entry is two by two. You look inward, through the glass, and observe there are only three customers and you ask, “Why two by two?” Finally you go and buy your products. The cashier is next to the guard at the door. He looks at your products, and the cashier collects you money and when you are going out you have to show your purchases and proof you paid for them, as he rummages through your plastic bag.

The kiosk, also selling in CUC, where there offer a few dairy products and open and there’s an employee inside, watching the pedestrians pass. You greet him the clerk, without returning the greeting, says they’re not selling anything because there’s no electricity. You are stunned and ask: “Is it because you don’t know how to add with pen and paper?”

These are a few examples of what constitutes an infinitely small part of civic helplessness. Someone may say: protest, do not accept it, demand your rights. You can, but it’s like plowing the desert, and you only risk a rude or violent response, depending on the mood of the person you demand them from, who enjoys impunity. What about the authorities? Fine, thank you. They are concerned with other things, preferably politics.

This is the result of living in a country where, for more than fifty years, the exercise of citizens’ rights and respect for them has been a pending matter.

2 April 2013

What makes a city is its people. The Capitol is not the most important thing in Havana, nor are the abundance of churches and alleys what is most striking of Camagüey, nor is the Moncada Barracks the greatest thing in Santiago, nor are their seawall walks the most pleasant parts of Caibarién, Cienfuegos, Gibara and Puerto Padre. It is the people who live or have lived there, their work, their faith, their worth or their dreams, who give meaning to those places.

And Pinar del Rio is a city that — forgive me for all the other valuable things that don’t appear in this blog — makes more sense because in many of its houses, ever stronger, grows the magazine Coexistence.

Occasionally Dagoberto Valdés, friend and editor of the magazine Coexistence, sends me a text message, a text that is not like the others, although it is also news: there is an Editorial Board. And I must be, and the finicky editor of texts that he lets loose in his alert counsels, and I’m glad because I cam going to see a ton of friends and good people, “good for me and good for this island bathes in waves of despair,” all at once.

So once more I pack my backpack, and correct the commas in an article I’m sure I haven’t sent them yet, and get a ticket or hang around the waiting lists at the bus stations. And begin the trip to Pinar del Río.

I’ve traveled a lot to the city that seemed a remote land before: since that first trip of curious journalist, when with my beard and covered in road dust I arrived at the home of Dagoberto Valdés, a few months from the end of the magazine Vitral, to help put out the first issue of White Rose. And instead of people consumed by sadness or resentment against the deserters, and the every-man-for-himself in which so many Cubans sail today, I found a team focused on their work, optimistic and affable, wonderfully resilient.

(That was my first trip to Pinar del Rio and the Magazine, in a very journalistic and traveling summer, when I still hadn’t been out of the University of Santa Clara did two months later, which I was two months later, by chance. And I joined the Editorial Board in February 2011, my own birthday present, four months before I was kicked out of the ISA. Obviously, my relationship with the magazine had a strong impact on me).

The red signs announces the closing of the workshop (also a museum) after 13 years, and the blue sign says “Strictly Forbidden to Stop Dreaming”*

Coexistence brought me to the home-based museum of Pedro Pablo Oliva*, and The Great Blackout epic my Cuban favorite. Coexistence gave me the chance to film, which I still owe them for, when a phenomenal jury gave Henry Constantin its audiovisual prize. Coexistence, that had managed to weave together a ton of friends in Pinar del Rio and outside the city, which they shared with me.

And Coexistence included me in its Editorial Board, and that night of the first meeting my modesty about being an upstart, for being the last to arrive and from the farthest away, they treated me almost equal to the founders, freely and without hesitation, with the right to edit and critique every new issue of the magazine.

A building in ruins in the center of the city.

Usually the traveler goes to see Soroa and Las Terrazas, climbs the hills of Vinales or goes down in the caves of Santo Tomas, spends an afternoon at Guyabita or breathig in the best tobacco brangs, bathing in Maria La Gorda, taking the waters of Los Portales and looking how it flows to the Gulf of Mexico from Cano de San Antonio or enjoying the clouds from Pan do Guajaibon.

All that is good, if one wants to know only the superficial. But if you want to know something of the best of humanity reborn in Pinar, and you left without a greeting to the people of Coexistence, without the magazine, a photo or a conversation, the traveler, possibly, would have missed everything.

Henry Constantín

*Translator’s note: Pedro Pablo Oliva is a painter in Pinar del Rio who fell on the wrong side of the government. The associated events are detailed here by: Yoani Sanchez, Dagoberto Valdes, Miriam Celaya and Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo.

20 March 2013

Photo: Peter Deel

The country’s leading authorities continually talk about the need to save resources and use the limited ones that are available for important issues, to support development and help in solving the many existing problems and overcoming the shortages. Undoubtedly, it is a fair demand, but it would be even more so, if they looked within themselves, and decided to save on those government activities that represent large expenditures and provide no wealth.

I am referring to the high subsidies enjoyed by the so-called mass organizations (CDR, FMC, CTC, ANAP, FEU, FEEM and others)*, institutions that present themselves as NGOs, but are, in fact, far from it; they are organized, directed and primarily funded by the State and solidarity groups abroad and while visiting Cuba; in addition there are some political campaigns, including that for “The Five**” (with the current adaptation of a mansion in El Vedado*** for its headquarters), payment of attorneys and multiple trips around the world for their families.

If they reduced the inflated payrolls of professional staff of these organizations, groups and campaigns, we would see a substantial savings in salaries, travel and maintenance, along with the great amount of free transport, housing and locales (usually the best), in municipalities as well as and in the provinces, helping to increase the housing stock to the public.

These measures don’t need commissions nor long studies and experiments for their implementation, as the sad reality already one of general control. If these savings also include major political organizations and some super-ministries, which enjoy carte blanche to own vehicles of all types, buildings, homes and locales (often underutilized), the results would be even greater and would be approved by the majority of citizens.

That is, if you really want to save, there is enough fabric available to cut within the State, without trying to apply them only to ordinary Cubans, demanding greater sacrifices.

Translator’s notes:
*All of these organizations are arms of the government: CDR =Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (the block watch groups); FMC = Federation of Cuban Women; CTC = Cuban Workers Union; ANAP = National Association of Small Farmers  ; FEU = Federation of University Students; FEEM = Federation of High School Students.

**”The Five” refers to five Cubans found guilty of spying in the United States.  Four of the five remain in prison. The Cuban government presents them as national heroes unjustly convicted.

***El Vedado is one of the nicer neighborhoods in Havana.

30 March 2013

CLICK HERE OR ON IMAGE TO WATCH

Freedom Tower, Miami

Years ago, when I left Cuba for the first time, I was in a train leaving from the city of Berlin heading north. A Berlin already reunified but preserving fragments of the ugly scar, that wall that had divided a nation. In the compartment of that train, while thinking about my father and grandfather – both engineers – who would have given anything to ride on this marvel of cars and a locomotive, I struck up a conversation with the young man sitting directly across from me.

After the first exchange of greetings, of mistreating the German language with “Guten Tag” and clarifying that “Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch,” the man immediately asked me where I came from. So I replied with “Ich komme aus Kuba.”

As always happens after the phrase saying you come from the largest of the Antilles, the interlocutor tries to show how much he knows about our country. “Ah…. Cuba, yes, Varadero, rum, salsa music.” I even ran into a couple of cases where the only reference they seemed to have for our nation was the album “BuenaVista Social Club,” which in those years was rising in popularity on the charts.

But that young man on the Berlin train surprised me. Unlike others, he didn’t answer me with a tourist or music stereotype, he went much further. His question was, “You’re from Cuba? From the Cuba of Fidel or from the Cuba of Miami?”

My face turned red, I forgot all of the little German I knew, and I answered him in my best Central Havana Spanish. “Chico, I’m from the Cuba of José Martí.” That ended our brief conversation. But for the rest of the trip, and the rest of my life, that conversation stayed in my mind. I’ve asked myself many times what led that Berliner and so many other people in the world to see Cubans inside and outside the Island as two separate worlds, two irreconcilable worlds.

The answer to that question also runs through part of the work of my blog, Generation Y. How was it that they divided our nation? How was it that a government, a party, a man in power, claimed the right to decide who should claim our nationality and who should not?

The answers to these questions you know much better than I. You who have lived the pain of exile. You who, more often than not, left with only what you were wearing. You who said goodbye to families, many of whom you never saw again. You who have tried to preserve Cuba, one Cuba, indivisible, complete, in your minds and in your hearts.

But I’m still wondering, what happened? How did it happen that being defined as Cuban came to be something only granted based on ideology? Believe me, when you are born and raised with only one version of history, a mutilated and convenient version of history, you cannot answer that question.

Luckily, it’s possible to wake up from the indoctrination. It’s enough that one question every day, like corrosive acid, gets inside our heads. It’s enough to not settle for what they told us. Indoctrination is incompatible with doubt, brainwashing ends at the exact point when our brain starts to question the phrases it has heard. The process of awakening is slow, like an estrangement, as if suddenly the seams of reality begin to show.

That’s how everything started in my case. I was a run-of-the-mill Little Pioneer, you all know about that. Every day at my elementary school morning assembly I repeated that slogan, “Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che.” Innumerable times I ran to a shelter with a gas mask under my arm, while my teachers assured me we were about to be attacked. I believed it. A child always believes what adults say.

But there were some things that didn’t fit. Every process of looking for the truth has its trigger, a single moment when a piece doesn’t fit, when something is not logical. And this absence of logic was outside of school, in my neighborhood and in my home. I couldn’t understand why, if those who left in the Mariel Boatlift were “enemies of the State,” my friends were so happy when one of those exiled relatives sent them food or clothing.

Why were those neighbors, who had been seen off by an act of repudiation in the Cayo Hueso tenement where I was born, the ones who supported the elderly mother who had been left behind? The elderly mother who gave a part of those packages to the same people who had thrown eggs and insults at her children. I didn’t understand it. And from this incomprehension, as painful as every birth, was born the person I am today.

So when that Berliner who had never been to Cuba tried to divide my nation, I jumped like a cat and stood up to him. And because of that, here I am today standing before you trying to make sure that no one, ever again, can divide us between one type of Cuban or another. We are going to need each other for a future Cuba and we need each other in the present Cuba. Without you our country would be incomplete, as if someone had amputated its limbs. We cannot allow them to continue to divide us.

Just like we are fighting to live in a country where we have the rights of free expression, free association, and so many others that have taken from us; we have to do everything – the possible and the impossible – so that you can recover the rights they have also taken from you. There is no you and us… there is only “us.” We will not allow them to continue separating us.

I am here because I don’t believe the history they told me. With so many other Cubans who grew up under a single official “truth,” we have woken up. We need to rebuild our nation. We can’t do it alone. Those present here – as you know well – have helped so many families on the Island put food on the table for their children. You have made your way in societies where you had to start from nothing. You have carried Cuba with you and you have cared for her. Help us to unify her, to tear down this wall that, unlike the one in Berlin, is not made of concrete or bricks, but of lies, silence, bad intentions.

In this Cuban so many of us dream of there will be no need to clarify what kind of Cuban we are. We will be just plain Cubans. Cubans, period. Cubans.

[Text read in an event at the Freedom Tower, Miami, Florida, 1 April 2013]