Translating Cuba

Juventud Rebelde didn’t lie when it said in its Sunday edition, “Raul returned to the fatherland with the emotion reflected in his face after intense days in Caracas.” I believe it wouldn’t be wrong to say that their words set a road map and marked guidelines.

The revolutionary government has lost its wet-nurse and knows, clearly, that without patronage it cannot choose to continue its unbelievable discourse, nor seek the permanence of something within Cuba that almost no one needs.

As my grandmother used to say seated before her balance sheet, before taking some tobacco, “What creates real uncertainty and despair is not what happens but what is going to happen.”

Times are changing for everyone, and we have to change with them. I know that within the island there are, at least, two sides. One has the power and, as so often happens with precious bounty, it is not disposed to cede it, but to hold onto it it will have to urgently reinvent itself.

Its main enemy, within and outside the public arena, is the ballast that generates its own inertia. Today, like never before, the dominant class on the island needs with urgent haste, and not discretion, a more democratic approach. It is disguising itself in a moderate esthetic, although its target continues to be the same, to gain time, always betting on biology, the oxygenation and multiplication of forces.

I think without renouncing any of their “convictions,” they can’t do anything other than to bend their orthodox path slightly toward a space with more understanding, including with the dissidence (which confuses Uniformity and Union) which at first glance doesn’t seem separated by great differences.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I dare to say that before next year, perhaps before this coming summer, they will announce new economic reforms, including political reforms, designed to create a new Constitution or to reform the current one.

They will separate the State, the Government and the Party to increase power in support of more political evangelism, and more legitimacy. It’s clear, they will build barricades that would allow them to remain immune faced with those of us who want to judge them or at least want to see them sitting in the dock.

Havana is becoming a territory that everyone — even I who have never been very cautious — need to look at with moderation and care. Someone wrote, that the most well-tried method to absorb the enemy is the make him feel important. We recall that for the Cuban government the world is nothing more than a great battlefield.

And yes, they still have the old traps capable of catching the naive, manipulating the sentiments of those who have for years enjoyed the pleasure of eating as a family, and handling the innocence of so many others who don’t even have a table to sit at. The danger is over tightening the nut and breaking the thread of the slight social cohesion.

The new role of the Castro regime is to show new-found false benevolence. Now they will invoke the necessary words — Justice, Liberty and Democracy — as they share out food to later collect votes. Because if it really is true that when you go hunting you don’t use the rifle in reverse, there are true stories in which the shot of the marksman has backfired.

13 March 2013

After having experienced during my stay in France what can truly be called, without any fear of exaggeration, a medical powerhouse, I return to the contrast of our sad reality.

Some doctors, family members and friends to whom I proudly showed the x-rays of my injured hand and its current state after recovery all unfortunately say the same thing: “Be happy you fell down in France and not here.”

Speaking to each of them separately, they have commented to me on the ever more noticeable state of deterioration of health services in our country. They are also in agreement on the lack of financial stimulus in this sector, which is leading to disenchanted young people to forgo medical careers. Then there is the exodus of doctors, now made possible by the “new emigration regulations, which grant them the ability to travel. They are leaving the country in search of better economic opportunities and greater recognition. Some leave only because they want to go exploring, but unfortunately most will not return.

One of the other issues most affecting health care workers at the moment is that, following demands for increases in their salaries, authorities have decided not to raise them “owing to economic problems confronting the country.” Instead, as a humiliating consolation, they have decided to pay two Cuban pesos (the ordinary kind) to doctors for every hour worked, fifty centavos to nurses and twenty-five centavos to all other auxiliary personnel. In other words, after working twelve hours in a hospital, a doctor receives a compensation of twenty-four pesos (approximately one dollar). Nurses receive six pesos, and auxiliary personnel get three. This situation is truly shameful, especially given the shortage of personnel, who are called upon to work more frequent shifts.

It is no wonder that increasingly we have fewer and fewer doctors. At some point we may have to seek treatment overseas, where the services of our excellent doctors are valued.

28 March 2013

“In life there are loves you can never forget…” says one of the songs recorded by the flamenco singer El Cigala accompanied on piano by Bebo Valdés. A few days ago this man of 94 years died, after more than five decades of not returning to the Island of Cuba. He promised his mother, before leaving in the autumn of 1960, that he would not return to Cuba until “the system” fell. So he spent the rest of his life in exile, mostly in Sweden where he found love and a second home.

The sad history of Bebo is that during his entire time as an émigré, he was erased from the repertoire of Cuban culture in the national media. They tried to remove him for good from the lists of Cuban pianists, although now and again his talent seeped into some clandestine recording or into  a documentary that spread through the alternative information networks. And so it was until the worldwide success of “Lagrimas Negras” – Black Tears – a record the Cuban musical censors could not bury. Tourists started coming to the Island asking to hear the melodies that excellent interpreter had immortalized with his hands.

Despite this, most Cubans today know nothing of Bebo Valdés and when his death was announced last week many looked puzzled trying to recall this six-foot tall man with the prodigious fingers. So something magical happened to Bebo, something already narrated in one of those melodies he played so often. That song that said, “nothing is better than the verse we can’t remember,” and so it has come to refer to him, that musician we can’t remember.

Some friends have asked me not to continue responding to the letters and posts of those who have sought a few minutes of fame at my expense, which, for the most part, are blogs that join the fray publicly for the first time despite the efforts put into them; others, are read only by the official Nomenklatura and written by people who have never been important except to their families, I suppose, and who for the first time, and also possibly for the last, received some ephemeral public attention in the virtual world, which encouraged — with luck! — their irrelevant and dull lives.

I’m sure the suggestion of these friends is reasonable, in fact, every time that I draft the answers I understand them, but I am an extrovert and I need to be very timely especially with those who manipulate their letters to confuse and, thanks to the high level of ambiguity consciously used, to distort the reality of the facts confusing their readers.

This occurred, for example, with the witness heard or referenced used by the prosecution against me. That witness mentions another woman, my friend, whose name he made public without consulting her or asking permission, and if that is not enough he put words she never said into her mouth. Both my friend and her husband, who was with her at the times referred to by the prosecution’s witness, have expressed feeling very offended by his lack of ethics and a high level of deceit.

The conversation I had with this friend of mine went through my cell phone and if I had said a single word that betrayed my guilt, that word now would be evidence that the prosecution filed against me as the investigator reviewed all my calls and my emails.

I can only repeat endlessly until my last breath — and this is what I have been saying in every answer I provide — I demand hard evidence to sustain the conviction that has been imposed on me; evidence other than the word of a manipulated person, a friend of the accuser, who repeats what she was told; proofs that are not those “contributed” by a Lieutenant Colonel calligrapher who swore, violating all the legal and scientific conventions on the legal value of a handwriting expert, that my “slanted handwriting” is proof of my guilt.

These proofs were exposed by a video made of a testimony of a false witness whom the prosecutor wanted to sneak in, and who was immediately discarded when we recorded him explaining how he had been bribed and forced to testify against me. This video was enough to prove my innocence. He disproved, for its falsity, all the lies the Court fabricated to hide my innocence. But — I repeat — it’s impossible to hide it. It’s impossible to deceive people even if they have a minimum of understanding.

The Government, Prosecutor, Courts, Police and every person who signed a letter condemning me for the alleged violence I’m accused of and for which they sentenced me, not one has presented a single proof against me.

Enough already with the talk and insinuations; it’s not sufficient to imprison anyone.

They say and accept that I got in their way; that in political life, to my regret, I earned recognition and respect; that my blog began to have ten thousand visits a day, and they saw me become too close to those on the island defending the truth, like the project For Another Cuba and the signatures for the U.N. covenants; projects that, I know, worry and frighten them.

They recognize that my presence in front of the police station demanding the release of Antonio Rodiles was found unacceptable for an intellectual, that the of the beating they gave me traveled the world; that thousands of people all over the world were terrified by the image of my blood-soaked shirt; that I maintained a hunger and thirst strike for those days; and above all, they confessed their helplessness because of the obvious evidence of their abuse of me and the international pressures.

They admit that I bothered them by not compromising when the State Security official Anibal told me to stop my political actions. That they took as a taunt my returning to the same place where they beat me the next day, accompanied by Rodiles’s wife Ailer Gonzalez, and his father, all three of us wearing T-shirts with the image of Rodiles demanding his release. That every day, during those 19 days of injustice, we sat in front of the police station until they released him, which they did only after the swelling had gone down and his black eye had disappeared.

And officers Camilo and Hannibal had warned me. And to stop me there was nothing they could so other than show me more sophisticated objects, more sophisticated instruments: the “Revolutionary Courts” that they both boast about.

The culpability of State Security is as obvious as that of those who have supported the typical and predictable campaigns against me looking to raise a smokescreen to hide their misdeeds. History will be responsible for each of us and will put us in the exact place that we have earned. That’s for sure.

However, despite the media campaign, I fought with the tools that my circumstances allowed me. I have exhibited my strong evidence, I’ve put it in front of their eyes, including the much talked about video of the false witness who retracted,  yet the Police and Prosecutors prepared to convict me for the rest of my days.

Whoever bites once, does it forever. So they brought military and State specialists, that is people forced to respond without the slightest intention of questioning orders, to flesh out versions that always favored the Prosecution. So they blatantly lied in court without the slightest pretense, dismissed my solid witnesses, some of them with no affection for me, but who took the risk to do their duty consistent with their consciences.

This was the case with my son’s teacher, the school principal and — a detail that has not been mentioned — a member of the Communist Party, whom the Delegate to the People’s Power went to see to pressure her, because “how can you defend a counterrevolutionary?” In a gesture of dignity I respect, she responded that she was defending a student, the boy, that he was the most injured because he — my son — had confessed to her that his mom had asked him to tell lies to denigrate my public image.

Another witness, thanks to the level of friendship he had with the accuser, testified that my ex had told him on several occasions that she “was preparing a number eight legal case against the father of her child.” By then my ex and I had been separated more than two years.

There was another witness with him I only exchanged a polite and cordial greeting, because I was visiting a family that lived in the back of his house, and I was obliged to park my car in front. At exactly the day and time when my ex said she ran into me in her house, I was passing through the home of this witness whom I heard strongly rebuking her son and, unable to contain myself, I asked her not to be so violent in the reprimand, he was just a boy.

She explained he had broken the windshield of a car and the owner was demanding 900 pesos. Then I said, according to what she herself remembered at the trail, that a windshield could be replaced a hundred times, but a child, no. She, according to what she told the court, didn’t forget the day because thanks to me she wasn’t unjust with her son: later she learned he hadn’t been the child responsible for breaking the windshield.

There were two other witnesses: a Lodge brother, who need to re-pass his exam for Master Mason which was coming up in a few days, and his mother, who prepared us lunch that day.

So in summary, the Court decided to ignore them in favor of the Prosecution’s witnesses, and did it with blatant lies and contradictions that can be seen in the judgment. Before the ease and agility with which the Court accepted everything against me, I was left in a legally hopeless state.

Instead they accepted a hearsay witness, who repeated what his friend told him, a witness who wasn’t present at the alleged events which I was accused of and yet they validated his “testimony.” (Editor’s note: According to the dictionary: Witness: 1. Person who testifies to something or attests. 2. Person present or who acquires direct and verifiable knowledge of something.)

As of today, no one has responded to my questions:

Why did the trial take place in the First Division of State Security, or specifically on the special site for “relevant” cases in Carmen and Juan Delgado, as they communicated to my attorney.

Why was my sentence announced by the Official Camilo, from State Security, a month before the Court issued it?

No doubt many do not want to see how obviously my case was rigged, and I understand their interests. And although I do not share them, I respect their complete right to be unjust.

A State of Laws?

Some friends have also told me to use the law to accuse those who have lied, but that would be another naivete. Friends, brothers, international public opinion: we do not live in a State of Laws, this is the Biran Ranch — the Castros’ ancestral home — where the foreman obeys the orders of the owner. We live in a feudal state with no rights where the only thing that protects us is to do whatever the King says, without question, because if you question, they will send you to where I am today: behind bars.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

La Lima Prison, March 2013

27 March 2013

Presided over by Cuba’s General-President, on Friday, March 15, 2013 there was an extended meeting of the Council of Ministers, which, in addition to resembling any other, at the same time typifies both the inefficiency of the entire government apparatus and the impossibility of renewing the so-called “Cuban model.”

The witches’ sabbath of official mediocrity was exposed from the very beginning of the conclave of the highest leadership of the country in which, in addition to ministers, are the members of the Council of State, the Politburo, and the Secretariat of the Cuban Communist Party Central Committee, who were invited by Castro II to witness the end of theatrical work — And Yet It Moves — staged by the children’s company, The Beehive. According to the words of the General, “It is not just a play, it is part of our political and cultural preparation.”

Undoubtedly, before the reality check of his management and the capabilities of his governing team, Castro II has deemed it opportune that they drink from the sources he believes they’re intellectually prepared for: children’s theater works. Ergo, from now on it will be Carlos Alberto Cremata and his child actors who are the inspiration and intellectual authors of the contributions deriving from the Government directives.

One after another, each head of the different ministries summarized the insufficient progress and overwhelming deficiencies of their respective portfolios, half of which would provoke the resignation of any minister in a minimally decent country.

For his part, the General-President, insisted throughout the meeting on what he considers his key for the success of the Cuban economy: the systematization of discipline and demands. “This is not the task of one day,” he repeated, which is absolutely true, given that he himself, since he assumed control of the country in 2006 and was officially ratified as head of the government in 2008 without our being able to appreciate up to now even a hint, not just of recovery, but of at least a slowdown in the general crisis that affects the present and jeopardizes the future of the entire nation. Following his logic, it could be interpreted that the Cuban economy fails to develop for two reasons: either discipline and demands are not sufficient factors or, more likely, nobody pays any attention to the guidance of the President. continue reading

For many years, perhaps too many, the word power has been an important part of the language of government. We have been, certainly quite doubtful, a medical power, a moral power, an education power, a sports power, a cultural power, a scientific power and many more to overcome the mythical number of seven powers, that cheap perfume from our parents, who smelled everything and nothing in particular. Something similar has happened with so many powers.

Underpinning the little word in a pharaonic concept of everything Cuban, we are led to believe it was true, and the harsh reality had to come and show their inconsistency and falsehood, although there are still some, both inside and outside of Cuba, who still believe in it, mainly due to lack of accurate information or primitive fanaticism.

All these fake monuments, raised to more easily manipulate the majority of the population and, unfortunately, they met their goal, mere ruins today, that compete with the buildings that collapse every day, at least in the city Havana.

No one today, with half a brain, would dare to speak of power in something, under pain of ridicule and not being taken seriously, which is an irrefutable sign of deteriorating political and ideological current that runs through Cuban society.

Ordinary people today are not interested in being a part of any power, consumed with their daily struggle and survival with their family, with the least possible state interference. This is the case although officially they try to demonstrate the opposite, with the unreal slogan of “”neighborhood-revolution” that is everywhere; but individualism has developed and it’s every many for himself in a society still too closed, despite the implementation of the new government “Guidelines.”

Luckily, the Pharaonic seems to have gone over the edge and, along with him, so many powers that never really were.

27 March 2013

“…because, although a nation may collapse, its mountains remain. And with the mountains there remains man’s eternal responsibility to preserve what is essentially his, which is his soul. And with that responsibility there remains the possibility of yearning and striving and the satisfaction that comes with doing it.” Hanama Tasaki

Fifty years ago the triumph of the Revolution was a paradigm for an era about to begin. The serious social problems that it sought to stamp out and the head-on antagonism towards the U.S. government marked its early years with a tense and radical tone. The justice of that struggle, the immense jubilation of a sea of people celebrating victory and later developments such as the literacy campaign, the invasion at Bay of Pigs and the October missile crisis would confer glory on its charismatic bearded leaders. It was a romantic image that resonated with every leftist movement throughout the world. At the time, as so often happens in similarly fervent eras, it seemed that anything was possible.

As one might imagine, to bring these dreams to life, a different type of man was needed. He had to possess his species’ highest virtues, be capable of making huge sacrifices while losing nothing. He had to be someone trustworthy, who acted in accordance with his principles to the point of being willing to die for them. There was an urge to forge an altruistic being, indifferent to the miseries of the past and without the slightest trace of selfishness. There was a need for a man aware of his moment in time and of the legacy he should leave. He aspired to be the perfect being “outlined in the speeches of Che Guevara” and was called upon to be the model for an idealized future. In other words, he was the dream of the New Man.

But that vision did not lead to a smooth road towards the promised land. While large estates, foreign holdings and properties belonging to the wealthy were nationalized in the early years, with the onset of the “revolutionary offensive” of 1968 such government measures were redirected against the very Cubans who had so fervently supported the Revolution less than a decade earlier. They often found themselves stripped of their small family businesses, whether they were simple little neighborhood stores, humble produce stalls, or tiny shoeshine stands. These misguided and extreme measures were followed by decades of economic stagnation and a flourishing bureaucracy that did nothing but demonstrate how inappropriate it was to adopt a carbon copy of the Soviet model.

The passage of time also saw an absence of civil guarantees, the lack of a separation of powers and an ethical impoverishment brought on by a press subjugated by censorship, all of which created an atmosphere of social hypocrisy that could only grow exponentially. The initial promise of plurality was necessary to motivate the people to wage war against tyranny of Batista’ as well as against assassins the likes of Ventura Novo and Cañizares, of Pilar García and Rolando Masferrer. It ultimately degenerated into a civil and spiritual poverty that today we recognize with embarrassment.

Now, fifty-four years later, I ask myself what remains of that dream. What of the utopia of the New Man have young people today inherited? The fantasy died in the cradle and in its place arose someone capable of the full range of hypocrisy, someone who runs from truth like vermin from light.

In he shadow of fear was engendered a lazy and selfish being, unable to put himself forward civilly with principles, unable to concern himself with anything that doesn’t have to do only with him. Insensible to the pain of others inadvertently powerless to go further, beyond the boundaries of his little plot, and in his Kafkaesque insect dimension, vegetates in his own harvest of misery without ever uncovering the great common parcel.

I don’t want to say that my inquisitive mind or judgement are infallible, nor do I want to wipe the slate clean, but it greatly distresses me that the behaviors that should be dark exceptions are the shameful norm: I look with sadness at the minimum level of spirituality of this youth, focused on fashion and reggaeton but too uneducated and superficial to notice major issues.

Elevated concepts like nation, commitment, duty or sacrifice are as alien to the average youth of today as the concepts of quantum physics. And it’s not that it’s wrong to live intensely, to wear the latest fashions and dance to the point of delirium, “because youth only comes around once and as beautiful as it is, it is fleeting,” but there should be, along with joy, depth… isn’t this Guevara?

The mega-experiment of the schools in the countryside had everything to do in such moral devastation, which for decades kept several generations of Cubans away from their families in the most critical phase of their adolescence, while their personalities crystallized.

In the classrooms of these boarding schools there was a climate of adequate teaching, “high quality in many cases,” while in the dorms many times the prison code prevailed: good had to adapt itself to sign of evil, and never vice versa, if you wanted to survive; their that young person in the making could descend to the most obscene unscrupulousness.

To this must be added the unfathomable crisis of values that came with the decade of the ’90s. The profound deterioration of people’s living standards prompted a mass exodus of teachers from the National Education System with its logical consequences, and meanwhile in the streets the law of the jungle was definitely enthroned.

Then libretazo of the 2000s “with its never achieved its Comprehensive General Teachers, its video-conferences and massive graduations of emerging, and volatile, teachers,” struck the final blow. The sad result we are touching today; it is my generation and my daughter’s generation that is the product of those years: the insensitivity, the worst education, the most arid vulgarity are the norm and, after so much time, have reached epidemic proportions. In short, we have created a Frankenstein and today we do not know what to do with it.

But I maintain the stubborn hope that not all is lost. Against such desolation I offer in opposition Jose Marti’s unshakable faith in human improvement. I have a living certainty that my people will draw, from the illustrious examples of their history, the strength necessary to rise from its ruins; so that the New Man we dreamed of one day, and whom I resist considering an impossible chimera, is finally born as the “son of universal values, not of political indoctrination” for the ultimate good of the fatherland.

We do not need the man of prefabricated harangues: essentially we need to rescue this man from the moral abyss dug by simulation and lies. We urgently need a Revolution of the soul.

“What can we count on…?!” the myopic skeptics scream. And the response worthy is what Agramonte shouted that shook the insurgent swamp: “The shame, we can count on that, the shame all Cubans deserve!”

by Jeovany Jimenez Vega

25 March 2013

The vision of the demonstrations of mourning of the Venezuelans who just five months ago voted for the president who now stars finally in his own and absurdly long death, arouses both respect and compassion. Respect, for every genuine expression of regret deserves it, beyond our individual ideologies. Compassion, because the crowds of mourners who parade before our eyes in Caracas are behaving like a deceived lover, who although faced with evidence of infidelity insist on denying it.

As announced on Friday, March 1 in his Twitter account, the Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles has revealed that Nicolas Maduro and other Cabinet members lied about the state of health of the president. The irreversibly serious state of the President’s health and his impending death remained hidden in the rigged reports and medical details, murky and full of inconsistencies, designed to maintain political control at all costs and despite the inevitable extinction of the caudillo.

On the other hand, the prolonged absence and invisibility of the President was so scandalous that many sectors of the opposition demanded a proof of life, a factor which had a decisive influence on the public declaration of his death. It was curious that with the growing demonstrations of the opposition and the justice of their demand how suddenly it came about. In just a few days they adjusted the planned program with the extreme seriousness of “the emergence of a new respiratory program” followed almost immediately by the death of Chavez.

Most likely, as has happened in history with the death of other caudillos, we will never know the exact date that the Venezuelan president died. In fact, the serenity of his daughters during the wake suggests a knowledge well before the event, far beyond what they expected as a logical outcome.

But there are other great lies in this saga. Chavez lied maliciously when he declared himself cured by a miracle, after two operations for the same illness, to be eligible for re-election and to take on the electoral campaign that would place him once more in the presidency of Venezuela. He lied with all his energy and at the cost of his own life, to remain in power, proof of enormous irresponsibility, because in the end the voters, without knowing it, voted overwhelmingly for a prospective corpse. If, as some argue, the late caudillo followed directions from Havana, the acceptance of such interference would only prove a major deception to his people.

Overnight the king has been left naked and it is obvious that “the right, the oligarchy, the empire and Chavez’s enemies” were telling the truth. However, tens of thousands of Venezuelans mourn his death. Many times before in history other peoples have mourned their dictators and then quickly forgotten them. The people are fickle, because they need to survive all the passing conflicts. At the end of the day, a good share of the Venezuelan people lie “perhaps in good faith,” when they say they will defend with their lives Chavez-style socialism, a paradigm of 21st century justice.

And so the embalmed corpse of Hugo Chavez, which will have a permanent place in the new Palace of the Revolution will be, along with a twisted and sick perception of worship, a way to keep him among the living, even if it’s all little lies.

For my part, as I’ve watched so many tearful faces cross my TV screen lately, so many slogans and testimonials of loyalty to Chavez, I could not but recall that old bolero that played on the Victrolas so many years ago in the bars my Old Havana: “Who cares, life is a lie … lie to me again, your wickedness makes me happy.”

8 March 2013

My first post this year titled “My first post of 2013,” dated January 9, explained to my readers the cause of my tardiness: my lack of internet connection meant that it was nine days into the year before I could post my first text.

Well today is March 26 and I’m posting my fifth post of the year, which is almost equivalent to an average, so far this year, of one post per month.

The truth is that I am not giving in to my lack of connection and so here I am again. I am even trying to take some measures not to achieve a better internet connection, which is impossible, but to take take advantage of the programming options offered by WordPress. So again I apologize to those who have the patience to glance at my poor blog. Thank you for looking here to follow my simple words.

God bless you all.

26 March 2013

The Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl, in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, which featured his experience as a Jew as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, says: “I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, “homeostasis,” i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”

His words definitely define, underpin and summarize my current existence. I live my days answering the call to my conscience, responding to my need to work to achieve a political change in my country that returns hope to Cubans and ends the sacrifice of families seeing their children leave for other lands to look for better conditions.

Later Viktor E. Frankl says: “(…) what matters is not the meaning of life in general terms but rather the specific meaning of every individual’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: ’Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?’ What happens is, simply, that there is no such thing as the best move, or a good move, apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. We should not search for the abstract meaning of life, because everyone has within him his own specific or mission to carry out; everyone has a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Thus he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated; everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.”

Through reading, my creative writing and my devotion to expressing myself in my blog, my strengths are multiplied.

I am determined to continue, whatever the sacrifice, to achieve our dreams and that they may complete the liberation struggles of the nineteenth century, with  Marti’s ideal as a banner. We can’t forget forget that God keeps all our tears.

We are not far, my nose tells me events predict the change that will finally return to us the meaning of life, with democracy as the only door to a better Cuba.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

La Lima Prison. March 2013

25 March 2013