Translating Cuba

By Ignacio Estrada Cepero, Independent Journalist

Havana, Cuba. On different occasions I, like other colleagues of the alternative press and the Cuban blogosphere, have published images that the official press, out of complicity, prefers to put to one side.

The images show the beggars in Cuba, despite the false promises made at the triumph of a badly managed revolution led by someone who today is pure history, Fidel Castro.

The Cuban nation is living in this time of increasing numbers of beggars or needy people in the streets who ask for help not only from nationals but also from foreign visitors. The social cuts and abandonment of Raul’s regime have left thousands of people without protection all over the island. This has led to an environment that brings the needy into the streets.

For the most part the population of beggars is old people of both sexes, another significant number are alcoholics and people with psychiatric or mental problems and a smaller number are children who runaway from their homes without their parents’ permission in some cases.

The situation is one of the most shameful realities that open the promised equality and well-being to criticism; what was once just words in the mouths of young people who had no other purpose than to deceive a nation, with the only aim being to enthrone themselves through the suffering of those they deceived.

Images will remain veiled as long as there is a single one of them need, I recognize that some beggars devote themselves to the collection of raw materials, others sell peanuts, or resell various articles, and I applaud you and see in you the mirror of a nation whose values are devoured by the only cause of so much poverty.

Today the blame will fall on the real culprits of each of these images. Those who intend to become “Images of the Outraged of the Revolution.”

January 7 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Ignacio Estrada Cepero, Independent Journalist

Havana, Cuba: One of the electrical appliance brands most sold on the island in the last months of 2012, were RCA Victor. Sold in “the stores that capture hard currency,” as we call the stores that accept only Cuban convertible pesos (CUCs).

The brand now on the market is one of those seized in Cuba by the nationalization process. RCA Victor is in demand because of the quality of its products, ranging from TVs, electric stoves, electric cookpots and microwaves, all of which are durable.

The Cuban family again warmly welcomes in every home products of the brands which were the standouts in the past, seeing a renewal of each of its products.

Now, we might ask ourselves how is it possible to receive in Havana a brand whose house was destroyed by those who, today, sell this brand?

January 7 2013

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE AT USA TODAY

From Tracey Eaton…

A couple of the photos from Tracey Eaton’s story:

January 7 2013

The “Another Dawn” concert held at the America Theater on January 5 and 6 as a tribute to the maestro Meme Solís, provoked in me nostalgia, shame and awe.

Nostalgia, because the program “Alone with you,” broadcast by Radio Progresso after 10:00 at night, was one of my preferred transgressions in the years of my military service, when we violated the silent hours and the prohibition against having portable radios. Gathering around the cot of the recruit Andrés Villorín, owner of the receiver, we listened to those songs that were a balm of modernity in the closed environment of Cuban music of those times.

Shame, because in that era it seemed perfectly normal to me that Meme Solís was stripped of his right to appear in public for having committed the “unspeakable fault” of having asked to leave the country. Although unfortunate, it also seemed normal and even acceptable that his songs were banned from radio programs. When almost the entire world had forgotten him I saw him in person, for the first and last time, at the Hotel Jagua in Cienfuegos, where he played the piano some nights in the cabaret. I thought then that they were being generous to give him that opportunity.

Astonishment bit me because at the concert, where almost everyone was visibly moved, the singer’s face could be seen on the screen accompanied by figures such as Maggie Carlés, Mirta Medina, Annia Linares, Xiomara Laugart, Albita Rodríguez and other glories of Cuban music who today live outside the Island. Is a cultural thaw underway to recover from the damage caused by so many years of political intolerance? Are we on the eve of producing a tribute to Celia Cruz?

The nostalgia was shared, especially by the audience members of my generation. The shame was not made manifest, because nobody there asked Meme Solís for forgiveness for the pain he was caused. The astonishment was shown in the approving applause every time one of those banned divas appeared.

I would like Meme Solís to know that we have not forgotten him and that no one now has the arrogant intention of forgiving him for having left Cuba, rather in every case the desire to ask his forgiveness for having abandoned him to his fate.

Reinaldo Escobar

7 January 2013

It looked like a small suitcase, with rounded corners and a detachable horn on the lid. That turntable was an object of worship for my father and an alternative to the boring programming on radio and TV in the eighties. The needle followed the small grooves in the vinyl and the melody filled the little room in an almost magical act. We also had a fairly small collection of albums: some bought at the store and others given by friends or relatives. We replayed the same music so much that my sister and I learned by heart certain boleros and ballads that had nothing to do with our generation. I remember, too, that we had four records we could only play at a very low volume and with the windows closed. One was a long-playing record by Julio Iglesias, another of songs interpreted by Nelson Ned, a third was the Cuban comedians Pototo y Filomeno, and the one by the quartet known as Los Memes.

Both the Spanish and Brazilian singer had been censored in the national media, it was said, for making statements critical of the Cuban government. The two native comedians, meanwhile, had gone into exile and this put them squarely on the “black list.” But what happened with those four young men who sounded divine on that other “banned record.” As those were the times of not asking too many questions, I only came to know five years later. Then I learned that José Manuel Solís (Meme) had been vetoed for the simple fact of having asked to leave Cuba in 1969. For eighteen years he waited for them to allow him to emigrate, a time when the cultural Torquemadas tried to erase his compositions from our musical history. More than forty years after that forced silence about him, a concert in tribute to him was staged at the America Theater in Havana, under the title “Another Dawn.” So Saturday and Sunday, January 5 and 6, Meme’s songs were heard once again in the country where they never should have been censored.

The show was a succession of excellent singers, from the best-known voices to others, young and promising talents. Despite the minimal — or absent — press coverage, the hall was packed both days. The most emotional moments occurred when on the main screen the faces of some of our artists in exile appeared. Maggie Carlés, Albita Rodríguez, Annia Linares, Xiomara Laugart and Mirtha Medina sparked huge ovations from the audience when they appeared for only seconds in the videos. But the brightest star of all was undoubtedly that boy from Mayajigua who had become a preeminent Cuban singer, pianist and composer. Although he did not travel to Cuba for the tribute — saying that he wouldn’t think of returning to Cuba as long as the current government remained — his presence was a constant during the almost two hours the concert lasted.

At full volume, without closing the windows, without playing the records at a whisper, without turning off the music when the neighbors knocked on the door. For the first time I heard the music of Meme Solís without hiding. The only thing missing was him singing it.

Yoani Sanchez

7 January 2013

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December 28 2012

As a prank for the Day of the Innocents*, Alicia Alonso has ordered the National Ballet of Cuba, the same one as in The Man from Maisinicu, that Cuban film that not one of her young dancers has seen: “stab it, stab it …”

In this case it’s about stabbing a hanged corpse, one still kicking, of the Revolution and it’s imaginary forgotten. No one can be left out of the bestiality: everyone will have to embarrass themselves in public with their choreographic commitment.

And there is nothing better for this than dressing your entire company as if, instead of an aesthetic elite, they were obscene workers from the sixties. With the March of the Guerrilla, anachronistically interpreted by the choir of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (in olive green suits), Alicia Alonso made a mockery of everyone in the audience at the Grand Theater of Havana yesterday (with prices for foreigners ranging up 25 CUC ), in a supposed Tribute-Gala for the centenary of the conductor Enrique González Mántici.

Almost centenarian herself, this retro-revolucionary clown Alicia Alonso, recalls the one who starred ages ago, Rosita Fornes, in her UFO landing in Sports City (the same Rosita Fornes who today, Friday December 28, will go on stage at a concert, perhaps in memoriam to that capitalist prank for the Day of the Innocents).

It seems that barbarism in Cuba has mutated into nonsense, and that this will be the popular sign of our 21st century, in response to a the Realpolitik of a government increasingly less ideological but also less democratic, where the rights of citizens are already kidnapped in perpetuity behind the scenes of a transition of intrigue, blessed in its constitutional criminality in all the churches of this small island equally abandoned by the exile and by God.

Scaling the Sierra Maestra to sing opera without sound or pictures, wearing the boots of sugarcane workers instead of classic ballet shoes: the humor is a superb kitsch of these gestures that vainly try to hide the despotic power of more than a few international bank accounts. The dancers themselves chaotically chatted and cackled while pretending to march into a coda that might well title itself after that obsolete signature of the Ministry of Education: Comprehensive Military Readiness (PMI). I wonder how many of them, hilarious in their humiliation, have decided tonight to defect from their next foreign mission.

Then, as an epitaph, the woman who for decades saved a ballet shoe secretly buried under the floorboards appeared in the stage, as a gloomy talisman against the new generation of Cinderellas with pretensions of being a prima ballerina. The director of the local ballet and wanted to postpone as long as possible a future of freedom, where no one should be so godlike as to endow themselves with the archaeological title of Absoluta.

The worst, then, was the applause our island neo-bourgeoisie dedicated to Alicia Alonso, instead of sounding the trumpets of resistance, less rabid than ridiculous, at her institutional burial.

A sick joke, like Fidel Castro’s moringa** manifesto, or the rheumatic immigration reform his younger brother, the truth is that I left the García Lorca Room wanting to hang myself, preferably from a guazuma (bay cedar) or caguairán (a tropical hardwood): “stab me, stab me,” I would tell the transhistoric thugs of this Cuban atrocity.

They can now stick their sharp daggers up to the hilt in our throats. I promise them that no totalitarian tracheotomy, be it legal or mafiosa, is going to invalidate or vacate the truth that is already innocently incubated in our voices. Let it be, then, that this December 28 is the perfect date to announce the joke that there is no military mummy that lasts a hundred years nor a ballet troop that resists it.

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Translator’s notes:
* December 28, the day Herod had the male children of Bethlehem massacred.
** Moringa is a kind of tree. In one of his last public utterances Fidel Castro announced that Cuba would meet all its needs — including for meat and milk — from moringa.

Translated from Diario de Cuba.

December 28 2012