Translating Cuba

Photos from Twitter, of Yoani’s “Christmas tree with only 2 branches.”

24 December 2012

The Kabbalah, the number is not mentioned, a superstition with numbers, the calamity that even pronouncing eight letters could bring. I remember when I turned thirteen the many jokes at school that revolved around it. “How old are you?” asked the upper grade students to mock my confusion when answering. I had to respond with “twelve plus one” or “fifteen minus two,” because to say those cursed digits landed me in a wave of laughter. They also might launch a “cocotazo” with the cry of “Gotcha!” as they rapped their knuckles into my skull, and still today I’m not really clear on what that meant in that context. So I grew up assuming that thirteen not only brought bad luck, but also scorn, derision, insult.

When I moved in with Reinaldo, I thought, “What a relief! At least we live on the 14th floor and not the one below.” I imagined what if, every time I gave my address, someone shouted that sarcastic “Gotcha!” of my adolescence. The embarrassment wouldn’t reach me. Years later the doctor predicted that my son would be born on August 13, 1995, but — luckily — nature moved up the date and freed us from that “dark day.” And so, bobbing and weaving, leaving off saying it at times, and using addition and subtraction at others, I’ve escaped the dark superstition of “ten plus three.” Like me, many others have done the same, sometimes more as a precaution than from true belief in the bad omen. But now comes an ordeal for everyone: the year 2013 is about to begin.

I have the impression that for Cubans the next twelve months will not be fatal. Looking ahead, I can predict they will be full of moments of change and great times. Much of the country we know will change, for the better, and a little for the worse; new names will emerge on the national stage and others will be finally inscribed in the marble of a headstone. An era will end, making the Mayans right this time. But all this depends, perhaps in the first place, on how we citizens handle the challenges presented to us, how aware we are that we are living at a turning point in history. Beginning now I am already preparing and I repeat like a mantra: thirteen, thirteen, thirteen, thirteen, thirteen…

* To all my friends, colleagues, bloggers, journalists from all over the world, readers of my texts, commentators have made this blog yours, translators who voluntarily turn it into so many languages, to those who with your true criticisms or your acidic tirades have helped me become a better person, to all of you, I wish you happy holidays and a wonderful new year.

24 December 2012

Design by Amalia Iduate

24 December 2012

Design by Amalia Iduate

24 December 2012

Design by Amalia Iduate

24 December 2012

Death displays no stars on his epaulets, nor in civilian clothes (as they placed him in a box with a single family wreath). Death is a gradation of colors, from the intimidating olive green of the uniform to the cadaverous yellow of skin about to be cremated. Death is, also, the silence of the official newspapers and the national television news. Death is the absolute helplessness of Chapel J of a famous Cuban funeral home, where the body of commander Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo lies, while outside the sea roars like a cyclone through all the streets of El Vedado, crossing the patrols extorting the prostitutes, and the United States Interests Section Office is cut in the wee hours like a futuristic lizard.

The men who led the Revolution of January 1, 1959 can be counted on the fingers. Very soon they will be counted only with the word. Say what they will, the post-guerrilla court physicians, the Utopia of founding a Club of 120 Years proved to be just another fallacy of the socialist emulation. They also die, comrades: no one was immortal. After more than half a century of the so-called “historic generation” in power, this is all that will remain (before my desolate eyes at the wake): fewer than a dozen mourners, zero curious, the press in passing for the photo op, not even police or state security personnel, an unlikely emptiness of plastic chairs and functionaries in threadbare suits. Nobody has died or perhaps we are the dead, the effects of pedestrian apathy and the disintegrated forgetfulness of our nation. Like in a photo of the broken family of the troubadour Carlos Varela: it doesn’t help…

It’s a full moon in Havana, a transparent night that makes us weightless. The Revolution has turned into a volatile bubble, gas that adopts the form of the repression that contains it. The cypresses here no longer pretend to believe in God. There must be cypresses in Cuba to prop us the sky. At this hour there should exist at least a warm and rather bitter sip of God.

I remember my readings of Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, including literary readings. I remember speaking with a crystal clarity and his lanky body in countless class documentaries that circulate computer to computer, although no one in Cuba today sees them, they’re boring, ugly, criminal. The new generations don’t believe in the prestige of death, so they have abandoned this gentleman to his fate. I remember him accused of being a Castro supporter (and in an epistemological sense he was right up to his last breath) by the undercover Castro agents. I remember trying to erase all the rancor from early on, despite the violence that in person altered him. I remember him tired of going up against death, provoking it to make life less miserable. One has the impression that in epic families such as the Gutierrez Menoyos, in that era of wholesale dictatorships (that one?), in whatever part of the world he would have sought vengeance against the Presidential Palace.

The testament of this excommunicated commander is a startling allegation. He dictated it to his daughter, Patricia Gutierrez Menoyo a couple of months ago. Both knew. This is a prescient text, bitter and hopeful. She, who reproduces her father’s features with a candor that makes you want to cry, sent it to the press as soon as she knew the inevitable had occurred. There, recently fallen from the airport after an aerial tour of the Island from Puerto Rico, she gave me a sheet that still smells of exile, of life, of liberty.

The commander Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo gives us, in his farewell, a lesson in style. It feels opaque and so seeks maximum transparency, the spontaneous metaphor in the bitter heart of the people. Being a man of submachine guns (nothing was more popular in Cuba than the language of submachine guns, which in the comics and literature of the seventies sounded symphonically rat-a-tat-tat-tat!), this Spanish Cubanism clings to a last butterfly that will alight in the shadow: thin, quiet, frail, full of joy, converging with the poetry of the New Trova that no one hears in this country any more.

Today they will cremate him, all the protagonists of our political 20th century, so his remains will not later be vandalized when, after the Great Death, the alarm sounds the democratizing ring-ring of the Transition. For now, rest in peace in this city that without wanting to he helped to ruralize, civilian commander of a barbarian in chief.

October 27 2012

Hello, everyone!

I am writing from the French town of St. Louis to let you know that I arrived safely and that the reunion with my granddaughters could not have been better. The morning after my arrival was magnificent. That night, after everyone had gone to bed except my older granddaughter and me, I tried to send some messages by Gmail, but simply could not. Frustrated, I decided to go to bed. It was already after midnight and, since I did not want to wake anyone up, I did not turn on the lights. I did not know the house well, so in the dark I tried to find the hallway that led to the bedrooms. The stairs were confusing, but I managed to climb some twenty steps only to collide with some Chinese carvings adorning the landing. The racket was so loud that it woke everyone up. I kept going but immediately knew that I had somehow injured my right hand.

In trying to protect my head with my arm during the fall, I fractured my ulna. Therefore, not only did I wake everyone up, but they had to take me to the hospital emergency room at Mulhouse, where I had to have a surgical intervention.

The care at the hospital was wonderful. As fate would have it, I had to make use of an insurance policy for which I was never happy about paying perhaps because it gave me a sense of foreboding. Thanks to my granddaughter, Isabel, I was able to write these few lines with her serving as my secretary since it will not be possible for me to use my right hand for a while.

December 23 2012

Marcos bought a dilapidated jalopy from the fifties. To do this he sold the house of his widowed mother and brought her to live with him, because she’s 70 and wants to be with her only son and two grandchildren. With the help of his teenage offspring, Marcos repaired, painted and took out a license to use the car as a taxi alternating with his eldest son.

They’ve done well enough in the business that they’re thinking of buying another “antique car” so the first-born can drive that and he and the younger son, who just turned 18 and is preparing to get a driver’s license, could share time at the helm of the other.

The kids seem to have the same entrepreneurial spirit as their father, but are more practical and think they could renovate the family SoHo with a new and modern car which the State doesn’t sell; it might be more profitable because they would save on repairs and fuel.

But the microenterprise of “Marcos and Sons” is destined to prosper more slowly and with difficulty because of the constraints placed on it by the authorities, those who want Cubans without political pedigree who yearn to be entrepreneurs to conform to what they authorize, to walk when they could run, to remain silent when they could speak, to crawl when they are capable of flying, to hold off instead of charging ahead, to keep their heads down and get by like oxen.

December 23 2012

One month after arriving in Madrid, today December 22, Teacher’s Day in Cuba and the National Lottery in Spain, I want to share with the readers of Voces Cubanas this note about my departure from Cuba after wrestling with the Immigration Office in Vedado and the approval of the agents of State Security that had been blocking my reunion with my wife since last March.

Three factors led to my release. The first lies in the fact of having accepted I would have to request a Final Exit Permit and instead of the Permit to Travel Abroad as I had done in March.

This banishment came about because of the previous repeated denials of my request to travel, and the suggestion that given that I am a freelance journalist I would “have to leave once and for all or forget about it.”

Still, after obtaining a new visa from the Consulate of Spain and returning to the Immigration Office, I was refused permission to leave because I remained “on the list of those who can not leave the country”, which I thought was a joke and I demanded an explanation from Chief of Immigration, also warning that would go out to the streets to denounce my retention should this officer keep me on the “black list”.

To this element of personal pressure was added the inconvenience for the regime that someone show to be a lie their “good intentions” expressed in the new immigration law — which from January 2013 removes the humiliating Exit Permit and makes the matter more “flexible.”

So much so that before being received by the Chief of Immigration I was visited at home by the official “Simon,” who told me that it was not necessary to go out to the streets to protest because I was already off the “black list,” that he had come from Immigration, where he left a not for his boss that “resolves the matter.”

So it was. Upon arriving at the Immigration office at Calzada and K, in Vedado, Havana, the Head of the Unit told me my case was settled and that within a week I could pick up my White Card (the exit permit). The web of almost a year fell apart by the grace of those that forged it: the State Security officials who punish those who exercise freedom of expression in Cuba, where to speak one’s opinion is still a crime.

One month after the nightmare I am able to write about my stay in Spain and other issues related to Cuba and its culture, as manipulated outside the island as they are within.

Miguel Iturria Savon

December 22 2012

The Havana Cemetery is once again in the news and a reason for concern among the city’s inhabitants. Its plight is an ongoing Via Crucis. Ever since church officials were relieved of responsibility and administrative duties were taken over by the government (perhaps with the intention of turning it into a Marxist-Leninist cemetery), it has suffered from neglect, robbery of its religious artifacts and works of art, the sale of its tombs and crypts, the smashing of skulls, the theft of bones and craniums, the elimination of its faucets and woodlands, and other indignities that have been widely denounced.

No effective measures have been taken to solve the problem, such as replacing the current staff, which has been implicated in these issues, with a new administration. Now, perhaps through self-initiative or because of “orders from the top,” it has been decided that all zinc, asbestos tile and wooden roofs over graves and crypts are to be replaced with sheet metal. An exception is being made for ceramic tile roofs. When questioned, employees said the material was being given to people who needed it to repair their dilapidated homes.

At first glance this measure would seem reasonable to some. Why should the dead have roofs when many of the living do not? But this is not the issue. Besides showing a lack of respect for the deceased (when will they be left to rest in peace?), it is a violation of citizens’ property rights in regard to their graves and crypts, and a crude form of plunder.

Perhaps someone, motivated by the series of reforms being carried out to legalize the illegalities being committed, has decided to apply them to the cemetery and legalize the on-going robbery of roofs, thus solving the problem. According to this logic, if one eliminates the object being robbed, there is no robbery. The danger is that this practice could extend to ironwork and marble to the point that the cemetery simply disappears.

The “reformed” vandalism that is currently being carried out is an indication of the current level of human and moral decline. Even in the mythical Macondo* the dead were respected!

*Translator’s note: Macondo is the fictional town where Gabriel García Márquez set his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

December 22 2012

Every year is a little more decadent than the last. Religiosity in Cuba has become a thing of barbarians, even to the point of a medieval superstition of the masses, repressive and cruel, out of pure fear of death in the midst of the apathy of a claustrophobic and inefficient country where poor animals and the best of human beings pay with their lives (in ritual sacrifices and sneak attacks). 2012 was no exception, rather it was the climax.

The procession of those payers of promises of the last two days to the shrine of El Rincon is a national scandal, a carnival that makes the flesh crawl of anyone who conserves a minimum of intellect and morality (these two utopias that no socialist handbook bothers itself about). With miles around seized by the army and the political police, the remnant of God on this Island, incarnated in the democracidal demagoguery of our Catholic Cardinal, must feel happy attending the apocalypse of a nation. ApoCubalypse.

Ever more misery and materialism to the point of idiocy. People crawling and clawing at their innocent children, as if to assure another half century or another half millennium of horror. Rocks, ropes, bricks, chains, torn sacks as clothing, a rotten stench, peeing in the gutters, trafficking in holy water as if it were a miraculous balm, dim lighting inspired by Dante, people barefoot on a collage of wax and the pandemic of spitters, drunks or raving lunatics or both, cripples and idiots, undoubtedly violent types, tropical theatrics with  attributes worthy of a satanic bible, without clearly remembering who the Lazarus of the crutches might have been and the dogs that never licked his sores as props. Increasingly selling more and more crap, fried pork carcasses and trinkets that rust the next day (today), apocryphal and ecumenical Christmas postcards, cryptocapitalism of the 16th century, all to the beat of the rheumatic rhythm of reggaeton recently prohibited* by an ancestral Revolution.

From the pulpit, scolding and diatribe with a half-smile half-sneer. They dare not reject their muddy faithful, because these are the only days of the Lord when the carnivalesque mob fills the church, but they do warn them they are in mortal sin, one by one, as if it were only a dirty little secret of the confessional (and it is, a people so infantalized that they take refuge in hedonism to flee from History), and not a consequence of living in a wacko nation through decades of stubborn pathetic despotism. We are reminded, of course (and the rotting flowers catalyze the synthesia), of the merciless death that will soon turn the cockroaches to dust (the children chant it with “here comes the Boogeyman and he’s going to eat you up”), and it is this terror, and not faith in the Truth, that rudely pushes the herd to God.

Disgust, vertigo, nausea. I felt the anthropological horror and an immeasurable pity at seeing myself indistinguishable between the Cuban nothing and nobodies there, yesterday.

We already know, language exists because communication is impossible. When the lie replaces the transparency of love, that love doesn’t shine and kill, but is blind and forces a lifelong sterile existence. This I saw, this I lived. The outrageous submission into the hands of a lord more fossil than futile, the nervous glances of those who are hoping to get a family member out of prison to be able to get the fuck out of Cuba, the coarse and invasive laughter before the difference of someone like me still seeming beautiful and free in the midst of the complacency, the walkie-talkies poorly disguised like the hypostasis of a gun to my neck at the zero hour of the debacle (F-Day** or, perhaps, its general rehearsal on Ch-Day**).

Forgive them, Saint Lazarus, because they know very well what they are doing. Cubansummatum est!

Orlando Luis Pardo

Translated from and image taken from Diario de Cuba.

Translator’s notes:
*Cuba recently announced it was banning reggaeton and other music with “aggressive lyrics,” or that is “sexually explicit, obscene, or misrepresents the inherent sensuality of Cuban women.”
** F-Fidel, Ch=Chavez

18 December 2012