Translating Cuba

In recent days talks have been taking place in Havana between delegations from the Colombian government and the FARC. This constitutes a positive and necessary step in efforts to find a solution to the violent conflict that for many years has brought bloodshed, death and suffering to the Colombian people.

It is worth noting, however, that, while the government’s representatives maintain a respectful stance towards the country hosting them by avoiding making statements or giving interviews that could adversely affect the talks, representatives of the guerrilla group never cease to hold press conferences, issue communiques, make irrelevant compensation claims for actions which occurred more than eighty years ago, present a full-size cardboard cutout of one of their leaders sentenced to sixty years in prison in the United States for drug trafficking (while demanding his release so that he can participate in the talks), use opportunistic language (such as “Cuba, the island of peace”) and other tactics in a desperate attempt to gain media attention.

Its comandantes, dubbed “shooting stars” by the official Cuban press, visit embassies, run around the city and enjoy their status as “political tourists,” demonstrating the close fraternal bonds they enjoy with their Cuban friends. Perhaps by dressing in civilian clothes and always smiling, they hope to sweep away their nefarious history of kidnappings, explosions, assassinations, torture (by strapping explosive collars around the necks of their victims), bank robberies, extortions of landowners and businessmen, evictions of peasants, and drug trafficking.

We trust that, in spite of the media spectacle, after so many reverses and loss of prestige they have gained some experience and are acting in good faith, in search of a serious negotiated solution for peace and not stalling for time by “washing their hands and face” in order to continue practicing the business of violence as a way of life

December 10 2012

This Tuesday a new Decree-Law went into effect in Cuba, gradually expanding cooperatives. In a preliminary state it is expected to contribute to the creation of more than 200 associations of this type throughout the country. Since the last session of the National Assembly, in July of this year, we have been awaiting the implementation of a measure that is expected to invigorate the island’s ailing economy. Until now, this kind of management has only been allowed in the agricultural sector. But starting now it will also include restaurants, transport, personal and domestic services, the recovery of raw materials and construction, among other sectors.

This measure is part of a plan of increased flexibility and economic adjustments approved by the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in 2011. According to official propaganda is part of a process of “updating the current model” rather than dismantling it. However, some critical sectors had advocated for less nationalization and more cooperatives, as an alternative to privatization.

This Tuesday’s edition of the newspaper Granma said that it is a decree-law that establishes the “experimental constitution” of these associations. It also announced that the lease of state-owned premises shall preferentially be offered to those workers who work in them now. Of course, when these workers “voluntarily determine to form a cooperative.” To form the cooperative the applicants will have to present a request to the municipal organs of People’s Power and these submit them to various committees.

Initially “first degree” associations will be authorized, with up to three employees. It is also expected that “second degree” associations will be permitted, made up of two or more cooperatives, although right now they still will not be implemented. A General Assembly, where each partner will have one vote, will be directed by each of these groups.

The official organ of the Communist Party clarifies that the the prices of products and services marketed will be governed by the laws of supply and demand. Although it warns that there will be some exceptions in which the State will determine the sales prices. During the session of the National Assembly in July, Vice President Marino Murillo said the government was working on the preparation of a General Law of Cooperatives.

Among the best received points of the new Decree-Law is the fact that these new entities will have a legal existence. They will not be administratively subordinated “to any state entity” although it’s been made clear that they should “conform to the guidelines set forth by the governing bodies” of each activity. For example, in the case of a group of workers who form a construction cooperative, they will have to abide by the quality standards dictated by the appropriate Ministry.

The new Decree-Law is also related to the Law No. 113 of the Tax System to take effect this coming January. This grants tax incentives for cooperatives compared to other state forms of management.

The economic adjustment plan driven by Raul Castro still has major gaps. Complaints from the self-employment and cooperative sector center on the inability to get bank financing and the lack of a wholesale market. The government has said the latter will be gradually implemented beginning in 2013, but this announcement has not quieted suspicions. However, a brief glimmer of autonomy is being opened with the Decree-Law that goes into effect on this second Tuesday of December.

11 December 2012

It was a beautiful day, rather warm. The sea perfectly calm, reflecting the blue of a cloudless sky.

We got up early, thinking to avoid the usual police cordon. We saw no signs of it. We assumed they were watching us, that they were all around, but on this occasion they didn’t make themselves visible.

The booth of Cuban Voices was dedicated to technology.

The rudimentary and the modern lent a hand.

We were satisfied with the work done.

There were very original performances, like that of El Sexto.

Title: Resistance
Series: My Body
Author: Danilo Maldonado
Materials: Flesh and Bone
Dimensions: Variable

In the next post I’ll offer more details and photos.

It was a beautiful afternoon, tranquil, with good attendance and especially with the presence of many children. Estado de Sats occurred in a relaxed and enthusiastic atmosphere.

December 11 2012

Lately my days are like weeks concentrated into twenty-four hours. I have Wednesdays that come one after another, Saturdays full of work and Mondays on which nothing seems to start, it all just continues. Sometimes I combine the most incredible events in a single day: sublime or mundane; extraordinary or tedious. But there is, every now and then, a date into which it seems I’d like to drain the entire calendar. December 10th was one of those days and I’d have liked to have on hand “The Devil in the Bottle” — as imagined by Robert Louis Stevenson — to ask him to delay nightfall by at least 72 hours.

This year has been no exception. From the night before, we began to notice “the syndrome of the eve of Human Rights Day.” Everyone notices it, even those who refuse to acknowledge these situations. We can observe an increase in the number of police in the most central parts of the city, and an increased tension in the security forces. For a while now here, the official institutions also try to appropriate a date that, for decades, has belonged to the critical sector of this society. We see television announcers smilingly presenting activities throughout the country that are honoring “rights…” and see their mouths dry up, their tongues falter, simply trying to come out with the words “cultural and social.” For too long the phrase “human rights” has been stigmatized, such that it provokes, at the very least, a blush among those in government spaces who now try to repeat it.

They carry out arrests and threats throughout the country on this day, but we always manage to do something. This year I participated in the opening day of the Endless Poetry Festival. This alternative fiesta in Cuba resurfaced yesterday with a fair of diverse projects. A hundred people gathered at the site of Estado de SATS and erected various exhibition spaces that ranged from music making to activism for racial integration. It was possible to visit the work of the Civic Libraries, the brand new “Journal of Plural Thinking” from the city of Santa Clara, and the young DJs of “18A16 Productions.” There was also our booth under the name “Technology and Freedom,” offering a sample of the work of the bloggers, independent journalists and Twitterers.

An island within the Island, this space was a foretaste of that day when respect for plurality will exist in our country. Laughter, projects, united in diversity and great friendship, formed the magic of the first day of the Endless Poetry Festival. When I got home it seemed I had lived a whole week in the space of one day and — for once — had not needed a bottled demon from a story to do it. With the energy of so many people we had managed to fit into every minute the colossal density of the future.

11 December 2012

The anniversary arrives uneventfully. Today is the Day of Latin American Medicine, and in this or that Cubanmedical center this or that political-cultural-recreational-allegorical act will be held, in which this or that director will repeat this or that second-hand patriotic phrase opportunely memorized. On the platform will be those who live to talk, pretend or lie, and those who simply work saving human lives. When the staging is finished they will leave behind the same panorama as always: a health care professional who asks what do the words accomplish without the support of the facts.

There are heard again these days rumors of an imminent “salary increase” that our sector will get, even specifying that it would be around 30 or 40% of base salary. Personally I very much doubt it — because in one of his last speeches Raul Castro made clear that for now that would not happen. To create expectations today would be like taking the heartbeats for the galloping horse that is expected, but it would be worth the effort, stage direction apart, to reflect on the value of such a “raise” for an economic sector that earns for this country much more than a billion dollars annually.

If true, that would be a raise of around $200.00 pesos (CUP or “national money”), which is the equivalent in Cuba of $8.00 in convertible pesos (CUC), or what would be the same as $8.80 US. That is, as long as we generate billions, they will offer us $8.00 a month for such a “salary increase.”

But the Cuban government says it has no more to spend on public health workers. True, they have to prioritize the wages of those policemen who stoically sacrifice to maintain such quiet that we do not hear anyone screaming in the middle of the Revolutionaries’ street that they can not afford to live on their salaries, which would create too awkward of a landscape for the tender eyes of the tourists and foreign reporters.

What defines the quality of a gift is the posture, the dignity of the recipient: if you receive something from a position of subservience or submission, to the detriment of a single shred of dignity, it’s as if you receive a handout but consists of millions received in an unworthy manner; this is what they do with us in 2005 and it would be the same now, if it is true what is rumored.

I think if some sector in Cuba is comfortably able to triple the base salary of its employees, it is the public health sector; tripling the basic wage — and from there add no less than $500 in Cuban pesos for each specialty practiced, or another way to look at it, each diploma or mastery –and this would begin to be more respectful, the rest would be pure symbolism, pure window dressing.

But as for now everything is pure speculation, and not to be accused again of being “metallic” for demanding a decent wage, I am happy today to congratulate from my humble site those I hold in high esteem, those working with very modest resources, ignoring the shortages they suffer personally, to return to health and to life as many people as possible; to my teacher, for whom I have an admiration and a respect bordering on fanaticism, and a devotion similar to that professed by the martyrs and the saints; to that professor who does not know my voice and who, but for the limits imposed by behavior and gallantry and good looks, like the kiss for a father, whenever I met him I would kiss his clean hands.

December 3 2012

 

The shortest monologue in the world has just been presented in a small room in Havana: “And where did Cuba end up?” (It is at the level of the short story “The Dinosaur” by the Guatemalan Augusto Monterroso.)

Its name is Rhapsody for the Mule, and it is directed by Nelda Castillo for her theater group The Enchanted Deer.

A heptalogy of madness, directly from the trash, collage over a bare wagon-cart for a collector of homeland waste (a trash collector of revolutionary residues: the actress Mariela Brito walking her brutish biology, drooling and urinating in circles on the stage, excited under the crude lights, its male-female sex only barely disguised under the coagulated dirt of silent desperation).

Go, beast. (“Horse horse,” here crackles the memory of a poem by Juan Carlos Flores.) An invitation to rape. To vomit. To live that which is evil (but without a trace of vaudeville, please: we’re speaking of an incredible hyper-realistic mirror). Push, sweat, give birth to nothing, abort almost an hour of underworld snorts, turn around. Turn a harness inside out.

The Havanothing or Satan Clara: cynical cities unrecognizable in a minimal set with background noise from Radio Encyclopedia, a station that incarnated better than Cuban TV’s Roundtables the discreet charm of the proletariat.

Rhapsody or, rather, Rhapsodium for domesticated animals of the contemporary Cuban street. Not necessarily the megametaphorical mule of José Lezama Lima with that “sure step (…) into the abyss” under a “load of lead,” although “glassy, short-sighted,” moving its “portable lamp (…) of some horror or another” on his “four feet.”

Quadriplegia. Much less would be that enchanted nineteenth deer that would be the delight the Historian of the City. No. The romance has fallen by its own weight before the idiocy (and who knows if the ideology). Memory is factual here. Dirty nouns tossed in a Tareco Plan of the XXI century: family, faith, future, fidelity. Be cultured to be crappy. Cuba fits into any pot.

It stinks. And yet, it hurts you. This song of the wounded invokes some of the most beautiful images that will be remembered over the noisy rhetoric of the Revolution in the year, say, 2059.

Extirpated from the work Galiano Varieties of the group itself, this micro-mispronounced-monologue (the character is very probably missing teeth), deeply moves a corner of El Vedado in a packed room over the last weeks. Every mise-en-scene of The Enchanted Deer leaves the same fear in the chest, this other impossible to translate into words, an ill-defined unease of farewell. Something ends here every night, although we still don’t know how to say what.

July 21 2012

At least once a week (Fridays) I acquire the newspaper Granma, to track its Letters to the Editor section, the only place where people can raise some problems and give some opinions other than the official ones, which occupy its daily pages and also all the other pages on this day, monotony piled on top of monotony.

What when it first appeared created some expectations, however slim of course, in an opening in the impenetrable wall of controlled information and opinion in Cuba, with the passage of time has become a resounding disappointment.

Here, instead of a civilized meeting space for different opinions, looking for the best solutions to the problems that beset us, are usually laid out inconsequential complaints about particular minutiae of city life, and the responses — more and more justifications and bureaucratic — from the agencies and institutions involved. In addition, it teems with the extensive views of some representatives of the most backward thinking and caveman-like who, on principle, oppose any change, however minimal.

I am not suggesting they not publish them, but there should also appear,on an equal basis and in equal space, opinions from those who think differently, so that the readers, educated, trained and cultured, as the official propaganda says, would have the possibility to compare and come up with their own opinions, in a climate of tolerance.

Maybe someone, a staunch advocate of immobility, contended that this is the organ of the Party and so it must be this way. In short, in Cuba, all national and provincial newspapers are official Party organs, because there is only one Party that controls them all, and they only publish what it decides or approves.

However, there is a latent contradiction. When some senior leaders, in their speeches and statements, talk about necessary changes, changing the mindset, allowing different opinions, etc., in official journalistic practice the opposite happens: every time the media tightens the straitjacket. In other words: rhetoric and reality are not in sync. Letters to the Editor is a great example of this.

December 7 2012

I do not know if I’m “ratting someone out,” although I do not think that I am because the illegal hardware and housewares market that has flourished alongside the Carlos III mall could not be more evident. About a year ago they closed an old tenementand self-employed vendors set up shop across the street from the park entrance of this commercial hub. There on organized stands you can find everything from a lightbulb to a selection of faucets, from pipe fittings to waterproofing.

In any event, trying to place the blame here would have no effects on such a flourishing market, today comprising most of the housefronts of this area, which display an amalgam of the same products forbidden last year and more as well. Young people strive to be more solicitous than their peers and expound in detail about the virtues of this or that merchandise, or if they don’t have what you need they assure you they can get it in two hours, or it can be resolved by the following day at the latest, all this with a professionalism that is lacking in State-run establishments.

These kids have learned the laws of the market on the fly and without a single class in theory. The technocrats who “update the model” could learn a lot from a visit to Retiro Street.

December 6 2012

For those who believe that in writing I mean to do harm, release repressed hatred, or seek the sympathy of those who argue with dangerous vehemence to defend extreme positions, I hope that with this article they will reflect and understand that I do not belong to the left or to the right. And for me, the anarchists venerate too many rules.

There are more than a few people who compared to Ernesto Che Guevara with Jack the Ripper. I agree with many of them, for example, both studied medicine. Today I do not intend to talk about such a controversial parent, but about a criticized son, little known, and with strong values, from my point of view.

Ernesto Guevara March, the youngest son of Aleida and Che, is accused of being egotistical. And he is, he is also kind, charming, and extremely sensitive. It’s not easy to be yourself in a society that professes equality. The media accentuates certain things, but I will try to put almost everything in context.

Ernesto never knew his father, he was born in 1965, and although there were victims of the revolution that deserve our respect and consideration, we can not forget that it was a time of euphoria in which the winds of passion raged, and the “bearded ones” were as idolized as democracy is today. These men, turned into dictators, represented for many the image of the spotless hero, the unblemished sun.

Ernesto, similar and different from his three older siblings (Aleida, Camilo and Celia), grew up in the Nuevo Vedado neighborhood in Havana, studied in “Fighters of Bolivia” primary school, attended junior high school at “La Lenin”, and then went to Vedado high school. He became a lawyer, and I can assure you unequivocally that, with that name, and the semantic weight that it carries, had been for him as influential as the flattering environment and persistent ghost of an absent father who, like it or not, is known around the world.

Let’s do an experiment. Let’s take a greased baking sheet and on it put an idealized portion of economic deterioration, season it with internal chaos, knead the mixture until it has the texture of enthusiastic support and popular worship; put the product in the oven, and after a dusting of the night of long knives, it is ready; the dish is called dictatorship. It is not difficult to make a list with the names of those who actually did and do the damage; but we can not include children for being children.

Equipped with a roguish charm, Ernesto is a good man, sometimes stubborn and at times temperamental, with a strong sense of friendship. He is an extrovert and not prone to confessions, he shelters in his own inner volcano. He willingly acknowledges his mistakes, likes to hold onto his childhood, though it is in the past, and has been saddled with an unfair guilt foisted upon him. I understand that it is harder to recognize than to attack; but to ask, seek, find information is very easy with a country teeming with informants eager to be bribed. Pull the trigger only against those who deserve it.

December 10 2012

Havana, Cuba – The reaction on the part of the parliament to the modification of the Cuban family code lays bare the institutionalized homophobia of the government structures led by Raul Castro Ruz.

The discussion of the new family code was again dismissed by the National Assembly of People’s Power. The family code was drafted by a group of lawyers working under the direction of Ms. Mariela Castro, head of the National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX).

Mariela Castro, in different interviews to foreign media and the national press, declared the agreement or the consent of her father to this new code, which is intended to provide for the first time in Cuba the right to legal recognition of same-sex couples. It is not the first time so far this year on the island that such a scandal is revealed that is nothing more than a political ploy intended to keep the Cuban Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community immersed in a total crisis of absence of their most basic rights.

There is evidence that in last Population and Housing Census of 2012, as well, that the Cuban government did not recognize those couples that are made up of people of the same sex who live together in the same dwelling. The events are reason enough to raise unrest in the Cuban LGBT community and to demonstrate the bad behavior of the self-proclaimed leader of this community, although she still has never confessed her reasons for identifying with it or what makes her supposedly march at the head of these proposals which are increasingly inadequate.

Different voices have been raised in protest at this new outrage against the LGBT community; human rights activists, organizations, journalists and civil society leaders have recently expressed concern in different ways and have denounced this latest act of outrage by a regime that is afraid to restore or establish the rights of its nation.

It shall be demonstrated despite the Cuban government’s lack of commitment and the evil role of CENESEX and its director, that in CUBA, despite the constant denials, Two Who Are The Same Also Make A Couple.

December 10 2012