Translating Cuba

The prime time news on Cuban television provides an account of the loss of values of Cuban civil society.

In it they highlight a complaint by a doctor who is bothered by the loud music at night recreation center near his house. The victim in this case, the doctor, complained for several days without getting any response.

Several people are victims of lack of education! Where do they put the churches and underground gay shows?

These two in recent years have expanded throughout the whole island. The activity with microphones or loud music or building a very musical church! They do not consider the place that is always surrounded by neighbors.

The Cuban Revolution with its more than 50 years of existence has brought many irreparable customs that in their promoters’ eyes are good.

What did the Revolution teach us?

In a bus today today, a person with a small child, be it a man or a woman, should be given a seat, but men and women both, many of them turn away to show they’re not looking, but sometimes you see someone chivalrous, but you don’t see it every day.

Formal presentations by the TV is a waste of time, the practice has always been the best way but since even that has fruit, a society destroyed by a revolution of equality where some work and others who work live. “This is what we will continue to develop.”

The Revolution taught us to organize a line of people has already failed, no one lines up to catch a bus (the word “last person” does not exist*).

Formal educational presentations on the TV are a waste of time, the practice has always been the best way but it no longer bears fruit, a society destroyed by a revolution of equality where some work and others live on their work. “This is what we will continue to develop.”

*Translator’s note: In Cuba, it’s customary for new people arriving at a line or a waiting room or area to ask “who is the last person?” and to organize themselves in that way, versus standing for long hours in line.

December 3 2012

Meanwhile at my unsuspecting neighbor Tomás’s house, the DVD overheats with the Pequeño Gigante program (Latin American TV can be just as bad as Cuban TV), and others are anesthetized by the Brazilian telenovela (they say today’s Cubans are worse than the worst of the Mexicans); I find my neurons peeling with the episodes of The Cold War, produced by Ted Turner. The series has me hooked with so much information to me on that era in recent history. Even my son is infected, and of course asks a ton of questions.

We Cubans continue in the inertia of that era, or if not, tell me… doesn’t the the case of Alan Gross seem like an episode that escaped from the Ted Turner series?

December 3 2012

My friend Calixto R. Martinez (far left in photo), a reporter for Hablemos Press, is now on the 23rd day of a hunger strike in the punishment cells of the Combinado del Este prison. Prosecutors charged him with the crime of “contempt for the figures of R. and F. Castro.”

According to the Hablemos Press bulletin: “Calixto was violently arrested in mid-September, when he was corroborating confidential information on the handling of a shipment of medicines and medical equipment, which would have spoiled in the warehouses of the José Martí International Airport.”

Some evenings I walked with him back to my house when we ran into each other somewhere. I liked to listen to him because he had a lot of experience in arbitrary detention and forced deportation and explained to me the best way to deal with a situation of this kind, aware of the legal pitfalls contained in the Cuban penal code.

On Saturday night I received a message from Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo: “Calixto Ramón, reporter for Hablemos Press, has been on a hunger strike for 21 days in the punishment cells of the Combinado del Este prison. He has lost a lot of weight and it very frail.”

I would like to organize a vigil for my friend. Days of fasting. How can we make this despotic and violent State listen? What needs to happen?

There is not a shadow of a doubt that what the revolutionaries call “defend their revolution” means a methodology for violating human rights in Cuba. From homes to prisons. From the doctor to the political police. Beginning with the clan of the Council of State, of course. It is a family business.

Let me give an example: in the building where I live they have placed a clipping from the newspaper Granma on one wall.If it weren’t for the tragedy it has signified for so many Cubans, among whom my friend is now; to make use of freedom of expression, what can be read on it can even be funny.

“Newspaper Granma, Friday, November 23, 2012″

Requested:

More people who point out what is correct and fewer who insist on harping on what is incorrect.”

The remaining six sentences that make up the note from Granma and that my neighbors found witty, all say the same thing in different words. It would be too tedious to reproduce it in full. I want to photograph the sign because, in addition to being ridiculous, it exactly reflects what is considered moral in this society.

I couldn’t hide that I took the photo as I was focusing at the moment when one of the two presidents of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) came down the stairs. She’s an elderly person, apparently decent, who said to me, “The Revolutionaries in this building don’t allow you to take photos.” All this is said with a shockingly clear conscience, considering  the degrees of repression to which current Cuban society is disposed.

It reminded me of something I read in Yoani’s post about her arrest in Bayamo. I remember it like this: “Nothing is what it seems. A bed is not a bed. Nor is water for slaking thirst.”

Each of the residents of building 702, for example, would be able to participate in an act of repudiation, imprison and even applaud an execution for political reasons; none of those people, I repeat, seem like bad people. However, they are. They are very dangerous.

Most have relatives in the United States and at some point have traveled to visit them or tried to travel. They cavalierly ignore the suffering of my friend Calixto and his right to demand freedom for Cuba. If someone visits their homes they are much more nicely painted than those of Calixto, Roberto de Jesús Guerra or mine. They eat better. They have nice manners and teach them to their families.

But at some point they will become very dangerous, they are transfigured in the style of the video game “Resident Evil,” and the only way it seems possible to combat them is to be willing to immolate oneself. Otherwise every day the world would be a poorer place and to paraphrase Yoani, “Nothing is what it seems and even names lose their meanings.”

I can’t imagine a worse fate for humanity than the inability to remember the true meaning of words, symbols, signifiers, for having lied for so long, like all dictatorships lie in their discourse, whether it’s the foreign minister or the leader, they speak of justice and solidarity, like they did in 1976 when I was born and in a place called La Cabaña they committed atrocious crimes against the opponents of the damned Revolution of 1959. And they commit them today with the complicity of the clear consciences of Cubans.

I ask of my readers solidarity with Calixto and that you offer me some objectively thought out idea, in accordance with the present circumstances, to get him out of jail where he has been thrown in the most arbitrary and deceitful way, as you sought to do for Antonio Rodiles and as many people have done before.

December 3 2012

I’m sad to see the streets of the city filled with trash and red earth. The doorways of many of the old mansions and residences in the Vedado neighborhood are converted into improvised stalls which, amid the grime and decay, display all kinds of merchandise from radio batteries to clothes and the worst taste and equal quality.

Beach umbrellas, nestled in the midst of what was once a driveway, with a makeshift and wobbly table, indicate places where food is sold. You see pedestrians passing by with a decorated cake in their hands, without any kind of protective covering. Others carry, as if it were a briefcase, pigs’ heads grabbed by an ear, or a mattress in a makeshift wheelbarrow dragging on the pavement.

You can see the same images in a country town and in the Havana neighborhoods, Vedado or Neuvo Vedado. The entire city, as our writer Leonardo Padura says, has been ruralized.

But the most painful of all this is to observe the numbers of young people, still school-aged or who should be learning a skilled trade, pushing wheelbarrows uphill loaded with produce. Today I saw with a certain sadness a young man, good-natured, with a face that reflected intelligence and pain,busily pushing his cart up 25th Street, loaded with fresh, clean and well-organized products, having to stop every three or four steps to gather his strength.

That young man probably did not continue studying on perceiving that, in this other way, he could earn more than a badly paid professional. I felt sorry for him and his parents. It is a very unfortunate state of affairs, but the majority of people who have chosen self-employment are the young whose talents are being lost and the country, in the future, will not be able to count on them.

If they weren’t young they wouldn’t have the physical strength to push these heavy carts, which recall those of the colonial era, when the country had not yet been developed and the Cuban nation was being born.

Of what value are those massive calls to study in the universities, after 1959, if the conditions for reversing the fruits of this education in factories, industries, etc. were not created for the development and benefit of the nation. This unfortunately form of commerce in the colonial style is what has proliferated in our battered country, taking us backwards in development.

December 1 2012

I do not mean to criticize children for being children, nor grandchildren for being grandchildren, I will just talk about a sector that just because we haven’t heard of them, that doesn’t mean they are not full of it. Today I’m answering questions about Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, the son of Deborah Castro Espin and Luis Alberto Rodrigues Lopez Callejas.

The marriage of Vilma and Raul was the most iconographic of the Cuban Revolution. He personified the hero, and she her heroic role of compañera, volunteer, submissive and party functionary. Four lovely children were born from the Castro-Espin union, children who in time became spoiled. The first of the grandchildren, the little Rodriguez Castro, was a solitary baby, naughty, lively and stubborn, already demonstrating in his behavior an authoritarian tendency.

Having been born male, with a skilled calculating father, and a sixth finger inherited through his mother, he awoke in grandfather Raul what we might describe as a mixture of love, joy and compassion. Raulito became the favorite. And on more than a few occasions the jubilant El General presented him with a phrase that provoked mockery rather than admiration. “My grandson is a marble beauty, a colossus with a baby face.” The general’s creativity, although it had improved somewhat, continued to be invaded by grandiose and epic concepts.

Surely hoping to construct a paragon of virtues, the family made this little angel a useless mess. So when he was enrolled in “Gustavo and Joaquin Ferrer” primary school, he walked alone accompanied by an inseparable flattery and an unbearable escort that cast a disagreeable spell over boys his age.

Surrounded, or perhaps well-attended by, his scandalous loneliness, he arrived at “Josue Pais” junior high. By then he was already a youngster who liked to annoy people and disliked everyone. Allergic to the entire spectrum of respect, he felt the holy grail of control and enjoyed a certain morbid knowledge that he featured in others’ nightmares.

The eccentricity of the age, plus the constant vision of his family environment, pushed him to drink, smoke, and to choose paths that others older than he called “missteps.” He adopted a vehemently racist attitude that at times managed to embarrass his most loyal friends, family and benefactors.

Out of respect I will not mention the name of the girl who was expelled from the classroom for being black, or rather, because The General’s Grandson announced his decree that he would not share the same space with this classmate because — according to him — blacks are not only ugly and gross, they stink.

By that time, the words “thank you” had been eradicated from his vocabulary. Quite understandably, Cuba suffers a feudal system generous with a dictatorial and anarchy ruling elite; no one has to be grateful for what they believe is rightfully theirs. Nobody learns to say thank you if they are not truly appreciative.

Ungrateful, unmanageable, and at the precise moment when economics is the latest hot topic, Raulito, now the presidential escort, decides to study at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Havana. It is common, and even reasonable, that high performance athletes study for degrees in Sports making international competitions their state exams.

Using this same principle, and after some convincing that included pressure, the rector of the university was left with no options but to understand that the student in question, tall, blond, with a strong build and uncouth manners, should be awarded a degree with honors due to his participation as a special guest at government events. His repeated absences from class were not taken as a sign of intellectual impairment, but as support to the national patrimony.

The winds of change blew, the world map transmuted its colors and this family, by order of their patriarch, needed to be more united. In an act of humility and sacrifice, Uncle Alejandro Castro, known as the Colonel with less body fat than grey matter, paired up with an ex-girlfriend of his nephew Raulito, and so hoisted the flag of the strange family passion for common property.

So, on Sundays, the clan enjoys the exotic delicacies still prepared by old Chute (the cook Jesus); and the rest of the week nephew and uncle review the proper code of conduct for sharing the same woman. It may seem immoral, but it’s nothing new; it is known that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his wifeNadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, went with, lived with, and were entertained by Elizabeth D’Herenville (Inessa). Sure, there are differences, the leader of the Bolsheviks, his partner, and their mutual concubine, were not united by consanguinity.

The boss of the State Security Staff of the Ministry of the Interior, and some others under his command, feeling threatened by the real possibility of being cruelly supplanted by a healthy and powerful chip off the old family block, try with incredible care to ridicule him, subtly launching a few phrases into the mouths of public opinion: “Bodyguard 2,” “no one knows if the grandson takes care of the granddad or if the granddad takes care of the grandson,” “I have to look after one and watch the other”… in short, the boy is criticized, but untouchable.

Raulito married, and at the wedding was heard the contagious strains of La Charanga Habanera, an orchestra that, among others, decided to exchange talent for the caresses of power. Later he divorced, leaving a daughter on the way, and making plans for another wedding.

The Castro Espin lineage is like a charitable organization committed to pettiness where common sense is the least common of the senses. Raulito is a victim who didn’t manage to be different. Today he calls himself a patriot and a defender of those ideas that perhaps nobly inspired looting and revolution.

He recreates a sickly ardor to impress the people beneath his social status. He is paranoid, and has only read some of the alternative pages of the life of Julius Caesar; he is really convinced that the end of his grandfather Raul will be reduced to assassination in an act of revenge on the part of his own bodyguard. To say more would be redundant.

December 2 2012

In 1959, “the year of the accident” as a friend of mine likes to call it, there were any number of well-known people who had degrees in business administration and public accounting. They practiced their professions in different manufacturing and service companies and in general their salaries provided them with a good standard of living. Accounting was practiced universally throughout the country, contributing to a healthy economy.

At some point “someone” determined that there was no need for all this, and the system was dismantled. Overnight, business administrators, bookkeepers and accountants either became nothing more than check writers for nationalized companies and agricultural businesses, or had to change professions if they wanted to to survive. In order to cut “the evil” at its root, provincial business schools and university accounting departments were closed. With these measures, economic controls disappeared since “under socialism they, as well as money, were no longer necessary.” Life, however, stubbornly and amply demonstrates what a big mistake this turned out to be. The country paid and continues to pay the consequences, while those who were responsible have never accepted responsibility or answered for their errors.

For some time now there has been a renewed emphasis on the importance of economists and accountants. They even have their own organization—ANEC (National Association of Economists and Accountants). One day, November 26, was inexplicably chosen, however, to be the day on which someone, who knew nothing about economics or accounting much less banking, assumed the presidency of the National Bank of Cuba. After reading about the duties currently assigned to him, while ignoring the gray years as if they had never happened, it seems like there will be a lot of them he will surely find difficult to fulfill. Let’s see. He must contribute to the implementation of the guidelines, design the theoretical foundations of “the model,” develop courses for bookkeepers as well as courses for entrepreneurs, provide advice to strengthen the work of accounting teams and the control of resources, coordinate the preparation of economic reports by directors, and develop a culture of economics, among other things. In other words, try to rescue (one of the verbs most widely used nowadays) all that was lost during the years of improvisation and failure.

It would be beneficial if he were successful, for the good of the nation but also as a palpable demonstration that they never should have done away with these economic activities. Although it is a bit late, it is good to correct things.

December 1 2012

The Mantilla neighborhood exhibits a rare blend of a Havana suburb with a rural village. Its park, its church, its streets that foreign tourists rarely see, and even its famous writer. This last is Leonardo Padura, born in Havana in 1955, a journalist and author of numerous novels. Despite his international recognition and his possession of Spanish nationality, Padura has preferred to live in the same town on the Island where he was born, which has been the scene of so many of his stories.

The name of this universal Cuban is associated with detective stories, but his work also includes journalism and screenplays. A baseball fanatic, incisive in his opinions and of a proven nobility, on the even of his sixth decade he is an unusual man. His “rarity” lies fundamentally in having been able to sustain a critical vision of his country, an unvarnished description of the national sphere, without sacrificing the ability to be recognized by the official sectors. The praise comes to him from every direction of the polarized ideological spectrum of the Island, which is a true miracle of letters and of words.

Padura commands the force of talent. He has been received with respect, even by those in the Cuban Writers and Artists Union who observe him with resentment for his books that feature the detective Mario Conde. In the hard years of the Special Period his novels took a deep look at a reality that others preferred to whitewash.

His literary honesty, his tenacity, and also a good dose of luck, allowed him to reach th dream cherished by every Cuban writer: to be published in other parts of the world. Publishers ranging from the University of Guadalajara toTusquets in Barcelona, have helped him to position himself as an acclaimed novelist. This international recognition has also prevented the local censorship from simply making him invisible, and instead they try to accept him, although reluctantly.

The “writer of Mantilla,” as many call him, has the rare privilege of seeing his novels photocopied and circulated as pirated editions among his compatriots. This insatiable appetite for his pages is also due to the small runs the local presses have made of his most popular titles. If we were to measure the success of an author by the number of times someone makes an illegal copy of his work, then Padura would earn the highest score of any living Cuban.

If 2011 was a year full of accolades for the author of Past Perfect (Tusquets, 1991) and The Novel of my Life (Tusquets, 2002), it now ends confirming Padura as the great Cuban novelist of today. In 2012 he has continued to build on the favorable track record left by his book The Man Who Loved Dogs (Tusquets 2009), which deals with the life of Ramon Mercader, Leon Trotsky’s murderer. In November, he was also celebratd with an Author’s Week in which Havana’s Casa de las Americas presented a collection of his stories and essays under the title A Man and an Island.

Currently working on the book Heretics, which he has defined as “three novels which have a tenuous and invisible thread.” The movie 7 Days in Havana (French-Spanish co-production, 2012), which he collaborated by writing the script from one of his stories, has given us a lot to talk about by showing a city if interwoven hardness and sensuality.

Leonardo Padura is now the face of Cuban literature inside the island and we are tremendously lucky that this is so.

1 December 2012