Property Law governs the use, enjoyment, possession and availability of good which one owns. The ultimate power is related, in short, to the possibility of the title holder doing with his property what he deems to be best. In the case of housing one of the issues is the disposition it, that is the owner’s decision about who lives in his property.
This is addressed in Article 64 of our General Housing Act, Act No. 65; however there are exceptions provision regulated in Article 65 of the law itself, which limits the cessation of cohabitation for ancestors and descendants of the owner, mothers with children born during the marriage, formalized or not with the owner, or mothers with children living in the housing for three or more years and having no other residence; elderly who have lived for more than three years in the building and who do not have a place to reside, cases of manifest injustice or inhumane acts.
Outside of these exceptions, the owner may terminate the cohabitation of any person without requiring an administrative or judicial declaration, but if the cohabitant refuses to leave the property, then the owner can call the Municipal Department of Housing to issue a resolution which determines whether unwanted cohabitant must leave, a process that can be achieved in the second instance in the Provincial Court, by application of nonconformity of the administrative decision, and which ends, finally, in appeal to the Supreme Court.
The real problem lies in the Order to Cease Cohabitation because once it is signed, either by resolution of the Municipal Housing (DMV) or Judgment of the Provincial or Supreme Court, whether the cohabitant refuses to leave the property and which is antisocial behavior unrelated to a work center, the competent authority comes to force removal by the police. But if the cohabitant does not meet these characteristics, the DMV only issues a provision ordering them to leave the house in 30 days and if they do not they will be fined 30% to 50% of their salary which will accrue to the State. So far.
Why doesn’t the competent authority take action in all cases where a final decision calls for the cessation of cohabitation? What coercive force is there in reducing the minimum wage by 30% to 50% when the cost of renting a home is around 20 Cuban Convertible Pesos (around 500 pesos in “national money”), and this figure is more than 50% of what the average worker earns? How can the owner get someone out of his house who doesn’t meet this requirement of an “anti-social labor link”?
There is no other option than to modify the Law so that it truly guarantees this ability.
What has cost others in the political world millions and years of publicity, has been accomplished by Cuban State Security with an arbitrary arrest. Antonio Rodiles has become a household name.
Antonio Rodiles has also turned into a dangerous citizen. If the tactic of three weeks was to humiliate him with bland interrogations, the other reading is that the interrogators lacked arguments (or intelligence, or both), and these same interrogators-interrogations have confirmed for citizen Rodiles the need to maintain Estado de Sats (State of Sats) and to push forward with the Campaign for Another Cuba (Por otra Cuba) for the ratification of the UN Human Rights covenants.
If Rodiles’ case wasn’t enough for the near-sightedness of many with regards to the status of our rights and freedoms as citizens, I go to the other extreme, the case of the blog La Joven Cuba (Cuban Youth), created by young professors from the University of Matanzas.
Very quickly, thanks to the absence of censorship in the comments section and the occasional approach to controversial issues of our national reality, the blog enjoyed a notable growth and visibility within the Cuban blogosphere.
It was a surprise that on the crest of the wave, La Joven Cuba issued a warning that many of us, with good reason, interpreted as a farewell, and that many of us, with good reason, interpreted as the effect of pressure to close a space that “had moved on.”
Recently, not only were my suspicions confirmed that the pressures were great and from different sides, but that it got to point where some hothead accused them of “going too far,” but of “going over to the enemy.” Nor did the constant profession of faith that they made when they dared to address some thorny issue, free them from suspicions which they are now trying to clarify.
Unlike the opinions of others, the fate of the blog La Joven Cuba and its creators gives me no pleasure, consistent with something I’ve made clear here and as a commentator on the LJC blog: in the country I imagine, diverse and antagonistic ideological currents will coexist, rather than be enemies, and I will have family and friends who vote for different candidates than mine without it leading to a rupture in our relations.
Both cases: Rodiles and La Joven Cuba, confirm for me the lack of freedom that sickens Cuban society. You know I don’t usually engage in profound analysis, so the rest of the ruminations I leave to you.
Image from comedonchisciotte.org To our wide repertoire of popular jokes, a new one that continues to be topical was added a few weeks ago. A couple of friends meet in the street and one asks the other, “Hey, did you know that Cuba has the biggest and best oil field in the world?” At first the listener starts to wonder if his friend is losing his mind, or whether they’ve just discovered a great source of crude and he hasn’t heard about it. For a moment he thinks maybe it was on the morning news, which he didn’t watch. He’s wracking his brain for an answer when his crony busts out laughing and announces, “Yeah, buddy, we have the Chavez oil well #1 that never goes dry and doesn’t need any resources to exploit it.”
The Venezuelan subsidy is felt in every part of our national life and this sensation doesn’t escape the jokes and ironies. This week the theme returned to the fore after Hugo Chavez asked his country’s National Assembly for permission to receive new medical treatment on our Island. Wednesday morning, supposedly. He arrived at the Havana airport although the national press failed to show any images of this moment. Days earlier it was already being passed by word of mouth that the resident of the Miraflores Palace had to come to receive urgent new medical treatment. The rumors flew about a possible worsening of the Venezuelan leader’s health, but secrecy continues to mark his stay in Cuba. Not a single word filters out, not one doctor dares to bear witness, not one revelation escapes through the media. Nevertheless, there’s a feeling of nervousness in the air.
Because many fear that the “Chávez oil well #1” might run dry and so trigger a deeper economic crisis in our country. Perhaps these common jokes are trying to deflect the worry through laughter. But behind the sarcasm, hides the perennial anxiety of a “kept” country.
Every November I write this same column. Without noticing it, without paying attention, without needing to parody or plagiarize myself.
November looms and frightens. The days are short, the sun kinder than ever in Cuba. The gray begins to beautifully color the garish and flat tones of our reality. The island looks a little bit more Nordic, less despotic and more democratic. Cubislandia, Habaneijavick.
I think, of course, of Eslinda Nunez of late 1971, the year I was born. Her black hair so black, almost digitally blue before the digital age: sprays of liquid light cascading over her disconsolate eyes in the foreground of the screen. Her waist, tiny. Her hypermobile ballerina voluptuousness. Her hands of an abandoned bird in a Havana pocket park between death and love. Her seriousness to kiss, her willingness to make love without falling in a common place. Her wonder, her miracle.
I’m speaking about a musical filmed by Humberto Solas and composed by Leo Brouwer: One day in November, a work very few in Cuba have seen and even fewer remember (a movie betrayed even by the interviews that ignore its director). I’m speaking, too, of all the successive Novembers that came while the anachronistic time of the Revolution dilated, until, of course, we arrived in that of 2012, when there is nobody left alive in Cuba, but the miracle and wonder again sprout with an atrocious voracity, of life that buds in winter, if only in the case of a girl on stage for half a month, or half a year, before jumping into the empty garden beyond.
I try and I try, but not even I can avoid living life to the full in November. I become friendly, adorable, and see things with total transparency, terrifying. Like the gaze of a messiah, who borrows the binoculars of an angel or of God himself. And I hope I am not committing a heresy with this. The truth of the soul should never constitute a heresy in the face of the Superior Being.
We are already at the 27th and for me it’s like the beginning of the month. My birthday is coming, on December 10. 2013 is approaching and very soon it will turn into summer, perhaps in March or April. It’s now or now. I am determined, I want to be me. I want to return the mutilated smile of Eslinda Núñez of 2012. I want to dare to break the traps of whatever era and walk hand in hand down the avenues of this city with H (a mute, deadly letter). I want freedom not to be a right to demand, but an eternal state of mind.
Ecclesiastes lies from A to Z. Or maybe not, but almost. There will be nothing new under the sun, it is true. But under the November moon even the ruins shine like new. There is nothing old under the sky of this only night. It is useless trying not to love you now. I do not even remember the name of my city and country. Cubislandia? Habaneijavick?
In recent days a horde of soldiers and officers from “State Security,” most in plainclothes, who are located in Section 21 (headquarters of “Counterintelligence”), attacked a peaceful group, of which I was a part and that was in front of the police station at Acosta and 10 de Octubre Streets, to support the elderly parents of Antonio Rodiles, whom they advised, in their turn, of the destination and “legal” case for which their son was being kept in the cells of that station.
One day earlier, this same horde of criminals, violators of justice and of the most elementary human rights, had assaulted a group of people who peacefully presented themselves at the aforementioned Section 21 together with the attorney Veizant Boloy to inquire about the whereabouts of his wife, the attorney Yaremis Flores, who had been kidnapped from their home by police.
Afterwards they took me to spend several days in the dungeons, where I remained without food and water, the only way I had to protest against the violence committed. They released me without charged thanks to the public outcry that resulted from the playing on the Internet of a video recording showing the brutal manner in which they arrested me.
Our only “crime” is to think immeasurably about the fate of our country, which for more than five decades has been in the throes of a ghostly and exhausting war, which has only served to devastate a nation and to keep you in power.
We have the unquestionable right to choose, to dissent, to gather together, to speak out, to decide what is most necessary for the Cuban nation and its future. We ar its legitimate children, with equal rights, so we demand respect and freedom for those who make up the opposition within the Civil Society in Cuba.
Right now, still arbitrarily detained under an alleged crime of “resistance,’’ is Antonio Rodiles, Director of the Independent Project of State of SA (Estado de Sats) and Coordinator of the Campaign For Another Cuba (Campaña Por Otra Cuba), a citizen initiative born in the deep social and economic crisis we are going through which demands the ratification of the UN Covenants, signed by your Foreign Minister on February 28, 2008 in New York City, and that we consider essential rights for the democratic transformation of the Cuban nation and its entry into the community of nations in the XXI century.
We therefore demand the immediate release, without manipulated charges, of Antonio González Rodiles, and I demand of you the earliest intervention in the ongoing violations in our country that are committed in your name.
Ángel Santistesteban-Prats
Cuban writer
Translator’s note: Between the time Angel released this letter and TranslatingCuba.com translated it, Antonio was released.
We will never yield to blackmail from any country or group of nations no matter how powerful they may be, come what may!
Don’t worry, reader, this article isn’t about what you think it is. It’s not a call from the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language to expedite the process of accepting new terms, nor even a demand to reduce the complexity of Spanish spelling. None of that. It’s been quite a while since I hung up the robes of a philologist, and I now understand more about bytes than syllables, more about tweets than conjugations. I am speaking, rather, of those peculiar twists used in Cuba to describe economic, political and social phenomena. The “reforms” that we are experiencing seem to be happening more in the field of linguistics and semantics than in concrete reality. I will offer up some examples… don’t despair.
In our country there has been a call to “update the socialist model” through measures that are simply adding elements of a market economy to the system. What is called “self-employment” is known in other parts of the world as the “private sector.” Nor are the unemployed designated with the corresponding word, but rather given the label of “available workers,” a very smooth way to describe the drama of unemployment. In hospitals, when they greatly reduce the number of X-ray and ultrasound technicians, it’s explained as a chance to “enhance the clinical diagnosis.” Which, translated into a truthful statement, means that the doctor must discover with her eyes and her hands everything from a fracture to an internal hemorrhage.
In the official discourse, popular frustration with the reforms is simply a sign of “misunderstanding and indiscipline.” If, in addition, this disagreement leads to protests in the street, then the participants are neither “outraged,” nor “proletarians demanding their rights,” but rather “mercenaries” and “counterrevolutionaries.” On this Island, the expression “the people” is one of the many pseudonyms for the powers-that-be, so you can imagine the confusion this often creates. When you read, “by the decision of a sovereign people…” or “with the participation of all the people,” you can substitute for the subject in each of these phrases “the Communist Party.” Nor can the cholera epidemic be mentioned by its seven letters, because the newspaper Granma has already coined the phrase “an illness of acute diarrhea.” And those impoverished neighborhoods that stretch around the periphery of the city, don’t even think of calling them favelas or slums! They are, in the distorted semantics surrounding us, “low-income communities.”
I don’t understand anything and neither do you. A meta language has taken over our lives and no word is what it seems. But trust me, reader, and “don’t worry yourself,” which is just the way we say every day that “the situation is worrisome.”
In response to an article published by Jean-Guy Allard in the newspaper Granma on November 12, in which Yoani Sanchez is accused, for the umpteenth time, of being “a mercenary working for the United States.”
Clearly the theme “Generation Y” has escaped the hands of those responsible for calming the troops, and I presume this has upset the dream of countless government operatives, real and virtual, at all levels of Cuban counterintelligence.
As in my role as a doctor I’m obliged to look after the physical as well as the mental health of every Cuban, today I am trying to convey to the author of this article and to State Security — including its Section 21, that maintains a very intense romance with this young woman in Havana — a doubt that assails me: if the U.S. government and/or the CIA have contracted with this “mercenary” and this is what motivates her, financial payments, she works only for this, then the solution to their insomnia is extremely simple: why don’t they bribe her? Why don’t they pay her more and call it good?
If there is something that history has amply demonstrated, it is that the mercenaries, without honor and flag, serve the highest bidder; then the solution is easy: if the people to the north have paid her some miserable half million euros, then pay her, let’s say, a million, or five, or even ten, and surely her eyes will jump out of her head at such an irresistible offer. After all, in this heart vacant of principles there is nothing more than greed, so now it’s time to raise the stakes on this out-of-control woman and you’ll see how fast she changes sides and sinks into an absolute silence, as such a contract would require.
Although I have been to her house many times, the only life of Yoani’s that I know is the publicly visible one. Despite the cordiality with which she treats everyone there, along with her husband — that also irredeemable soul, Reinaldo Escobar — there are barriers that respect and prudence presuppose. Because of this I don’t aspire in this post to offer an apology, not to mention that’s not my personal style, it’s about something much more elemental: someone who has managed to feed a blog that receives, according to Wikipedia, 14 million visits a month — making it the most visited page in the Spanish language network — doesn’t need it.
As for me, I don’t seek anything personal from Yoani either, and what’s more, having never flattered or bowed down to absolute power and the onerous owner of everything around me, capable of ruining my life with a snap of his fingers, then I’m not going to do it before anyone.
But it fries my bacon that in the official Cuban press, which is scandalously silent about the high level corruption overrunning my country, everything is reduced to the old story of money money money — as evidenced by the fact that absolutely every Cuban political opponent, from the oldest and most recalcitrant to the latest upstart, without exception, is accused of this.
So fine, back to the point: paying this “depraved” woman more would be a solution, right? And given that, thanks to the blockade, budgets for repressive activities are tight, something unlikely, say 500,001 euros ought to be enough. After all, for these out-of-control people, according to the official accusation, the difference of a single dollar ought to be enough to make them collapse, drooling, at the feet of their new master.
In a country where millions keep their mouths shut and fake it for a leadership position, for the assignment of a State-owned car, for a little work mission abroad, what wouldn’t this libertine do before such an offer. I think, I suppose, I am saying, the best thing to do with this trifling sum — which would be worth extracting, with due prudence, from the secret account of some tycoon who’s robbed millions from this little country — would be enough to rid the general staff of such a pain in the testicles.
I do want to note, though, that I acted here only from the professional point of view, from an analgesic vocation to relieve the discomfort caused by this chick with iron balls — undoubtedly the largest and most powerful on the island, nobody questions it — and all would be carried out in the most secretive and strict confidentiality.
After all, we doctors work for free in Cuba, it’s nothing to me, but it’s amazing, I remain concerned that the genitals … I mean the genial… strategists of State Security never thought to follow such an elementary strategy.
Under the Geneva Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (1955), are rules 57 and 59 which address Imprisonment and other measures whose effect is to separate the criminal from the outside world, which are afflicting by the very fact of depriving the individual of his right to dispose of his own person by depriving him of his liberty.
Therefore, the prison system should not aggravate the sufferings inherent in this condition… the prison regime should utilize — trying to apply them according to the individual treatment needs of all offenders — all the remedial, educational, moral, spiritual and methods of other natures and all forms of assistance that can be provided.
The individualization of punishment is the adaptation process that occurs between the subject and the sanction. Within this process we find legal, judicial and prison individualization, this last phase, the most important, which must be continuous and must comply with all the biological, psychological and social peculiarities of the subject. Some of the components of this individualization are the classification and treatment of prisoners as a way to treat the prisoner as a person in need of assistance or aid for belonging to a particular group or be a special case.
Treatment must occur within a framework of respect for human rights to dignity, liberty, equality and safety.
In Cuba much of recidivism in crime is due to the poor conditions in prisons where there are no buildings suitable for the various categories of offenders, nor the prison staff suitable to working scientifically with the current measures for this.
Despite some experiments, such as sports fields, shops, schools, hospitals, we have not gone beyond mere mechanical custody, and have never applied enough effort and and enough funds, to establish a more serious and consistent therapy, we have settled on external isolation.
Among the many defects are overcrowding and lack of hygiene in these centers, the idleness which most inmates suffer, and especially the grouping of inmates regardless of age, severity of the crime and personal situation: indicted or convicted, or repeat offenders, healthy versus physically and mentally ill. All these factors adversely affect the inmates and should be avoided.
There are other drawbacks to imprisonment and that is the violent, the sexually abnormal, the doctor who has caused an illegal abortion, motorists who violated traffic code, coexist in the same facility and share the same areas, and yet there is a great difference between all these prisoners.
Antonio Rodiles after being released on 26 November 2012
Translated from an interview by Ivette Leyva Martinez in Cafe Fuerte.
After 19 days of detention in a police station in Havana, Antonio G. Rodiles returned to freedom convinced that the best path to a better Cuba is through the rejection of violence.
Rodiles was released on Monday afternoon after authorities agreed to the request of his lawyer to withdraw the charges of “resistance.” His violent arrest sparked an intense campaign of international solidarity.
The activist was fined 800 Cuban pesos [approximately $30 U.S.]. He will not go to trial.
CF: What do you take away from this experience?
AR: I say to my friends and others with whom I have spoken, that my main experience is that at this moment in Cuba there are a great many people who understand that the country has to change, and that people thinking differently, that people having different views of things, political, ideological, is not a reason for people to hate them or to not respect them but, sadly, there is a group of people who up to now have demonstrated that they have carte blanche to use violence, who are committed to creating situations like this one and I think, what’s more, they are committed to creating even more critical situations.
I think it’s very important that all national and international public opinion support civil society activists because these people are not the preponderance of the people in this country.
Definitely what they did to me was a vulgar beating and it was planned by them ahead of time.
CF: Your followers and the people who have followed your case insisted that there had been violence especially against you. What precisely happened that day of your arrest?
The State Security agent who uses the alias Camilo
AR: An official who has become known for beating and abusing people, whose alias is “Camilo,” crossed Avenue 31 [in the Havana municipality of Diez de Octubre] with a group of people, crossed directly to beat me. He says “identificaiton” or “ID card,” something like that, but simply to mention it. No one in uniform came, they didn’t identify themselves, and they immediately pounced on me.
When I put out my hands so they wouldn’t grab me, they rained punches down on me. They grabbed me by the neck, and threw me to the ground, there was a group of between 10 and 15 people — people who were there said it was something like 12. And when they threw me on the ground they began to kick me, to punch me, and at that moment someone punched me in the left eye, thank God their knuckle didn’t go into my eyeball, only the edge, this gave me a strong contusion in the eye which even bled. After they picked me up, they took me to the cop car, and against the car they were still hitting me, in the chest, all my ribs, it was a total beating. Thank God I didn’t have any fractures but I certainly could have.
CF: In the dungeon, what else did they do and how did they treat you?
AR: When they took me to the detention center on Acosta Avenue, which is a center for ordinary crimes of the Police Technical Department of Investigations (DTI), on arriving there, there was still this individual Camilo with two other characters he goes around with, who were also trying to provoke me, manhandling me, trying to provoke an incident.
This individual Camilo recorded me with a video camera, everything that was going on, but there appeared a major from the police station itself and these things were stopped until they took me to the cell. And yes, the next day, the people who had charge of me in that place had a completely different attitude. It was one of total respect, both physically as well as my moral integrity. I had medical attention, the doctor was a very kind person, she checked me over completely, looked at my eye, healed the eye. And the officials there, of the police, they behaved with respect.
It’s also incredible how the prisoners identify with people who come there for political reasons and they always call you “political” and the people are in solidarity with you.
CF: Do you think the delay had to do with having you look better before they let you out?
AR: Yes, it’s possible that had some weight, evidently there was a lot of pressure from many different directions, I think. What they were trying, in my opinion, was a short detention, of a few months or something like that… but at first what they did was very rough, they made a circus out of it, including statements they made themselves that didn’t apply to the crime of “resistance” and then at the end they simply didn’t have much of a way to justify what was happening and well, they released me.
CF: The photo that was distributed showing you in the cell, is it real?
AR: As I have mentioned to several people I would have to look at it in detail, and since I got out the phone hasn’t stopped ringing. If it was taken, it was taken while I was sleeping. No one took any photo of me while I was awake, although they took a video on my arrival. But I can tell you, I have to see the photo calmly to be able to analyze it. I saw it from above, if it shows I was hit in the eye, and it was that area, I had a shirt like that, the color of the walls was similar and those things.
CF: What do you think the intentions are between the work of the police and the strategic tasks of the State Security?
AR: That’s hard to know being in a cell, is something that I can not fully distinguish, what I can tell you is that contrasting the treatment and attitude of the people of the State Security, who are clearly unscrupulous people, they strike without any restraint, and the treatment received at the DTI station, it was completely different.
CF: Will you continue Estado de Sats? What are your plans now?
AR: The project of course will continue and I would say even more forecefully. The idea of the project Estado de Sats, of the campaign “For Another Cuba,” has to do with respect for the rights of Cubans, with respect for the human being first and foremost, with the opportunity to debate, to openly discuss, and I think that with this beating this was the main thing they showed me: this way is the way for Cuba to change, and clearly violence is the enemy. Now more than ever I believe that the work requires total dedication.
I send a huge hug [to those who supported me], I’ve always said that in this type of situation those who most need support is the family and my elderly parents feel very very supported by everyone and this gave them tremendous strength.
In a previous post we talked about Cuban Immobility (stagnation), an issue that has many sides, or as we say in “good Cuban”: “There is a lot of fabric to be cut.”
The issue of civil rights in different sectors of our society has been analyzed by many compatriots. But I want to refer specifically to sports, where despite little public information, people know the avatars and the suffering of the Cuban athletes, the few rights they have, and the great immobility that distinguishes its managers in holding back our sports system.
For our athletes the questions are: When do they stop paying for their career in sports? Who reviews their contracts and enforces its terms? If Revolutionary Sport is a unified thing, why are some hired and compete with professional, and earn awards, and others cannot?
The immobility and mutilation of rights border on the absurd; in team sports to reach the rank of cadet or youth participants, the athletes have no championships or regular leagues within the county, holding back their development by being unable to compete in international clubs, a normal practice accepted around the world.Rarely do we remember that athletes are the most selfless, pressured, monitored and manipulated, especially with regards to contacts with their counterparts in other countries.
A few may earn hard currency for their activities and without their consent their bank accounts are emptied for “collective goals”. Nobody reacts to defend the athlete. Neither those who run the programs nor the “eternal seconds” who spend the year traveling, talking politics, but never sports.
To accept the changes and respect the rights mentioned, sports talent as a profession would become an unimaginable monetary income generator for the country.
Finally again we have the relationship of citizen-constitution-civil rights. While this “three-category” democracy is not real, tangible, sustainable, Cubans, and within them our athletes, continue to suffer discrimination.
We remember that these people are unique in nature, are born with their talent and in some cases come around once in many years, while being humble, modest, giving us great satisfaction. In gratitude, we must help them.
9 minutes: Writer Angel Santiesteban reports that Antonio Rodiles has been released, after long days in jail and a fine of 800 Cuban pesos. 13 minutes: Antonio Rodiles was just released!
Translator’s note: 800 Cuban pesos is approximately $30.00 US
The songs written and performed by the young musician, David Escalona, carry the very essence of a different Cuba. Omni-Zona Franca, the alternative Havana-based art group, launched the political and social quarrels into the world, and they carry a certain magic.
On the night of Saturday, November 24th, I went to go see him once again. He was radiant, as he has been in the best of his concerts. The urban themes, such as survival, the banishment of living- as they have said themselves- in Alamar, a ghost city, or the repression to which they have been subjected for quite some time, are the best of incentives.
The ingredients of their poetry of resistance immediately flourish in themes which include social exclusion, political intolerance, and the most refined methods of apartheid in contemporary Cuba.
From the moment the concert opened David explained the main motive of that night: to have a good time amongst young Cubans of other latitudes who had met up in that cosmopolitan city known as Miami.
However, after the accustomed courtesy, this versatile artist asked for his concert-goers to pay close attention when he said, loud and clear, that he was dedicating that concert to his friend and compatriot Antonio Rodiles, who is still detained in a police station of Havana for daring to demand justice from the olive-green authorities. With the song “Dare and You Will See“, he started the party.
He’s an exceptional musician who walks on a slippery bridge of governmental confrontation and turns art into a useful tool, used to raise some fists, the will of the non-conformists.
In an interview through Skype, he explained that he makes “free-hop” because he considers himself to be a free man, because when we are convinced of our cause “no one can take anything from us, no one can give us anything. Freedom is in us and no one can take that way”.
The concert was enriched by the vocal talent of Soandry, the creator of Hermanos de Causa (‘Brothers in Cause’), that duo which shook the days of Havana as well as the improvised rap and hip-hop festivals of the 90′s in the island.
The Cuban soul of right now vibrated this past Saturday in Downtown Miami. An extraordinary David stood in the small concert hall, and said on various occasions, “do not fall asleep, there is always an enemy”. This time, he dedicated all his urban strength and talent to a friend, to that same Rodiles who so many people want to see free from the iron bars and barbaric treatments. That is David- contradictory, luminous, and energetic like a flash of light in the darkness.
I worry about this old man who, after working all his life, now sells cigarettes on the corner. Also the girl who looks in the mirror and values her body for “the sex market,” where she could meet a foreigner to get her out of here. I worry about the black man with leathery skin who, no matter how early he gets up, can never rise to a position of responsibility because of the racism — visible and invisible — that condemns him to a lower position. The deeply wrinkled forty-something who pays her dues to the union, but senses that at the next meeting they will announce that she is out of work. The provincial teenager who dreams of escaping to Havana, because in his village all that is waiting are material shortages, a badly-paid job and alcohol.
I worry about the girlfriends I grew up with and who now — with the passing of decades — have less, suffer more. The taxi driver who has to carry a machete hidden under the seat because crime is increasing even though the papers never report it. I worry about my neighbor who comes over in the middle of the month to ask for a little rice, despite knowing she’ll never be able to return it. Those people who race to the butcher shop just when the chicken arrives in the ration market, because if they don’t buy it that same day their families will never forgive them. I worry about the academic who remains silent so that suspicions and ideological insults won’t rain down on him. The mature man who believed and no longer believes, and yet even thinking about a possible change terrifies him. The boy whose dream is going to another country, to a reality he doesn’t even know, to a culture he doesn’t even understand.
I worry about people who can only watch official television, only read the books published by the official publishers. The peasant who hides the cheese he will sell in the city at the bottom of his bag, so the police checkpoints won’t find it. The old woman who says, “Now this is coffee,” when her daughter who emigrated sends a packet with a some food and a little money. I worry about the people who are in an ever greater state of economic and social need, who sleep in so many of Havana’s doorways, who look for food in so many trash cans. And I am worried about not only the misery of their lives, but because they are increasingly at the margins of speeches and politics. I am afraid, I am greatly concerned, that the number of disadvantaged is going to grow and there are no channels to recognize and fix the situation.
We have spent more than fifty years hearing talk of “the enemy.” All the blame for our deficiencies is charged to this, just like all the evils and misfortunes, product of carelessness, inattention and neglect, also go to his credit.
With that idea they have tried to hypnotize and “idiotize” the population of “our beloved planet,” and regrettably, in many cases they have achieved it. But in spite of all that, when someone thinks about emigrating, it is always to the country of the “enemy” (USA). Also on occasion to others, which they use as a bridge, in order to achieve the same end.
Many of us have resisted letting ourselves be influenced by such fallacy, but even so, due to all the notoriety that precedes the matter and to the prejudices sown around it, we take care not to fall in the ideological trap, and to pander to the representatives of power.
Just a few days ago I received an e-mail from a very dear American friend, where she announced to me the visit of a friend of hers of the same nationality who wished to get to know me, and in turn he was the bearer of a gift that she was sending me. I was very satisfied to meet him and to report that the friend of my best friend, was a charming “enemy.” Empathy soon arose between us and it remains for us to meet next time.
Last Friday afternoon, this one invited us to go to see the traditional ceremony of “the cannon shot,” a custom that exists since the epoch of the brief English occupation, when at exactly nine at night, they closed the doors of the walls that protected the city, and that they now recreate with a pretty representation in the Cabana Morro Tourist Complex. I was pleasantly surprised by how well restored and preserved is this emblematic place, thanks to the work of the Office of City History, the only state entity, that without fear of being mistaken, we can say has been busy rescuing and conserving some of our traditions.
We had a great time in the company of him and his parents. It was what could be called a beautiful night of “walking with the enemy.”
By Miguel Iturria Medina
The songs written and performed by the young musician, David Escalona, carry the very essence of a different Cuba. Omni-Zona Franca, the alternative Havana-based art group, launched the political and social quarrels into the world, and they carry a certain magic.
The concert was enriched by the vocal talent of Soandry, the creator of Hermanos de Causa (‘Brothers in Cause’), that duo which shook the days of Havana as well as the improvised rap and hip-hop festivals of the 90′s in the island.
