Translating Cuba

Note: This article was originally published on election day in the U.S., before the polls closed.

Four years ago a good number of Cubans conceived the hope that President Barack Obama would introduce into the foreign policy of the United States changes that would lead to an improvement in relations with Cuba. Among the most significant points was the reduction or elimination of the embargo/blockade, the relaxation of travel and remittances to Cuba, and the closure of the prison at the Guantanamo Bay naval base.

“Unfortunately” Obama has not been the dictator of the United States, but just a president who must abide by the democratic system that the Americans have built over more than two centuries. Nevertheless, he eliminated restrictions put into place by his predecessor, Bush, relating to Cuban-Americans and the sending of remittances. More Americans can travel to the Island at this time, but the persecution of companies that trade with Cuba continued, and the Guantanamo prison continued to operate as before. We can always ask ourselves would the situation have been if, in the 2008 election, the winner had been the Republican McCain.

In parallel, the four years of the Obama administration coincided with the “Raul reforms,” in which, as expected, the same level of anti-imperialist belligerence has been maintained, combined with the assertion that the table is set for discussions with our northern neighbor, if and when they are carried out in conditions of full equality. Throughout this entire time the approach offered by the Cuban media — the private property of the Communist Party — has focused on demonstrating that the “black president,” has he has repeatedly been called by Fidel Castro, has been more of the same and even worse in some respects.

With less than a week before we will know the results of the election, the Cuban Foreign Ministry (MINREX) issued a Statement in which it reacts with considerable irritation to some courses offered by the United States Interests Section in Havana and the establishment of centers where Cubans can connect to the Internet. The term “illegal” appears five times in the text that contains the assertion that “the current government of the United States has no real desire to leave behind the worse policies and practices and of the Cold War…”

Some say this statement could be the harbinger of a new wave of repression against dissidents. Others are suggesting that it simply sends a message to Obama, should he be reelected, or to Romney if he turns out to be the winner. In a few hours we will know if there will be change or continuity in the United States. I have the impression that there is less optimism about what Obama will do if he is reelected, and a great expectations about what Romney might do if he carried out his threats. What is significant is that this country, which has spent half a century demonstrating how it has broken all dependence on its powerful neighbor, continues to depend on what is legislated in the USA to determine how it will repress its opponents and even how far it will relax its travel and immigration policies, to cite only two examples.

I fear that, whoever wins, it will be on this side where we will continue to have more of the same.

5 November 2012

Meanwhile the Great Culprit
shelters behind the wise protection of the forehead.
“Defense of the innocent myocardium”

Rubén Martínez Villena

My family claims for itself that mass of neurons, reinforced with the care lavished on me as a child. The teacher who taught me to read demands credit for the connections that helped to unite thought and language. Every one of my friends also claims their share, their piece of one lobe or the other, for the satisfactions and upsets they have inscribed on its fragile convolutions. Even the boy who crossed in front of my eyes, just for a second, would be entitled to a portion of my cerebral cortex, as his passage recorded a tiny impression in my memory.

All of the books I’ve read, the ice creams I’ve eaten, the kisses given coldly or with passion, the films I’ve seen, the morning coffee and the shouts of the neighbors… to them belongs a share of this grey mass I carry behind my forehead. To the cat that purrs and digs its nails in, to the police who watches and blows his whistle, to the official who adjusts her military uniform and says “no,” to the mediocre professor who misspells “geographie,” and to the brilliant speaker whose words seem to open doors, throw wide the windows. To them should be given — one by one — my cortical cells, on which they managed to make indelible marks. My axons would be distributed among millions of people, alive and dead, to those I met or simply heard in a musical note or through their verses.

However, according to Legislative Decree 302 which also regulates the foreign travel of professionals, my own brain — like those of the rest of university graduates — does not belong to me. The folds and grooves of this organ are the property — according to the new law — of an educational system that boasts of being free but later charges us through ownership over our intellect. The authorities who regulate the possibility of leaving this Island believe that a qualified citizen is a simple conglomeration of brain matter “formed” by the State. But claiming the rights to use a human mind is like trying to put gates on the sea… shackles on every neuron.

9 November 2012

Video showing the arrest of Yoani Sanchez (seen early in the video in a black top and red skirt, confronting those arresting her) and the beating and arrest of Angel Santiesteban

In the last 48 hours a wave of arrests has been unleashed that at this point can’t be explained in any reasonable way. The first difficulty in understanding what happened is that it is very difficult to think like the repressive forces. They have their own “logic” and it is often confusing.

Shortly after learning that among the people arrested was my wife, the blogger Yoani Sanchez, I went to the police station on Acosta street with the blogger Agustin Lopez (his blog is Dekaisone). Minutes after asking uniformed men about Yoani’s presence in this place, others came, dressed in plainclothes and also uniformed, and told us we were being arrested.

The frisking process was brief, they handcuffed us and put us in the car. The squad car pulled out and turned the corner. We had barely gone 60 yards when a man in civilian clothes stopped the car and ordered them to let us go. Probably Agustin and I have starred in one of the shortest detentions of recent times.

The night went slowly, full of news of other arrests and releases. At this point, still behind bars are Yaremis Flores, Antonio Rodiles, and an undetermined group of civil society activists.

9 November 2012

A couple of months ago some strangers in plainclothes waited for me crouched on a corner in Lawton, eventually kidnapping me in a National Revolutionary Police (PNR) squad car when I left my house at the corner of Beales and Fonts streets.

Those in plainclothes said they were from State Security (the PNR were illiterate accomplices from the neighborhood station). Clearly they were, because one of them was Yoani Sanchez’s attacker on 6 November 2009, a paramilitary misogynist. He was the same white guy who reappeared in March of this year — when I was on a hunger and thirst strike for two days after my arrest (without charges or records kept) during the visit of Pope Benedict XVI — to coerce me to go to a hospital where they exhaustively examined me to certify they hadn’t tortured me.

Naturally, what’s important is none of this. If I live in Cuba I’m already buried (of course, I don’t authorize putting my name on any literary contest or independent library), although they haven’t threatened me with death, as they promised Oswaldo Paya in the presence of his family. What is important is a question of angulation, of gaze.

What did they do throughout the holy Sabbath, those guys on their two Suzukis and one Geely car imported by the State? They tossed out rumors for a start (which is crime): the most archetypal was waiting for a provocation in Lawton from the Ladies in White. They probably smoked. Cold-bloodedly occupied the terrified neighborhood. Maybe bought a little lunch from some self-employed person. And sat in the shade of the last almond tree that the anti-cyclone brigade of tree assassins hadn’t cut down.

But it’s obvious they never looked. Their eyelids were blinded by hatred. Hatred against me, against their mission, perhaps against themselves. No one should have any illusions. A paid hatred that one day will force them to kill or be killed, even in front of professional cameras and reporters from the BBC and other chains in chains, which, after all, will broadcast nothing.

If only they had raised their eyes, they would have seen what you see now. The old El Chino Octavio bodega at the corner of Fonts and Rafael de Cardenas. The debacle of a lunar pavement, the shelves as squalid as the facades and the skin of the un-inhabitants, the curbs razed by the bulldozers of Communal Services, the atoll of garbage uncollected for weeks, the bacteria and viruses freely incubating, the sub-Marxist shit that seeps from the pores of Raul Castro’s Realpolitik. Despotic poetry of the first degree.

If only they had dared to believe their own eyes, they would not have gone without the notion of Fidelista favelas — slums — in which the once elegant suburbs of Havana survive. Lawton, for example, with its staircases, rivers, trams and industries, was a labyrinthine jewel on the outskirts of our capital. Today it is just this: the poorest pasture for secret police and regular police who make a living at the expense of not looking.

In reality, I sincerely sympathize with this ostrich-like vocation of the agents of Cuban repression. Their blindness doesn’t allow them to hypocritically polish the image of my country. We are not longer in the mythical 20th century of the international Left. Silenced by the death of the grandiloquent demagoguery of Fidel Castro, our stunted State capitalism will finally show to the world the Cuban people just as we are: the worst of pre-capitalism and the worst of the post-totalitarian State.

Just as well, comrades. It was already time to live in the truth.

From Diario de Cuba

November 6 2012

Some dissidents believe the best place for the current constitution is a waste basket. Laura Diversent, an independent attorney, is more circumspect.

“Certainly, today’s constitution has innumerable shortcomings. I don’t believe it would be adequate in a democratic Cuba. But in the early stages, as part of a serious and profound process of reform, the constitution ratified in 1992 could be applied. Shortly thereafter, a constitutional convention could be called to draft a new Fundamental Law that is sober, has a solid legal foundation, and that covers the social and political rights of all Cubans,” says the legal expert.

Diversent does not see re-instituting the 1940 constitution as a option. “It is inappropriate, overly meticulous and obsolete for these times,” she claims. For a few years now, intellectuals and Cuban legal scholars from the moderate left, participating in open debate forums sponsored by various online organizations and the Cuban Catholic church, have echoed this theme.

The constitutional challenge cannot be put off. Setting aside their differences, lawyers, academics and political experts who have analyzed the issue have expressed their belief that a vigorous popular democracy is essential. For them, the future of Cuba must, by necessity, be a socialist one.

Voices such as those of Roberto Veiga, a legal expert and director of the publication Espacio Laical*, would prefer a less ideological system of government – one that is inclusive and more effective at managing the country. Veiga, who could accept either a new constitution or the current one with some corrections, foresees a socialist state but would prefer to opt for a moderate form of capitalism with a strong social program.

According this viewpoint the people should decide this at the ballot box. The debates, discussions and forums on the future of the Fundamental Law is a sign that many intellectuals on the island are not idly standing by.

The level of judicial ignorance among Cubans is appalling. In 1976 people obediently went en masse to vote for a new constitution that few had barely even skimmed. In communities and neighborhoods in the Cuban heartland a significant segment of the citizenry is unaware of its anti-democratic precepts. At the end of the 1980s I participatedwith Tania Quinteroin the production of a national television program called Disrepect for the Law. In on-the-street interviews an overwhelming majority ignored what was “the first law of the Republic.”

In an article published in the journal Espacio Laical, the attorneyJulio Antonio Fernández reports the results of a study carried out by te National Assembly of People’s Power in 1987 on “the factors that most affect the development of a culture of respect for law” in which people were asked, “What do you consider to be the law most important to a citizen?” Of the 1,450 who responded, 1,046 did not cite the constitution. Of the 44 who did cite it, 5 were political figures.

And it is the government of Fidel Castro that has been the most flagrant violator of the Constitution. For years it infringed Article 43, where it says that, “The State recognizes the right won by the Revolution of citizens, without distinctions of race, color of skin, sex, religious beliefs, national origin or any other damage to human dignity.” Among its statements it established that they “are served in all restaurants and other public service establishments” and “enjoy the same resorts, beaches, parks, social services and other cultural, sports, recreation and relaxation centers.”

Cubans were third class citizens in their own country. They had no right to stay in or enjoy hotels and facilities designed exclusively for foreigners. A shameful tourist apartheid.

The current Constitution is a complete farce. It needs urgent reforms. Or to be replaced by another. A Basic Law that most people don’t know should not be endorsed in the future. Currently, many do not see it as a protector of their inalienable rights. The current Constitution recognizes several social rights. But excludes political rights and freedom of expression, association and movement outside the authorized olive green autocracy.

In the hands of academics, political scientists, dissidents and citizens remains the task of deciding what do with the current Constitution. If the current one should be rewritten or a new one created. The future of Cuba needs a Constitution that serves all of us.

Photo from Martí Noticias.

*Translator’s note: Espacio Laical (Lay Space) is a journal published by the Archdiocese of Havana and officially tolerated by the Cuban government, whose articles and editorials discuss alternate proposals for social, political and economic change in Cuba.

November 4 2012

This Sunday, one week after the hurricane, the TV of our planet set aside more than 2 hours of the Arte 7 program to present Sandy’s making off, which emphasized the government’s effort and aid to the affected eastern provinces, especially the devastated city of Santiago.

The images shown after the hurricane are conclusive proof of how bad the living conditions were and how badly the most affected installations were, like the electrical and telephone infrastructure, the grocery stores and others.

It seems the TV program wanted to “cover up” the many growing commentaries about the government’s abandonment, instead emphasizing the revolutionary solidarity, praising the dispatching of food, maintenance brigades, doctors, etc, to the affected provinces. It is logical in situation such as this one, but when it becomes a routine practice, it is not normal. Undressing one saint to dress another is an old political scheme practiced for more than five decades.

If something is crystal clear, it is that there are no available resources to respond to any type of meteorological phenomenon the way the government propaganda wants us to believe.

November 4 2012

My mother was just a girl of five living in a tenement in central Havana and I was barely one egg of the many dozing in her womb. Amid the daily grind and the first signs of shortages – already noticeable in Cuban society – not even my grandmother realized how close we were to the holocaust that October of 1962. The family felt the tension, the triumphalism, and the collective nervousness of something delicate happening, but never imagined the gravity of the situation. Those who lived through that cruel month all behaved the same, whether they were unaware or accomplices, uninformed or ready to bring sacrifices, enthused or neutral.

The so-called Missile Crises, known in Cuba as The October Crisis, touched several generations of Cubans in different ways. If some recall the terror of the moment, it left others with the constant tension of the trenches, the gas mask, the shock of the alarm that might sound in the night, the island sinking into the sea, offered metaphors for speeches and songs. Nothing returned to normal after that October. Those who didn’t live through it first hand still inherited its sense of unease, the fragility of standing right on the edge that could end in the abyss.

Perhaps what most draws our attention now is the enormous capacity to make decisions that was taken by some individuals on matters of such great importance. If, in a moment of weakness, the Soviets had given into the temptation to leave the red button near the finger of the Maximum Leader in olive-green, as he would have liked, probably no one would be reading this article. What’s more, this article would not even exist. Luckily, to arm a missile with a nuclear charge and to launch it is a lot more complex than some doomsday movies would have us believe. And it was especially so in 1962, when the electronic controls required huge labyrinthine metal cabinets arranged in hermetically sealed rooms.

The slogans that were shouted in Cuban plazas in those days would be frowned upon today, by the common sense that is beginning to take hold in the early days of the twenty-first century. It would sound too irrational, absurdly excessive, contrary to life. Because when European mothers put their children to bed with the fear that the sun wouldn’t rise, on Havana’s Malecon people were chanting the strident “If you come you stay”; and while the entire world was calculating with pessimistic exactitude what would be lost and what would be left standing, on this Island they repeated to the point of exhaustion that we were ready to disappear “before agreeing to be the slaves of anyone.” When the USSR decided to remove the missiles, irresponsible people in the streets hummed, “Nikita, faggot, what you give you can’t take back.”

Recently Fidel Castro himself returned to some of that puerile – almost childish – arrogance when he stated that, “We will never apologize to anyone for what we did” His words were an attempt to surround with glory the intransigent attitude of the Cuban government during those days that shook the world. Now, at least, we enjoy the relief of knowing that this stubborn old man of 86 is ever further from that red button that would have unleashed disaster. Every day the impossibility of his influencing the global road map becomes greater. The missile crisis will not be repeated on the Island, no matter how many Octobers lie ahead of us.

6 November 2012

For the first time I feel like a target of attack by the State dictatorship in the Statement of the Minister of Foreign Affairs published last Friday the 2nd of November.

I am a student, since a little less than a month ago, in a journalism course offered by the International University of Florida through the United States Interests Section in Havana.  The first thing I did on enrolling was to ask if there existed the possibility of studying the complete career of journalism or philosophy at a distance.  But the answer that the Cuban employee gave me was that the government of Cuban had cancelled that possibility.

I do not feel forced to give explanations, but to defend myself from the possible reprisals that the government — which evidently feels threatened by the exercise of the freedom of expression — might have in store for us from now on.

To respond the calumny that we are mercenaries of a foreign government would take this spiritual struggle to the level of speaking the language of our kidnappers and presumed assassins.  It is imperative that they prove that they can dialogue with us in the language of liberty without the excuse of pretending that the nation is a military encampment, faking paranoia.

In 53 years they have not dared to dialogue with the opposition, they lack the courage because they cannot sustain themselves before the citizens who oppose the tyranny “of the socialist morality” and its consequent “legality”: a species of dead language without image and that therefore cannot and does not have the will to express our human rights.

There is nothing easier to read and understand for the whole world than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because it is written in our image. But it is very difficult to follow the logic of thinking in the official Cuban discourse because it represents the interests of just a tiny collection of people in this country who have managed to buy and terrorize another so many people within the Island, and feed the misanthropic envy of the radical left in the world.

There is something I want to note, because it is the only note that is obvious in the text published in the newspaper Granma: “… the impossible task of converting its mercenaries into a credible movement of the internal opposition.”

We have to start from the fact that the Cuban State has been faking paranoia as an excuse to reprimand citizens who dare to express themselves in opposition to their government which is a complete fraud, including of course the electoral fraud covered by legal loopholes.

I won’t have to work too hard to explain that true paranoia is not aware of the reason for placing blame on another, but the Cuban State does know why it has chosen the United States as at fault in order to justify the attack against its own people: the Cuban State, absolute dictator over the existence of the souls under its jurisdiction, has never tolerated the political opposition and has rudely denied silencing them, first by firing squad or incarceration through the “revolutionary laws,” including Law 88 (the Gag Law), because they know they could not survive the full exercise of freedoms and the popular will consulted without coercion.

Again I suggest looking at the text of the judgment against Hubert Matos in 1959; there, in the words of then prime minister Fidel Castro, who served as the principal accusing witness (and who explicitly governed this Island until 2006, and seemed to continue through his whole life to impose his will), we see the beginning of the most ridiculous campaign in the legal history of Cuba where this witness creates the crime of being “counterrevolutionary.”

Decades later this modest housewife was surprised that something as natural as being against some political and social tendency that has committed so many criminal acts, that has drafted such tricky laws to incarcerate Cubans, that has never represented in its gigantic discourse the true size of a single human being, could be a crime.

It cannot be a crime to be against a government and to express it and to want to change it, not in a revolutionary way, that includes the use of arms, but in an embryonic democratic way: with the arms of opinion, including citizen protest. But the detail is that to prevent those rights, the Cuban State fakes madness, fakes paranoia and the target of the attacks is the United States, and this faked paranoia also serves as an ideological alibi to maintain persecution against its opponents.

The most dissident act, in a county of such political hypocrisy that it would make the “whitewashed tombs” that Jesus referred to in the Gospels pale by comparison, is to remember decency and to begin to be honest and objective toward the Cuban reality. It is easy to achieve credibility if we only remain true to the Christian and humane vocation that we all have, and exercise it on a scale larger than our selfishness.

In situations like this I can wait for my persecutors, without missing a single journalism class, reading the Bible first and foremost and especially the Gospels, and also remembering people like Martha Beatriz Toque, like Oscar Elias Biscet, like Elizardo Sanchez, so maligned, so persecuted, at times so long-suffering, so abandoned (by this people always disposed to exchange its rights for a pittance) and yet, like the ancient prophets, such victors in Christ and such towering figures.

November 5 2012

Santiago de Cuba is characterized by being one of the provinces than most supports the Castro government. Its citizens, its major, are loyalists. The native city of the Castros has been destroyed by Hurricane Sandy.

Was Sandy the principal cause of the destruction and the deaths? And what did the government do?

Normally, when a Hurricane comes no matter how small, the measures taken in Havana are always unlimited. Trees are felled to avoid accidents as happened in the east of the country, where because of falling trees several perished and the electricity was cut off leaving the population without power.

The living conditions of the very poor consists of nothing more than wattle and daub houses, and the best have a tile roof — a material susceptible to wind. Then, did Civil Defense do its work 100%?

Thus is was that Cuban citizens perished in their houses because they collapsed and because trees that weren’t cut down fell on them.

October 29 2012

The boat sent by Venezuela for the victims of Hurricane Sandy in the east of the country will not fulfill its objective. Most of the merchandise will be diverted to the hard currency stores to enrich the Cuban government.

It won’t be the first, or the last time that the government diverts some of the merchandise meant for the Cuban people sent by some foreign country. This is what some of the capital’s population say in the streets. “It’s nothing more than a benefit for the families of the military,” say the great majority.

We wait what will happen, but history has demonstrated that the products don’t get to the ordinary Cuban.

October 31 2012