Alas Tensas, Editorial, 2 May 2018 – Those of us publishing the feminist magazine Alas Tensas have been subject to systematic harassment and attacks over the last two months. No doubt they want or need our independent and self-proclaimed feminist media to disappear.
As the British feminist Mary Beard says in her essay The Public Voice of Woman: “It’s not what you say that prompts [the abuse], it’s the fact you’re saying it.” Beard reminds us that a favored refrain of the patriarchal discourse, and one that she herself has suffered, is “Shut up, you bitch,” when a woman dares to venture beyond the domestic space and take the floor in the agora. Thus, they tell you to get back to the kitchen or darn their socks.
We have experienced demonstrations of force from all sides. The most recent has been the prohibition on traveling outside the country. Not only is our freedom of movement violated, but also our right to self-realization: they have prevented us from participating in feminist training courses and journalism workshops with a gender focus.
Ileana Álvarez, director of the magazine Alas Tensas, was invited to a journalism workshop in Panama (April 6), and to a fellowship at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, the Regional School of Feminist Education based in Mexico (April 22). She was not able to leave the country on either occasion because in the National Identification System (SUIN) managed by the Directorate of Identification, Immigration and Emigration (DIIE), she is listed as “regulated for the public interest.”
Nor was the designer Yaudel Estenoz able leave the country, when he tried to travel to Trinidad and Tobago on April 22, to apply for a student visa for a scholarship he earned to pursue a master’s degree in the United States.
Earlier, on March 24, a laptop was confiscated from the writer, visual poet and journalist Francis Sánchez, when he returned to the country through customs at the Santa Clara airport, after they reviewed his personal files and found a piece about elections and machismo in the history of Cuba. Sanchez learned that the same “regulation” weighed against him when he tried to extend his passport.
Travel bans are just the tip of the iceberg. First, we were interrogated – or summoned for “conversations,” as they call it – by State Security officers. In those meetings, serious accusations and threats were issued. In short, they are trimming our wings.
Within the concert of spontaneous, independent modes of expression – blogs, youtubers, the weekly packet, newspapers, producers of music, video and movies… – that have been emerging recently despite great obstacles, we are the only Cuban magazine that specifically defines itself as “feminist.”
They tried to root out this ideology from Cuba for being “bourgeois,” and labeled it as unnecessary in the first place, by a de facto decree that the Revolution abolished all discrimination.
However, as of October 2016, here we are. Our reality has been to show that, beyond achievements such as the right to abortion, the law of motherhood, pay equity or access to study and work, serious problems remain in Cuba, which are not talked about and that get worse, while others continue to emerge.
Meanwhile, state media, including some aimed at the female audience, are silent. To begin with, in Cuba, statistics regarding femicide are not even collected. Nor is there a law against gender violence.
This is not the first time they have tried to “deactivate” a project and a feminist magazine. Women communicators of the MAGÍN group, who tried to change the image of women in the media, were “deactivated” in 1996. They had begun working together only three years earlier and ultimately their magazine project never saw the light of day. They were not even able to enroll in the Association Registry. The story of this endeavor can be found in the testimonies we rescued in Alas Tensas, including: “Magín, simply” and “Magín: Never stop feeling like a star.” Obviously, what annoys them is to “wield the complaint,” as María Zambrano would say, that is, to speak out in the public sphere.
Returning to Mary Beard, we agree on the cause of patriarchal intolerance: “It’s not what you say… it’s the fact you’re saying it.” Now Alas Tensas is also trying to go beyond the scope of symbolic representations that concern the “wanting to say,” leaving behind the abstract thought and the closed and more comfortable framework of the academy, to speak out in the public sphere.
Despite publishing our magazine from a small city like Ciego de Avila in the interior of Cuba, our work appears to have acquired a social and international dimension that means they cannot tolerate us. The mentality of the controller – one might also say kidnapper – is to keep us isolated, confined to the geographic and mental space they have delineated for us, so that the truth, our truth, is never known and loses relevance.
From our first editorial: “Alas Tensas Born in Cuba …” we have not hesitated to call Cuban society “macho and patriarchal,” because it has been bearing the weight of this for centuries. Then, we committed the “sin” of showing that in Cuba there are also women who are killed by sexist violence, at the hands of abusers, and for lack of preventive action. We revealed this in the chilling story: “Femicide must be told: Misleydis, murdered despite repeated complaints.”
We question, in short, the patriarchal tradition, the structural and naturalized hypocrisy, as we did in the article “Is International Women’s Day a day to celebrate?”
What we publish, being digital, can be read anywhere. It allows us to get in touch with feminists around the world and to expand something called sorority: brotherhood among women with a gender conscience. Those who have created Alas Tensas – Ileana, Francis, Yaudel, plus some members of the Editorial Board – belong to LASA (Latin American Studies Association), and we have participated in their academic congresses in New York (2016) and Lima (2017), always in the thematic area of “Sexualities, genres and feminist studies.”
The results of our research and panels prepared for such conferences have been published in our pages, for example “The current Cuban poetry written by women: Rebellion through ethnos and sexual orientation,” and “La Avellaneda in Martí: From somber judgment to the testimony of light.”
Similarly, of course, we must participate in the 36th LASA International Congress planned in Barcelona from May 23 to 26, since we put together the panel “History, feminism and feminist representations in Cuba. The new stories.” But – and we send this alert to the academic community – we cannot attend if they do not lift the unjust travel ban.
We have been told that now is not the “historical moment” conducive to our work. Entire generations have been postponing their dreams, their creativity, and engaging in self-censorship for the sake of when that historical moment arrives. While… life goes by, and we are surprised to find ourselves tired and aging, with our children scattered around the world, while we live off their remittances.
In these sixty years, society has experienced a constant dejà vu, repeating the same mistakes. Most live in a climate of fear, they cross to the other sidewalk every time they see someone who has “fallen into disgrace” as, in “their moment,” were Dulce María Loynaz and Virgilio Piñera.
In Cuba, in these decades, we have always seen the demonization of civil initiative: that which has not been created by official mandate. Today it happens to us, to almost all journalists and independent media. They accuse us of being cyber-mercenaries. They violate our privacy. They seize our equipment. They block our pages. They bring legal charges against us. They threaten us. They involve our families.
Thus, the names of Alas Tensas are joined today to many others also threatened or restricted. The list of those currently unable to travel continues to grow.
Feminists who know that the gender category intersects with other factors such as race, sexuality, religion, economy, ideology… should understand that, in our case, the harassment we suffer from doing journalism can not be separated from the fact of living in Cuba, in a province in the interior, away from the capital, writing with a gender focus and proclaiming ourselves explicitly feminist. For these reasons, our vulnerability increases.
We must remember that the first documented example of a man silencing a woman appears at the beginning of Western culture, in the Odyssey, when Telemachus reproaches his mother, Penelope, for daring to express her desire to hear a happier song among the bards. Then, he asks her to sequester herself: “Go in and do your work,” he says, “Stick to the loom and the distaff. Tell your slaves to do their chores as well. It is for men to talk; especially me. I am the master.*”
Some people, because they supposedly love and care for us –as Telemachus does his mother – beg us to remain silent for our own good. In that quietly spoken request we sense the repeated cry “Shut up …” from the masculine power that comes from above.
We advocate for our legitimate right to express ourselves freely, to make journalism attached to the truth and to be a feminist medium. And we thank the people of good will, from Cuba and the world, who join us in this demand.
*Emily Wilson translation, © 2018
