Generation Y

I remember very well the children’s parties that ended with the pushing and shoving and laughter of those who wanted to grab a candy or a gift. The piñatas, shaped like a clown or a boat or resembling some cartoon character, were the funnest part of every birthday. But that time has passed and what is being distributed now in our country is not sweets or balloons, but properties. Like the Nicaraguan Sandinistas once did, or the leaders of the Communist Party in Russia, Cuban leaders are distributing — at their convenience — rental properties, cars, businesses, houses.

Yesterday’s publication of Decree 292 — for the ownership transfer of motor vehicles — has been the culmination of a several decade’s wait. For far too long obtaining a car has been a perk earned through unconditional ideology. Now, they have added a few pinches of this ingredient called “market” to a mechanism that has been ruled for half a century. Even with this new legal reform, however, the great majority of citizens are only allowed to buy a used car, which in Cuba means vehicles more than 15 years old, and in particular Russian Ladas or Moskvitches, or Polish Fiats, which were previously marketed through a meritocracy. Some modern cars in State service will be sold to those who meet the strict requirements of belonging to an institution and demonstrating their fidelity to the Government. And those impeccably new ones, recent imports, are destined for a Revolutionary elite that has in their pockets money sanctified through official channels. To drive a shiny Citroen or a late model Peugeot will continue to be a sign of being a member of the powers-that-be.

Another revealing detail in this resolution is the emphasis given, in its pages, to the concept of “final departure” for those who relocate abroad. If, as Raul Castro himself has said, we are committed to migratory reform, what is the significance of not repealing this shameful category? Those who leave may not sell their cars before departing, they may only transfer them to their closest relatives. The penalization of emigration, then, remains in place. But what is most worrying is the already visible composition of the piñata, the structure of a sharing out among equals, embodied in cars taken out of tourist or business use which will be marketed to a very select group of people. The existence of such a mechanism will undoubtedly feed corruption, “socialism,” and put into the hands of government sympathizers the fattest strings for when it becomes necessary to pull on them in unison. I have no doubt that to this party, which they have already begun to prepare, we Cubans will not be invited.

 

 

Narcissus stares fixedly into the water which reflects his own image, but at moments he also perceives in it the flashes of a city with crumbling columns and shattered stained glass. Since September 23rd the oil painting of a young man leaning over a lake, attributed to Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, has been on display in the Universal Hall of the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana. The king of chiaroscuro, whose brush delighted in shadows, has come to this city that abounds in sun and shade. Transported and protected by the aviation company Blue Panorama, this painting and twelve other works make up an exhibition curated by Rosselle Vodret and Giorgio Leone. A fragment of the Italian Baroque here with us, a piece of that epoch when a quarrelsome and eminent artist forever changed the concept of light in painting.

After the listlessness of August, this art exhibit brings back to us the sensation of being a part of the world. The university students look at Narcissus with greedy eyes, the museum curators feel they have a unique opportunity in their lives, and the nocturnal prowlers of Old Havana wonder why all the fuss over a “painted cloth.” If the unquiet Milanese — dead at just 39 years of age — could shake off the dust of the centuries and walk our streets he would find here his old models, the same prototypes that served him to paint virgins and saints: prostitutes, beggars, the excluded… and also the young, seized by their own beauty. Caravaggio would find in this city many self-absorbed and distracted Cubans, trying not to let their eyes stray beyond the narrow circle around them. Hundreds of thousands of Narcissuses, refugees in what only feels safe now: their youth, their bodies, their beauty.

 

He was working for a new kind of corporation, one of those occupying a luxurious mansion in the Miramar neighborhood and importing goods from abroad. To find such a job it was enough to appeal to the influence of his father, a lieutenant colonel, the pull of the family tree. He belongs to a new generation of ideology-free entrepreneurs, but to keep his job he shouts a slogan every now and then, faking loyalty to some leader. This crafty “New Man” seeks out the cheapest, lowest quality goods on the international market and passes them off as the choices of his bosses who assigned him to be a buyer. From the difference, thousands and thousands of dollars go into his pocket every year. Like him, a whole litter of money-grubbing cubs defraud Cuban enterprises, arming themselves financially for the changes to come.

The latest episode of moral corruption in the business sector is related to the highly publicized fiber optic cable connecting us to Venezuela. Announced since 2008, it only reached our shores in February of this year, under the anxious eyes of 11 million citizens who dream of connecting, en masse, to the Internet. After several postponements, July was set as the date for it to start working. Between rumors on the street, dispatches from foreign agencies, and the testimony of workers for the only telephone company allowed in the country, we have learned that the cable is a disaster. A bad choice in the material from which it is made, the lack of the correct covering to prevent it from being chewed by the sharks that abound in Caribbean waters, and even the theft of funds meant for its activation, seem to have disabled its implementation until further notice.

But beyond the almost comical details of the non-working cable, our attention is called to the high level in the political hierarchy of those involved in this new corruption scandal. They are not second-tier officials, but strait-laced Party servants previously entrusted with lofty responsibilities. How did these faithful employees of ministries, joint-venture firms, and foreign companies become “green-collar” criminals? Red-card-carrying thieves? Perhaps it was their opportunistic-fueled noses that made them believe the future was ever closer and if they met the changes with an economic foundation they could become tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. For each one that has been discovered, there are dozens who continue “fishing” in the shadows, shouting slogans, swearing allegiance to a leader, and who, when they are alone, calculate the number of digits already in their personal fortunes, the size of the pile they have been able to extract from a State that trusted them.

An expanded version of this text was published in the Peruvian newspaper, El Comercio.

A friend tells me that when she feels overwhelmed by daily life she goes to Old Havana. She grabs her purse and heads off to some of the restored streets that recall Barcelona, where she has two sons who emigrated a decade ago. “I gaze at the bell towers and mansions to make myself believe I am no longer here,” she says, a little melancholic. But immediately she points out with a laugh, “Haven’t you noticed that even the street vendors in that area say ‘popcorn’ instead of ‘rositas de maíz’ and hawk ‘news’ instead of ‘periódicos’?” Many Havanans like her have found, in these newly reconstructed sites, a place for strolling, taking their children, sitting in the shade of a bougainvillea. What was, a few decades ago, a neighborhood in ruins, today is a true island of comfort and beauty, although thousands of its residents still carry water in buckets or live among the timbers propping up their roofs.

The day before yesterday, I went to this other city, cute and touristy with churches everywhere and cobblestone streets. I stayed for a couple of hours in one of its most distinguished sites: the San Francisco convent’s lesser basilica. A vaulted room where musical instruments sound as if they were playing inside our own heads. The place was full and at six on the dot Bach’s concert in E Major for violin and orchestra began to play. Then, the talented musicians of the Havana Chamber Orchestra played Mozart, and, to end, the Simple Symphony of Benjamin Britten. The best part of the evening was the presence of Cuban violinist Evelio Tieles, who had just arrived, full of energy, from Tarragona, Spain where he lives and creates.

When I returned from this journey to another dimension, my Yugoslav-model building seemed uglier and grayer. The shouts of people from the balconies sounded out of tune and instead of eighteenth century towers the view was dominated by the huge cast concrete water tank. I entered the elevator trying to preserve the last notes of the bass and cello, the brilliant baton of the orchestra conductor. I thought of my escapist friend and just then the door opened onto the 13th floor and an illegal vendor shouting “Eggs! Eeeeeeeeeggs!” and I knew I was back, back in my other Havana, so hard, so real, so suffocating.

Her son pulled on her skirt asking for candy, while the guard demanded the ticket from the cash register and someone asked, insistently, for the purse-check ticket. In the midst of all this madness, she made the mistake of not checking her change for the purchase, a little over 6 CUC that had to last until the end of the month. When she got home she discovered that hidden among the coins was one with the face of Che Guevara, who, with his majestic gaze, tried to make himself pass for a one convertible peso coin. The lady ran back to confront the vendor, but no one paid any attention. She’d been ripped off by one of the most common tricks of the hard currency stores: giving her a three Cuban peso coin in place of a shiny CUC, with eight times the value. She had the urge to throw that tiny coin through the window, but her husband recommended she sell it to some tourist to recover the lost money.

Life offers these unpredictable somersaults. The face of Guevara, the former Central Bank president (1960), looks at us now from a coin that is used primarily as a souvenir or as an object of deception. That man who had the irreverence — some will say the disrespect — to sign the national bank notes with his brief nickname, “Che,” is contained within a circle of metal of doubtful value. Trapped in this monetary duality that he never imagined hovering over the chimeric “New Man” of his discourses. All around the hotels, now, one sees the elderly with their poverty-level pensions, showing a foreigner the “merchandise” of these shiny three-peso coins, with a beret and jacket-clad guerilla. Meanwhile, the clever hand of a cashier managed to sneak them into a client’s change, taking advantage of the distraction of a confused customer caught between the demands of her son for candy, and of the doorman who checked her bag.

 

 

I felt a shock on learning that Diana Nyad would make an attempt to swim across the Florida Straits. I recalled the days in 1994, when my neighborhood of San Leopoldo was swarming with people building improvised rafts on which to launch themselves into the sea. I especially remember one group that left, during that period in which the Cuban authorities stopped preventing illegal departures. A craft armed with pieces of wood, plastic tanks serving as floats, the image of the Virgin of Charity, and a patched flag that no longer knew to which nation it belonged. But the most striking thing turned out to be that on that flimsy raft were only the elderly. There was a very black lady with a colorful straw hat, a flowered dress and a smile, thanking in both Spanish and English the boys who helped her to set sail. I never knew if that rickety expedition made it to its destination, if all those seniors disposed to start again got the opportunity.

Seventeen years later, I hear the news that an American wants to try the same route, but this time protected by divers, a pair of kayaks and even a medical team. Her laudable intention was to highlight the closeness between the Island and its neighbor to the north, to help reconcile both shores. But the Straits of Florida is also part of our national cemetery, the graveyard where lie thousands of our compatriots. The omission by the athlete of such an important characteristic did not appeal to me. Nor the fact that with her nautical feat she would highlight the twentieth anniversary of a most exclusive club, the Hemingway Marina, where a Cuban, even today, cannot board a vessel and may not enter — on his own — such a beautiful landing. I would have preferred that the Gulf currents would be swum by someone who knew the pain sheltered in these waters and who would dedicate their gesture to the “unknown rafter” who died in the mouth of so many possible sharks.

When I learned, on Tuesday, that after a 29-hour effort the swimmer was unable to achieve her objective, my superstitions were confirmed. There are certain spaces, I thought, that need more than strokes or sports records to seem less sad. State television said succinctly that “insurmountable obstacles had emerged, among them winds of more than 12 miles per hour.” I can imagine Diana fighting against the waves, the sun gaining strength overheard, the intensely salty sea flowing into her mouth. I am going to go further and fantasize about the inexplicable detail of a straw hat, the colorful sombrero of woman who passed close to her, making her think herself delirious in the middle of the Florida Straits.

 

My cell phone rang just as a stern-looking soldier handed me the forms to apply for an exit permit. The mansion on 17th between J and K streets had been restored: new aluminum and glass windows, retouched paint, and an expanded number of chairs for the long wait. Nothing in this recently retouched institution, yesterday, indicated that they would be easing the restrictions to enter and leave the country. Rather it seemed that the enormous smokestack-free industry of travel restrictions–paying substantial annual dividends in hard currency–would remain in place for many years. I reluctantly took the call, overwhelmed by the bureaucracy that had ground away at me all morning. An almost metallic voice, passed through the circuits of Skype, asked, “Did you hear what Raul Castro said?”

I returned home and listened to the Cuban president’s speech before the National Assembly. Almost at the end, he announced that they were “working to implement an upgrade of the existing immigration policy.” In my hands, however, I now have all the forms to get a travel permit and a passport filled with visas I haven’t been able to use. This coming Thursday I am supposed to leave for the BlogHer event in San Diego, but it is unthinkable that the new flexibility will go through fast enough for me to board the plane in time. Listening to the new Maximum Leader, I was reminded of a friend who said, half jokingly, half serious, “In Cuba not even the widest openings are that open, nor are the closures that closed.” In this case I can’t let go of the skepticism that comes from my own personal experience, with 16 denials of a travel permit in just four years.

For too long, the ability to leave and enter the country has been a method of ideological coercion. Obtaining the “white card” that allows us to leave our insularity, or the “empowerment” to enter our own country, has been conditioned on our being “politically correct.” I do not think, in reality, that the flag will fly at the same height for all. A list of people who may not leave will be kept in some drawer, a scarlet letter marking those who will not benefit from this reform. However, something is moving in the right direction. At least I have hope that when most Cubans are able to travel freely, the forced immobility of others will be more of an embarrassment.

 

“The chocolate is over!” screamed my two friends, as I opened the door that night of July 31, 2006. They were alluding, with their improvised slogan, to the latest plan pushed by Fidel Castro to distribute a chocolate quota to every Cuban through the ration market. When the doorbell rang there were only two hours left before the first of August and Carlos Valenciaga, Fidel’s personal secretary, had already read a proclamation on TV announcing the unexpected illness of the Maximum Leader. The lights at the Council of State remained lit — oddly — and an anomalous silence settled over the city. During that long night, no one could sleep a wink in our house.

As they reached for their second glass of rum, my friends began to count how many times they had planned for that day, predicted that news. He, a singer-songwriter; she, a television producer. Both had been born and grown up under the power of the same president, who had determined even the smallest details of their lives. I listened to them talk and was surprised by their relief, the flood of desires for the future now unleashed. Perhaps they felt more free after that announcement. Time would bring them to understand that while we were chatting about the future, others were ensuring that the package of succession was neatly tied up.

Five years later, the country has been transferred, entirely via blood. Raul Castro has received the inheritance of a nation, its resources, its problems and even its inhabitants. Everything he has done in the last five years stems from the imperative not to lose this family possession, passed on to him by his brother. The slow pace of his reforms, their timidity and superficiality, is marked in part by feeling himself the beneficiary of the patrimony entrusted to him. And what, you wonder, of my friends? When they realized that under the younger brother the repression would continue, that the penalization of opinion would remain intact, they distanced themselves, frightened. Never again did they knock on my door, never again did they enter this place where, in 2006, they had come screaming, believing that the future had begun.

 

It was very early, the circles under the speaker’s eyes could be seen like two dark wounds, and the sun was not yet too punishing in Maximo Gomez Plaza. On soft seats, a small group witnessed live the 26th of July event in Ciego de Avila province. Meanwhile, the rest of those in the Plaza sat on plastic chairs or were simply left standing. From this side of the screen, we few viewers awake at that hour made an effort not to go back to sleep. The event was so boring and so predictable in its structure that at times it seemed like a rebroadcast from the previous year. Not even a spontaneous breeze moved the hair of the attendees. Even the fly on the face of the orator that took a fancy to the camera, looked unreal.

But the greatest monotony came with the words of Jose Ramon Machado Ventura. An hour after having heard them, it was difficult to remember what had been said by this grayest of all vice presidents, the most dogmatic of the orthodox. During the scheduled pauses in the speech someone shouted a slogan which was then repeated by the crowd. The applause heard was also conveniently administered, without unauthorized outbreaks, with no fits and starts. Enormous credentials hung from the necks of those who enjoyed the chairs, giving the lie, with such an excess of paper and plastic, to the calls from the podium for efficiency and putting an end to the bureaucracy.

In a moment that must have been the end, though it could just as well have been a break in the script, Raul Castro left without having directed a single word to the crowd. He rose from his chair and walked away, followed closely by a loyal bodyguard who has more of a role on TV than some ministers. The Plaza quickly began to empty out, as the speaker tried to close with certain slogans that once moved passions. “And this is all that’s left?” I thought, with sorrow for others. With this exhausted choreography they thought to move passions? I turned off the TV in the middle of a phrase and went back to sleep. Outside the sun was warming the balconies, drying up the puddles, revealing the cracks.

Translator’s note: The 26th of July was the date of the failed 1953 attack by Fidel Castro and others on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, and was taken as the name of his movement. It is celebrated annually in Cuba.

 

In memoriam for Pedro Meurice Estiú
Archbishop Emeritus of Santiago de Cuba

They called Archbishop Pedro Meurice Estiu “the lion of the East” for his more-than-proven bravery in the face of the arbitrary and authoritarian. That January 24, 1998, in Antonia Maceo Plaza in Santiago de Cuba, his face is serious, deep in thought. Pope John Paul II has just finished his homily and the Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba was to address his flock and the Shepherd who had come to visit it. Before taking the podium, Meurice spoke with the priest Jose Conrado Rodriguez Alegre and told him, “This lion is old with a shaggy mane, but it will roar.” He took the microphone and kept his word.

Facing the surprised Santiagans gathered there, and those who were watching the live on television, Meurice’s address seems to interpret our thoughts, to spring from our own mouths. “Holy Father… I present to you a growing number of Cubans who have confused the country with a party, the nation with a historical process we have lived through in recent decades, culture with an ideology.” And on this side of the screen, many of us did not stop applauding, crying, jumping, looking at the shocked and annoyed face of Raul Castro at the foot of the dais. No one had told the Minister of the Armed Forces–in public and before so many witnesses–truths of this nature. Some escaped in fear from that immense square, but others? The boldest? They were chanting the word, “Freedom.”

“This is a people that has the richness of joy, and a material poverty that saddens and overwhelms it, barely letting it see beyond immediate subsistence,” the lion continued to roar. And in our lethargic civic consciousness something began to stir. Meurice had returned to his years of greatest vitality and the swords that emerged from the ground of that Plaza flew in the face of a rebelliousness lost in some corner of history. For a few brief moments we were free. The homily ended, the severe gesture of our current president presaged scoldings for the old lion, but the crook of John Paul II would protect him.

Today, Pedro Meurice has left us, with his nobility of the feline guardian of the litter, leaving us with the responsibility to present ourselves to the world. How are we going to describe ourselves now? Who will be believe that 13 years later we haven’t been able to “demystify the false messiahs”? How will we explain the fear that has led to paralysis, to continuing to wait for others who will roar for us?

 

Going to a movie theater to see adult films, buying a beer in some bar, or being hired as an employee, are some of the proofs that we have arrived at the age of majority. When we are fourteen or fifteen years old, every day brings us closer to that legal adulthood we await so anxiously. We approach a milestone that we flaunt in front of friends, while reminding our parents that we are no long so small, that they can no longer treat us like children. But the sensations associated with reaching sixteen are quite distinct from those that overwhelm us when our children reach the age of legal responsibility. It’s exactly then that we realize how physically and mentally immature they are to take on so much responsibility.

I am reflecting on this because my son will reach the age of majority this coming August. He will then be ready–according to the law–to buy alcoholic beverages, to be drafted into the army, or to go to prison. From that moment, nothing he does will be treated by the criminal code as if he were a minor. He could even be called to die or to kill in a war, a not ridiculous option in today’s Cuba. All the teenagers born in the difficult year of 1995 will pass through, in this 2011, the barrier between childhood and adulthood. And I say, without maternal excess, that they are too young, too fragile, to face the burden of being considered adults by a legal system that does not correspond to international norms.

Several weeks ago, the United Nations asked the Cuban authorities to raise the age of majority to 18 years. But there is little hope that such a demand will become fact. Were it to be successful, all the women between 16 and 17 who are selling their bodies to tourists would become minors trapped in child prostitution. And postponing the end of childhood would also deprive the government of a great number of voters–easier to manipulate–in local elections. And, of course, it would temporarily prolong the ascendancy of parents over their children, to the detriment of that of the State over these young citizens.

Now that I am more than twice the age required to exchange the card of a minor for the ID of an adult, I realize they robbed me of a couple of years; that an incorrect legislation placed a responsibility on my shoulders that I did not have the discernment to assume. At that time, I enjoyed it as if it were a letter of freedom, but today I see it as the loss of a legal protection that was my right.

Eliseo Alberto Diego, to his friends simply “Lichi,” talks as if he were writing, narrating the most ordinary stories as if they were literature. I remember some afternoons in his house in Vedado when he would tell us these anecdotes and we couldn’t say, precisely, if they were total inventions or might have some smidgen of reality. Because this big kid full of laughter delights in narrating and narrating. His acquaintances have thus become his receptive “ears” where he has tried out the fiction that later appears in the pages of his books. We set ourselves up, to our infinite pleasure, as the beings on whom he tests and practices–over and over–his work.

Thus, when Lichi the great storyteller told us he needed a kidney transplant, our first thought was that he was trying out another of his poetic tricks. He was, by then, already half Cuban and half Mexican, half poet and half novelist, and now, we suspected, he wanted to boast of being composed of organic material from several people. It seemed, viewed with suspicion, simply his latest invention. But no, he wasn’t talking about a character in the style of those described in “Esther en alguna parte” (Esther Somewhere), or “La eternidad en fin comienza un lunes” (Eternity Finally Begins on Monday), but about himself. His body was writing, for him, the most dramatic of his stories.

I remember that my husband, Reinaldo, offered him one of his kidneys, but Lichi didn’t want to believe him, or wouldn’t allow his friend to face so many battles without one of those organs. Last night we got the news that his body now houses a fragment of a Mexican teenager who died in an accident. The solidarity of a family, the wait–at times not so patient–of the son of the great Eliseo, and the desires of his friends, have combined to begin to give a happy ending to this adventure. Now, when he returns to embellish his stories, we will, inevitably, have to believe him a little more. Because Lichi, the skilled storyteller of our Havana afternoons, has been very close to an experience that only he can tell us.

Razones Ciudadanas Capítulo 7 from Yoani Sanchez on Vimeo.

 

 

News has several lives on this Island. First they hint at something but don’t publish it, then they announce it tersely in some national media, and later its echo repeatedly feeds popular fantasy. This has happened with the recent information about the new flexibility in buying and selling homes. For months–perhaps years–we spun the rumor that a new housing law was about to be approved, that the absurdities of real estate would no longer stand. But only when the Cuban Communist Party Congress addressed it in Guideline No. 297, could we put some hesitant certainty to it. Although late, the measure has sparked an exclamation of relief, but has also revealed our suspicions.

Curiously, most people who bring up the issue, repeatedly put the same question to me. “Can you sell your house before leaving the country?” everyone asks, as if the real estate business was just a step to fulfilling the widespread dream of emigration. Until now, someone who permanently left the country was dispossessed of their property. Only a family member living under the same roof–and for ten years–was able to stay put, but they had to pay the National Institute for Urban Reform the value of the house. Forced evictions of those who didn’t follow this rule became a common sight on the streets of this capital. Now, the great conundrum is whether a property owner will have the power to dispose of their home on the market and use that money to relocate to another latitude. How much time should elapse between this commercial transaction and the departure from the national territory?

We have been conned so much that people prefer to wrap themselves in skepticism and believe that the new selling measures will also be full of restrictions. I am surprisingly optimistic amid so much suspicion. I argue to the doubters, “The government is forced to open up, or the reality will leave them behind,” but they prefer to carry on without illusion. Notwithstanding their distrust, many cherish the idea of offering the walls within which they live in exchange for a ticket and visa to get out of Cuba. Sell and leave, trading a roof here for one there, using their small patrimony to escape. And do this before the real estate flag drops again, before the step back is taken.

For several days, millions of people tried to decipher what happened in the hospital room where Hugo Chavez is resting. Because beyond the resilience of an individual, in that room is defined a part of the road map of this Island and an entire regional project involving several nations. This issue transcends the gravity of a tumor, the lamentable and sad illness of any individual, and becomes a true political upheaval. The surgery performed not only delved into the flesh of the tenant of the Miraflores Palace, but also created a wound through which can be seen the weakness of his work. Right now, in Venezuela, the political chess game is underway, even to the point of analyzing options for succession. In Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution the deliberations are also intense.

For the Cuban government, the healthy existence of Hugo Chavez has emerged as a guarantee for economic reforms at a rhythm and velocity that won’t lead to a loss of control. The 100 thousand barrels of oil that arrive daily from that South American nation sustain the process of “perfecting” the system driven by Raul Castro, and allow him to buy time in the face of citizen discontent and international pressure. Thus, to care for Chavez is to preserve the presidential seat, to lose him could hasten Raul’s own downfall. In recent weeks the island hierarchy has felt, once again, the vertigo of the abyss into which we sunk following the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, and it intuits that it could not survive the loss of another powerful ally. The vitality of the caudillo is also a guarantee of its own future, his weakness threatens a rapid loss of support.

We are also present at an authentic lesson of the inconstancy of the politics of the individual, hopefully one that will spark a rethinking among those committed to the vertical structure of Chavez’s rule. Without the incendiary speaker of international forums, without the leader who launches almost weekly verbal attacks, the region suddenly seems more contemplative, more centered. It is as if, in a plural chorus, the voice of the overpowering baritone, drowning out all other tones, had suddenly left the stage. We must not discount, however, that the speeches under the hot sun will return, the long perorations to demonstrate he is fully recovered, the hours in front of the camera on his Hello Mr. President show to prove that he is healthy. Hugo Chavez wants to get back into the role of an invincible figure, but inevitably something has happened to him. Something not foreseen by the opposition, or by the Cuban advisors surrounding him, or by the apologists who spread his ideas. Something related to the easily broken composition of a human being, a small detail of his anatomy that refuses to continue going along with his so pompous campaigns.

Today, the Paseo del Prado runs between the historic town full of tourists and that other part of the overpopulated and dysfunctional city that is Central Havana. The lion sculptures on each corner show the nobility of old, the former dream of grandeur that caressed the nation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although the park lived through times of outright neglect–perhaps for having been conceived and built during the Republic–some years ago the Prado underwent a process of restoration that improved the tree cover and repaired some lampposts. But not even in the most neglected times did its bronze felines cease to be an obligatory reference for those who came from the provinces and wanted to bring back a photo of their stay in the capital. Perhaps it is precisely this history of splendor and neglect that has made the Paseo del Prado the chosen site to celebrate Gay Pride Day in Cuba. A community degraded, for decades trapped between a machismo culture and the repressive politics of the State, wants to take to the streets on June 28 at three in the afternoon. The call has been launched by an alternative group that protects the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

It’s worth noting that in recent years Cuba has advanced with respect to differences in sexual orientation, but from there to permitting the Cuban LGBT community to spontaneously join together and take to the streets to celebrate its diversity is a long stretch. Until now, the campaigns to accept plurality in the choice of whom to love have been kept within the hands of official institutions, without letting those whose interests are represented represent themselves. This, of course, characterizes the broad inability of free association suffered by our society at all levels.

In a gesture of celebration and joy, the promoters of the Gay Pride Day celebration have spread the invitation for weeks. Having chosen the Paseo del Prado as a site for the event benefits and protects them, because the tourists with their restless cameras, curious children frolicking on all sides, the unsuspecting lovebirds embracing on the benches, will be witnesses to this parade of diversity. And the lions, ah, the lions! They will have their moment of glory once again, among brightly colored flags, streamers, and handshakes. The claws and manes cast in the bronze of a past war will seem less aggressive, with a lower dose of testosterone, and with a bit more of the sparkle of life.

 

 

Nine in the morning outside Combinado del Este, the largest prison in Cuba. Dozens of families are gathered to listen to an stern guard shouting out the names of the prisoners. Immediately, they order us down a narrow stretch to the sentry box where they search our bags and run a metal detector over our bodies. They also inspect the sacks of food the families have been filling for weeks with crackers, sugar, powdered soft drinks, cigarettes and powdered milk. They are the result of the unselfish efforts of the families who deprive themselves of these foods to bring them to the prisoners.

One woman cries because the guard won’t let her bring in the ripe mangoes she brought for her son. People hang along the fence around the entrance without any protection, all those not allowed to enter. There is a bag with a mobile phone, a young woman’s wallet, some deodorant that the official says could be made into moonshine within those walls. Me, they search the magazines I carry, give a pull on the zipper of my jacket, and run their fingers through my hair. Ahead of me there is someone trying to bring in a cake for a birthday that surely happened months ago. A young man grips his pants because they won’t allow his belt inside. It would appear we are plunging into hell and–in some ways–it’s true.

The place where we spend the visit smells of sweat, sweat and enclosure. The two Italian prisoners in front of me desperately put words one after the other. They have been arrested for the murder of a minor in Bayamo, but assure me that they hadn’t been on the Island on the days of the crime. They’ve spent more than a year in prison without trial and I try to reconstruct, journalistically, the course of the case. One of them Simone Pini, talks to me about police irregularities and and I agree to investigate. “I can’t do much,” I tell him, “nor do I have access to the investigation record, but I will find out.” I haven’t finished my sentence when a guard shouts my name through the bars of the room. And leads me to the other side of Combinado del Este. To the immaculate, air-conditioned and wood-paneled office where the Chief sits, located in a different part of the same horror. Meanwhile, a lieutenant colonel warns me that they will never ever let me enter this prison again. When I try to leave, I note that the door has a lock with four combinations. “So much fear…” I think to myself. They escort me to the exit and I see a line of family members for the next visit that starts at noon. They carry sacks scrawled with names, and someone groans because they won’t let him bring in a present. I discover in this moment that something sad has established itself in me, like the weight of the bars which, since then, I carry everywhere.

 

June is the month when students finally launch themselves on their books, serious scholars review their notes, and we parents jeopardize our wallets to pay for private tutors. For years, the existence of these informal teachers has been undervalued when taking stock of Cuban education, but those of us with children in the middle grades know well their importance. Right now, if a teenager doesn’t receive extracurricular attention from a private tutor he has few chances — or none — of being accepted into college. Teaching — paradoxically — has been privatized, but without public acknowledgement.

Demand is so high that in these last weeks of classes the houses of freelance professors are packed. The cost of one hour’s review varies between 20 and 25 Cuban pesos, one-tenth of the average monthly salary. Attending the classes compensates for the incredibly low level of secondary and high school educators, especially in the subjects of mathematics, physics, chemistry and grammar. But it also must be said that there are many high school students who want to cram in the last minute all the content they paid no attention to in more than ten months of classes. The material and conceptual impoverishment, excessive ideological indoctrination, and the lack of seriousness during the school day, take their toll during final exams, and thousands of parents are willing to pay rather than accept failure.

The reality makes a mockery of the slogans. Those who have resources can provide their progeny with additional teachers; those who don’t, will have to settle for a frame on the wall with just a 9th grade diploma. Lately, in the living room of any apartment, you see fingers writing as fast as possible, taking notes like nobody’s business, total silence and a great show of interest. These are the students with their private tutors, the extra teaching support without which they can’t go very far. They know that each of these classes is a sacrifice for the whole family, so they absorb the words, the digits, the theorems. They will, without a doubt, take one more step toward the starting line, with an additional advantage over those who never had a private tutor.

 

Presentación de mi libro “Un blog para hablar al mundo” from Yoani Sanchez on Vimeo.

Presentation of my book, “A Blog to Speak to the World.”

They came with their trucks, a grader and even a new machine for recycling asphalt. They worked all morning before the astonished eyes of neighbors who, for over twenty years, have seen their street deteriorate without repair. For the most skeptical, there was also a dash of hope with the pavement was as smooth as glass, and then another brigade appeared. This itself was unprecedented. Instead of leaving the manhole covers below the tar–as in the past–the new group of workers dismantled them and placed them even with the ground. No one could believe what was happening. This “new mentality” some said, boasting of the already noted changes in the way things are done, was palpable.

To warn motorists of the fresh cement bordering the storm drains, they left a pile of rubble around them. “You’ll see, they’ll come back to remove it,” said the optimists. But there it stays. The passage of tired was spreading the stones all over the street, pressing them into the still-soft asphalt. The remains of the reconstruction were collecting in the grating of the drains, accumulating in the gutters. Two weeks later they were still spreading their dusty presences, and creating mounds here and holes there, spoiling the finish. “Ahh, this mentality!” the dreamers corrected themselves, immediately adding, “Instead of changing how they do things they dress it up, but it’s the same mentality as ever.”

 

For a long time the only way to get one’s hands on that gadget called a microphone was to pass through many ideological filters. Given that same paranoia, to this day few programs on our national channel are broadcast live, so that no one can deliver–to the eyes of the viewers–opinions contrary to the system. And although in recent months criticism has been timidly allowed to pass in the official media, the doors remain closed to those who do not agree with the official discourse. Hence, we have had to find other microphones, other sets, other cameras. Improvised and less professional, yes, but indisputably more free than those of the studios at 23rd and L, at Mason and San Miguel, or at the provincial broadcast centers.

From the terrace of a house, with a sheet hung as a curtain and lights borrowed from a musician, one can make films without the boring triumphalism of the Roundtable show. One example of these new spaces that are emerging is the SATS project, where “art and thought come together,” directed by Antonio Rodiles. In a broad framework for debate, guests expound on a theme and then, later, respond to questions from the public. They analyze, equally, the trajectory of a hip hop musician, the work program of an outlawed legal association, or civil society from the viewpoint of a doctor of philosophy. Afterward, each day’s filming is distributed by the same alternative networks within which blogs, films, documentaries and opinions circulate.

Still missing, it’s true, from these space of SATS and also Citizens’ Reasons, is the presence of the “other.” Of those who defend the official versions of events and who are willing to come together with us and say so in front of a camera. But however much invitations have been extended to these people from State institutions, calling on them to debate and present their arguments, they prefer not to bestow on us the belligerence of their presence. I remain hopeful, however, that one day they will arrive. Sooner rather than later they will come, perhaps before they offer us their own spaces and allow us to speak from “their” microphones.

 

The branches bend under the weight and children throw stones and shake the limbs trying to knock down the fruit. It’s mango season. Like a cycle of life that transcends the crisis, the lack of vision, and the failed agricultural plans, the mangoes come again, the filipinos and bizcochuelos. We are at exactly the moment when the most humble courtyard in a forgotten hamlet can compare itself with a meticulously tended garden in Miramar. It is enough that the old mango tree planted by the grandparents is bearing fruit for the whole family to begin to revolve around it.

Right now, while cutting some mangoes given to us by Augustine, I think of how my life is marked by the memories associated with this smell and texture. The little ones, preserved in syrup, that we ate during my vacations in the village of Rodas, the green tart ones that we salted at the schools in the countryside, and those others that we stole–driven by hunger–from the Experimental Farm in the municipality of Guira during the dark days of the Special Period. And after one bite, the strings caught between my teeth, the juice dripped down my chin and dirtied my clothes, I sucked the seed until it was white, and threw the rind on the floor where it was as slippery as a banana peel.

Mangoes evoke every stage of my existence, each one of the periods we have gone through lately on this Island. I remember the free market known as Central–in the years of the Soviet subsidies–where I first tried Taoro brand mango nectar. Then came the process of “rectifying errors and negative tendencies,” with its sweeping away of the petty bourgeoisie; and when Taoro nectar reappeared ten years later it was sold only in convertible currency.

This fruit has the merit of having proved its incredible resistance to State farms, to the blunders that absorbed thousands of acres of land, like the 10 Million Ton Sugar Harvest, the plan to grow microjet bananas, and even the unwanted advances of the marabou weed. The stubborn mango is still here, marking our lives with its flavor, making any poor yard a haven of prosperity, at least as long as summer lasts.

 

 

As a child whenever I heard the name of Perico*, a town in Matanzas Province, I ended up with a pain in my stomach from laughing so hard. Until I learned that a part of my father’s family was from that area and the joke didn’t seem so funny to me any more. Last Saturday I was invited to go back and see its dusty embankment and dilapidated train station once again, but the departure of my sister left me paralyzed here on the fourteenth floor, not wanting to go anywhere. I very much regret not going, because twelve of the ex-prisoners of the Black Spring were waiting for us there, hosted by a good-natured hard-working peasant named Diosdado Gonzalez, who offered his home and his table for this important meeting.

Initially it was to be a get together to strengthen friendships, meet each others’ families, share of piece of that more than seven years the Cuban government had seized from them. However, Guillermo Fariñas’ decision to begin a hunger strike, totally changed the tenor of the day. The idea of relaxation was transformed into concern and the stools that were meant to support the festivities bore, instead, the weight of their worries. In brief and between sips of coffee–refilled from time to time by Alejandrina–the reunion became a civic staff council, where rather than maneuver plastic soldiers on a war map, they rearranged ideas on an historic statement.

Afterward, Pedro Argüelles read over the phone to me the approved text of that day, and once again I regretted not having been there. Among their demands, the signatories called for a serious investigation into the cause of death of Juan Wilfredo Soto. Also they call for avoiding the death of Fariñas and–in my judgment the most difficult to achieve–the cessation of repression and acts of repudiation against opposition activists. But this time the ears of power seem more reluctant to listen than they were a year ago. My fear, also, is that the body of the Sakharov 2010 Prize winner will not survive another prolonged fast. Hopefully life will surprise me and something will be done, and Perico will cease to be a village with a delightful name and become the place where words, civic conscience, and unity won over a stubborn and long-standing authoritarianism.

El Roque, Perico, Matanzas
Saturday, June 4, 2011

DOCUMENT OF DEMAND TO THE CUBAN GOVERNMENT

Given the high centralization of power and decisions in our country, we hold the Cuban president, Army General Raul Castro Ruz, responsible for meeting the three related demands as follows:

1. To allow an international multidisciplinary team, immediately, to exhume and examine the corpse of peaceful activist Wilfredo Soto Juan Garcia and impartially rule on the actual causes of death. This would help all parties.

2. To prevent the imminent death of the peaceful activist and Nobel Andrei Sakharov prize winner, Guillermo Fariñas Hernández, from the hunger strike he is undertaking.

3. To cease the repression, beatings, acts of repudiation and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment against peaceful pro-democracy and Cuban society activists.

In expectation of an appropriate response, according to current circumstances, the undersigned endorse this document:

Pedro Argüelles Morán
Eduardo Díaz Fleitas
Iván Hernández Carrillo
Librado Linares García
Angel J. Moya Acosta
Guido Sigler Amaya
Oscar Elías Bicet González
Diosdado González Marrero
Arnaldo Ramos Lausurique
Hector M. Maceda Gutiérrez
Félix Navarro Rodríguez
José Daniel Ferrer García

The original of this document was delivered to the Ministry of Justice of Cuba on June 6, 2011.

*Translator’s note: “Perico” means “parakeet” but is also a slang for people who are very humorous and tell a lot of jokes.

Emigration has taken my friends, my childhood acquaintances, neighbors from the place where I was born, and people I greeted once or twice in the street. One day it grabbed my paternal uncles, cousins, classmates with whom I shared the joy of graduation, and even the shy mailman who brought me the paper once a week. And, as if still unsatisfied, now it has come back for more, taking also the part closest to me, the most intimate of my life.

I remember when my sister told me she’d entered her name into an international visa lottery. Yunia was always very lucky in games of chance, so I knew what to expect from the outset. My mother tells of the day she gave birth to her, the doctors and nurses crossed themselves seeing a baby emerge from the womb with its amniotic sac almost intact.

“You came into the world in a bag,” they told her, as if this guaranteed prosperity, love, happiness. Hence, this Island seemed too narrow to contain the good fortune of my older sister. And more than twenty years ago she reached the same conclusion as the majority of my compatriots: How can one set down roots in a country where so few can bear fruit? I didn’t even try to convince her, I just watched her in a blur of paperwork here, a line waiting for permission there, meanwhile knowing that the moment of parting was near.

Finally, on Friday, her plane took off, taking also my only niece, my brother-in-law, and a little stray dog they could not abandon. My mother cried the day before, “I’m not ready! I’m not ready!” while my father hid the tears of one for whom “a man who is a man doesn’t cry.”

Nothing prepared you for the separation, Mami, for knowing that the ones you love are only ninety miles away but in an abyss of immigration restrictions.

You are right to mourn, Papi, because this distance should not be so definitive, so harrowing, so conclusive.

 

 

It’s been almost two years since I’ve been seen at a hospital. The last time was in that November of beatings and kidnapping when my lower back was in very bad shape. I learned a hard lesson on that occasion: given the choice between the Hippocratic oath and ideological fidelity, many physicians prefer to violate the privacy of their patients–often compared to the secrets of the confessional–rather than to oppose, with the truth, the State that employs them. The examples of this pouring forth on official television in recent months have strengthened my lack of confidence in the Cuban public health system. So I am healing myself with plants that grow on my balcony, I exercise every day to avoid getting sick, and I’ve even bought myself a Vademécum–a Physician’s Desk Reference–should I need to self-prescribe at some point. But despite my “medical revolt,” I haven’t failed to observe and investigate the growing deterioration of this sector.

Among the recent hospital cuts, the most notable have to do with resources for diagnostics. The doctors receive greatly reduced allocations for X-rays, ultrasounds and MRIs which they must distribute among their patients. Anecdotes about fractures that are set without first being X-rayed, or abdominal pains that become complicated because they can’t do a scan, are so common we’re no longer surprised. Such a situation is also vulnerable to patronage, where those who can offer a gift, or surreptitiously pay, obtain better medical care than do others. The cheese given to the nurse and the indispensable hand soap that many offer the dentist noticeably accelerate treatment and complement the undervalued salaries of those medical professionals.

A thermometer is an object long-missing from the shelves of pharmacies operating in local currency, while the hard currency stores have the most modern digital models. Getting a pair of glasses to alleviate near-sightedness can take months through subsidized State channels, or twenty-four hours at Miramar Optical where you pay in convertible pesos. Nor do the bodies who staff the hospitals escape these contrasts: we can consult the most competent neurosurgeon in the entire Caribbean region, but he doesn’t have even an aspirin to give us. These are the chiaroscuros that make us sick, and exhaust patients, their families, and the medical personnel themselves. And that leave us feeling defrauded by a conquest–long brandished before our faces–that has crumbled, and they won’t even let us complain about it.

 

I could barely sleep last night. A book left me tossing and turning, staring at the ceiling grid in my bedroom. “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” the novel by Leonardo Padura, shaken by his sincerity, by the corrosive acid he throws on the evasive Utopia they wanted to impose on us. No one can remain calm after reading of the horrors of a Soviet Union we were made to venerate as children. The intrigues, purges, assassinations, forced exiles, even though read in the third person, would rob anyone of their sleep. And if, on top of this, we watched our parents believe that the Kremlin was the guidebook for the world proletariat, and knew that the president of our country, until recently, kept a photo of Stalin in his own office, then the insomnia becomes more persistent.

Of all the books published on this Island, I dare say that none has been as devastating as this one to the pillars of the system. Perhaps that’s why they only distributed 300 copies at the Havana Book Fair, of which barely 100 reached the hands of the public. It’s hard, at this point, to censor a work that has seen the light of day from a foreign publisher and whose author is still living on his dusty road in Mantilla. Because of the visibility he’s achieved beyond the Island, and because it is nearly impossible to keep subtracting names from the national culture without its becoming sparsely populated, we readers were lucky enough to get to peek at his pages. Trotsky’s assassin is revealed in them as a man trapped by the obedience of the militant, one who believed everything his superiors told him. A story that touches us very closely and not just because our country served as a refuge for Ramón Mercader in the last years of his life.

Padura puts in the mouth of his narrator that his was the generation “of the gullible, of those who romanticized and accepted and justified everything with eyes focused on the future.” Our generation, however, was bitterly touched by the frustration of our parents, seeing how little they’d achieved, those who once went on literacy campaigns, who gave their best years, projecting for their children a society with opportunities for all. No one emerges unscathed by this, there is no social chemistry that holds up before such a stubborn reality. The long night tossing and turning gave me time to think, not only about the garbage swept under a doctrinaire carpet, but also about how many of these methods are still being applied to us and how deeply Stalinism was instilled in our lives.

There are books–they warn us–that open our eyes, such that we can never again sleep in peace.

You come out of this filth of the starving …
Joan Manuel Serrat, from his song “Princess”

She was raised to succeed. As a little girl, her mother took the fried egg of her own plate, if need be, to give it to her, because she was a promise which the whole family was hanging from. They didn’t even let her scrub, so that her hands would not crack and harden from the scouring pad and the soot. When she combed her hair into ringlets her elder sister predicted she would one day marry a Frenchman or a Spaniard or a Belgian, someone from the “nobility” of monarchy or business. “Everyone will love you!” cried her grandmother, whose fingers were twisted with arthritis from half a century of washing and ironing for the whole street. They wouldn’t even let her have a boyfriend in the neighborhood, because she had to be preserved for the future that awaited her, for the potentate who would come and take her from that crowded tenement in Zanja Street, from that crowded country in the Caribbean.

One day, when she was barely out of adolescence, she found him. He was much older and didn’t belong to any wealthy family, but he had an Italian passport. Nor did she like him physically, but simply imagining him in Milan made his bulging beer belly look not so big. The aroma of the new clothes he brought every time he came to Havana also covered the smell of nicotine and alcohol that always came from his mouth. At home, her family was delighted. “The child is leaving us to live in Europe,” they told the neighbors, and her own mother cut her off when she tried to explain that her fiancé that occasionally became violent and beat her. And so they pushed her to complete the legal paperwork and make the marriage official. In the wedding photos she looked like a sad princess, but a princess.

When the plane landed in the Italian winter, he no longer seemed like the kind man who, 24 hours earlier, had promised her mother that he would take care of her. He took her to a club that same night where she had to work serving clients liquor, and even her own body. For months she wrote her grandmother about the perfumes and food she had tried in her new life. She recreated, in her letters and phone calls, a reality very different from what she was living. Not a word of extortion, nor of the husband who had evaporated leaving her in the hands of a “boss” whom she had to obey. In the Havana tenement they had all spoiled her and made her happy and she didn’t want to disappoint them. When the Italian police dismantled the prostitution ring in which she was trapped, she sent a brief text message to her relatives on the other side of the Atlantic, so they wouldn’t worry, “I won’t be able to call you for several weeks. I’m going on vacation to Venice to celebrate my wedding anniversary. I love you all, your Princess.”

 

 

I was eight months pregnant when I met two Basque radicals living in Cuba, Rosa and Carlos, or at least that’s what they called themselves then. They invited us to their Miramar mansion for a party with troubadours and chorizos. They had some sources for Serrano ham and dried fruit, foods we only knew of from the movies. But not even the aromas and flavors could dispel our rising doubts as we observed them. How did these people manage to live in a such a place, with a car with private plates and such a well-stocked pantry? What had they done to access privileges unthinkable for nationals?

My son was born a month later, the Serrano ham didn’t reappear in my life for many years and a decade later I ran into Carlos in the street. I called him by name but he didn’t answer. He jumped as fast as he could into a car and lost himself in the bustle of Avenue Reina. Of Rosa, I knew that she had moved and was now introducing herself as Daniela. Her new facade was distributing tour packages. But, as happens in Havana, stories were rife, gossip circulated, secrets made the rounds, and I learned that they were wanted by Spanish justice and the mansion to which they’d been assigned functioned as an official guest house. The two of them could not return–under their real identities–to Spain.

Nonetheless, their pampered refuge came to an end. Today their hosts have become their jailers. The same government that one day sheltered and provided them resources has refused, for months now, to falsify new passports so they can go to France or some other place. I don’t know under what new names Rosa and Carlos are known, where they are living, or how many of their previous privileges they have now lost. I imagine they have ended up confined to this Island, distrustful of those around them, cursing their fellow travelers who gave them shelter, those “generous” protectors of earlier days, who ended up imprisoning them here.

 

We are experiencing another turn of the screw of intolerance. Just when individual daring is gaining ground here and there, the times of admonishment come along. The first signs appeared with the TV serial called “Cuba’s Reasons,” whose script seems to have been written in Stalin’s Russia rather than on this 21st Century Caribbean island. Then came the “rapid repudiation rallies,” increased police operations, monitoring cellphones in real time, detentions and searches. All this while the official press continues to say that “the improvement of the economic model” is well underway and that the Cuban Communist Party’s Sixth Congress “has been a resounding success.” We, meanwhile, face the shock of the correctives; no boldness is left without its everlasting punishment.

Among the lashes applied by Daddy State this time, is the closure of the cultural center run by the painter Pedro Pablo Oliva, located in the city of Pinar del Rio. Urgently called before the local authorities, this artist, winner of the National Arts Award, fell under a barrage of criticisms and reprimands. He was questioned about having declared in an interview that he was in favor of a multiparty system, and about having sent a most cordial letter to this writer to publish in her blog. He was also accused of opening the doors of his house to counterrevolutionaries, and even hobnobbing with diplomats from other countries. He was stripped of his position in the Provincial Assembly of People’s Power and a few hours later a farewell poster appeared in the door of his workshop.

The artists from the Writers and Artists Union of Cuba (UNEAC) have chosen, so far, to remain silent and look the other way. Like the little figures with empty eye sockets and forebodings that take Oliva months to paint on his canvases. I maintain that now is the time to support him, to say, “Relax, your brush will be more free without these ideological ties, without these partisan formalities.” It is also a good occasion for those of us sanctioned by insult, censorship and surveillance to do something. If we haven’t converged in our opinions and proposals for the future, at least we can articulate the pain, drawing closer because the blow received by one is felt by all.

Razones Ciudadanas 5 from Yoani Sanchez on Vimeo.

Chapter 5 of the program Citizens’ Reasons, this time dedicated to the alternative Cuban blogosphere. The debate centers around the evolution, characteristics and future projections for this citizens’ phenomenon. Among the guests in the studio are Claudia Cadelo, Yoani Sánchez, Orlando Luís Pardo, Luis Felipe Rojas and as moderator. There are also brief appearances from more than 15 alternative bloggers.

 

This year we have not been able to bathe, even in the first downpour of May. In Havana, the drought has robbed us of this rain that popular tradition associates with good luck. The mangoes hanging from the branches seem to await the coming of a shower to ready themselves for our mouths. The striations in the dirt, the barely flowering buds of the flame trees, and this sticky dust that fills the air will only leave when it begins to pour. Where is the drizzle on the windowpane, the smell of the humidity, the droplets left on the leaves after a storm!

But the worst thing is the loneliness of the pipes, the strained trickle that comes from the taps, area residents carrying water in buckets because the aqueduct has almost no reserves left to pump. Faces covered in sweat, stinking shirts, nearly empty clotheslines because the precious liquid is not enough. Don’t spend too long in the bathroom! Reinaldo shouts, so that the tank on our balcony won’t run dry. Meanwhile, the building’s cistern becomes a sad puddle, and the hosepipes hover above its minimal limits.

And on top of such dryness, is the belief that this year’s agricultural output may be worst than last year’s, if the rain holds off once and for all. We’ll see the headlines in the press saying banana production is down, rice hasn’t withstood the drought, and fruit trees have been hit the hardest. And this feeling that there is always something missing for a full plate and that our salaries don’t stretch far enough. Whether from poor management, the lack of material incentives for the farmers, or the stubborn rain that, today, obstinately denies us its favors.

Long ago I read that the acid test of a poet was to write a sonnet. The straitjacket of meter and cadence of its composition drew out the worst and best of whomever had already tried their hand in battle with assonant rhymes. I confess that with my irreverent seventeen years it seemed that those hendecasyllables, grouped in two quartets and two triplets, were only for those who had not been able to prove themselves in the freedom of modern poetry. Displays of novelty that I flaunted until I read Francisco de Quevedo, and the theory of rejecting the combination of “cuidado” and “enamorado” blew me away.

Well, I have to tell you that, like a sonnet, there is nothing harder to write than a technical manual. I know, you’ll laugh, and say that anyone can manage to produce a leaflet for a medication or explain how to use a washing machine. Try it and see if you can, experiment and you’ll see how difficult it is to create an instruction booklet that isn’t full of the same boring and graceless prose of so many others. You’ll realize, then, how hard it is to avoid sounding dully didactic or petulantly professorial, to avoid boring your readers to death.

I am telling you this because I just finished a manual about WordPress with the title, “A Blog to Speak to the World.” When reviewing the more than four hundred pages I composed, I wondered how I found–in this unstable Cuba–the time, the peace and the skill to finish this book. Some friends tell me I’ve been sidetracked into a minor genre… and that makes me laugh. I fact–I reveal to them–I have just composed my own delicate sonnet, with twenty chapters that are like fourteen lines and some technical advice instead of declarations of love. My book, in one of life’s coincidences, will be presented in Madrid this coming May 21, the birthday of the poet with the round pince-nez and the aquiline nose. The same insolent who wrote, “my flame can swim frigid water and will flaunt so cruel a law,” as if instead of eternal romance he was relating the act of managing a blog from a country drowning in censorship.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image taken from: www.penultimosdias.com

Today I was going to publish a text about Mother’s Day, a brief vignette where I would tell of my mother, her hands smelling of onions, garlic and cumin… from all the time she spends in the kitchen. I had the idea of telling you of the pleasure it gave me to see her come to the door of my high school in the countryside, bringing the food that had cost her an entire week–and great effort–to get. But just as I put the finishing touched on my little material chronicle, Juan Wilfredo Soto died in Santa Clara and it all became senseless.

The police batons are thirsty for backs in these parts. The growing violence of those in uniform is something that is whispered about and many describe it detail without daring to publicly denounce it. Those of us who have ever been in dungeon know well that the sweetened propaganda of “Police, police, you are my friend,” repeated on TV, is one thing, and the impunity enjoyed by these individuals with a badge is another thing entirely. If, on top of that, those arrested have ideas that differ from the prevailing ideology, then their treatment will be even harsher. Fists want to convince them where meager arguments can’t succeed.

I don’t know how the authorities of my country are going to explain it, but I doubt, this time, they will manage to persuade us it wasn’t the fault of the police. There is no way to understand how an unarmed man sitting in a downtown park could represent a major threat. What happens is that when intolerance is given free rein it feeds public disrespect and gives a green light to the police, and these tragedies occur. As of today, a mother in Santa Clara is not sitting at the table prepared by her children, but in a dark room at a funeral home, keeping vigil over the body of her son.

 

Razones ciudadanas 4 from Yoani Sanchez on Vimeo.

The furrow extends to infinity before our eyes. We would not, that day either, complete our quota, but who cared? At that school in the countryside we engaged in an exercise widely practiced throughout the country: pretending to work. When the teachers were watching we bent our backs and feigned pulling up the weeds that surrounded the spindly tobacco plants. If they left, we returned to the horizontal position to talk about our principal adolescent obsession which–surprise!–was not sex, but food.

That morning, the irrigation machine was standing in the middle of the field and looked like a wide-winged albatross stuck under the sun. My friends and I climbed into the empty cab and touched the lever, the buttons, the steering mechanism. We jumped on the patched seat and fantasized that we could “take a walk” with this piece of screeching metal and soak all the students with its hose. We laughed in anticipation but not a single drop came from the long hoses extending on either side. However, while snooping here and there we came across a can with some rare fruits. They were shaped like a pepper, but the color ranged from yellow to a deep orange and a seed hung from each one. Urban youth, trapped between the scarcities of rationing and the collapse of agriculture, there was no way we knew that this was a “cashew.”

We sunk our teeth into them immediately. Sweet and soft but later, when our mouths started to dry up, we thought we’d been poisoned. Horrified, we ran screaming. The teacher’s laughter lasted long minutes. When the astringent sensation passed, we were left with the desire to again bite that texture already captured in peasants’ songs, mentioned by our grandparents and painted by brushes of the previous century. I was impressed with that fruit prohibited by our socialist paradise. Almost twenty years would pass before I would encounter it again.

She has a five-bedroom house that is falling to pieces. She got it in the seventies when the family for whom she worked as a maid went into exile. At first she went through all the rooms each day, the interior patio, caressed the marble banister of the stairs to the second floor, played at filling the basins of the three bathrooms just to be reminded that this neoclassical mansion was now hers. The joy lasted for a while, until the first bulbs burned out, the paint started to peel, and weeds grew in the garden. She got a job cleaning a school, but not even six salaries for such a job would have been enough to maintain the ancient splendor of this house that seemed increasingly larger and more inhospitable.

Thousands of times, the woman in this story thought of selling the house inherited from her former employers, but she would not do anything outside the law. For decades in Cuba a market in housing was prohibited and it was only possible to exchange properties through a concept popularly known as a “swap.” Dozens of decrees, restrictions and limitations also arose, to regulate and control this activity, making moving an ordeal. An all-powerful Housing Institute oversaw the completion of a string of absurd conditions. With so many requirements, the procedures were strung out over more than a year, such that before families could go live in their new homes they were exhausted from filling out forms, hiring lawyers and bribing inspectors.

Such anxieties raised hopes that the Sixth Communist Party Congress would raise the flag for real estate. When, in the final report, it said that the purchase and sale of homes would be accepted and all that remained was to legally implement it, hundreds of thousands of Cubans breathed a sigh of relief. The lady with the mansion, at the moment it was announced, was sitting in front of her television avoiding a drip falling from the ceiling right in the middle of the living room. She looked around at the columns with decorated capitals, the huge mahogany doors, and the marble staircase from which the banister had been torn out and sold. Finally she could hang a sign on the fence, “For Sale: Five-bedroom house in urgent need of repairs. Wish to buy a one-bedroom apartment in some other neighborhood.”

They travel in groups around Havana neighborhoods. Hundreds of Chinese students who learn Spanish in Cuba and add color to a reality where other foreigners barely stay a couple weeks as tourists. Thanks to them, the city once again has those Asian eyes that were so common in the first half of the twentieth century, that Asian gait which gives the impression of feet barely touching the ground, has returned, for a time. They crowd around Chinatown, giggling in front of some restaurants with paper lanterns and red curtains where the menu offers more local and Italian food than plates of spinach and noodles.

One morning, I met several of them lost near the Central Rail Station. They had empty bags, tired faces, and walked slowly. One of the girls asked me, after consulting a small dictionary, where they could buy lettuce. It was one of those hot months where the only green on the market pallets is cucumbers. But there they were, waiting for the agricultural miracle that would put some soft leaves on their plates. I explained that the sun was very strong and the vegetables were harvested just in roofed areas, that the lack of packaging hampered their arrival in the cities, and when they appeared it was at very high prices.

After a few minutes, those almond-shaped eyes rounded in consequence of my strange explanation. “Lettuce! Lettuce!” they insisted, and one of them translated it into every language he knew, “lettuce, laitue, Kopfsalat, alphas ….” I smiled, it’s not about not understanding the word, I said, it’s that I don’t know where, right now, where they could find vegetables to eat. It was clear, they didn’t believe me. “Go to Four Roads Plaza and see if you can find them there,” was the final thing I thought to tell them, so as not to kill hope. And off they went in that direction, their steps already exhausted, empty bags blowing in the wind, with their oriental elegance faded somewhat, lacking vegetables to revive them.

“To the warm shelter of 214…” began a song by Silvio Rodriguez which — in my adolescent naivete — I listened to as if it were a riddle. So it was until a friend, who’d lived a little more than I had, unblushingly clarified the phrase. It was simply the address of a well-known Havana motel, where couples could find a place for quick love in a country already gripped by housing limitations. Waiting outside those places were women who covered their faces with scarves and sunglasses, while the men paid the desk clerk and got the key to the room. An insistent knock on the door would warn them that their time was over and others were waiting to enter.

Havana’s inns, scenes of so many infidelities, sudden passions, and even innumerable passions that led to formal matrimony with several children. These places, once flourishing, faced a long period of stigma and then a precipitous decline. They passed from sites of ardor to become cramped housing for victims of building collapses. Put like that, it sounds fair: substituting necessity for pleasure, the rapture of the flesh for the pressing needs of a family. One after the other, the city’s motels were closed to the public and their small rooms were taken up by people who lost their homes to the winds of a hurricane or the ravages of a fire. Informal love began to move to the bushes, dark corners, or, quietly, to the same room where Grandma was sleeping. Those with hard currency could, in turn, seek out private homes that rented rooms for 5 convertible pesos for several hours.

Now, passing through Fraternity Park late at night, it’s not uncommon to hear to a groan in the shadows, the muffled sound of clothes rubbing against each other. The majority of people my age and younger have never had their own roof under which to caress their partner, or a private bed where they can lie wrapped in each other’s arms. People who haven’t known what it is to live in a city where there are motels with neon signs and tiny rooms where you can make love for at least an hour. Nor do they understand the song — outdated now — of that singer-songwriter, and names such as Hotel Venus, 11th and 24th, The Countryside, or Ayestaran Cottages do not awaken any pleasant memories.

The capitol, rum, salsa music played on street corners, cars that look like collector’s pieces although under the hood they are falling to pieces. This and more in the chapter, “Spaniards in the World,” filmed here in Havana. Fifty minutes with stories of immigrants from Asturias, Galicia, Andalusia, which have transported their dreams from the other side of the Atlantic. Everything is nice and blue, sprinkled with salt; but something doesn’t fit.

While I watch the serial I have the impression that what they’re showing me is another country, a distant dimension in sepia tints. The life stories of the seven main characters happen, for me, in a space far from the daily life I know. And though I repeat — to calm myself down — that the serial is about Spaniards spread across the globe and not about Cubans lost in their own geography, as the credits run I can’t escape the feeling of having been conned.

The writers cleverly hide the detail that those interviewed possess prerogatives unattainable for natives. They fail to say that spending a night at the Bodeguita del Medio, or at the Tropicana cabaret, renting an office in the Bacardi building, managing cosmetic or tobacco companies, dining on lobster and wine, are privileges accessible — almost exclusively — to the wallets of foreigners. Not to mention the beautiful sail on the yacht in one of the final scenes, prohibited by law to the nation’s 11 million people. It lacks, this modern and diverting program, the explanation of the imbalance, the story about the gap that separates the world of these Spanish who come here from the world of the Cubans who were born here.

The video Españoles en el mundo - La Habana

And now, the end is near
and so I face the final curtain...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To say goodbye can be accomplished with just a brief note left on the table, or by a telephone call where we say our final farewells. In the preparations to leave the country, at the end of a relationship, or of life itself, there are people who try to control the smallest details, draw up those limits that oblige the ones they leave behind to follow their path. Some leave slamming the door behind them, and others demand before taking off the great tribute they think they deserve. There are those who equitably distribute all their worldly goods, and also beings with so much power they change the constitution of a country so that no one can undo their work when they’re gone.

The preparations for the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party and its sessions in the Palace of Conventions have been like a great public requiem for Fidel Castro. The scene of his farewell, the meticulous ceremonial demanded by him and realized — sparing no expense — by his younger brother. In the organizational excesses of the military parade, held on April 16, was seen the intention to “spare no expense” in a final tribute to someone who could not be there on the podium. It was clear that the announcement of the names of who would assume the highest positions in the Cuban Communist Party would not be read by the man who decided the course of this nation for almost fifty years. But he sat at the head table of the event to validate, with his presence, the transfer of power to Raul Castro. Being there was like coming — still alive — to the reading of his own will.

Then came the standing ovation, the tears of this or that delegate to the party conclave, and the phrases of eternal commitment to the old man with the almost white beard. Through the television screen some of us sensed the crackling of dried-up flowers or the sound of shovelfuls of dirt. It remains to be see if the General-cum-President can sustain the heavy legacy he has received, or if under the watchful supervision of his Big Brother he would prefer not to contradict him with fundamental reforms. It’s just left to check the authenticity of Fidel Castro’s departure from public life, and whether his substitute will choose to continue disappointing us, or to reject him.

Razones ciudadanas 3 from Yoani Sanchez on Vimeo

 

The echos of the shouts reach my balcony, in a rhythm marked initially by feet accompanied by throats. It’s less than two weeks to the huge parade planned for for the Plaza of the Revolution and residents for miles around are worn out by all the preparations. Closed streets, police blocking traffic and squads making the avenues and sidewalks shudder, where there should be cars, people and baby strollers.

I climb to the roof to see the choreography of war in its entirety. Things will go badly if the Cuban Communist Party Congress starts with a procession of bayonets. If they really wanted to project an image of reforms, it would not be these olive-green uniforms on exhibit on Saturday, April 16. How much do we wish this day would be a peregrination of results, not of fear! That they would show a long line of what we could accomplish, not the overwhelming demonstration of a military might we don’t even have! Can you imagine? A parade along the Paseo and its environs where the dreams we dreamed of are sheltered, not the cold metal and threatening triggers of AK rifles?

This could be a procession of the things we miss, a festival of joy in which no one would be forced to participate. No principals recruiting schoolchildren to pass under the sun waving at the platform and the workers knowing that their absence would not result in a black mark in their personnel file. A true popular parade, not the wasting on one day of an entire month’s worth of the Nation’s resources. Better to let it sprout spontaneously, smiling people taking to the streets, rather than this sense of anguish that today’s syncopated cries provoke in us.

razones ciudadanas 2 from Yoani Sanchez on Vimeo.

A drop slid down my leg, I maneuvered it into the hollow between my ankle and my shoe and did a thousand pirouettes so my high school classmates wouldn’t notice. For months, my family had had only mineral oil for cooking, thanks to pharmacist relative who was able to sneak it from his work. I remember it heating to a white foam in the pot and the food tinged with the golden color of a photograph, ideal for food magazines. But our bodies could not absorb that kind of fat, made for creating lotions, perfumes or creams. It passed right through our intestines and dripped, dripped, dripped… My panties were stained, but at least we got a break from food that was just boiled, and could try another, slightly roasted.

We were quite fortunate to have that semblance of “butter” that someone stole for us, because in the nineties many others had to distill engine oil for use in their kitchens. Perhaps that’s why we Cubans are traumatized by this product extracted from sunflowers, soybeans or olives. The price of a quart of oil in the market has become our own popular indicator of well-being versus crisis, in the thermometer that takes the temperature of scarcities. With an ever shrinking culinary culture, from Pinar del Rio to Guantanamo, most stoves know only recipes for fried foods. Hence, pork fat, or buttery liquids with high-sounding names such as “The Cook” or “Golden Ace,” prove essential in our daily lives.

When, a few days ago — with no prior warning — the price of vegetable oil in hard currency stores rose by 11.6%, the annoyance was very strong, even more so than when fuel prices rose. Many of us don’t have cars to show us that convertible pesos are continually turned into less and less gasoline, but we all face a plate every day where the prices of staple foods have soared. That this happens with no accompanying public protest, no discontented housewives raising a ruckus beating on their pots and pans, no long articles in the press complaining of the abuse, is harder to swallow than a meal with no fat. I’m more embarrassed by this tacit acceptance of rising prices than I was of the thread of mineral oil snaking down my calf before the mocking eyes of my classmates.

 

He was the first American president I shouted a slogan at. I don’t remember the precise words of the insult as almost thirty years have passed. However, I can remember the feeling of my clenched fists, my red and white uniform trembling with each scream that I launched at Jimmy Carter who — according to my kindergarten teacher — would destroy the island, the palms, the classroom desks, happiness.

And three decades later, here I am in Havana, talking with him and other familiar faces from our nascent civil society. I barely resemble that Little Pioneer buried in the hysteria of political slogans and this man I am speaking with doesn’t fit the role of the leader who was the target of my insults. Now he is a mediator, a man who doesn’t seem interested in wiping Cuba off the map, as they once assured me in primary school. So the girl who was supposed to be the “New Man” and the former commander of the armed of the forces of the United States, have met at a moment in their lives in which neither has the same position as before, in which the path of both has taken the direction of dialog; although once we could have killed each other, across some battle field.

I see him speak and wonder if he knows that I was trained to hate him. Will he be the villain of my childhood stories, the face of grotesque caricatures in the official newspapers, the man whom government propaganda blamed for all our ills? Of course he knows, and still he extends his hand to me, speaks to me, asks me a question. And so he, who was “the enemy,” offers me his kind words.

Outside the Hotel Santa Isabel where we have met, in some school in the area, another little girl repeats her slogans, squeezes her hands, shouts, focuses her mind on the face of a man whom she says she detests. Fortunately, she too will forget the words she screams at this moment, erase from her mind the slogans full of resentment they make her chant today.

________________________

P.S. I am attaching a message, accompanied by a gift, that we gave Mr. Jimmy Carter in the name of several bloggers and other Cubans.

Havana March 30, 2011

Mr. Jimmy Carter:

On behalf of several alternative bloggers and other members of Cuban civil society, we would like to give you this present. This is a small sample of the food that the self-employed are able to make from maní, the word Cubans use for peanuts, that dried fruit that you know so well.

For over half a century the maní has been one of the few products that has escaped the control of State planning. Even in the hardest days of the so-called Special Period one of the the few things we could buy on the free market produced by independent people were these cones and peanut butters that we offer to you today. There were times when the traditional cry of “peanuts, the peanut seller is here…” had to go practically underground, becoming a phrase whispered into the ears of clients.

This popular “criminal” food, within the reach of every pocket, has become the symbol of public resistance before totalitarian pretensions, a stronghold of creativity and ingenuity in the face of centralism and control. Here is the maní, the conqueror of difficulties, stubborn disobedient, transformed now into a symbol of union, a meeting point between your people and ours.

In our little room, he told us that morning about the time he had spent in the USSR. He’d only been in Havana a few hours, after an Aeroflot plane had brought him back from his long sojourn in the land of Gorbachev. The gothic letters on his diploma showed he’d graduated from the university in some kind of engineering my childish mind couldn’t understand. It was the first time I’d heard about the Juraguá nuclear reactor, which was built in Cienfuegos in 1983. The recent arrival’s voice described an enormous VVER 440 reactor located in central Cuba as if it were a live dragon breathing its whiffs on us. Hundreds of young people, trained in research centers nearly 6,000 miles from home, would work there as atomic scientists. Millions and millions of rubles arriving from the Kremlin helped to construct what would be the pinnacle of our “tropical socialism,” the fundamental pillar of our energy independence.

Later I learned that this young enthusiast never worked as a nuclear engineer. The Soviet Union was dismembered just as the first of two planned reactors was 97% complete. Grass covered a good part of the site, and exposure to the elements broke down everything from pieces of the core, to the steam generators, the cooling pumps and the isolation valves. Juraguá became a new ruin, a monument to the delusions of grandeur left us by Soviet imperialism.

With his graying temples, while cutting metals in his new career as a lathe operator, the one-time expert told me now, “It was lucky we didn’t start it up.” According to what he and his colleagues had calculated, the chances of an nuclear accident at Juraguá were 15% more than at any other nuclear plant in the world. “We would have ended up with the island cut in half,” he said dramatically. I imagined a piece of the nation here and another over there, while a stubbornly smoking hole changed our national geography.

Now that the plant in Fukushima is spreading its residues, and with them fear, I can’t but rejoice that the Cienfuegos reactor has not awakened, that under the concrete sarcophagus a nuclear reaction hasn’t started. Thinking about all that has happened, all of our current problems seem small to us, insignificant trifles compared to the horrifying spread of radioactivity.

 

Had I hired an ad agency and a nimble publisher to disseminate the work of the alternative bloggers, I probably would not have accomplished such wide awareness of our existence, within Cuba, as that achieved thanks to the “Cyberwar” program shown Monday on official television. The tangible result is that my phone hasn’t stopped ringing and I’m hoarse from talking to so many people who have come to show me their solidarity. My sunglasses — as big as owl’s eyes — are no longer enough camouflage for me to pass unnoticed in my city. Every few yards someone approaches me on the street to offer words of encouragement and even big hugs, the kind that take my breath away.

What’s happening on this island such that those of us “stoned” by official insults have become so attractive? What happened to the time when aggravating State media represented years and years of ostracism and vilification? When did the spontaneous anger against those slandered, the sincere punch in the face for the stigmatized, fade away? I swear I was not prepared for this. I imagined that 24 hours after this pack of lies, told in emulation of Big Brother, everyone would pull away, stare fixedly at the cobwebs on the wall whenever I passed by. The result, however, has been so different: a complicit wink, a pat on the shoulder, the pride of neighbors who are surprised because a certain quiet and frail little woman who lives on the fourteenth floor is apparently enemy number one — at least this week — until the next to be stoned appears.

And I’m not the only one. Almost all the bloggers whose names and images appeared on the “Interior Ministry Soap Opera” are experiencing similar situations. Vendors at the farmers market who hand them a piece of fruit in passing, drivers of collective taxis who say, “You don’t pay today, sir, it’s on the house.” If the scriptwriters of that courtroom TV show had calculated such a response at the grass roots level, I think they would have refrained from putting our faces on television. But it’s already too late. The word “blog” is now irrevocably linked with our faces, glued to our skin, associated with our actions, tied to popular concerns, and synonymous with that prohibited zone of reality that is becoming more and more magnetic, more and more admired.

Razones ciudadanas from Yoani Sanchez on Vimeo.

Translator’s Note: Readers who want to prepare a transcript… you can either post it in the comments… or email DesdeCubaEnglish Gmail com. If you want to take on a particular speaker… or a certain part (specify the time from and to)… I will post in the comments section what part of the transcript is underway so people’s work doesn’t overlap. And of course I will happily translate it to English once it’s done. Gracias and thank you.

The village graveyards are picturesque and sad: whitewashed tombs with the sun beating down all day on their stones, and the dirt roads packed hard by the feet of the mourners. But there is a graveyard in the town of Banes that has hosted unusual cries in the last twelve months. Crosses around which intolerance has no shame, where it has not lowered its voice as one does before a headstone. For several days, moreover, the entrance has been guarded as if the living could control a space dedicated to the dead. Dozens of police officers wanting to keep Orlando Zapata Tamayo’s friends and acquaintances from coming to commemorate the first anniversary of his death.

Those who now patrol the tomb of this bricklayer know very well that they can never accuse him–as they have others–of being a member of the oligarchy seeking to recover his property. This mestizo born after the triumph of the Revolution was not the author of a political platform nor did he take up arms against the government. Yet he has become a disturbing symbol for those who, themselves, cling to the material possessions that come to them through power: swimming pools, yachts, whiskey, bulging bank accounts and mansions all over the country. A man raised under political indoctrination escaped through the door of death, leaving them on the other side of the threshold, weaker, failing more than ever.

Sometimes the end of person cements his name in history forever. This is the case with Mohammed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian who set himself on fire outside a government building because the police confiscated the fruit he sold in a square. The consequences of his immolation were completely unpredictable, the “domino effect” he set off in the Arab world immense. The death of a Cuban on 23 February 2010 has created an uncomfortable anniversary for the government. Right now, when Raul Castro is about to celebrate his three years at the helm of the nation, many are asking what will happen in Banes, in the small cemetery where the dead are more strictly guarded than prison inmates.

Though they surround as much as they can, this week the political police can’t stop people–from within their homes–invoking the name of the deceased Zapata Tamayo much more often than the long string of titles of the General-cum-President.

 

He would often raise his fist while screaming in his high-pitched voice, his face flushed, at whomever he disagreed with. And so would the newspaper Granma, as if a breath of life had turned it into a person; as if a rare spell could make the paper body of the tabloid turn itself into flesh and bones. He would dress in a plaid shirts, proudly displaying the sharp creases of his clothes achieved with successive sprays of starch. The daily paper of the only party permitted in Cuba was of an undefined age and a nineteenth century mentality, displaying his medals, constantly talking about feats he never actually accomplished. He never listened to others, because his interminable tirade drowned out criticism, contrary ideas, the least hint of differences. He behaved like a grouchy man who couldn’t even converse with his own children, who had seen all those whom he once loved escape from his side.

Granma, like some I know, would turn his face if someone close to him bought a little food on the black market. But he would scarf down every last bite without asking where the piece of potato or the slice of bread on the table came from. His large-type editorials would maniacally scream vacuous slogans whenever he knew the neighbors were listening. He would appeal–with great frequency–to betrayal and intrigue. His boring triumphalist reports would wrap themselves in conformist phrases delivered to the desperate faces of those around him. The same newspaper which still, today, has never published a color photo, would shroud in gray boring platitudes and unbridled rage. He would sniff out the tiniest illegalities of survival and denounce them with the same urgency as his pages now publish attacks and lies.

The “comrade” embodied in Granma would be one of those human beings whom–I don’t know about you–I would never invite to my house.

 

Darkness and light in Tahrir Square, a red phosphorescence glow interrupted by the camera flashes and the glowing screens of mobile phones. I wasn’t there, and yet I know how each one of the Egyptians felt, gathered last night in downtown Cairo. I, who have never been able to shout and cry in public, overwhelmed by happiness that the cycle of authoritarianism under which I was born has ended, I know I would do the same until I had no voice left, I would hug everyone, I would feel light as if a huge burden had fallen from my shoulders. I have not experienced a revolution, much less a citizen revolution, but this week, despite the caution of the official news, I have the sense that the Suez Canal and the Caribbean Sea are not so far apart, not so different.

While young Egyptians were organizing on Facebook, we were watching with consternation the leaked chat of a cybercop, for whom social networks are “the enemy.” This censor of kilobytes and his bosses have every right to fear these virtual sites, where as individuals we can meet outside the controls of the State, the Party and the ideologues. Reading the words of the young Egyptian Wael Ghonim, “If you want to liberate a country, give it Internet!”, I understand more clearly the secrecy our authorities display regarding whether or not they will allow us to connect to the Web. They have become accustomed to having an information monopoly, of regulating what comes to us and reinterpreting for us what happens both within and beyond our national frontiers. They now know, because Egypt has taught them, that every step they let us take into cyberspace brings us a step closer to Tahir Square, leads us quickly to a plaza that trembled and a dictator who resigned.

Currently on display at Pabexpo, the exhibition center located in the wealthiest part of the city, are computer-related products created within and outside our country. Guests from all over are brought together there, including a large group of foreigners whom I imagine are more interested in taking a trip on our Paleolithic technology than doing business with local firms. The Kaspersky Group, for example, is showing a version of its well-known anti-virus program, developed in conjunction with the national company Segurmática. Everything has been made to look like an exhibition of this type anywhere in the world, were it not for one detail: This is the Island of the Disconnected.

Already well into the year 2011, inhabitants of the “Cuban archipelago” cannot buy a bus, train or airline ticket on the web, we don’t know the sensation of managing our bank accounts online, and purchasing a product through the computer screen is something we have seen only in foreign films. Still, today, my compatriots have never handled bureaucratic paperwork via email, not even the simplest of requests for one’s own birth certificate. Don’t even talk about reserving some vacation on the flashy webpages of the travel agencies Cubatur or Islazul. Among my hundreds of friends, none have managed–from here–to recharge their own mobile phones on those portals that offer the service, without having to stand in the long lines at the ETECSA office. We are a people who have no opportunity to pay our bills through cyberspace and who live as software pirates faced with the impossibility of purchasing licensed versions.

Here we live at a stage that is more characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century than it is of the twenty-first. Thus, the Information Science Fair appears as a glimpse into the future, a shop window that displays to others what we haven’t even tasted. After the visitors return home, they will praise the skill sets of the Cuban computer scientists and remember the tasty Mojito they were given at the farewell party. Meanwhile, we remain in the twilight of the disconnected, turning on autistic computers unable to connect to others. We dream–it’s true–of one day filling out a form on the Internet where a phrase will confirm for us: “Thank you for your purchase, your ticket to Guantanamo has been reserved. Have a nice trip!”

 

Chunks of concrete, fragments of roads leading nowhere, bridges that don’t link to any shore. Monuments to urban paralysis located along the national highway, unfinished structures that dream of feeling the weight of trucks and motorcycles. People crowd under these unfinished overpasses waiting for transport to take them to some other side, taking advantage of the shade from these arches of defeat, these enormous structures that serve only as umbrellas, the most expensive in the world. With railings that have never felt the warmth of a hand, the unfinished bridges in my country make a face and stick out their tongues, reminding us of the atrophy of our urban development, our ramshackle roads.

Whenever I pass under their deteriorated masses I wonder: What good are these truncated roads without cars? What is the reason for being of these incomplete giants that go nowhere? Were they built when the plan was to fill this Island with highways, like a living backbone branching out in all directions? Several decades later, they are still disconnected from the traffic network, accessible only from above, ironic hosts to vultures and lizards warming themselves on their columns. Monoliths to the immobility of people who, instead of new highways, arterials, roundabouts and avenues, have seen their truncated bridges deteriorate and begin to crack without ever having felt the rolling of a tire.

Seated in the armchair of a hotel with my laptop open, I note the slow blinking of the WiFi transmitter and watch the stern faces of the custodians. This could be one more day trying to enter my own blog with an anonymous proxy, jumping over the censorship with a few tricks that let me look at the forbidden. On the bottom of the screen a banner announces that I’m navigating at 41 kilobytes a second. Joking with a friend I warn her we’d better hold onto our hair so it won’t get messed up from “speeding.” But the narrow band doesn’t matter much this February afternoon. I’m here to cheer myself up, not to get depressed all over again by the damned situation of an Internet undermined by filters. I have come to see if the long night of censorship no longer hangs over Generation Y. With just a click I manage to enter the site that, since March of 2008, has not been visible from a public place. I’m so surprised I shout and the camera watching from the ceiling records the fillings in my teeth as I laugh uncontrollably.

After three years, my virtual space is again sighted from inside Cuba.

I don’t know the reasons for the end to this blockade, although I can speculate that the celebration of the 2011 Havana International Computer Science Fair has brought many foreign guests and it is better to show them an image of tolerance, of supposed openings in the realm of citizen expression. It is also possible that after having proved that blocking a website only makes it more attractive to internauts, the cyberpolice have chosen to exhibit the forbidden fruit they so demonized in recent months. If it’s because of a technical glitch that will soon be corrected, once again throwing shadows over my virtual diary, then there will be plenty of time to loudly denounce it. But for the moment, I make plans for the platforms www.vocescubanas.com and www.desdecuba.com to enjoy a long stay with us.

This is a citizen victory over the demons of control. We have taken back what belongs to us. These virtual places are ours, and they will have to learn to live with what they can no longer deny.

 

Timid colored awnings spring from nowhere, under newly opened umbrellas fruit smoothies and pork rinds are sold, the doorways of some homes are turned into improvised snack bars with striking menus. All this and more grows in the streets of my city these days because of the new flexibility for self-employment. Some of my neighbors are making plans to open a shoe repair, or a place to repair fridges, while avenues and plazas are being transformed by the efforts of private initiative. The straitjacket that gripped individual initiative seems to loosen. Some remain cautious, however, waiting to see if this time the economic reforms will really take hold and not be shut down as happened in the nineties.

In just the few months since the announcement of the expansion in the number of licenses for independent work, the results are encouraging. We have begun to recover lost flavors, longed-for recipes, hidden comforts. More than 70,000 Cubans have taken out new licenses to work for themselves and at their own risk, and thousands more are seriously considering the advantages of opening a small family business. Despite the caution of many, the still excessive taxes, and the absence of wholesale markets, the brand new businesses have started to be noticed in a society marked by stagnation. You see them building their little stands, hanging colorful signs announcing their merchandise, rearranging their homes to accommodate a snack bar or to offer haircuts or manicures. Most are convinced that this time they are here to stay, because the system that so suffocated and demonized them in the past, has lost the ability to compete with them.

The Cyberpolice in Cuba from Coral Negro on Vimeo.

Are you one of those who fabricates the lies? Or one of those who believes them? I would like to ask this question of the speaker who deploys a complicated conspiracy theory in this video. If it’s someone who is just sending a message, then the answer is simple: the falsehood is concocted higher up and he is just the messenger. But I fear that part of what he is expounding in front of those grim soldiers — with a constellation of stars on their uniforms — is  his own production, cooked up by himself. His lengthy presentation, punctuated with words such as “enemy,” “operative,” and “the evils,” shows me what can happen when one talks about the most modern of technologies using old-fashioned language. He doesn’t seem to understand the affinities and ties that link sites like Facebook and Twitter, but applies a prism of his own making to them, rather than recognize that individuals make their own decisions to join them and — horrors! — jump the ideological barriers. Although he might be a brilliant computer scientist, this young man failed social sciences.

On this fictitious base they design strategies that will barely hurt the Cuban blogosphere. Meanwhile, believing that the impulse does not come from us, but from others who manage us like puppets, they will develop tactics that will make a lot of noise but generate few results. To recognize that the New Man — their New Man — is tired of being a soldier, repeating slogans, applauding at political rallies, and now wants to have his own space for expression, would be like confessing that they have failed. All the walls and boundaries they impose on us in the physical Cuba, we have jumped over into that infinite space that so robs them of their sleep. If they can no longer control us, let them at least console themselves by dismissing us.

*Thanks to the commentator in my blog who sent me the link to this video, the distribution of which is proof positive that our government has lost the monopoly on information, including its classified materials. Viva Cubaleaks!

Translator’s note: Given the length of this video I don’t think we will be able to prepare a translation. The gist of it is a detailed explanation of how Yoani and other dissident bloggers are classified by the government as counterrevolutionary enemies controlled from the U.S. and Spain. There is a proud enumeration of the “Revolutionary” blogs and the accuracy of their attacks on Yoani et al. The principle criticism aimed at the alternative bloggers is that they are trying to break the “ideological barriers” (put in place by the Castro regime). The term “human rights” is repeated as if it is an obscenity. At one point the slide on the screen shows us Fidel’s “blog” and how many “hits” he has (more than half a million!).

 

To have a sip of coffee in the morning is the national equivalent of breakfast. We can lack everything, bread, butter and even the ever unobtainable milk, but to not have this hot, stimulating crop to wake up to is the preamble to a bad day, the reason for leaving the house bad-tempered and fit to burst. My grandparents, my parents, all the adults I saw as a child, drank cup after cup of that dark liquid, while they talked. Whenever anyone came to the house, the coffee was put on the stove because the ritual of offering someone a cup was as important as giving them a hug or inviting them in.

A few weeks ago Raul Castro announced that they were going to begin mixing other ingredients in the ration market coffee. It was nice to hear a president speak of these culinary matters, but mostly it was the source a popular joke, that he would say something officially that has been common practice – for years – in the roasting plants of the entire Island. Not only citizens have been adulterating our most important national drink for decades, the State has also applied its ingenuity without declaring it on the label. Nor will they use the adjective “Cuban” in the distribution of this stimulating beverage, as it’s no secret to anyone that this country imports large quantities from Brazil and Columbia. Instead of the 60 thousand tons of coffee once produced here, today we only manage to pick about six thousand tons.

In recent weeks “the black nectar of the white gods” — as it once was called – has become scarce. Housewives have had to revive the practice of roasting peas to ensure the bitter sip we need just to open our eyes. Whether it can be called coffee, we don’t know, but at least it is something hot and bitter to drink in the morning.

He cleared his throat before explaining why they were meeting, in the sober drama that is rarely seen anymore. In his hands he held, like a script, the blue booklet with the guidelines for the Sixth Communist Party Congress, and behind the table those present included municipal and provincial officials. Before yielding the floor, he stressed that they should stick to what was written on these pages and only discuss economics. He stressed this last word to emphasize it, to ensure that they didn’t claim their right to “free association” or demand that they be allowed “to freely enter and leave the country.” E-CO-NO-MICS, he stressed again, widening his eyes and raising his eyebrows to emphasize it again, while staring directly at the most troublesome employees.

With such an introduction, the meeting became a tedious process, one more task added to the workday. Mechanically, dozens of arms went up when they were asked if they agreed with each point. Awkward silence followed the phrases, “Who is against it?” and a certain fatigue could be noted after each, “And who abstains?” Only one young man questioned the current prohibition against buying cars or houses, but a militant immediately took the floor to read a long eulogy to the figure of the Maximum Leader. And so it was every time someone pointed out a problem, others jumped in to emphasize the country’s achievements. The apologists were stationed equidistant around the auditorium and reacted as if they’d studied a script and rehearsed the choreography. The feeling of being at a staged assembly competed in intensity with the desire to leave — as soon as possible — to go home.

The next day the workplace had returned to its routine. A mechanic who had been sitting very close to the president no longer remembered a single one of the guidelines. The girl from the warehouse summed up the discussion of the previous afternoon for her friends with a simple, “Ah… more of the same.” And the manager’s chauffeur skeptically shrugged his shoulders when a colleague asked what had happened. Many experienced that day as sample of what will happen in the Conference Center next April, a sneak preview of the Cuban Communist Party Congress. In just a few months they will see the same staging unfold on their TV screens, but this time it was they themselves who were the actors, raising their hands in unanimity before the stern gaze of the director.

It is getting close, but it hasn’t arrived; they announced it but it’s not concrete. We may be able to see it soon from Punta de Maisi, nevertheless it seems so distant and remote to us. For more than two years the fiber optic cable between Cuba and Venezuela has been the carrot dangled before the eyes of the inhabitants of this disconnected Island. Its thin threads have served as an argument against those who insist that the web access limitations have more to do with political will than lack of bandwidth. We have paid attention to the sluggish wanderings of the umbilical cord that will connect La Guaira with Santiago de Cuba, the boat that brought it from France, and the news which announced it will increase our data, image and voice transmission speed by three thousand times. But something tells us that this cable already has a name, an owner and an ideology.

With its 640 gigabyte capacity, the new tendon will be particularly devoted to institutional projects monitored by the government. When the official press mentions its advantages it stresses that “it will strengthen national sovereignty and security,” but not one word is directed to the improvement of the information spectrum for citizens. At a cost of 70 million dollars, this underwater connection seems destined more to control us than to link us to the world, but I am confident we will manage to upset its initial purposes. In these times, when several installations from the so-called Battle of Ideas have been converted into hotels to raise foreign currency and there are warnings that unprofitable businesses will be liquidated, it is quite likely that many of the digital pulses will reach the hands of those who can pay for them. With authorization or without, connection hours will be sold — to the highest bidder — in a country where diversion of resources is a daily practice, a strategy for survival.

When we are connected with Venezuela along the seabed, it will be even more immoral to maintain the high prices for access to the vast World Wide Web from hotels and public places. They will also lose the justification for not allowing Cubans to have accounts at home, from which we can slip into cyberspace, and it will be more difficult to explain to us why we can’t have YouTube, Facebook and Gmail. The pirated connections will increase and the black market for films and documentaries will feed on those megabytes running across our island platform. In workplaces with Internet the employees will also use it to register with the U.S. visa lottery, surf foreign sites looking for work, and engage in lovers’ chats. They won’t be able to prevent our use of the cable for things very different from what is planned by those who bought it, those who believe an Island can be neatly tied up — with no loose ends — with a simple fiber optic cable.

He bought a box of strong cigars though he doesn’t smoke, a cloth bag for errands, though he already had one, and two boring copies of Granma on the same day. He did it to help the trembling ancients with their bloodshot eyes who sell endless bits and pieces on the streets of Havana. People with legs stiffened by arthritis, hair gone gray years ago, a cane to complete their spindly anatomy. Old men and women thrown into the informal market exhibiting their meager goods in the doorways of Reina, Galiano, Monte and Belascoain Avenues. Septuagenarians forced to sell their constantly dwindling ration quotas, sad-faced grandmas who eat thanks to the candy and peanuts they themselves sell outside schools.

Thousands of Cuban seniors — at the end of their lives — have had to return to work, this time facing illegality and risk. Hands shaking with Parkinson’s offer sugary snacks at bus stops, wrinkled faces offer razor blades for only five pesos. Their pensions are extremely low and the well-deserved rest they planned to enjoy has turned into jittery days hiding from the police. The system they helped to build cannot provide them with a dignified old age, cannot spare them from misery.

That ungainly octogenarian, dragging his feet to the corner, hawks sponges to scrub with and tubes of crazy glue to stick everything together. A passing girl checks the contents of her wallet. She doesn’t have enough for either one, but in the morning she returns to buy something, if only one of those national newspapers in whose pages the faces of the elderly are always happy and satisfied.

The snack bar on 13th between F and G — that afternoon on December — is full of security agents and admirers. The first are the ones who follow this restless blogger, like a tragicomic troupe that dances around my body, my house; the second pursued the radiant face of the actress Julia Stiles, with her laugh from the full-color big screen. Enormous confusion, when they watched the girl who plays the role of Nicky Parsons sitting at the same table with the author of Generation Y, and chatting affectionately. But yes, the famous New Yorker reads my virtual diary, is interested in scratching below the surface of the picture postcard images that export our reality. She barely wanted to talk about herself, although I wanted to know more about her professional life, or even stoop to ask for an autograph.

Julia and I are of that generation of American and Cubans who have been separated and faced with the rhetoric far from our own desires. Descendants of the Montagues and Capulets who tried to pass on to us their grudges and hatreds. But looking objectively, they didn’t manage it, and the result has been quite the opposite. Close, but separated, similar and yet set at odds, like many young people from here and from there we are tired of this outdated “cold war” and its consequences in our lives. So the meeting with Julia had the character of a reconciliation, as if in the middle of combat two opponents approach each other and begin feel each other out, to embrace.

No one in the cafeteria heard the noise of arms being tossed aside, not even those who were there to watch us saw how we dismantled the walls separating us. In the end, the smiling girl from the movies and the girl from Havana who should have been the “New Man” hugged each other and said, “See you later.” Each went to her own side, returned to her life, in front of the cameras or in front of the keyboard, in the Big Apple or in a Yugoslav-model building. But since that afternoon, whenever I hear the television seething against our neighbors to the north, I recall Julia, and it is a kind of therapy to remember her laugh and the little armistice we managed that day.

The hands move with confidence and speed, having barely 30 seconds to slip the cigars that will go to the black market under the table. Two cameras pan the room where the fragrant leaves are rolled and put in boxes with names like Cohiba, Partagás, H. Upmann. Each glass eye rotates 180 degrees, leaving — for a very short time — a blind spot, a narrow stretch of unguarded rollers. Just enough time to put that Lancero or Robusto — to be sold later outside the official market — out of sight of the supervisors. Another employee is charged with paying the guards to let them out of the premises and within twenty-four hours a strong aroma will already be on the streets.

When my Spanish students asked me about the quality of the cigars sold “outside,” I would joke with them saying that inside those boxes they might well find rolled-up copies of the newspaper Granma. But I also know that a good part of the clandestine supply comes from the same institutional places where they make the ones exhibited in the legal stores. Three out of every five Habaneros, if challenged, would brag about knowing a real roller who can get them authentic and fresh puros. The business of nicotine involves thousands of people in this city and generates a network of corruption and earnings of incalculable size. The challenge is that the final product looks just like the one the State sells, but costs three or four times less.

Among the most common proposition a tourist hears is, “Mister! Cigars!” or “Lady! Habanos!” shouted from every corner. At least it’s not as shocking as when some pimp sidles up to whispers his catalog: “Girls, Boys, Girls with Girls.” So the sequence that starts in the factory, in those thirty seconds when the lens of the camera is looking the other way, ends with a foreigner paying, for twenty-five cigars, what would otherwise be enough to buy only two. Everyone leaves happy: the roller, the guard, the illegal seller and… the State? OK… but who cares?

 

With their colorful covers and nylon sleeves, the new supply of CDs and DVDs fills every corner of my city. Selling music, TV series and movies is one of the self-employment professions that has expanded — more and more rapidly — in recent weeks. Everyone wants to have their own distribution point; the most creative offer compilations of the same actor, or the complete discography of a singer. There are no copyright barriers and the American and Spanish serials are the most commonly purchased. Piracy is no longer something whispered in the ears of those interested, rather the merchandise is displayed publicly on makeshift wooden and cardboard shelves. Anyone can wrap up record labels or producers, as long as they don’t cross the line of the ideologically acceptable.

Given the audacity shown in ignoring copyright, it’s striking that no one dares to offer the popular — but banned — programs readily available in the alternative information networks. Absent from the public catalogs are the documentaries — so often watched in Cuban homes — that approach our national history through a different lens from the official. Nor do the shelves in doorways and windows display films that show the situation in the Romania of Ceausescu, or in Stalin’s Russia, or the North Korea of Kim Jong Il. The real hits of the underground world would jeopardize the licenses of these newly minted self-employed. Warning “visits” to the new entrepreneurs make it clear, don’t even think about providing certain controversial materials. The censorship pact is in place.

Beyond the issue of control is that of profitability of these small businesses. When they first started to emerge, the price of a DVD with five movies was around 50 national pesos. Today, in view of the profusion of vendors, it’s dropped to around 30. Many don’t survive the first quarter as independent workers. Others diversify their production and expand their sales. But to stay afloat and become profitable, they will probably need to turn to themes currently banned. In a few months, a good part of them will have, in addition to the visible offerings, another hidden shelf only for trusted customers, to satisfy the restless seekers of the forbidden.

There are two men on the corner. One is wearing an earphone while the other peers into the door of a building. All the neighbors know perfectly well why they are there. A dissident lives on one of the floors of the building; two members of the political police watch who comes and goes and keep a car nearby to follow him wherever he goes. They don’t try to hide because they want this person, who signs his name to his critical opinions, to know they’re there; they want his friends to distance themselves so as not to end up caught in the network of control, in the spiderweb of vigilance.

It is not an isolated case. Here, every non-conformist has his own shadow — or a whole group of shadows — who follow him around. The so called “securities” also use sophisticated monitoring techniques that range from bugging phone lines and placing microphones in homes, to tracking the location of their targets through signals from their cell phones. The effects on the personal lives of those who suffer these operations are so devastating that we have come to refer to State Security by terrible names such as “The Apparatus,” “The Armageddon,” or “The Crusher.”

But not even these soldiers dressed in civilian clothes can escape popular scorn. Several jokes are making the rounds about the inordinate number of “securities” surrounding each individual opponent. Whispering and looking over their shoulders, many comment sarcastically, “There is so much manpower needed in agriculture, and look at these guys here, spending the whole day watching someone who thinks differently.” Because, indeed, what a contrast it would be if, instead of criminalizing opinion, they devoted themselves to productive labor; if instead of projecting their long shadows over the critics of the system, they let them fall over some lettuce or tomatoes, over the furrows — now empty — that they could help to plant.

She was an attorney at a business in Camagüey until the Day of the Magi, when her gift was a layoff notice. Disheartened, she took home her plastic drinking cup and the small-leafed plant that adorned her desk. At first, she didn’t know how to tell her husband she was no longer employed, nor how to call her parents and tell them their “little girl” had been left aside in the new reorganization of the workforce. She endured and remained silent while eating dinner, as the national news spoke optimistically about a new path to greater efficiency. Only when she was lying down in the dark bedroom did she tell him not to set the alarm because she didn’t have to get up early the next day. Her new life, without a job, had begun.

After cutting the workforce, the administrator at her Camagüey office hired a law firm to deal with legal matters. If before the company’s attorney had handled all the legal paperwork for only 500 Cuban pesos a month (less than 25 US dollars), now the company had to pay 2,000 pesos for the assistance of an outside institution. The arithmetic haunts the unemployed attorney because she can’t even console herself by knowing her dismissal make the company more profitable. Not only that, the most politically reliable and the director’s closest friends remained in their jobs. They managed to acquit themselves well declaring their incompetent bureaucrats, as if in reality they were directly linked to production. Thus, the Cuban Communist Party General Secretary appears now — to the eyes of possible inspectors — as if he were a lathe operator, when everyone knows he vegetates behind a desk piled high with old yellowed documents.

But the greatest anguish for this woman who has fallen into idleness is not the future of her state employer, but the direction her personal life will take. She has never done anything but fill out paperwork, write contracts, amend declarations. Her seventeen year professional life has been spent working for the government boss who, today, threw her out in the street. She knows nothing of hairdressing, nor of the manicure arts that might let her open her own beauty salon. She barely knows how to work a computer and speaks no other languages. Nor does she have the initial capital to open a coffee shop or to invest in breeding pigs. The only thing she’s good at is analyzing legal decrees and finding the loopholes in legal articles. In her case, the layoff is the end of her working life, her return to the kitchen. It is the perennial silence of the alarm that used to go off at six in the morning.

 

 

Pinar del Río is a city without movie theaters, an urban place where cars barely pass and at night the streets are dark and empty. However, some personal projects shine in the midst of such paralysis. One of these is Pedro Pablo Oliva’s workshop, with its room halfway between a family home and an art gallery. There they invite you in, give you coffee, show you the canvas hung on the wall or the sculpture tucked into a corner, without asking who you are, where you came from. The first time I visited, Oliva was adding brushstrokes to a Fidel Castro in oils, seen through an X-ray machine. He was floating with his scraggly beard and between his hands in held a nearly asphyxiated maiden, who resembled — irrefutably — Cuba. At the bottom of the painting, tiny people with empty eye sockets watched the force with which the Maximum Leader strangled the country.

I went home treasuring the affection the painter, his wife Yamilia, and his daughters, one with the beautiful name “Azul,” had all shared with me. I felt that with people like that it was possible to embrace, the understanding, the debate; it was even possible to revitalize, to rejuvenate, the streets of Pinar del Río. A few months later I learned that repudiation meetings had also marked this place, when Yamilia began to stage a series of public performances under the title, “Without Permission.” She chose December 10, Human Rights Day, a day when the demons of intolerance on this Island, run riot. The result, a mob of people screaming in front of her door, blocking her from taking her easels outside so that passersby could fill them with color in the plazas and parks. A year later, also on Human Rights Day, the scene was repeated, this time with the threat of sticks and stones forcing her to stay inside.

From her mobile, Yamilia sent her message asking for help, and I remember uploading to Twitter that S.O.S. coming from the west. At one point I even recommended publicly that Pedro Pablo Oliva, an emblematic figure in our culture, express himself about what was happening so close to him. A few days ago I received his response, along with his permission to make it public. His words are so free and filled with reconciliation that I think it’s worthwhile to share them with you. When I read them, I knew that the movie theater in Pinar del Río would reopen some day, and that this urban and civic immobility would give way to a more lively, less sectarian city. The great blackout that he painted in the most difficult years of the Special Period, has given rise to a candle here… a firefly there.

Video of works by Yamilia Pérez

Letter from Pedro Pablo Oliva:

Yoani:

First I want to say hello and ask after your and your husband’s health, the last time we met was in Obispo Street as a result of the meeting you requested with the official who abducted you (to put it in a poetic way) in those ugly and awkward days. He taught me the marks of violence.

I will get to the point so as not to run on and on.

I imagine you are aware of the declaration that the Home-Workshop (a project I’ve had for 10 years) issued relating to the art performance of Yamilia Pérez Estrella, at that time my wife, in the province of Pinar del Río, it’s still on the Internet.

In some of the paragraphs of that declaration I expressed my position, but if you like I can state other things much more clearly.

I am, I was and I will be against the use of violence, manipulated or not, to silence any thought or idea, it is truly shameful to use aggression to impose a way of thinking or to try to use it to intimidate. Every act of this kind generates rejection and repulsion and is no help at all in the so necessary unifying of this country marked by political and family conflicts.
On the other hand, I have always thought and believed that the artist needs more open spaces for communication, and fights for this.

My generation, on the other hand, believed in the social function of art, and I, at least, assumed it proudly, hence my desire for a work that tried to reflect its context and that brought a critical analysis of society. For this I’ve been censored more than once.

Yamilia joins me in the desire to change the world, to try to make it better, always from different positions, she from direct confrontation as Tania Bruguera did, or does, I from the place where social projects are born, questioning or not, criticizing or not. Something that we totally agree on is: this is not a perfect society, nor are others I’ve experienced.

I dream of a different society, Utopia is that man I am and have lived year after year, successes and failures, but I do not stop fighting for that dream.

I am, Yoani, one of those who believe that opposites need to express themselves like day and night, wet and dry, I think fearlessly of the need for more than one party because people have the right to group together based on affinity of thought and philosophy and the precious agreement of dreams.

If you were to ask me one day (which I doubt) what party I would like to belong to I would answer one that does not imprison its children for thinking differently, one that permits the flow of ideas like a river that runs between two shores, one where I know its children are where they receive the sweet embrace of the motherland, where they respect that a woman can love another woman and a man another man. One that grows, step by step in the enchanted spell of love. Where the horizon is seen not as an end but as a beginning, the party that does not say, “this is,” but that opens like the wings of a butterfly, where children are protected from the hateful ghost of hunger and the terrible scourge of dogmas. A party that understands that the new generations need to lead the country and express themselves as the wind and the rain express themselves, and much more, Yoani, that would take forever to name and that form a part of the dream that this man aspires to.

If I have learned in all these years that one person can’t remain for so much time leading a country, I can understand the presence of a party of 20 or 30 years, even 50; but not always led by the same image, the faces, the manner and the way of thinking; changes are needed every so often, each man may have a different method.

Forgive my disintegration and incoherence. You know that Yamilia has a work that is too short, but it has spirit and guts to overcome any obstacle in the process of creation.

This is my position, there is no other, I am sorry to see so much official apparatus circling around a thin girl to stop her from an artistic act one day someone wrongly determined was dissent, if ten Yamilias arose I imagine they would deploy a whole army.

I assure you, Yoani, that this man lives without fear.

My love to you,
Yours,
Pedro Pablo Oliva

Translator’s note: Alumbrón is a “made up” Cuban word which comes from “alumbrar” or illuminate. Rather than note when the lights go off, and call it a “black-out”, no electricity is assumed to be the normal state and electricity the exception, so when the lights come on the illumination, or alumbrón becomes the exceptional event that is named and remarked on.

It’s only thirty-two pages with a blue cover. This Cuban passport looks more like a safe-conduct than an ID. With it we can escape from insularity though it still doesn’t guarantee we can board an airplane. We live in the only country in the world where acquiring this document to travel requires us to pay in a currency different from that in which they pay our wages. Its cost of “fifty-five convertible pesos” means that the average worker must save his entire salary for three months to be able to buy this filigreed booklet with the numbered pages.

However, in this beginning of the 21st century it is no longer unusual to meet a Cuban with a passport, something extremely rare in the seventies and eighties when only a select few could show one. We became an immobile people and the few who left went on a foreign mission or departed into the finality of exile. To cross the barrier of the sea was a prize for the faithful and the great masses of “unreliables” could not even dream of leaving the archipelago. Fortunately, that began to change thanks, perhaps, to the influx of tourists who infected us with curiosity about what was outside, or the fall of the socialist camp, which meant the government could no longer award “incentive trips” to only the most loyal.

Now, when they become citizens of another country, my compatriots breathe a sigh of relief to have a new identification document that gives them a sense of belonging somewhere. A few brief pages, wrapped in a cover with the coat of arms of another nation can make all the difference. Meanwhile, that little blue booklet that says Born in Cuba, remains hidden in a drawer, in the hopes that one day it will be a source of pride, rather than shame.

*Considering that the Office of Immigration and Aliens retained my passport after my last application for an exit permit, have I become an undocumented?

The rumba sways from side to side as the partying cuts across the Havana Malecon in a summer that makes you use your shirt sleeves to wipe away the sweat. From the eighth floor of a nearby building, a man can no longer hear the congas and the drunken shouts. His thoughts come with bursts of machine gun fire and the smell of a distant Africa where he lost a friend, sanity, and sleep.

Ariel is the main character in The Carnival and the Dead, the latest novel from Ernesto Santana, an authentic writer of shadows in a blacked-out city. For those of us who already know his writing — harsh, accurate and loaded with questions — this new novel reacquaints us with a daily venality now so common that we hardly see it anymore. He draws us into the trauma of those who were taken to distant lands to wage a war they didn’t understand, one that still, today, many of us cannot comprehend. It is a story of love, ghosts, HIV, and other characters in this drama of just 175 pages. A fiction of the dead who leave and return, of specters with epaulets and medals, soaked in alcohol, needing to forget, urged to throw themselves into the void. In short, a book in the most intimate and raw style of the winner of this year’s “Novelas de Gaveta Frank Kafka” literary competition, Ernesto Santana.

Shortly, in our home on the fourteenth floor of a Yugoslav-style building that could well be in any part of Cuba, we will be presenting this horrifying and indispensable work. Neither triumphalism nor despair will be welcome.

 

 

I still can’t believe that the Cuban delegation at the United Nations added its vote to a group of “countries that include homosexuality as a crime under the law, including the application of capital punishment for that reason, in five of them.” I didn’t invent the quoted phrase, it comes from a statement published by CENESEX (The National Center of Sex Education) to try to explain this absurdity, to justify the abominable. On a peculiar list, where some of the great suppressors of individual liberties appear, this Island also appears, despite the official discourse that has assured us for some time that abuse of homosexuals is chapter from the past.

It goes without saying that no one consulted Cubans before ratifying — in our name — a resolution that gives carte blanche to the death penalty for reasons of the victims’ sexual orientation. Not a single word is said by the official press, no transvestites have been able to go out and protest in the Plaza of the Revolution or in front of the Foreign Ministry to demonstrate their displeasure with this act of political expediency. Initially, it was the Benin delegation that pushed for a change in the resolution about extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions in the world, a change that as a result of which — as of two weeks ago — the UN resolution will no longer apply if the accused is subject to execution for loving a person of their own gender. Frightened, we witness the circle joined by the intolerant, the complicity established between the doctrinaire, the silence before violations committed by others, to buy silence for when they themselves will have need of it.

It is sad that an institution like CENESEX, that has worked to promote respect for diversity, engages in verbal acrobatics so as not to call things by their name. Mariela Castro cannot take cover behind the terse words of a statement where one finds no condemnation proportional to the mistake committed by our delegation to the UN. This coming Sunday she will appear on a national television show, Journeys to the Unknown, to present a documentary that touches on the theme of tolerance towards gays and lesbians. I think that would be a good time to explain to us why her response has not been stronger, why her silence has the ring of an accomplice.

Dark night, a blackout in the vicinity of the Buena Vista neighborhood in Playa. The dilapidated shared taxi I’m taking stalls, and with an exhausted snort refuses to start again. A passenger and the driver are trying to fix it, while on both sides of the street we see people are sitting outside their houses, resigned to the power outage. I look in my wallet for my mobile, wanting to tell my family I’m delayed so they won’t worry about me. It’s an ugly picture: we are in the midst of the darkness, in an area where crime isn’t child’s play, and to top it off my cellphone doesn’t work. Every time I try to dial a number I get the message, “Call Failed.” Finally, the car is purring again and we manage to advance, but the telephone service is not restored to the useless gadget and I feel like throwing it out the window. When I get home I discover that Reinaldo can’t call from his, either, and that my blogger friends can’t even receive text messages.

Our only mobile phone company cut the service for all of Friday night and part of Saturday, canceling for more than 24 hours a service for which we paid in convertible currency. With its announcements of “instant communication,” Cubacel comports itself as if it is an accomplice to the ideologically motivated censorship; supporting the reprimand from the political police ,it puts an error message on our screens. It uses its monopoly power to punish those clients who deviate from the official line of thought. Part of its business capital, provided by foreign investors, is used to support the infrastructure of a momentary or prolonged boycott of certain cell phone numbers. A contradictory role for a company that should connect us to the world, not leave us hanging when we need it most.

It is not the first time this has happened. Every so often someone flips a switch and leaves us in silence. Curiously, it happens when there is important news to report and urgent information to bring to light. The forced cancellation of the concert by the group Porno Para Ricardo may have been the trigger for the phone company to violate his own maxim of keeping us, “in touch with the world.” The possible cremation of the body of Orlando Zapata Tamayo and everything that is happening around that event could be another reason to turn off our voices. What is certain is that on Friday night — in the midst of the darkness and worry — Cubacel failed me again, showing me the military uniform that hides beneath its false image as a corporate entity.

The response of the General Customs of the Republic to my complaint about the confiscation of ten copies of the book Cuba Libre is incredible. See with your own eyes their motivations for declaring these daily vignettes “dangerous.”

Translation of “facts” on second page of letter:

1. Fact: I am the Inspector of Customs Control and of the Postal and Shipment Customs.
2. Fact: It was the acting inspector who issued the Resolution of Forfeiture No. 409 of March 25, 2010, which provided for the administrative forfeiture of ten books entitled “Cuba Libre,” published by Marea, Yoani Sanchez author, and a blank publishing contract.
3. Fact: The contents of the book “Cuba Libre” are against the general interests of the nation, since it argues that certain political and economic changes are required in Cuba so that its citizens may have more material benefits and achieve personal fulfillment, ends completely contrary to the principles of our society.
4. Fact: The shipments constitute a unique and indivisible whole, a reason to also apply the sanction of confiscation to the publishing contract with “Marea” Publishers.
5. Fact: The fundamental facts taken into account to apply the sanction of confiscation were not recorded.

Claudia Cadelo is still waiting for a response from the Provincial Prosecutor to her complaint about the cultural apartheid at the last Young Filmmakers Exhibition. Agent Rodney never showed his face to confirm or deny the sad events of November 2009. And plainclothes police surround the home of Luis Felipe Rojas, without any court order to do so. My complaint to the court for the beating and false arrest I suffered last February has met only silence from the legal institutions… while Dagoberto Valdés is still waiting for an explanation of why they will not let him travel outside of Cuba. We are surrounded by a repression that does not sign papers, show its face, or place a stamp next to each act which violates its own law.

Punishments they do not want to leave any evidence of, detainees who do not appear on the inmate roll of any police station, threats from voices that leave no trace. A culture of intimidation without a written language, imposed by pseudonymous agents who use coercion to avoid leaving evidence. When we demand that they put in writing the phrases they scream at us, far from the cameras and microphones, they tighten their lips and boast about the power that allows them to remain anonymous. If we file a complaint, appealing to the law that they themselves have created, then thirty, sixty, ninety days pass, and nothing. No judge will hear a complaint against the olive-green institution that rules this country.

So vainglorious from the dais, they use words like “courage,” “sacrifice” and “fortitude,” to hide behind their own fear, to avoid putting their names, their faces, and their convictions next to the atrocities they commit.

He returns speaking softly, knocking cautiously on the door of that friend he hasn’t wanted to see for more than a year. For a long time he doesn’t talk about what happened when he didn’t come, or why, but the way we look at each other says everything. Fear, that element that puts affection to the test and throws corrosive acid over declarations of loyalty, has kept him away. Now he’s back for just a few minutes. While he’s in our house he speaks in a whisper, pointing to the tiny hidden microphones he imagines in every corner. We invite him to share a couple of fried eggs, a piece of taro, and some rice, not a word of reproach. We act as if we’d seen him yesterday or as if we’d talked on the phone just this morning, as if he’d never been away.

Nevertheless, something is broken beyond repair. So we only tell him about family things, about Reinaldo’s granddaughters who grow bigger every day and Teo’s new interest in playing the guitar. Not a single word from this side about the gratifying and painful side of our lives that comes from expressing ourselves freely in a country full of masks. When we seem to have run out of things to say, we extend the conversation by mentioning the rain or the stories of violence that seem to become more common every day in this city. To fill the void created by distance we tell him about our inability to find cooking oil, and the detergent one has to tease out from the hidden stores in the shops. We avoid, of course, future plans, daily worries, the police cordon, and how sad we feel about those who leave.

After a while the friend goes and we’re convinced he won’t return for a year or two, an eternity or two. Who knows, he might be here sooner than we think, patting our backs and telling us that when everyone fled from us in terror he wasn’t infected by the fear and from his room, at a afe distance, he was with us every step of the way.

With the start of mass layoffs, our authorities own official propaganda apparatus has announced their worst nightmare, the day the system collapsed. The drastic measure has been justified as a part of perfecting, or actualizing, the Cuban economic model, euphemisms with which they try to mask the growing use of market rules in the functioning of the economy.

What the current government is doing is a relief to the politicians of the future; it will be they who will get to announce the beautiful part of the transition, when civil liberties and economic rights will take center stage. Contrary to how it was presented by the regime’s propagandists, the rocks against which the ship of the Revolution is crashing, with all its conquests on board, are not along the far shore where the sirens of capitalism sing, but here, in the illusion of Utopia, on this shore.

People are shouting from balcony to balcony and at first I think they’re insulting each other, but that’s not it. The woman from the building on the corner tells another woman that they have Crazy Glue at the little shop at Boyeros and Tulipán. Both are wide-eyed, gesticulating, “I thought it was gone forever,” “There’s been none anywhere,” they say. I chuckled while looking at the tip of my shoe, greatly in need of this instant fixative that the neighbors are announcing as if the ration stores had gotten a delivery of beef. If I get there in time to get a tube of the magic glue, I could fix the computer key that’s been flying off, and also the doorbell, which you can barely hear when someone rings it.

Surrounded by my list of broken things, I start to wander if there will be statistics on how much crazy glue is used each year on this Island. It is not a basic product, but I sense that there is a relationship between the need to repair our belongings and the seriousness of the country’s economic crisis. If not, why is the whole world running after an adhesive that is advertised as able to reassemble everything. Often I have bits of glue stuck to my elbows or on my clothes after making one the repairs I’m faced with every day. The last time I focused on these tasks I ended up with my thumb and index finger glued together, until hot water managed to separate them, taking off a piece of skin in the process.

In many stores, when this contact cement comes in you’d think they were having a big sale. People buy dozens of tubes, as if its great adherent power could glue together a reality cracked by frustration. We are not an excessively austere people, who can’t stand to throw out useless things, but we find it difficult to pay attention to the expiration dates provided by the manufacturers. When we break something, we rarely have a substitute. So I will leave this post here, and go and buy my share of crazy glue, my necessary dose of that instantaneous mender. Perhaps a few drops will help me to gather the pieces of that future we’ve dropped on the floor, smashing it to smithereens all over the place.