I am doing an onomastic and simple study: How many members of Generation Y are part of Cuba’s power mechanisms today? I am under the impression that if I look under any rock there are Yunieskys, Yordankas, and Yusimís everywhere. On the street I turn my head every time someone calls out a name similar to mine, but I don’t see a profusion of “Y’s” in the positions that decide the direction of the country.  The National Assembly – which will convene in a few weeks – has a roster that barely shows this crazy letter that proceeds “Z.” Also, one doesn’t find the capricious “Y” among the managers, administrators or leaders of companies.

What if, from the penultimate place in the alphabet, from this extravagant letter so rarely used in our Spanish, we launched a cry that would reach the imposing vowels and consonants in the top ranks.  We would say something like: “The Y’s moment has arrived! It’s high time for the alphabet to begin at the end!”

There are definitions, slogans and ways of saying things that continue to be used out of habit, although in reality little remains that justifies these names.  We continue to talk about a social equality that cannot be found anywhere, of a sovereignty that contrasts with our actual dependence on foreign markets, and an ideology that doesn’t bear out its principles in the midst of this “pseudo-capitalism of the State.”

We could continue hanging the same poster on the door, but we this won’t make its slogan match reality.  For example, in the photo above, a tree has grown up and covered part of the resistance option, “Socialism or Death.”  Thus, life ridiculed the extreme choice proposed to us by this slogan. A few thick branches with their green leaves covered the mention of “the grim reaper” and created a dilemma different from those shouted to us from the podium in the hardest years of the Special Period.*

A small sprout threatens to also cover the word “Socialism.”  Hasn’t the time come to change the sign?

Translator’s note: 

Special Period = A long period of severe economic hardship in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed and no longer supported Cuba.

Photo caption:  At the end of Linea Street, one of the few billboards that recalls the slogan, “Socialism or Death.”

The big question on Saturday evening is not what can we do, but how can we afford to pay for a night out priced, for the most part, in convertible pesos? For a young couple, going to a disco can mean, a cost, at  least, of ten “chavitos.”*  Hence, house parties or the Saturday night movies on TV are best for your wallet. I entertain friends who come over and occasionally I go to the Malecón*, which remains free. I join the young people who sometimes hang out at the intersection of 23 and G to spend the night talking, singing loudly and walking from one side to another.

So I am happy when the French Film Festival comes and we only pay a subsidized price to be entertained for a few nights. That said, we can’t have a small beer after seeing the film “99 F” or the comedy “You are really handsome,” because that would cost a full day’s wages. After the programs we hang around outside the Chaplin cinema, or we go home. I was reassured by an announcement of a week of German films: at least for a few days, enjoying ourselves will not mean committing hara-kiri.

*Translator’s notes:

Chavito = A nickname for the Cuban Convertible Peso.  The word is a play on “Chavez,” the name of the president of Venezuela.

Malecón = The sea wall and the street along it that wraps around Havana.

In your sneakers with the Nike logo on the tongue you sneer at my synthetic leather sandals, while I calculate that your Italian sunglasses cost you a month’s salary. You pull a pack of Marlboro cigarettes that you bought in Vía Uno out of your purse and offer me one, even though you know that I don’t smoke. We are going together to your house in Cerro–a small room in a crumbling mansion occupied by seven families. I enter the living room and your impeccable shoes seem out of place alongside a metal chair without a back, a shapeless mattress covered by a gray sheet and walls that haven’t been painted since her grandpa died.  She pours coffee for me into a cup without a handle, but I can only stare at the gold ring on her index finger. “Yadira,” I say to reprimand her, “you’ve got such opulent clothing but you don’t even have your own bathroom!” She smiles and I catch sight of a small ruby embedded in her canine tooth.

Leaving her shabby house, I notice the strange combination of ostentation and misery that “decorates” our streets. I see pairs of Adidas, Kelme, and Wilson sneakers going in and out of the front doors of crumbling buildings on Reina Avenue, and my nose picks up a stench wafting from a broken sewer pipe nearby, along with the unmistakable scent of Christian Dior perfume. The lines that form outside of the boutiques attest to the quantity of money that arrives through remittances, illegal activity or diverting resources which sustains these conceited “peacocks.” Nobody wants to go without designer clothing, whether it is genuine or fake.

Somebody told me that the Adidas store on  the corner of 1st Street and Avenue D in Vedado sells more merchandise per square meter than any other Latin American subsidiary, to the point that they are thinking of moving to a bigger site so they can double their profits.  Some of their products will be bought by people who don’t have their own room or who must struggle to eat everyday. They prefer to keep their most “valuable” possessions on their own bodies.

When she looks out from behind the lenses of her UV sunglasses, wearing her Point Zero cotton clothing, with the L’Oreal scent in her hair, Yadira doesn’t notice the missing tiles in her kitchen or the springs sticking out of her mattress.  Those who know her believe that she is a splendid young woman who wears designer clothing rather than the resident of a squalid solar, where every morning she must carry water to a small shared bathroom.

 *Translator’s note:

Solar =  A type of single room occupancy housing with shared bathrooms, that can vary from adjoining shacks to an old mansion broken up into single room dwellings.  Whole families may live in one room.  The closest English word is probably “tenement.”

In my Soviet elevator of the Brezhnev era, a drop of oil began to fall from the emergency exit in the ceiling. The persistent drizzle does not clash with the technical condition of the elevator, but rather matches the chipped floor, the obscene graffiti and the horrifying noise the doors make when they open. Several neighbors have ruined their clothes or had their hair oiled by the capricious substance, but the solution we have found is to relinquish the space so that it may fall as it chooses. For the last couple of months, six people can no longer fit in the deteriorating machine because a space must be reserved for the falling grease.

In the same way that we retreat before the capricious drop, we adapt ourselves at the cinema with six beautiful doors, only one of which opens. Conformity leads us to accept that at the end of the film, everyone in the audience must squeeze themselves through a single opening in what was formerly a row of grand doors. Likewise, we have become accustomed to store clerks who treat us badly, to adulterated products, and to services that fail shortly after their introduction.  All this, with the same bovine consent with which we see our civil rights diminished.

To be indolent is fashionable.  For as my neighbors and I have come to believe, the elevator grease is good for growing hair, and the spots that it makes on clothes are the prettiest.  If it waits for action from us – we who can live calmly with the drip of my Soviet elevator – we will let it fall in peace.  Who is going to fall into the absurdity of trying to change things?

Two years ago social workers knocked on my door.  They came as part of an overblown campaign called “Energy Revolution” to change my incandescent light bulbs for energy-savers.  I liked the warm yellow light from the living room lamp but a quick inspection by trained teenagers revealed a wasteful filament and I had to give it up.  They have me another bulb that projected a pale light and lasted three weeks.  My eyes were grateful for the short life of the economy bulb because at night there was no way to distinguish details under its fading light.

To replace the broken one I turned to foreign-currency stores, but they had not gone back to selling the demonized conventional bulbs – the ones that I have had in the nightstand my whole life.  I resigned myself to buying the short-lived energy-saving bulbs or the others – called “cold light” – that give my living room the appearance of an operating room.  But for the last two months, even those are not available.  There are no light bulbs of any kind in the stores of Havana.

As a  joke, the clerks tell me that the boat that brings them “hasn’t arrived from China” and inform me that a little shop in the Cerro district rescued a few in the middle of a riot.  A quick check of my apartment shows that the shadowy areas already exceed the well-lit ones.  If the capricious distribution continues I will have to improve my sense of touch or I will trip over all the furniture.

What nobody knows – and I only write these secrets in a private diary like this one – is that I managed to hide, from the social workers, one specimen of the persecuted bulbs.  It is a round and wasteful one that has accompanied me for more than five years with its yellow 40-watt light.  It is not that it is a pleasure to waste electricity, but I need to believe that at least I can decide under which type of light I read, cook or watch television.

I cling to the fugitive bulb as if it could illuminate and elucidate not only the living room of my house, but also the stupidity of the retailers and the pig-headedness of the energy campaigns.

In the Central Havana of guapos* and brawls where I was born, I learned that there are certain lines that a woman should never cross.  I have spent my life breaking the laughable rules of machismo, but today – and only today – I am going to take refuge in one of them, and precisely in one of the ones I dislike the most.  It warns that, “A woman needs a man to represent her and go to bat for her when another man insults or slanders her.”

Feeling attacked by someone with power infinitely superior to mine, who is more than twice my age and in addition – as the neighbors of my childhood would have said – someone who is “macho-man-male,” I have decided that it will be my husband, the journalist Reinaldo Escobar, who will respond.

I refer to the damaging remarks that Fidel Castro made about me in the prologue of the book, “Fidel, Bolivia and something more.”  Not even such a “great” attack convinces me to abandon the premise of not entering into a cycle of rejoinder and self defense.  I am sorry to say I remain focused on the theme called “Cuba.”

Let’s leave it up to Reinaldo and Fidel to do the fighting.  I will continue in my “womanly” labor of weaving together, despite the chatter, the frayed tapestry of our civil society.  The guapos from my neighborhood will know that I learned “something” from them!

*[This footnote appears in the original] Do not confuse a Cuban guapo with a handsome man [“un hombre apuesto”] or beau.  That could cost us a slap or, in the worst case, an explanatory stabbing.

Translator’s note:

Photo caption: A couple old appliances from the Soviet era that refuse to die.

Along with many others in Havana, I am distressed by the police operation that dismantled various manufacturing networks that made plastic plates, teaspoons, and hair clips.  In the midst of a sweep against “social indiscipline” the police – after sweeping up the “divers” [see Blog entry “Diving in murky waters” June 10, 2008] – closed thirteen workshops and ten clandestine warehouses making and distributing high-demand products.  The illegal manufacturers did not process drugs or traffic in arms, they simply dedicated themselves to producing plastic bowls, clothes pins, and hair clips.

It seems that the reforms that they are publicizing to the outside world include cracking down on private manufacturers.  Whether or not this is the case, as a protest against this raid I will leave my hair loose for now.  This is my way of telling myself, “Yoani, get used the disappearance of the accessories that allow you to tame your locks.”  In the meantime, I’ve already bought an aluminum slotted spoon and a new broom, products that will surely disappear after this offensive.

As distressed buyers of plastic paraphernalia we would prefer that, rather than a police onslaught, alternative producers would have the opportunity to legalize their work. If the National Tax Authority (ONAT) legitimized them, the manufacturers would pay taxes and gain access to wholesale markets for raw materials.  Soon nobody would want to pay inflated prices for similar merchandise sold at the foreign currency stores, and the State would no longer have to import products from so far away.  The usual whistleblowers would not have to inform on those who make coffeepot gaskets, coat hooks and bottle caps.  Not to mention my hair, which would display a beautiful clip of local make, bought from a respectable self-employed producer.

To read the news item published in Granma (in Spanish), click here.

Thanks to the friends I’ve gained through this Blog, I have a copy of the novel Chiquita, winner of this year’s Alfaguara Prize. It is likely that I have one of the few copies on the island, which compels me to read it quickly and pass it on to the list of friends who are waiting for it. The more than five hundred pages written by Antonio Orlando Rodriguez are appealing not only for the story he narrates, but also because of the air of mystery that envelops the book, not to mention the fact that the official Cuban media have not yet announced that a compatriot has won such an important prize.

Amid the flood of journalists and paparazzi that fell on the award-winning author since the jury’s decision, I am certain that not one of them came from a news outlet based in Cuba. This silence doesn’t surprise me; when I was studying Cuban literature in secondary school the same capricious selection process omitted the works of Cabrera Infante, Dulce María Loynaz and Gaston Baquero. Omission is one of the most common tactics relied on by censors and, according to them, Chiquita does not exist. The officials have determined that something created in exile should not be included in “Cuban culture’s” strictly defined territory.

If you read the biography of the Lilliputian  Espiridiona Cendes, you will find no thematic or stylistic reasons that the book has been ignored. Its suppression in the news, intellectual debate and critical journals reflects obedience to causes other than literary ones. The fact that its author does not belong to the cultural institutions of the island, that he might have made a few uncomfortable statements about the Cuban government, or simply that he submitted his book to an international competition without proper authorization from UNEAC [Union of Cuban Writers and Artists] and the Ministry of Culture, excludes it from being recognized in its own country.

They waste their time, these Torquemadas of culture: In today’s world, everything is known. The long line of people waiting to read my copy of Chiquita tells me that if popular opinion prevailed, Antonio Orlando Rodriguez would be on the front pages of our newspapers and on the shelves of every bookstore. Espiridiona Cenda would be the character of the moment and the censors’ mental dwarfism would not be able to keep secret from us the history of this “Cuban living doll.”

As in a game of pick-up sticks, where a fistful of thin rods are dropped from above, so have my colleagues and I been scattered across the enormous tabletop of the globe.  Those of us who studied together in the same classrooms, exchanged ideas or worked together on projects, could now make a network of philologists, graduates of the University of Havana, scattered throughout the world.

Marlen, from Matanzas, lives on the other shore and studies for her doctorate, while Nelson, who was the first to graduate, has been away in the United States for almost six years already.  I know that the poet José Félix used to sing with his guitar in the bars of Spain, and Walfrido – who excelled in semantics – is with his girlfriend in Madrid.  Many of the students who graduated ahead of me, such as Sahily and Yamilé, make a living in the Big Apple or in countries in Latin America.  The list of emigrants coincides, save for the rare exceptions, with Faculty of Arts and Letters’ roster during the years I studied there.

The pick-up stick that is me has done its tumbling from one continent to another, but a crazy gravitational force finally returned it to its origin.  Because of this, I don’t resent those who fell away.  For all of us, a variety of circumstances threw us from here to there. “The hand that throws the sticks” was, for some, economic necessity, the lack of future prospects, or the simple impossibility of continuing to live under one roof with parents and grandparents.  For others, we were driven into exile by the suffocating lack of freedoms, the desire to shout on a street corner, even if nobody hears us.

The loss of all those linguists, writers and art critics has caused irreversible damage to the Cuban culture. Needless to say, I do not hear the necessary phrases of regret over the mass escape of my classmates in cultural conferences, meetings of UNEAC [Union of Cuban Writers and Artists], much less in political forums.  No hand seems willing to re-unite all the “sticks,” to provide these “philologists in flight” the chance to have their own homes, to fulfill their professional dreams, or to shout – with freedom – from every street corner.

Translators note:  The pick-up-sticks game is also called Jack Straws, Spellicans, Mikado and other names.  In Cuba it is called Palitos Chinos, or Chinese Sticks.