I’m already used to it that from my fourteenth floor any little wind seems like a category five hurricane.  Today I got up and noticed that the neighborhood remains in the same place, the Plaza of the Revolution is as vertical is it was yesterday, and the only thing missing are some trees in the immediate area.  I don’t have electricity yet, but at least I have a good excuse for not burning my eyes out in front of the screen.

I put an entry from Claudia [see below: “From paranoia to a scream”], the other person who held the poster with Gorki’s name at the concert at the Anti-Imperialist Grandstand, and a brief chronology prepared by me – of five pages – about what happened between Thursday, the 28th and Friday the 29th of August.  I regret not being able to be as brief as usual, the situation deserves a record of the details.

By Claudia Cadelo De Nevi

On Friday night, after the release of Gorki and when we had already been to his house, he asked Lía if she had been to the beach.  Well, it is simply impossible to narrate the last four days in two hours.  He didn’t know yet that we had been at the court from eight in the morning, that we had been burned by the sun the whole day and that later two storms had rained on us… and that we were all there – the diplomats, the press and us (I say “us” because some of us didn’t know each other from before, so it was simply us, those who had been there).

I write this note because I want to share my experience in this act of solidarity that artists and non-artists (like me) have had with him and with ourselves, clarifying that I refer to physical artists, painters and writers, because I didn’t see a single musician, not even the most “underground” of the underground.

My friends call me a paranoiac; I am the one who lives in fear, who never opens the windows, who never speaks of politics, I am afraid of the dark, I don’t go out after ten at night, not even to the corner.  But nothing had made me as afraid as I was for the last four days starting on Monday (and it still hasn’t left me).

However, getting to know people like Yoani, seeing her at my side with the banner in her hand, after having talked to her two or three times on the telephone, driven by faith, to see us all today helping Gorki, Ciro, Renay and Herbert, my friends holding the ground with me and rising to overcome our fears and doubts, with friends overseas moving heaven and earth and, finally, managing to convert a sentence of four years into four days… to me it still seems like a miracle.

I feel pity for those who haven’t called me, who have been hiding from me in case I might ask them for help, for those who said “yes” but didn’t come, I regret they haven’t experienced the happiness of the end, the sensation of having achieved the unachievable.

I believe today marks a turning point from “no we can’t” to “we can.”  We have shown that things can change, that we can stand up to injustices and the abuse of power and that fear is NOT infallible.

Photos by: Claudio Fuentes Madan

Thursday before the concert.
How did it occur to us to go to a concert by Pablo Milanes to ask for the liberation of Gorki?  That is something that has the trademark of the spontaneous and the haste of that which can not be postponed or thought better of.   Ciro, Claudia and I talked about it among ourselves and immediately decided to do it because to organize or arrange actions too much is the fastest way for “them” to find out about it.  None of us stopped to think about the repercussions of what would happen, because only he who has something to lose weighs his actions, with the same care that a housewife handles the tins in the market.

Thursday, 28th, 7:30 p.m.
A group, among whom were Ciro, Claudia, Hebert, Emilio and me, met at the Coppelia bus stop to leave for the concert at the Tribuna Antiimperialista [Anti-Imperialist Grandstand].  At this time we were already being followed by some nervous boys of the political police and the police operation was impressive.  It was still daylight and Pablo Milanés was singing when we arrived at the Protestómetro [Protest station].  We found a varied set of people there, including many military and some from the international press.  For nearly forty minutes we were waiting for reinforcements but in the end we decided to take action without counting on those who were lost in the crowd, or who had never arrived, or who once there had changed their minds.  The plan was to display two posters with the name of “Gorki” and to shout his name.  That was meant to remind the musicians giving the concert that we had hoped for a pronouncement from them about the arrest of the leader of Porno para Ricardo. [More: keep reading] Read the rest of this entry »

I have a lot to tell about the events of these last days.  I know that you are waiting for the details about what happened at the concert on Thursday, the poster, the beatings, the arrests, the incredible police operation and all the stand-by activities in front of the Playa Municipal Tribunal that ended with the liberation of Gorki.  The trial alone – at which I was present to check the inconsistencies in all the accusations made against the rocker – would give enough material for several posts.   Unfortunately, because of Gustav the weather situation in Havana doesn’t allow me to leave the house to connect to the internet in a public place.  On my balcony, fourteen floors up, we already have strong winds, and have started to close the windows and protect the plants.  Today I am called on to face another cyclone.

What I do not want to fail to say is that never before, as in these last days, have I seen international public opinion, the media, and part of Cuban civil society come together and unite.  Yesterday we demonstrated that the wall can be pushed if we do it together.  We have forced them to retract, to undo the injustice, and this is a very good precedent for us and extremely dangerous for “them.”  The internet proved that it can act, in the Cuban case, as a virtual environment for joint efforts.  I hope that these centimeters we gained by pushing the boundaries will be followed by meters and meters of reclaimed freedoms.

*I have dictated this post by telephone to some friends who will post it.  With the collaboration of some of them I was able to report yesterday from outside the court.  I want to especially thank Ernesto Hernández Busto through whom much of this information saw the light of day in the pages of “Penúltimos días.” 

They took him because nothing destabilizes the intransigents more than a man in his most free state.  At the Fifth Police Station, 3rd and 62nd in Playa, where the criminals take turns and a toilet is a painful illusion, Gorki plucks the strings of his rebelliousness. He is a weird guy, everyone notices it, even more weird in a society where the model of the “New Man” is the coloring book version of the idiot in the classroom.

Gorki concentrates the attraction that his critics do not have; he sings, sways, and shouts in his bloody rock lyrics what others mutter with fear.  He has a room lined with egg cartons somebody gave him, because if we added up all the eggs he’s entitled to from the rationed market he would not have been able to wallpaper even a closet.  He is accused of a crime from the script of the film “Minority Report,” charged under the euphemism of “pre-delinquent dangerousness.”  Translated into the language of reality, it means they put you behind bars so you don’t commit the mischief that others see coming.

In the case of Gorki, the charge has been led by a delegate of the constituency with delusions of James Bond, a neighbor woman they “advised” to make the accusation, and by a community that avoids interceding for the “uncomfortable.”  On Thursday he will have his preliminary hearing and only some clothes and toiletries brought by his father have managed to make it to him where they have him “guarded.”  There is little chance of the defense lawyer convincing the strict prosecutor that Gorki’s long hair, his rock songs, and the noise of his guitar, are not more dangerous than the inertia, conformity and double standard in which everything is wrapped.

More details about the detention are here.

A city identifies itself not only by its people, its architecture or its plazas, but also by its billboards, posters and graffiti.  That is why I have gone out to photograph the signs in the area surrounding my house.  I post the sequence here so you can see the images and messages that surround me.

“Stand firm, helmsman, Granma commands history” (See footnote at link)

“Without Revolution we would not have been able to dream of developing in our country a great sports movement”

“Let’s dedicate ourselves daily to strict performance of duty”

“That absurd First World consumes three quarters of the energy produced in the world”

“Revolution Forever”

“(CDRs) Vigilant and Combative”

“From these men comes a people”

[The profiles are: Julio Antonio Mella, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Che Guevara]

“Freedom now [for the Five Heroes]” (See footnote at link)

“5 hours of the blockade [the U.S. embargo] is  equivalent to the annual dialysis needed for all the patients in the country”

“CDR [Committee for the Defense of the Revolution] There is no truce”

He’s 28 and works at a hotel pool because his stepfather bought him a job in the tourism industry.  His command of English is awful but with the two thousand pesos he paid to the administrator, he didn’t have to prove he could speak it.  More than half the bottles of rum and coca cola he sells at the snack bar he bought himself at the retail price.  His colleagues taught him how to sell his own “merchandise” first, over that which the State sells to tourists.  Thanks to this trick, on every shift he pockets what a neurosurgeon would earn in a month.

His rhythm of spending is tied to his illegal profits, so he tries to comply rather than clash on the plane of “ideological unconditionality.”  He’s one of the first to arrive when called to a march or to the May-Day parade.  In his wardrobe, for when needed, he has a pullover with the Five Heroes, another with Che’s face, and a dark red one that says “Battle of Ideas.”  If his boss tries to catch him diverting resources, he wears one of those shirts and the pressure eases.

At his young age, he already understands that it doesn’t matter how many times you cross the line of illegality as long as you keep applauding.  Some slogans shouted at a political event, or that time he spoke out against a counterrevolutionary group, have helped him keep his lucrative employment.  His hands, that today steal, cheat customers, and divert goods from the state, six years ago these same hands signed a constitutional amendment to make the system “irreversible.”  For him, if they let him continue to line his pockets, socialism could well be eternal.

Translator’s note:
Five Heroes = Five Cuban men convicted of spying in the United States.  More detail about this ongoing case can easily be found by searching on: five heroes Cuba.

More than twenty years of repairing the Soviet elevator and exercising on the stairs are nearing an end.  Two brand new Russian elevators have just been delivered to my building to replace the obsolete socialist technology.  We have had to wait until the ancient machinery exhibited an actual state of “danger to life”;  for the military buildings near where I live to take priority in the replacement of elevators; and for Cuban-Russian relations to once again flourish.

I’m happy because Reinaldo won’t have to spend so much time repairing the prehistoric Armenian elevator.  Thanks to those who, twenty years ago, expelled him from his profession, the residents of one hundred and forty-four apartments have enjoyed a journalist-turned-elevator-mechanic who, living on the fourteenth floor, has had a great interest in repairing the elevator.  Only through the neighbors’ persistence has it been possible to extend the useful life of something that should have been replaced years ago.  The solutions applied by the citizens are often displayed as “achievements of the system,” when they should be registered as desperate struggles for survival.

After a decade of cannibalizing one of the elevators to get the parts to keep the other one running, we are looking forward to the replacements.  The installation will last about four months, during which I will expend many calories on the two hundred and thirty-two steps that separate me from the street.  However, the intense exercise doesn’t scare me; I have climbed these fourteen floors with my bike on my shoulders, carrying a mattress and, a ton of times, with my son in my arms.  Now I’ll do it with the incentive that soon we’ll have two new elevators.  They won’t be Soviet, like those of such poor-quality, but rather – and here it is worth pointing out the difference – simply “Russian.”

In the absence of tourist offices where a Cuban citizen can arrange – in Cuban pesos – an excursion in his own country, private resourcefulness has addressed this “market niche.”  During July and August it’s common to find posters advertisting a trip to the Bellamar Caves, Varadero, or the Zapata Swamp.  The organizers rent a bus from a workplace and sell places for a price that varies between 50 and 120 Cuban pesos.  They leave early in the morning, to avoid the controls and the hot sun on the highway, and return before nightfall.

Even though this is an illegal economic activity, the police turn a blind eye to it; in a pot where the pressure accumulates it’s good to leave a few small slits open.  Because of this, there are people who have earned their living for several years by organizing tourist excursions in this alternative way.  The most daring have started to advertise their trips on the internet or by email.  Others improve their offers by including a snack in the price or even lunch at a local paladar restaurant.

This weekend I went to Soroa on a trip coordinated by one of these emerging “tour operators.”  With three decades under my belt there are still landscapes in my own country that I have never seen, thanks to the chaotic transportation system and the restrictions on accessing them.  Only twice in my life have I visited this mountainous area and its attractions; the first time was in the idealized 1980s when Cubans could travel as tourists in the money in which they paid us.  The second, this weekend, was thanks to the ingenuity of citizens and their spontaneous tourism networks.

A big cheer for private initiatives that clearly reveal the ineptitude of the State when it wants to organize everything.

• Below are some pictures I took during the trip.

Translator’s notes:

A paladar is a small, legal restaurant in a private home, with many restrictions on its operations.  The term “paladar,” which means “palate,” comes from a Brazilian soap opera that was popular in Cuba during the early 1990s.

Soroa is in Pinar del Rio province, about 70 km west of Havana.

Cuba has a dual monetary system.  Cuban pesos, or moneda nacional (national money), is the currency in which people are paid their wages.  The “Cuban Convertible Peso,” (CUC), is the money sold to tourists.  Many products are sold, even to Cubans, only in CUCs.  The exchange rate between moneda nacional and CUCs is about 24-to-1, with one CUC equal to about $1.10 to $1.15 in Canadian or U.S. dollars (today’s exchange rate), and one Cuban peso is worth about a nickel.

On the morning of August 13, 2001, I turned on the radio very early.  In a pompous voice an announcer intoned, “Today is the Fatherland’s birthday,” and then proceeded to read an interminable panegyric on the Maximum Leader.   Lying in bed I had the impulse to catapult myself to another galaxy, to escape from this Island where the anniversary of a birth has become the founding date.  That day I made the decision to emigrate from my country and eleven months later I boarded a plane destined for Europe.

It has been seven years since that outburst.  I have left and returned but I continue to hear phrases similar to what was said on that day.  I notice the same attempts to associate the questionable actions of a man with something more enduring: the Nation.  What has changed is that this ridiculous cult of personality no longer makes me want to escape, instead I want to stay; it doesn’t confuse me, it makes me see more clearly what we must not tolerate.  In the future, no person should be confused with the Fatherland.  No birthday candles on any cake should be blown out in the name of us all.