The most important news in the Cuban press does not come with titles that give away its contents. Under the titles “Informing the population,” “Letter from the Ministry of the Interior,” or “Declaration of the State Council,” we learned of the most significant events. This Monday it was the newspaper Granma which trumpeted in huge letters, “Information for our people.” The elderly quickly bought all the newspapers from the kiosks and raised, to two pesos, the resale price for a copy of the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party.
“Granma is authorized to report,” the newspaper announced, just as they used to do, in their time, in the pages of the Soviet newspaper Pravda. The expression made me think about how much news they have been ordered not to report in our largest circulation daily paper, and with what discipline they have complied with this direction to shut up. I shook off the Stalinist reminders of the front page and continued reading. After a few paragraphs it was already clear to me that not only did the design recall the worst of the Russian press before Glasnost, but that the tone and threats did as well. With the warning that “any attempt to violate the law or the rules of social coexistence will be met with a swift and forceful response,” the editorial warns speculators, profiteers, or sellers in the informal market that punishment awaits them.
I was especially confused by a small paragraph in the center of a very “Pravda-like” composition that pointed out: “Thus it invariably will be enforced in the face of such actions and against all signs of privilege, corruption or theft…” How could the General Prosecutor of the Republic cope with so many privileges, granted to the ideologically loyal, that proliferate on this Island. Will the excesses that are going to be penalized include the beach house where the lieutenant colonel vacations with his family, the shopping bag with chicken and detergent given to the censor for filtering web pages, the access to preferential prices enjoyed by the whistleblowers and the “vultures” of State Security. These are the privileges I see around me, but I don’t think that Granma has launched a crusade against them. That would be an act of self-cannibalism.
The title of this article should be “It threatens our people,” because we are all included in the harsh words that seem to be directed only at criminals. I read it like this because who is this country doesn’t cross the line of illegality to buy something; what citizen doesn’t depend on the black market; how many families don’t survive through the diversion of resources against the indignity of their salaries; which are the mechanisms of distribution that aren’t plagued by corruption, so despicable but tolerated by the State itself because it is one of the safety valves that prevents a social explosion. The ghost of Pravda is not the only ghost I have perceived through reading this article, but also that of radicalization, the strong hand, and the State of Emergency. That situation of a constant battle against something within which our leaders seem to feel so comfortable.
I recover from a cold humming a tune by the Habanero singer-songwriter Erick Sánchez that he dedicated to me at his last concert and that today I want to share with you. It’s a catchy tune about those who only know how to wait, with their arms crossed, white others do something. The song has already been around for a while but Erick added a final improvisation about these times of supposed reforms and expectations.With this video, filmed by me in the small theater at the Museum of Fine Arts, I want to add a multimedia component to this blog for the first time. We have only had to “wait” seventeen months to post some music, so it hasn’t been too… This Saturday I went back to Pinar del Rio and in the next post will include some images and anecdotes about what I saw over there.
Meanwhile, here are the lyrics of the improvisation by Erick Sánchez:
In Spanish:
Esperar, esperar, esperar
A sin permiso viajar afuera
Esperar, esperar, esperar
Que pongan una sola moneda
Esperar, esperar, esperar
Y que lo hagan sin que te duela
Esperar, esperar, esperar
Y sin tanta preguntadera
In English:
Wait, wait, wait
For freedom to travel abroad
Wait, wait, wait
For a single currency
Wait, wait, wait
And that they do it without causing you pain
Wait, wait, wait
And without so many questions
I dedicate this song to Adolfo Fernandez Saenz, who ended his hunger strike last week, in the Canaleta prison. With your determination and the help of many who supported your complaint, you succeeded in getting the prison guards to return your books.
Adolfo, brother, this song is for you and hopefully you will not have to wait much longer.
The accounting of the disaster is over and our news programs seem to have entered a rosy period where there is only room for reports of recovery and optimism. Neither regret nor doubt have a place among so many calls to confidence. The opinions and faces shown on TV are carefully selected; they only show those who have something hopeful to say. The phrase “back to normal” is repeated by Party general secretaries, by drivers of trucks loaded with roofing and even by the victims themselves. They try to erase at all costs the “now” to return to the “before” of the two hurricanes.
The truth is that I do not believe that a month ago we had anything resembling “normal.” Furthermore, in the three decades that I have under my belt I do not think I have lived in anything other than what is anomalous. To those who trumpet the word, I would like to ask them if they believe the Special Period* is “normal,” the fear of the zero option,* the endless speeches, the Battle of Ideas, the rallies of repudiation, my friends arming a raft to take to the sea, the “it exists but it doesn’t touch you, or it touches you but it doesn’t exist,” the perennial lines, the promises of change that is not specified, the idle land, the idea of the public square where dissent is treason, speaking in a whisper, the paranoia that everyone could be part of the Apparatus,* travel restrictions, the privileges of a few, the dual currency, the indoctrination in schools, lack of expectations, billboards with slogans that nobody believes and the hope, the expectation, the dreams that sometime everything will arrive at a point close to “normal.”
Translator’s notes:
Special Period: The period following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its support for Cuba.
Zero Option: A contingency plan from the post-Soviet period that envisioned Cuba surviving “alone” in the world, with its economy cut off from almost all other countries.
There are those who have a wall full of diplomas, or a shirt straining under the weight of medals. Heroes who accumulate scars, and we citizens who stockpile frustrations. Not to be left behind in this widespread mania for collecting, I attempt to have my own collection of something. I collect denials of travel, slips of paper that repeat that I may not leave “for the moment” and airplane tickets postponed. All this with the same compulsion that others amass soft drink labels or ceramic figurines.
Stubborn, like a can of condensed milk, I have resubmitted my papers to visit Europe. Not acquiescent with the “no” they already gave me in May, I returned to the Plaza municipality’s Bureau of Emigration and Immigration. I waited several days, while the breaking of the machine that prints the stickers delayed an answer that I already intuited. In the end, someone in olivegreen confirmed to me that the penalty still stands. The corrective, being made to kneel on rice, is in my case a prohibition on leaving this Island. Won’t the Daddy-State learn how irritating children become when they rarely leave the house?
* Here is a link to the second document, in less than a year, that tells of my condition: Captive Blogger.
Translator’s notes:
More information about this canceled trip is included in the footnote to the Italian translation of this blog entry; click on the Italian flag, above.
Saturday night I’m yawning in front of a boring cops-and-robbers thriller on TV. The phone rings and it’s Adolfo,* who is still behind bars since a tantrum of power condemned him in the Black Spring* of 2003. He sounds upset. Some quasi-literate jailers are preventing him from receiving the books and magazines brought by his wife on her last visit. The list of the “dangerous” texts withheld includes the Catholic publications New Word, Secular Space, and the spiritual reflections of Saint Augustine. His co-defendants and fellow inmates, Pedro Argüelles Morán and Antonio Ramón Díaz Sánchez, have been united in exerting pressure in the only way they can: Rejecting the meager sustenance put on their trays. As long as they refuse to pass on the sustenance of words, they will refuse the tasteless ration that keeps them alive.
The distrust among the Canaleta* prison guards provoked by the books reminds me of the Columbian Jorge Zalamea and his poem-novel, “The Great Burundan Burundi has died.” A dictator, fearful of articulate language, condemns his subjects to a world without communication and without literature. To enforce his mandate of silence, he recruits all those offended by words. He summons, to train his armies of censors, “those incapable of fervor, those lacking in imagination, those who never talk to themselves, (…) those who hit animals and children when they don’t understand their glances…”
The pawns who today withhold Adolfo’s books form a part of these same phalanxes of illiterate censors. Jailers of expression, they understand—as the Great Burundan might understand—that the human condition and “the rebellion that follows it, have their foundation in the articulated word.” They suspect that when Adolfo, Pedro and Antonio are engrossed in an essay or a story the bars disappear, the jail fades away, and they manage to shake off their lengthy sentences. The “instruction” received by the guards in Cuban prisons ensures that they know that a book is something extremely dangerous.
Black Spring: In March 2003, coinciding with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Cuba arrested about 75-90 people including about 25-35 journalists (reports vary). The majority of these people remain in prison.
Canaleta: A high security prison located in Ciego de Ávila, about 460 km (285 miles) east of Havana.
She was going to be called Gea and she would come to relieve Teo of the burden of being the only child in the house. With her I might once again have prepared pureed malanga, boiled bottles in the night and washed loads of diapers. But thinking better of it, Gea remained the desire of another child that I did not have. I looked ahead twenty years, with the same housing problems of today and with two married children who would bring their spouses to live in our apartment. At first, with the three marriages, we would try to maintain harmony, but the fights would inevitably come.
Our house would be like so many, where several generations live and a suppressed battle takes place every day. The refrigerator would be divided into three zones and the couples would make love quietly, faced with the proximity of the other beds. The grandchildren would come to share the bedroom with the grandparents—in this case my husband and me—and make them feel like they were already a nuisance to the young people. The children would spend a good part of the time in the corridor or in the street, because of the little space available at home. They would become teenagers and look for partners, new potential occupants for the house already bursting at the seams.
If, before the hurricanes Gustav and Ike, my generation and that of Teo had to wait forty years or more to have a house, now the period has surpassed the span of a human life. Together with the roofing tiles and the windows that the winds took, they also sent flying our dreams of having our own roof. Where there are no resources to replace what the victims had and lost, how long will the wait be for those who had nothing.
Without sentimentality Gea has vanished totally from my life, now I know that we will have no space for her.
August and September have been a tough test for the long-awaited economic reforms, which appear to have been shipwrecked even before weighing anchor. “You have to have confidence in the management of Raúl Castro” exhorted my friend on seeing my persistent distrust. “Soon they are going to implement new measures,” the same lady assured me, almost three months ago. She belongs to the group who hope the rulers can solve our current problems—a good part of which they created themselves with their absurd prohibitions. Me, I’m on the picket line with the skeptics.
My doubt stems from “the original sin” of Raúl’s government: It was not elected by the people, rather it is the fruit of a dynastic, inherited succession. He was not chosen instead of even one single opponent and, for me, designation without an alternative is not an election.
The current President did not propose a program, he did not commit himself before his voters, and that means he is not accountable to us. The much needed measures can take one year or five years because he will not lose his post. He caught, without competitors, the tempting apple of power. Now he can eat it without haste, because our votes have not been the path that led him to obtain it.
A character with a fat neck and briefcase in hand appears every Wednesday in the humorous “Let me tell you,” in same space where Professor Chicken Mind, already described in this Blog, releases his platitudes of dilettante wisdom. Incompetent Lindoro is the director of an inefficient company and has a car registered to the State that he never uses for the benefit of the workers. Impeccably dressed, he sidles up to his subordinates and warns them ironically, “As for me, it pleases me to please.” His extra pounds and his elegant dark blue suit contrast with his slovenly demeanor and the unproductivity of everything in the “Bartolete Pérez” workshop.
This prototypical boss flaunts a phrase that has managed to insert itself into the popular vocabulary, precisely the epithet with which he refers to the inefficient, apathetic and poorly paid group of household appliance repairers that he directs. With his Colgate smile and while announcing some urgent task or a new bureaucratic absurdity, he asks the question, “How is this valiant collective?” Incompetent Lindoro is not a caricature of a boss, but rather the sum of many of them, the portrait in humorous tones of those who have a little power.
These days he frequently evokes the chubby company director and his triumphalist language. In the midst of a flu caused by rain pouring in through the windows of my house, I listened on my little dynamo radio to many Incompetent Lindoros. They spoke precisely of a “valiant collective,” where I only see desperate faces. They called for calm and resistance, from their fat necks from their dry cars. Some, the most powerful, without personally going to the disaster sites, attempted through a telephone line to make promises as hollow and empty as those of this satirical character.
Our Incompetent Lindoros don’t want to recognize that the emergency situation created by Gustav and Ike is not only the fault of the strong winds and rains, but rather of the disasters of production and housing that had already dragged this Island down. Today, in the morning, after two hours in line I was able buy four pounds of sweet potatoes and a piece of fruta bomba* without seeing in the line a single specimen of a director. For pork, we must take turns in the early morning. In the stores that take convertible pesos* the empty refrigerators stink of chicken and meat that was ruined. The food situation could not be worse and although my house endured the winds and in my area there is no great devastation, the only thing people ask about is food. Rising fuel prices already caused the private taxi drivers to double their fares; for a trip that used to cost ten pesos we now pay twenty. But the TV doesn’t see that side of the crisis, but rather a people strong and “valiant” declaring their votes of confidence and expressing hope in front of the cameras.
What will Incompetent Lindor do when the slogans shouted today in front of journalists turn into expressions of discontent and protest? Will they hide themselves then–with a stash of food–inside their briefcases?
Translator’s notes:
Fruta bomba is the Cuban word for papaya. In Cuba ‘papaya’ is an exceedingly rude word relating to female body parts. If you are in Cuba and would like a papaya, you are advised to ask for “fruta bomba.”
Convertible pesos: See the entry, “From the same pocket,” 7 February 2008, and the footnote for “Cyber-mutilated,” 21 July 2008, for more information about the Cuban dual monetary system.
The principal Cuban television meteorologist, Jose Rubiera, announced that no new tropical storm or hurricane has formed in the Atlantic ocean. The relief spread across the one hundred and eleven thousand square kilometers of this island. At least for a few days, the cyclone corridor that we have become will take a break. This climatological news has not dispelled the sorrow and unease that we have for the immediate future. Despite the air of triumph they present to us on the TV news, talking about “hurricane recovery,” Cubans are very worried.
On the one hand, all the illusions of those expecting an economic recovery in the coming months have been dashed. We have already said goodbye to certain products including bananas, mangoes, avocados, the foods and citrus fruits that will take years to return to their already high current prices. After four days without electricity and without any water supply we, and all of the neighbors in the 144 apartments in my building, are waiting for a free supply of drinkable water and the distribution of prepared food. Some have been shouting their disapproval from the balconies, to which I responded with a provocative “Viva Raúl!” which nearly cost me a lynching.
Nor can the market where they take only convertible pesos, with its fat prices, cope with the demands of desperate habaneros. Hurricane Ike has made the profound social differences between those who can keep a reserve supply of food, boards, and battery-powered radios, and those who depend exclusively on the official administration, all the more obvious. The past history of how State aid to victims of natural disasters fades over the months causes people not to want promises, but rather immediate solutions. The voracity with which we take now what might no longer be available tomorrow had the inhabitants of one town in Pinar del Río laying into a truck with machetes to reach its 100 sheets of asbestos cement roofing.
There is a lack of humility in those who should do everything possible to allow humanitarian aid to enter Cuba. One measure that would be very well received would be if the National Customs waived the taxes on the kilograms of medicines, clothing and food emigrant family members want to bring to the island. Instead, however, we Cubans woke up in the middle of a cyclone to an increase in prices for fuel and other staples. They turn down aid without asking what the people think and allow some outsiders to conduct inspections while refusing to let others do likewise. The image of the Venezuelan military arriving in Cuba to “inspect the damage” – that’s word-for-word – contrasts with their fastidiousness about accepting something similar from the European Union countries (with the exception of Spain and Belgium) or the United States.
The questions of the moment are: What is the priority of the Cuban government? Political principals or the welfare of those who have lost everything? What is the preference of the North American government? That the formal inspection requirements are met, or that the aid reaches the victims? Citizens are not going to wait until both governments come to agreement. The people’s diplomacy can surprise them by acting faster and more efficiently.
Those who have plans to travel to Cuba in the coming months and would like to show their solidarity by helping, I recommend bringing in your luggage a few kilograms of supplies to deliver directly to the victims. While anything can help those families that have lost their possessions, there are certain things and resources that are a priority.
Water purifying tablets.
Vitamins, every kind of painkiller, thermometers, band-aids, oral hydration salts, disposable syringes, cotton, medicinal sprays for asthmatics, aspirin, paracetamol and suture thread.
Clothing of all kinds, including underwear and shoes.
School supplies, especially notebooks and pencils.
Rechargeable batteries, flashlights and portable radios.
Toiletries: soap, toothpaste, shampoo and toothbrushes.
Baby clothes and things for babies. Remember that babies have been left without even a bottle.
A recommendation to take into consideration: It is always preferable, whenever possible, to deliver the aid directly to those in need. Personal delivery or sending things through friends is the most secure.
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