Hands emerging from well-cut suits at the UN pressed the red, green or yellow button today to rule on the blockade/embargo *.  Over the last few weeks, television has thrown at us the entire collection of statistics, testimonies and analysis on the ravages of the trade restrictions affecting Cuba.  The issue has been so manipulated by politicians that, from down here, many have chosen to “press the off button… to make it shut up.”

Anticipating the outcome of the vote, I would like to refer to another siege in effect every day.  This one prevents me from entering or leaving my country freely, from associating with a political group or creating a small family business.  An internal blockade, constructed on a base of limitations, control and censorship, has cost Cubans countless material and spiritual losses.  I try to match my mood to that of the newspaper Granma—which requires a huge effort—and make myself care about the outcome of today’s debate in the United Nations.  I go out into the street and what is most glaring are the continuing restrictions imposed on us by our leaders; the wall that no one in the UN will vote against today.

What if they let us press the button!  What if we could vote to rid ourselves of the fence that blockades us within the Island!  I would leave my finger on the green button for many days.

* I refuse to call it either of the coined terms; they already know how bad-mannered we linguists are about these things.  In my daily conversations I simply say, “the pretext,” the clumsy “justification” that is so very convenient for those who block us in here.

This blog, public square, cockfight pit, exorcism and personal nightmare for the boys of the Cybernetics Response Brigade, is nominated for two prestigious awards.  Right now, Generation Y is listed as a finalist for the Bobs Awards granted by Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle.  We are proposed (notice that we use the plural because this blog is no longer just for myself but belongs to those who regularly comment, to the trolls and to the occasional visitors) in the category of Best Latin American Blog, Best Blog Worldwide, and the special prize for “Reporters Without Borders.”

Also, in the 20Blogs Awards contest, organized by the Spanish news site 20 Minutes, we might win something.  At the end of the post are the links where you can vote.  So, if you show the same passion you show commenting here, you are going to end up crashing the voting sites… (Now, now Response Brigade boys, stay calm).  The first prize we have already won:  the blog continues to live in the face of the blockade on the public servers in Cuba.  Even if I can’t see it, I continue writing and neither the complications of Internet connections nor the other “impediments” are going to stop it.

Abstentions are accepted*:

20Blogs Prizes: http://www.20minutos.es/premios_20_blogs/

Bobs Prizes: http://www.thebobs.com/

For English speaking readers you can vote here: http://www.thebobs.com/index.php?l=en

Generacion Y appears in:  Best Weblog, Reporters Without Borders, and Best Weblog Spanish.  You can vote in all three categories.

Translator’s note:

“Abstentions accepted” is a (joking) reference to how “elections” are run in Cuba.

I don’t know what’s going on with the intolerant and hair, which they focus on more viciously than the rest of the body.  They have a special fixation with what sprouts from other people’s heads, whether it’s hair or ideas.

In the seventies my father wanted to grow hair down to his shoulders, but the scissors had their way.  The oppressors were always blandishing them, those who assert that a military haircut is the sign of a “proper” man.  That was the same era when the hippies’ blue jeans and mop hairdos marked them as exponents of “ideological diversionism.”

However, a mop of hair is not the only thing that messes up these barbers of reprimand.  I remember when, overwhelmed by the lack of shampoo and outbreaks of lice—common in the dark years of the nineties—I decided to cut off all my hair.  I was at the Instituto Pedagógico and my shiny head nearly cost me an expulsion from the university.  On the street there was always someone to remind me that “a woman who is respected” does not disregard her hair.  Weighed down by so much interference, I let my tresses grow, ad infinitum.

Today, my son wants to sport a pair of tufts over his ears thanks to the aesthetic influence of Japanese cartoons.  But there is the director of his school to make him live just like his grandfather and I did.  With the white and yellow uniform of secondary school—according to this barber in turn—a hairdo that strays from the most military style doesn’t fit.  To Teo’s blackest hair and enormous sideburns, the old scissors of the intransigent also approach.  The permanent hand that wants to cut off all the differences.

A large madman kicks the cars in the middle of Ayestarán Street.  His clothes are ragged and on his arms you can see the “answering” scars received from some vehicles.  Another lunatic walks around Central Havana offending the president and his brother, while a nutcase spits her dissatisfaction against three impassive police officers.

They make you want to enjoy the same impunity as the mad.  You want to stand on the corner and shout, “The emperor has no clothes,” like a little boy would.  But adulthood and sanity carry the burden of punishment.

Then we will behave like one demented or a child.

Putting things in drawers and sorting and labeling them is not a task only for officials and bureaucrats.  There are some who take a special pleasure in hanging tags on citizens.  The art of listing us by categories has been a common practice in recent decades in Cuba.  One day you’re in the directory of the “obnoxious” or on the tame list of “collaborators.”  Denunciations can move us from the file drawer marked “followers” over to the difficult one marked “enemies.”  There are those on the list with the initials “CR”, which represents the adjective most commonly applied to those who think differently: Counterrevolutionary.

It trips up the archivists when they don’t know how to inventory someone.  It bothers them when the old categories don’t work for newly emerging phenomena.  These “opinion labelers” could use some new categories because almost nobody blinks any more when they’re labeled with “employee of the Empire.”   The bookshelf schematic where they have been arranging Cubans is full of termites but, sadly, we ourselves use the same epithets “they” invented.

I have refused to be on any list but even so I am on many!  I would prefer, however, the single file of those who want to end this ridiculous categorizing of citizens.  I’m confident that one day it will be enough for the people of this earth to know on which list we are all counted together.

That’s me.  And you, what list are you on?

You can be 23 years old and see with the clarity of someone who has lived a great deal.  It’s possible to have a raggedy old laptop fossilized by the heat and to write a blog without breaking any keys in the effort.  She manages to say the hardest things—things the majority of people only mumble at home—publicly, brazenly, and even sensually.  The one managing this unusual feat is Lía Villares, living in Luyanó, playing the guitar and wanting to change things.

One day she combined the name of her city and the chronic loss of red blood cells and began her blog, Habanemia.  In her case, the absence of hemoglobin was caused by the scarcity of dreams for a generation that has been able to fantasize very little.  Lía was one of those who started school at the time when the Special Period was coming into our lives.  Children who don’t remember the ration book for manufactured products, with the unfavorable letter “E”, which my mother  guarded as if it were the most valuable thing in the house.  Those for whom it wasn’t common to drink milk with breakfast, who didn’t receive gifts on birthdays, and who listened, bewildered, to stories of former delicacies, related by the very old.

Lía’s large eyes speak of calm, and questions, thousands of questions at once.  In her blog she lets her hair down and is transformed.  She shouts, sings, shows the pan with oil, the only food obtainable in these days of scarcity.  Her angustiada fe de vida* [anguished faith of life] is shared with friends who gather at night in G Street, with books that distract from the ceiling falling in: “Me in my little house in Luyanó, falling to pieces like all of Havana, spending hours without the Internet and trying to sleep and to finish The Idiot.”

“It’s twenty times better to be a foreigner on this terrible Island than to be a Cuban who does things by the book” she tells us in one of her entries.  However, since Lía is not a “Cuban who does things by the book,” Habanemia has let her shake off this widespread maxim which she describes as, “inaction and silence. The collective inertia of a people lost in thought. ”

* From the poem “El ausente” [The Absent] by Eugenio Florit. Here is a music version by Ray Fernandez.

I argued with a lady in line for malanga root.  She wanted to let her two friends cut in and I figured that if they did I wouldn’t get the ten pounds of food, rationed since the hurricanes.  In the end I let the two old ladies cut the line and didn’t even insult them when the clerk announced, “It’s closed, there’s no more!”  It depresses me to get into a fight over food which is probably why I’m so skinny.  In the pre-university where I studied, I never had the claws to grab for a better share and it always went to the strongest.  When I see myself reduced to fighting for food I feel badly and prefer to come home with an empty shopping bag.  Of course my family offers no thanks for my excessive pacifism.

To console them, I bought a few boxes of bouillon cubes, which has come to be the most common food for the vast majority of the people in this city.  When some confused tourist asks me what a typical Cuban dish is, I answer that I don’t remember, but I know the most common everyday recipes.  And I list them:  “Rice with a beef bouillon cube,” “rice with hot dog,” “rice with a bacon bouillon cube,” or the delicacy of “rice with a chicken and tomato bouillon cube.”  This last one has a color between pink and orange that is most amusing.

If we’re constantly fed pre-digested news on the television, canned speeches past their expiration date, little cubes of patience and waiting to get by day-to-day, why shouldn’t our plates reflect these same bitter flavors.

So I resign myself and buy the happy placebo that will make me believe my rice contains a tasty rib or a piece of chicken.  After the most “complicated” preparation, I put the steaming dish on the table.  My son, smelling the odor, asks me reproachfully, “Why didn’t you fight harder in the line for malanga?”

Although a crack down has been announced against the diversion of resources, price speculation and stealing food, lately the official market has also collapsed.  In a brief tour of state-run cafeterias in my neighborhood, I could see a reduction in what is available.  A convertible peso restaurant* specializing in fish no longer sells shrimp pizzas or rice with seafood.  Why?  Because on this Island, nothing can escape to the presence of the informal wheeling and dealing, to the arms that, under the shadow of illegality, support even what seemed one hundred percent state-owned.

To maintain sales in the cafeterias and restaurants, obviously supplies from the black market were needed. Much of what was sold, under the guise of “official products,” in fact had been purchased by the employees themselves from informal sellers.* With the resources received from the food distribution companies, the public facilities could not have maintained a constant supply.  The waiters and managers of these places worked there primarily for the extra money they made, beyond their wages, by selling these illegal products. No longer able to obtain these dividends, they have lost interest in serving a full menu and the customers notice.

With its obsession for hunting the mouse, the cat has caught its own tail in the trap.  That hairy prolongation of lawlessness and corruption that, when it is cut off, bleeds dry in a short time.

Translator’s notes:

For an earlier Blog entry that gives more background on how employees of State enterprises increase their income, see The Corruption of Survival.

Convertible peso restaurant:  A restaurant that sets prices in CUCs, the money used by tourists and for many products sold to Cubans.  See the footnote to this entry for more information.

In late August I wrote a post titled “What I see around me” which, illustrated with pictures of several billboards, showed the signs that surround me.  These posters, television propaganda and political murals in workplaces form part of the visual inventory of the obligatory.  Images quite different from what we select when guided by our own interests and tastes. An exploration of the documentaries and films that are circulating at the moment, through alternative distribution networks, shows the distance between what the official media shows us and what we really want to see.

I put together a short list of “Underground Superhits,” which circulate today thanks to flash memory and CDs.  Among the most attractive topics is what happened in the Eastern European countries during the collapse of socialism. However, the common denominator of these images and stories that we enjoy today in a semi-clandestine way, is that they were not disclosed or were treated very poorly in the Cuban news. Hence our desire to see what they have not wanted to tell us; to know the other side of the official version they kept secret from us.

Here is the list:

- You Will Love the Leader Over All Things [North Korea]

- The Battle of Chernobyl

- The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the End of the Russian Tsars

- Socialism, the Earthly Paradise

- The Truth of the Sinking of the Kursk Submarine

- The Ouster of a Dictator: Slobodan Milosevic

- The Massacre at Katyn

The informal market is experiencing sharply rising prices these days. An egg now costs the high price of four Cuban pesos, one-third the average wage for a day’s labor. But the pockets of the buyers have not been the hardest hit; for those who illegally sell this product, conviction can lead to two years in prison. This measure seeks to eliminate the swindles of these sellers, after the carnage in the poultry farms caused by hurricanes Gustav and Ike. Reckless traders in the black market are processed in summary trials as a lesson to those who illegally market food, construction materials or medicines.

Our police—long-trained in detecting beef, cheese, shrimp and powdered milk—now also track down eggs. The most immediate effect of these new raids is the disappearance of certain products that used to come to us only through vendors knocking on our doors. These days, chanting “Eeee-eeeggs” may be more dangerous than chanting anti-government slogans. OK, let’s not exaggerate, opinion has always been punished more.

The new wave against the informal market has helped us to resolve the riddle, “Which came first?” We now know that the egg was first, then they arrested those who sold home-made sweets, later they prosecuted those who were protesting the price increase for fuel, and finally they punished those who reported the scarcity of products in the agricultural markets. When it’s the turn of those who traffic in chicken, the prison term will exceed the length of a human life.