Who doesn’t remember the sweets and the accompanying soft drink we received, during the years of the Soviet subsidy, as a school snack.  Like everything that is free, we ended up diminishing its important and during recess many of us played at spraying the fizzy drink and tossing the pastries.  In our hands, the guava pastries and the sugar cookies flew from the balcony of my little school on Salud Street at the corner of Soledad.  In spite of the fact that we undervalued it, without this snack in the middle of classes we would have been hungry and exhausted by midday.

At the beginning of the economic crises of the nineties, one of the first subsidies to disappear was the snack for elementary school students.  The children stopped hearing the sound of the bottles being opened, or of the truck with the tins of cookies that would come early in the morning.  Those tossed sweets became a memory that we tortured ourselves with, for so much wastefulness.  The parents had to take on the task of preparing a snack for school and no one explained in the press why, precisely, they’d decided to eliminate that much needed sustenance.

Among the many ways of extinguishing light, there are very peculiar ones such as “shining in its absence.”  An unmistakable gleam has remained reflected in a photo that appeared yesterday on Granma’s front page, where the Cuban flag lacks the five white points in the middle of the triangle.  The commotion has been such that the newspaper was sold out in the early hours of the morning and today, on the street, everyone was talking about it.  Obviously it’s not a question of a printing error, since a star does not escape so easily.

I prefer to think that, capricious and proud, the bright star that represents our sovereignty decided to go away, on the eve of the birthday of the Teacher [José Martí].  Because the independence that he radiates is not only that of being autonomous of a foreign power, but that which allows every citizen to be sovereign of the powerful State.  In light of the fact that it’s so dark in the field of civil liberties that we can’t even see our hands, the solitary star deserted its red field leaving the official organ of the Party with its marked absence on the front page.

There are errors that have much greater symbolic weight than hundreds of successes.  Evasive stars and readers who interpret their escape; Islands that live dependent on prophesies and superstitions; days to remember the national hero and flags that dare to show what so many people keep silent about.

* Line from Jose Martí, which originally read: “The star that illuminates and kills.”

He started with a pick and shovel, planting the heavy crossbeams that support the train lines.  His father had also been a railroad worker, and an uncle even managed to drive the freight cars, loaded with cane, up to the plant.  I was very young and already his life was connected to the journey of a locomotive, with its file of loud, packed cars.  Some years passed, he managed to have, finally, the controls between his hands and to drive the metal serpent through the Cuban countryside.  My father became an engineer, fulfilling a long family lineage, which had been joined to the railroad for decades.

More than once, I myself drove one of those machines along a quiet stretch, while he supervised my movements and taught me to sound the horn.  “We had trains before Spain,” my paternal grandfather said, whenever anyone asked about his work.  So I grew up, smelling the metal of the brakes that screeched at every stop and pulling the rope of my toy train, surrounded by plastic trees and miniature cows.

The collapse of socialism in Europe derailed the family profession.  Many engines stopped for lack of parts, the trips became more widely spaced and the delays habitual.  Leaving Havana headed to Santiago could be delayed twenty hours or three days.  In some small towns the cars were attacked by needy peasants who would steal some of the goods being transported.  The loudspeakers in the central station repeated endlessly, “The departure of the train to… has been cancelled.”  My father was left without a job and his colleagues began to make a living through a variety of illegal work.

The railroad in Cuba hasn’t recovered from this crash.  Aging rail lines, long lines to buy a ticket and the fall from grace of an entire profession, has given this mode of transport the worst reputation.  “At the rate we’re going, we’ll stop having railroads before the Peninsula*…” my father says sarcastically.  His gaze is not fixed on the wheel that he begins to dismount—in his new profession as bicycle repairman—but at a point further away, to the mass of iron that he guided along this long and narrow Island.

Translator’s notes
“Lokomotiv” refers to a Soviet Era locomotive
“The Peninsula” is how Cubans often refer to Spain

I could spend the day scared, hiding from the men stationed below.  I might fill pages with the personal cost this blog has brought me and with the testimonies of those who have been “warned” that I am a dangerous person.  It would be enough for me to decide that every one of my articles would be a long complaint or the accusing finger of one who always looks outside to find fault.  But it happens that I don’t feel myself a victim, but responsible.

I am conscious that I have been silent, that I have allowed a few to govern my island as if they were running a hacienda.  I pretended, and accepted that others will make the decisions that touch us all, while I shielded myself behind the fact of being too young, too fragile.  I am responsible for having donned my mask, for having used my son and my family as a reason not to dare.  I applauded—like almost everyone—and left my country when I was fed up, telling myself that it was much easier to forget than to try to change something.  I am also burdened with the debt of having let myself carry—sometimes—the rancor and suspicion with which they marked my life.  I tolerated their inoculating me with paranoia and, in my teens, a raft in the middle of the sea was a frequently nurtured desire.

However, as I do not feel myself a victim, I raise my skirt a little and show my legs to the two men who follow me everywhere.  There is nothing more paralyzing than a woman’s calf flashing in the sun in the middle of the street.  Nor am I wooden like a martyr, I try not to forget to smile, because giggles are hard stones in the teeth of the authoritarian.  So I continue my life, without letting them turn me into a whiner, with only one regret.  Ultimately, everything that I live today has also been the product of my silence, the direct result of my former passivity.

In mid-2007, Julito assured me that before August pork would be sold at ten pesos a pound, the daily salary of the average worker.  Not seeing his prediction come true, he was shouting last January about the exact date of the meat discount.  With his permanent smile, he assured me that we could acquire the precious meat—at a fairer price—by the summer months.  Then came the hurricanes and my neighbor’s prediction turned into a bitter prophecy or, even worse, a harmful naiveté.  I didn’t run into him for several weeks and couldn’t throw back in his face his excessive triumphalism.

Yesterday, Julito came up to my floor to talk about another topic.  His youngest daughter has just taken the path already charted by the previous one, after deserting in the midst of an artistic trip abroad.  The two have been reunited in one of the large U.S. cities and her father is not so much sad about the separation as happy about the future of his daughters.   Sitting in my living room he declared that he and his wife plan to reunite with the exiled part of the family.  “There we will be more useful,” he tells me in the tone of someone who’s already made a decision.

I had the urge to ask him if he wouldn’t wait for the meat discount, and afterwards fly to the family reunion.  But I know that as parents we don’t usually care for jokes about our children, so I preferred to ignore his past optimism.  I forgave him the fatigue his prediction caused me and even the appraisal of “pessimist” with which he’d greeted my suspicion.  Julito is one of those who even on the gangway of the airplane will continue to swallow his criticisms.  Later, in Boston, maybe he’ll read this blog and he’ll probably send me an email to confess that he never believed in anything, that he was just as skeptical as I am.

I’m post-modern and disbelieving: speeches put me to sleep and a leader standing at a podium is, for me, the height of tedium.  I associate microphones with calls to intransigence, and the praised oratory of some has always seemed to me like nothing but screams to deafen the “enemy.”  At public events I usually manage to slip away and I prefer the buzzing of a fly over listening to the promises of a politician.  I have had to hear so many harangues—many of them seemingly endless—that I’m not the best person to endure a new lecture.

For me, the voice that emerges from the podium brings more intolerance than concord, a greater helping of exasperation than of calls to harmony.  From the podiums I have seen predictions of invasions that never came, economic plans that were never met, and even expressions as discriminatory as, “Let the scum that leaves, leave!”  Which is why I was so confused with the serene statement  delivered today by Barack Obama, with his manner of carefully constructed arguments and invocations to harmony.

It seemed to me when reading it—I don’t have an illegal satellite dish to watch it on TV—that he condemned all the rhetoric to be left in the twentieth century.  We have started to say goodbye to that convulsed eloquence which no longer moves us.  I only hope that it will be, “We, the People” who will write the speeches from now on.

Há já uma semana que andamos a receber muitas chamadas telefónicas com as mesmas perguntas: “Como está o ambiente em Havana?” “O que há de certo nos rumores que correm?”. Respondo-lhes que a temperatura baixou um pouco, que não tem chovido e que se comenta que vão descongelar a entrega das licenças para taxistas.

Os que indagam ficam sem perceber, imagino que o fazem para não me prejudicarem, mas não consigo entender o que querem saber, porque afinal não tenho nenhum tio doente, e quando nasci o meu avô (o que foi mambí ) já não estava entre os vivos. Sim, é verdade que se vêem mais polícias nas ruas, mas o Granma explicou que é para controlar melhor o trânsito. É falso que estejam a escassear as flores e que dê trabalho comprar rum nos mercados. Que eu saiba, não se produziram detenções massivas nem se estão a reabilitar os túneis nem os refúgios anti-bomba.

Mudanças perceptíveis não vejo nenhuma. Bem vistas as coisas, e isto é absolutamente subjectivo, o ar parece mais transparente e a terra mais leve, mas não acho que seja sobre essas temas que os meus amigos me fazem perguntas.

Inspired by one of the many tourist advertisements, an idea occurred to me to attract visitors to the Island.  It is not an ecological tour to appreciate nature or an historic tour of the country’s plazas and monuments.  Stay “a lo cubano,” as a Cuban, could be the slogan of this tourist campaign, condemned in advance to lack interest for its possible target audience.  Come and live it, it would say on the cover of a ration book, which would be given to each of those who embark on this adventure.

Accommodations would not look like the luxurious rooms displayed by the hotels in Varadero or Cayo Coco, since our tour operators would suggest dingy rooms in Central Havana, tenements in Buena Vista and a crowded shelter for hurricane victims.  The tourists who buy this package wouldn’t use convertible currency, but for their expenses for a two week stay would have half the average monthly wage, three hundred Cuban pesos.  Thus, they could not ride in foreign currency taxis, or drive a rental car on the country’s roads.  The use of public transport would be obligatory for those interested in this new method of travel.

Restaurants would be forbidden to those who opt for this excursion and they would receive eighty grams of bread each day.  Maybe they’d even have the good fortune to enjoy half a pound of fish before they leave on their return flight.  To travel to other provinces they wouldn’t have the option of Viazul, but instead of spending three days in line for a ticket, they could be given the advantage of being able to buy a seat after only one day of waiting.  They would be prohibited from sailing on a yacht or renting a surfboard, so they wouldn’t be ending their stay ninety miles away rather than on our Caribbean “paradise.”

At the end of their stay, these risk-taking excursionists would get a diploma of “Connoisseurs of the Cuban Reality,” but they will have to come several more times to be declared “adapted” to our everyday absurdity.  They will leave thinner, sadder, and with an obsession with food, which they will satisfy in the supermarkets of their countries, and above all with a tremendous allergy to tourism ads.  The golden advertisements that show a Cuba of mulattas, rum, music and dancing will not be able to hide the panorama of collapsing buildings, frustration and inertia that they have already known and lived.

Translator’s note
300 Cuban pesos is about $12 U.S.

Agora que está na moda relembrar o que ocorreu há meio século, quero desempoeirar a minha mais antiga culpa, que tem o nome de Horacio.

Horacio Otaola era o aluno mais brilhante do colégio Enrique José de Varona na cidade de Camagüey. Fizemos juntos o ensino primário até 1959. Ainda me lembro da sua impecável caneta Palmer, do seu lápis Mirado 2 sempre afiado, dos seus cadernos sempre forrados com sobriedade, da rapidez com que invariavelmente respondia em Matemática e História.

O pai do Horacio era dono de umas serralharias e muito cedo se deu conta de qual seria o rumo que tomaria o recém triunfante processo revolucionário. Ele fez alguma coisa, ou disseram que fez alguma coisa, não sei com precisão, que o fez ir parar à prisão por motivos políticos. As suas propriedades foram confiscadas e a família perdeu todo o seu sustento. Então o Horacio começou a trabalhar, com somente 13 anos, como mensageiro num mercado.

O mercado era privado, se bem me lembro era uma “Grocery”, e estava na esquina da rua San Esteban com a San Fernando, muito perto da minha casa. Todos os dias, pela manhã cedo, eu era obrigado a passar por esse sítio quando ia para a escola, e a essa hora já o Horacio lá estava para levar as compras aos clientes.

Horacio Otaola era meu amigo e a primeira pessoa por quem senti inveja. Vê-lo na sua nova situação, despojado da possibilidade de ter um futuro à medida do seu talento, fazia-me sentir mal. É muito difícil mudar a inveja pela lástima, mas isso nem era o pior. Sem que naquela altura o pudesse explicar, recusei cumprimentar aquele que tinha sido o meu colega de escola durante seis anos.

Nunca consegui encontrar, no meu sempre aberto arsenal de argumentos, uma só razão que me justifique. Arrasto esta culpa até hoje.

Perdoa-me Horacio.

Faced with the promises of a future that never takes shape, I lean toward the prospects that begin today, toward the dreams that materialize on this day.  I already had my eyes focused on tomorrow, breathed in mouthfuls of possibilities and believed the illusion of what would come.  At this point, I’m betting only on the viable.

I got out of bed reversing one of those chimerical slogans–the kind we hear so much on TV–in order to make it more real.  A possible world is better, I said to myself, and began to feel that we are going to achieve it.  That the planet, my island and my city will find realizable solutions, not another barrage of utopias.