An unforgettable night yesterday at the Wilfredo Lam Center, thanks to the performance artist Tania Bruguera.  A podium with microphones, in front of an enormous red curtain, formed part of the interactive installation in the central courtyard.  Everyone who wanted to could use the podium to deliver—in just one minute—any rousing speech they pleased.

As microphones are rare, certainly I never met up with any in my time as a Young Pioneer reciting patriotic verses, I took the opportunity of the occasion.  Advised ahead of time by friends in the know, I prepared a speech on freedom of expression, censorship, blogs, and that elusive tool that is the Internet.  In front of the lenses of national television and protected by the foreign guests at the X Havana Biennial, I was followed by shouts of “Freedom,” “Democracy,” and even open challenges to the Cuban authorities.  I remember one boy of twenty who confessed that he had never felt more free.

Tania gave us the microphones, we who have never been able to deliver our own speeches, rather we have had to suffer under the hot sun the speechifying of the others.  It was an artistic action, but there was no game in the declarations we made.  Everyone was very serious.  A dove rested on our shoulders, probably equally well-trained as that other one fifty years ago.  However, none of us who spoke considered ourselves chosen, none wanted to stay—for fifty years—shouting into the microphones.

* The video—very amateur—that was made yesterday.

Translator’s Note: We are working on a video with English subtitles and will post is as soon as it is completed.

Certain stubborn statistics are never announced in the media; much better to keep them hidden in spite of their significance.  In addition to the number of suicides, abortions and divorces, the real number of unemployed are also concealed.  The news media and billboards would have us believe we live in a society where everyone has the chance to find a job and distance themselves from any inclination to vagrancy.  So many hands producing nothing, however, is the essence of a system that has transformed work into a mirage, and wages into a bad joke.

Some days ago on TV there was a short program about youth unemployment, but it didn’t mention the current number not working.  Havana, at ten in the morning on a weekday, is the best evidence of how many people don’t have a job to earn their living.  The parks, sidewalks and every corner, filled with people during working hours, is more reliable than the low numbers of unemployed reported in the annual statistics.  According to a cautious specialist who spoke in front of the cameras, many young people have a false estimation of their talents and so won’t accept certain jobs.  She was followed by an interview in Granma Province, at the Department of Socio-Cultural Studies, where recent graduates complained about their job assignments as “floor-cleaners” or mosquito inspectors.

So much verbal juggling to ignore that while salaries remain so low, young people don’t have any motivation to work.  They don’t see the appeal of self-denial or calls to save the Fatherland with their daily efforts, unless they get paid enough money to allow them to lead a decent life.  The planned “New Man” is not so different from the rest of humanity: he wants to use his time and energy on something that returns prosperity and well-being  That shouldn’t be so difficult for the experts to understand, nor so systematically ignored by the statistics.

Buying a car is like one of those Indiana Jones adventures: you can end up with a heart attack, or a ten-year wait.  For a long time it was only possible to get a car as a part of the distribution based on merit.  An outstanding worker, with thousands of volunteer hours or a mission as a soldier to Angola or Ethiopia, might consider himself lucky if he was allowed to acquire a Moskovich or a Lada.  Professionals of the highest rank would compete in the universities and study centers for the small allocations of automobiles.  Meanwhile, government officials could aspire to more modern models, which would be repaired in the State’s own workshops.

When the pipe that carried the subsidy from the Kremlin to here collapsed, the distribution of appliances and cars based on merit ended.   It began to work in another way, with money as the medium of exchange to get a vehicle.  However, a selective filter was maintained to get the right to buy one of the newcomers, such as a Citroen, Peugeot or Mitsubishi.  The old cars acquired before 1959 can be sold, but transferring ownership of the cars obtained for labor or ideological qualities is prohibited.  The regulations ended up stipulating that what was acquired in those years of “Real Socialism” is only half owned, non-transferable and easily confiscated.

To this day, although some shops display modern all-terrain air-conditioned minibuses, no Cuban can order and buy a car simply by having the money; they must have a letter of authorization in advance, which takes years of paperwork.  The process includes an exhaustive investigation into the origins of the funds, along with verification of the ideological purity of the buyer.  For almost a decade, the signature on this safe-conduct was that of Carlos Lage, vice president of the Council of Ministers, who was thrown out of office a few weeks ago.  So, in the midst of the astonishment caused by his removal people are asking, “Now who’s going to sign the letters to get a car?”

The last short film by Eduardo del Llano should be shown to the editorial boards and the news media across the country.  In a roundtable discussion in the film, an editorial board debates which event will be the front page news in their next edition.  There are several news events to choose from: an extraordinary sports record, a falling meteorite that killed a painter on the spot, several work heroes, and some internationalist soldiers.  The obedient editors await a telephone call—from above—to tell them which news story they should favor over the others.  Meanwhile, they carry on the pantomime as if they could decide, making a show of acting as if the newspaper were really theirs.

Brainstorm is a short film with characters who are not caricatures, on the contrary, it is a reflection of a reality that is in essence exaggerated and grotesque.  A world of poses, of professional cowardice, as a result of seeing the more daring colleagues self-destruct.  The challenge for these journalists is not to have an original opinion, but to anticipate and predict what the opinion of the powerful will be.  Every good “revolutionary” reporter must know what the leaders will say before they emit a single word, they’d better interpret the gestures of the rulers and not err in reflecting them.

The short film deals with this and other journalistic miseries, adding to the list started by the now classic Monte Rouge.  Of the series of films directed by Del Llano, this one has hit me the hardest with its thematic immediacy and reference to the gagging of the official press.  Seeing it, has confirmed for me the immense privilege I enjoy of not having an editorial boss, censor, or anyone who dictates to me what topics I can cover or what importance to give them.  My worst professional nightmare would be to find myself at a table like that, where everyone’s watching their backs, in order to preserve the small privilege of working for Granma, Juventud Rebelde, or some provincial newspaper.

As in the final scene of the short—don’t worry, I won’t spoil the ending for you—something happens out there and our media continues to ignore it.  Thousands of incidents happen each day, but the disciplined television news correspondents aren’t authorized to tell us.  Instead, they show us a heavenly Cuba of successful agriculture, ambitions accomplished, presidential visits, commitments to resist and smiling Little Pioneers.  The telephone call that authorizes reporting the reality, has not come—yet—to the editorial team of any newspaper.

Many of us have come to believe that if we aren’t under the umbrella of a state entity, we don’t exist.  At the door of a ministry, or face-to-face with the secretary of some official, we are always asked the same question, “And you, where are you from?”  It’s not curiosity about our regional origin, but rather a sharp inquiry regarding what institution validates us.  When you don’t have a badge with the logo of a state enterprise, little can be done for you in these official departments. Those of us who are “independent citizens” or “self employed individuals,” are accustomed to long waits and negative answers.

In this peculiar condition of free electron, remote from the nucleus of any privilege, power or important position, I’m an expert in setbacks, a specialist in procedures that are never resolved.  I’ve been asked, a thousand and one times, the same question about the state umbrella that protects me, and I prefer to burn under the sun of my autonomy, to shelter under my own prerogative.  Of course this philosophy of “not belonging” can’t be explained to the guardian so that I may enter to resolve some forbidden matter.

It turns out that I don’t exist, because no state entity has me inventoried, because I don’t pay a fee to a union or appear on the list of some workplace cafeteria.  Although I walk, sleep, love and even complain, I lack a certificate-of-existence that would give me affiliation to a small—and boring—number of neogovernmental organizations.  In practice, I’m a civic ghost, a non-being, someone unable to show the sharp eye of the doorkeeper even the slightest proof of being in the official mechanisms.

I put on the glasses of optimism and glance out over the collapsing city where I live.  With these shimmering crystals of hope, my heart beats more peacefully, without turning somersaults.  Thanks to them, I understand that I’m not climbing fourteen floors thanks to an inefficient state—incapable of installing an elevator after five months—but rather I am a fervent ecologist, determined to consume only my human fuel.  With this new glass through which I see everything, I see that my plate lacks meat not because of the super high prices in the market, but rather because I love animals and avoid the suffering of slaughter.

I don’t have an Internet connection at home, but the rosy lenses reveal to me that this service is only for officials and resident foreigners.  Perhaps they want to protect me from the “perversions” of the web, I tell myself, as would Voltaire’s ridiculous Candide.  So I’ve tried, for the briefest moment, to see palaces instead of ruins, leaders who carry us to victory when in reality they lead us to the precipice, and men who are hypnotized by my hair, even though I know they continue to watch me.

The problem starts when I take off the glasses of innocence and look around me, at the real colors of the crisis.  The pain in my calves returns in response to the long flights of stairs; I start dreaming of steak; and a blinking modem becomes an almost erotic desire.  I toss the glasses of optimism from my balcony, maybe there’s someone down there who still prefers to use them, who would even like to distort the truth with them.

This time they’ve been more direct: “You are not authorized to travel,” the woman told me quietly, almost nicely, dressed in her olive-green.  My attempt to get permission to leave ended without much delay and with the same negative response.  I demanded an explanation from the officer, but she was only a wall of contention between my demands and her hidden bosses.

While they were telling me “no,” I recalled the declarations made by Miguel Barnet* a couple of months ago.  The president of the Writers and Artists Union of Cuba (UNEAC) affirmed that all Cubans can travel, except those who have a debt to the justice system.  I spent the day looking for some legal reason hanging over me, but nothing came to mind.  Even the rice cooker that I bought on credit at the ration store I paid for in full, even though it only worked for two months before completely breaking down.

I have never been charged in court yet I am condemned not to leave this Island.  This restriction has not been dictated by a judge, nor could I have appealed it to jury, rather it comes from the great prosecutor—with full rights—in which he’s set himself up as the Cuban State.  That severe magistrate determined that the old woman sitting next to me in the office at 17th and K would not receive the ‘white card’ because her son ‘deserted’ from a medical mission.  The boy who waited in the corner couldn’t travel either, because his athlete father plays now under another flag.  The list of the punished is so long and the reasons so varied, that we could establish a huge group of forced islander “stay-at-homes.”  It’s too bad that the vast majority are silent, in the hopes that one day they’ll be allowed to leave, as one who receives compensation for good behavior.

One of the first places of pilgrimage for those who don’t get the exit permit should be the office of the naive president of UNEAC.  Maybe he can explain to us the crime for which we’ve been condemned.

To augment the papers in my collection of negatives, here is the latest document received from SIE (Immigration and Emigration Section).  I am also posting my visas, to record the fact that my problems are not about entering another country, only about leaving mine.

Translator’s note:
The opening paragraphs of the article about Miguel Barnet read, in English translation: 

The writer Miguel Barnet criticized, today, those who believe his countrymen cannot freely leave the island as he, who has traveled widely, does and says the only ones who can’t travel are those in prison.  “People believe that we Cubans can’t travel and I’ve been to more than 47 countries,” Barnet said during a meeting with the press  in a bookstore in Panama City.  “Cubans are traveling,” he stressed, “the only ones who don’t travel are those in prison,” affirmed Barnet, considered one of the Cuban writers most published abroad.

When you read this post I will be sitting in the waiting room of the Plaza Municipality Office of Immigration and Emigration.  Among military uniforms, my passport waiting for a permit to travel that has been denied me on two occasions.  During the last year, the obedient soldiers dedicated to limiting our freedom of movement have not permitted me to accept international invitations.  In their databases next to my name there must be a mark condemning me to island confinement. The possessive logic of this Daddy-State sees it as normal that I, as a punishment for writing a blog, like a box on the ears for having believed myself to be a free person, will not receive the “white card.”

The least I desire on this Friday of bureaucracy and expectation, is that it ends with someone putting their hand on my shoulder to tell me, “We were wrong about you, you can leave.”  I do not think they will amend “the error” of blocking my travel, nor do I nurture the slightest hope of boarding the airplane on March 29.  I will sit in the crowded lobby of the mansion at 17th and K for only two reasons: to inconvenience them with my pigheadedness and to claim my rights.  To show them the visa document that authorizes my entry to many parts of the world, while “they” curb my travel.  I will be there, confident that one day all this machinery to extract profits and generate ideological loyalties—which the exit permit has become—will cease to exist.

I confess that I do not want them to allow me to travel as if it were a gift, rather I fantasize that—this very day—while I am waiting for the third “no”, someone will come out and announce that this regulation that is such a violation was just repealed.  I have a feeling that I will leave Cuba when everyone can do it freely, but in the meantime,  I will continue besieging them with my demands, my posts and my questions.

Here are links to the two forms I had to fill out to request permission to leave:  Form 1 and Form 2.  [An English translation of the form is available here.]

Added Friday, March 20, 2:15 pm.
Response to the application: Again, the answer is No.

They took Adolfo one morning six years ago, after raiding his home as if it were that of a dangerous terrorist.  There were neither weapons, nor chemical substances in his poor home in Central Havana, but his papers bore witness to many opinions, written without permission.  They indicted him with the same urgency that—in those same days—they shot three young men for hijacking a boat to emigrate to Florida.  It was near the equinox but to all of us it seemed so dark that we could only call it one thing: The Black Spring of 2003.  Not even the war in Iraq managed to obscure the news for the families and friends of the seventy-five prisoners.  The old trick, so often and successfully repeated, of taking advantage of everyone looking the other way, didn’t work.

From his prison in Ciego de Ávila, he called this week to tell us that his daughter Joana is going to have a baby.  He probably won’t be able to see this baby get its first tooth, due to the stubbornness of those who condemned him to fifteen years.  His release has been converted into a bargaining chip, saved for a political game that no one knows how or when it will be played.  Only one man, dying and therefore stubborn, seems to have the ability to decide his release from prison.  For that fading old man, the future of Adolfo—free and living in a plural Cuba—must hurt more than the needles of the serums and injections.  Despite the enormous power of this octogenarian patient, he cannot prevent the grandchild of this humble English professor from seeing him only as one more name in the history books, as the capricious caudillo who put his grandfather behind bars.

March has not turned out to be the month in which the days last as long as the nights, because a persistent eclipse of freedoms has settled itself on all of us.  I look and look but it continues to seem that we are in the midst of the solstice and the penumbra.  Far ahead, I manage to see my children and those of Joana under a persistent light, calling to us.

I left high school in the countryside feeling that nothing belonged to me, not even my body.  Living in shelters creates the sensation that your whole life, your privacy, your personal possessions and even your nakedness has become public property.  “Sharing” is the obligatory word and it comes to seem normal not to be able—ever—to be alone.  After years of mobilizations, agricultural camps, and a sad school in Alquízar, I needed an overdose of privacy.

I’d read, for the first time, the books of J.R.R. Tolkien, and the warm home of Bilbo Baggins was my ideal of a refuge where I could hide myself.  I missed having a place to put my books, hang my clothes, decide which photo to tack to the wall, and being able to paint a sign on the door saying, “Stop.”  I was exhausted by having to bathe in showers without curtains, eat off aluminum trays, and share the lice and funguses of my dorm mates.  The illusory world of The Hobbit offered me this warm and quiet home that reality had never allowed me to enjoy.  It was to this fictitious hole in a tree that I escaped, when the indiscriminate cohabitation became unbearable.

The beleaguered individual that I carried inside understood, in these years, that it was not only the camps and the boarding schools that disrespected the privacy of the individual.  My Island is, at times, like a sequence of bunks where everyone knows what you eat, who you spend time with, how you think.  The grim glance of my high school director was replaced by the vigilance of the CDR.*  I’m asked to iron my uniform, shine my shoes, and expected to maintain a certain ideological posture.

The impression of being a “public good” or a “socially useful object” has not disappeared, rather the years have confirmed that I live in an enormous shelter controlled by the State.  In it, one hears the bell calling you to come and eat—now disrupted by the shout of a neighbor announcing a new product is available in the ration market.  Faced with that call, however, I don’t jump immediately from my bed, but take the time to hide something under the mattress. It’s a strange and dangerous book, where a dwarf with tufted feet smokes his pipe and enjoys a warm and intimate haven in a tree.

Translator’s note:

CDR = Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the ubiquitous block watch groups that keep tabs on every Cuban.