Generation Y

Today I woke up to the noise of the loudspeakers shouting slogans and the horns of the buses that would be taking thousands of the May Day demonstration participants back to their provinces. The parade had been announced for weeks in all the official media, as “a dignified response to media campaign” against the Cuban government. In the workplaces everyone had to put in writing their commitment to attend, to not absent themselves from their date “with the Fatherland.” Many high school and technical school students slept at their schools last night, to be brought, very early, to the Plaza of the Revolution, since nothing could be left to chance in this coming together for the workers’ day. Curiously, no banners were seen calling for better wages nor criticizing the radical downsizing currently taking place.

The whole day I kept remembering Baby and Pablito who, in previous years, waved their little paper flags in that enormous architectural complex where human beings look so tiny, so anonymous. I recall they went in their red T-shirts and before leaving the neighborhood they knocked on everyone’s doors so no one could evade their responsibilities to the Revolution. It was, in fact, in the living room of their house where they had that book that 8,013,966 Cubans had to sign to make socialism irreversible.* The illegal vendors avoided calling at their door and the neighbors – when speaking of the couple – touched their index and middle fingers to their shoulders, a sign that in Cuba indicates someone belongs to the ranks of the Military or the Ministry of the Interior.

Just a few months ago we learned that the activist couple had emigrated to the United States, having won places in the visa lottery of that country. She handed in her CDR vigilance card, and he turned over his Communist Party card at a meeting where everyone was left with their mouths hanging open at the news. They started to publicly buy milk and eggs on the black market and a few days before leaving they gave away some of their clothes, including the brightly colored get ups they used to march in. They boarded the plane and left behind the skins – or masks – that they had raised high for so many long years. Now, from Hialeah, they follow the alternative Cuban blogosphere, are alarmed at what is happening to the Ladies in White, and speak not with veneration, but with irritation, about our leaders.

Their unconditional ideology was as brief as the color on the paper signs they left behind on the ground of the plaza, which were drenched by the determined downpour of the first day of May.

*In June 2002, the Cuban government – violating all the requirements established by law for a referendum – had the population sign a constitutional modification that made the socialist system irreversible. Popular and academic slang called it “the constitutional mummification.”

He had repaired all types of books, from Bibles to incunabula with pages on the point of turning to dust. He was very good at returning to their places torn-out pages, repairing covers, and spraying them with a chemical solution that made the ink stand out. Through his hands had passed nineteenth century manuscripts, first editions of the works of José Martí and even a couple of copies of the Constitution of 1940. To all of them he returned the elegance they had once had, and on salvaging them he read them, like the doctor who wants a peek into the soul of a patient whose viscera he already knows well.

He had never seen a book, however, like that brought to him that afternoon in the late eighties. By its size and thickness it seemed to be the pharmacological recipe book of a dispensary, but it didn’t contain chemical formulas nor the names of medicines, but instead it was full of accusations. It was the detailed inventory of all the reports that the employees of a company had made against their colleagues. Without realizing her indiscretion, the director’s secretary sent it to be repaired – this register of complaints – with its worn cover and several torn out pages. Thus, it came into the hands of the persistent librarian, that invaluable testimony, on paper, of the betrayals.

As in the plot of Dangerous Liaisons, in one part it could be read that Alberto, the chief of personnel, had been accused of taking raw material for his house. A few pages later it was the denounced himself who was relaying the “counterrevolutionary” expressions used by the cleaning assistant in the dining room. The murmurs overlapped, weaving a real and abominable box where everyone spied on everyone. Maricusa, the accountant – as witnessed by her office mate – was selling cigars at retail from her desk, but when she wasn’t involved in this illegal work she turned her attention to reporting that the administrator left some hours before closing. The mechanic appeared several times, mentioned for having extramarital relations with a woman in the union, while several reports against the cook were signed in his own hand.

On concluding the reading, one could only sense an enormous pain for these “characters” forced to act out a sinister and disloyal plot. So the restorer returned the book to the fray, after having done the worst job his hands had ever executed. Even today, he can’t stop thinking about the names, reports and accusations that those pages have continued to accumulate all these years.

With a tight sweater and gel-smeared hair, he offers his body for only twenty convertible pesos a night. His face, with its high cheekbones and slanted eyes, is common among those from the East of the country. He constantly moves his arms, a mixture of lasciviousness and innocence that at times provokes pity, at others desire. He is a part of the vast group of Cubans who earn a living from the sweat of their pelvis, who market their sex to foreigners and locals. An industry of quick love and brief caresses, that has grown considerably on this Island in the last twenty years.

Havana has the air of a brothel at times, particularly if you pass through Monte Street where it meets Cienfuegos. Young women in their flashy – if a little faded – clothes offer their “merchandise,” especially after night falls and the spandex doesn’t look quite as baggy nor the circles under their eyes quite as dark. These are the ones who can’t compete with those who can snag a manager or a tourist to take them to a hotel and offer them, the next morning, a breakfast that comes with milk. These are the ones who don’t wear perfume and who finish their work in the cramped quarters of a solar or even on the landing under the stairs. They traffic in groans, exchanging spasms for money.

These men and women – merchants of desire – avoid tripping over the uniformed police who guard the area. Falling into their hands can mean a night in a cell or, for those in the city illegally, deportation to your home province. Everything can be “resolved” if the officer accepts the hint of a probing thigh and agrees to withhold an official warning in exchange for a few minutes of privacy. Some officers return regularly to take their cut, in money or in services, that allows these nocturnal beings to continue taking up their positions on the corner. A woman who refuses the exchange can find herself in a prostitute reeducation camp, while the men might be charged with the crime of pre-criminal dangerousness.

And so the cycle of sex for money comes full circle, in a city where honest work is a museum relic and the needs bring many to position their bodies and swing their hips in hopes of an offer.

With the coming of the nineties, many of those children who had been guardians of the elections evolved into young people who annulled their ballots with statements in between exclamation marks. I remember the first time I entered the wooden booth and I was ready to deface the piece of paper where they had put a “vote for all.” A neighbor warned me not to even think about writing a slogan in place of the docile X next to the names, because each ballot had an identification number. “They will know it was you,” he warned me, and related stories of people reprimanded for having done something similar. But there are certain moments in life when any scolding or punishment doesn’t matter.

Later, on reviewing the number of friends and family who had invalidated their ballots, it didn’t correspond proportionally to the figures given on TV. Either those who claimed to have marked graffiti instead of giving consent lied, or it was the official statistic that didn’t match reality. Thus, I went from the second phase, boredom, to the position of those who have completely lost confidence in the process of selecting a candidate for the People’s Power. So now I stay home every election Sunday. I don’t know if they still distribute bread and cheese to the children who guard the ballot boxes, but they are still sending them to knock on the doors of the defaulters, to ask them to go to the polling station. Perhaps, all things being equal, some of them will turn 16 and take the red pen to scribble on their ballot, or adopt – as I have – abstention as a form of protest.

* Slogan expressed by Fidel Castro during the first year of the Revolution in response to those calling for presidential elections in the country.

Last night I was visited by a friend who lives in Las Villas who, to reach the capital, must overcome the transportation problems as well as the circle of vigilance that surrounds him. He told me that a few weeks ago he was detained and they confiscated his mobile phone for a couple of hours, until an officer appeared, annoyed, with the small Nokia in his hands. “Now you’re in trouble,” said the State Security officer holding him at the station, over and over. The reason for such alarm was that his phone’s address book included an entry for Twitter, accompanied by a number in the UK.*

“No one can save you from fifteen years,” threatened the officer, while asserting that sending an SMS to someone with such a strange name who lived so far away was a crime of enormous proportions. He didn’t know that our tweets travel to cyberspace through the rough sending of text-only messages by way of cellphones. Nor could he imagine that instead of ending up in the hands of a member of the British intelligence services, our brief texts go to this blue bird that makes them fly through cyberspace. It is true that we broadcast blindly and that we cannot read our readers’ replies or references, but at least we are reporting on the Island in 140 character fragments.

Always thinking in terms of conspiracies, agents and plots, they haven’t noticed that the technologies have turned every citizen into his or her own mass media. It is no longer foreign correspondents who validate a given story in the eyes of the world, but rather, increasingly, it is our own forays on Twitter that are turned into informative references. My friend recounted it in his own way, “Yoani, when we were coming to Havana we had a big operation behind us. I drafted a text message in advance to alert people if they stopped us.” Maybe it was the brightness of the Nokia display or the conviction that something new would intervene between pursued and pursuer that stopped them from putting him in a patrol car. If they had intercepted him, a brief click of a key would have sent his shout across the Web, telling what the international press would have taken hours to find out.

As I saw him off at the door he had his cellphone in his hand, like a dimly lit lantern. In the folder marked “drafts” an already prepared text would protect him from the shadows that awaited him below.

* Among the services offered by Twitter, is the ability to post via SMS for those who do not have Internet access. Everything is done through a service number for sending messages that will appear immediately on the user’s account.

Attentive eyes, eardrums tuned to the elusive sound of the diversion of resources, and brown, almost earth-colored, uniforms. They are the “carmelitas,” a veritable army of inspectors who keep watch so that theft will not take the little we have left. They function as a protective body, not subordinate to the administration of the workplace where they are assigned; they answer, like soldiers, to a higher structure of command and control. In exchange, they earn a higher salary, several pounds of chicken every month, and an appetizing snack which they resell on the black market. They are the new army of auditors, in a country where the employees don’t measure themselves by what they earn, but by what they are allowed to pilfer to sell on the black market.

These controllers stay just a short time in each industry, to avoid their developing relationships with the employees and falling into the chain of corruption. In the cigar factories they must search the rollers so that they don’t sneak out leaves or cigars under their clothes; in the Suchel Plant in the municipality of Cerro they look through workers’ pockets for shampoo or perfume extracts; in the middle of the road they check every passenger on the bus to make sure they have a legal ticket; and at the Río Zaza company they had to prevent sacs of milk or tomato puree from walking out. Trained to check seals, close locks, and make a record of the products in a warehouse, they still haven’t managed to stop the constant embezzlement. It seems that the task of creating pockets of efficiency and control is impossible on an Island where looting the State is a means of survival.

The point is that the government knows that people steal from every workplace, but they also understand that closing all the conduits of this ransacking would create a climate of great social tension. Until now, the blind eye turned toward this pilfering was a way to maintain calm among the offenders so they would not demonstrate their discontent in other, more public, ways. The majority of citizens are aware of what they applaud or keep quiet about, to avoid any investigation into their own lives and bringing to light the illegal sustenance that feeds their family. For years this permissiveness toward embezzlement has been an efficient medium of exchange for passivity, hence the difficulty of eradicating it without dynamiting the system itself. The “carmelitas” will not be able to prevent the continued siphoning off of resources, because corruption is the sap that feeds, fundamentally, those who today send the army of auditors into the streets.

PS: I recommend reading the article by Esteban Morales: “Corruption: The True Counter-Revolution?“

Caridad could not find Sancti Spíritus on a map, the province where the company run by the Chilean, Max Marambio, is located, but she is aware of all the rumors about its closing and the corruption scandals. She has learned to decipher the omissions of the press and to read, in the repetition of certain topics, an attempt to cover up others more interesting.  So she is not content with the sugar-coated pill offered by the national news. For this 40-year-old Havana woman, the rumors on the street in the last weeks have caused her to dust off an old saying she stubbornly repeats: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Just the name of the Río Zaza factory reverberates in conversations, although the newspaper Granma only mentioned the investigation in a brief note about the death of its general manager, Roberto Baudrand.

In the journalism schools they should teach certain lessons. One of them – which we Cubans have learned forcefully reading between the lines – is that hiding a story intensifies the interest in it and leads people to fantasize and speculate about the details. While they call us to attend acts of Revolutionary reaffirmation and to condemn the media campaign against Cuba – from which they have not published a single document – everyone assumes there must be something big that they want to cover up with so much noise. The delay in confirming that something happened in this joint-venture company has made the foreign press, the independent journalists and the bloggers grab the topic from the hands of the controlled official reporters.  They are called on to sing of the glories, not to reveal the trash swept under the rug.

Caridad has been right about the wisps of smoke, which have become a roaring fire. Something quite fetid is hidden behind the silence and distraction. It smells like greenbacks, embezzlement, and has the stench of corruption, no longer localized in one place but rather endemic to the system. The army of accountants that will be unveiled in the coming days will not be able to stop the bleeding. They would need as many more to control the inspectors, to monitor the monitors, to supervise the supervisors. The cloud of smoke billowing from this fire is already huge, and we can all see it behind the slogans.

I don’t enjoy going through life defending myself against attacks, perhaps because I have spent most of it in the crossfire of criticism. I’ve learned that at times it is better to digest the insult and move on, because denigration sullies the one who does it more than the victim. Everything, however, has its limits. It is a very different thing to put words in my mouth that I did not say, as has happened with the interview published by Salim Lamrani in Rebelión. As I started to read it I didn’t note much distortion, but by the second part I couldn’t recognize myself. It’s true that in the introduction he tries to generate an aversion for me in his readers, but it is the right of any interviewer to describe how he sees the object of his questions.

The big surprise has been noted, in the way in which he presents the text: enormous omissions, distortions and even invented phrases attributed to me. It would have been just another attempt, among many thousands, to attribute to me positions I don’t share and declarations I never made, if it weren’t for the fact that the official Cuban media was prepared to quickly echo the rearranged interview. Yesterday, when I saw the presenter of the most boring program on official television refer, without ever mentioning my name, to a series of questions that had “stripped me naked,” I began to understand everything. The reason for the adulteration was not haste in transcription nor the desire of the journalist to prove his hypothesis at all cost, even distorting the words of the interviewee to do so. Something major is brewing with this semi-apocryphal text, and I now make a stop along the way in my blog to warn of it.

I have a very vivid memory of that afternoon almost three months ago - curiously Mr. Lamrani has waited all this time to publish our conversation - and of the words we exchanged. I remember his stereotypical questions, at times uninformed about our reality, and with very little resemblance to those, as documented, that he has reworked to appear to be a specialist. I would not characterize myself as one who responds in monosyllables, and I had a hard time finding myself among so much parsimony. As our interchange at the Hotel Plaza advanced, I could sense the sympathy he had for my position growing. In the end, I felt that all the barriers had fallen and he understood that we were not opponents, simply people who saw the same phenomena from different viewpoints. A final hug on his part confirmed it. But, evidently, his discipline for “the cause” was stronger than his journalistic ethics, and the professor from the Sorbonne ended up - visibly in the second part of the interview - falsifying my voice. On his painfully hip iPhone my moderate phrases must have been like a computer virus, eating away at the stereotypes, a call to end the confrontation that people like him prefer to feed.

Some economists warn that sending home all the excess workers could make the unemployment figures soar to more than 25%. One in four workers would be laid off in order to clean up the bloated payrolls, as the country has no liquidity to keep on paying idle hands. Such a high number of unemployed would imply an increase in social unrest, hundreds of thousands of people released to take up illegal occupations, and finally the trick of creating underemployment as a way of adulterating the employment statistics. I would like to investigate what will happen in those government departments, swarming with bureaucrats, or what will happen with the engorged list of those who work for State Security. Will they also be downsizing? Seeing the growing number of plainclothes police who roam the streets, I think they should start with them to eliminate so much excess. For reasons of image, those left outside will not be called unemployed but rather something subtle – as already happens at other times – such as “surplus” or “idled.”

A few days after the May Day celebration, many Cubans are at risk of losing their jobs. However, I am sure that we will not see, in the parade from the Plaza, a single sign displaying discontent or criticism about the layoffs. The president of the Cuban Confederation of Workers himself said that the gathering of the workers will be to reaffirm their support for the process and to criticize the so-called media campaign against Cuba. The only legal labor union in the country shows its status as a transmitter of directions from the powers-that-be to the workers, but it does not carry demands in the other direction. We will see them pass in front of the podium, on the point of losing their jobs, but carrying banners repudiating the European Union or the United States. No one will be able to make this day one of real complaint, a meeting to demand from the great patron called The State that it not leave them in the street.

The desire to be competitive was punished with labels very difficult to expunge from our dossiers, accusations such as self-sufficient or immodest.  The success must be – or seem to be – common, the fruit of everyone’s labors, under the wise direction of the Party. And so we learned that self-esteem must be hidden and enterprising enthusiasm reined in. The mediocre made a killing in this society which ended up clipping the wings of the most daring while promoting conformity. Those were times of hiding material possessions, to show that we were the children of the self-sacrificing proletariat and to affirm that we detested the bourgeoisie.

Some faked their embrace of egalitarianism, even as in reality they accumulated privileges and amassed fortunes while repeating, in their speeches, calls for austerity. They reiterated in their autobiographies that they came from poor families and their main aspiration was to serve the fatherland. In time, their colleagues discovered that hidden behind the ascetic image was a diverter of State resources or a compulsive accumulator of material possessions. Even today, the mask of frugality covers their faces while their bulging abdomens tell a completely different story.

With the mass stampede of foreign investors, the store shelves show the real statistics of our finances. My mother called early to tell me there is toilet paper in a distant market; she said I should hurry because word was already out and it soon would be gone. I go out looking to the right and left like a fan, to see if there is any kind of juice to put in Teo’s cup for the morning. But the shortage of supplies is remarkable. Río Zaza brand Tetra Paks have disappeared from the shops; the former joint venture that produced them is now mired in a corruption scandal. The black market has collapsed; it’s no secret to anyone that it is fed by the diversion of resources from the factories and the theft of goods while in transport to the shops.

Even the most patient foreign entrepreneurs, like the Spanish who ran the outstanding firm Vima*, have packed their bags and gone home. The consortium between the perfume maker Suchel and the Iberian capital provided by Camacho has come to an end and in the absence of dyes my friends are showing their grey hairs. The time when the country bought first and paid later is over, now we are carrying so much debt it is difficult to attract capital or to buy on credit. The effects of the crisis are felt strongly in everyday life, with the price of soap 30% more than it was a year ago. The housewives scratch their heads faced with the skillet, while shouting that the wages go like water once paid at the end of the month. Not even those blessed by a remittance received from abroad or the skilled traders in the informal market have it easy.

Few remember now that speech from three years ago in Camagüey, where Raul Castro suggested the possibility of a glass of milk for every Cuban. Quite the contrary, the words he delivered last Sunday have brought us trenches, parapets and apocalyptic images of an Island sinking into the sea. Chasing the elusive food, we have little time to reflect on what was said at the Palace of Conventions, but his Numantian* threats hang over us. Interpreted literally, they portend that we can expect a foxhole surrounded by sandbags, a rifle to shoot we do not know whom, with the final bullet in the chamber to be used on ourselves. Meanwhile, the General will stand firmly at his post and check, from a distance, that no one breaches the final order of immolation.

Translator’s notes:
Vima: Food importer which supplied hotels and state-run businesses.
Numantian: Search on “the siege of Numantia” for background; in short, the Numantines chose to burn their city rather than surrender it to the Romans.

Just yesterday, on the eve of the presentation in Chile of a compilation of my blog posts under the title Cuba Libre, I received a report from the Customs Department of the Republic. It confirmed the confiscation of ten copies of my book sent via DHL. In the rancid and brief words of the bureaucracy, it explained:

Physical inspection of the package found documents whose content goes against the general interests of the nation, and for this reason they have been seized consistent with the established legislation.

I try to recreate the scene of “the specialists” clarifying if they would or would not permit the book to cross the borders of this Island and come into my hands. Would they look in its pages for some obscene images that could offend morality? Certainly they didn’t find any among the photos of inflammatory billboards with political slogans, the dilapidated bowels of an abandoned car and the Cuban flags on display in a market that does not accept national currency. The latter may seem obscene but it’s not my fault.

Would those who groped the phrases of Cuba Libre be zealous doctors of grammar, looking for an error, perhaps, or misuse of a verb tense? Were they military analysts, searching between the paragraphs of my chronicles for hidden codes, revelations about the economy, or secret State Security documents? They found none of that, not even the recipe for how to make guarapo, the nearly extinct national drink made by crushing sugar cane.

I make do with fantasizing that those who prevented the Spanish version of my posts reaching hundreds of friends, among whom they would have circulated, were some soldiers with more discipline than literacy. They were probably already warned by the listeners who constantly monitor my telephone; they might even have been warned not to read the contents. If three years of publishing in cyberspace would serve to bring my voice only to these grim censors, I would have sufficient reason to be satisfied. Something of me would remain inside them, just as their repressive presence has marked my chronicles, my book has pushed them to leap toward freedom.

The biggest meeting of the Union of Young Communists (UJC) ended in Havana, but its older relative, the Party, still hasn’t announced the date it will hold its Sixth Congress. Raúl Castro affirmed, in early 2009, that he would call, very soon, a national conference of the Communist Party of Cuba but at this point no one can find it on the calendar. So the UJC has gone ahead and met in the Palace of Conventions and discussed topics that might have led to fruitful debates if they had occurred within a framework of true respect.

Under the motto “All for the Revolution,” hundreds of young faces observed the presidential table full of officials who have already lived more than six decades. The older generation was not there to tell them the latest news, “The country is yours, it is up to you, now, to decide its directions,” but rather to exhort them to sacrifice, admonish them for their lack of fighting spirit, and to extract from them promises of continuity and eternal fidelity. It is the type of behavior that a political party uses to attract its quarry, but in the case of Cuba the UJC is the only youth organization permitted under the law. It is noteworthy that at the age in which we try on various personas and defend the most incredible causes, our youth is only admitted to membership under the red card. Many of them, in freer circumstances, would swell the ranks of a conservation group, sign on with some union activists, or join together to demand to end compulsory military service.

Those who today form the UJC were born at the beginning of the Special Period, when toys were not seen in the ration shops and they could only drink milk, legally, until they were seven. They grew up thanks to the black market and wore shoes because their parents diverted State resources or asked an exiled relative for help in buying them. This is a generation that came of age in the midst of the tourist apartheid that blocked Cubans from entering hotels or accessing certain services; children nursed on empty slogans in the schools and the language of monotony at home. Despite their promises of loyalty, I suspect they nurture thoughts of revenge, of that moment when they will break all the promises they made to their elders.

Twenty years ago our streets began to fill with bicycles and empty of cars. It wasn’t in fashion to protect the environment, nor to get exercise, rather it was the direct result of the end of the Soviet subsidy. The preferentially priced oil supplies from the East were interrupted, public transport collapsed and my father lost his job as a train mechanic. In those days, getting to work could take the equivalent of half a day and we frequently traveled hanging out of the doors of the bus, like bunches of human grapes.

Then the successive shipments of bicycles from the land of Deng Xiaoping arrived, and were distributed among the outstanding workers and vanguard students. Now the reward for a meritorious task or for unconditional ideology was no longer a trip to East Germany or the delivery of the latest model Russian Lada, but rather a shiny Forever brand bicycle.  Parking lots where the light vehicles were protected from thieves sprang up everywhere and my father opened a workshop to repair punctures. Innovations also appeared with the addition of baby seats, trailers and front baskets. Even women of an advanced age, reluctant to show off their legs while they worked the pedals, ended up adapting themselves to the rhythm of the times.

With the dollarization of the economy high level officials, artists and foreign residents were permitted to import their own cars, while tourists could rent a Peugeot or Citröen. So the streets experienced once again the steady rolling of tires. The number of bicycles dwindled because ships full of them no longer arrived, spare parts became scarce, and Cubans got tired of pedaling everywhere. A slight improvement in the bus service has led many to get rid of their rolling comrade, as if by this gesture they could rid themselves of the crisis.

For over a decade the corner of Infanta and Manglar showed the unfinished mass of a twenty-story building. Its completion ran aground with the coming of the Special Period and the end of the construction concept known as the “microbrigade.” Those who had laid the foundation with the illusion of getting an apartment in the high-rise, raged with impotence when it was announced construction could not continue. They had given years of their lives to raise the walls and suddenly the wished-for home escaped them with the same celerity as the Soviet technicians, boarding airplanes back to their homeland.

With its twenty floors incomplete, and still surrounded by construction materials, the building came to be one of those new ruins that un-gild our city. The enormous housing problems led many to make plans to occupy it illegally, so as not to have to stay in a shelter provided for the victims of some remote cyclone. The site, however, was well-guarded as some office was cooking up a plan to restart the work and award the apartments. The neighbors saw them return with some cranes, trucks and cement, and a few construction workers, who would not live there after the opening. In place of the original microbrigade members, the owners would be selected based on their political, artistic or journalistic merit. We all understood what they were doing: the building at Infanta and Manglar would be awarded to the most faithful.

In the middle of the campaign to bring Elián González back to Cuba, some voices stood out who were immediately seen to be compensated for their enthusiasm with a key to their new home. Popular cunning baptized the finally completed building in Cerro, “Fame and Applause” – a reference to the TV show – and it began to fill with singers, film directors, cartoonists, ministers, reporters and actors. Participating in the “Battle of Ideas” now would have a concrete result: the ability to enjoy a window with a view of the impoverished district of San Martín. For many, finally getting their own home encouraged them to commit themselves even more to the official discourse and their public stance moved a little closer to unconditional support. Below, the illuminated parking lot was rapidly filling with modern cars which arrived to complete the already substantial perks.

The eyes that peek out of the humble dwellings next door are surprised that the ruined building of old is now a huge mass, freshly painted, with anti-glare glass, and famous faces looking out of each window.

* The so-called Battle of Ideas was twist in the ideological propaganda that arose with the Elián González case and died – without any announcement from the official press – a couple of years ago now. It consumed enormous economic resources to mobilize participants of Open Forums, prepare T-shirts with political slogans, and organize marches of revolutionary reaffirmation.

This is not the chronicle of a woman who manages to escape from her abusive husband, nor the story of a teenager who runs away from authoritarian parents. The title refers to another process of emancipation – complicated and feudal – that doctors, nurses and pharmacists must request to travel outside the island. Under the significant name of “liberation,” there is a mandatory process that Public Health workers must complete to be allowed to leave, temporarily or permanently. Included in the record of the possible traveler is whether he owns his own home or car, because the State will confiscate those if he does not return within 11 months. The paperwork passes through numerous levels of authorization that can delay it a year or a decade. Many never receive a reply.

Mario saw patients in a specialized practice and began to be seen as a deserter when he announced a desire to reunite with his family across the sea. He was immediately punished by being assigned to a position of general practitioner in an emergency room far from his house. They reminded him every day that the degree hanging on the wall in his living room had been given to him by the Revolution, which he now was betraying. Forced to swallow it whole, he endured the four years of repeated jabs and investigation for his safe-conduct to leave the country, which the minister of his branch still had not signed. “We have many cases, we can’t cope,” the secretary repeated, and his exiled wife broke into tears on the telephone when he told her. His children, meanwhile, were growing up in some distant place without a father.

In the midst of his impotence, Mario came to reproach his mother for having encouraged him to study medicine. “Why didn’t you warn me!” he shouted one afternoon, when he could no longer bear the white coat that had become his shackles. When they finally allowed him to board the plane, a circle of baldness delineated the middle of his head and a nervous tick had taken control of his hands. To those who welcomed him in a distant airport, he was not the enterprising orthopedist from years ago, but someone who had decided to have nothing to do with hospitals. The agonizing process of “liberation” had taken away any desire to fix a knee or correct an ankle; he couldn’t stop thinking that it was that profession that had separated him from his family.

Photo taken from eldia.es

It was hard for me to convince my friends at pre-university to let me listen to some songs by Silvio Rodríguez on their Russian tape players. I was born in a neighborhood that vibrated to the rhythm of salsa, rumba and guaguancó, where the poetic images of that singer were not very well received. I could only manage to hear a bit of Ojalá before one of them would change the cassette and play something from Los Van Van or NG La Banda. The official media, however, was constantly playing “The Blue Unicorn” and we speculated whether behind the metaphor we would find a woman, or a pair of jeans stolen from the clothesline.

Just when I was beginning to get excited about the compositions of this singer-songwriter, everything collapsed around me. The crisis* came, the beatings in response to the Maleconazo* and I could see the rafters setting out on the slice of the sea visible through my shutters. I was shocked that so many wanted to clear off, meanwhile Silvio continued singing: “I live in a free county, which can only be free on this earth at this moment.” Still, the minstrel of San Antonio touched me, especially the themes that plucked on the heartstrings, because those of a social and political nature seemed passé. Then came university and, in his voice, the song “The Fool” appeared, and with that I finally identified him with the system, the government, the status quo, “the thing,” in short, the group in power.

Just today I have been able to read the full statement made by the author of “For Whomever Deserves Love.” The official press avoids it, but it ricocheted around the foreign media until finally reaching us. His words seem to deny that chorus of “I died as I lived,” where he announced his refusal to accept the changes we Cubans have been crying out for for decades. But now,  disenchantment lending him a critical ear, he listens, but with the stealth of someone who has too much to lose if he shares all his opinions about the national disaster. He knows that in our eyes he is “their man,” sadly typecast as a troubadour who, from the beginning, played the strings of intransigence.

During the launch of his latest album, Silvio ventured a linguistic play on words to overcome “the R in revolution” and in its place give priority to “evolution.” As if, in place of excluding a new dissident, it is better to accept him into the group of those of us crying for openings; I am going to follow his lead and eliminate the inconvenient letter at the beginning of “repression.” With a certain slight metamorphosis — removing an R and slipping in an X — that word and all that hangs on it would mutate to free “expression,” which we so badly need. Meanwhile, speaking of R’s, the R in the name of the one who governs us needs to take its owner, leave the stage, and give way as soon as possible to the other consonants of our plural alphabet.

Translator’s notes:
The crisis = After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its financial support for Cuba.
Maleconazo = A social uprising, that is a riot, that erupted along the Malecon in August 1994.

A couple of years ago I went to the DHL office in Miramar to send some family videos to friends in Spain. The clerk looked at me as if I were trying to send a molecule of oxygen to another galaxy. Without even touching the Mini DV cassette, she told me that the Havana branch only accepted VHS. I thought it was a question of size, but the explanation she gave was even more surprising, “It’s just that our machines to view the content only read the large cassettes.” When I tried to insist, the woman suspected that instead of the smiling face of my son, I wanted to send “enemy propaganda” abroad.

Frustrated, I returned home – where I have never received a piece of regular mail – and some time passed before I again had need of the services of this German company. Faced with the impossibility of traveling to Chile to present my book, Cuba Libre, a few days ago the publisher sent me ten copies, in a single package marked “express.” Neither my numerous telephone calls to the office at the corner of 1st and Calle 26, nor my physical presence there, managed to make them deliver what is mine. “Your package has been confiscated,” they told me this morning, even though in reality they should have been more honest and confessed, “Your package has been stolen.” Although these are the same texts that, without descending into verbal violence, have been published on the web for three years, the customs censors have handled it as if it were a manual about how to make Molotov cocktails.

Now, when headlines around the world are announcing the end of the Google’s collusion with Chinese censorship, foreign companies located in Cuba continue to obey ideological filters imposed by the government. With its airs of efficiency, its tradition of immediacy, and its phrases such as, “We keep an eye on your package,” DHL has agreed to apply a political filter to its customers. To refuse to do so would earn them expulsion from the country with the consequent economic losses, and so they ignore the sanctity of the mail and look the other way when someone demands what belongs to them. The red and yellow colors of their corporate identity never seemed to strident to me. Looking at them today I feel that instead of speed and efficiency they represent a warning: “Not even with us is your correspondence safe!”

But the primary sporting passion of Cubans is not exempt from politics, especially when some baseball superstar decides not to return home after a trip abroad, or if a player is not chosen to play at an international event because he is feared to be unreliable and at risk of “deserting.” At a recent match-up between two teams of ardent rivals, one player was offended because he thought that the ball had been thrown with the intention of hitting him, and to the surprise of the spectators, he ran after the pitcher swinging his bat. The players emptied the bench, some fans dived into the fray, and the police made generous use of their pepper spray and batons, with a few kicks thrown in for good measure. The official cameras broadcasting the game were turned away from the melee, and not a single TV viewer knew what had happened… at that time.

But the new technologies foiled the prudish censor, as dozens of digital cameras and cell phones filmed every detail. That version of events was distributed to thousands of people on CDs and flash memories. And what great discussions we had in the parks, then!

I remember when Silvio Benítez spoke for the first time to introduce himself at the People’s Power elections in his district. Not even his closest friends cherished the hope that he would be nominated, or at least manage to get someone – outside his family – to publicly propose his name. The frustration, a priori, the reluctance to get our hopes up, has played too large a part in our lives. Thus, we feel defeated before even planning a way to transform our country. The raft sailing the sea, or complicit silence, remain the most common strategies for solving each individual’s problems, given that the national “problem” seems permanent.

That night in Punta Brava, however, the soap opera was less of a draw than the worn-out machinery of choosing “the best and most capable.” Curiosity filled the streets and sidewalks with people wanting to know if “the candidate of change” had managed to win. Silvio had promised them a different program, one marked not by ideology but by citizen management. Even though he did not succeed in getting his name on the list of the more than 15 thousand delegates from around the country, at least half the electors in his area felt compelled to abstain. Not daring to vote for him, many of his neighbors stuffed their hands in their pockets, stroked the heads of their children, or held their cigarette in front of their lips when they called for a show of hands. His victory was in all those folded arms, all those mouths that didn’t venture to mention his name, but that did not reject him.

I watch my fellow citizens go to the bodega like automatons, meekly vegetate at work and cast hopeless ballots at the polls. Their lives pass by while they shop for ever shrinking bread rations, collect their symbolic wages which don’t stretch far enough for even a bad life, and raise their hands at the meetings to nominate candidates. None of those chosen in the current electoral process will manage to solve the daily problems that weigh upon life in Cuba. Of the candidates my fellow citizens know almost nothing, barely recognizing their photos or their biographies, which are stuffed with “accomplishments” and the almost universal statement that they are “of humble origin.” Yet not a single word is devoted to their programs or intentions once they assume their new post.

Curiously almost everyone who comes to be a district delegate is a militant of the Cuban Communist Party and puts their party discipline ahead of their obligations to the voters. They will not represent us against the government, nor be our voice projected to the institutions, but rather will serve as heralds for the bad news coming down from above, transmission channels for regulations and directives decided by a few. In the more than thirty years of their existence, these representatives of the People’s Power have not managed to efficiently collect the garbage, coax quality products from the bakeries, or ensure that the sewers are not everywhere overflowing. Nor do they embody the heterogeneity of opinions in our society. They have come to their positions more through proven loyalty than by their ability to manage.

Tonight is the meeting to nominate candidates for the area of concrete blocks where I live. The citation arrived a couple of days ago, meanwhile on TV they are calling for us to choose the best and most capable. I have not one iota of faith, however, in a mechanism that has proven itself unworkable and discriminatory. I would like to raise my hand for the neighbor of strong words and concrete projects who lives across from me, but there are orders to forestall any nomination of a “dissident,” including those who may only seem inclined toward change. It is highly likely that the nomination will go to the same delegate who has, for more than ten years, promised us solutions, knowing full well it is not in his hands to deliver them. He is the comfortable candidate of these useless elections, while we are mere figurines who must raise our hands or mark our ballots.

Until this last minute you thought that maybe the archives of the Ministry of the Interior would not be too well organized and your history of nonconformity would not come to light. You often imagined that a secretary would go for pizza at the exact moment she checked your file and the rumblings of her stomach would make her put it, as quickly as possible, in the pile of those approved. You know well the effect that melted cheese and tomato sauce can cause in a bureaucrat who looks at her watch at three in the afternoon.

But the option of state negligence didn’t work this time. They uncovered your case from the moment you presented the first papers for a trip south. Some boss with the rank of lieutenant colonel would have smiled on seeing you were finally in his hands. After you believed you could act like a free man, speaking your mind loudly and publishing articles without a pseudonym, you had reached the point where you would feel all the walls, all the bars, all the locks.

You have no criminal record, have never been found guilty by a court, and your most frequent offenses consist of buying cheese or milk on the black market. Nevertheless you have just verified that you are suffering a punishment. Your sentence is to remain behind the bars of this archipelago, confined by this band of sea which some in their naïveté consider a bridge and not the uncrossable moat it really is. Nobody will let you out because you are a prisoner with a number stuck to your back, even though you think you are wearing the blouse you took from the closet this morning. You are in the dungeon of the “immobilized pilgrims,” in the cell of those forced to stay.

Through the window a voice berates you for not having shut up, faked it a little… worn the mask to be able to travel. You will not see the light until the entire prison is torn down.

Life never returns to normal, it does not go back to that time before the tragedy that now – illusorily – we evoke as a period of calm. I open my datebook, try to resume my life, the blog, the Twitter messages… but nothing comes out. These last days have been too intense. The face of Reina Tamayo, in the shadows in front of the morgue where she prepared and dressed her son for his longest journey, is the only thing in my mind. Then the images of Wednesday piled on: arrests, beatings, violence, a jail cell with the stink of urine that adjoined another where Eugenio Leal and Ricardo Santiago demanded their rights.  The rest of the time I continue on like a mannequin, looking without seeing, furiously typing.

And so, there is no one who writes a coherent and restrained line. I so want to scream, but February 24 left me hoarse.

This afternoon, hours after the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Reinaldo and I were able to approach the Department of Legal Medicine, where autopsies are performed, in Boyeros Street.

A cordon of men from State Security were watching the place, but we managed to approach Reina, the mother of the deceased, and ask her the questions in the recording posted here.

Pain, indignation in our case… sadness and fortitude in hers.  Here is the recording, amateur and in very low light, but the heartbreaking testimony of an anguished mother.

English transcript of Yoani Sanchez video interview of Reina Tamayo, mother of Orlando Zapata Tamayo

Yoani Sanchez: We are here to express our condolences. We would like to know at what time did he pass away, what do you know about his last minutes, what are your feelings right now, and what is going to happen after he is released by the coroner?

Reina Luisa Tamayo Dangier: I am Reina Luisa Tamayo Dangier, the mother of prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo who was interned in the hospital of the Habana del Este Prison. Last night he was moved to the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital where he passed away at 3:00 PM.

I can tell you I feel a horrible pain, but I am holding on, enduring through this pain. I was able to be at his side until he passed away and now hope to have the courage to dress my son Orlando Zapata Tamayo.

We will leave for Banes, Holguin Province, Embarcadero road, house number six, where we will hold the wake before our family altar, at my home, for as long as required.

I want to tell the world about my pain. I think my son’s death was a premeditated murder. My son was tortured throughout his incarceration. His plight has brought me great pain and has been excruciating for the entire family. Even, as he was transferred to this prison, he was first held in Camaguey without drinking water for 18 days. My son dies after an 86-day hunger strike. He is another Pedro Boitel for Cuba. [Pedro Luis Boitel died in 1972 during a hunger strike while serving a 10-year prison sentence in Cuba]

In the midst of deep pain, I call on the world to demand the freedom of the other prisoners and brothers unfairly sentenced so that what happened to my boy, my second child, who leaves behind no physical legacy, no child or wife, does not happen again. Thank you!

This is an event organized by the Society of the West Indies for the Latin American blogosphere.

Here is the video. Below are links for discussion, and a text transcript (in Spanish).

For those readers who want to comment here is the link:

http://www.lasindias.coop/presentacion-de-la-cumbre-eurolatinoamericana-a-la-blogsfera-latinoamericana/#respond

A transcript can be seen here.

http://www.lasindias.coop/presentacion-de-la-cumbre-eurolatinoamericana-a-la-blogsfera-latinoamericana/

You could have been a prostitute selling her favors, or equally an interrogator for State Security.  The needs were so many, that to exchange your body for a bottle of shampoo or some soaps, was always a possibility.  Only your figure was too frail for the trade and your skin so pale, for those foreigners who come looking for the cinnamon tone of the tourist ads.  You lacked a “certain something” to carry off the tight-fitting garments of exchanging sex for money, of strutting around outside some hotel to get your family out of a tight spot.

You were on the point of donning a uniform when, on finishing the ninth grade, you thought of going to the Camilo Cienfuegos military school, to escape from a house with  too many prohibitions and too much misery. You thought you were ready to become a pursed lipped soldier with access to those little privileges you saw the members of the Army and the Interior Ministry enjoying.  The timely advice of a friend made you abandon the shouts of “Ah-ten-SHUN!” and the constant rattle of a machine gun.  But if, on that afternoon in 1990, you had not heard the query, “What would you do with yourself, wedged between orders and trenches?” perhaps now you would be intimidating someone in a closed room at Villa Marista, where they take the political prisoners.

You could have been a rafter, a suicide, a government minister’s lover, a censor, a political prisoner, a cop or a victim.  It was not possible to emerge unscathed from this crisis of the nineties that touched your life, the collapse of values, the marginal scene where you came of age.  Some part of you was left in red lycra standing on the corner, in the epaulet of a lieutenant, in these possible people you could have been, from which by chance, by events, and by your own weariness you were saved.