Civility

It is a little delirious to demand civilized behavior from a society that, with the help of the state, foments the creation of Rapid Response Brigades [to attack anyone who publicly protests or dissents]. Because of this, when I see the agitated state of people around me, I try to breathe deeply and tell myself, paraphrasing Ivan: They are not the enemy… nor am I.

We say this jokingly between us, and jokingly as well they told me this sad story the other day. I am one of those who maintains humor as a “maximum” remedy against what is, I have Faith in laughter to cleanse me of the bad feelings I get going out in the street, and to fight my daily grind.

The story is simple: it happened a few years ago when we still were enjoying the delirious interventions of the Comandante on the Roundtable TV show. But sometimes mysterious disappearances created conjectures among people (like now when he doesn’t update his blog for many days). During one such period, a friend of Julio (a professional dominoes player) died, a man named Fidel.

One of the players went to Julio’s house to give him the news, and as he lived on the third floor he shouted from the sidewalk:

- Julio! Did you know? Fidel died.

But the neighbor above Julio didn’t play dominoes and didn’t know “that” Fidel, so he thought it was the “other one.” He went straight to his room, grabbed his baseball bat, went to the house of the president of the CDR (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution) and split his head open.

Unfortunately I’ve been able to confirm that almost no one else has this dread that I have. Hopefully when that day comes that we are all waiting for more or less anxiously, with more or less Faith, with more or less apprehension, it won’t occur to any player to split anyone in the head.

Daily surrealism or customer service

Collage: Lia Villares

I'm going to 23rd and 16th to buy a hotdog. I get there and there are no tables outside, generally people get the hot dogs to-go, so I go in and sit at one of the tables inside. Five minutes go by and then one of the waitresses comes by and says, while looking toward the counter:

- Mmmmm

Obviously I didn’t understand so I obediently stayed in my seat waiting. Then the counter girl called me:

- Psssssssss

I get up and walk over to her, strangely she doesn’t say a single word but continues some incomprehensible conversation with the other waitresses, the last one is listening and at the same time humming a song playing on the TV. In a moment she looks at me, takes a torn piece of paper, and says:

- How many?
- Two.

I pay and she writes something strange on the paper, gives it to me and nodding toward the kitchen says:

- Give it to Ugly there.

Ugly there was the cook. I walk over to the kitchen pass-through and give him the paper. I return to my table, still vacant, and sit and wait. Soon I realize there are two dogs on a plate in the pass-through, the guy signals me from the stove to come and get them.

I get up again and grab them and return to the table to fix them but then I realize there’s no mustard or ketchup, there isn’t even any on the empty tables. At that point I’d already realized I couldn’t count on the servers. A bit annoyed, I approach one of the occupied tables and ask if I can use theirs. As it seems the normal thing to do they told me yes quite calmly, I put a bit of everything on my dogs and left.

Sad Connections

Today I just finished Persepolis, by the Iranian writer Marjane Satrapi and I have seen reflected there a part of my life and my worries. Strange things unequivocally mark totalitarian regimes, beyond ideology, religion or culture, which have the same effects on their citizens.

Coincidently, the author talks about a novel, Oshin, that I saw in Cuba when I was still a girl. I remember my sister and I turned my room into a Japanese shrine, my father made us a few chopsticks to eat with and my mother soaked the rice to complete our tragic soap opera fantasies. But even more notable, it turns out, was to see that just as in Cuba Oshín didn’t work as a Geisha, in the Iranian version she was called a “hairdresser,” in the Cuban one she was a “stylist.” The work of a Geisha didn’t fit with Islamic morality, and on the other side of the world the communists considered it opposed to socialist morality.


When I was 20 I taught a Spanish language student from North Korea, at that time I didn’t have the slightest idea what happened to people in that part of the world. My student was hard working, spoke with an accent but with grammatical accuracy, and liked the classes. However, something strange about him repelled me, his ideas frightened me and his compositions left me with my mouth agape. Once when we were working on the imperfect subjunctive and the conditional, his sentences were more or less like this:

- If the general had called for the sacrifice of the army, the soldiers would have died happy.

He never wrote anything that wasn’t about war. I decided to suspend the class, he apologized and asked for some homework that he could study. He didn’t want to leave, he told me I was the only foreigner he was authorized to speak to in Cuba, the Spanish teacher. I told him I was very sorry and said goodbye.

The years passed and I learned that we and North Korea share the same destiny: to live in a dictatorship. I realized that sensation of freedom that I feel when I publish in my blog was the same one he felt when he talked with me and I mocked his sentences. I felt intolerant and lazy, I cut this poor man’s connection to the ground, his tunnel of information. I’ve never heard anything more about him.

It’s incredible that we share such similar feelings, though we are so different, and that our governments use absurdly parallel techniques. Marjane says that when you are only obsessed with correcting your dress, there’s no time to worry about your personal freedom nor the rights of others. How many times have I heard people tell the discouraged people in Cuba that they can’t talk politics because first we must put food on the table?

It’s not easy

Image: Luis Trápaga

The other day at one of our blogger meetings we chose to talk about the stories of the Colón cemetery, of the vicissitudes that happen in Cuba when someone close dies. It seems to be a shocking enough topic, and in a certain sense it is, fortunately we’ve seen the movie, “The death of a bureaucrat,” which made it clear years ago that dying in Cuba “is not easy.”

A few days later a neighbor caught me by surprise with a horrifying story. It seemed that a 40-year-old woman in the neighborhood had died from epilepsy. The attending doctor found no external signs of violence, but in the interest of prudence called Legal Medicine to come and examine the body. Legal Medicine that it wasn’t necessary, despite the youth of the victim, if there were no signs of a crime they should proceed directly to preparing the death certificate without them.

For security reasons, the family asked that an autopsy be performed on the deceased and began to prepare the paperwork. As it was late at night, no hospital had much interest in receiving them, they heard several variants of refusal:

- There is no water.
- There is no technician.
- The person in charge can’t be located.

Finally they found a hospital that agreed to receive the deceased and the family quietly awaited the results, which take about two months. But three months passed and there was no response: it seems that the organs were lost and/or were thrown out at some point between the hospital and the processing site.

Deciding to make a complaint, they went to the province and tried to move heaven and earth, but they realize that they may never know what she died of.

It's not easy.

Pedro Luis Ferrer’s interactive concert

The truth is that we did not want to go to Pedro Luis Ferrer’s concert. Ciro was rehearsing and I was dripping fat drops of sweat in front of the computer (literally) trying to decipher a code error in the HTML in the off-line version of the blogs. Outside, summer was pure fire.

Then I received Yoani’s call saying they wouldn’t let her enter the concert, with a mini repudiation meeting and all. I say mini because they are no longer able to call on thousands of people willing to shout “To the wall!” because cameras and microphones try to stand in for the apprehension that was previously supplied by hundreds of people wanting to make you grovel on the ground. What happened is that both Yoani and Reinaldo were good in front of the cameras. In my case it was a little while since I’d played cat and mouse with State Security.

Again, I pity the artists and intellectuals. They don’t even know that State Security has filled all the seats; they have no voice nor vote in their activities, they can’t even choose their guests nor interact with their public. After they didn’t let Yoani enter no one else could go in, the median age of those who heard Pedro’s concert this afternoon was 60, while behind the bars of the Museum of Decorative Arts railing we young people were looking at the illusion of empty seats and dreaming of applauding the themes and shouting the refrains. Sadly, the audience who came in chartered buses (we verified it later) didn’t have the least musical disposition.

But still I had a ball: I took photos of the security guys, saw solidarity among those who yesterday one would have seen repudiated, shared the afternoon with people my age and found out that State Security doesn’t like ballads. As we’d already left home and wanted to celebrate Macho’s birthday, we went to G Street. Ciro was playing the guitar until one in the morning (El Comandante and Alpido Alonso were, as always, among his most requested hits), I met a blogger and finally decided that we're not going to lose one of these holidays (anyway we have to earn them with our working wages, no?).

Events in Granma

I’ve decided to subscribe to the newspaper Granma, every time I happen to see one I have the feeling that it raises the stakes. Today, for example, I discovered that the obituary was dedicated to Kim Il Sung under the ridiculous and disconcerting title of “Dear love of the people” with a small summary of his life that, when you read it, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Here in Havana they are showing two documentaries: “North Korea, access to terror” and “You love the leader above all things” which leave everyone dumbfounded. When you see them you can believe that Ramiro Valdés has emotions, that Randy has an iota of dignity, and that Fidel and Raúl are a couple of “little old men.”

After finding out that I was born on the same day Kim Il Sung left this world, I realized that he also shared his death with the first nine sites of the “People’s Camping Plan.” Any similarity to surrealism is pure reality.

Sometimes my demons are tired

There are days when I lose a little strength and I’m tired of the idea of going on and on along a path where nothing in the end looks very clear. It’s difficult to swim against the current, or against the currents, because at times in truth I feel I am going to be alone with two or three cats who inspire me when I’m tired. I think I would miss this blog like I’ve never missed anything before, and that finding a space of freedom has been the strangest thing that ever happened to me, in fact it’s not something that happened to me, it’s something that is. For that reason I find it hard to use adjectives like good or bad, because it’s difficult to describe the existence.

The other day I was walking around handing out CDs on G Street and a boy told me he had a blog and gave me the address for it with a warning: Don’t manipulate me. I laughed and told him I wouldn’t manipulate him, but I would put a link… then I changed my mind, in case he might feel manipulated if I put a link, who knows. Later heading over to 23rd I was thinking that I might have responded that I’m not Randy nor Taladrid to be manipulating anything, that he had the newspaper Granma for that and I, thanks be to God, was small enough that it would be almost laughable to thin =k I could manipulate anyone, especially in a country where information is a chimera and ideology is in its death throes and how can you support your weight on the crutch of opportunism.

I find that people without Faith make me shed my own, people who don’t understand, who swallowed paranoia as if it were an ice cream infinitely digested in the belly. Then I get sad and ask myself if it wouldn’t be better to return to my calm drawings, to throw myself only into my work and relax every day, if in any event someone tells me every 24 hours one of two things:

- You’re wasting your time.
- This isn’t the way it’s done.

And I wonder: Are there any specific way to express themselves freely is more important than others? What better way than trying to be free? I really feel that I very happy with my blog, so simple, if not the ideal way is what I chose, if I'm wasting time, I found no greater pleasure than to waste time telling me what want.
And I wonder: Are there specific ways to freely express yourself that are more important than others? What is the best way to try to be free? The truth is I feel most content with my blog, it’s that simple, if it’s not the ideal way it’s the way I choose; if I’m wasting my time, I haven’t found a greater pleasure than wasting time saying what I want.

But it’s been almost a year and I almost forgot the post with which I presented Octavo Cerco: for people without Faith who move to my side. Then I have no reason to doubt, I have always been against the current and I’ve never promised Faith, I’ve just wanted to share the little I have.

Three phone lines in Aldecoa

Back in Ciro’s neighborhood they are putting in some phones; there are 20 people on the list without phones but only three lines available. I find out, with growing sadness, all about the process from one of the concerned parties. ETECSA doesn’t decide who is going to get a telephone, rather it’s a commission appointed by the CDR that does a “study of the terrain” and names the chosen.

The initial three-person commission first named the president of the CDR, and second the delegate from the district, and in third place it was split between two neighbors close to the committee. The dispute continued until it became a scandal at ETECSA, who sent them home to come to agreement.

Other neighbors, seeing the problem, joined the dissent. The woman who told me the story, for example, explained that she was waiting to make her claim because she thought she had more merit in the CDR than those in the dispute. The matter was so raw that the commission was dismantled and a new one put in its place.

The new commission, together with the neighbors, have called an extraordinary meeting for a new selection, which still hasn’t taken place but it will take place without the presence of those involved in the problem. In any case, always when they selection is made and they make a decision, one can then make a claim for a new review of the whole process: a person argues why they don’t agree and lists the merits of the one whom they want to benefit beyond which they have benefited.

I remember when televisions were distributed people in Havana were shocked by the quarrels between neighbors; I know of friends who didn’t have a television and preferred not to get into it with their neighbors: dirty laundry, old stories, families in the United States, comments against the government, numbers of guard duty served, voluntary work, ideological quality of relatives… in the end, any argument is valid when it’s time to explain to the CDR that the television or telephone is deserved by you and not by the guy next door.

But worst of all is that there are people, like the woman I spoke of, to whom the process seems just. People who don’t see the sad and painful result of a system that makes it citizens behave like dogs getting a bone out of the trash, who sadistically wash their hands and indolently register with pride the responsibility of having converted envy and snitching into new values of the socialist revolution.

The paradoxes of Randy Alonso

Photo and video: Lía Villares

A friend told me that for the first time Cuba and the United States agree on one thing: The coup d’etat in Honduras is a threat to democracy. The only problem is that the step would place Honduras at some point in time near to Cuba in the past, because for some time we’ve renounced historical truth and the succession of events, over and above democracy; in my country no one remembers any more that yesterday, today and tomorrow are not synonymous.

So the ineffable Randy was doing his work on The Roundtable on Thursday. Trying within the dimensions of his possibilities to explain to us the reasons why the coup cannot be accepted or established, which is clear enough to all who believe that power imposed by the military almost always degenerates into sad dictatorships or corrupt and militarized governments (if one has lived the experience themselves they can harbor no doubt).

He considered it necessary, however, to spell out certain rights that a civil society must maintain above all if it is a State of laws and he said that now, in Honduras, these rights are being violated:

- The right to free association.
- The right to a free press.
- The right to demonstrate against the government.

He concluded the program with a key phrase: “No despot has the right to lead a hard-working people.”

It’s not a joke, Randy said that… I almost cried I was laughing so hard, to think he would have the nerve. I suppose it slipped his mind a little. I start to imagine that at the end of the broadcast he would receive a friendly “little call” from “above”:

“Randy, please. There are many ways to argue that the civilian government of Honduras has to be restored. Next time might you avoid giving unnecessary details?”

Then I found myself thinking maybe the idea isn’t so ridiculous, they called Pánfilo for much less.

Perico in Matanzas

The other day I went to Matanzas and visited Alejandrina, the wife of Diosdado González Marrero, a prisoner of conscience since the Black Spring of 2003. He was on a hunger strike alone in a cell in the Pinar del Río prison “Kilometer Five and a Half” (Cuban prisons never cease to amaze me with their horrible names, horrible like their conditions, of course). Alejandrina was telling me the ups and downs of going to Pinar del Río for visits, as traveling in Cuba is an odyssey.


I went on this same odyssey to be able to reach her home in Perico, a very complicated little town. I had to ask a lot of people, and I was very paranoid because I was afraid of being intercepted by State Security. However no one seemed to know the name of any street and I refused to say whom I was going to see… until finally I realized it wasn’t so serious, people greatly respected the families and helped them.

At the house you can see in the photo, right at the corner of Alejandrina’s house, I asked my last question and was answered, “I don’t know,” which seemed rude to me… maybe she spent a lot of time giving directions from here to there and was annoyed. The fact is that when I realized I was right next to my destination a wave of reproach hit me in the chest towards that woman who, obviously, had lied.

But I was wrong, that sad family had all the problems of mental retardation and lived in appalling conditions, divorced from reality and forgotten by the social welfare system. Last year the cyclone left them homeless and they haven’t even been able to finish the reconstruction thanks to being forgotten by the government, and in spite of help from the neighbors.

A woman in a doorway, with the roof half finished and the bare block walls, and a red rag on her back who doesn’t know the street where she lives, these are things “The Socialist Revolution” doesn’t take into account.