Secret Agents

I read recently in Cubaencuentro about a call for "secret agents.” It may be an example of what happens when everyone is corrupt: there are staff shortages. Being a secret agent is not necessarily synonymous with working for the secret police, I don’t believe that the secret services are so bad as to put out mass calls.

What it’s about, as people say, is again more of the same: who sells chickens, eggs, meat; who has a particularly prosperous business; who rents movies; who gets money from abroad. In the end this sad note is more than a desperate cry of the government which seems to have fewer squealers than we can imagine.

So I wonder what happens with the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), with the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), with the mass organizations that are structured at all levels of society and that are supposed to report all these things. “The direction of the Revolution” has spent years tolerating that people live with illegality, no one has intended to solve the problem of wages and in they slyly overlook corruption. At this point it would be too complicated to have informants, the illusion would be to find informants who aren’t tainted by the black market.

Being Isaac Asimov

Image: Garrincha

August is an especially hard month, along with all the little things you have to deal with the whole year—the national news on TV, finding toilet paper, underwear, a strip of metrobamate, the daily dose of multivitamins, etc.—you have to endure 36 degree heat while having a cold.

But at times, in those moments of crushing tedium something lights up the television screen. I’m sitting at the computer and suddenly recognize the well-known delirious voice that I almost never have the pleasure of hearing. Despite being super edited I can feel that the one who makes me split my sides laughing could not have been done away with: the incoherence.

In three minutes el Comandante speaks of global warming, then he mentions a submarine and for some strange mental connection resumes his last reflection: “The Empire and the robots,” (a tribute to Isaac Asimov), and afterwards concludes that the Marti-inspired Bolivarian republic has always been under oppression, and that this can be demonstrated mathematically (at this point Ciro exclaimed, “WHAT did he say?!”).

According to the presenter of this short excerpt, Fidel Castro spoke for three hours before a small audience of students. The only thing I can’t understand is how no one started laughing out loud at some point; perhaps it was because at this stage the audience is quite small, lest anyone lack the patience for it and start nodding off and, embarrassed, has to stumble out (if he gives them a chance).

Singing in the Eye of Sauron*

Image: Guama

For me, the truth is I would love to go to a six-hour concert with a heap of musicians in this country where boredom and apathy are our daily bread. But I can’t deny that I feel a certain aversion to going to the Eye of Sauron, and it’s not only the Eye, but also what’s around it: The Communist Party Central Committee (behind), the Headquarters of the Interior Ministry (in front) and the Headquarters of the Armed Forces Ministry (on one side). I’m sure that the majority of people there don’t know that this is the setting of what once used to be the Civic Plaza.

I was talking with a friend the other day about the Juanes concert, and he told me that the place actually existed before the Revolution and that therefore it wasn’t necessary to take it so literally with regards to the concert. Even though I agreed that it’s not necessary to take it so literally, to deny that for fifty years the Plaza has had another owner is disingenuous.

I think it would have been healthier if the concert had been in Mordor, where many musicians have come to play before (Manu Chao, Audio Slave, Café Tacuba, Rick Wakeman, Air Supply) and maybe through the power of music a little of the political curse that gave rise to it has been lost (despite the horrible signs of Viva la Revolucion they put all over the podium and which I hope Juanes can get rid of). It could be my paranoia, but I suspect that that no one told the singer that foreign and national musicians who can play in Cuba usually hold their concerts there.

With respect to Porno Para Ricardo playing in the Plaza, I am sincerely in absolute disagreement: first because they are not able to play “El Comandante,” and second because it seems to me very risky for any member of the band to put one foot on such a site.

The only thing I can assure you is that if there is a concert on September 20th and if they let me come to the Plaza I will post my amateur report with photos on this blog.

* The Eye of Sauron: Nickname given to the Plaza of the Revolution, I believe the origin is the radio antenna illuminated with a red light on the tip of the tower.
Mordor: Nickname of the Anti-Imperialist Grandstand, also known as the “Protestodrome”.

Who misinterprets whom?

When I hear an analysis that seeks to build bridges between the artist, his work and officialdom, recurring phrases like, “they misinterpreted me,” “they could not understand my message,” “I never wanted to give a political opinion,” are among those that turn my stomach, especially if they assume I should raise my hand and ask a question, give an opinion. The other day I went into a debate depressed: no real question, no real answer. At that moment someone said, “Imagine, they think I’m a worm,” and I said to myself, from this moment if I raise my hand and start to ask questions, for reasons inherent in my personality I will be forced to start saying, “ As a worm I would love to know if…’ But deep down I felt bad and wasn’t in the mood for jokes. I repented from the moment I discovered I wouldn’t raise my hand, I swear it wasn’t cowardice, it was disappointment.

With the passing of time the phrases change and adjust to a new way of understanding the world. When they are intransigent and exclusionary concepts but have not ceased to be valid, sometimes they soften the construction without losing the essence. For some days I’ve been turning over in my mind this incoherence: “Within the revolution everything, outside the revolution nothing”; from my perspective I feel a change which I might try to materialize in this way: “Inside art everything, outside art nothing.”

Perhaps a new government strategy has drawn a clear red line between us: Criticism from within Art (valid), criticism from outside Art (counterrevolutionary). I wouldn’t like this post to give offense to anyone, it’s only the opinion of one who criticizes from outside Art and without any intention to “make culture.”

The Cuban government has always utilized techniques gleaned from censorship, recently I saw the documentaries of Nicolás Guillén Landrián and thought they it would be too difficult for a foreigner to understand why they were censored in the sixties. Without denying its value and above all with total humility before “the criticism from within Art,” with this post I would just like to record that the red line was not put there by us but by them; sometimes, over the years, these details are forgotten.

Rotilla Festival and La Babosa Azul concert

The first time I went to Rotilla I was 15, there were 50 of us and the conditions were very bad. I never went back until this Saturday and I’ve come home with one certainty: it was worth it. When the bus got to Jibacoa beach I felt I’d made the trip on an airplane, that is that I’d landed in another country.

There were more than 5000 people housed in the place and and for hours it didn’t stop raining but no one cared. The organizers had put up four stages: video, techno music, rock-rap and fusion (I went back and forth between the last two). The people with their tents danced, swam in the sea, saying, finally, that Rotilla had “tremendous voltage.” However, among the young were some men in checked shirts* who didn’t seem to fit in with the event… I wondered what they would do in the area besides be bored.

The bad thing is I feel incapable of writing a realistic chronical of my last 24 hours on the beach, it was all sensory overload: freedom and joy would be the best summary of what I lived at this festival. Here are some photos and a little video of the concert of La Babosa Azul.

Translator’s note
Men in checked shirts = The poorly “disguised” security services.

Place X Day X: Porno Para Ricardo in concert

Pre-criminal dangerousness

Photo taken from hhh.

Among those every day who are taken in for dangerousness in Cuba, today it has fallen on Pánfilo. He will be behind bars for two years for having yelled that he was hungry in front of a camera, because this is what the government considers dangerous. I remember very well the words of Gorki’s lawyer on the day before the trial in July of last year: to convict you they don’t need proof, a declaration from the police is enough, no one escapes. In passing he told us that the charges that really suit the repressive machinery just fine is that now they don’t even have to abide by the legislative paperwork to imprison someone.

The trial made me want to cry, I saw the head of the sector and one of his subordinates lie. The tongue of state security was putting words in the mouths of the two police officers whose hands trembled as they made their declarations. Then Heidi came, the zone president of the CDR for Playa and an art history professor at the Instituto Superior de Artes. With her there was no mistaking it: not one word she said was true, the worst is that she liked out of conviction and that is, without any doubt, the saddest thing you can see from the public bench.

It’s repulsive to imagine what to level of arbitrariness this government can reach through its channels to crush the people and strip them of everything, even their own ideas. If I had not seen it with my own eyes I might never have understood it.

About those who can’t adapt

Picture: Sculpture at the entrance of the Chaplin Cinema, between 23rd and 10th, Vedado.

When I was 14 I was studying in the 9th grade and the only thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want to go to a boarding school. Which is why I didn’t take the entrance exams for the Lenin school. I wasn’t sure if I would be accepted at San Alejandro school: in those days they reserved only some seven places for the City of Havana and, as all the students at the Elementary in Plastic Arts knew, five of those places already had names and surnames on them. Being a teenager, I had no idea what I was going to do with my life and I heard some rumors that choosing to do the three year pre-university schooling at a non-boarding school would mean a lot of dollars that my family didn’t have, or living in extreme poverty.

I graduated from high school without taking any admittance exams and without my certificate for the pre-university in a non-boarding school. I opted to go to the “Heroes of Chapultepec” school, a boarding school for training teachers, with the hope that the three years would go by fast and that after that I would go to the University of Havana to study biology.

After just three weeks at Chapultepec, in the city of Güira de Melen, I had lost 15 pounds. They would give my a bronchial spray, Salbutamol, twice a day, and had me on intravenous Aminophylline, a bronchial dilator drug. At school, the doctor was the only one who notice, beside me, that I wasn’t adapting well.

My mother went to all the ministries with the documents from the doctor at the boarding school saying I should be transferred to a non-boarding school. Three weeks later I was out of the school with a certificate, and I stayed home waiting for an answer from the Ministry of Education about what they were going to do with me.

A month later they had refused my transfer to a non-boarding pre-university school, saying that my illness had developed after I was in the boarding school and you could only go to a non-boarding school if you already had the illness.

Finally I went to study Accounting and Finance, starting at the end of October. I still remember the first day when I was sitting in class, I had no idea what being an “accounter” meant.

Another generation

Graffiti in central Havana

W is 16 and is always on G Street. I like talking to him because he floods me with a feeling of CHANGE that I don’t find in any other place in this territory. He doesn't make me remember when I was 16 like him, nor does he seem like any of my friends from that time, in him there is something we didn’t have: conscience.

I know the word sounds a little “Che-like,” but there isn’t another to define a boy so young who is already thinking about what he wants to do with his life, and fighting to achieve it. He doesn’t want to leave the country, and he fearlessly plays the songs of Los Aldeanos, Porno Para Ricardo and La Babosa Azul in little groups in the park. He has very interesting political ideas and says things that make me delirious when I think that I’m almost twice his age. W has come to three conclusions:

- He doesn’t want to leave the country: “Let them go, some old men,” he says not knowing that a few decades before almost the same words were said in an interview by Dulce María Loynaz: “Let them go, those who came later.”
- He reads everything they give you on G, pamphlets, discs, books. He says that that to be able to know what exists in the power you have to read everything. The other day he scolded me because I said I wouldn’t read Fidel’s “History will absolve me,” even if you paid me.
- He’s convinced, along with all of his friends, that this doesn’t have even one breath left, and that you “can push the wall.”

The traitor (the proofs)

Text of "diploma": On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Directorate General of Counterintelligence and in recognition of the personal activities and results in completing the tasks of State Security.

Taken from the Saga: The Ciro versus State Security

Now there can be no doubt… we have always been deceived… Tell me if this document, extracted from the ultra secret archives of the G2, isn’t verification. In the same folder we found this photo and to top it all off we have his confession.

The fake Ciro Javier Díaz Penedo worked as an undercover agent since 1978, the year he was born. He was assigned to spy on himself and inform about his own activities so that his superiors could indicate what actions he needed to take against himself. Thus he informed State Security about his own concerts and other counterrevolutionary plans.

Claudia Cadelo and Van Van don’t exist, they are the same person: The Ciro. Take a good look at the size of the posts of this Claudia person and then look at VanVan’s, they’re the same length. And absurdly (don’t forget that little word) antagonistic, never agreeing on anything.

So this is how this charlatan tries to deceive us but he won’t manage it because I am here. Me, The Ciro, who has searched out all this evidence to expose myself publicly. And I want you to know that I’m not going to stop until I kill him, even if it kills me.