Searching the Air of Cuba

Text: Boris González Arenas

Photo: Leandro Feal

See, see how from the ground
rising magnificent in flight
searching the air of Cuba.
"One Palm" Luis R. Nogueras

We don’t play with freedom. We spend our whole lives thinking about the danger of losing it, that once it is lost it is impossible to rescue it. Many ideologies come to the aid of the censors. It’s so easy to cover up the crime with the feeling of necessity.

But freedom is like the palm and even tyrants suffocate without air.

My country is a topic of great interest. On one side, us, for whom the interest goes hand in hand with the urgency, and on the other, foreigners, who, for whatever reason, suffer with us.

The analysis of Cuba has sped up in recent years, since the Raul Castro’s leadership has made the central focus -- rhetorically -- what to do with strategies vital to Cubans: change.

Among recent analyses I came across recently was one written by Guillermo Almeyra. "Cuba: a dangerous and contradictory document" is the title and the document is the third part of a reflection on the "Draft Guidelines for Economic and Social Policy," recently circulated by the Cuban government without many knowing whether it informs or confuses. But this is already what Mr. Almeyra says when he describes it as contradictory.

With regards to the classification of “dangerous,” Mr. Almeyra devotes his article to describing it. Extremely critical and respectable, the article points out the incomprehensible finding that the structural changes of great importance are those by the State, at the margins of society and the Communist Party, delegating to those who should be the source of social analysis, the diminished role of receptors. The author uses Leninist theory to remind us that the State responds to the class interests of those who overflow the margins of the society it administers. The society administered should be provided, then, with effective mechanisms of control to dampen the enthusiasms which are the province of the State.

The author also points out the shameless attitude of distancing themselves from the social policies that tended to mitigate inequalities among citizens, as if these were errors from the past. An attitude that has contributed to deepening the despair and frustration.

Infamous military privileges, the vile excesses of bureaucrats, the power of a schizoid and good-natured Raul, none of this escapes, with equally harsh words, Almeyra’s critique.

Now, when a bunch of senile leaders must face the consequences of their self-extinction, is when they come forward with the essential strenuous measures for a starving citizenry, without acknowledging, without even a hint of severe criticism of themselves, those who have autocratically and cruelly led a suffering society.

Almeyra says this with the words and theoretical references required, and so earns my complete respect.

My disagreements with him are nothing major, but I want to record them.

In his text the writer ignores that no Communist Party congresses have been held for more than ten years in Cuba, and that in them unanimity is the rule and through them Fidel weaves the cover of many betrayals.

There is a certain attempt to find Cuban authoritarian procedures novel, or at least aggravated, says Almeyra in a circulated document that never mentions the word “worker.” I don’t think the average Cuban would be much affected by this omission, either because he has much more serious things to think about or, and I think this is the real reason, because the word “worker” ceased to have any significance, decades ago, for a citizen used to surviving at the margin on low-paying and discouraging jobs.

There are other points where I disagree with Almeyra, more at the margin of my convergence with this deep critique, which demonstrate that the ideological debate is not a confrontation of conceits. I refer, at the beginning of his article, to “the enemies of the revolutionary process,” an overly confrontational tone what seeks to keep alive the old antagonisms between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, in a country where the greatest urgency is life faced with the criminal  irresponsibility of the Castro regime. The alarming rates of population decline, the deterioration of civic dignity, the tendency to emigrate and the lack of commitment, will be the real legacy of Fidel Castro, the principle threat to a Cuban whose extinction is not merely a symbolic issue.

When he says, later, that the Mariel Boatlift was the end of the Cuban bourgeoisie... in reality, here I have no words. To call the tens of thousands of Cubans who left, desperate, in an excruciating and hungry decade (I can’t find many more words for the seventies in Cuba) -- accompanied by political activists who were invited to exchange exasperating prison cells for exile, common prisoners who received passes to take advantage of the situation and who were mixed in with psychiatrist patients, gays, and “alternative” Cuban men and women -- to call these people “the Cuban bourgeoisie” at a time when we now know that in this same era the elite of the Castro regime enjoyed an army of unsuspected privileges, is simply, in my opinion, irresponsible and unjustifiable.

Nonetheless, this effort by Almeyra is magnificent. With the entire left indisposed to intellectual production in a Cuba faced with the imminent advent of democracy, where the palms of liberty are already more than mere shoots, the ground could be left open to threats of future perversions.

Boris González Arenas
20 December 2010

Note: this article is the first of a three-part series in which Boris opines with regards to three publications that explore the Cuban issue, and the current state of politics on the island.

Happy New Year

In spite of signs like this:

The Theater Collective / Salutes the Anniversary of the Revolution / Happy New Year

Voices 4

voces4

The Words of Luis Alberto García

Click image to go to original blog post and listen to recording

Although I received an invitation by mail and by text messages from a number of friends to go to the National Plastic Arts Award Ceremony for the artist René Francisco, I didn’t go. Since that Pedro Luis Ferrer concert, where I discovered that I am banned from entering the National Museum of Fine Arts and other Cuban cultural institutions, I’ve been overtaken by a strange, “Because as long as that flag is flying, I vowed not to enter.*”

Now my relationship with my country’s art has become subtle and intimate: fragments of event reach me through cables and USB ports. It’s probably much more exciting to listen to Luis Alberto García in person, rather than alone in my house with headphones. But I’ve decided that until freedom of expression in Cuba is more than a performance, I won’t participate.

*Translator’s note: A line from a poem by Jose Marti, loosely translated to convey Claudia’s meaning.

There Was a Concert

Ciro in his uniform as Lt. "Telaplico" with Hebert to the left, behind.

This weekend La Babosa Azul and Porno para Ricardo played a concert in the distant suburbs of Havana. The concert was outstanding, my legs hurt from dancing so much and I'm hoarse from singing "El Comandante."

I'm going to upload a video and then take a seasonal vacation.

Setting up the concert

Ethics Sleeping

Photo: Lia Villares http://habanemia.blogspot.com

I am arguing with a friend about ethics and the intellectuals and he reproaches me, “If that’s what you think you should tell those people.”

And I respond: How am I going to tell someone so intelligent, so wise, something so obvious? Don’t you know? How am I going to say to a curator that I think he should suspend his show because the artists participating in it are being threatened by State Security? How am I going to advise a musician that I think it would be ethically correct to suspend his concert because there are people outside who can’t enter because the venue has been taken over by the political police? How am I going to suggest to a theoretician that I don’t think his conference should take place because some of those interested in the topic cannot be heard, as they are considered “counterrevolutionaries”? What right, indeed, do I have to say all these things when I’m usually among the threatened, those denied entry, and the counterrevolutionaries? I feel that my position, clearly anything but neutral, obliges me to keep some of my opinions to myself. But I know that were he in any other circumstance, he would surely think the same.

My friend tells me my answer is cowardly, and he’s probably right. I don’t like to tell people what I consider ethical, I know perfectly well that they agree with me on these issues and for reasons having nothing to do with ethics they take other positions.

I guess I’m turning into a radical. When I studied history in school they told me that was good. Will they be right?

Placebos

I still remember how at the height of the Special Period my house was deteriorating before our eyes. The walls were peeling, the lights gradually burned out, the wood of the doors and windows buckled, and in general everything became impoverished too fast for my child’s mind to fathom. At times I wondered why the world was becoming so ugly with the passing of time, and it was not a subjective reflection. I never got an answer. That’s also when the messiness started. It seemed that things didn’t “go” anywhere: there were boxes, clothes, papers and junk everywhere. The worst of it was that the same thing was happening outside, as well.

My mother, for her part, never stopped trying to mark the space with what she called “change.” Once a month she would rearrange all the furniture in the house. The same easy chair with the rotted bagasse would be found at the entrance to the apartment in January, next to the telephone in February, between the living and dining rooms in March, and in April it would be on the balcony. The neighbors were moved by her perseverance and sometimes when they visited us they would exclaim, “But everything looks new! How do you manage it?” Now that the years have passed, that sentence sometimes makes me strangely sad: she, helpless before the collapse of the world represented by her home, moving things from one place to another, as if she could stop the inevitable impoverishment; and me, super happy at her side, proud to have a magician for a mother while the condescending neighbors patronized the illusion we threw over our growing poverty.

I was always grateful to her for having tried, without wavering for an instant, to light up my life in the midst of so many grievances: not having school shoes, not having winter coats, not having milk in the morning, and, finally, having absolutely nothing at all. If I were in her shoes for one day I hope I would have the aplomb to act toward myself and toward others exactly as she did. Even so, I can’t understand now, after so long and from my adult point of view, that we fed on an infinite placebo that never solved any of our problems and that, if I look at it from a larger context, is the same placebo that is consuming our nation; changing exactly that which doesn’t change anything.

Going Begging

 

 

Claudio Fuentes Madan

One full page in the newspaper Granma of December 9: a transcript of the speech of Bruno Rodriguez on climate change and, on the front page, Raul Castro with the president of South Africa and Machado Ventura in Pinar del Río. Obviously, not a single word on the eve of Human Rights Day.

A law student friend sent me this text message this morning: "I am on the steps with some students who are waiting for the Ladies in White. Do you know something? What can we do? The first lift a hand to them is going to feel my fist.” Too cynical, I would say, to choose law students from the University of Havana to participate in a repudiation rally on December 10. Are these the lawyers who are going to defend us tomorrow? Those who today spend the afternoon vilifying women whose families were and are imprisoned for crimes of opinion?

Cuba is a signatory to the the U.N. covenants on Human Rights. How far does the hypocrisy of the Cuban government go that not even today can they stop themselves from repressing those who think differently? Meanwhile, in Geneva, the foreign minister is performing semantic cartwheels to justify the totalitarian system he represents, and in the streets of Cuba the political police are demonstrating that our human rights -- with or without U.N. Covenants -- continue to go begging.

What Changes?

 

With great effort I’ve managed to read the eleven pages of “The Transformations Required in the Public Health System.” I have the impression that if we took out all the ideological apologies -- such as, “the direction of our glorious Party,” or this one, “the immense historic responsibility we have for the future of the fatherland” -- the text would only be three pages. Sadly, the ability to synthesize has never been a virtue of those who govern us.

To make matters worse, in the meat of it there’s not much there, other than a shifting and rearranging of equipment and personnel from here to there, the well-known and prioritized “internationalist” work, and a strange insinuation that there is a surplus of doctors -- I say it’s strange because it’s true but I didn’t expect them to say it. There is not a word that speaks specifically to a wage increase for workers in the Ministry of Health, much less any guarantees to citizens about the quality of the services. There is even a delirious expression (semantically and grammatically) about medical ethics: “The Medical Ethics Commission should not act as a court, but should think of itself as an ideological commission.” Can anyone imagine the practical significance of such a statement?

More of the same and yet they call it transformations. Sometimes I wonder if really -- even with the political will -- the government will manage to fix the debacle that has been steadily building in public health.

From the denial of the denial to the denial of the obvious

 

I was lucky: I finished the ninth grade with one teacher for each subject. A few years later began the debacle of the “emerging teachers” -- who were not allowed to specialize. The same teacher would teach the arts and sciences to the whole high school. The old guard of teaching withdrew in fear (the devil knows more because he’s old than because he’s the devil) and most of the teachers changed the level of instruction, asked to move down, or retired from a long and always underpaid career.

Shutting off the voice of experience, the Ministry of Education gave free rein to its imagination of the absurd, and classes without specialization gave way to classes by television. To make matters worse, the salary and poor classroom conditions remained the same. We finished the academic era and entered the ideological era: more politics, less knowledge.

So things continued until the pitcher went to the well one too many times*. The emerging teachers quickly tired of a profession that was more work than earnings, and the government decided to punish them with seven long years of obligatory social service in the classroom. Negligence, corruption and mediocrity established themselves where, previously, wisdom and education had lived. Parents who had the economic wherewithal found private teachers, and the rest resigned themselves to changing their children’s school all the time.

Then it occurred to someone to try the strange idea of a “new” approach: specialized education. Now they’ve gone back to the days when the mathematics teacher only worried about numbers and not syntax or historic dates. Four or five schools in Havana are serving as guinea pigs for the “unprecedented experiment” and the parents -- among whom are several friends of mine -- move heaven and earth to ensure that their children are among those chosen to “test the new formula.”

* Popular saying: The pitcher that goes to the well too many times is sure to break.