Demonstration in Barcelona

Best of luck to everyone!

The same thing 50 times

Text: La Salamandra Blanca

It would seem that in Cuba, instead of a reason for happiness and celebration and hope, all that the New Year could bring with the coming of every January is simply the arrival of the alleged celebration of the now extremely old Triumph of the Revolution. Because of this, the press is always full of “the same.” Recently a 50th Anniversary Bohemia Special Edition magazine was published with articles published in 1959. In general, like always, even today, they tell of the horrors of the dictatorship overthrown that year and everything “we cannot forget.” (But how could we, if every year, one after another, they remind us again how hideous it is?)

In the magazine there are two pages with “Phrases for History,” of course from the “Star of that moment,” with many photos of him. I would like to repeat some of the phrases here, to see how they strike one today with the passage of time:

…”This war was won by the people. And I say that for anyone who believes that he has won it. What interests the Revolution is the people…”
Who would be the one who, at that moment, believed that he had won and was interested in maintaining, for such a long time, all of the people under his absolute command and authority?

…”I believe that this people has the same rights as other people to govern itself and to chart its own destiny.”
…And since then…? Sometime it’s time to let the people chart a new destiny, and it would be good to stop living through what someone else charted for himself and extended to everyone.

…”Where there is justice there is no crime, and where there is crime there is no freedom of the press; where there is crime they hide what they do.”
…Freedom of the press? Where is that… is it here?

“This people is not a barbaric people, nor is it a criminal people. This the most noble and sensitive people of all."
…Asshole, then why are you so determined to fuck them over?

The shooting star

I find out through the official organ of the Party that our star no longer lives in the flag. They already came out with explanations, but I am left with the symbolic message. I think it says more than words.

P.S. The explanation from Granma can be read in Penultimos Dias.

Declassification of PPR Archives

They’ve sold a pig in a poke to our friend the local political boss Guamá, our comrade in the PCC (Partido de la Carne de Caballo [aka “The Horse Meat Party” to you English speakers]). A Gorki (who is not the director of PPR because he knows how to turn on a computer and even has an account on Facebook) has sent him nothing more and nothing less than a communiqué, which the boss kindly published. We exonerate the boss of all guilt, so please they are not going to burn him at the stake, and I already talked to my former comrades of the G2 and all the archives will be eliminated.

According to the MINIT [Ministry of Interior] computer the information sent was a co-production between Hugo Chávez and Kim Il Sun who, as we all know, are boyfriends who communicate through Fidel Castro, who plays the role of intermediary between the living and the dead.

We apologize to all the innocent anticommunist victims who have been affected by this com-muniqué.

I take advantage of the opportunity to attach a photo of myself, which is totally beside the point but I look very sexy in it.

The Ciro.

The Revolution… Mighty?

Foto: Claudio Fuentes Madan

I think the political posters and billboards have long since crossed the line of semantic absurdity. But this latest adjective, “mighty,” [pujante] has left me with my mouth hanging open. The first time I saw one of these banners (they’re now hanging all over 23rd Street), and read “mighty,” I imagined a woman laboring to give birth with tremendous pain and, since then, every time I read the little word I can’t get the idea out of my head. The worst is when I read the complete phrase, “The Mighty Revolution.” I can’t even begin to explain the disagreeable image that forms in my brain, where there’s no longer a woman in labor, but poor exhausted Cuba, incessantly pushing to give birth to this enormous revolution that won't leave her womb once and for all.

I wonder, who are the people who are making the signs and how much are they paying them? At times, I can make myself believe that they’re doing it deliberately, that those fetuses of metaphor are so that we will read between the lines, so that we will laugh to ourselves and know that they, the designers and publishers of the Mighty (from now on I’ll call it that), are only doing their job because that is how they earn their beans.

The C.D. R. on the 50th Anniversary

Abandoning the unofficial CDR acronym, widely used in commercial transactions on the black market, for 24 hours the Cuban people can say loudly on the telephone, “Here, man, I got the Carne De Res.” You have to be careful, however, you can only say it once since it’s half a pound; if you say it twice you’ll raise suspicions that you have enough for two meals.
Here’s the photo of the gift of the Communist Kings, who are different from the Three Kings, they come only once every fifty years and they don’t give gifts, they sell them.

Translator’s note: Carne De Res is ground beef.

Solution 1: Throw the sofa out the window. Solution 2: Throw yourself out the window.

Photo: Claudio Fuentes Madan

Irrespective of what it might mean to be standing at the front of a classroom without the pedagogical skills necessary to handle it, to make matters worse by having academic gaps, makes it truly pathetic. However, if you add turning on the television as a substitute for the work of a teacher, adjectives fail me and we enter, once again, into the Kingdom of the Absurd.

Newly-minted teachers and social workers I know are desperate: with seven years of compulsory social service, going where they send you, without working conditions, faced with marginal adolescents they can’t handle, teenagers themselves with an absurd program, the Revolution decided to give them the responsibility to teach what they don’t know.

The consequences? The demands on the teacher-in-training and the academic level of the students in the cellar, depressed teachers, students with serious behavior problems faced with teachers with serious problems of self-control, and a television that tries to teach what the teacher doesn’t know. There are even teachers who are prepared and would like to run their classes as well as they can, but no: they can’t turn off the television because they are not the owners of the classroom, the owner is the one speaking impassively from the screen who makes the laws and says you have to present the following content.

Knives to threaten the teachers and chairs to break the heads of the students form a part of the teacher-training process in some cases. There’s one who’s teaching an entire secondary school by himself in spite of his having punched a student, but what are you going to do if no one else will take on such a workload.

The students who take knives to school get sent to another school, the teachers who knock them about or crack chairs over their heads are sent to another school also, as the joke says: a man comes home and finds his wife having sex with her lover on the sofa; desperate, the guy throws the sofa out the window. We all throw out the sofa, then the wardrobe, then everything in the house and then, we throw ourselves out the window to see what happens. Anyway, the governmental experience protects us: what it has mostly done, this Revolution, is throw out the sofa, by the dumpster load.

Question of monarchy

Text and photo: The White Salamander

I recall the stories told by acquaintances about the efforts, expense and the lies some parents had to tell to give their children a present for “Three Kings Day.” Siblings were even born to satisfy the requests of some toddlers.

Revolutionary history always emphasizes how, before, poor people didn’t have any money and could not, even on this day, give anything to their children who still “believed” in the “Three Kings and Father Christmas,” and the social problem of the marked class differences between those who received much and those who received nothing. Hence, the absurdity of celebrating these dates was like something taken as a given by the people… to the great dissatisfaction of some.

But, in reality, the differences were never completely eliminated. They tried to eliminate the frowned upon celebration of Christmas and the Three Kings Day which, according Revolutionary history, became a part of the bourgeois life that we had to let go, when in reality, for some, they were almost more cultural and family traditions than celebrations based on religious beliefs. Then the children had to put aside their silly innocence and must learn that the bearded kings were others and brought other kinds of gifts.

This last January 5th, watching people expend tremendous effort running to the shops to buy their children “toy cell phones” at 25 Cuban pesos (national money), and others in line at stores selling toys in “Cuban pesos” but also in “convertibles” or CUCs (1 CUC = 24 national money or Cuban pesos), I remembered that the “terrible” social differences that the government so greatly “fears,” have more or less always existed.

As a child I had friends who had everything--toys and other things--that marked the differences, solely because of the fact that they were Papa’s nieces or nephews, relations or shirt-tail relations, or his kids. Me, with my “poor communist” family, I had to be satisfied with playthings from the coupons in the ration book in their three variants or categories: basic, non basic, and additional. Making it even more complicated were the numbers they gave out and the terrible lines, adding uncertainty about whether you’d get something you saw in the window, and the disappointment when the most desirable items were running out, the times when you’d be “bawling” because you didn’t reach the front of the line in time and had to leave the store with “something” so as not to go home with tears running down your face and empty hands.

To me, Three Kings Day and Father Christmas don’t mean a thing, nor do I know the history very well (because of my background, I suppose), but I wonder if the absurdity, like so many other things, wasn’t an attempt to impose the disappearance of these dates on so many people for whom they continued to matter and to try to eliminate something, established or not, in the mass culture of the people. Because even now some grandparents and parents find themselves “between a rock and a hard place” with the problem of low wages and the high prices of toys, etc. etc… on top of the terrible and noticeable differences compared to their children’s playmates.

Maybe the kids of today will just have to invent a new story about the New Kings (...at this point, way too old) to see if we believe them.

Information is power*

Our last blogger meeting was led by Eugenio Leal of the Mason blog. In his presentation he discussed citizen journalism, copyright, freedom of expression and self-censorship, all from the viewpoint of the personal ethics a blogger may or may not adopt. It’s a topic that’s very difficult to reach consensus on and for this reason it was, perhaps, one of the most lively meetings, which I like because it shows that we don’t all think alike and what is brilliant is that we will be VERY different.

I’ve transcribed here some of the paragraphs from his presentation which were most interesting to me:

“With the internet we are learning, beyond the technology, that human communications of a new type are being created in the new era of computing: virtual communities. These communities are based on the exchange of information and knowledge between people who might live in different countries and who will never meet face-to-face…”

“Blogger Code of Ethics:

1. Assume responsibility not only for your own words but also for the comments you allow on your blog.
2. State your tolerance level of abusive comments.
3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
4. Ignore the trolls.
5. Continue the conversation outside the internet, talk directly or find an intermediary who can arrange it.
6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, let them know.
7. Don’t say anything online you wouldn’t say in person.”

This code provoked enough controversy among us, I have doubts with respect to many of the points (which is normal for me), I think talking about blogger ethics is too complex. There are many blogs and to make it worse we are not blogging under normal conditions, for example: not only do I have anonymous comments, but I encourage people to comment on my blog anonymously, or protected by pseudonyms. At the same time I think it’s good that we try to reach a consensus among ourselves, even though it might not be infallible.

I close this post with the same words with which Eugenio closed our meeting, a beautiful interpretation of the words of Jeremiah:

“Because, like Jeremiah, what we try to do is: uproot and tear down, ruin and demolish, build and grow.

Uproot and tear down everything that separates Cubans.

Ruin and demolish the psychological barriers of helplessness.

Build and grow our nation, finally, with all and for the benefit of all.”


* Eugenio’s words.

Political Economy of Capitalism

Photo: Claudio Fuentes

I have an exam coming up in this subject and these are its general objectives. I have decided to publish them to share my moral conflict of wanting to pass it, which is too large to bear alone.

GENERAL OBJECTIVES:

1. Interpret the significance of Marxist-Leninist Political Economy as a scientific foundation for understanding of the exploitative character of the Capitalist Model of Production.

2. Develop the belief that the study of capitalism is a necessity for the construction of Socialism.

3. Explain, from the Marxist-Leninist and third world viewpoint, that the socioeconomic changes operating in contemporary capitalism don’t alter its exploitative nature, classism, and its historical trend.