At Full Volume

Photo: rapsinlimites.blogspot.com

The neighbor downstairs heard the salsa and the one upstairs the rock and roll. At any hour of the day you could walk past the building and hear the incredible fusion of Van Van and Metallica. They called it the “strength test” and it consisted of round after round of raising the volume. The first who gave in and didn’t gradually increase the decibels of the stereo, lost the fight. It didn’t occur to either that the neighbor on the third floor might prefer, for example, Mozart, or to listen to no music at all.

Neither the advice of the neighbors nor that of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) influenced those involved in this “internal” matter. Nor did any neighbor dare to knock on their doors and ask for a little audio clemency. Apparently no one was bothered by the scandalous noise.

One day the rivals signed, without even agreeing, the final truce. It did not consist of lowering the volume, but of listening simultaneously to Los Aldeanos. The neighbors, this time, welcomed the cease fire because everyone liked the rap group and was used to the absence of silence. However, a week later, a delegate from the CDR presented himself at both apartments and demanded an end to musical blast, because the noise was bothering the neighborhood. That same night, while playing dominoes at a little table in the street, the watchdog admitted that the problem wasn’t the racket, but the lyrics of Los Aldeanos.

These Peculiar Guidelines

Photo: Claudio Fuentes Madan

At the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution they are talking about the guidelines for the next Communist Party Congress. Despite the fact that, according to the Official Gazette, some of the proposals in the guidelines have already been passed as laws and the parliament hasn’t had its chance to display its unanimous approval, here in the neighborhoods we’ve already begun to stage the play and recite the script. After a ten-year gap since the only legal party in my country met, it would seem that the communist ideology is the last imperative of the meeting. There’s even a joke going around saying they’re going to change the name of the party.

But people are tired. People stopped recognizing socialism, even in books, long ago, because the history of the Revolution seems too much like the history of a 19^th century capitalist monopoly. In parliament no one has been classified as “unqualified” or “unreliable” (as they have been on the layoff lists), and not one delegate to the National Assembly has been laid off under the concept of inflated payrolls. It is in the neighborhoods where 500,000 CDR members are going to be left “unoccupied.” So the spirit of the meeting is tense; even the poster announcing it reminds us: “Attendance will be taken.”

My friends tell me (the meeting in my neighborhood hasn’t happened yet) that things got hot. One retiree said it was time to see young people leading the country, another said he was tired of discussing planning and reforms that never changed anything, a lady announced she is retiring because as long as they aren’t talking about raising wages they can’t count on her, and the Party member murmured, ending the meeting, which would be the last time the core would be called together. Raul Castro’s government has reached out to a people who are tired and skeptical, and bored with seeing the same movie over and over.

The blindness of power has no limits. The other day I heard that the son of a high-ranking military man (he doesn’t want me to say his name) complained that disposable diapers are expensive and hard to find. His father then asked him, “But son, aren’t they given out in the ration book?” 

Historical Absurdities

Foto: Claudio Fuentes Madan

How much do you make? That was the question a faceless journalist asked a man on the National Television News (the best science fiction saga on Cuban television, after, of course, the reading of Fidel’s Reflections). As he earned about three hundred pesos a month, she was wanted to know how much of that salary was spent on food for his family: Almost all -- then he hesitated -- All.

I looked at the screen with suspicion. What are they up to? Because obviously they are not going to raise the salaries, and even if they did it wouldn’t be enough to eat. Sometimes I wonder how the government can be so completely shameless with the salaries it pays. Suddenly the camera pans to show an organopónico, an urban garden site. I bust out laughing and my family looks at me strangely. What can I do? I justify myself. I could cry but I’ve seen the same movie too many times and have developed a certain cynicism. So instead of earning more money, what we have to do is plant a few furrows on the apartment balcony and grow some onions, right? My father used to grow herbs in the nineties until he realized he didn’t have any food to season.

I was sixteen when I first read, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera and I have never forgotten its analysis of the eternal recurrence of Nietzsche and human historicity. What happens to us when events are repeated over and over again? We could be more serious about overcoming them if they were unique and not the same ones, always repeated. Then when on TV some poor guy doesn’t earn enough money to feed himself and they show him  in front of a plot of dirt, instead of crying it makes me laugh, and he, instead of slapping his boss starts to garden, though he knows that his crop will never be enough. And if you live in Vedado and don’t have any dirt it doesn’t matter, the imperative is to eat, but the system is stuck in neutral and perpetuates itself.

I seem to have the syndrome of eternal return: nothing moves, nothing really changes. I would like to make a video in which I take each phrase said over the last fifty years that proves my theory, every “but now...” “perfecting...” “redevelopment...” “updating the model...” “correcting the mistakes...” Maybe on seeing it all together we would remember that there is another way to live, one in which we move forward over time, and not just go around in circles.

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.