The requirements of the UJC

I wasn’t alive yet, but they tell me that in the ‘70s getting into the Young Communist Union (UJC) was an achievement. You had to demonstrate an untainted revolutionary integrity, having participated in all the political or combative activity wafting about and having complied conscientiously with whatever task of the moment the commander dictated.

But the years passed and that organization that was first about being a good student and revolutionary, getting a good job, a good reference, lost the most important thing that gave meaning to its existence: ideology. As a comparison, we might say it is like the serious diagnosis a technician makes of a computer with a broken processor: it lost its heart.

And without its heart the UJC came to the nineties, years in which I’d supposedly be called on to inject my young blood into its already blocked veins. But in my day things were very different: without combativeness, without ever having participated in anything, including not completing various tasks, the call came to me when I was thirteen. I accepted and began a process that, fortunately, my mother decided to suspend as soon as she learned of it, because she believed that before the age of 18 one has neither the conscience nor the need to belong to a political organization. I will always be grateful to her, even though the proselytizing team of the UJC ignores those arguments, apparently they returned all my paperwork and I arrived at my technical high school thinking myself free, how naive!

They never called me to a meeting, never gave me anything to do, I apparently was not a member of the UJC. My four years of high school passed without anyone telling me that in my school records, stuck there on the last page, a handwritten sheet said that I was not only a member of the Young Communists Union, but that I had completed all the tasks assigned to me.

The Other R

When I was walking on 23rd yesterday someone gave me this bulletin.



I’m not going to transcribe the whole thing, just the part I liked best. It’s name is: The Other R Movement.



Hello Cuba:

Light up your house as a way of saying something is wrong. Have you ever wondered what would happen if for just five minutes we turned on all the lights and electrical equipment in our houses at the same time. And if all of us did this at the same time? Perhaps we could say in a simple way: Something is wrong, something has to change. Express yourself by lighting up your house, your neighborhood, on August 5 from 8:00 pm to 8:05 pm. Every day until they take us into account.

Playing with the dinosaurs by Lazaro Lopez McBean: Jurassic

When he deserted, the dinosaur was still there.

How to get to work on time by NA Tamayo

Most likely you are among the many who live in Central Havana and work in Playa, or vice versa. If this is the case (and you have the same kind of problem I have) these solutions were made for you:

1- When you get to the stop don’t ask any more who is last in line (you’ve probably already realized that nobody does that). This is a waste of energy and you’re going to need energy when the bus comes.

2- If you’re waiting for the P4 and someone asks if you’re waiting for the P4, tell them your bus is another one. So when the first P4 stops you will not have anyone behind you. Because what you are going to do is sneak in any door no matter what, preferably the doors at the back.

3- If you manage to climb in by the back doors you’ve done something very good, because then you save about 20 pesos a month. Getting on the bus by the front door only has the advantage that the bus driver may give you a chance to get off the bus at another stop different from where the bus stops regularly, that is if instead of throwing the money in the farebox you give it to him. But be careful with this money, you can be seen by another Cuban and…. you know.

4 – Make yourself comfortable in a place where no one can bother you, hit you or rob you. Then forget that you’re in the street, in the bus and there are a lot of people. Meanwhile the less you help people get on and find a place, the more time the bus loses in the first stops, and so the driver will always be worried and start to pass up the following stops, which will make the trip very fast.
Note: If you are a man never sit down, the seats are for women and for men who forgot their manners.

5- When it’s time to get off, always say the magic words but also push.

The unyielding in their principles and their dignity

Handing out discs on G street is now part of my summer nights. I’m a little shy so I barely speak and deliver the disc in silence and try not to interrupt the conversations. I’m not the only one handing out things: people come from the churches, techno party promoters, Rock fanzine creators and young pollsters (it seems to me we form a good slightly monolithic fauna together).

My disc is called Voces Cubanas and almost everyone thinks it’s music. But last night a frikie thought it was a disc of religious songs, he destroyed it with his hands and stomped on it several times with his boots, slivers of plastic flying everywhere. It seemed awful to my friends but to me, first it made me laugh to see someone act like that with information media, I imagine that the security people have the same impulse with the all flash memories, memory cards, external hard drives and the CDs. One of them soon returned to find out what it was that was broken, we answered, “Don’t worry, God loves you.”

They remained a little ways off and we laughed our heads off, they never understand anything. Such an attitude toward people who believe in God is shameful and a typical of the politics of concrete. However, I’d love to know if this man has such an aggressive attitude when his CDR president knocks on the door to demand he pay the annual dues for that organization, if when he was a student he refused with the same intensity to cut his hair, if he ever stood up to an abuse of power by the police, if he breaks all the banners along all of G street telling him to stop “lazing around” and “get to work”, if he has ever been able to record his dissatisfaction with the system.

What’s happening (or not happening) at the University of Havana

Imagen: Pueblo Viejo, de la serie Carteles y vallas UMAP, Hamlet Labastida

A professor at the University of Havana told me he’d seen members of the Education Ministry and Party officials meeting together. It seems that the “combative” attitude of the students leaves much to be desired.

The only concrete example is the scholarships offered by the United States Interest Section to study in the U.S.: “To aspire to the scholarship indicates, at least, an unacceptable and inadmissible ideology, even more serious in the case of students selected for the United States Interest Section which makes its decision after conducting a political discussion with them.”

The phrase takes me to a classroom in Colina without air conditioning, at 1:00 in the afternoon: some 60-year-old “combatants” are trying to convince some 23-year-old boys that they can’t go to Washington D.C. to study history for a month because it’s “bad.” The sad thing is that, after not being able to convince them, Daddy State denied the white cards needed to travel. However, this is not the only concrete reason that the Party includes this phrase in its report: “We need to shake up the system of higher education, persuade and convince its officials, professors, students and workers of the risk to the Revolution” (…); it’s still remembered here in Havana that the Young Communist Union was not able to make its members shout obscenities a the Women in White on the staircase during their march, that in Santiago de Cuba the university had to close for three days for a student movement self-titled, “Join and you won’t stand out,” and that Eliéser Avila* of the University of Information Sciences managed to get Alarcón* broadcast on the “Discovery Channel” talking about the contamination of the skies.

The working paper is titled, “REORDERING OF THE POLITICAL-IDEOLOGICAL WORK OF THE UNIVERSITIES,” and included within its dense six pages is a small list: Key ideas for educational and political ideology work. I thought to write a post about some of the topics of the document, but it’s too long with too few specifics (typical of PCC pamphlets), so I decided to upload it for those interested and you can read it here.

Translator’s Note
At a closed door meeting between Ricardo Alarcón, President of the People’s Assembly, and the students of University of Information Sciences, a student representative, Eliéser Avila, posed a number of questions which were caught on unofficial video and subsequently broadcast around the world. In addition to questions about lack of access to the Internet for Cubans and why a toothbrush costs 2-3 day’s wages, Alarcón was asked about restrictions on travel. He replied that if everyone in Cuba decided to travel there would be too many planes in the sky and they would hit each other and crash.

A cold of some kind

Photo taken during the Havana Biennial

Ten days ago I started coming down with a cough and a cold. I went to the pharmacy to buy some cough syrup, vitamins and acetaminophen, to prepare for my first cold of the summer. They had nothing. As the most important thing is to stay hydrated, I became resigned to curing myself with water. On the fifth day it wasn’t gong very well so I went back to the doctor who listened to my lungs and diagnosed me with asthma. As I had no fever, muscles aches or headaches, he ruled out H1N1 and ordered a spray.

Twenty-four hours later I was still breathing badly so I went to bother a friend who is a doctor and who always ends up saddled with me. She didn’t have to do any more than listen with a stethoscope to my back to tell me:

- Of course the spray hasn’t done anything, you don’t have asthma, it’s settling in the lungs… in two days you’ll have pneumonia if you don’t start taking antibiotics.

Luckily I'm already well, a gift between friends yielded:

- two tubes of vitamin C
- one tube of vitamins
- a strip of Dipyrone, an anti-inflammatory.

I have to take the bull by the horns once more against the Cuban health system. Talking to people I know, for example, a doctor is not authorized to prescribe medicine that they don’t have at the pharmacy. For example, if you have a cold and the pharmacy doesn't have anything to buy, neither cough syrups nor vitamins. Then the usual thing would be to ask the doctor if the medicine can be bought at an international pharmacy or to ask a family member abroad, but the doctor is not authorized to give that answer.

In a case where it’s not possible to get the medicine, not even in CUCs and you don’t have family abroad, then it’s assumed that you have the right to appeal for the medicine through Law 232, which says that the state will arrange to buy and distribute it. I have two friends who have been in this situation, neither of the two managed to even start the paperwork because the doctor who saw them thought the case wasn’t sufficiently important to be presented to the pharmacological commission that reviews it and then elevates it to the ministry, where they review it again and approve it. In the first case the person died from chronic heart failure and the second person is losing their sight for lack of a vitamin.

Photo taken from Penúltimos Dias

(…) It’s not a question of shouting Fatherland or Death, Down with Imperialism (Applause), the blockade hits us and the earth there, waiting for our sweat. (…)

With the monolithic unity of our people, its strongest army, forged in the crucible of the struggle under the direction of the Leader of the Revolution Fidel Castro Ruz (…)

Speech delivered by Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, President of the Council of State and Ministers, at the central commemoration of the 56th anniversary of the assault on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks, in the Plaza Mayor General "Calixto García", Holguín, July 26, 2009, “Year of the 50th Anniversary of the Triumph of the Revolution.”

I’m not good at remembering quotes, however I am sure that the last time I heard Raúl Castro speak about unity he had a tagline “in the diversity.” To what do we owe this sudden change in semantics? In a few months we’ve left off being diverse to convert ourselves into a block of reinforced concrete?

It seems crazy to me that the general still dreams of the fallacy of a monolithic people… Is it that after so many decades before an audience in red T-shirts, olive-green caps or white guayabera shirts with their hands raised he has forgotten how the world outside the auditorium functions?

To make it to seventy with a vision of the surrounding world that is so wrong is terribly depressing. It took him 50 years to realize that “Fatherland or Death” is a vacuous expression, I hope (for his mental health), that it doesn’t take 50 more for him to understand that “the monolithic unity” is as well.

The last card: Passed even though you don’t learn

Photo: Claudio Fuentes Madan

At Cepero Bonilla high school this year the physics teacher failed 500 students. My neighbor’s daughter was one of the victims of the “terrible” 61-year-old teacher who “knows it all.” He failed the girl and her mother went to protest at the school, where she didn’t expect to meet the other 500 parents at the door.

No one could enter the school: not even the children of mom and pop could enter, she told me, meanwhile poking me in the right shoulder. She heard, in the middle of the poking, a lieutenant colonel shout he’d blow the teacher’s brains out if his son lost a year.

As she’s a buddy of the English teacher, who is even more appalled by the attitude of the physics teacher, she managed to slip in and talk with the one “responsible” for the failure of the students. The first thing she asked him was why he hadn’t given her daughter, who is so good in all other things and always participates in political activities, the grade she needed to meet the teacher's standard. She received a negative response which annoyed her but there was nothing she could do: the girl will have to be re-evaluated along with her 499 classmates and come back to retake the exam.

Meanwhile, I got the whole story from another neighbor, even more horrified than the English teacher, who encouraged her to be careful, because she was sure that the teacher “had it in for the girl” for “some reason.”

It seems that no one seems to realize in this country that when a student fails an exam it’s because she doesn’t have the knowledge necessary to show she’s mastered the material of the school year and that, obviously, she needs to study it again.

Cut off from the "culture"

Without batting an eye, I arrived at quarter past six for the Pedro Luis Ferrar concert at the National Museum of Belles Artes in Old Havana, accompanied by two friends. One of them was surprised to see “apparent civilians” posted in military positions behind the uniformed guards of the museum… but I didn’t see them.

When we were buying our tickets a man came and introduced himself as the director of the theater and smilingly asked us to accompany him. I knew what it was about but something inside me said no, it wasn’t possible. I felt sorry for my two friends who, without eating or drinking, stared wide eyed at what is known around here as “The Clerks of Cuban Culture.”

The man told us that the institution reserves the right to refuse admission and we could not enter because we’d participated in a provocative action “against this” during the Havana Biennial. My girlfriends had no idea what he was talking about but I asked him if he could be more specific and he said that we were being denied entry for having spoken into Wilfredo Lam’s microphone during “The Whisper of Tatlin” performance of Tania Bruguera.

I told him I’d been there but that surely there was a mistake because many people had been there that day; he asked me to wait a minute and went off to “consult.” A woman came and asked,

- Which one of you is Claudia?

I raised my hand as before, and the man came with another woman who held back a little.

- Claudia, I’m sorry, the museum reserves the right to refuse admission and they called to tell us that you cannot enter.

- Are you aware of the sad role they’ve put you in?

- Yes, I’m sorry.

At this the one who had held back stepped forward:

- There is no sad role, you are a provocateur and you can’t enter.

- Madam, on what are you basing your statement that I came her to provoke something?

- You participated in the performance of Tania Bruguera, I was there.

- Yes, I spoke into a microphone that was open for the whole world for one minute each, everyone who wanted to could speak.

- You can do it here.

- Do you know what a performance is?

- Yes.

- It’s not obvious. Don’t you realize you are acting as a segregating and discriminating agent of Cuban culture?

- You are not showing me respect.

- Madam, you have failed to show me respect since I came here.

She wasn’t going to stop watching me until the concert was over so I left, and also I couldn’t ask my poor companions to pay for something they hadn’t been able to enjoy for one minute in the full exercise of postmodern communism: freedom of expression for one minute in the eternity of the revolution.

On my way home I wondered if our photos are in all the museums like the photos of those wanted by the police or those missing. I’d love to know if in order to graduate from the Committee for Vigilance and Protection (CVP) course you have to be able to recognize all of us from photos and demonstrate that at any time or place, a Vigilance and Protection Committee law knows if you spoke into a microphone or not.

A summer of slogans

Saturday night I went walking all over Vedado which I enjoyed very much because even though it was hot the sun wasn’t beating down on me and I saw many young people in the street. The first thing that surprised me was this enormous sign at the stop at 23rd and A saying "Our five moral giants will return":

As we were commenting on the delirious lettering that looks more like a name than an epithet, a boy we met recited this poem, between outbursts of laughter, telling me that they put it on TV a little while ago:

If in the two wars of fire and torch
Freedom gave birth to radiant heroes
In this battle of ideas
Peace has given birth to five giants.

Naturally he didn’t remember the name of the author, completely unimportant.

Later I was able to confirm that all of 23rd was completely saturated with this type of sign, some of them absolutely hilarious. That was the opinion of everyone who, like me, was astonished by this new… strategy? …to reach the young people. Those who barely watch Cuban television, who hardly know that the newspaper Granma exists, who don’t care; they don’t forget that political propaganda is in full “neo-renaissance.”

At Mariana Grajales park at 23rd and C there there was a concert with Agonizer, a Cuban rock group. The park was full of people but I didn’t go to the concert because I wanted to continue my stroll. But I was very surprised when from 23rd I saw that the back of the stage they had installed was half covered by this sign saying, "To work hard":


Finally, on coming to G Street, an incongruous giant cloth, saying "This revolution is the daughter of culture and ideas," made us duck our heads to cross from one side of the boulevard to the other, always watched over by two cops, in case some too tall frikie might decide to remove the obstacle between him and his friends on the other side. But best of all is that, when I was complaining about the terrible bombardment of propaganda they subject us to, someone walked by and said to me:

- Better this way, so that we don’t forget that they don’t love us and we annoy them.


Fotos: Claudio Fuentes Madan

Mix-ups

The other day I saw the movie “Crossing Over” which tried to encompass the subject of immigration in the United States. From my perspective of a “potential emigrant” citizen it seemed quite shocking, although it didn’t deal directly with the “Cuban” issue, and I was very touched. A strange coincidence of “positive” American characters and “negative” foreigners, although subtle, left a bad taste in my mouth.

Almost all of my friends now live in a some country in the world other than Cuba. I see around me that “leaving the country” is the “Cuban dream.” In no way am I standing in judgment on their decisions, I simply think that it is extremely sad that this island has become so unlivable for almost everyone.

My mother dreams that one day I will finally open my eyes and get on a plane for “someplace else,” my friends “fight for” scholarships and postgraduate positions where they might leave, a doctor curses over and over that she chose a career that is not assigned a “white card”; but as if that isn’t enough, high government officials and many people “committed” to the “process” long for the same destiny for their children and themselves.

To say goodbye to somebody at least three times a year is a part of my everyday life, sadly I can’t say the same for saying hello. Strangely, I know my friends don’t find what they’re looking for either, maybe it’s almost as hard to be an emigrant as to live under totalitarianism.

I ask myself when the day will come when we young people don’t have to scatter to the four winds to begin to plan a life from the darkness of emigration. I wonder when the Cuban government will assume responsibility for separating and dispersing us.

Talking about emigration is sad and complex and, like in the movie, to treat it lightly can be sad and hurtful to those living outside the country. Unfortunately, to emigrate is not an option: it’s an exit.