June Rain

Photo: Silvia C.

After several desperate days in the island-sauna, today the sky turned black, flashes of lightening lit up the darkest areas of the city, and, finally, the droplets of this much-delayed rain that we have been waiting for since May, fell.

Even when I was a child I liked very much to “see rain.” My mother told me that every drop, as it fell to the ground, was like a ballerina doing pirouettes. Perhaps it was that metaphor that made rain something almost mystical for me: it washed me, gave me peace, made me think of those things that an ordinary day under the sun doesn’t let me feel.

When July arrives it is so hot that my brain “fries” as if it were a computer hard drive; the power goes out, whether by a sadistic act or terrible chance the “Guiteras” thermoelectric plant, like every summer, has just begun a maintenance phase, adding to the blackouts; the fans stop; and just the smell that announces a downpour is capable of bringing me peace.

The Exchange

Photo: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The optimism drained out of me without my ever having been able to enjoy – much to my regret – a moment of that feeling with so many names, but which is defined by only one verb: to believe. Once again that other Claudia – the skeptic – criticizes the naïve: I warned you that the action was “doubtful.” When Pablo Pacheco called me, excited about the start of talks between the Catholic Church and the Cuban government, I told him, “I have no illusions, but I’m glad that you, from prison, and sentenced to twenty years for writing your opinion, have not lost faith.”

A few days later the transfer of the political prisoners began which I have decided to christen as “The Exchange.” Always so skeptical! I control myself. It buys a little time; at best they will release someone before Fariñas’ spirit is released from his body. What naiveté on my part and cynicism on the part of my government.

When I learned, after the hemming and hawing typical of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that Mr. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Council on Human Rights special investigator on torture, would not be coming to Cuba, everything became clear: we are the presence of The Exchange, and like it or not, he could rot in jail. Even I get paranoid and wonder if the two decisions (a Cardinal-General dialog, and denying entry to the investigator) could have risen simultaneously in a single mind. Wasn’t it about, at the beginning, freeing the sick journalists and dissidents? At what point did “move to another province” became a step toward “release”? Is it torture to imprison a man for his ideas? And to change the prison he is in, what’s this?

I would love it if tomorrow someone showed me evidence that I’m wrong, that my friends would lecture me, “You’re always so radical,” that the detractors of Octavo Cerco would invade the forum with comments like: Claudia, you’re wrong! Take it back! Raul Castro has freed the sick! But I don’t know why this transfer of prisoners, the refusal to admit the investigator, and a dialog without deadlines or commitments, reminds me of the game “Pin the tail on the donkey,” that competition where you blindly try to stick the tail in place on a painted animal, guided by the shouts of a group who don’t even agree where on the paper the animal’s head is.

Living Without Water

Photo: Leandro Feal 



Sometimes what we call in my country "geographical destiny" does not touch us for just a few meters, as is true in my case: I live in El Vedado, in an area where I have water every day. Despite the philosophical statement "man thinks as he lives," I try to get out of my wet environment to verify that, around me, others learn to live without water.

I have a friend who, long ago, gave up on the idea of having a white toilet; the water comes every two days and the tank never has enough for the luxury of clearing it out with every use: disgusting yellow marks are a reminder, every forty-eight hours, that whitening the porcelain may become a luxury. But she doesn’t complain, there are others – whom she knows – who are worse off. For Leo, over in Central Havana, water comes through the pipe once a week. As his house has been declared “uninhabitable,” he can’t put a tank on the roof because of the risk of the roof falling in on his head. Outside the capital it’s worse, they can go a week without a drop of water coming out of a half broken sink that’s not even worth repairing.

All these hardships can only be resolved – who even dreams any more about getting an answer to the letter sent to the Central Committee detailing your plight?! – in the black market. Plumbers with a truck, hoses and plenty of water bring, for a few hundred pesos, the dry tanks and appease the need for cool refreshment in the heat of this rainless June. As not all the neighbors can pay the illegal plumber, there is always someone who calls the police to snitch and denounce the crime of “buying water on the black market.” For my part – and there’s no convincing me otherwise – in Spanish we call it envy and it is one of the primitive features of the New Man: human misery.



This venom towards the welfare of others, however, has odd results: a few days ago a friend told me how he had been caught red-handed filling his tanks, because a neighbor called the police and denounced the plumber. My friend was left without water, the vendor ended up with a fine of fifteen hundred pesos and the neighbor – this is the part that is absolutely incomprehensible to me – also was left without water because the State can no longer thank each informer with a bonus. Why didn’t the neighbor show the same perseverance in reporting the wasted water flowing out of broken pipes and tanks all over the city? For example, the tank of the electric company next to my building overflows so much it makes me think I have a spring under my apartment. Sadly, I know why he did it: his “fighting spirit” in the face of evil deeds doesn’t climb the stairs of the official out of cowardice, because the State’s tank has the impunity to squander water while his neighbor doesn’t have the right to enjoy a shower, and this seeing the collapse “to the bottom” has become, unfortunately, a national sport.

The enemy

Photo: Claudio Funetes Madan

I still remember, though I was very young, the canned food and soap that my mother kept in a Russian metal basket, so we would be prepared for a U.S. military intervention. It was called “a state of Red Alert,” if my memory doesn’t fail me, and sometimes we had rehearsals about how to protect ourselves; luckily I didn’t participate in them. According to my father we would have to hide – my mother and I – in the basements of buildings, and stay there until the war ended.

The image was terrifying, made worse because at five I didn’t understand the difference between “eternal test to prepare for defense,” and “imminent armed confrontation.” I thought – for many years, in fact, I believed – that one day I would have to hide from U.S. soldiers who would try to kill me with their machine-guns.
Several times, with tears in my eyes, I said goodbye to my toys. At about eight I read the diary of Anne Frank and the example of that brave girl gave me the strength for when it would be up to me to survive in the dark.

In high school I discovered the lie, I felt so mistreated I never said anything to anyone. How could they have terrorized us like this for fun? In a good Cuban there is a phrase for this: they “took us for a ride,” me and my whole family. Even in the Special Period my mother suffered when she had to open some of those Soviet cans of food, meant to save us from starvation as the bombs fell.

The worst thing is that official speech hasn’t evolved very much. There are still high school classes in PMI (Integral Military Preparedness), and before they are sixteen teenagers know how to crawl on the ground “like special forces soldiers” up to a trench and shoot a rifle, and they also know by heart what to do when we are in a ridiculous state of “Red Alert.” But something happened to us, the adults, and also to them: my mother no longer saves cans (except for hurricanes), my friends don't fear running to the basement with their children to protect them from bullets, the PMI teacher is not as demanding (he knows we’ll never be in a real trench), and young children in elementary school are not afraid of one day becoming Anne Frank.

And What’s Lacking Now?

Photo: Claudio Fuentes Madan



Every month I find myself overwhelmed by the absence of random staples; it can be oil, shampoo, detergent, milk, eggs or sanitary napkins. Every time the end of the month approaches, the question that comes to mind is, “What are we missing now?” Sometimes I can’t wash, other times cleaning is agony, or my pot of beans is distraught by the abandonment of its inseparable companion, rice.

I try to remember the moment when all this started, and I’m surprised to find that since I was a little girl the economy has played hide-and-seek with me. I still remember clearly the things my mother sighed for when I was only seven: food, cigarettes, shoes for me. Others populated my adolescent longings: chocolate, meat, a pair of shoes, soap. Here I am an adult, still finding myself frustrated by the persistent absence of simple things.

I wonder, as do the rest of Cubans, how long will it be until a bottle of hydrochloric acid, to clean the bathroom with, comes to star in my life? Could it be that when I am eighty a roll of toilet paper will still evoke nostalgia?

An Illegal Kiss

This video is "mysteriously" circulating around Havana. Without any additional introduction I leave you this example of the use and abuse the National Revolutionary Police make of their duties.

Without a Photo of R

Photo: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

This post does not contain an image of R because I didn’t have the heart to ask her to let me photograph the hole in her butt where she was stabbed. It was nearly two in the morning on Saturday and Ciro, a journalist and I were at Juan Juan’s house when the call came.

R was shouting at the other end of the phone, we could hear her sobs and the words “blood” and “they stabbed me,” she was just in the block of the “La Mariposa” store in Nuevo Vedado, at the corner of her own house. The men went to look for her in Juan Juan’s car. Minutes later there in front of me was a woman with her face covered in blog, her mouth swollen and a hole with a red ring around it in her pants, just where they give you a shot. They stole her cell phone, kicked her, and to finish off, “stick her! stick her more!” which, thank God, they didn’t do any more or she wouldn’t have come out of it alive. I helped her wash while she kept repeating, “They were boys, the age of my son”; she was shaking like a leaf.

“We have to go to the hospital because the wound is bad, later you can rest.”

At the Surgical Clinic the surgeon on duty, after we woke him up, asked, “What happened?”

“They assaulted her, they stabbed her,” I told him, and then the surrealism began for real:

He sat at a desk, took out a form and a pen, looked at R and without any transition between the hole in her butt and his routine for tonsillitis, began to fill out the form.

“Name? Surnames? Age? Municipality?”

While he tried to get his pen to write, I killed a cockroach ambling lazily across the table and skirting, without any difficulty, the form. When he finished his formalities he took a look – I thought he was never going to get around it – at the wound.

“Just a stitch and it’ll be fine.”

We left to get the stitch. The doctor looked at me as if I were completely off my rocker when I started to swat the flies out of the infirmary. He, who could share his desk and write with cockroaches, must of thought I was some kind of cleaning maniac. R laid down – I won’t give you the details of the stretcher – and the doctor prepared the thread to sew her up. A second before seeing the needle pierce the skin I asked, “Isn’t there any anesthetic?”

“It’s just two stitches, it’s not necessary.”
“Stitches hurt.”

Juan Juan, standing next to me, as white as milk and breaking out in a cold sweat broke in, “But they just finished kicking her. Isn’t there any anesthesia?”

Thank God they had some and they gave it to her, because the “two stitches” took fifteen minutes to put in and R wasn’t in any condition to bear any more pain. At some point it all finally got to be too much for me and I felt like vomiting: the flies, the blood, the heat. I went out to get some air.

“What liquid is this?” cried Juan Juan near the end when I was again pursuing catharsis with the flies, going after them with a fury.
“Iodine, the best disinfectant in the world,”
“Luckily I’m not allergic to it,” said R, giving me a smile, otherwise I’d have fainted.

The Irrational State

Photo:  Penúltimos Días

Lately, I catch the wave of expectation: through the mediation of Cardinal Jaime Ortega we learned that Raul Castro would be willing to release some political prisoners of conscience -- the sickest, I dare imagine. This dialogue between the Catholic Church and the General is not by chance, but the consequence of the many moral crimes that have characterized the "young president," or as we might call him, “The Crown Prince.” 

Who remembers at this point the winds of political and economic changes that many saw in the new but almost octogenarian president? Far from the expected reforms he brought us a prisoner of conscience killed on a hunger strike, an intransigent Guillermo Fariñas who is firm in his ideals and ready to follow in the footsteps of Zapata Tamayo, a considerable increase in the abuses of the political police against the Ladies in White and, in consequence, the logical repudiation by international public opinion, which the official media insist on calling "the media campaign against Cuba." 

I have no expectations of good deeds from a state whose very existence demonstrates, still, the totalitarianism that sustains it. But though the mediation of the Church has not brought the fruits of freedom, I am happy that the representatives of the Catholic Faith in my country have taken a public stand against the abuses committed, with total impunity, by the Cuban State. 

Perhaps my approval of the dialog alone, without waiting for the results, is bit naive, given that the objective of these negotiations would be to find a middle ground that benefits both opponents (Raul Castro vs. Freedom), and evidently the free have not been invited to the talks. The Party Central Committee has kept the file “political coherence” under lock and key for a long time, I hope the Church remembers to carefully weigh this detail.

A People of Underage Children

Photo: Claudio Fuentes Madan

I look with distaste -- why deny it -- at the face of Ramiro Valdes on TV. This time it’s about the sermon to the workers in the construction sector. I barely take the trouble to listen any more, every time he speaks it’s to scold us, he and Machado Ventura have been transformed, you might say, into the nannies of the Cuban citizen: admonitions, punishments, threats.

It’s always the same old story: work harder, ask for less, don’t complain too much, show a fighting spirit, finish the work of the Revolution, don’t divert resources, don’t expect incentives, trust the leaders of the process, be faithful to the Party... It’s the authoritarian father lecture to his eternally underage children.

Doesn’t Ramiro wonder what the builders would eat if they didn’t “divert” some bricks to sell in the black market? The union leaders, it seems, turn a blind eye. Could it be that they too need a salary to survive? Why don’t they show a little courage and pass the baton to the “deadbeats” to tell their version of the workers’ paradise?

Instead of threatening to remove incentives and perks -- which only causes opportunism and double standards to flourish -- he should ask why the wages aren’t reason enough to work hard, to get better results, to increase production. Of course, he would do it the truth mattered to him, and if -- in addition -- he wasn’t confusing the National Union of Construction Workers with a nursery school.

No Right To Show Her Face

It has become customary on our National Television News to see groups of people protesting in various parts of the world. It is ironic for us, Cubans, to see spontaneously mobilized sectors of a society on the news of the only information system we have a right to. It is both gratifying – we feel there are people out there who confront the powers-that-be with civil action; and saddening – we are suddenly made aware of our terrible loneliness, tiny beings compared to the omnipresent state.

The other day images flashed by of a protest by immigrants in the United States and some of the demonstrators were speaking to the cameras. One woman of about forty complained that she had spent several years in the country and was still undocumented, and if the immigration authorities found her she would be deported to her country. I looked at the television and thought, at times this island of mine grows in my mind and I forget what a small space we occupy in the world. How can a person say this in front of the camera? Now the agents will know her face and go looking for her wherever she hides!

I forgot that immigration officials, intelligence and counterintelligence, law, government, media and trade unions don’t all answer to the same entity, much less the same party, and that the political police – bless freedom – don’t exist. In my country, for example, the Cuban consulate has foot soldiers in Spain who send photos to the Cuban secret service and the Ministry of the Interior so they will know “who behaves well out there and who does not.” The guardians receive orders directly from State Security so that some “complicated” citizens cannot access public institutions, official journalists are fired from their jobs for publishing in sites critical of the official ideology, those who dare to report the news without asking permission can wake up one day sentenced to twenty years in prison, while political opponents bring the anger and reprisals of the whole Party Central Committee down on their heads.

I watch the illegals in the United States with their banners and defiant eyes and feel a twinge of envy, I know my neighbor would never dare to say in front of the lens what that woman just shouted to the whole world. My neighbor does not fear being deported, she has an identity card, a legal address and a face that, nevertheless, would show no disagreement under any circumstance.