Drawing

Twenty Years

Photo: Penultimos Dias

I’ve made quite an effort not to write about Fidel Castro. First, because I’m not capable of saying anything serious about his persona (sometimes I would like to take him less lightly); second, because reading his “Reflections” has the same affect on me as do some science fiction fanzines (I like the genre), and third, because the Commander-in-Chief is today, despite himself, a ghost from the past of Cuban politics.

But he won’t stop talking! He publishes books, predicts the future of the human race, speaks about himself, confuses José Martí with Lenin, changes the past, annuls the future, and has a temper tantrum in the present because he is running out of time. He continues to appear over and over in scenes more like the theater of the absurd than the desperate politics of a system in ruins. Whether at the aquarium, or at a special session of the National Assembly, the costumes are worn at the seams, but the piece is played as if elegantly staged. Always surrounded by bodyguards (we call them “avatars” for their physical appearance), the old man doesn’t fall down but slips through the recesses of his mind, destroyed by power. After so many years enjoying the life of a Messiah, it is impossible for Fidel Castro to now assume that his death will not change the course of history, that the Year Zero will not be repeated, that Cuba will continue on its path and that his brother will or will not make some changes when he no longer exists (before himself being absorbed by the Change once he’s left alone). He has written his apocalyptic script like a prelude to departure. He will not take us with him because he can’t, but until the last instant of his earthly existence he will assign roles, cut off heads, vilify his enemies and announce -- through some kind of amazing theory -- the end of the world. He will die, but not before trying to make us believe that all of humanity is going with him into the grave.

Isolated from everything, his reality has become a mirror of a future where his image is not included. It no longer matters that the history of the Cold War is a rotting corpse that will never be revived. His only option is to construct a scene where he is not the premonition of his own illness, but rather the illness of the rest of us: nuclear war as a palliative of the mortality of a single human being. Whether well constructed or not, fear and opportunism will do the dirty work. Each one of the actors in his staged scenes follows his script exactly, from asking the entire Cuban art world to reproduce the Cuban Five, to requesting, tearfully, to be allowed to kiss the Commander.

In the government they’re pulling their hair out trying to prevent the economy from a near-term collapse, the power is rearranging itself, and corruption is becoming the new face of island totalitarianism. Meanwhile, at the University of Havana Fidel Castro, looking for his own eternity on the earth that is going to swallow him, reminds us that “...the hard work of warning humanity of the real danger that it faces falls on Cuba, and in this effort we must not lose heart.” But the stage machinery of his act dissolves on the faces of this audience of bored twenty-somethings; they do not feel beholden, they long to leave the country by any door, and their memory of nuclear confrontation comes down to the movie “Lisanka.” Comrade Fidel faces a public that cares not a whit about his misunderstood mortality and his prediction of nuclear catastrophe, because the only bottomless thing about the University of Havana student body is their twenty years.

Urban Paranoias

Image: “Your passport, citizen” by Erick Perez Jorge Mota

Following the universal law of Cuban telephone lines, after the downpour on Wednesday my phone died. “No line,” was the post-mortem note, in English, on the little handset screen. On Thursdays we reported the outage several times because, as the experts say, the more reports that are made about the same break, the faster ETECSA will come.

On Friday I canceled all my plans and prepared to wait for the technician. Hours passed: I read, I wrote, I scrubbed and cleaned, I didn’t talk to anyone all day and had time to speculate. I came to the conclusion that there was a high percentage of probability that the technician who services me also has a small job with the Department of State Security (DSE). At six in the evening my theory became an absolute certainty. I went out and called the users-service-line to ask them to tell me, if not the hour, at least the day my repair is scheduled for: “I’m sorry, we do not have that information, it could be any day between eight in the morning and four in the afternoon.”

Anticipating that the wait could be extended to September, I tried to cover the month of August in morning and afternoon watches with my friends. If I had to leave home for some emergency, I had to call my mother so she could rush over and not leave the house empty. Life is like that, you just have to wait longer than expected and stop looking for the guy to turn up.

My and Ciro’s time was the most affected, of course. I told him about my theory of the technician moonlighting for the DSE, and he looked at me with that face he makes when he thinks I’m being paranoid. There are those in Cuba who think everyone is from State Security, even if it's proven otherwise.

I was wrong. Saturday at eight-thirty in the morning the man in question showed up. He didn’t give us time to make bets about his Security origins. He looked terrified, poor thing. He came in and before saying “Good morning,” he asked, “Do you have a modem connected?”

The little box for my phone line is in the bedroom, behind the bed. He was tinkering with it under my scrutinizing gaze. It looked like he didn’t put a microphone in it, but one never knows.  Either way, the things I talk about in bed are inconsequential. He said the problem wasn’t in the box and that he would have to make a sketch of all the wiring in the house. I put on my I-don’t-think-so face when Ciro’s voice came from the living room, “It’s already fixed.”

We left the bedroom. I started to feel guilty toward the guy. At the end of the day, he had fixed my problem and my cogitations, I thought, seemed as fantastical as the reflections of comrade Fidel.

“Would you like a coffee?” I asked, with the idea of lowering his guard.

I couldn’t get to the kitchen because he decided to make a call.

Previous position: On guard!

I stood a few inches away with the obvious intention of overhearing what he was saying. I didn’t understand a thing. I think he used slang and hung up quickly. I must have been staring, I was really surprised. How is it possible that one can’t understand someone speaking Spanish less than a yard away in a quiet atmosphere? With the satisfaction of having been proved right, and the discomfort of having a security agent in the room, I went to put the coffee on. He started a conversation.

“Did you see the Roundtable show yesterday?” he asked Ciro.

“Our TV is very bad.”

“A man talked about the global economic collapse.”

But Ciro was not intimidated, “Well, according to Karl Marx, in the future there will be no money, no leaders.”

The guy was a little disconcerted. I put his coffee in front of him and didn’t say a single word.

“There will always be leaders.”

“ Really? What do you call the president of Sweden, or Denmark or Finland?”

That was the last thing I caught. I didn’t want to be a part of it, although it was cracking me up. Suddenly everything had become extremely hilarious. He drank the coffee quickly and left. We made bets later, which are ongoing: State security or not State security?

Sacrifice

Photo: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

She grabbed the mission for several reasons: they would put 50 Cuban convertible pesos (cuc) in a bank in Cuba every month, she could acquire the home appliances that she’d needed her whole life, she could buy her children clothes, and what’s more, she could leave the damn polyclinic that was ruining her life.

She knew Venezuela was pretty violent and politically unstable, but the Cuban delegation would surely be well protected, supposedly they were a priority. They were located on the outskirts in a poor, high crime area. No one warned her that after she got there they would take her passport and she would be undocumented. She worked hard, discovered that most Venezuelans felt like Cubans: politics had split the society in two.

She suffered the hatred of a people who, like hers, had lost control of their future. She discovered that paranoia knows no borders and that fear also travels on airplanes. A colleague of hers was killed in a brawl between gangs in the neighborhood. She asked to return to Cuba, but the commitment was unbreakable -- like the Communist Party -- and being depressed is not consistent with solidarity among peoples.  She still can’t return and to console herself she gives herself therapy in front of the mirror every morning: 50 cuc, 50 cuc, 50 cuc.

The Accident

Photo: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The other day I witnessed an accident in Luyanó. Orlando Luis and I tweeted what we could, and managed, poorly, to take some photos without some of those guys dressed in civilian clothes taking away our cameras. Traffic accidents happen all the time everywhere in the world and I wonder why the Cuban government blocks these incidents from press coverage. It’s ridiculous and embarrassing that State Security agents spend their time, in the middle of a catastrophe, chasing after little cameras and avoiding reporters.

Sometimes it seems that censorship and bureaucracy are living beings, with their own laws of survival, their need to perpetuate themselves and their life cycles. Does it put the State at risk to tell us how many were killed or injured on August 20, what caused the accident, and what happened to the driver?

It’s not even about a free press press or political freedom, or even the rights of citizens. It’s about this monster that in fifty years has grown to the point where it could swallow everything that happens in the nation. A monster that feeds on our knowledge, our intellect, our ability to understand history. A monster who swallows our sorrows and joys, our dreams and our lives.

Fatigue

Image: The Executioner, Luis Trápaga

Her mornings have been the same for years: buy the flour “on the left” from the State bakeries, get the eggs from sellers who carry them hidden in backpacks, haggle for the guayabas in the produce market to give it her business. With the ups and downs that depend on the degree of repression against the “illegals,” she managed to maintain a decent home selling sweets.

But things have gotten too complicated: Twice she had to hand some cakes through the patio window as fast as she could, for her neighbor to hide, when the inspectors came. Thank God that doesn’t happen often! When she can she puts some little candies into the cakes; her sister, who has a successful little dessert shop, sends them to her from Miami. She started in 2000, doing everything alone, but with the years she hired an assistant and now has a modest business that supplies tidbits to a good part of the neighborhood.

She tells me all of this with an infinite nostalgia, a healthy envy of her sister on the other side who has managed to “get ahead.” I ask her if she thinks Raul Castro will allow some economic opening, facilities for small businesses, licenses and the minimum breathing room to make life easier. She laughs, but her eyes look like she wants to cry. “I’m old, chica, it’s all the same to me, I got tired of waiting.”

Unknown City

From so much looking out the same window, seeing the same street, talking with the same people and living in the same city, you end up thinking you know everything. If someone had told me I would not have believed it, now that I know it’s true I’m full of questions. The streets of Havana still hold many surprises for me, fortunately.

Lethal August. I arrive gasping at 23rd and 12th and find, scattered on the ground, various papers as in the photo: FREE IRAN. My God, what’s this? I grab one and look around, I would say I’m the least surprised of those around me. A guy who looks like State Security gets caught in the act of putting one in his pocket and makes a gesture of disgust with amazement. I don’t think he likes it. I couldn’t say if FREE IRAN falls within “Enemy Propaganda,” but apparently it’s not “Friend Propaganda.”

At 23rd and G there are more. Many more. Most have been trampled. Who could have thought up such a brilliant idea? I have no doubt that this is related to the fixed ideas that have gripped the hallucinatory mind of Fidel Castro. How would Compañero Fidel take it if if instead of the Third World War what came to pass was the end of the Iranian dictatorship?

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Earning a Living

Photo: Claudio Fuentes Madan

He arrived at G on Friday to join the crowd of other young people watching the wee hours of the night pass waiting for better times. For some inexplicable reason the police would only allow them “to be” on one of the two sidewalks of 23rd and having made an appointment earlier to meet a girl in the “prohibited zone,” decided to run the risk rather than lose his chance of the night.

The risk turned out to be higher than he’d calculated – naïve and crazy kid: an official welcomed him with a shove and asked for his ID card.  Not producing it fast enough, they handcuffed him and before he could ask why he was already in the back of the patrol car.

He was thrown in a dungeon at 21 C. He thought he had forgotten to let go of the wrists. However, a look around allowed to check two things:
- All the detainees were handcuffed.
- There were many detainees.

They threw him in a dungeaon at 21st and C. He thought they’d forgotton to free his wrists. But a look around informed him of two things:

-- All the detainees were handcuffed.
-- There were a lot of detainees.

As he wasn’t even twenty yet, he was terrified. He didn’t know anything about his rights nor was he going to risk the night by defending them. Then again there is always a third option.  He managed to whisper the magic words to an officer:

“Hey pal, I have fifty pesos. My mother is sick and I can’t get home too late.”

Half an hour later he was home. He summarized the story for me with a moral: “They made a lot of money Friday, we were a ton of people. Next time I’ll give them the money in the patrol car.”

Inconceivable

Reina Luisa Tamayo and her daughter. Photo by: Claudio Fuentes Madan

There are things I've thrown in the trunk of the "incomprehensible." I would say I won, they defeated me, I couldn’t bear it, they beat me. I refuse to exhaust my brain one more instant in trying to find some logic, some, even minimal, sense. In the package – I confess that there are several, too many – is the return of Fidel Castro, the “measures” of Raul Castro, the signers of the open letters from UNEAC – the Cuban Artists and Writers Union – the special session of the National Assembly, the gossip with Elian Gonzalez, the mind of Randy Alonso, the dead of Mazorra, the permission to leave or travel permit, the ideological “utility” of the Roundtable, the ethics of Orlando Zapata Tamayo’s doctor, the shame of those who today wear the olive-green uniform, or the morality of the Party militants. The list, I swear to you, could become extremely long.

There are, however, other kinds of rebel events that also fall into the sack, that I can’t understand either – including some I understand even less – but I can’t stop coming back to them over and over, analyzing them, dismembering them. They haunt me, they rob me of my sleep. I feel that they shouldn’t exist, or more to the point, that they CAN’T exist. My rationality tells me that they are impossible, my brain screams at me with desperation that people who are paid to beat a mother, to prevent her from visiting her son’s grave at the cemetery, or putting flowers on it to pay tribute to her dead son, these people can’t exist.

I fall back on science, I want to analyze it like a reality show: I want to know what each one of the repressors (actors and directors) of Reina Luisa Tamayo do when they get home. Put a pot of beans on the stove? Open the windows as night falls? Hug and kiss their children before bedtime? Sleep the sleep of the innocent or do nightmares haunt their dawns? Laugh out loud? Look in the mirror and see… what? Enjoy the rain? Chat with their neighbors? I can’t help it, my mind makes its calculations and finds them to be unreasonable: At best, they don’t breath oxygen, or perhaps they are not mammals, it declares. Then I protest: NO! I already told you, they are human, human like everyone else! But the other me, impartial, is unmoved: They must be another species, they must be another species.