National Thermometer

Photo: OLPL

The relationship of Cubans with public transportation is intense. The interaction is produced on various levels: between the public and the driver, amongst the public themselves, and between the public and the bus. This interaction is determined by the frequency between one bus and the next; and at this time that frequency has once again become, as it almost always has been for many years now, low. The irritation and annoyance with transportation that is delayed and packed determine the violence with which “the factors” react. Now on television they chide the public for the mistreatment of the buses and for the quantity and quality of the collection made as a conception of payment. In that type of reports there is no mention of “our working people”, as if those chided didn’t form part of those same people of the official demagoguery.

So if the public decides not to pay, or prefers to hand their fare directly to the driver, or refuses to pay $1.00 CUP (Cuban Peso = national currency) for a service that costs 40 cents and tears a bill in half to approximate the price, or bangs without mercy on the back door of the bus when the driver misses a stop, or points out somewhat cryptic responsibilities but in a loud voice; I don’t know what sociologists see (especially if those sociologists don’t travel on public transportation), but I see a reaction to accumulated frustrations, and not just with the subject of public transport.

Translated by: Maria Montoto

May 29 2012

At Hula

The Cuban press blames the opposition, but opposition’s denunciation made the massacre public. It that also part of a media war?

Photo from Vera Frogel.

May 28 2012

My Photos of May 15th

Translator’s note: See related post, “A Day in Images,” for the genesis of these photos.

May 26 2012

Economic Emigration

In recent times so much has been said about the Cubans abroad that my ear has grown accustomed to the word emigrants. The term economic emigrants is said and written to refer to the Cubans that abandoned their country as a result of the crisis that we know here in Cuba as the Special Period.  Even if it is true, that is not all there is to it.

Those who manipulate the term with ease disassociate it from the cause of why Cubans have put roots down even in countries like Haiti and Namibia. From having been a country colonized by Spain, China, “Poland” (a source of Jewish immigrants) and other smaller places, the flow of foreigners not only stopped, but it is now Cubans who began to spread out around the world, in a flow that has not ceased. That would be unthinkable if opportunities for personal or professional development existed.

The causes always refer to politics; in Cuba,politics is what has imposed limits on the economy and a disruption of the logical order. So, however much they try to remove ideology as a motive, Cuban emigration is political.

May 25 2012

Touring Havana

Former commercial establishment converted into a dwelling and today re-converted into a dwelling-business.  On San Rafael Boulevard.

I went with my brother the architect who needed to exchange a toilet.  It was hard because the green ones were not to be found, and my brother refused to put a white toilet in a bathroom where even the bathtub is green. We had to “tour Havana”;  his expert eye and my critical one were taking note of the urban follies that people have committed to open a small business.  No one guided them. They demand a health license but with a simple permit they disfigure the facade or put up a hideous poster, paint at whim without taking into account the upper floor or the dwelling next door; and without telling anyone they block the facades and invade the flowerbeds. Those striking posters and the brand new paint contrast with the local businesses in State hands that languish in the middle of the filth and abandon.  Both extremes deface the environment a little more.

With that lack of urgency with which the “process of modernization of our economic model” is undertaken, one supposes that it is because the steps have been planned minutely. So, after so much thinking, why didn’t any civil servant come up with a better idea than that each person would open his little business according to his own possibilities and often without conditions, while the cafeterias and stores built to such ends are the living picture of underdevelopment. The shops are still as ugly as before, and they put up makeshift structures to sell food or cheap goods.

I argued this to my brother who in one of his witticisms told me:

“Well, as long as you keep taking Thinkathon, that pill that makes you see reason, I’m kicking you out of the car.”

At the edge of the family joke which has become “I’m kicking you out of the car,” are now revealed some words of President Raul Castro calling for urban legislation. Like almost everything in Cuba, the problems grow and grow without the responsible authorities taking action or being respected, and it isn’t until the highest leadership speaks out that, as if by magic, everyone takes notes and clutches their heads not knowing where to start.

May 23 2012

A Day in Images

Taken at the moment in which the dentist was beginning the torture session

I secretly envy those who achieve those photos that I would like to have made.  Before, with the film camera, there was a “roll.”  Getting Orwo film from East Germany was a tiresome task: if there were rolls, the 100 ASA did not suit me; I detested the Orwocolor, which always seemed to be expired; but the 400 ASA Orwocromes were hard to get.  Developing a roll was a matter of months in the “consolidate enterprise.” They also sold little rolls of slides that were developed with the same delay and had to be viewed with a projector.  In the 1990’s Orwo disappeared, and Agfa and Kodak reappeared, but now those came in the other currency that has marked our lives, and my little Minolta camera, a gift from my brother Michael, sits in some drawer, which, if it exists, well I have lost sight of it a long time ago, just as it has been years since I’ve seen a roll of film.

The invasion of the digital camera changed photography forever and was love at first sight, but impossible love.  It was not until a little more than three years ago that they gave me a very good digital camera that I dropped on the floor on my trip to Spain last year, and when I took it to a shop for repair, the clerk ended up selling me another.

With that little second-rate camera I entered myself in the competition of aday.org in order to photograph my 15th of May.  I got up ready to do a portrait of all that would be my day.  In the end I found myself with almost 100 photos from which I had to choose ten (the maximum number admitted in the contest).  I decided on a group that reflects occupations.  They are not great photos, but in almost all can be seen the attraction of the photographed for the lens.  All strangers (except the dentist), they had no objection to being photographed, and even those who do not seem to have, “posed.”

My reality has a decaying beauty that makes the shutter contract.  A foreign observer could not perceive the conflicts running through them.  My images do not reflect misery, not even evident poverty, but life in one of the best places of the city, and I did not leave home.  On the other hand, as is already known, the essential is almost always invisible.

Translated by mlk

May 18 2012

Havana May 12 at 2:00 p.m.

Placard of the 15-M (May 15) in Spain

Saturday I went shopping for Mothers’ Day gifts. The street was full of anxious people wanting to stretch the little bit of money they had in the manner of Jesus. While the expensive items stayed on the shelves, the cheap cologne, little soaps, plastic flowers, fans, and cards of congratulations soon ran low. A few trinkets, my gifts brought back the epoch of the “convoys” of MINCIN (The Ministry of Domestic Trade); the best thing was to find gift-wrap paper, not the really pretty ones of shiny silver, but still nice.

With my colorful rolls of paper in hand, I returned late (2:30) to the meeting of the Critical Observatory on Carlos III and Belascoain. With the vivid memory of having seen the birth of the movement of the Indignados – the Outraged — in Spain, I crossed the street in the direction of the park where it was taking place; in addition to five uniformed police standing on the sidelines, I saw numerous groups of civilians spread around the espalande, but no event happening. On the corner of San Carlos (the first indication of the street name is parallel to Belascoain), I saw another group where I recognized the faces from the day of the Los Aldeanos concert in the Acapulco movie theater. Faces of those who didn’t like hip-hop, nor the marches with the gladiolas, nor even this demonstration against “all capitalisms.”

In the entrance of the very same primary school, two young people allowed me to verify that the new batch of the political police had stopped wearing those checked shirts they used to like so much, and were now dressing with the same bad taste as the hustlers. One woman in the school doorway was whining with an old security guard that the police had been making fun of her.

All without seeing a familiar face. Luckily I met Andy Sierra, bewildered like I was, and to make this short, we headed out with other friends who didn’t like hip-hop to explore by the statue of Karl Marx. They pointed toward the center of the park, I continued without seeing any statue, and now in the park, I headed toward another group of the same friends. One of them showed me a very discreet bas relief on a long wall that, with my poor sight, I had thought to be a coat of arms, without soul near the sundial. I asked the same friend about the activity that was supposed to be happening there, and making a peevish gesture with his hand he told me: Ah, that took place a little while ago. So short? I asked, incredulous. Yes, they sang the Internationale, said a few words, and that was it.

Since she was close by, I decided to take coffee to Miriam Celaya. I called to her from downstairs in her building to open the door for me, but, to my surprise, Miriam and Eugenio Leal had been “relocated” in Playa by friends who didn’t like the gladiola marches either, just when they were heading toward the meeting of the Critical Observatory.

To judge by the deployment, there had been more police than solidarios with the M-15. The Left were infiltrating the confrontation with the little groups like one more of them. Who would have thought the Internationale would be subversive!

And speaking like these crazy people….How much did this operation cost poor Liborio*?

*Translator’s note: “Liborio” is the Cuban equivalent of “Uncle Sam.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

May 14 2012

Toothache

The heat is back. So far we’ve enjoyed a slightly higher temperature in the day and cool nights, but two days ago I had to turn on the fan to sleep. But I’m not going to talk about the weather, I referred to it in passing because yesterday I spent the day outside. I was at the dentist because the day before yesterday, eating bread, I bit into a stone and something in my mouth which was not the stone went CRACK!

Don’t think the responsible party was a roll of the kind they sell on the ration book, oh no. It was ten-peso bread that brought one more stone!

“Elsewhere you could demand that you get to eat bread free for the rest of your life,” my husband told me.

But here you can to to see the dentist at the polyclinic where the attention is free.

They fixed it after torturing me with that infernal machine dentists have, and I have return next week to restore the damaged tooth. The wait time wasn’t too bad and nor was the care, for those who say I always say bad things. As I went in the morning for the tooth, by nine I was in the street with the taste of cloves in my mouth, so I went to the bank to buy — to try to buy — a credit transfer.

Here it was not fast, but the wait was comfortable and the air chilled. When my turn came a pleasant employee typed my data into her computer, and at that moment, BLAM! A transformer exploded and the power went out. It was instantaneous, but “the system went down and you have to wait a moment,” (in reference to the intranet of the national bank).

During this wait, an outraged citizen entered the bank branch. He was making a withdrawal from an ATM in the lobby when the power went out. When the power came back he saw the amount had been deducted from his balance, but he didn’t have the money in hand. He waited in the cashier’s line, which was not short, to get the cash and, given that the outraged citizen wasn’t lying, they gave him his money.

My transfer didn’t appear, the pleasant clerk gave me a card with phone numbers to call to find out when it will appear, and I left behind one outraged citizen and a considerable group of frustrated people waiting for cash from the ATM.

Other systems fail, but the one that should fail, nothing.

May 11 2012

Alzheimer’s

Don’t be fooled by the brevity of my texts. I talk a lot. And it happened that in the middle of an argument, my mind went completely blank, I couldn’t find the next word, knowing that it’s on my hard drive, knowing what it is, but it was like a short-circuit between my brain and my voice, I couldn’t come up with it. Similar words came to me, and I borrowed a synonym. The exact word remains inaccessible and familiar at the same time. It doesn’t even have to be a difficult or rare word. On those moments I think about Alzheimer’s — no old person in my family has suffered from it or its first cousin, senile dementia — but there is always a first time.

I have a horror of this could that will leave me without memories, without words, without emotions; I have a horror of myself, beatific and dazed, rocking in a chair.

I write as an exorcism. As a magic spell against the danger. Or perhaps I am in the chair imagining I am writing some words to scare away Alzheimer’s?

May 4 2012