Ode to Joy / Regina Coyula

Two different audiovisual have made me reflect again on our country’s future. The first, a recent BBC report on North Korea. It is one thing to read about this dystopian society and another to view images whose referent is the Orwellian nightmare. Politics is complicated, but they can not be good. Knowing them to be friends of my government gives me a feeling similar to that produced in me by demonstrations of friendship with the Iranian government.

But to dispel that depressing vision, last night, in the Cinema of Our America, I saw “No,” the Chilean film about the referendum against Pinochet. The film left me feeling very positive that the opposition could act from joy, and so from that feeling can call people together.

Not to maintain the scheme that to dissent is dangerous, because people from instinct or fear shy away from dangerous situations, even when they can’t divine them, can’t divine the depletion of public confidence in the government.

From the confrontation and the pulse, the heroism is evident, but this in itself does not add up and often valuable and much-needed life. I’m thinking right now about the hunger strike of a large group of activists from UNPACU — the Patriotic Union of Cuba — which very few Cubans inside the island know about, but which is magnified in this rumor of repression to which they are subjected.

There are ideas that I share with you, readers, because you already know what the associations are. With all due respect for the pain of many families, the joy, that component of our character, should be a basic component in the mortar of our reinvention as citizens.

26 April 2013

In Baseball

My worst fears came to pass. Holland has us sized up. Like the majority of readers pontificated, we aren’t going to the next round. I’ll leave it to those who know the analysis of factors of the defeat of a team into which so many resources were invested. Marginally, my personal impression is that the charisma of Victor Mesa was adverse to the team and applied additional pressure to that it already carried. Differently than those who are happy about it, I so lament not being able to see them play in San Francisco.

Translated by: JT

11 March 2013

Petty Finance

The bus stop at G and 27th, three in the afternoon. Several people gather around a skinny seventy-something. He’s not selling peanuts, he’s not selling newspapers, he’s not selling candy bars, he’s not selling anything. He is exchanging one Cuban peso for 80 centavos. It works because although public transport costs forty centavos, in practice breaking a Cuban peso into smaller coins is difficult because Cuban pesos are only in the places selling on the ration book (at the bodega and the bakery) are fractions handled.

People prefer to make change with the skinny guy, outfitted with a cardboard box of his own invention hanging just below his chest, because with a peso you can only pay for one trip, and if you change it you can pay for two, others prefer to favor the retiree before tossing a coin in the farebox.

And so it goes! I say to myself annoyed at my camera. I try to speak to him but he crosses diagonally across G Street to the stop for the P-2, which starts its journey towards Alamar there.

I tried to calculate (you already know, numbers aren’t my strong point): With five people making change, he can buy himself a small coffee; with forty a pizza. How many hours a day will he have to dedicate to tramping from stop to stop, how many times will the police stop him. But in any case, the next list of allowed self-employment professions should include money-changer, coin-breaker, or something like that.

February 25 2013

Credibility

It is not the theme of my blog address the issues of other countries, but the fate of Venezuela is so interwoven with our own, that I make an exception. Years of learning “Granma Grammar”–the language of the Party’s daily newspaper–teach us that if there were a single publishable image of the Venezuelan president, it would already have been published, especially after the opportunity offered up by the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Chavez is dying of the complications of his disease, one doesn’t have to be a doctor to know that  metastases do not remit. Those who are governing in his name have shamelessly manipulated him to hold onto him like the apostles holding onto Jesus.

And I wonder how the Venezuelans will feel, including the president’s followers, when they realize the farce of his recovery has been playing on the feelings of the people; his own family with double the pain of the imminent loss and the manipulation.

I can’t feel that this farce at his expense is what he would have wanted. This seems to me true especially for the ultimate Chavez, much more sensitive because of his awareness of the gravity of his situation.

The President governed in the majority and won his elections. But the political validation of Venezuela’s current “hard men” is weak. When the time comes, what credibility will Nicolas Maduro, Elias Jaua, Diosdado Cabello have? This, in the face of the population, can be very serious.

Because it was them, not a doctor, not a relative, who issued encouraging news, while in Havana they watched the terminal phase of the illness. Will the Venezuelan people trust these functionaries who kept the real condition of the president secret?

The discredit is so undeniable that one wonders if we will see a conspirinoia to detail whether it would be a good move to get them out of the game in favor of other less visible (but perhaps more opportune) figures from the Chavez camp, and to do all this without appearing to have done so.

Reasons of State will be alleged, but the fissure is there. Something that has become clear to me in the two month absence of Chavez: however much they invoke him, none of his acolytes is Chavez.

February 13 2013

A Smoky Exploit

During these final days of the year the chatter in my neighborhood has focused on a woman who traded up from a nice little house to a gorgeous residence on a corner lot. This neighbor spared no expense in order to create the home she wanted. An array of private and state-owned trucks delivered material to the site where a building team repaired and remodeled the home over the course of more than a year, following the owner’s instructions. Residents of Nuevo Vedado are used to seeing nice houses — ones that are in good repair and well-maintained — but they were astonished by the magnitude of this project. When they told me about it and I later saw the house, all I could say was, “They are waiting for her to finish it so they can seize it.”

I do not know if the house was ever completed, but the owner was fired from her job. It is rumored that she is facing investigation at a farm called “La Campana,” which I believe is the place where corruption cases are handled. The police conducted a search and filmed the entire house, but the neighbors found out, to their great surprise, that the remodelling project was not the cause but a consequence. It seems the owner, who was recently fired as director of a cigar factory, is under investigation for matters related to the factory’s output.

Since November we have known about the detention of the company’s general manager related to the shipment of contraband cigars to Europe. I won’t deny that I immediately thought of my neighbor, the director of that same company. For a long time she emerged unscathed after anonymous and on-the-record accusations were made by her own workers.

I understand she was very confrontational, and was even offered the directorship of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution to which she belonged. She also active in the Cuban Communist Party and cracked the whip at her workplace. I am not surprised. Someone told me it was a shame what had happened — it was a way of personally profiting by robbing the state because, if these managers are harming anyone, it is their employer.

The neighbor has not been tried and remains innocent until proven guilty. But I am not happy about this. Corruption depletes my county’s patrimony and that of all its citizens. Anyone who has followed the recent history of Russia and the other Soviet republics will know that many of the USSR’s now-discredited company managers shielded themselves as they set about getting rich. With of all their stolen gains, they are now rich and powerful businessmen, mafiosi or both. When it comes to the multi-million dollar tobacco industry, it seems that robbery is practiced on a grand scale.

Regina Coyula

December 25 2012

The War of the Worlds

Free enterprise is not a term that is mentioned in the new process of “updating the model,” but you just have to give a little nod to “the factors” in constructing your own socialism now that the Frankenstein of socialism, which according to them is being built in Cuba, seems to be delayed. There are some new entrepreneurs who are serious.

A 3-dimension cinema has appeared, with prices that seem would attract no customers, but they do; a city of two million inhabitants has several hundred happy citizens who don’t have to count their pennies at the end of the month.

Asking for directions to a friend’s, they pointed to a door at the end of a pleasant terrace equipped as a tapas bar. Going through that door was like entering a parallel world. The place is equipped with the best, down to the slightest detail, the menu and the bill are presented on an iPad. In fact, when the iPad gets to the cash register it has to be transcribed because the technology doesn’t go that far, but the effect on the customer is devastating.

A popular snackbar made stickers for cars, and those who return with the sticker on the windshield received a discount. The stickers, I was told, were ordered withdrawn because private businesses are not allowed to advertise. On their own, or with the knowledge of what had happened to the snack bar, some clever person got a bullhorn and advertised from a vintage car, an impeccable almendrón.  What did they advertise? Movie showings in 3D with a matinée of children’s films at a reduced rate. So there’s competition for the guys with the iPad.

Until now inventiveness, “the struggle” has been banned.  This is the real parallel world.

December 17 2012

Dialog

The cause that has kept me from this blog in recent days has been that I am the caretaker of my stepdaughter (younger than me, but not by much) who is recovering from surgery in my house.

But yesterday, having to go our midday, I got on the route 27 and inevitably overheard the dialog of a man and a woman, seated in front of me, as I rode standing up. The famous travel and immigration reform seems to be everywhere, entertaining even people who will never travel, but now they have the illusion that they might. It wasn’t these hopeful comments that impelled me to intervene in a dialog that wasn’t with me. The woman was already getting off when the man said something like, “It’s that sadly we’ve become accustomed to their giving us everything.”

After excusing myself for the interruption, in a voice not very loud but very clear, like that I used in the classroom to get the attention of the students, I expressed to the man my disagreement with his phrase. Said like that, it would seem that we Cubans have enjoyed the ability to decide our own lives, when in reality it is the government that takes the initiative, intervening in the public sphere and interfering in the private.

It was nice because the man tried to make amends with the argument that young people think they deserve everything, and he said it making a gesture towards a teenager with an emo haircut wearing the school uniform of a technical school. The young man, sensing himself alluded to, told him, “No, old man, no, the Lady is right.” Then he looked at me seriously, genuinely interested, “That shit is hot!”

I smiled at him and as my stop was coming, I said goodbye to the gentleman; we exchanged names and shook hands, and he said to the boy, like someone who reveals a key, something he will instantly forget or remember his whole life: “You are a citizen. Exercise this power, we have already left our fate in the hands of others for too long.”

November 2 2012

Disagreement

In the Friday edition of the Granma newspaper, editorial letters are printed. Despite the filter through which they are submitted, (my friend Fernando has submitted letters since the editorial section started, but his letters have never been published, probably for not having the “correct” focus: the way Fidel taught us…, in accordance with the actualization model…,to comply with the rules…) nevertheless, there are still some interesting letters that get published.

Today it is a letter that alludes to two letters from last week. One is about the responsibility of bosses, and the other is about disagreeing with the boss. In today’s letter, the sender H. León Báez asks himself when the right to disagree with the boss’s opinion was lost. Very good for León Báez for bringing attention to a forgotten right. I invite readers to remember when between your peers, or on your own, you tested the boundaries with your boss. Right away I remember famous cases such as Borrego, who was the Minister of the Sugar Industry during the seventies, and more recently Doctor Terry, Vice Minister of Public Health, and Marcos Portal, Minister of General Industry.

In another part of his letter, León Báez refers to the popular practice of anonymous criticism, and agrees that this practice is free of reprisal, which tacitly acknowledges that disagreement is commonly met with punishment.

The day that Cubans are able to express our ideas without fear, our country will turn into  the Babel of opinions. Until then we will continue with agreement and silence.

October 19 2012

A Homemade October 10th

Although October 10 marks the beginning of Cuban’s struggle for its colonial independence, and is a holiday, the celebration has been reduced to a few ads and billboards. The same is true for February 24, but no one mentions May 20 any more, it has gone from being our national day to the execrable beginning of the Republic. The important anniversaries are the assault on the Moncada barracks and the day Batista fled.

My son’s History textbook summarizes it like this: … the energy of the Manzanilleros, led by the attorney Carlos Manuel de Cespedes… determined the beginning of the Cuban Revolutionary process on October 10, 1868… Cespedes’ uprising from his La Demajagua refinery, inaugurated, in national history, the use of the path of armed struggle to achieve independence.

Besides being carelessly written, the book is full of generalizations that prevent young people from identifying with the events and characters they study. My son’s face became attentive when he learned that Cespedes was a notable chess player of this time, that he was in love and liked to write poems to the ladies of his affection, that La Demajagua refinery had a steam machine many years before the famous “Cry of Yara” for independence, and that the help of the slaves, rather than productive, was onerous.

He was amused, believing a joke, when I told him that the head of the uprising wasn’t Cespedes, but rather Francisco Vicente Aguilera, and that Cespedes had not resigned the command to him when he moved forward the date of the uprising to October 10, as the story goes, by a telegram intercepted by a sympathizer, where he let slip to the Spanish authorities about the imminent uprising. I’m sure my son won’t forget any of this detail that doesn’t show up in his book.

I clarified, before his rapid conclusion, that it’s not about a history of the good and the bad, that Cespedes was wrong many times, but he was great despite his flaws. In the patriotic plan I told him about La Bayamesa written Cespedes and Fornaris, of Aguilara whom I’d already talked about, the patrician who even gave a theater to Bayamo and died poor and in exile.

About Perucho Figueredo and his nervous verses that he wrote in the saddle and that today we sing as the national anthem. What can I do! I’m from before, from those who still get emotional about certain symbols; my son, on the other hand, belongs to his era of disbelief. At least I try to be less cynical. At least I try.

October 11 2012

A Civic Demand

“For Another Cuba”

A person who I hold in great esteem led me to discover a truth of Perogrullo*: I’m a citizen. Something so evident had remained half-intertwined among other dangerous ideas like liberty and democracy. For me, it’s been like a child learning to walk: first, clumsily, then more confidently, until there’s no turning back.

It’s because of this that I’ve received the Civic Demand for a Better Cuba with enthusiasm, because it seems logical to me that I, as a part of the people, who are sovereign and elect public officials to execute popular mandate (at least, in theory), convey knowledge and conviction regarding the fact that the ratification of the United Nations Compact by the government will bring benefit to all to citizens who, like me, have not realized it.

I’m not speaking about political affinities, but rather about exercising a civil right.

 *Translator’s note: A truth of Perogrullo is a statement of the obvious. Perogrullo’s origins are disputed, but he was a real or fictional person from sometime between 1200-1600.

Translated by: Will Bettinelli

August 6 2012