Catholic Cuba

I’ll never forget when the news came from Radio Marti that we Cubans had a Cardinal. My mother, excited, let me know, and from her tearful eyes came her illusions about the Catholic Church, that had just added to its conclave a high church official. From her hopeless simplicity, my mother intended to convey to me that, hierarchically speaking, “a cardinal is more than Fidel,” as she decreed. I remember that I shook my head yes; I didn’t want to spoil her illusions.

Of course we know what a cardinal means, but those who should have believed it didn’t. ”President” Fidel Castro and his supporters ultimately never finished the work of mowing down the church of the Cuban people. That unfinished task has always been his frustration.

In my humble person Pope John Paul II had one of the faithful who most admired him. My love for him became worship. In addition to being the Holy Father, he was a born political leader. And I will always keep the thrill I felt when he greeted me, an unimportant bystander, when he expressed love from his motorcade.

I will always remember his visit with gratitude. But if I had been his advisor, I would have suggested that he not turn up in a Cuba without freedom, without progress and without the most basic respect for human rights: Freedom of Expression. Many Cubans placed their hopes in his visit, thinking they would gain significant social achievements, political freedoms, and even that it augured multiparty elections.

It’s healthy to remember the years of “politicking” that keep the Castro brothers in power, and needless to say, they wouldn’t accept any visit, not even of Jesus Christ in person, if it jeopardized their power. I always knew that with objective clarity.

After the Pope left, we still have hope, even if we have empty hands, because after all we keep them in our pockets, there’s no point in showing how empty they are.

What we Cubans have to achieve won’t come from anyone’s visit, nor from the “peace concert”, although it had good intentions, nor from the “U.S. blockade.” It will come the day we demand what belongs to us by our own right. Then, after participatory democracy wins and Cubans have the right to choose freely and consistently what they want for themselves, we will welcome the current Pope, and also, spiritually, we will receive the Vicar of God, now in heaven, Father John Paul II, the simple man and scholar who was Wojtyla.

But we know that the road to paradise is paved with good intentions, and so is the one that leads to freedom on the island of Cuba.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Translated by Regina Anavy

January 26 2012

G2thugs.com

On the pilgrimage of the Virgin of Charity del Cobre, on September 8, a group of thugs were commandeered by Cuban State Security to attack opponents of the regime. I have to confess that I could not hide my surprise to see those criminals who, like mercenaries, respond to the orders of the military.

Among that group of people I spotted the Ladies in White with gladioli in their hands, ladies dressed in white, marching in silence. I approached them in solidarity, excited, without stopping to admit that it was silliness or innocence on my part, if it were within my reach, to protect them in some way.

An opponent pulled out his cell phone and tried to take some photos, and one of the delinquents who earlier and now, with license from State Security (G-2) acted as a bully on their behalf, tried violently to steal the phone. For a few seconds the force of the compact mass turned into a stampede. The international journalists tried to capture the images and the rogues, not the officials, tried to put their hands in front of the lenses to block them. Two thugs quickly took another opponent by the neck and pulled him into the candy store on Galeano street, where two other men were waiting inside where they beat him unconscious.

Then the supposed Ladies in White who were next to me started to shout, “Viva Fidel! Viva Raul! Viva la Revolucion!” I was so surprised by this farce that I fled, terrified of the ruling clique. I approached the young dissident whose cellphone they had tried to steal. And he told me the details.

I was so angry that I took out my phone to capture the faces of those who had undertaken the operation and one day, when freedom comes, it will at least be a reminder of the injustice and abuses there were. To my surprise, I didn’t know at what moment they had me surrounded. There were ten burly ruffians who had made a circle around me. I couldn’t approach them, nor they me. With the cellphone I filmed them, especially the Chief of Operations (he had a gold chain around his neck), who seeing my intention turned his face to avoid being captured on camera. There were two things that aroused my curiosity, and they showed up in the images: Among the miscreants there was one white, and they all had an aspect of low moral character, little education, and the air of the prison about them.

The pilgrimage changed into a journey of the absurd, of complete audacity. All I could do was ask myself two questions. How is it possible for a State employing such maneuvers to continue in Power? And the second: How is it possible that anyone can defend a system that commits these violations and abuses?

Last Monday, the 26th, at the Church of Las Mercedes, they conducted another but more hidden raid. Agents in the motorcade blocked auto access around the perimeters close to the church. A cordon of plainclothes knaves, with the same aspect of thugs, stationed on the corners, prevented the arrival of the opponents seizing their identity cards and loading them into Lada-made cars with yellow — private — plates, to avoid any association with the Government, and took them off to the interrogation rooms.

At the same time they prevented several Ladies in White from leaving their houses. At the doors of their homes, two unpresentable looking men warned them, every time they tried to leave, not to try it for their own good because something very bad would happen to them if they did. On the facing sidewalk several young women, who looked a sight, gesticulating and acting like a mob, told the two criminals, “Let them leave so we can come up there and give them something to show for it, when we’re done with them they won’t want to counterrevolutionaries any more!”

Despite everything, it was the reaction from the neighbors that caught my attention. They looked astonished about what the Castro brothers had come to, to save their useless system. And, despite their fear, they expressed themselves against the abuse without even lowering their voices, at the expense of those pressuring them.

Then other criminals came to replace them. And I followed them to see where they were going. Along the way they were boasting about the kicks and punches they were going to give to “these counterrevolutionaries,” if they finally left their houses.

that group of undesirables went down Cuban street until they reached the Police Station in San Ignacio. A police van was waiting to take them back to the shelters when the operation ended, and also waiting for a car with MINIT plates. When I went through the Station door I saw them inside having a snack, refortifying themselves to return to their repression.

A friend who lives nearby told me that the majority of the criminals in the operation were on parole from prison to help the Revolution. The classic blackmail. Most of the people they choose for the job are blacks because they intimidate them with what will happen if another system replaces the current one, and at the same time they are least likely to have family in Miami, so they can criticize them and persuade them to take such action.

But it is simpler and more straightforward than that: if they don’t comply with their agreements and follow orders when they are given, they return them to the prisons they took them out of to serve the rest of their sentences and, certainly, the cancel the reductions in their sentences for good behavior. My friend assured me that now a new force is coming made up of some of the 2,900 released prisoners that Raul Castro announced in his last speech.

Then I couldn’t help feeling sorry for these captive and at times enslaved beings, with a fate imposed on them, who also, like the opponents, are struggling to do better for themselves; only in the case of the dissidents despite the blows and arrests they suffer first hand, when they think of themselves they substitute their own bodies for the Island of Cuba.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

January 17 2012

A Chip Off The Old Block: Che’s Daughter

As if by agreement, Mariela Castro flatters the Dutch system of prostitution in the Amsterdam red light district, and Aleida Guevara (both without highlighting they’d come from the most advantaged sperm of their fathers who fertilized the eggs of their mothers), counsels the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez Frias, that he should nationalize the entire press. Their declarations do discredit to themselves. In each interview they gave they received a red card and a penalty.

To recommend such barbarism to the Caudillo shows an Olympian underestimation of him, as if it hadn’t already previously occurred to him. Perhaps little Aleida didn’t read about Chavez’s closure of the newspapers and radio and TV channels? Couldn’t she imagine that her uncle Fidel had already advised the same.

What is happening is that times now are not the same if we compare them to the decade of the sixties, and no one has informed this brat that she has lived in a bubble (having had the privilege of believing that socialism is effective because her table has never lacked filet mignon, nougat, apples and wine, all as a great concert of imports), and she is unaware that the world is watching and expressing its disagreement with such abuses and lack of democracy, and, precisely because of these follies typical of dictators, in recent times the most important political changes in contemporary history are taking place.

I’d like to note that this post has been the most difficult of all those written by me so far. I find Aleida so alien, so distant from the events of the world, that at times it seems to me as if she is mentally retarded. I saw her with her children in primary school many times, at 5th and 62nd Streets, with her arrogant airs and figure, looking at the rest of the parents over her shoulder at a prudent distance so as not to mingle with the plebs. I could also appreciate the sly contempt with which the parents responded. Listening to the teachers, after flattering her, cursing her and cataloging the ungratefulness and abuse of her position as “daddy’s girl.”

In addition to her caudillo-taliban education, you have to remember her genetic inheritance, hence Aleida Guevara’s pose as a Court Aristocrat, nails bared as is natural. It doesn’t take much imagination to know what she would be capable of if you put a little power in her hands.

I always remember the shocking testimony of Comandante Benigno, who may have known Che well, when they went to execute the peasant who told the enemy the coordinates where they could find Fidel Castro’s guerrilla camp in the Sierra Maestra, and after a “summary trial,” the accused was led by Che, William Galvez and Benigno, and as they left the camp, looking for a place to carry out the execution, they hear an unexpected gunshot very close to their ears. The shock made them take a defensive position, when they looked they saw the body of the peasant fall with his head exploded from a shot by Che, who, cold-bloodedly, put away the pistol and advised them to hurry back because it was going to rain. There’s nothing more to say. To end this interminable story, on his arrival at La Cabaña prison, where he established his command post, he provoked a river of blood with hundreds of firing squads. He spent more bullets in La Cabaña than in the entire guerrilla war.

In Africa, after the battle in which an African soldier, in order to save his own life, had to abandon his machine gun because of its weight and the difficulty of moving it, Che called him a coward in front of everyone. And the African soldier refuted him, explaining that he had no other human choice. And Che, with the same coolness with which he destroyed the peasant’s head with his bullet, said laconically, “you made a coward of yourself.” And in the follow battles the soldier chose to lose his life rather than abandoning the machine gun again, and the same Che, later in his diary, recognized that it had been his fault. He had this gift of killing people, directly and indirectly, those who because of ideology and by chance ran into him.

And now his daughter, she takes after her father, doesn’t know the reality of Cubans, lives in a house that she doesn’t know how or by whom it got built and she’s never had to pay the costs of it, drives a car without having earned it, at a cost which is the sweat of people who were never consulted about whether they would accept the sacrifice for her comfort, and now on her Trip to Peru she assures the press, thinking herself greatly conversant in the political and social world, that she has counseled the dictator Hugo Chavez to imitate her uncle Fidel. How ridiculous is this girl from the court? I can’t forget when, as an adult, she went to Argentina for the first time, and in less than a month returned speaking with the intonation of her father. She was greeted at the airport before a world cringing in embarrassment, in front of her uncle Fidel, who timidly watched her butcher the accent, a capricious cadence at a desperate speed.

And now she comes to us with her know-it-all airs, wandering the world with the people’s money and the memory of her father. I’ll never understand how there can be people who are proud of a man who ordered executions and who, himself, with his own hand, carried out the sentences. It seems to me that the figure of Che has been the image most manipulated in our era.

Now we have to endure this daughter of her father and niece of her uncle, who comes to us with her extremist actions that reaffirm, in addition to her genetics, the sentiments of her biological family and the work of her in loco parentis Fidel Castro.

As my aunt would say, “God save us, and take us confessed.”

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

January 10 2012

Open Letter from the Writer Ángel Santiesteban-Prats to the New President of Spain

Havana, 20 December 2011

President Mariano Rajoy, I turn to you on the day my daughter celebrates her birthday. Just thinking of the Cuban young people, I decided to write you these humble and sincere words without standing on ceremony other than to offer you well-deserved congratulations, and to cry for the young of my country whose only horizon is the Straits of Florida which cause so many deaths. But not before giving you a small account of the last two governments of my country and the impact they have had on us.

Since the absence in power of Spain’s People’s Party, three elections back, the freedom of Cubans has been banished. We quickly received a half-communist minister representing the PSOE (Socialist Workers Party), who came to negotiate with the Castro brothers. Since then, the silence and Spanish president Zapatero’s complicity threw its dark mantle over the Cuban archipelago. The days when the freedom of the people was more important to Spain than relations with a tyrant, were long gone.

That complicity with which the Cultural Attache welcomed those of us with the intention to participate in some literary contest in Spain, and the envelopes full of stories and hopes, ended. From that time on we no longer received the latest published books from the Iberian peninsula, nor the journal Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana which had provided us with the latest cultural events in the world and, especially, in the culture of our diaspora forbidden on Cuban soil.

The literary, essay and photography contest thought up by the Spanish embassy, which was juried and where I was told there was no pressure because they would award the prize to some irreverent text despite the political system that scorns us and exists in this country, only got as far as a call for entries. The official policy of support for marginalized artists vanished. We also lost the profound and hard work of the Hispanic-American Center because the dictatorship closed it, not wanting there to be a space for the cultural freedom it supported.

Then, the meeting with the ungainly ambassador of whom I only remember his name “Lazarus,” and who joked about a Bible passage, “Lazarus, arise and walk,” because the Lazarus sent to us only came to lie down at the feet of the dictator. And the following meeting for Columbus Day, which we had celebrated in the ambassador’s residence for many years, and Lazarus just read our group what his work plan was going to be, which was “nothing,” making him the second Government of the Island. Since then we haven’t gone back despite continuing to receive an invitation.

Months later the Ambassadors of the European Union wanted a meeting-dialogue with Cuban writers in the residence of the Ambassador of Austria, which chaired the EU at the time. Attending were Leonardo Padura, Amado del Pino, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Reinaldo Montero and me. Each gave his vision of the social reality.

Some Ambassadors wondered about the relationship between Venezuela and Cuba, and thought that perhaps, as expressed by the Spanish Ambassador, that starting with a substantion improvement in the economy, there would arise an improvement in individual freedoms. He was hoping for better times for Cuba, the raising of the national economy and social freedoms.

When I intervened I said that with reference to the possibility of “economic improvement”, I found myself pessimistic, given that the years of dictatorship had demonstrated gross mismanagement of the assets of the People, and that in the unlikely event that Venezuela became what the Union Soviet and the rest of the socialist camp had been for Cuba, it would be disastrous for individual liberties, as rather than being strengthened, repression would also increase.

That the Ruler (at the time it was Fidel Castro, now it is his brother, but it has always been the same last name), had ceded his harsh dictatorship from the Special Period, when he lost credibility and followers, but there was a return to economic consolidation, which I doubted we could say for certain that it would sharpen the repression, censorship and imprisonment of opponents of the government.

After the meeting ended, while having refreshments, I was approached by Ambassador Lazaro, who told me light-heartedly, “Don’t be so pessimistic.” I gave him a look as impotence threatened to overcome me. “Sir,” I said, “how is it possible that you dare to ask for optimism from one of the members of the third generation that this process has consumed without any benefit. Fidel Castro is a human crushing machine.”

The ambassador wanted to escape but I stopped him: “Never,” I pronounced, “have I seen the Cuban State prosper, not in economic matters nor in individual liberties, and unfortunately we two are going to be alive to see it.”

The Ambassador raised his arms and walked away. We never met again. I did not accept his invitations. Wherever he finds himself today, he should remember the words that without being an expert in political and social matters, were offered to him, a career diplomat, most disadvantaged by our forecasts, with his failure as Ambassador and his role in a boring and submissive political party, so much so, that his own workers in the Spanish embassy in Havana let us know that they had a room full of the journal Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana, which they couldn’t distribute because the government had forbidden it in secret negotiations.

In those two governments of Zapatero, we have suffered the shamelessness of both presidencies (Zapatero-Fidel and Raul Castro) and their minions. Supposed achievements in the matter of the prisoners of conscience have only served them to be accomplices in helping to take the lid off the pot and relieve the pressure and thus avoid a social explosion on the island, to procure some respite for a process that is asphyxiating at times, an that resorts to strategies intended to improve its international image, award accomplices, and ultimately ultimately extend a system which the population does not believe in, such as releasing the prisoners of conscience to Spain which agreed to receive them as political refugees, but which disengaged from them after their arrival and haphazardly left them in the hands of God. The Master of Ceremonies of this sizable circus was Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos.

In the end they demonstrated that releasing the prisoners was not done for humanitarian but for political reasons. I also pray for them and I urge you to provide them the place they deserve after suffering persecution, torture and imprisonment, it would be very kind of you to stop this escalation of agony, and end something that started ill. Ii is in your hands to do it.

Of course, we know that while the Popular Party has won, it doesn’t mean it will resolve the immense problems that have shaken Spain, much less solve the dilemma of the Cubans. What we are sure of is that at least you, President Mariano Rajoy, have extended a hand in solidarity and know how to take the measure of a dictatorship that is dying, but that even in its death throes, keeps kicking and is willing to take the lives of those who confront it.

Recently Cubans have lost a friend, intellectual and former Czech President Vaclav Havel, but God has provided us with you. Having called the Czech writer to His side, he is right to leave this task in your hands.

With humility we simply ask you, President Rajoy, for an ambassador who respects us and offers a place to the thoughtful opposition, dedicated and determined to achieve the freedoms inherent in being human.

Welcome!

Sincerely,

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Translator’s note: Slight changes have been made in this letter for English-speaking readers who may not know what positions those named hold or held in Spain and Cuba — they have been added.

December 26 2011

Cuban Intellectuals: When Fear Seeps Into the Bones

Miguel Barnet, Raúl Castro and Abel Prieto

How is it possible that intellectuals who were humiliated and punished by the same people who now govern the country, stay next to the boots that kicked them into submission, that harassed them until they were broken in body, soul and artistic endeavor?

They suffered so much that the fear still corrodes them and they continue to talk in whispers for fear of being overheard and punished again.

These intellectuals reaffirm the lesson received when they learned: this is and will be the rest of your days. Many have already died and could not go beyond the artwork for which they were punished. The fear never left them. Nor have those who remain gone beyond, obviously because they lack the time and spirit to do so.

Isn’t it time to submit the bill? Someone has to pay for the books not written. The plays not staged. The music not created. The empty or fatuous canvasses. Who will pay for all this lost culture?

Some were imprisoned in concentration camps known by the acronym UMAP (Military Units to Aid Production), because then everyone had to be a man, strong and ready to pick up a gun. If they were not suitable physically, or insufficiently masculine, or morally or ideologically unreliable, they were sent as a punishment for not being useful in the defense of the “Revolution.” The artists who didn’t openly defend the Revolution in their works were put on the black list.

They also were sent to these concentration camps for not wearing Russian boots, smoking cigars,  or passing their working hours without getting their hands dirty; and there were those labeled gay, religious, or unenthusiastic about social tasks such as not participating in “voluntary work” or the sugar cane harvest; these, too, were caught and sent to these hells.

The sacrilege of the different

To receive mail or calls from abroad, to wear outlandish dress or new fashions, was a direct affront to the socialist system. It was sacrilege to listen to foreign music or to Cuban singers living outside the island, to access literature that didn’t sympathize with the “Revolution,” to have long hair was an insult to machismo, to be frowned upon by any official or simply not to get along with the president of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution on your block. Those fascist-style or Stalinesque concentration camps (we know now they did the same damage) were designed according Fidel Castro’s version, and he has not had the dignity to publicly acknowledge, or at least to say that we was wrong in one of those writings he calls his “Reflections.”

It’s true that most of the intellectuals did not go to these concentration camps, but as artists they are supposed to have the sentiment to suffer those disastrous events that happened in their time. In any event, they did not escape unscathed, suffering other acts of torture, derision for being creative. Most were expelled from schools and workplaces. Their cultural work was slanted for many years, and ultimately it was permeated by that fear that sinks into the bone.

All the artists were mocked by political, military and cultural officials, who concurred in being the same. And “Socialist Realism” took off because it was the only way to present yourself as an artist. And they are still out there presenting their anti-aesthetic and submissive works.

Several decades of those early events that marked Cuban artists have passed, and still the horror keeps them prostrate, the impression caused by the punishments imposed, their bodies still bleeding from the wounds as in the early days, sometimes covered by false scars constantly hidden by makeup.

Frozen by the horror

Worst of all is that they remain silent and still pretend to support the system. They still respond like intellectuals of the seventies. The horror froze them in time and they don’t know how to reject it, to share their real opinions about “the damned circumstances” that occur in society because their mission, they were told, is to be artists, and the artists are concerned only to entertain people without questioning the political leadership of the country.

If one is an artist of the “left,” from anywhere in the world that questions the United States or any political process opposed to the dictatorial regime of Fidel Castro, then one can be a political artist and you were and are invited to summer in Cuba. Artistic thought can only go in one direction, and the arrow of orientation is toward the government.

The question that follows is whether they will die with that fear. If they will never be able let escape what they have always hidden. If they will contain their catharsis and present their suffering and discrepancies from surfacing before the ways of acting of the political process, and if they will conform to the narrow purged space they were permitted during “the email war” of 2007. If they will continue being the bland part of society, as we were labeled by that disagreeable, and later crazy, State functionary?

At least it is my wish to invite them to fulfill their aspirations, that are reasonable with their conscience, with which they can honestly expound their ideologies and their personal conversations where they give free rein to their real thought, and say and assume it publicly.

You will then see that their hearts will swell with emotion as they beat.

Angel Santiesteban-Prats

January 4 2012

Cuba: A Country Being Auctioned

Emilio's Daughter (1974), by Servando Cabrera Moreno, one of the works being auctioned off by the Cuban government.

These days the Cuban nation should be crying and writhing in its own betrayal. It gives the sensation of a country winding down, that sells quickly, like someone trying to extract every possible benefit before leaving.

For years it has been auctioning off its cultural heritage on the Internet. Works by leading artists who are not even alive to replace them. Creations that would be difficult to return to our country. This year important works by Servando Cabrera Moreno have been auctioned off for more than 600,000 dollars: A 1957 painting, “Figure with Bird,” “Cocoon” (1945), “Emilio’s Daughter” (1974), and “Kisses” (1966). Also “Last Journey” (1979) by Wilfredo Lam. Among the 44 artists were Tomás Sánchez, Mario Carreño, René Portocarrero, Amelia Peláez and Raúl Martínez. In recent years we have lost an important part of the pictorial wealth of the nation.

In other countries, when private collectors decide to sell, government regulations to preserve the cultural heritage, which is untouchable, establish that the State has priority over cases of interest. Owners have to accept three propositions. They can keep the work but not sell it. They do not have the right to take it out of the country. Also, if they keep a work considered to be part of the nation’s heritage in their house, an annual tax must be paid to the State. This seems a laudable idea to me. I believe that the place for the best paintings of every nation is in its museums, so that they can be admired by both nationals and visiting foreigners.

Theft and demagoguery

Yet lately we hear denunciations from Cuban government spokespeople lamenting the “thefts in the museums by the Allied troops when they entered Iraq.” Also, the world still mourns for the cultural works destroyed and sacked by the Nazi hordes in the invaded countries, a great part of which remain hidden.

But in Cuba it’s like we don’t have the ability to look at ourselves. Education was required for the sake of protecting the supposed Revolution of 1959, and that was no more than a way of allowing Fidel Castro to commit his outrages without being criticized. I realize that to try to do so would have been a grievous mistake. Confronting him would have immediately led to a fierce punishment. Trying to criticize, even constructively and for “revolutionary” honesty, is seen as suicide.

Few of that generation, none of those who today live in the country and participate in the official social life, confronted the designs of Tsar Fidel Castro, and in cowardice they remained silent so they would not be considered eligible for punishment. They preferred to be slaves, silent accomplices, incapable of dissent. They considered this appropriate for survival, and they forgot their place before their own consciences and before history, which will remember them as they were and still are today.

And they tried to transmit that education to the three generations that followed them. And because we don’t accept it they brand us as traitors, saying that we are complicit with an enemy we don’t even know, one that hasn’t tried to “buy us,” “capture us,” or whatever other accusations the spokespeople make on that insufferable Round Table TV show. They don’t still believe in the consciousness of Marti. Later, in personal conversations, they acknowledge that there are problems with the system, and on occasion they even discover a certain admiration for the opposing positions that their fears, in moments of rebellion, don’t let them develop.

Beneficial Intellectuals

So what can remain of a cultural milieu whose Cuban Book Institute sent a group of intellectuals to a Book Fair in Mexico without guaranteeing them economic support? Especially since they were sent to represent Cuba, to obey the orders of the officials who sent them,   and to attack whomever opposed the State. They looked like a “delegation of famine,” and as official writers they were willing to wave the little flags so they could continue being considered “trustworthy” by the regime and keep receiving handouts as mercenaries.

Outside Cuba I have attended the National Literature Awards, to beg from the organizers of international events, with the excuse that “Cuba is poor,” so they will assume that its people are as well, and they bury their pride and decorum. The “Revolution” asked so many to sacrifice; there were times when it made them grovel to ask for pardon for words or actions committed, and the politicians were not grateful and made them lose their shame. I would have to quote the Indian Hatuey, “If that is the revolution, then I’d rather not be a revolutionary.”

Intellectuals, despite not sharing political views, are immeasurably respected for their creative and spiritual work and, in many cases, for their social mission. But they assume an attitude of silence, despite having their souls wounded by seeing how the cultural riches of a nation are lost. The Historian of Old Havana himself, Eusebio Leal, who has returned to the historic center the pride and respect it deserves, is silent before the government’s robbery. The great poet, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Director of the House of the Americas, also remains silent before the depredation, and will leave this life with the blood on his soul of the young men shot for trying to escape in a boat. The President of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), the ethnologist and writer Miguel Barnet, also is silent, as he has always known how to be. They, among many who are respectable voices, should join together to defend the cultural treasures of the nation.

What shall we do with the yacht Granma? Sink it into the sea?

Why doesn’t the Government of Cuba sell the yacht Granma? I know some who would buy it, to destroy it or worship it – the fate of that barge would be their choice. Why not sell all the possessions of the Argentine Ché Guevara? He has many fans in the world who would buy his weapons and uniforms with economic generosity. Let them strip those heroic museums throughout the island, filled with their materials of war. They could be auctioned off! But the egoism of the regime and their lack of respect for the culture has been constant. They get rid of art because they underestimate it. It bothers them because it doesn’t reflect their epic or because its authors are homosexual. They see it only as a source of wealth, and before the economic crisis they prefer to lose the nation’s heritage rather than the symbols that support their ideology, its great farce and fraud. And all this happens before the cowardly silence of the voices called to guard this heritage.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats.

Translated by Anonymous and Regina Anavy

December 22 2011

Leaders Die in the Land of Good and Evil

Two political leaders have died only a few hours apart. But aside from the timing, they were also incompatible in their ways of seeing life, acting and delivering for their people. One represented Justice on earth and the other personified evil. The first, Václav Havel, was a born fighter, an intellectual and politician by nature, one of those who did not wait for more suffering to oppose one of the most ferocious dictatorships of mankind. For this he was persecuted, humiliated, put into prison and tortured. At the end he died from the after-effects caused by his daring to face a dictatorship that suffocated its people. But at least his people knew how to reward him, and today they mourn him, because he gave them the gift of a free and prosperous country. He was President for the time he needed; he served his term and then watched as his country took off and developed.

The other death, of the dictator Kim Jong Il, we can’t call “human loss,” because for that we would have to have feelings that justify that category. He was no more than a tyrant, the most perverse and egomaniacal that ever lived. After his death, he left behind only the suffering that all of his kind guarantee: punishment, famine and death.

Václav Havel was not content to see his country sovereign, but also fought for the freedom of other nations such as Cuba. In his personal geography the Cuban archipelago occupied a central place. His interest in the Cuban reality and conditions for the Cubans was constant, and from the seat of his country in Havana, we felt the support of his Government for free thought, individual rights and national independence. In us he saw himself in the years of dictatorship, in the current totalitarian state that we suffer. He felt at one with us Cubans.

Kim Jong Il did not stand out in life other than having been the prince of this new type of dynasty shared by North Korea and Cuba, the family legacy. His father, the dictator and mythomaniacal Kim Il Sun, guaranteed the delivery of power to him, which his grandson also received, then is great-grandson. No matter that his country lacks food and freedom; the only requisite is that which coincides with the rest of his autocrat lineage: to maintain power. And before the general disgust of the civilized world, the Cuban government decrees national mourning for the vile tyrant.

At some point, maybe very soon, we will erect the monument that Václav Havel deserves. We will lay flowers there for the rest of our lives, one generation after another. While in North Korea, they would tear down the statues of the Il family, given the opportunity.

We Cubans hope the Korean people will soon get their freedom, like we also want, and we wish them happiness. We offer the Czech people our sincere condolences, and we mourn their leader, a friend who understood and accompanied us at all times. And we will mourn him for more than 72 hours.  We will mourn for eternity.

Farewell, President Václav Havel.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Translated by Regina Anavy

December 24 2011

A Little Report about Governmental Fraud

The last thing able to survive from our Cuban heritage is housing, owing to the totalitarian will of Fidel Castro, who dictated for more than 50 years that everything was his property and only he would decide what was whose and when it stopped being so. Fortunately or unfortunately, the family home was the only thing that couldn’t be sacrificed to survive the debacle that has lasted over 50 years. Soon that ban on the sale of real estate will be a memory.

In the 1980s, the Cuban people were robbed of jewelry inherited from their ancestors; the elderly, to satisfy their children and grandchildren and alleviate their extreme poverty, handed over their goods in exchange for a few “chavitos” [Cuban convertible pesos], which had value only in hard-currency stores, where the prices of the items were laughable. And everything worked like a robbery because there were no other stores where they could get these products, which were nothing special, other than the opportunity to acquire them.

Having dollars in those days could send you to prison for many years. People were confronted with the perfected gears of a governmental blackmail, which left some in bad shape, those who refused to sacrifice the memory of their ancestors for their family. In the end, the old women who gave up their engagement rings, relics that they exhibited on their hands as a window into profound feelings, did it with a mixture of pain and satisfaction, to please their families. They were left with the perception that they were duped like the Indians at the arrival of the Spanish, when they traded gold nuggets for stained glass.

The State also bought their porcelain vases, silver and gold, paintings that their ancestors hung on the walls to admire, design furniture, wealth that went into the coffers of politicians or their families and that now rest in safe deposit boxes in foreign banks. If I may say, it reminds me of the Jewish Holocaust, where they even removed gold teeth by force.

Our people are like the sugar cane: squeezed.

Cuban society has been sacked spiritually and materially, like the cane, which is repeatedly passed through the mill, where it loses consistency, becoming bagasse and powder. What’s painful is that everything happens in total silence, under the auspices and complicity of Cuban officials and intellectuals, who don’t comment because of the fear that always accompanies them in their artistic souls. They remained silent before the grand theft that exchanged jewelry for bread. For once they didn’t fulfill the role, so vaunted, that makes intellectuals the voice of society, its defender, its living memory. Instead, they preferred to turn their backs on the people, and history will recognize this in its righteous assessment.

But circumstances have changed so much for the ruling elite, that it has no choice but to revise its extreme methods and wave the flag, always for the sake of its benefit, ignoring the repeated and lengthy speeches that claimed that “private property will never return to Cuba.” Have you ever wondered how much pain it must cause Fidel Castro to see how the whole house of cards he forced us to visualize is crumbling? He wanted us to believe it as if it were true and palpable. What must be happening and what plans do they have for beginning to return some small freedoms that they took away before and that makes them feel they are losing their valued power? Surely it’s the same feeling of helplessness  the masters felt when they were forced to free their slaves. For let’s not deceive ourselves, no measure of this Government will ever improve things for the people, not even to restore the freedoms and rights that correspond to being human.

The right to be born….in the wrong place?

Now the government has approved the sale of houses, something that had already been announced. But it’s also been more than a year, as “by chance” they began in Cuba, after 50 years of stagnation, to update the property registrations. Everything has been done with the utmost urgency. It has been a so-called mandate for the state enterprises, with the inescapable management of citizens for any procedure involving their homes. In each municipality offices were opened to enter into the books the names of the current owners, with extreme urgency and pressure. They know that time is running out. The locals have handed over premises for these offices, given training courses, printed flyers that have been corrected, and delivered computers, files and office supplies. Visits by the Provincial Director of Justice and political officials are constant. They also are pressured with other requests. They have to answer for how much the total climbs when they get an entry on the books. The first person who began this task, as part of his duties as Prime Minister (Mayor of Havana), Juan Contino Aslan (may his small power rest in peace), was dismissed and now is on the “pajama plan,” (like his predecessors and political mentors, who allotted houses to their mistresses).

The Government of Cuba never makes a move that will not bring it compensation. But in this case, all the trappings lead us to the true intent, which is to take back the properties belonging to the old owners, who have left the country or died in Cuba.

The goal is to erase the past. When the State gets in its possession all the old properties, it will make them disappear and, with the registration, only the updated properties will remain. No property owner whose property was “nationalized” beginning in 1959, nor their heirs, will be able to reclaim something that doesn’t exist and that they can’t prove officially.

Perhaps some have conveyed their properties from exile, but they were the minority. And you might think it’s a commendable gesture of the Castros to assure Cubans that they will not be thrown into the street when the inevitable political change appears, but that would be naive. The real reason is that the power elite is trying to hide the family estates that were seized or inventoried after the departure of their original owners. Inside the great mountain of paper that contains the entries, the personal properties will be lost. By the way, this will reassure the generals and acolytes that they will not lose the confiscated property given to them when they came to power.

The country is bleeding 

The Cubans, in this carnival of small, unknown freedoms, in their desperation to change their reality, in the desire to fulfill some dreams, especially that of emigrating, now can sell their homes. Those who wish to stay on the island immediately think about how that money will solve all their pressing needs: eating, dressing and sleeping without the torture of not knowing what you will eat the next day. The government is already warning that it is “not responsible for the bad decisions of owners who spend the money and end up in homes in poor condition that may fall down, or for those who are wandering around without a roof over their heads.”

Once again, we wonder what function this supposed revolution had, which presumably was made to guarantee people a secure life with equal rights. What do we gain from suffering a dictatorship for more than 50 years, if at the end we find ourselves selling the only things we posses, the only things we could keep? And what’s worse, it’s a “socialist” state that has nothing to do with its people, who were its only standard and justification in this long march of agony.

 The Comandante‘s bag

As a child, we thought the “coconut” would come for us, for our body; it would come to take us away for not eating all our sweet potatoes, or for not going to bed on time. After growing up we knew that the man with the bag, the bogeyman, had passed through our lives, and he took in his bundle more than wealth and family belongings. He took the lives and dreams of my grandparents, parents, siblings, friends, those relatives who still grasp me with their nails and their teeth so they won’t be snatched, and already he controls my children and now, if we permit him, our grandchildren.

The Cuban State, for more than half a century, has held up the monster of “capitalism,” which it constantly criticized, to children who were frightened that the “coconut” would come, and by studying so thoroughly the original, it now has become the reflection and has converted itself into the image of ”the bogeyman who is coming to take us away,” in order to frighten us with capitalism as communist propaganda.

We Cubans have been scammed. The socialist State is slowly giving way to ideas with which they can perpetuate the dictatorship, a frank regression to capitalism. With the difference that now it will be more vulnerable, because there is no knowledge of either family or social infrastructure, which is necessary to meet and sustain a dignified life.

The big difference is in who wins at the considerable sacrifice of millions of Cubans in this more than half a century. The Castro family lives in luxurious mansions They own several cars and yachts. They travel constantly and have prosperous businesses, fortunes and properties in other countries. They definitely enjoy an income that allows them to live like millionaires.

The beginning of the 21st century has begun to be their end. They sense that they are running out of time. The only thing I don’t know is how and what they will develop for the family to maintain its status and wealth, and to ensure, of course, that it will not be returned later to the Cuban people.

While they prolong the strategies for usurious benefits for the Castro family, the Cuban peoples’ dreams of freedom and a prosperous economy are put off and continue being deferred.

Ángel Santiesteban Prats

Translated by Regina Anavy

November 16 2011

Art Versus Political Speeches and Promises

A few weeks ago I wrote a response about a naive comment on my blog that they signed under the name “Lori” where the following was recommended:

“It is my desire to improve myself, read books by writers who have had to leave my country. Read the bloggers of Vocesdecuba.com, come to Cuba and take the bus, walk the streets. Leave the tour guide and talk to people on my own, those who don’t give a learned speech that protects them from being persecuted. I wouldn’t stay in the hotel pool, but would walk along the malecón and learn about the Cuban reality. I wouldn’t waste my time with the shows at the hotel. I would go to the theater, to see the dilemmas facing today’s society. I wouldn’t buy only traditional music, which they recommend, but also the music that is not promoted, and whose songs are passed, thanks to Bluetooth, from cell phone to cell phone.”

This afternoon I remembered the many “Loris” who hide behind a nickname, either by ingenuity, opportunism or because they are actually cybernetic soldiers in the service of the Cuban state. I invoked them while attending the Bertolt Brecht Cultural Centre for the performance at the Vital-Theatre, of Four Less, by the playwright Amado del Pino, which won the Carlos Arniches International Award (2008) in Spain.

When the Director-General Alejandro Palomino said to light up the stage, on opposite sides appeared two small and humble rooms. In the center, a park bench, the kind that are scattered throughout the island and where Cubans still go to give flight, incredibly and with that stubborn calling, to their dreams and hopes for a dignified life.

The work, intense from the start, which builds to a crescendo from which the story breathes and takes shape, and, well, without being trite, could be called empty-nest syndrome, proposes a journey through a family’s destinies. Generations that harbor different and conflicting illusions. Andrés, the typical old father, a destroyed leader, expelled from the Communist Party, the usual stubborn and honest character that nevertheless needs to continue clinging to utopias, to promises that fade like clouds, who persists in his blindness to the present time and the changes that are imposed for a society lacking the most objective necessities, although he survives in a miserable reality, where fear, opportunism, spite and the abuse of sexual rights converge in an environment that doesn’t help heal the wounds.

Tamara: And that is your job? Do those who run things love you? Look, the worst is that there is no room even for a guy as romantic as you, who holds on to being revolutionary. (spoken with emphasis) Re-vo-lu-cio-nary, not to repeat the same litany…

Ania is Andrés’ daughter, who as a minor requires his signature to emigrate and definitively leave behind their home, and a country that is falling apart without mitigating the imposed conditions of extremism, which her generation doesn’t accept or understand or consider relevant. The mother, the ex-wife, begs him not to agree, that he not allow her to go.

Ania: I can’t take any more speeches, papá.

Tamara: … and at this rate we will have asylum in America!

Pollo: I had a professor who said you have to give up the past for the young. Not out of kindness but because if you only go half-way, they will knock you over and and go by on top of you.

Tamara: This is the only country where people don’t retire, where ministers are 70 years old. If there is no retirement, everything gets confused and you reach your forties receiving treatment as if you had  young promise, with tender certainty of tomorrow.

Andrés:We have become a marriage agency. Here the “uncoupled” Europeans meet partners who are healthy, educated, enthusiastic and even passionate. An entire nuptial prostitution!

In addition, Andrés has a son from a previous marriage, Saul, and because he did not give him legal authorization to leave the country, he separated Saul from his mother, who decided to give custody to the grandmother, so Andrés has a guilty conscience.

Saul: I never knew if you refused to sign to protect me or so you would not have your own problems, and that doubt was certainly the worst part of all.

Andrés: Now would be the time to answer you but I have no answer. Nor do I know; I was mixed up by convictions, by fear ….

Saul: Don’t go looking for answers, papá. They’re not needed. I want to learn to live without asking so much.

As if that were not enough conflict, Tamara, Andrés’ current wife, 15 years younger than he, is expecting her first child and has received a job offer abroad with the possibility of his accompanying them and which he refuses to consider, because leaving is treason, and also because he feels ashamed about his son Saul, who he separated from his mother and who, after all, has had the chance to emigrate, because he works on a cruise, but always returns.

Tamara: What can you offer your next child?  Maybe you’re denying him the possibility of a better life!

All the pros and cons of life as seen from different angles and options, accompanied by the characteristic humor that Amado del Pino places in his works, and that makes us feel like we’re there listening, a mental game of sympathy that infects us with brief sparks of cubanía.

Pollo is a gay friend and work colleague of Andrés. He has refused to join the Communist Party, because it’s the same people who berated him for his courage and honesty in living openly with his partner.

Pollo: It’s fashionable now to save us, to claim us, to enfold us, but neither am I going to ride – as old as I am – in that “triumphal” car. The boss called me on Monday to tell me that they offered me membership in the Party, now. If that means being in the vanguard, they should have given it to me a long time ago.

Andrés is discussing his doctoral thesis, which has been rejected because it was a study showing the low birth rate in the country, considering that young people emigrate at the time when they would normally be having children, and which would have given him his degree.

Tamara: Condemning those who leave or go away is shitty. Some do more damage by staying. My uncle watches the Round Table every afternoon and believes 100 percent of what they say on TV, but he dresses, eats and fixes up his home with what my cousins, who left, send him. I know he’s not rude, he still believes his ideas are true, but it seems to him that it’s too much to continue loving them, to pick up the phone and accept that they aren’t traitors. And that we are in the 21st century, because he buried his younger sister alive when she left for Puerto Rico.

Andrés: I suffer with the defects of this Revolution precisely because it’s mine.

Tamara: That’s the worst part of your thesis.

Andrés: If the young people leave, who are we going to work with? Who are we going to convince?

There’s a moment of greater anguish when Andrés accompanies his daughter to the airport, and she sings a verse of Fragancia. Then the sound of the plane taking off until a light goes out and leaves the stage dark.

The public swallows its suppressed tears because most of us suffer a similar separation.

Next comes a light that reappears like the birth of dawn.

Andrés: Fuck whoever invented the airplane – an agonized sentence because he can still hear the rumble of the engines.

Final theme song: “Thinking, thinking, tell Fragrance that I love her, that I cannot forget her, that she lives in my soul, go and tell her… tell her that I think about her, although she doesn’t think about me.”

Sometimes we doubt if life is different from theater, novels, conflicts that we writers invent and cast to the streets like a virus which then mutates and adapts to the environment to achieve greater damage. How do we measure the influence of our Art on the times, in the actual context of social life? And to what extent can we warn the next generations so they won’t be deceived like us?

I congratulate the playwright Amado del Pino for helping to disseminate with his art the hardships of the Cuban people, which are the same. A reality so alive and Cuban these days, like the royal palms. A denunciation of the social conflicts in today’s Cuba with respect to human feeling, regardless of their place of origin, language and geographic latitude. A perfect canvas that spreads, like rays of light to dark and unknown corners, with the technical and precise colors of Art in its fullness.

I counted the seats that were occupied and came up with 484, and because there were no more, they used the stairs and some chairs around the edge of the stage. Outside there were, like there have been for several weeks, two times that number of spectators who welcomed the news that the run would be extended until October 23.

I wish the Cuban communities scattered throughout the world could enjoy this work, inviting the group Vital-Theatre to book fairs and theater festivals, or by having it put on by artists in other cities. How is not important. The urgent need is to spread the work to get a greater understanding by other spectators about a national reality that has condemned us for over 50 years.

And paraphrasing a text of the play, I would like to remember that 50 years is two times 25. It is five times 10. That means 10 multiples of five. Fifty percent of a century. The full life of a man. A time and space where three or four generations converge, and that the most advanced has not been able to improve the fate of the last, in which coincide the fears and cause hair to fall out and wrinkles and furrows to appear on faces worn out by tears at seeing the departure of our children, siblings and friends. Several descendants who face the same abyss. They lose their teeth and their illusions. We have always been “four less,” up to a hundred less, thousands and millions less who walk scattered around the planet and whose spaces await them on this island of all.

Now it’s time to return. To retake the reins of a runaway country. To be able to spread hope in a land that doesn’t know that crop, so that eventually it serves as gratitude to all those who, in the past 200 years, have given their life for the Cuban nationality, free and authentic. This we owe to them who knew how to die for us, without having earned on our own a minute of that bitter agony.

Let them live in glory!

Translated by Regina Anavy

October 11 2011

Production Line for Cuban Robots

Cuban Television puts forth, in its horrible primetime schedule, another program of manipulated news coming from Telesur, with a Venezuelan ideologue-manipulator-agent-”journalist,” Walter Martinez, who has forgotten ethics and the first rule for a reporter: to report news without adding his personal opinion, which in all cases is linked to an ideology that he represents and that pays him, and therefore has a particular interest (like a pirate without a hook he appears every night on Cuban screens sniffing the rear ends of Chávez and Castro).

I would have to ask how much is the monetary gain in this matter, and the advertising benefit received by the president of his country, to lend his face and impudence to defend a socialism that, be it either from the 20th or the 21st century, is the same scam. Like a virus, it ruins the economy of our nations, and if Venezuelans want to be sure, go for a ride around the island, but not by those hospital-hotels that make it easier for their treatments, which I have nothing against, let alone healing a human being from any country, but the mass-media function for which they later are used. Let them go out on the streets, visit homes, hospitals almost in ruins, without doctors, medicine or surgical tools, etc.

To make matters worse for the Cuban people, in trying to educate us across generations like automatons, remember that there are dozens of programs that daily accommodate the official news chosen for political censorship, with the exact narration for all media information, and which are repeated as a torture for the rest of our existence. With two hours a day, deploying the best technology and the highest production costs, the inadvertent Roundtable show, which goes about building a militarized anti-logic, attacking everything that smacks of capitalism, its star attraction being the United States, then the right-wing presidents. Before it was Aznar, now Sarkozy and Berlusconi, among so many, while defending the Latin American Presidents who have allied themselves with Chávez.

To this we must add the three newscasts, the kings of media disinformation, who also go about justifying the international disasters of their ideological peers. The ineptitude and excesses of the abysmal administration of the Castro brothers of the weak national economy for half a century. The constant radio news. The famous Radio Reloj, which from minute to minute puts out the most incredible and unjustifiably manipulated news. The written press: read six pages of one and you’ve read all the rest. The daily Rebel Youth, which is no more than the journal of the oldies in rebellion who are in power. The publication of Workers, which is nothing other than the voice of betrayal of the Cuban working class in the service of the tyrannical masters.

Throw in the printed organ of the Communist Party of Cuba (the only party), the mother of all news, which picks and chooses what the people of Cuba should know. The magazine Bohemia, that not in the worst moments of past dictatorships was submissive or official. The provincial papers governed and monitored by the regional Communist parties. The digital news bulletins, also like parrots, copying what is accepted at the request of political superiors.

It’s as if they put speakers in our ears and shouted at us again and again what we should think, memorize and perform, and, as an exercise in boredom, start counting from 1 to 53, the years of dictatorship, to corroborate the emptiness that lights up that space. And last but not least, this Mr. Official Walter Martínez appears, and with each image, chosen also for its censorship, he gives us pre-processed news, underestimating the intelligence of viewers, and all this does is guarantee that we have the worst news program, not even the ”Democratic” Republic of North Korea’s are worse.

There is a reporter who is not silent for a minute, with a know-it-all air of God Almighty, who will hang posters, use nicknames, with the constant irony of always rowing toward the benefit of Chavez’ and Castro’s shore. In the past he would come to Cuba to record an interview with Fidel Castro, which was nothing more than an ode to the old Comandante, a chorus of criticism of his political enemies, a suck-up to the great leader. The only thing this man has achieved, is that in Cuba we have silent movies again. The viewers, with the volume at the minimum, guarantee the elimination of the interruption of his submissive voice so they can enjoy the images that the Cuban government censors of the national news. What he doesn’t know, or perhaps does and doesn’t mind, is that his program is also reviewed and edited before being aired, so that after censorship, there is another more refined Cuba where he at times appears to be too much of a “journalist “and becomes a spokesperson at the service of the enemy. Not even he, an official voice for both countries, has emerged unscathed from the arrogant and extremist ideology of Fidel.

And as usual, the mouthpiece Walter Martinez, when he comes to the end of his journalistic farce, says “You may turn off the camera, Mr. Director,” and he removes himself. The camera, before going dark, takes in his image, and with the gallantry of the frustrated official he wished he had been, he walks down the aisle to get closer to the screen as a symbol of the nightmare and the danger it represents, and then with greater impudence and cynicism makes a military salute to the camera that reaffirms what we already know, which is that he is at the service of the military in Venezuela and Cuba.

One day, I’m sure very soon, Mr. Walter, you will lose the benefits with which you have been bought and hopefully won’t find yourself on the roster that hands out paychecks for spies.

Translated by Regina Anavy

November 23 2011