“Angel Santiesteban is going to jail, and no one says anything.”

(THE RETURN OF MARTIN FIERRO)

Whoever is a friend, never
leaves him in the lurch,
but doesn’t ask him for anything
or expect everything from him:
always the most loyal friend
is honorable conduct.

Jose Hernandez

Where are you Knight (dashing ones?)?

Published by Amir Valle/Published in De Literature/Published 01-30-2013

Angel Santiesteban is going to jail.  So simple.

The Cuban judicial system shows, once more, that justice does not exist for those who think differently than Raul Castro who clearly is trying to become a Chinese dictator, which is to say, deceptively combining supposed economic and social reforms with greater repression.  The fools, idiots and dreamers of good and bad faith who so abound in our world will open their mouths amazed in the face of the “reforms” and shut them once more in the face of repression.

Angel Santiesteban is going to jail and no one is saying anything.

Circulating on the internet are all the proofs that demonstrate his innocence, all the videos where the witnesses confess that they were forced to testify against Angel, to lie in order to create an image of the writer as an offender.  And until this moment I have not seen any of the intellectuals who proclaim themselves champions of justice publicly speak against a manuever so dirty, so low. Their names do not appear, not even to comment on the numerous articles in defense that other people have published these days, since the Cuban judicial system condemned this outstanding writer to five years in jail.

Why do I insist that the intellectuals speak?

1.  Because the strategy of the government has been to try to criminalize a writer who has earned all his country’s literary prizes through a work that is recognized nationally and internationally.  And to accuse as criminals thinkers and creators of contrary ideas over whom they wield power has been and continues to be a strategy of dictators whether on the right or the left.

2.  Because Cuba has a prolific and heroic tradition where intellectuals set the course of history, defined social strategies, channeled social thought and now have an opportunity to show that we are not, as they assure many parts of the world, “sheep who bleat to the rhythm of the batons of the dictators, the Castro brothers.”

3.  Because outside of Cuba there are hundreds of prestigious intellectuals who personally know or have read the work of Angel Santiesteban and now have the opportunity to show that in truth, as some say, they raise their voices against injustice wherever it is committed.  And in this case they would be supporting a colleague, someone who may have ideological differences but is not a fundamentalist who sows terror, is not a corrupt politician, is not a heartless banker. . . he is just a writer who writes the hard daily truth about his country in his books and on his blog.

4.  Because before the writer Angel Santiesteban, by work and grace of cultural and political repression, was metamorphosed from a butterfly into a caterpillar, as I have written in another article, many of those Cuban and foreign writers proclaimed themselves “brothers,” and it was normal to hear them praise the “beautiful innocence of Angelito,” “the immense humanity of Angel,” “that heart with legs that is Angel,” “the loyalty of Angel with his friends, a proof of everything…”

These “reasons” are four, do you notice;  and it is on purpose because each deserves an answer:

1.  The answer is required by the fact that the dictator Raul Castro, who only; some blind men and opportunists see as “a step forward” if he is compared with the era of Fidel’s government, keeps using the intellectuals (those of the left, precisely from Havana) like the most perfect machinery of support for a dictatorship that each day attacks the freedoms that those intellectuals say they defend.  It is time they get rid of the giant, putrid ballast and clean their consciences.

2.  A resounding answer to the arbitrariness of condemning a writer ”in the free and sovereign Cuba of Raul Castro” is necessary.  It is time that Cuban artists and writers living on the island unite to defend the rights of someone like Angel Santiesteban, someone who (in case the proofs circulating on the internet are not enough) they know well enough to know that he is not that criminal to whom an official of the State Security (agent Camilo) announced ”are the five years in jail that we’re going to give you not enough?” weeks before the tribunals (who say they act independently of the political police) handed down (oh, coincidence!) that same sentence: 5 years.  Where are they right now, all those that put together the national and international racket when they saw that Cuban television was paying homage to two old repressors?  All those that swore to be ready to do whatever so that the “gray five years” do not return to Cuba — where are their pronouncements in favor of the right of Angel Santiesteban to think and write differently?

Eduardo Heras Leon (center) and Francisco Lopez Sacha (on the right) with Angel Santiesteban (between Heras and Sacha) when they were still “brothers.”

3. It requires a damning answer from many of those writers and intellectuals who spend a good part of their time following the news of what happens in Cuba (many of whom are familiar with the writer Angel Santiesteban or his work) is necessary.  In order to be coherent in the discourse that they usually put forward in their blogs, in their articles or interviews in the press, it is time that they condemn the “criminal blockade” of the United States against Cuba, just as they condemn the disastrous policies of the current Spanish government and the European Union, just as they support the hunger strike by a writer that in Spain honorably decided to fast in order to support a fellow countryman unjustly jailed, just as they openly criticize the attacks on liberties and human rights that they are committing in Spain and other European countries, or just as they condemn the attack against what was achieved in their countries in material social well-being, they also should pronounce against the disastrous and inefficient policies of the dictatorship in Cuba against liberties and human rights of its citizens, as is made evident, once again, in this absurd and unjust sentence against Angel Santiesteban; someone who, to be sure, also undertook a hunger strike seeking his own liberty (without any of these “righteous intellectuals of the left” supporting the campaign that we launched denouncing his illegal and arbitrary arrest in which, also, he was savagely beaten, as we demonstrated with photos); not to say that many seem to forget, when they defend any of the makeup strategies that the dictatorship achieves in facing the world, that for millions of Cubans on the island the words “social well-being” sound like science fiction.

4.  Finally, it is necessary that those who have been quite close to Angel Santiesteban for almost thirty years now and who today are in positions of power or influence or have sufficient relationships to be able to prevent the incarceration of Angelito, the writer, your “brother” until recently, someone with whom you shared happiness and sadness, terrible moments and glorious ones — it is necessary that they give an answer.

I have sworn many times not to write in my critical articles the name of any colleague, friend or former friend.  I have kept that oath, except in the case of my public criticisms against the immorality of the most immoral and opportunistic of Cuban writers:  Miguel Barnet, who also should do himself the favor of pronouncing his support of Angel Santiesteban who by no coincidence is a member of UNEAC, the institution over which Barnet presides.

But now I break that oath and, in order to cite only those in Cuba I know that were joined in brotherhood with Angel Santiesteban, I ask:  “Where are you now, Abel Prieto,  you who so many times mentioned Angel as the best story writer of my generation and, on two occasions in front of me, lauded the great human that he is?

Where are you now, Eduardo Heras Leon, you who spent entire years speaking of the need to make ethics and truth the only valid condition for fueling our lives and our works with the hallmark of literary and human authenticity?

Where are you now, Francisco Lopez Sacha, you who know well how clean, how humble, how big is the heart of Angel Santiesteban?  I can mention others, but I leave it at that.  It would only suffice for you three to sit down and talk (as on other occasions you colluded in noble and ignoble actions and now more than one of you is on the side of the dictator, you, Abel) in order to prevent them from throwing Angel Santiesteban behind bars.

I know that Angel would try to convince me that you have no other option but to remain quiet, look away, and make yourselves deaf.  I know that he would pardon you if you lift not a finger in his favor, even in the most difficult moments in that prison that today threatens his life.  But believe me, everyone, writers, artists, intellectuals of the island or anywhere else, alluded to in these words, if Angel Santiesteban has to complete even a day of that unjust sentence due to silence from fear or convenience, I know that as long as I think of your names, your professional careers, your books written and yet to be written, I will find as my answer those worthy words that the great Eliseo Diego pronounced before the outrages that the people of our town began to live because of the power-sick madness of those politicians who today misgovern Cuba:  “May God forgive you, I cannot.”

Published in Amir Valle Blog

Translated by mlk

January 30 2013

Socialism = Inefficiency

A neighbor told me that the re-involution of ’59 had taken property from owners but had not found a substitute.  The director of a business will never be the owner, never have the sense of ownership over what he administers.  To illustrate that there are more than thousands or millions of examples, it would suffice to offer a country like this one, worn out, a culture where theft is not seen as a crime because to survive death should not be punishable.

A man who, outside the State work plan of his job as a carpenter, makes a curtain rod to sell it and so is able to guarantee the feeding of his child should not be condemned, although for that he has had to use tools of the State, and to take pieces of wood and laces that do not belong to him.

A culture where the concept of “social property” is so foreign and absurd that Marx and Engels would feel so horrified by the result that inspired their theories, that they would not hesitate a second in refuting their communist philosophy.

An example of this was when, some days past, a gas station was about to explode in Santiago de Cuba. The video of the events reveals in detail all the ineptitude of the authorities of the place, from their own workers of Cupet, who immediately washed their hands and distanced themselves from the events — that reminds me of “I am returning, Captain,” when abandoning the sinking ship — but the irony of this case was that, thanks to their cowardice, the “Captain” and the workers of the station saved their lives.

The irresponsibility of the firefighters can be seen in the video in spite of their arriving before the police.  They parked the firetruck near the incident, and got out with the same hurry with which they might have arrived at the beach on a summery morning.  They watched, distantly, the events as if they were not any of their concern.  They did not run to spray foam, like one supposes they would do in this kind of fire, they established no perimeter security, they just limited themselves to being part of the watching public, like those children nobody wanted filling the tanks of their motorcycles using their helmets, and how the neighbors came with boxes to stock up on precious liquid, at the expense of paying with their poor lives as the price of such imprudence.

Of course the inevitable happened, what the least mentally capable person could have predicted from the beginning: The explosion!  Everything began with the late arrival of the police authorities. They immediately inspired terror. Looking at it coldly: taking that gasoline from a puddle in the middle of the street was not a crime, it was even — if you will — beneficial, because it would be less liquid spilled.  But, as if the rural guard had arrived to distribute machetes, those young men decided to keep their distance, and in a hurry they disappeared,  still euphoric for having gotten some gains with no apparent sacrifice, they decided to kickstart their motorcycles, and then, with the first spark they detonated the bomb.

That whole group that appears in the video was caught in the fire trap.  For the majority it was like the hug of death. The general reaction of the people of Cuba was unanimous and identical:  first toward the inactivity of the workers and the Boss of Turno of the gas station at not turning off the electricity in order to so stop the flow of the combustible liquid; then, the uselessness of the firefighters at not assuming, exercising and implementing what is established for those cases; then for the late arrival of the agents of order in their rickety Lada patrol car, which made its entrance like an old cart that comes in search of dead gladiators in the Roman Coliseum.  None of these appeared with the quickness required, by the political directors of the Government in order to prevent the fire that approached like the night.

It was such a big chain of ineffectiveness, worthy of being received by the Guinness Records (very similar to the tragedy that occurred in the Chernobyl nuclear plant); but the worst of all is how to understand how great is the misery in which our people subsist that it brought the victims to commit such foolishness.  That made me think of all the inhabitants of the Cuban archipelago that have launched themselves at sea, aware of such as an act of suicide.  We have assumed a culture of danger where “whatever God wants” is the determining phrase that decides our lives.  For the majority of Cuban families, it is very normal to have suffered the loss of a loved one in the Florida Straits, there we have spilled millions of tears and prayers for our missing brothers.  All the flowers of all the springs of the world will not manage to honor those who offered up their lives in the effort to cross the agonizing ninety miles of sea that separate us from the promised land in search of a liberty so long dreamed of by our people.

One of the lessons that the explosion in the Santiago de Cuba gas station leaves is that those people lost their lives for a few liters of gasoline, that is to say:  five or six Cuban convertible pesos (CUC), that was the value that they gave them.  Another lesson is that the ineptitude of the Cuban “Government” was absolute and at all levels.  And, if it serves anything, almost with days of differences, to a greater or lesser degree, the explosion in the refinery of Apure in Venezuela, and the gas station of Santiago de Cuba, both events coincide, maybe in an apparent warning from God that with time, Venezuela will become the mirror of Cuba: an ineffective totalitarianism.

May God protect Venezuela because in Cuba many Cubans believe that He already forgot them long ago.

Translated by mlk.

October 28 2012