Grammatical Ambiguity

Young people in Camagüey are faithful to his/their* ideas.

My friends tell me that lately I’m getting to be too “Camagüey.” In my previous post I put two audacious (imaginary) delegates at the First National Conference of the Cuban Communist Party, hailing from two little villages: Piedrecitas and Magarabomba, both near the town of Florida. Some — pointedly and thoughtlessly — asked me if this “closeness” didn’t imply some kind of grammatical political ambiguity, suggesting in a veiled way that our solutions will come from the peninsula of the same name.

To get even with them for this thrust I offer you a photo of this propaganda billboard, located a few yards from the Camagüey Train Station. This is definitely a grammatical vagueness of profound political ambiguity, typical of the imprecise use of the third person possessive.

To whose ideas are young people from Camagüey faithful? Their own? Or to those of the gentleman represented in the drawing? I can attest that those with whom I have spoken have their own ideas, appropriate to their time and their interests.

*Translator’s note: In Spanish the third person possessive pronoun agrees with the “thing possessed,” not with the “owner of the thing.” Hence, it is not grammatically clear whether the young people of Camagüey agree with their own ideas or with Fidel Castro’s.

17 January 2011

And if Nothing Happens?

It is less than three weeks until the First National Conference of the Communist Party of Cuba, and it seems that almost no one cares about what will happen there. Perhaps we haven’t lost the habit of events like these coming accompanied by billboards, posters, TV spots, heroic exploits of labor dedicated to them, and other things of that type, perhaps the sober publicity already forms a part of the Party’s new methods with which it wishes to inaugurate this conference. I don’t know, the truth is that the lack of enthusiasm doesn’t correspond to the importance that this occasion should have, where the ‘historic generation’ that started this process will have a final opportunity to clarify their intentions regarding the future of the Nation.

As a responsible citizen I feel that I have a civic duty to express myself, going through the steps ahead of time of overcoming the dilemma between giving and denying legitimacy to those people called together by the Party. The easiest thing would be to declare those days a vacation, and to pay no attention to what is agreed on there. But I live in a country where the current constitution establishes that it is this Party that commands and leads, leaving me no choice but to listen and hope.

January 28, 2012 is a new opportunity to pay attention. We cannot discount the possibility that the delegate from Piedrecitas, or the young secretary from a unit in Magarabomba, may take it in mind to rub salt in the wound in the middle of a plenary session, and that, through a window inadvertently left open, a fresh wind might blow in to awaken the entire paralysis. If nothing happens, that is to say if the boring unanimity prevails, if no one appears who dares to say, with total clarity, “my mouth is my own,” if amid the rhythmic applause they approve by proclamation the same concepts that currently tie our hands and isolate us, if in the end the Conference becomes more of the same, then we will see how those who expected something react. I suppose that at least they won’t add to the applause, and they will take one more step up in the shadows, that is if they are not afraid to live.

Dynastic Socialism

None of the classics of Marxism-Leninism could foresee the possibility that a country formally declared as socialist would be governed by a family dynasty. But now we get the news (?) after the death of Kim Jong Il that the leadership of that country will be left in the hands of his third son, Kim Jong-un, whom they call “the brilliant comrade.”

With the information available to us on this island, we should not make predictions about whether the new Kim has reformist tendencies, or is subnormal, or is more totalitarian than his predecessors. What I do consider useful to put on the table is the ease with which in this country’s public offices are inherited and, what interests us most, is how the Cuban media, private property of the Communist Party, approaches the issue: taking it for granted.

In the name of an alleged respect for the sovereignty of nations, they will recognize the legitimacy of the new leader, happy that a precedent exists, quick to point out the “imperialist maneuvers” or “media campaign” launched with regards to a family clan’s perpetuating itself in power. We must pay attention to the degree to which such a monstrosity is accepted, because said acceptance will be directly proportional to the proclivity to repeat here what happens there.

And I won’t even try the line, “this is not North Korea.”

19 December 2011

The Options

In the lower left corner of my screen I have the Windows Taskbar. When I click it suggests different shutdown options:

Switch User

Log Off

Lock

Restart

Sleep

Hibernate

Ah, if it were only that easy! On the keyboard and over the mouse keys I have a monopoly on decisions, but in the realm of reality I can barely manage to blow the dust off my table. Cubans in exile approached our shores to launch fireworks. The newspaper Granma assures me they are terrorists. I saw groups on the Malecon in the rain, brought there in a bus with government license plates, and they want to convince me that it is the people spontaneously gathering to confront the provocations of “the employees of the empire.”

I get calls from almost all the provinces in the country denouncing arbitrary arrests, beatings of opponents and other abuses. On Sunday the Ladies in White try to march down 5th Avenue and are forced into official vehicles and taken away. There are people on hunger strikes, others prepare and sign documents, the Twitterers tweet, the poets do their thing, the movie lovers gather in the screening rooms of the 33rd Cinema Festival.

Nightly TV programming includes a science fiction film where a young man leaves the plane of reality and enters a computer game. I didn’t have nightmares, but on waking up this Monday I surprise myself trying to find a comparison between the options offered by technology and those I just haven’t found in reality.

13 December 2011

Why Don’t the Bells Toll?

Constructed in 1927, when the exploitation of its waters brought prosperity to San Miguel de los Baños in the province of Matanzas, the church of San Miguel Archangel today sees its bells muted due to structure’s precarious state. Darovic Caballero, a Cuban priest only 27, lives attentive to the almost three thousand souls in his parish. His voice brings spiritual nourishment to the faithful. He is heard loud and clear and it is understood, by virtue of his transparency, that he speaks from the heart.

Not far from the temple, the proud edifice that was once a place of pilgrimage for those who wanted to improve their health is also in ruins. Some say that the medicinal mineral spring’s bicarbonated waters — magnesium, calcium, with a touch of radioactivity and colloidal sulfur — have lost their curative powers; I haven’t had a chance to try it but I will investigate. What I could confirm was the frustration of a population that went from prosperity to abandonment.

The Archangel Michael is depicted holding a balance in one hand and a sword in the other, while under his feet, evil lies defeated. The leader of of the heavenly host still has a lot to do. How I envy people of faith!

28 November 2011

The Temporal Dimension

From all sides voices are heard asking the government to hurry. An editorial in the Catholic publication Espacio Laical emphasizes that the transformations must be made with the greatest possible urgency, that certain adjustments shouldn’t wait and suggests that we are already coming to the end of people’s patience. In a letter signed by L.R. Perez Gonzalez and published last Friday in the newspaper Granma, the author reflects the opinion that it is necessary to show a little more agility in making decisions and to do so as quickly as possible. He also recalls that the people are patient, revolutionary, and self-sacrificing in everything… “but we can’t trust.”

Just like in those computer games played by teenagers almost everywhere in the world, in the case of political and social transformations there is a horizontal bar marking the time left to take action. Paradoxically, if the player doesn’t go fast enough from the beginning, he will have to speed up his actions even more in the final seconds and this is frequently a source of more mistakes.

Yes, I know that it’s one thing to participate in a game where there are strict rules to follow and another to lead a nation at one’s whim, where those who govern us have imposed the rule of victory at any price and they have the power to cheat, to break promises, to disqualify opponents, and even to erase the records of the past. But time is running out and soon they will no longer be able to buy one more minute. It’s as if the sound of ticking was getting louder in all the clocks and the final pages of this 2011 calendar was more brilliant and striking. “Comrade Cronos” is demanding the floor, screaming and pounding his fist on the table.

22 November 2011

Compete or Emulate?

One of the few controversies we’ve seen among the supporters of the socialist system in Cuba has been the contention over moral and material stimuli. I say it can in some way be called a controversy, because in reality the defenders of moral stimuli raised their voices as if they were arguing, but they were doing it with someone whose arguments they didn’t know or simply didn’t even listen to.

“It is about creating consciousness with wealth but about creating wealth with consciousness,” the Maximum Leader said then, contradicting in some way the Marxist tendency to put the material over the spiritual, and this was how Socialist Emulation became rooted in our reality. To be a practitioner of this emulation, an advanced worker, or an accumulator of those merits that were identified with the letters A through K, constituted “the driving force of production” that managed to meet the goals and allowed the workplace to claim the Heroes of Moncada banner. At a year-end assembly each worker was given a certificate that specified the number and quality of the merits obtained, which could be presented in the coming year to support an application for domestic appliances.

These union committees were frequently held in which we had to determine if the refrigerator would be given to Karitina, who had merits A, B and C, or to Sarria, who had earned B, C, E and H, and on more than a few occasions cumbersome technical ties occurred in which we had to decide whether to give the television to the lady who had a mentally retarded child or to the one whose elderly mother had terminal cancer.

One fine day European socialism was shipwrecked, and those subsidized items stopped arriving in the country, and another fine day the economy was dollarized and “the Shopping” appeared, where there was no need to show up with a bonus certificate handed out at a union meeting, rather a wad of greenbacks had the miraculous ability to turn itself into goods and services.

People began to understand that to obtain those dollars, which later metamorphosed into Cuban Convertible Pesos (CUC), you had to do the opposite of what was one required to earn merits. Then prostitutes looking for tourists returned, and the grandmother who survived a cancer that wasn’t terminal had to move into a corner of the living room because it was necessary to rent her room (the only one with a window onto the street).

Even the government understood that everything was changing and among distrust and suspicion it opened up opportunities for self-employment, where surviving the cruel laws of the marketplace required neither diplomas nor medals but rather efficiency and profitability through pure and simple competency.

That extra effort that the entrepreneur puts into her kiosk to sell more is the most important change that has occurred in Cuba in recent years. This need to be competitive is the best therapy to begin to heal the anthropological damage caused by the crazy whims of certain manufacturers of utopias.

14 November 2011

Which Party Owns This Yacht Now?

It struck me that this yacht moored at the Cienfuegos marina is the same one that workers for the magazine Cuba International toured the bay on in 1975. That was a courtesy of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in the then province of Santa Clara*, in recognition of a special issue about the territory, prepared by a group of journalists and photographers, that was triumphantly distributed at the commemoration of the XXII anniversary of the assault on the Moncada barracks.

I could not forget that tour shared with my colleagues, now scattered throughout the world. I had told Yoani the story so many times — she wasn’t born yet — that she could repeat it in all its details: the gargantuan buffet, the open bar and, especially, the illusion that this privilege unquestionably put us momentarily above the rest of Cubans, something which we truly deserved.

It had to be the same yacht because my fantasy wanted it to be and because to board it together with my wife to relive those events in a new light was something I didn’t want to miss. So we went to an office with the suspicious name of “the operation” where we paid the fare and they gave us a receipt to give to the captain at the dock of the Jagua Hotel. A group of tourists (Canadians or French?) boarded the boat smiling, while we made our way to the best corner of the upper floor from where we could take good photos of the voyage. I remember that from there, 36 years ago now, the singer Pedro Luis Ferrar enlivened that mythical journey I made with my colleagues from the magazine.

Solicitous and gallant, the captain asked us our nationality. “I’m from Camaguey, she’s from Havana,” I said, with a touch of pride. The man maintained his smile and said something about the drinks being included in the voyage. A few minutes later he returned to say that he’d been obliged to inform headquarters that there were two Cubans on board, “and if gives me great pain to say this,” but it is absolutely forbidden and, in consequence, “we very much regret” that we would to leave the ship.

Yoani demonstrated the enormous superiority of not telling me “I told you so” and stood up, but not before spitting out to the amiable captain something that made him uncomfortable. I managed to offer up a little speech in French (my poor and mangled French) to the astonished tourists who suddenly felt themselves in the South Africa of apartheid. Once on the dock, I asked Ramiro Torres, the official from headquarters who came to enforce the order that we get off, if he knew that this had been  Communist Party’s yacht in the former province of Santa Clara, but the man was very young at that time and knew nothing of an era in which another kind of segregation predominated, one in which this humble servant was a beneficiary.


Translator’s note:
In 1976 Santa Clara province was split up into three provinces: Villa Clara, Cienfuegos and Sancti Spiritus.

7 November 2011

The Time of “The Feathers”

54…To confront racial, gender, religious belief, sexual orientation and other prejudices that can give rise to any form of discrimination or to limit the exercise of the rights of persons, among them those who occupy public office, of the masses and in defense of the Fatherland.
Taken from the base document of the First Cuban Communist Party Congress.

I have news that in this last half century they have denied no one the chance to be a member of the Communist Party, an official of the armed forces, or a member of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution for having a certain sex, race, or for being presumed to be homosexual. After the 4th Party Congress in 1991 the opening was extended to those with religious beliefs, such that Point 54 of the Base Document of the First Conference of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) has been edited obviously to permit, as of January 2012, for homosexuals, bisexuals and lesbians to join the PCC, hold responsible positions in government or to be leaders of some organization, without having to undergo the humiliation of hiding their preferences in the closet.

Other unmaskings will occur, as happened after the Fourth Congress with the believers who had disguised themselves as atheists in order to keep their red cards. But this time it will not be the crucifixes or the ikines of the god Orula that will be exposed to view, but the long-suppressed “feathers.” Then we will be able to ask Comrade Secretary General of our nucleus, even the captain of the tank squad, a question about his husband, or to comment to the union official, and also the Sector Chief of the National Revolutionary Police, how well he physically keeps his commitment.

What it does not, yet, get us, is the ability to found new parties, unless the reference to “and other” underlined in the citation from the document alludes to the prejudices and discrimination that we are subject to, those of us who do not share the ideology of the Communists. Perhaps we will no longer see our rights to participate in our own political organizations limited, and we will be able to defend the Fatherland from its true enemies?

2 November 2011

Climate of Utmost Trust

“1.8 …a climate of utmost trust should be encouraged and the necessary conditions created at all levels for the widest and honest exchange of opinions, both within the Party an in its relations with the workers and the people. This would allow, in a framework of respect and commitment, the expression of ideas and diverse concepts, in a way that disagreements are assumed to be a normal thing.”

Taken from the base document of the First Cuban Communist Party Congress.

On this point I have more questions that opinions. Here are some of them:

Does this climate of utmost trust refer exclusively to the relations that the Communist Party establishes (a) among its militants, (b) in its relations with the workers and the people?

Does the widest and honest exchange of opinions include the political opinions of others or those adverse to the ideology of the Communist Party?

It is understood that this must happen in a framework of respect, but what does a framework of commitment signify?

Can the expression of diverse concepts happen through the mass media?

Will “spontaneous reprisals” be prohibited, such as the repudiation rallies directed against those who express in the streets and in a peaceful way their disagreement with the politics of the Communist Party?

Will official reprisals be ended, such as arbitrary arrests, preventing people from entering public places, home arrests, kidnappings, forced interrogations, denial of permission to leave the country, false accusations and public disgrace with no right to respond, the control of technological and communications media, the confiscation of literature, wiretapping, surveillance, harassment and other oppressive activities practiced daily against those who don’t want to wait to be given permission to be honest?

25 October 2011