Father Conrado’s Last Mass at Santa Teresita

Minutes before officiating his last Mass in St. Teresita Church in Santiago de Cuba Father Jose Conrado went to visit the Sanctuary of El Cobre. There, at the foot of the Virgin of Charity, on his knees, he prayed silently. Then he stood up, sang and prayed to the patron saint of Cuba. Noticeably moved, with tears in his voice, he begged for his sheep, for the priests that will substitute for him in his church, and for the people of Cuba. It was almost six in the evening and the temple was practically empty.

We are used to seeing a priest in his role as emissary of God to the faithful, teaching the Gospel, hearing confessions and forgiving our sins. This Friday on the verge of abandoning the congregation he was responsible for for almost fifteen years, Father Jose Conrado was our ambassador to the Virgin. Not even lacking absolute faith could anyone could be oblivious to the emotions that vibrated at the altar. Joseph Conrad pleaded for us all. I have no doubt, we were heard.

10 June 2013

They’re Already Arriving

Eliecer Avila arriving back in Cuba after traveling in Europe and the United States.

Last night Eliecer Avila returned, they tell me that today Berta Soler is coming, and Thursday we will greet Yoani and then the others will return: Guillermo Fariñas, Wilfredo Vallín, Juan Antonio Madrazo, Manuel Cuesta… and while some arrive others will leave, among them Dagoberto Valdés, who leaves today after years of his exit permit being denied.

Now missing is permission to visit or return permanently to Cuba for all those they have prevented from returning to their Homeland. Some won’t be able to do it because they died in exile, among them our Celia Cruz, others will require special guarantees, like Carlos Alberto Montaner and others who have been demonized.

“Cubanness,” that indefinable abstraction, will be stronger than any ideology, any religion. When sitting at the table we look at each other and recognize ourselves as Cubans, Cubans, period! as the great blogger rightly said; only then will solutions begin to appear, far from definitive, and bringing new problems, new challenges, new questions.

Someone will have to explain to me what must happen for this miracle to appear.

27 May 2013

The Weight of History

This Tuesday, in the morning, tens of thousands of Young Cubans will be taking their history exam as part of their entrance exams to higher education.  The main content of the test is Cuban history, and it covers from the wars for independence of the 19th century through the early 21st century. To enter university, one has to pass three exams: mathematics, Spanish and history.  The final score on these tests represents 50 percent of the final score that is added to the other 50 percent formed by the cumulative grade point average acquired through three years of high school. Thus, the final scores are accumulated with which students compete for a place to study the major of their choice.

Very often, the opportunity to study a specific major is lost because of a missing decimal point in the final score. That missing decimal point can be the result of giving the wrong answer on the subsection of a single question.

Tomorrow, tens of thousands of Cuban youths’ future will depend on the way they answer questions like these: “When was the Moncada Program* fulfilled?” “What has been the repercussion of the US Blockade against Cuba?” and others of a similar style in which ideology is most important.

Many will answer what is expected of them because to a great extent their chances to fulfill their vocation depends on it.  Then, they will have to face the “University is only for Revolutionaries” requisite, and they will have to make new choices, such as attending an act of repudiation**, or raising their hands to participate in a meeting, or applauding something they dislike.  But, one day they will laugh at all that, and they will tell their children what they had to do to obtain that college degree hanging on their wall.

Translator’s notes:

* The Moncada Program was a series of demands and measures stated by Fidel Castro in his History Will Absolve Me (La historia me absolverá) speech while conducting his own defense at the trial for his assault to the Moncada Army Barracks in 1953.

** The linked video shows images of an act of repudiation against the author of this blog.

13 May 2013

The Conquests of the Proletariat / Reinaldo Escobar

…one of the most noble forms of serving the Nation is to devote yourself to WORK

This Wednesday we will once again see the traditional May Day parade. In a difference from other countries, where the working class takes advantage of these events to make its demands, our workers will march with photos of Hugo Chavez (to whom, at the last moment, this day is dedicated) and will carry a variety of previously approved slogans. The major placards of the day will hold the slogan: “For a prosperous and sustainable Socialism.”

Although it seems incredible, not a single person will carry a sign asking for higher wages (even though the whole world knows and proclaims it that no one has enough to live on), no one will demand the liquidation of the system of dual currency, or a reduction in prices, or the building of affordable housing, or improvements in transportation. Much less will we be able to read something relative to the freedom to unionize or any protest over the elimination of jobs.

The official response to the absence of these demands is that this is a government of the workers and peasants and there is no reason for them to march in protest against themselves. They know that they will have to wait until there are the objective conditions to improve the situation. They have been persuaded that if progress is not faster it is because the country can’t manage to produce more and better and this, it’s obvious, is their own responsibility, so how can they come out in protest?

Those watching the parade from the grandstand have been very busy lately satisfying the conquests of the middle class. The purchase of cars and houses, expanding the cellphone network, freedom to travel the world, marketing of modern home appliances, permission to open a little business and to hire workers, acceptance of the law of supply and demand in the marketplace. Someone from that other sector of the self-employed will happily wave their prosperous flags and, at best, they might even be allowed, in the midst of the parade, to sell something to the workers who are those who ensure their sustainability.

I think it was Lenin who said once that reality is stubborn and obstinate.

29 April 2013

For a Sustainable Prosperity

Two new words have been incorporated into the Newspeak of Cuban political officials and leaders: prosperous and sustainable. These “recent” adjectives are greatly used to describe the society they are trying to achieve or the socialism that is supposedly under construction.

Both terms were rolled out in General President Raul Castro’s inauguration speech for his second term, and soon were already appearing on the banners hung behind the presidential table at official events, on TV ads, and very quickly on billboards. In fact part they make up a part of the key slogan of the coming May Day.

In recent decades prosperity has always been seen as a petty bourgeois aspiration, and sustainability as a concept rejected for being opposed to the voluntarism* prevailing in the long years of the mandate of the comandante en jefe, years when the Maximum Leader tried to implement his crazy ideas “at any price.”

It is difficult not to associate prosperity with visible (if not obvious) improvements in the material life of individuals: A comfortable home, appliances, a private vehicle, a balanced diet, clothing that satisfies individual taste, resort vacations and other details that healthy human ambition can add to an endless list.

The best way to understand what the new bosses interpreted as sustainable is to list what has been dismantled as unsustainable: the schools in the countryside, unearned handouts, free workplace cafeterias, inflated payrolls to mask unemployment, decentralization of university education, “social workers”**, the Battle of Ideas as an omnipresent super-ministry investment, and other more abstract things such as the waste of resources and galloping corruption.

As I enjoy playing with words I think that, as a comprehensible goal, a “sustainable prosperity” — the Chinese say “a moderate prosperity” — is better than “prosperous sustainability.” The first step would be to decriminalize prosperity, eliminate forever the persecution against anyone who manages to legitimately improve their life, and for this it would be worth the redundancy to legalize many things, among them the ownership of the means of production and the exploitation of the labor of others, understanding “exploitation” as an economic term, not as cruelty. Where does all this lead. . .?

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Translator’s notes:
*”Voluntarism” in this context relates to the concept as it was defined by Mao:any social or economic barrier can be overcome by sheer willpower and “voluntary” action.
** “Social work” in this context means an army of young people put to work on government projects.

22 April 2013

I’m Back

After a long time without entering my blog (particularly because of technical difficulties with the DesdeCuba portal) I am here only to tell you that I am alive.

My absence has awakened suspicions that it was Yoani who was writing my texts and not the reverse, as was believed on the birth of Generation Y. Others have said that I’m so busy with domestic matters that I don’t have time for anything. Sneering and more sneering. Don’t worry, I can take it

In these days of technological silence, many things are happening, perhaps the most important being the elections in Venezuela. I would have loved to have had my say here, especially to be mistaken in my hopes, but I say it now: I wish Capriles had won.

April 13th also passed by, a date for which there was a kind of prophecy. As is obvious, nothing happened.

My friend the Cuban photographer Ivan Cañas Boix turned 67, and I couldn’t properly congratulate him, with more hope than nostalgia.

And Yoani’s journey is underway, a topic I resist talking about, out of basic modesty.

Well, friends, the thing is, I’m back.  I’ll return on Monday.

19 April 2013

Bye guys…

I must be brief because I’m dedicating myself to “the tasks belonging to my sex” while Yoani undertakes her exemplary work as a citizen ambassador. What most caught my attention in the recent “elections” was Raul Castro repeating that Machado Ventura would not leave, nor would we have to wait another day to know the names of the members of the new Council of State. What I most admired was the popular indifference. As I noted in my Twitter account, there were no popular celebrations, people didn’t go out into the street to celebrate the reelection of their leader, the car horns didn’t make the slightest noise, and it didn’t occur to anyone to hang a Cuban flag from their balcony. If we compare this chilly reception with the demonstrations we saw in Ecuador at the reelection of Correa, or the symbolic welcome Chavez received in Venezuela, we have to conclude that those Revolutionary emotions, that overwhelming enthusiasm so bragged about, have died forever.

This will be not only be the last term of Raul Castro, but also the swan song for the already dying Cuban revolution.

25 February 2013

A Very Old Trip With Enormous Wings

After receiving 20 refusals for an Exit Permit over the last five years, yesterday, Sunday, the blogger Yoani Sanchez crossed the border of Jose Marti airport in Havana to fly to Brazil.

A dozen countries are included in this trip to accept academic invitations and attend social networking and media events. If, as has been said, Yoani was the thermometer to measure the scope of the new travel regulations, we have to accept that — despite its limitations — this is the most important reform implemented by Raul Castro in the political and social realm. A few hours earlier Rosa María Payá, daughter of the deceased opponent Oswaldo Payá, had headed for Europe and now other prominent personalities of civil society, such as Dagoberto Valdez, Berta Soler and Wilfredo Vallin, are arranging their visas.

Currently the travel restrictions are being maintained only against those who were imprisoned during the Black Spring of 2003 and who now “enjoy” the status of being on parole but have not been pardoned or reprieved, so by law they are considered to have outstanding convictions.

The presence abroad of those who are now crossing the national borders represents the exercise of popular diplomacy by citizen ambassadors. It breaks the monopoly of the Cuban authorities and its official sector, as the “tolerated inconvenient” spread a version of our reality.
18 February 2013

Responsible Citizens; Citizens with Rights

Alicia Barcena, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), said in Havana that the new economic policies dictated by Raul Castro to make people pay taxes will open the way for there to be responsible citizens. What the Mexican Specialist did not say was that when citizens are given the responsibility to share the social costs through their taxes, they also must provide them legally backed rights to express themselves freely and to associate freely.

To be responsible for the economic costs of a social process about which you have no say, you can not change, can not be an  “enviable” practice.

14 February 2013

A Clarification for the Unbiased Observer

At ten o’clock this morning, Monday, February 4, not even the government website Cubadebate had fresh news about the final results of the so-called “Elections” in Cuba. Clearly we can bet that all 612 candidates were approved for the 612 posts as Deputies. Perhaps that’s why the news that Fidel Castro has reappeared filled the morning news on TV.

As on every occasion in the past, we will receive, in due time, a flood of numbers that break down by province the number of voters at the polls and the number of annulled and blank ballots. No one will be able to dispute this data, despite the fact the official media insists on proclaiming that any citizen can be present at the time of scrutiny — even foreigners!

The electoral law establishes that on completion of the count, the managers of each polling place will record the results on a blank ballot, identical to that used to cast the votes, where only the names of the candidates appear. This ballot must be displayed to inform the public.

The law is particularly emphatic in insisting that it is forbidden to use any other paper to write out this information. In all these years it hasn’t occurred to anyone to design and print a model where there are spaces for the number of ballots annulled and left blank, along with the number of people appearing at each polling place.

If there were such a model, anyone would have the time to travel around by bike or on foot to the schools in their municipality that served as polling places, and in coordination with others compute the results for the province and at a national level. The lack of such a model would require civil society to have an observer in every one of the 30,000 schools throughout the country to tally this information.

When there is no way to prove, compare, or disprove, with evidence, data of such importance and which generally serves as a measure of discontent, there is a right to suspect the transparency of the process. There are many people who don’t need to know the details I describe here to lack confidence in the electoral results. It is a clarification directed at the unbiased observer who tries to take an objective position.

4 February 2013