Thank you!

When I invited a group of friends in December to send messages for the second anniversary of the Desde La Habana blog, I didn’t expect that so many would reply, much less with such praiseful greetings to the blog and to me.

In my style, I’ll continue reflecting the reality of my country and its people, without asking anyone for permission, be it from the opposition or from the regime.  That’s the freedom I’ve earned in these 15 years I’ve been writing as an independent journalist.

Nor will I stop going to troubled neighborhoods or tenement courtyards.  Nor will I stop talking to hustlers, pimps, gays, transvestites, drug addicts, pickpockets and common ex-cons, among others marginalized by society.

I received 19 messages in total.  Here go the senders:

Delphine Bougeard and her Spanish-language students at the Julliot de la Morandière high school in Normandy, France; Zoé Valdés; Raúl Rivero; Jorge Luis Piloto; Charlie Bravo; Joan Antoni Guerrero Vall; Alberto Sotillo; Isis Wirth; Jorge A. Pomar; Camilo López-Darias; Carlos Alberto Montaner; Pablo Pacheco; Luisa Mesa; Carlos Hernando; Manuel Aguilera; Rolando Cartaya as well as Regina, Helen and María, translators of my posts into English.

To them and also to Carlos Moreira, Tania Quintero and all the readers of the Desde La Habana blog, I give thanks and send my most sincere embrace.

Painting: Catedral, oil on canvas painted in 1972 by René Portocarrero (Havana, 1912-1986).

Translated by: Yoyi el Monaguillo

January 27 2011

The United States: A Necessary Enemy

Fidel Castro loves to make references to the numerous economic, paramilitary, and political aggressions of the 11 administrations that have been through the White House throughout these 51 years the strong-man of Cuba has been in power.

The United States is far from being the ideal neighbor.  In the first 40 years of the revolution, it unleashed a ferocious campaign of assaults on Castro.  It was an all out fight with all the ingredients.  Dirty war, economic pressure, and anti-government propaganda.

But Castro is no saint either.  Strengthened by more then 20 million rubles that Moscow granted him, he served as the Russian’s aircraft carrier in the Caribbean.  In October of 1962, he made the unfortunate decision of accepting 42 intermediate- and medium-range nuclear missiles equipped with nuclear warheads, strategic bomber aircraft, and 43,000 Russian soldiers on Cuban territory.

He financed numerous guerrilla groups in Latin America and Africa, including some that, years later, have degenerated into terrorist gangs such as the FARC in Colombia and Shining Path in Peru.

On top of provoking the thunderous collapse of the Cuban economy, with his absurd plans and his method of managing the country as if it were his own private estate, the extraordinary comandante maintained military troops thousands of miles away from this island.

He acted as if possessed by a tropical Napoleon complex.  Cuba got involved in the civil wars of Angola, Ethiopia, and Somalia.  The consequences of our participation in those conflicts have yet to be written about.

During the Cold War, Cuba and the United States maintained a mutually irritating political rivalry.  As a center of global power, Washington didn’t want to allow an openly Soviet military presence and, on the part of the government in Havana, support for insurgencies around half of the planet .

After Khrushchev withdrew the missiles, the now vanished USSR maintained troops on the island and a base for electronic spying on North America.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Cuba lost its steam.  Once the pipeline of Russian rubles was sealed up, we entered into a period of economic poverty.  The Americans plopped down on a recliner to await the fall.  But against all winds and tides, Castro resisted.

Now, the world isn’t the same.  Even Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales reached power through votes, not through bullets.  Ernesto Guevara’s theory of “Revolutionary Focalism” has been tossed into the sack of obscurity.  The theater of action presents a new design.

The elderly warrior that miraculously escaped death in July of 2006, has reemerged, transformed into a kind of international guru, predicting catastrophes and lending credence to any old incendiary conspiracy theory.

Only on the immigration issue is Cuba a national security problem for the United States.  A hypothetical internal crisis could unravel whereupon thousands of people would hurl themselves into the sea on any floating object to escape the island.  The White House is the most interested party in the Cuba situation not getting out of its government’s control.

In spite of Castro’s anti-yankee discourse, today the United States is the island’s fifth trading partner and first in foodstuff sales.  We hear talk of the ban on travel from the United States to Cuba being lifted.  The embargo is an absurdity.  In the foreign currency stores they sell Coca-Cola and Dell computers, among other products.

The biggest of Cubans’ problems don’t come from the North.  The enemy sleeps among us at home.  Rampant corruption and economic inefficiency are, among others, the causes the nation is treading water neck-deep.  Fidel Castro attempts to blame the gringos for many of our calamities, but sensible people here believe that bad governance and the system’s inoperability are the most responsible.

On top of being a current minor evil, the United States contributes financial liquidity to Cuba: 100 million dollars annually by way of family remittances and 50,000 Cuban-Americans who travel to the island every year and spend dollars at full throttle.

But it’s always easier to pin the blame on the same old lifelong villain.  If the United States hadn’t existed, Fidel Castro would have invented it.

Iván García

Photo: Ralph Crane, Life Magazine, October of 1962.  In a store in Los Angeles, people follow the news of the naval blockade against Cuba authorized by Pres. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Translated by: Yoyi el Monaguillo

In Cuba, Many Don’t Share the Attitude of Some Ex-prisoners in Spain

The initial joy over the release and flight to Spain of some 20 prisoners and a substantial number of their relatives, has given way to a certain malaise over the news that’s reached the island from different sources on the Iberian peninsula.

It hasn’t gone over well, not within the dissident community, nor among those with the highest access to information in Havana, that many of those former political prisoners, in less than 48 hours after their arrival in Madrid, began to complain publicly.

First, it was over the accommodations, then they started demanding to be granted political asylum status, because they rejected the “assisted international protection” status, proposed by Spanish authorities.

Moreover, one group refuses to be sent to other cities, as almost a dozen already have done.  To be sure, almost all of those who accepted a move to Andalusia, Valencia, and La Rioja are professionals: doctors, dentists, nurses, art teachers…

The Madrid group has dug in its heels and, with the advice of an attorney, not only have they questioned the Spanish Constitution, they consider themselves within their rights to submit their protest to the Public Defender.

“What upsets me most is that they’re giving the impression that all of us Cubans are ungrateful, and it’s not true.  Because if there’s a people with which we’ve always sympathized with, it’s with the people of Spain”, said an indignant

María Rosa, age 56, home-maker, who stays in the know through foreign radio stations.

A dissident who preferred to remain anonymous, thinks that these prisoners and their families, on top of giving the Cuban dissidents’ and political prisoners’ movement a bad image, are being manipulated.  “According to what I’ve read, the Partido Popular (Spain’s leading right-wing party), as well as long-established Cuban exiles, has been using them.  And it’s a shame, because these men have just been freed after seven years of being locked up and they find themselves misinformed.  And that misinformation has been taken advantage of for [the Partido Popular's and Cuba exiles'] political interests,” he stated.

Lorenzo, age 23, university student, had the opportunity to browse the Internet and was able to read commentaries left by readers of Spanish online news media.  “I felt ashamed, because you don’t spit on the hand that offers you food.  More so, when you come from a prison and a country with so much hardship.  And over there, they’re making demands, as if here they’d been living in mansions in Miramar or Nuevo Vedado.”

There are all kinds of opinions.  Yarisleidys, age 20, street-hustler, lamented not having been able to get with a political prisoner in jail, since maybe now she would’ve been able to leave with him for Spain.

When I tell her that if they release the 52 the Cuban government promised, there’d still be nearly 100 political prisoners in jail, she responds: “Oh, yeah?  Well, look here, I’m gonna get on these guys’ side, I don’t care if they’re old and sick.  What I want is to get the hell outta this country.”

In politics, as with sports, one has to wait til the game ends before chanting victory.  Those who protest today in Spain, not only should have shown themselves to be more grateful, they should’ve hung in there until the rest of the prisoners were out from behind bars, either on the island or en route to exile.

At any moment the Castro brothers may decide to blow the whistle, and declare the game ended before the clock’s time.

Iván García

Photo: EPA. Meeting held by ex-President José María Aznar with the group of former political prisoners and their relatives on July 28, 2010, in Madrid.

Translated by: Yoyi el Monaguillo