SOUTHAVANAFRICA 2010

SOUTHABANÁFRICA 2010, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

www.diariodecuba.net/deportes/73-deportes/2209-el-mundial…

CARLOS SALADRIGAS REVISITED

CARLOS SALADRIGAS REVISITED, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

THE OLD GUAMÁ, CARÁ…!

EL VIEJO GUAMÁ, CARÁ…!, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

Text from image:

Editorial.

We greet our readers.

We are born to fulfill the sacred mission of journalism. We come to say what others remain silent about. We are motivated by nothing more than our creed that this is a democracy and to show that we are a force, however modest, without support from the government or political institutions.

Nothing and no one can silence us, our mission is only to say the things as they are in their essence, and we care nothing for flattery or abuse. We will tell only our truth and will be whip to injustices, immoralities and the shame that takes possession of our social atmosphere.

Nothing else. And we hope to be received as we are, small in format but great in our faith.

UBIESTUPID

UBIESTUPID, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

vocescubanas.com/boringhomeutopics/2010/06/27/to-ubieta-o…

UBIESTUPID

UBIESTUPID, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

vocescubanas.com/boringhomeutopics/2010/06/27/to-ubieta-o…

REP(LY)UBLICA

DEGENERATIONAL MANIFESTO

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

To be evil, to be nice, to be reactionary, to be lucid, to be the best. Hard work for a generation left on the sidelines of the action, supplanted in the middle of the street, stuck on the street of fear.

What a shame. We should have come so far, we should have dynamited any karstic concepts of our notion of a nation.

Today I look for the glance of my friends, who are no more, and I see only vile glass. They have renounced their biographies in exchange for a little time to neither kill nor be killed. After all, everyone has retired to the complicit cowardice of his cave.

Harassed at the whim of the tsar, we have been left to ourselves, in the hands of adulterated adults who deliver their speeches through dentures and laboriously make love; in the hands of media missionaries who cultivate the ubiquitous gift of malice or imbecility; in the hands of the shells of heartless Cubans; in the hands of paid ghosts who stigmatize wholesale any sprouts of new life; in the hands of state warriors who lack the grace of so many pedantic patriots, since the only thing they hold in their gross claws is the cynical shadow of National Security Forces. They are only marionettes of ministerial bullying, who kick to be allowed a shitty microphone on radio or TV, in addition to the usual travel permit and blank check for travel. And faced with a such a state of intellectual mercenaries it would be ingenuous to waste five minutes of text to practice the reply (it’s preferable to remain at the epicenter).

To be narcissistic, to be anarchistic, to be terrifying, to be mute, to be better. Hard work for a generation left to snatch the beauty of the action, uprooted in the middle of the street, cursed in the middle of the street.

What a luxury. We should have been wounded so far away, dynamited any karstic concept of our notion of a nation.

CUBA SICKLER

CUBA SICKLER, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

ARIEL EATEN BY THE CHOLERA OF CALIBAN IN DIARIO EN CUBA:

www.diariodecuba.net/cuba/81-cuba/2136-el-cuerpo-en-los-t…

PULIDO’S FREE FORMULA

PULIDO’S FREE FORMULA, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

The Rolando Pulido’s key equation for the Cuban chrysalis which is already breaking free…

VERY BAD POEM

PHOTO: SILVIA CORBELLE BATISTA

Listening to Mariela Castro at UNEAC

In one of those homeopathic fights against Cuban homophobia

Seeing her laugh cleanly and neatly

With the guerilla but bourgeois graciousness of her young mother in the ’50s

Caressing the microphone like a miracle

In her hands synonymous with the New Woman

Savoring the rhetoric of her plurisex vision

In the uncritical and monotone heart of a cultural institution

Listening to Mariela Castro at UNEAC

I think of all the great queers

Who lived the history of the male hymen on this island

Guys muted in the first crackdowns

And then imprisoned in the blind man’s bluff

At the start lumpens and later auctioned leukopenics

Bodies that don’t fit in the canon of prudish but promiscuous Cuba

Scheming bitches parameterized in a poem of the virgin Piñera

Closet compañeros of every materialist and dialectic class

Glamour of three by ass with gum

Sucking a barbed wire tit in UMAP in the ’60’s

Sweeping undertakers or like bathroom custodians

Bearers of their own comfortless cadavers

Accomplices in cinemas or crappy dawn buses

Death-defying at the real-socialist theater of the macho years

Little lives narrated by no one in the world’s little revolutionary grandstand

Listening to Mariela Castro at UNEAC

In one of those homeopathic Cuban tantrums against homophobia

In the same chapel where Padilla was hetero pissed off

At the request of the political police in the ’70s

I think of all this uncivil society of the pleasure of liberty

Dissidents of desire like an indoor curse

Until fleeing the paraplegic country in a toilet paper raft in the ’80’s

Or waiting for the process of rectification of straights and negative tendencies

Lined up for free dentures in a polyclinics in the ’90’s

Aging without being invited to the Party Congress in the zero years

Buried in the sacred ground of the postproletariot world

Agreeable and bitter

Calling on Parliament to prune their patriot penises

Without a parade

Without a movie

Without a poem

To vomit all the unjust human time that touched them

WE WILL BE LIKE CHE(SS)

CAPABLANCA IN OLVIDUM

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Every Cuban should know how to play chess, and how to play it well.

I, like every child prodigy who is respected in the island of Capablanca, also defeated my father very early. His name was Manual Dionisio and he could well have been my grandfather. He had a 52 year advantage on me, in life as in chess.

He was a starting player, a brilliant indoor student, but a negligible force for winning live games: too noble to concentrate faced with the screaming fury of the neighborhood opponents (“frogs,” mutually offended with each other in every match on which bets were laid).

It was my father who taught me to “move the pieces,” after they were baptizes “pieces” and even after being honored as “chessmen.” Until he died, at 81, he resisted using the system of algebraic notation. It sounded like another Soviet invention. He preferred the old way and taught me from the time I was very young the name the plays in Spanish and English: P-4R, P-K4…

My father, like me, like every Cuban alive in the seventies (a splendid era in my childish ignorance), was a fanatical fan of Fisher. It was like being a fan of the United States, living another reality in secret which in contrast would have to be spectacular, like denying the socialized pragmatism of the USSR in exchange for the archetypal Western hero.

We bought magazines, old and new, about chess. We also had antique from the nineteenth century romantics (we rehearsed the King’s Gambit to practice sacrifices). We read everything about Fisher, of course. We listened to programs on Rebel Radio We participated in simultaneous games (I remember with a particular sadness one of a Hungarian supposedly called Istcan Csom). We engaged in problem contests and in a fleeting illusion of chess-by-mail. We tried it blindfolded (I was the household champion in that). We castled at length and took pawn for pawn. We didn’t always ask the Queen. The national time passed slowly and productively, honey-colored afternoons where we were happy at home, and the unbeaten shone in the championships on the corner of Fonts and Beales, in Lawton.

We progressed like athletes of the squares, my father and I (now a teenager, he modernized to the point of letting it go with the queen’s pawn). I stopped playing ball to watch the matches. One day I dreamed that I was a Grand Master and woke up crying, I wanted to grow up and be one and travel the world that same night. Another time I dreamed that I moved like a bishop (only within the dream of my lost homeland of the twentieth century is this explicable).

We had a Staunton set made of wood of the most common kind, but it was beautiful and well balanced, an aide to thinking, until the white castle was stolen and a cabinet maker replaced it with the worst possible (the new piece wasn’t even weighted). We had a board painted with black ink, also of wood and very heavy, to confer a sense of gravity to the game. And we didn’t have a timer until well into the nineties (the kinetics of game was so free and slow like a good dose of philosophy).

Then I played regularly in the Caribbean University Games. I never did anything, obviously. Knowing what to do and when, in competitive practice is a permanent mistake. I suppose this meekness of the adult was an inheritance from my old father.

After that I stopped playing. Since the century and the millennium turned over I barely do it. I don’t know who won the championship or who is the world champion (before I knew the list from Anderssen and Steinitz or maybe Morphy). I seems unlikely that a Cuban would cross the cosmic barrier of ELO 2700 (a fluke, I studied biochemistry with the daughter of our first GM Silvino Garcia). Now I no longer understand the tele-classes of Chess for Everyone on TV. I don’t know why I showe3d up at the Capablanca 2010 Tournament in the shabby room at the Riviera Hotel in the year zero or two thousand (for the public, a single magnetic board and another paltry paper one.

I miss my childhood tournaments. Almost all were in the winter. It was cold then and at night the light from the streetlights was a haze from another latitude. Never was reality as real. I wanted to live forever and be good and true in this country.

I’m sorry, Dionisio Manuel Pardo Fernandez (1919-2000). But all the same I confer on you now the ELO minimum of 2200 points to start you in the amateur and anonymous Olympiad of eternity.