TWITTIANDY ALONSO…?!

TWITTIANDY ALONSO…?!, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

May 30 2011

TWITTIANDY ALONSO…?!

TWITTIANDY ALONSO…?!, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

May 30 2011

http://issuu.com/OLPL/docs/voces8

View this document on Scribd

28 May 2011

OLPL IN THE PLAZA LAS ARMAS

May 23 2011

Meow Meow the Dead

He died, in the end, without a name, the poor little high-contrast black and white kitten. He died of hunger and cold despite our sheltering him in a warm cloth with all the warm milk we could drop into his strawberry mouth. Separated from his mother by the mean hand of dim-witted resident of Buenavista in Havana. They threw him way behind the backdoor of house, still so small (would it have cost them so much to wait a couple of weeks?). They tossed him like a promise at this “counterrevolutionary” house where pity for animals still remains. A house where perhaps they would use “the imperialist dollars from the CIA” and other imbecilic inventions of our country to buy evaporated milk in hard currency, and dedicate hours and hours to saving a meowing life that no one else in this Cuba in the midst of a General Crisis of Socialism (CGS) cares about saving.

Who cares about it. If you live every day to kill or be killed, just like in the army or in prison: Favorite logic of the Total State.

Just this week the political police experts rounded up another Cuban television directly (another Padilla Case just months after the Piard Report), and they sat down with no explanations on the editing room of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT) to erase, chapter by chapter, my work as photo-set of the soap opera of the day on this Island of Iniquity (the tetragram OLPL terrifies them). Just this week, too, various paperwork issues of mine were interfered with by an operative in real time who listened into my cell phone (+53) 5-334-0187, without the cautious CUBACEL company being aware of it (to them it’s enough to collect the dollars that the “enemy” sends me thanks to our capitalist-loving system of digital recharges through ezetop.com).

What will it take for them to get the message. I’m sure the majority of the operators and directors are already finishing up their paperwork to become Spaniards and flee, as soon as they can, to the Plaza del Sol, to peacefully protest the European establishment and forget their complicity with the censors, their left-behind compatriots.

Kitty died, in the end (I knew, at his young age he would never survive) and he is not the first to die on me. Nor the first I’ve had to sacrifice to not see them suffer from the pangs of hunger or from a beating, or non-accidental poisoning. Kitty stopped moving in the early morning, blaming me for my entire species with each cramp in my hand, complaining to everyone each time I forced him to open his mouth and swallow.

I decided to bury him in the anonymous early morning of this insipid Sunday in May. The Day of the Nobodies.

I put him in the red earth. Stones from the sea. And a stolen postcard. I talked to him a bit before leaving.

Still, I have things to do for him. For others like him, feline or human. Beings turned into zeros by the pedestrian apathy of my country or planet.

My heaven, heaven doesn’t exist. I keep you much closer than this rotten word. My my window I see you.

Goodbye Kitty (I have written like this before in this blogspot cemetery).

May 22 2011

1st Cuban Free-Lance Photosocial Country of Pixels Contest is Already Underway…!

Vocescubanas.com/cubafotosocial/2011/05/21/luzbely-escobar/

May 21 2011

MINCULT OR MINCUT VERSUS PEDRO PABLO OLIVA

LET US NOT FORGET OLIVA IN HIS HOUR OF HORROR

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

I don’t know the Pinar del Rio painter Pedro Pablo Oliva. i don’t know anyone among the stateless dust of a people dispersed as are Cubans (maybe we don’t even go that far, and we are just an illusion of identity). But since 1987 I retain a small original signed by him, called “Traveler,” which surely cost a pittance in national currency because, at that time, unfortunately, the only thing circulating on the Island was the useless Cuban peso (not a few were imprisoned ahead of their time and for treasuring dollars in a half-smuggled box).

I like the unknown work of this unknown compatriot. I remember his “Fidel Grandpas,” sleeping like most of his nightmarish little characters with bizarre colors (although they give the illusion of being realistic). I know he had his run-ins for exposing Fidel Castro on his canvases, but I think that after the usual ministerial censure, one or another of his little Comandantes-en-Jefe in miniature did make it to the galleries (and they even used it on the cover of a magazine as official as UNION!).

Now winds of death come not only for the poor Cuban dissidents, but also for our intellectual enrichment. There will be no puppet with head left before the Apocalypse or Apoptosis of the Maximum Leader. Thus, after 13 years of creative work, Pedro Pablo Oliva’s Workshop in the city of Pinar del Rio has been closed by the state (miraculously they haven’t confiscated or worse: like the political police searched of an editor of the magazine COEXISTENCE, directed by his fellow from Pinar del Rio Dagoberto Valdés).

They accused this ex-deputy of the People’s Power face to face at a government meeting. They called him every name in the book, starting with “traitor” to the Revolution and, of course, to his so often daubed Fidel. They expelled him from everything. Abel Prieto, the outgoing Minister of Culture, called him and suddenly didn’t have the courage to berate him, so of course he, Prieto, got offended and hysterical and threateningly hung up. The art students in his province (and in the country) are prohibited from coming anywhere near him. As they seem to stink do they want to put the stink on him it seems. Who knows if they’ll have the police interrogating him at the earliest opportunity, if the international community doesn’t respond immediately, showing solidarity with the fate of this universal artist who publicly believes in a multiparty system and sees no political sin in being a pen pal, for example, to Yoani Sanchez.

I look at his “Traveller” from 1987. It’s been too long since then.On the cardboard a motley baby with pins is balanced on an axle with uneven wheels. Imbalanced. A skein as free as any labyrinth that is nothing more than a few brushstrokes without a map. What a sad image and what a painful destination for a career where conciliation came first, along with the aesthetic genius of Pedro Pablo Oliva. Cuba is cannibalizing the best Cubans. The future belongs by right to the carcass of this foolish nation.

The bearable spaces on the island promise to be zero. Like during that excited idiot with perestroika, the political police today with personnel to spare cauterize, one by one, our critical or even nonconforming personalities. Exile, illness, trapped by some common crime. I recommend silence to them. To survive, please. We will need them so much tomorrow in the midst of the new mafia. But, for now, if you read me with a shred of heart, don’t let the Revolution kill the soul of the painter Pedro Pablo Oliva. They tell me he cried alone like a child after hanging the closed sign on his workshop, where we are strictly prohibited to dream. He wept with the innocence of one of his own grotesquely charming doodles.

I’m sorry, unknown brother. Resist now. Your irrational share of the truth has touched you. You are as exposed as I am. Your success as an artist was running simultaneously with the many repressions that now by chance have hit you (your National Plastic Arts Prize of 2006 coincided with hundreds of prisoners of conscience all around). Still, I am with you. Dust off your little work of 1987, so Pinar del Rio. It’s just the damned circumstance of hate everywhere.

May 20 2011

THE MAKING OF TOMAS PIARD’S “JUDGMENT NIGHT“

Author: Gretel Marin

May 16 2011

La Joven Cuba is Cuban Censorship….!

La Joven Cuba es Censura Cubonista….!, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

The great cowards gave permission to publish the interview Ted Henken did with them and then they withdrew permission. They’re a bunch of sheep.

lajovencuba.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/encuentro-de-la-jove…

May 4 2011

Americas Society about Cuba in May, NY 2011

Americas Society about Cuba in May, NY 2011, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

www.tandf.co.uk/journals/review

This launch of a special Cuban issue of the Society’s acclaimed journal will feature comments by Editor Daniel Shapiro (Americas Society), Guest Creative Editor José Manuel Prieto (author, Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, Rex), and Guest Academic Editor Anke Birkenmaier (Indiana University; author, Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina); and readings of poetry and prose by Cuban writers Juan Carlos Flores, Reina María Rodríguez, and Rolando Sánchez Mejías—some of whom live on the island, others in Europe—and translations by Kristin Dykstra (University of Illinois).

All of the participants have contributed texts to Review 82.
This program will be conducted in English and Spanish with simultaneous translation.

Cuba Inside and Out: Panel Discussion – New Media in Cuban Literature Today
Thursday, May 19, 2011
7:00 p.m.
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue
New York, NY, USA

A group of Cuba’s most contemporary writers, including several who reside on the island and others who reside in Europe—collectively, Abilio Estévez, Ernesto Hernández Busto, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and Amir Valle—and Rachel Price (moderator)(Princeton University), a contemporary scholar of new media in literature, will discuss the use of the Internet, e-mail, blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media as a means of creative expression as well as of distributing contemporary writing on and off the island. All of the participants are featured in Review 82 (Cuba Inside and Out, Spring 2011). In collaboration with the Cuban Cultural Center of New York and InterAmericas®.

This program will be conducted in Spanish with simultaneous translation into English.
In collaboration with the Cuban Cultural Center of New York and InterAmericas®.

May 2 2011