SMILVIA

Let me sink myself softly into your craziness.

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

I called an old flame from Matanzas (no love is old as long as one of the two doesn’t die) and she tells me: “I’m afraid of going crazy this Sunday, I’m afraid of doing something crazy, help me.”

We are separated by over 60 miles, but to survive this day we still cling to my spied-on-by-the-politica-police telephone to speak privately. Many times, at the beginning of the zero years, or in 2000, we made love by phone. An extreme experience. Her voice choked with tears, like now (she was always sad, like her province). Her freedom of a young mother who doesn’t fit in Cuba nor in her (also too sad) family. Her outrageous desires, her overwhelming polyorgasmia, her thighs raining below, like the posthumous rivers that cut through Matanzas until they lose heart in the bay (the “bahía”… this apocope of “vagina”). Her ethics of the obscure and austere writer. Her urge to annihilate herself and her panic that it is something genetic, an inheritance from her multiple suicidal ancestors. Her abandonment of the girl who discovers, first her parents, that everyone has to die.

I speak to her. A thread of tension between us. A rush of erectile blood in our crotches, I know. We are all still raw between memory and imagination. One slip could introduce us into each other for the thousandth time. We grope each other, we preserve each other. I tell her things. I speak of the utility of spite. I ask her not to be crushed by her own goodness. To despise and be vile, to escape her contemporaries and believe only in God and in me (many times resurrected after being discharged as a volcano, vomiting spasms and moans, so now I’m her more tangible god, as she was mine after the white screenshot of my supernovas). I demand that she hate Cuba and her depressing post-Castroism Sundays. Don’t be afraid, my love, if in any case the soldiers are going to kill us one by one, before the winter comes that purifies the hell that is this country.

She hears me. She cries. She sounds disconsolate. She speaks to me with a sepulchral calm (provincial cemeteries are worse than the worst death). I make note that for us life doesn’t even exist in any other place. We are alone. We get old (I see her as a baby through her forty years, as virgin as the decade of the seventies, as spring-like as someone born in her own backyard and within her shamelessly unpronounceable organs). It is too late for everything. The rabid vengeance is not enough to catch our breath. We are sick and no one will believe us. We cannot go on like this. What will we do, then, my love. And we won’t hang up the phone at least for the rest of today.

And so the crazy time of a Sunday afternoon in the Cuban September of 2012 stretches on. Sometimes I just hear her swallowing. Sometimes voices of the holocaust arrive. A dog. A girl. A horn. Trendy music that crosses the Bacunayagua chasm and brings us back to reality.

She reads me her latest wonderful poems. Texts out of nowhere in Cuban literature, because they were written before and after any literature or nation. She asks me what I’m writing and I have to confess that I stopped writing years ago. I am a puppet in the criminal hands of the Cuban State. I live in someone else’s biography. But I am proud to be just that, because it would not have been worth the trouble to have been me.

I tell her that there is a place in the world called Havana (she forgets it now and again), to come with me, that in the middle of nothing there is a reserve around me where I run into people worth loving, some very wounded because they have been ripped from the hands of their loved ones, some congenital suicides like her, others floating on the rhetorical surf of the Revolution, even some pixelated in another reality broken by digital despots. All bereaved, all nervous wrecks. But she must resist it. Bear witness to her intimate, trivial and colossal horror. Let me touch her. That I love her as we both know that we would never stop loving each other when we sent hundreds of letters, even the counterintelligence official in charge of Lawton’s mail interrogated me, not without curiosity, at the beginning of the year zero and two thousand.

I finally hang up on my old love of Matanzas with the promise that we will communicate and see each other more often (sometimes years and years of absence go by) and I tell her: “Go crazy this Sunday but don’t do anything crazy: please, don’t give them the satisfaction.”

September 9 2012

A Tribute to Harold of the Christian Liberation Movement

A tribute to Harold Cepero Escalante, the man, the friend, the liberation activist…

Tribute to Harold Cepero, a young man who lost his life while working to build the Cuban civil society he dreamed of, with rights, progress and unity. Thanks to people like him love abounds on this earth. Help us investigate the causes of his death.

January 30 2013

Obama for a Seat in Cuba’s National Assembly

The presidents of the United States have been a taboo topic in Cuba for 55 years. The image of the Evil Imperialist could only be authorized by the upper echelons of the propagandists of the Communist Party (the only legal one in the country) or, where appropriate, by the Council of State itself. The idea was to depersonalize and discredit all the men in the White House (the pamphleteer documentary filmmaker Santiago Alvarez incarnated the vile vanguard of that mission). Every foreign enemy had to be to artificially animalized, assassinated like one more internal opponent. Only in this way, by elementary media comparison before the eyes of a captive audience, could the image of the sublime Maximum Leader shine more brightly in our hearts:

Fidel the future, Eisenhower the fossil; Fidel proletarian idol, Kennedy bourgeois asshole; Fidel internationalist guerrilla, Johnson international warmonger; Fidel sincere to the bone, Nixon scandalously fallacious; Fidel perpetual Comrade, Ford ephemeral as a model year; Fidel pitcher, Carter catcher, Fidel a still young star, Reagan an almost senile stunt man; Fidel in the Special Period in Times of Peace, Bush-the-father post-perestroika bomber; Fidel celibate, Clinton promiscuous; Fidel a horse, W. Bush a donkey; Fidel a dove repeatedly robbed of his Nobel Peace Prize, Obama a white hawk in a blackbird’s skin (showing their racism, the Cuban state media accused him of betraying his race).

After nearly a decade of censorship in Cuba (despite the fact that the signal is received and the channel is invaded by Cuban staff), the TeleSUR channel started to be freely seen in Cuba as a New Year’s gift from the Raul regime. It is no longer just Walter Martinez’s pirate eye-patch, savoring the deferred Bolivarian pap of the continent’s illiterates and fanatics, indeed now we have Mr. Barack Obama live and well on every television set in Havana.

And, to the discomfort of everyone at home, it then turns out that the skinny guy from the Mulatto House in Washington doesn’t scream or threaten the public with his hooked fingers, nor does he wear a military uniform, nor does he spend hour after hour jabbering on to the millions and millions in his Babylonian nation. And to make matters worse, the guy looks like a citizen and, what’s more, spoke about urgent ecological concerns, the rights of minorities (he represented the LGBT community better than our National Assembly), of social projects without the need to sacrifice another half century (while simultaneously the police authorize a protest against him).

Afterwards, in the neighborhood, someone made a joke about how in the upcoming elections the ballot would include an extra little box to validate Member of Parliament Obama. That would give publicity to this historic little joke even on the internet. If I were the Cuban State, I would not take lightly this symptom of tastiness or scorn for Cuban neighborhood socialism. And, just in case, I would install one more arm chair in the meeting hall of the National Assembly.

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Havana

Translated from PenultimosDias.com.

January 23 2013

Six Months Without Oswaldo Paya, the Pain of His Family and All Cubans of Goodwill

Ofelia Acevedo who lost her husband, Oswaldo Paya, six months ago.

@OswaldoPaya

@RosaMariaPaya

@Maverik18

January 22 2013

Literature of OLPL and Generation Zero in Gato Pardo

www.gatopardo.com/GaleriaGP.php#8

January 20 2013

Test and Menta

Testament of a Figurehead

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Standing, naked, with eyes burned by the tears and the Cuban nights passed without blinking a damn eye. Or blinking, but jumping from nightmare to nightmare, possessed by a Havana without Castro or Marx.

Standing, decrepit, with bony phalanges, and a barbaric beard. With an ache and a void in the soul of three sets of balls.  With my cock brushing the keyboard of my mercenary laptop, mercenárida, exquisite corpse that announces briefly the whole of my corpse.

And so I write this.  And so I want to be remembered. And so I was a thousand nine hundred and fifty times more free than you.

When I was a child of the seventies I hated my happy childhood. I always knew more than the adults around me, who were poor and fearful but with enormous hearts. I thought that when I grew up, the eighties would find me out of that house forever. I would be free of the drowsy uniformity of this country, and of the good sun that turned my poor neighborhood into a local paradise.

I thought that Cuba would not resist the date changes.  That Havana would be filled with colors and unrecognizable people before the year 2000.  That was the future life.  I was wrong.

All the parents and neighbors died, and all the ministers, and even the premier himself rotted inside and out while still alive, without the decency of a farewell or even an apology. They left us alone in the zoo, among beasts in uniforms of an olive-green color, green like a lie, green like silence, the green of the universal death of our nation.  The future was today: futile, fossil, funeral.

It died, of course, any stupid attempt to find among so much shit the infinitesimal and infinite miracle of love.

Our hearts grew old, our bodies trapped in a childhood of penance for being such hypocrites, but not enough to smile over.

We gave in. We didn’t find our neighbor We don’t have a single motherfucking contemporary Cuban. We are extinct. Our hands only serve to wiggle our fingers in panic, telling our own biography: No, no, no…

We deserve an Absolute Revolution in perpetuity. We are the Absolute Revolution in perpetuity. Hallelujah, human time has stopped and we unknowingly lived in a state of grace.

Thank you.

I look at my books. There are thousands and thousands. I’m going to trade them to the old man who sells hookers on the corner. Except for two or a dozen, I’m still not sure. They are books that cause instability, illusions of movement, desires in mutation. They are treacherous books, like one of those most musical themes of three sad decades ago.

I look at the internet censored for Cubans in Cuba. It has been an imbecility to partake of the forbidden. The moral attitude was disgusting. Disgusting having to pirate what belongs to me by my own right. Disgusting to have entertained everyone, with a vaudevillian theater that breathed hope to the patients of a totalitarianism without a terminal phase. They should not believe me. not a single syllable of saliva. Disgusting to survive death successfully in the desert, rather than focus on the source of my insatiable thirst. Disgusting to have been so traitorous and not knowing to dwell in posthumous peace my failure. Disgusting of not having met you before, love.

And still I type standing naked, my stomach making me crick-crack like a psycho-rigid insect. They don’t invent with me. They don’t project now. Nobody is going to die. That is our gloomy phobia. Getting to an end without end.

I will not move a finger. Traveling is embarrassing if you are Cuban. To be free, inside or outside, is infamous if you’re Cuban. Individual creativity is a stigma while reality coagulates around us.

The circle of murderers approaches, shark without a country, from the absolute power of an unknown and ubiquitous government. Name three ministers if you have balls. Go ahead, name them, and you will see that you do not know who they are. Are pseudonyms, pseudopods. Name three thousand dead people and see if you remember their false features. You do not know dick, bro. You are exceptionally ignorant. Your tongue chirps like the insects of my stomach emptied of hunger and meaning. And just for that I still love you, in spite of myself.

Cuba has finally become pure action.

Things happen, but now nothing takes place.

Do you see?  Do yo not see?

Adiós.

Translated by BC CASA

November 3 2012

NICE! @RosaMariaPaya

Nice! Rosa Maria Paya in her blog.

Cuban journalism is too important to be left in the hands of Cuban journalists.

Rosa Maria Payá hands a treat to the salaried employees of the International Press Center in Havana, whining cowards who don’t know how to read freely and without fear what there is to read.

www.intereconomia.com/blog/habana/”quienes-son-usted…

January 13 2013

Elaine Diaz Takes on Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa on Facebook

Dear Rafael Correa,

I am dismayed by your government’s introduction of a letter of invitation as a condition of entry to your country. The clarification leaves me more confused: “The paper should state that the Ecuadorian or the foreigner with an immigrant visa who invites a Cuban citizen has sufficient funds and pledges to cover all costs, including medical care, during the stay of the guest.”

I say to you, Correa, that in Cuba we are very humble and do not like to boast of economic wealth, but many people in my country do not need any other citizen of the world to cover their expenses.

As a Cuban, whose salary is not enough to visit Ecuador without a visa or Europe with a visa, I am deeply offended by this drastic change just a few days from the Cuban immigration reform.

If we were Brazil, tomorrow we would include a regulation that asked not only for letter of invitation, but a reserved round trip ticket, bank statements and a hotel reservation from the citizens of your country.

Instead, I hope that my country will continue training, for free, your students in our universities, healing your sick and assisting your nation in social development programs.

Latin-Americanly,

Elaine Diaz

www.facebook.com/elainediazrodriguez)

January 16 2013

On your marks… get set: GET OUT!

While the entire government of Bolivarian Venezuela moves its necrophilic headquarters to Havana, the people of Cuba use the Raul regime’s reforms to sell their cars and houses in exchange for a passport and visa to any other place, with the bonus-track of an airline ticket. The first, is called annexation; the second plebiscite (in both cases, silent comedies).

The annexation began in 1992 with a brainstorming of internationalist or interventionist ideas that culminated in the scripted television coup in Caracas, followed by the mea culpa of the starring comandante in that remake of the assault on the Moncada Barracks and History Will Absolve Me.

Then came the red-shirt political-parody revolution in the style of “Hello, Big Brother*,” before returning now to the concept of a cancercoup d’etat with a veneer of constitutional continuity (a constitution they are determined to edit like a miniature biblical socialist Tree of Knowledge permanently blandished on the small screen by this or that continental caudillo).

The plebiscite this January 1st marked 54 years of enthronement on the Island. It is the Cubans who are leaving. First, because for decades it was impossible to go. And now, because suddenly it’s only possible to go. They are voting with their feet, at the first opportunity, losing this Paradise Found in Made in Castro Cuba. Although no one is now stigmatized as “scum,” rather, in any case, as “elite.”

God tries to call Hugo Chavez to his side and standing in the way are the babalawos, protestant pastors and Cuban cardinals (there’s no need to reduce to one the rhetorical faces of Jaime Ortega y Alamino). Of course, the proletarian petrocracy depends on another — and worse — crisis not erupting in Cuba like that of the “Special Period*,” this time not “in times of peace” but probably of uncivil war.

So, the rights of almost half of Venezuelan citizens — who just voted at the polls against the convalescing Chavez — are not at all convenient for Cubans. Nor does it suit us to evoke an initiative known as the Heredia Project, launched six years ago in Cuba by the Christian Liberation Movement, in which are enshrined, among others, the travel and immigration rights of our nation, some of which are disguised today as the Raul reforms without so much as citing their author, Oswaldo Paya Sardinas (the dead to the grave, the living to the airport).

We have absolutely no use for the rights of Cubans, not for the many Cubans on the Island as well as in exile, be they puppets of the ruling class or leaders of the opposition. In practice, totalitarianism is useful for its uncompromising governability and the openness to certain privileges under central control.

Like children caught in the gap between personal ethics and the Daddy State, the chatter of democracy terrifies us or makes us laugh. The real resistance has never been against the dictatorship. Rather, we have fought tooth-and-nail knees-to-the-ground to make our slavery more comfortable. Indeed, to violate slightly (another) Milanese poet, better we should drown ourselves in the sea than betray the coarseness in which we have lived.

“I am Chávez” is the slogan of the popular-made lemmings and putschists dauphins of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. “I am the Revolution,” was the end-of-century end-of-millennium slogan launched by then First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, Fidel. Two post-monarchical statements that could not be more sincere. Whoever does not fit in this elementary logic does not fit into the status quo and, sooner or later, must be eliminated however indirectly, thanks to the Marti-inspired anathema that “there are things which, to accomplish them, must remain hidden” (it’s called holocaust-by-eyedropper).

So the palaces of Caracas have become obsolete and the presidents of the New Ark of ALBA are portrayed in Revolution Square in Havana (they too are terrified and laugh). So today it would be a crime against leftanity to free the animals in the zoo who have only known captivity and, rather than demand reforms, we appreciate the protectorate.

Translator’s note:
* Hugo Chavez had a long-running unscripted television talk show called “Hello, President.”
**The deep crisis Cuba faced after the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss of its huge subsidy was called, by Fidel Castro, “a special period in times of peace.”

Translated from DiariodeCuba.com

January 15 2013

The Truth Will Make us Free – Rosa Maria Paya Asks for an Independent Investigation

It’s been 177 days since we have not known how my father, Oswaldo Paya, and Harold Cepero died. Support an independent investigation.

www.oswaldopaya.org/es/proyecto-de-ley-de-reencuentro-nac…

January 14 2013