Yesterday, the OAS voted for much more than the silence of María Corina Machado. Yesterday the OAS sentenced her to the murderous loneliness of nasty socialism, which is the only one that germinates in America. Yesterday the OAS made itself an accomplice to a crime against morality which, like the coercive quotas of Venezuelan oil, muddies the miserable hands and tarnishes the reactionary faces of half a continent. Read the entire article here.
23 March 2014
Video by OLPL
22 March 2014
17 March 2014
Cuba Out
Cuba Out of the Armed Forces
Thousands and thousands of Cuban are now working, day and night, to the peak of their professional abilities, so that the Venezuelan dictatorship won’t fall.
16 March 2014
Washington, DC reminds me of the William Soler Children’s Hospital which, in my early childhood, was on the outskirts of Havana, until I got older and the city annexed it.
The buildings here, in places, have the same curved mystery of clinical solitude. They are made of glass instead of windows. One can look inside each room at the patients of the great little American capital. From the street, I would say that in every home here there is an oxygen tank over-illuminated to the point of sterility, like in the William Soler Hospital in Havana
The buses remind of the English Leylands from the seventies in Cuba. The Metro reminds me of the trains that back in the eighties were called “specials.” The girls in Washington are insanely beautiful. A certain Casablanca power irradiates every corner, especially now that winter is already dying and there are still enough green leaves and doors where we can find casual shelter for our hearts.
The world of the United States continues to be like an O’Henry story.
Forgive me. The truth is that it’s four in the morning and I assume it will be another sleepless night. We Cubans have provoked a massacre in Venezuela and the worst part in this sister nation is yet to come. Moreover, I am not in Cuba and so there are weeks when Havana always makes me cry at this hour.
The sky is red in DC, like that of my city illuminated by the threat of rain and the exhaust from the Nico Lopez refinery in Regla. A blazing chimney hijacked from Shell or Esso or Texaco more than half a century back: from owners who have already died at supposedly more proletariat hands, but today they, also, are dead. The refinery, like me, we have been left very alone, listing in a corner of the bay, two ghosts of insomniac smoke, inertial.
I don’t want to stay in this country. Here I’ll never watch a movie in context. Here I will never be able to stand on a corner and understand my position without turning on the GPS. Here Castro’s political police could murder me, like so many Cubans before and Venezuelans today, but at least they can’t harass or arrest me, if I’m entirely missing the body is me. I’m tired of not being Orlando Luis. It’s even hard to write well, don’t you notice?
It’s twice as hard to be me here. The prize is that, when with you I write in Cuban, I’m back in my free Cuba mind, the same in which I was exiled these last five years, when I opened my blog in 2008 and the former Minister of Culture Abel Prieto immediately announced that I could never again publish on the Island.
Many planes fly in Washington, D.C. This is something new in Havana. Since I’ve been in the United States my asthma is cured, but every night I need air a little more. I’ve lived precisely in the air, borrowed, as in hospital rooms where there are no oxygen tanks nor memories. I know my lungs are going to close up entirely, the words, the nightmares of being back among my loved ones on the Island, the patience of never going back to see my house, of not saying goodbye because I left for just three weeks, then for three months, and then for three years. And now I understand it will be for three lives.
I know I’m surrounded by the damned circumstances of Cubans everywhere. “Damned” in the sense of “mischievous,” which was the word where we were kids and the first of our parents hadn’t died. Nor the first of us.
But I will be strong and light like a ray of sun. I will never leave you alone, it is a promise of a lost country. If I didn’t leave you alone being a prisoner there in Cuba, much less will I abandon you being free here and now. Just wait a little until this vertigo passes, this dizziness. Forgive me again, suddenly I really want to vomit.
The night is deep. The Spanish readings have something of a talisman. Every book now turns out to be a sacred object, like in childhood. A bible of truth. I believe I am more free. Expect anything from me. I love you.
9 March 2014
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Venezuela, Life or Abyss: Let’s Not Abandon Them Now
Left-wing dictators never step down. Thus says a killer subject called Universal History.
Left-wing Latin-American dictatorships have no reason to be the exception. They institute eternal systems like the Castro dynasty to the humiliation of the Cuban people. Or they impose their feast of outrages before and after being deposed from power, such as in Chile with the radical regime of Salvador Allende. In both cases, the price of any change is criminally high.
Today, Venezuela is struggling in the streets between these two limits. They have already gone beyond both.
Translated by: M. Ouellette
8 March 2014
Beautiful Venezuela, so weighed down for such a long time with your own revolution. Is that what you wanted? No! That’s why we are going to save ourselves.
So much left wing higher education, so much nostalgia for Silvio Rodríguez and so many other dogs’ breakfasts of patriotic poetry, so much Castroism disguised as uncomfortable intellectualism, so many arms smuggled from Havana (the scroungers were previously the guerrillas), so much of our parents’ out of date Marxist social criticism. Is that what you wanted? No! That’s why we already saved ourselves.
Thanks, Venezuela.
Fidel Castro hates the Venezuelans as much as he hates Cubans a much as he hates human beings. Much more now, because he will die soon. And he hates the idea that millions and millions of people should live when he doesn’t.
The Venezuelans resisted Fidel too much, since January 1959 when the Commander in Chief proposed a diabolical pact to President Rómulo Betancourt: Venezuela will give Cuba all its oil and also its land as a trampoline for expanding the Revolution: in return, Fidel held out the promise of the destruction of the United States in a few years’ time and the damned imposition of the dream of Bolívar and Martí (he almost managed it in October 1962, at the cost of the Russian nuclear missiles, which showed that Bolívar and Martí, far from having dreams, had terrible nightmares).
Fidel tried military invasion of Venezuela several times. The continental consequences were negligible. No-one had any faith in his invasions. There were fabrications of Yankee imperialism and of national oligarchy. And the repressed people applauded that argument which seemed at the time to be conciliatory rather than totalitarian terrorism. Do you get it now, my dear Venezuela? Yes, I know, my strong and beloved little girl.
Also, it is possible that the Venezuelans felt a certain demoniacal left-wing pride at having been invaded time and again from the little island. You agree? Doesn’t matter.
Finally, when Fidel noticed that the world had changed, and that he had become older, he recruited thousands of Venezuelans, taught them his jargon of hate and thuggery, and he gave them the money to empower them (money which in fact came blood-soaked from Libya and Iran)
In this disgusting chess game, Rafael Caldera was the anonymous ally of Castroism, which cost many Venezuelan lives, including countless soldiers who were massacred in “accidents” authorised by Hugo Chavez and including later the assassination of Chavez himself when the very obedient one let the wild beasts know that he, Chavez, ought to be Fidel’s successor.
Beautiful Venezuela, so pregnant for so long, to give birth also to your own Revolution. Is that what you wanted? No! Now all of this is about to happen. Maybe it has already happened.
Today, those who don’t know about any of this, are angry on the streets in Venezuela. They are a legion of heroes. They are life. They are beauty. They are truth. They don’t yet have the strength to give up. They are not going to surrender. Let’s not abandon them, please. We are not going to abandon them.
Those free Venezuelans don’t want to live a life without liberty until the end of time. They are as tired as the Cubans, but they still have a last breath of hope. Best of all, this little ray of light may also wake up us apathetic Cubans.
Free little Venezuelans do not want to exist in a caricature of Castroism without Castros. In Venezuela today the future is showing itself, for fuck’s sake, and they are slaughtering that future in full view of the world. Don’t abandon them, please.
Please
What do we do?
I propose some International Peace Brigades, to put together a Freedom Fleet in a couple of days, and then sail from all the ports in America to Venezuela, loaded up with all our love, and more love (and food and clothes and medicines to cure the wounds of torture, and arms to close ranks by your side, and togetherness in our looks that we will never turn our backs), and once we are there, relaunch a country where words are not a perverse parody, where despotism is just a relic of the Corpse in Chief cooking in his dreadful nearly ninety years old delirium in a buried, inhuman Havana.
Venezuela, I love you.
Venezuela, let’s go.
Translated by GH
21 February 2014
The Cuban people will go down in history as the people who most contributed to Latin American disintegration. Disguised by the ideological hatred of capitalism, we bit into the core of fratricidal hatred on our continent. This guilt today covers several generations, irreversibly anthropologically damaged. There is no forgiveness capable of freeing us from this criminal responsibility.
Since January 1959, a bourgeois and pro-democratic revolution, with strong hints of urban terrorism and a certain Cuban-style Protestantism, was re-channeled by Fidel Castro into an agrarian and anti-imperialist process, and ultimately turned into a dictatorship of the proletariat and an extreme alliance with Moscow in the context of the Cold War.
The United States did nothing to avoid the artificial radicalization of the Revolution. Rather, great arrogance and a touch of ignorance led to the victimhood with which we Cubans justify a regime of injustice and impunity: massive social programs but not for those human beings who weigh in with an opinion (whether for or against, discipline in the face of despotism was always the key to survival in times of revolution).
Thus, Castro took thousands and thousands of lives, not only of his opponents (many of them armed), but also of Cuban revolutionaries, the majority executed extra-judicially — many of them were tried after they were shot — as soon as they manifested the least symptom of dissent to the official totalitarian discourse.
Cuban society came unhinged within a few months. No press remained. No religion one could publicly confess. No independent education, only that imposed “for free” by the State. Nor was there personalized healthcare. Nor commercial brands. Nor “human rights,” a term that still today sounds like an insult within Cuba. All exchange of international currency was abolished. We could not leave nor enter the country. We could not connect by phone with the outside nor receive a letter without being fired from our jobs.
Those who could flee, fled. We are still fleeing. It is our permanent plebiscite before a government that never listened to its own people: flight as a reaction to asphyxiating Fidel-ity. Those who remained on the island shut up or went to prison with long sentences — and terribly cruel tortures — like those that made Nelson Mandela, for example, a global icon.
We non-Castroite Cubans never became icons of anything. We were simply “worms,” “traitors,” “scum,” the “lumpen” of the “first free territory in America.” In American academia, especially, where Castroism had been “politically correct” from the very beginning, the greatest Cuban intellectuals, like the exiled and ultimately suicidal Reinaldo Arenas, never found shelter.
Then we imposed death on Asia, Africa and the Americas. We tried to spark 1,959 Vietnams all over the planet, possibly with nuclear missiles installed in Cuba behind the backs of the Cuban people. We invaded sovereign nations like Venezuela, and forever traumatized the fragile democracies of the hemisphere in the interest of a violent seizure of power, in uprisings or false populist movements that implied the scaffold for class enemies.
Just around the time our failure was obvious, with the fall of the global Socialist Camp, we used the money from other genocidal powers — such as Libya, North Korea and Iran — to encourage the false socialist democracies of the 21st century. Finally, it’s now Venezuela’s turn. A country that for many decades has been on Cuba’s death row, as General Angel Vivas reminded us a few days ago from his besieged home.
The Venezuelan people slept, like so many in the region. And in addition, it was a nation that evolved in its incessant clamor for a more just social system and less political demagoguery; this sequel we’ve dragged with us in Latin America since independence only bequeathed to us its retrograde string of caudillos.
Free Cubans, in Cuba and in exile, deplored Hugo Chavez from before his triumphant election. We never believed in his cynical smile. We didn’t even trust his most transparent election. Cubans know that the butcher’s hand of Castro never fails. But the world labelled us, then, reactionaries, “Batistianos” (half a century after Batista), and “Washington’s mercenaries” (as, in effect, many of us had no choice, having lacked a country in perpetuity). And, still worse, they spat in our face the stigma of being the intestinal traitors of the universal cause of Revolution.
Today Venezuela has taken to the streets, it “has had enough and has begun to march,” to the scorn of Ernest “Ché” Guevara, Salvado Allende, and other victims of Castroism still not recognized as such. In Venezuela the exploding popular tide is not political, but rather one of founding resistance. There where dictators and democrats have failed, the Venezuelan people understood that they were looking at their last chance. The alternatives to Chavezism, with or without cancer, were becoming obvious to Venezuelans after a decade of decline: Castroism in perpetuity or Castroism in perpetuity. They would never escape this monolithic idiocy if they didn’t escape it now.
Venezuelans are a lovely and free people, as were Cubans. It is now that they have to break the chains of constitutional fatigue. The Castro regime has never before been in such danger of finally beginning to disappear, with or without octogenarian Castros dictating their death ordeals from an interred, inhuman Havana.
Your freedom is now or now, Venezuela, still miraculously alive in this terrible trance were even vengeance seems like a virtue.
1 March 2014, From El Nacional, Venezuela
Down K Street
My father had died, the good Armenak (1918-1998).
They laid him out at the funeral home at Calzada and K Street, not far from the municipal maternity hospital: the América Arias hospital.
Chapel K: it was my mother who chose the letter. It reminded her of her homeland, Armenia, which in native Armenian is actually spelled Armenika. It reminded her of my own father, the recently turned-into-cadaver Armenak. It reminded her of herself; a sudden widow named Takuji. In both cases, Saroyan.
My parents were cousins before being lovers. The Saroyan family excommunicated them: they did not tolerate such liberties within their clan. But they insisted.
Later, it was the occupied Armenika who excommunicated them: they didn’t tolerate liberties either within their false frontiers imposed by the Russians, the Turks and the Iranians. They insisted.
They crossed the continent and the ocean in one thousand and two layovers, until their ship wrecked by chance in another little homeland called Havana, bringing along with them Armenika as a stowaway, folded one thousand and two times along with the worthless currency in their pockets.
They insisted. But this time death at last excommunicated these two cousin-lovers from their so insistent passion for freedom.
At the most luxurious and lonely funeral home in Vedado, Havana, Cuba, my mother Takuji warned me:
Do not cry for your father, the good Armenak – she said. Cry for me, for not knowing how to die with him. Cry for you, for the shame that your parents have brought upon you; first, without a homeland, and now, without a family.
My mother Takuji pronounced it all in Armenian smooth and fragile, like her, a language that could not be any more dead even if no one in the world remembered it. It is the language of forgetfulness and of frustration as home: the same in the homeland as in the family, we no longer knew anything of our fate, uprooted with a country but without a destiny.
My mother Takuji continued:
-Vilniak- after centuries, she would pronounce my name in Armenian again – do not let your children get attached to their homeland, alright?
-Yes, mother- I replied.
-Vilniak- Takuji insisted- do not let your children love too much any son of the homeland, alright?
-Yes, mother – I replied.
-Vilniak -holding the weight of my head in her hands, as if she still did not give me any credit at all- do not allow your children to listen to you too much. Do not let them listen either to you nor to any of your mother’s words that will remain within you, alright?
-Yes, mother- I replied.
It was all uttered at midnight in her smooth and fragile Armenian, just like her weightless hands, just like Takuji all of my mother, just like the flaccidity of the dead man who was lying in the coffin, still, with his arrogant black tie made out of cotton from the homeland, dead, and yet actively listening to the two of us, as usual, unable to interrupt even our silence: Armenak or, as I hadn’t called him in ages, Papazik Saroyan.
At that time, my mother and I were Chapel K’s sole inhabitants, on the highest floor of Calzada and K street. In Vedado, 1998: Midnight.
It had also been centuries since the old Armenak died, just like the young Armenak. His terror of death made him play the role of a dying man for himself, even though he had always acted as a vital man in front of the others. So he exorcised his panic. So, and with the talking companionship of a sudden widow named Takuji.
My mother asked me to turn off the lights in the chapel. I went up to the light switch and jiggled it. Nothing happened. The lamp was set up to be permanently on.
With the help of a nail file, I was able to remove the only remaining screw in the breaker. I pulled the wires and they snapped easily. The light disappeared, or maybe it slipped away through the broken windows of the glamorous room.
I returned to my mother and the ceremonial candle, blended with the beeswax of our garden’s eternal beehive, it was flaming: Takuji had lit it.
-Vilniak- she had forgotten all the languages of the world and now she only counted on the Armenian: her native language, on Lake Van, 1921- no one ever dies his own definitive death. It will now be necessary to detach father from every single object, from every single space, and from every single memory, understand?
-Yes, mother- I replied.
-Vilniak-Takuji insisted- you know that no man is good as long as he doesn’t hear his name on the lips of a woman. And you know that every man ends up creating out of nothing she who will be his wife. You know it, and still, you resist. You do understand that this happens when you don’t love reality too much, right?
-Yes, mother- I replied
-Vilniak- holding with her hands the lack of weight of her own head, as if she still didn’t give herself any credit at all – why is it that we no longer speak Armenian?
She was right. We never spoke in Armenian anymore.
No, she was not right. We no longer spoke.
I raised my eyebrows. Stayed silent. I winced just to smile.
I closed my eyes. I bent over her chair and felt her breath. It was smooth and fragile, perhaps weary. Like smoked beech bark. In that precise instant I was woken by a shriek.
From the door of Chapel K, a certain functionary K was having a temper tantrum. He was shouting insults at us without restraint, pointing the rusty index finger of his left hand at us. How the hell had we turned off the light…? That was strictly prohibited by the administration. We were irresponsible, transgressors, almost to the point of deserving to be excommunicated by the funeral parlor: the sad old congenital old story of all Armenians.
Mr. K brought other Mr. K’s and together they restored the light: a lightbulb of at least one kilowatt. The big ceremonial candle was no longer shining besides the casket. Useless honey made out of processed flowers by worker bees.
My mother spit on her fingers and put it out. She thanked the State delegation in proper Cuban, and also in proper Armenian, she asked me to leave her alone for a good while. There was a mournful rancor in such propriety: a posthumous hatred that I hadn’t remembered in her.
-Yes, mother- I replied and left.
I left Chapel K for the little narrowed-shaped park on Calzada and K street, right where that republican funeral home’s building stood.
It was still El Vedado, 1998: just past midnight. Dozens of men were sleeping on the marble benches and over the lawn of dirt, all along Calzada street and almost to the Malecón. Their sleep seemed too deep for them to be able to mourn the dead bodies laid out on each floor of the funeral home.
A little old lady was selling coffee out of a thermos bottle and I went up K street, moving away from the sea. I was thinking about my parents’ life and about life in general. I remembered those books I was read to as a child about great Armenian characters. There are thirty-eight letters, and they are beauty to draw, but it’s even more lovely to pronounce them. I remembered the ever-snowy cap of Mount Ararat, just as seen from the capital city Yerevan: a now forgotten summit on the other side of the false border with the real Turkey. I remembered the genocide stories and the genetic hatred towards the word “Ottoman.”
Three blocks down I reached the grand avenue. I saw the little narrowed-shaped park nestled between Línea and K street. I got closer the bronze bust and it was, as usual, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938): founding father of the Turk nation and the one who grieving bade farewell to the Armenian un-nation.
Peace in the country, peace in the world: said the plaque almost unreadable due to the lack of light. I felt the Latin characters in relief. Pax turka, I thought, and I sat down under the lamppost without a bulb or maybe it was a lamppost with a broken bulb, who knows.
I was thinking and thinking and every so often a hearse without a casket would pass by heading east, via K street, illuminating me with the yellow spotlight of its headlights. It was a disproportionate and frightening peace. I was thinking and thinking about a dawn in a new world, when finally the dawn broke over the old world on this side of the Atlantic.
The sparrows were cheeping with rage, they were expiating all the frustrations from the night before. A couple of them settled over Atatürk’s metallic bald head. They were playing, and they most likely would end up making love today. Many times: quickly, but many times. Literally like sparrows.
The male sparrow wiped its beak over the bust, showed the arrogant black tie around his neck one last time and flew off to no sky in particular.
The female sparrow shook her tail feathers, dropped a copious liquid dump, and flew off as well, in the same direction previously traced by her male partner. Heading west, towards the municipal maternity hospital: the América Arias, literally from Armenika to America.
I ran back, almost galloping down K street until I reached Chapel K at the lonely and luxurious funeral home on Calzada street.
My parents wake would take place on that winter Friday at eight-thirty in the morning.
I would be the only attending mourner and I found it impossible to give up now.
That’s it.
Translated by W.Cosme
20 December 2013
Post Revolution Mondays 