No blogger, no Obama / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

No blogger, no cry.

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

1 In the beginning was the Blog. 2 But blogs were formless and empty. 3 Repression was all over the blogosphere. 4 And the citizens saw the blogs were good. 5 So that lacking other channels of expression, the Cuban civil society occupied blogosphere as a tool for dissent. 6 Won’t you help to share these blogs of freedom? 7 Redemption blogs, redemption blogs to emancipate ourselves from the State.

As early as in the summer of 2005, I opened a blog for publishing a literary and opinion magazine that three Cuban writers decide to edit in Havana: Cacharro(s) —in English, Junk(s).

Lizabel Monica, Jorge Alberto Aguiar and I were posting our texts in cyberspace, hoping for a reader abroad to save us from the silence within. We couldn’t imagine that in a couple of years our initial experiment was to be ignored in the history of Cuban blogosphere, when our efforts to escape not only censorship, but also the mass media mediocrity of the Revolution, were displaced by new voices with high public impact both from the cultural and political fields.

This happened when the Consenso —Consensus— digital magazine became Contodos —With All— and opened the website Desdecuba.com, directed by Reinaldo Escobar, Manuel Cuesta Morúa, Miriam Celaya, Dimas Castellanos, among others, including a webmaster who, in April 2007, started a very simple WordPress blog called Generation Y. The trademark Yoani Sánchez was born, as well as the first virtual revolution in the time of Castro.

This was the genesis of an independent movement of citizen journalism which challenged the lack of transparency of the public sphere in Cuba, a country still without private Internet today.

Cuban top-level intelligence commanders like Ramiro Valdes have stated that the Internet is a “wild horse” that “must be tamed” before offering it to the people. After many promises and postpositions, including a submarine fiber-optic cable that connects us with Venezuela since 2011, Cubans are still waiting for a miracle.cu, although the vice-president Miguel Diaz Canel has warned our press not to be objective but “loyal to Fidel, Raul, and the Revolution”, while Fidel himself determined that the “internet is a revolutionary tool”.

Elaine Diaz, blogger of La Polemica Digital —The Digital Polemics— known as critical of certain official measures, but at the same time a professor of journalism at Havana University and now a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, in her degree thesis about the Cuban blogosphere “scientifically” established in terms of topics and chronology that none of the renowned dissident bloggers were pioneers at all, thus diluting this phenomenon in an ocean of other blogs practically discovered by her, up to nearly 3,000 today, which outnumbers by far the dozens of local independent bloggers.

Diaz quotes only those blogs that can be quoted in Cuba without risking her research position, like Patria y Humanidad —Homeland and Mankind— since 2006 administered by Luis Sexto, a winner of the National Journalism Prize; and La Isla y la Espina —The Island and the Thorn— since 2007 administered by Reinaldo Cedeño, both defined as open to “foreign authors” and to “hot heated debates” but, of course, within the temperature limits of political discipline on the Island.

Diaz recognizes that the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC) and no less than the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, authorized more than 1,000 official journalists to open blogs from their workplaces or privileged home connections, in order to —as Milena Recio wrote in her article “Cuban blogs: an entrenched identity”— reproduce in cyberspace the same battlefield logic of the street propaganda, to “counteract the distorted and opposite speeches from hegemonic mass media” against the Revolution.

The very Code of Ethics of UPEC rejects “hyper-criticism” in its article 7, while in articles 8 and 9 reminds their members to “maintain a social and moral behavior in accordance with the principles and norms of our society […] to promote the best of our national values and the constant improvement of our socialist society”. And after paternalism comes a large list of punishments, which includes imprisonment, as happened to a journalist from the Communist Party newspaper Granma, Jose Antonio Torres, accused of espionage after one of his official reports.

Diaz also proposes the “emancipatory and anti-capitalist usefulness of the new media and technology” in Cuba, and the need of “virtual symbols” for a country where it is “possible” the “horizontal dialogue”, beyond power hierarchies and all kinds of social exclusion: by race, by gender, by sexual preference, by economic status, etc. Although she omits to mention the cause of all discriminations in Cuba: the political intolerance and hate speech of the revolutionary government, summarized by Fidel Castro in his speech to Cuban intellectuals in 1961: “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.”

Recently, this “dialogue” approach has been updated by the web Cuba Posible of Lenier Gonzalez and Roberto Veiga, former editors of a Catholic Church magazine that published some civil debates, where certain civil society activists managed to participate. Cuba Posible claims for the complicit concept of “loyal opposition” to the regime, if critics are to be considered legitimate. Besides, Gonzalez and Veiga urge the Cuban dissidence to commit suicide and stop all the support they receive from foreign NGOs, despite the detail that they both defended this viewpoint from Washington DC, invited in January 2015 by a compendium of US pro-Castro NGOs, like the Cuba Research Center of Philip Peters.

During the last decade, the Cuban alternative blogosphere has expanded and contracted like the cycles of a claustrophobic universe. Its main communication strategies and activists have renovated only to remain identical.

With my blog of fictionalized chronicles Lunes de Post-Revolution —Post Revolution Mondays— and my photoblog Boring Home Utopics, I have witnessed most of this Cuban digital e-volution, with its pro-human rights achievements and, unfortunately, with today’s drawbacks in the face of a State involved in a self-transition to capitalism without capitalists, but with accomplices of Castros’ agenda.

Most of free-lance Cubans’ blogs are linked in the websites HavanaTimes.org and VocesCubanas.com, where can be found the famous Generation Y of Yoani Sanchez, blogs from visual artists like the graffiti performer Danilo Maldonado El Sexto (in jail since last December) and the photographer Claudio Fuentes, blogs dedicated to new media and technologies like the one by Walfrido Lopez, blogs from independent lawyers to give legal advice like the unregistered Cuban Juridical Association of Wilfredo Vallin, blogs from religious leaders like the Baptist minister Mario Felix Lleonart, blogs of digital publications like Plural Thinking Notebooks, Notebooks for the Transition, and the magazine Voices edited by me, community participation initiatives like Pais de Pixeles photo-contest, blogs of filmed debate projects which then are uploaded to the web to impact on public opinion, like Razones Ciudadanas/Citizens’ Quests.

Thanks to the volunteer amateur projects TranslatingCuba.com and HemosOido.com many of these blogs are distributed beyond geographical isolation and the barriers of language.

Mainly in Havana, much closer to the www than Cuban pre-technological countryside, events have been held to shift from the cyberspace to citizen mobilization, like the Blogger Academy where we teach the technical rudiments of self-publication, as well as the primitive option of tweeting by an international SMS sent from the Island, as local mobiles have no internet service in Cuba. Other events also held in private houses, like the two annual editions of Click Festival 2012 and 2013, had the privilege to count on international experts on blogs, and consequently they were stigmatized by the governmental blogosphere as being part of a subversive conspiracy to disrupt social stability.

Indeed, cyber-bullying is the less brutal answer of Castro’s political police to Cubans exercising our right to freedom of expression.

Two inflexion points in this abusive battle of the government against their own citizenry, occurred in 2011. First, the Cuban TV showed a weekly series on Cyber-mercenaries where all independent activists were severely threatened to be prosecuted (coincidentally, Elaine Diaz was used an example of blogging correctly). Then a suspicious video leak occurred from State Security, where an officer later identified by the social media as Eduardo “Tato” Fontes Suarez, delivers a conference for the Ministry of the Interior to teach them how to manipulate the internet in the era of an American president “much worse the Bush”, implementing a clone blogosphere to reproduce Cuban official press and saturate the web with convenient contents. This includes the logic of creating authorized local versions of Wikipedia (like Ecured), Facebook (like La Tendedera), Twitter (like El Pitazo), etc.

This should remind us of the theories of Evgeny Morozov on how disappointing is the excess of web optimism, because repressors also learn how to take advantage of the interconnected world to channelize and control social discontent to their own convenience.

Unfortunately, after the 2013 migratory reform that for the first time in decades allowed Cubans to travel abroad without the humiliating “exit permit” or “definitive departure”, international recognition of Cuban civil society leadership has meant a national weakening of our networks and the dispersion of our already limited impact on the Island.

All the peaceful movements and prominent personalities of Cuban civil society, that in the good old days of 2008-2011 seemed about to integrate in a unified opposition front with political implications, are now splintered in their respective personal initiatives among themselves. The more successful their international projections, the more isolated among themselves are their national projects. We Cubans are still lacking a culture of open polemics and understanding of differences. After more than half a century, Castroism has castrified even their opponents.

Here are some sad examples, as they all are my dear friends and have been fighting quite a long time for a better future in Cuba:

The Ladies in White split one more time, in a fractal procedure that keeps the movement stagnated in number of members, and with an exponential increase of refugees fleeing to the US. Once in exile, most Cuban dissidents quit social activism or, in the best cases, end up as secretaries in Cuban American NGOs. The legacy of their founding leader Laura Pollán is at risk for the benefit of the Ministry of the Interior, now that their new leader Berta Soler carried out a shameful repudiation against one of its former members, and then had to hold a referendum to ratify her life-long leadership. But Soler was expelled anyway by the daughter of Laura Pollán from her home headquarters in Neptuno Street in Central Havana, where Laura Pollán junior expects to direct a new foundation that will monopolize exclusive use of her mother’s name.

The Christian Liberation Movement (MCL) is headless after the 2012 extrajudicial killing in Cuba of their leaders Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero. Internal rearrangements have displaced from any position even the daughter and the widow of Oswaldo Payá, in a dispute for the redemptive legacy of the martyr, as well as the strategies that should be implemented by this now virtually an exiled movement.

The Cuban Patriotic Union (UNPACU) always has nearly half of their activists in jail. On one hand, UNPACU fostered the creation of an independent branch that broke out of the Ladies in White, the Lady Citizens for Democracy. On the other hand, they are obsessed with detecting and denouncing —and sometimes converting to the cause of freedom— Castro’s secret agents, like the infamous case of Ernesto Vera, but they lack a citizen mobilization strategy beyond their self-extinguishable street protests, partly because the Cuban people are unfortunately unmovable.

The Somos Mas movement launched by Eliécer Avila relies only on his face and voice as a charismatic character, once himself a digital soldier that conducted the Operation Truth at the University of Information Sciences (UCI), a platoon of trolls devoted to defaming activists worldwide, distorting online forums and surveys dealing with Cuba, and hacking websites that expose the violations and fallacies of continental Castroism.

The bitter debate of mutual distrust and discredit between those close to blogger Yoani Sanchez and her brand-new 14yMedio.com digital outlet —prone to take advantage of the US-Cuba new engagement to push the limits of censorship in Cuba—, and other previous digital citizen journalists, like the staff of Primavera Digital (who in turn last year publicly despised their Swedish funding partners), and also with the well-known Antonio Rodiles from the very active audiovisual discussion project Estado de Sats, who practically accused 14yMedio and colleagues of collaborating with the regime’s surviving agenda of allowing foreign investments with no guarantee for human rights, in a Putin-like or Chinese or Vietnamese or Burma post-totalitarian model.

On the official part, in the monolithic digital headquarter of Cubadebate, general Raul Castro with his speech at the ALBA Summit in Caracas this month, and many other op-eds published in tandem, has warned that the “international ultraconservative right” is again deploying its “mass media weapons” to use the “concept of civil society in order to attack all the progressive governments from the hemispheric left, with the purpose to deceive and manipulate all the peoples of the world.”

Cubadebate has even announced the popular repudiation that Cuban dissidents —namely, “mercenaries”— will receive in the Summit of the Americas in Panama next week, because we all are “conceived, paid and directed as drones from the US and the EU, through NGOs supposedly for the promotion of human rights, but in fact having met with confessed terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles in Miami, and besides being directly financed by secret institutions of the American imperialism, including the Pentagon and the CIA”.

In March 2015 the Castro regime still proudly calls Cuban social activist leaders “Washington’s puppets, in the line of the dictators Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile, whose mission if ever we attain power is to surrender the wealth of our nation to the US monopolies”, and a white elite that cares not about the “black, aboriginal, farmer and workers minorities”.

Although, paradoxically, it was Fidel Castro who dollarized the Cuban economy for over 20 years now, while his brother Raul Castro is demanding financial credit from American banks and corporations. Furthermore, Afro Cubans suffer much more than other dissidents in Cuba in the hands of the mostly white State Security top-officers, who assume that blacks owe more gratitude to them the rest of the Cuban people.

These are only some tragic examples:

The death of the Afro Cuban opposition activist Orlando Zapata Tamayo in a jail, after a long hunger strike in 2010 to stop torture against him. The 33 months that the Afro Cuban member of the Ladies in White Sonia Garro and her husband spent in prison without charges and with no trial. The harassment and beatings against of Afro Cuban leader Jorge Luis Garcia (Antunez), usually prevented from stepping out of his own house in Placetas town. The arbitrary political police arrests, plus the temporary or permanent invalidation of the passports of Cuban Afro Cuban intellectuals and activists Manuel Cuesta Morúa and Ivan Hernandez Carrillo. The fascist-like mobs conducted by the government against the residences of Berta Soler and other Afro Cuban peaceful women of the Ladies in White, including throwing tar —yes, tar— with impunity against their bodies, like recently happened to Digna Rodríguez Ibañez. Or staining them by force with red paint to resemble human blood, like they did to Mercedes La Guardia Hernandez.

The White House and the remains of the US economic embargo should not ignore that a market economy is not a tropical liberation formula, since it has already been implemented by authoritarian systems as a tool for despotic control. The secret negotiations to appease our tired tyranny should remember that what has been good for free Americans since the Eighteenth Century is also good for Cubans citizens today.

The rationale that, after waiting for so long, Cuban democracy can wait a little longer is a discriminatory concept implicitly legitimized by the US press and academics in their search of a lost Latin American Left.

Maybe the hope of the White House is that the New Man will stop being a soldier and become the New Salesman, but bringing down the wall should mean more than opening up the wallet. In the urgency of Google, Amazon, Delta, Netflix, Coca-Cola, and even Bacardi to re-conquer their Pearl of the Antilles, they shouldn’t forget that we “Cubans have the right to have rights,” as preached by Oswaldo Payá before the gerontocracy and their international accomplices took his life.

In any case, according to the migratory statistics, Cubans are certainly making a lot of space for the Yankees to come home to our Island, as we keep escaping by legal or lethal means, in a kind of pedestrians’ plebiscite, voting with our fleeing feet instead of with electoral ballots.

For the funerals of Fidel, the commander-in-chief will have achieved all the glories of history —which is the mother of all horrors— but also the frantic farewell of his own people —almost one-fourth of our population. This migratory crisis is what the US is really trying to stop by stabilizing the Communist dynastic succession to the Castros 2.0 generation: namely, Alejandro and Mariela Castro Espin, among other relatives, whether dandies or despots, many of them holding high level positions in the Cuban establishment while receiving privileged visitor status in the US.

The hope would be in convoking a national referendum with international observers so that the Cuban people can freely and safely express our will for the first time since 1948. Otherwise, Cuba will become a Castro-centralized capitalist condominium, economically annexed to the US but with a hyper-nationalist speech to justify impunity on the Island.

Now President Barack Obama can choose to extend his helping hand to the oldest Latin American dictatorship. Or he can consider if the Cuban people deserves to endure our apartheid until the last of the Castros manages to remain in power without consulting anyone (except maybe Obama himself).

1 Fidelism 1959, the temperature at which fundamental freedoms burn. 2 As time blogs by. 3 As I lay blogging. 4 The blogger in the ryevolution. 5 From dictatorship to dictocracy. 5 Blogged the Raven: nevermore. 6 Castrobamacare as the measure of all things. 7Won’t you help to share these blogs of freedom? 8 Redemption blogs, redemption blogs to emancipate ourselves from the States.

29 March 2015

Our Dead Are Raising Their Eyelids / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, 22 January 2015

It’s true. Although I still don’t believe it.

But they’ve told me it in all the families I’ve visited since I’ve been out of my country. That’s what families are, a mausoleum. They don’t lie. There is no Cuban family which is not our death memory.

That’s how it is. We Cubans die in the family. That’s the saddest part of dying. Not dying as such, which doesn’t bother the person dying, but the horror of imposing on exactly those people who loved us while we were alive. People should go and die among strangers. Get lost, and that’s it. That’s why I went to the United States. That’s why I didn’t die in Havana, in spite of the fact death whispered “Orlando” in my ear every morning where I lived.

But it’s true. At first I panicked when I knew that somebody was going to tell me the same thing again. Without, of course, coming to any agreement, without ever having been in contact with each other. So, I only wanted to grab the phone, call my house and cry.

Little by little I was thinking more about it. I calmed down. From fear of the mystery to admiration of the secret sense of a non-existent nation: Cuba. The stories repeat themselves. Every Cuban family can remember one, two, three, ten cases. In every Cuban family the same sparkle in the eyes, and the trembling of the hands of the person telling me about it. And maybe too many generations have passed. We are now in exile, without guides, and with no turning back. That’s to say, we are an empty space. We all now have a memory at home of one of us who died without love, without a home, without Cuba.

They have told me it in Spanish and English. In Hialeah, which is La Lisa del Norte, and in Fairbanks, Alaska, where no other Cuban has ever been. Two details are always included:

1) In exile you don’t die at any old time. You die at night, which is when our country is reflected in the sky and indirectly under the breastbone, and because of that it is easy to see it more closely than when we are there.

2) When a Cuban goes away to die far from Cuba, he has a very intense moment of lucidity. And of youth. He stops being the scornful and cruel adult which he has always been, and gets back then an aura of the angel which he never has stopped being. We become good at the precise moment when we can no longer do any good. And every family tells me, in almost the very same words, irrespective of the level of education or intellectual pretentiousness, that the distant Cuban, before he dies, always pronounces the name of Cuba.

Can you believe it? It’s amazing. A destroyed people, degraded, dispersed, unable to recognise each other. And at the time which is no time, totally stretched out on the beloved bed to create the following Cubans, who will later cuddle them while they grow between great big pillows which save them from the shortages in Cuba, collapsed on the edge of the tomb, watched without a goodbye by our people  where everything comes together into a death rattle. And we breath out this elemental pair of syllables: Cuba.

I have never read this before revealing it here. I owe this evidence to the Cuban people, we owe it to them.  And it’s a perverse word which I detest as a killer of men. But after knowing how we will all die without Cuba, including you and me, I think we deserve to be some kind of a people. The nocturnal imaginary nation, hollow, like the human heart. The family remembering those who are going to die by themselves and neverthless with a chorus of Cuba, Cuba, Cuba.

Don’t let me say goodbye to you. What with death and everything, I still love you.

Translated by GH

Leave Me a Comment at the Entrance and We Will Win This Contest / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, 10 March 2015 — Every morning we would lose ourselves amid the skyscrapers until we find ours. That one. The one with the artificial rain that would fall, even in the driest months of the city. She likes then to take a pause in our route. She would let go my hand and draw near to the false marble facades, until she would start getting wet almost without realizing it, from imaginary drops that would evaporate before reaching the asphalt. Imaginary but, even so, they would wet her in a dance that was greatly erotic and somewhat erratic.

Her liquid hair, her transparent garb, in the megalopolis of limousines and suits. I would lag a bit behind. I did not want to interfere with those little mornings in liberty. They lasted so little, it was only an instant. Far from Cuba, far from the Revolution. Oh not so far. Because once, upon the end of an October of overcast skies and recurrent cyclones, it was raining for real in Manhattan. She said to me, “You smell it, too, right? Today is not New York, but rather Havana.” And she went out from under our umbrella, a grave bumbershoot more appropriate to those scenes of cemeteries at the end of the North American films of our childhood.

Far from the “long island” [Cuba], so close to Long Island. She told me, “One day we are going to be like those imaginary drops that never fall. And another day it will be we who fall amid a tired rainstorm.” I just walked behind during the rest of that morning. I knew that she would never forgive me seeing her mix the rain with her foreign-city tears.

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

Roberta Jacobson Queries the Castros’ Crime / Rosa Maria Paya

Screen shot from the Twitter account of one of the regime’s aliases

 

A subject we always include

Rosa María Payá

I have only been in Washington DC 12 hours. Time enough to take up Senator Marco Rubio’s kind invitation to go to President Obama’s State of the Union Address.

It’s winter in DC, but as it gets late, the monumental silhouettes are turned on, giving the capital a warm appearance. In the Capitol I was able to talk to various Democrat and Republican senators, all of them wanting to hear about Cuba. The points in question continue to be fundamental ones:

1) The United States is having high level conversations with a government which has never been chosen by its citizens. And therefore we hope they will put on the table some support for the constitutional petition put up by thousands of Cubans in favour of a referendum for free and multi-party elections.

2) The United States authorities have, on various occasions supported the need for an independent investigation into the violent deaths on 22 July 2012 of my father Oswaldo Payá, European Union Andrei Sakharov prize-winner, and Harold Cepero, young leader of the Christian Liberation Movement. To be consistent, this matter should be discussed now with the Cuban government, as there is the opportunity to address it directly via the new official channels.

Flying back, I bumped into Roberta Jacobson, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere. I went up to her immediately and she got up to greet me. I was pleased she did that.

“Going back home or just to Miami?” she asked me in an innocent way. “I’m going to Miami,” I told her and it struck me that I had not gone back to my home in Havana for more than a year. The last time I was there, State Security chased my brothers in the street, by Parque Manila in El Cerro, and phoned them to say, “Bastards, we’re going to kill you.”

Mrs. Jacobson was going to Havana to some meetings with Cuban government officials. One of them is the well-known State Security functionary Gustavo Machín. Not by coincidence, it was he who had the responsibility for the press conference circus given by the Swede Aron Modig in Cuba, while he was kept in solitary confinement without charges, just before he was deported from the country without being allowed to meet my family, as we had requested as he was a friend and we would be the ones most affected.

Aron was in the car with my father the day of the long-expected attack on our family (nearly always with witnesses, to terrorize them, like an exemplary measure) and was captured by the State Security immediately after the car was run off the road.

I asked the Assistant Secretary whether the independent investigation we have been demanding into the death of Oswaldo Payá and  Harold Cepero would form a part of the dialogue with the Cuban government. “This is always a point that we raise,” she answered in agreement.

She also explained that they were planning to discuss human rights, without saying when. She was speaking in the normal way officials do, as if they weren’t travelling to the heart of the longest-running dictatorship on the planet to meet criminal functionaries, some of whom worked as spies in her own United States.

The Cuban government has lied to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extra-judicial Crimes, when he had asked them for information about my father’s death. More than two years later, the Cuban authorities continue to deny us the autopsy report, which the family has the right to see under current laws in the island.

This Friday January 21st, I am going to meet Ricardo Zúñiga in the White House. I hope that by then he will have news about the Cuban government’s response to Roberta Jacobson, about the investigation into the attack against Harold and my father that cruel day which my family feared but never were able to understand.

The United States and every other country in the world ought to know that, unless all the truth comes out about this and so many other atrocities that have been mythified  as a “Revolution”, there will be no real democracy or stability in Cuba. It is possible that before Friday the accredited international press in the island will already have a reply to both parts of this inescapable question in such a high-level dialogue.

 Translated by GH

22 January 2015

Castrobama

(BACKGROUND IN D.C.: Obama with Chavez-like smile)

LET THE OLD DEAD GIVE WAY TO THE NEW DEAD

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The title is, of course, a quote from the Czech, Milan Kundera, an obsolete reference for the rest of a world, which believes it is living in the post-communist era. But in Cuba, it continues to be something referring to the future.

Just as in global capitalism, “time is money”, in twenty-first century Castroism time is the essence of totalitarianism itself. Because of that, Cubans don’t have lives, only, barely, biographies. And because of that Cubans don’t live in human time, but buried, with the dismal defect that it could last for all eternity. And because of that, for the first time, the White House is so interested in co-opting us. Because of that Fidel Castro’s funeral fascism is rescued by the tyrranical resolutions of Barack Obama and his Democrat mates who hate democracy, in Congress, just as in the Plaza de la Revolución (before his disappearance as the Chief many of them travelled to the island to take supportive selfies with our dictator).

After his 20 January 2015 State of the Union Address, the United States was ready for his presidential winding-down. The American union’s voters are awaiting his demagogic dissolution. To survive in a stable fashion, the democracies which are going to remain on the planet should now do it not just in opposition to  fundamentalist conservatives or lefties, or both, but also in opposition to the United States. And the Cuban case feels like a valuable precedent.

As a part of the secret pact between the two elites, it was obvious that nobody was demanding anything from anybody, except mutual recognition of legitimacy. The 5 or 55 “heroes” or “brothers” of the horror-show arrived in Havana threatening that they were keen to carry out new assassination and infiltration missions, like the informant doctor who theatrically returned to Africa to challenge Ebola again. David and Goliath nowadays are only money and abuse.

The first attracts the second to the island with no Commander, where time stands still, but where there are a thousand and one “decent” descendants of degenerate generals. The second is the mechanical gesturing of the most unknown North American civil president: his public programme is based on springing a private surprise. Even physically, he seems crafty. We don’t matter to him in the slightest, on the contrary, we irritate him. He has a different agenda and Obama is not going to miss out on the legal impunity he can enjoy in his last two years.

In the case of Cuba, the communists’ revenge for Cuba’s exile has finally been accomplished. They fought for that for decades. They bumped off their  libertarian leaders with sudden post-soviet diseases. They empowered those who were interested in investing – and inventing – with a “Plattismo” economic model. They collided with North American public opinion using little Elian dolls and “sperm spies.” (It was easy to do this as they were dealing with an infantile and detestable audience). And now comes the grand orgy of reconciliation between the victims of post-revolutionary repression –  without the orgasm. Today there is not one sensible Cuban, whether in exile or on the island, who believes in the changes. Castroism ended. And, for that reason it is never-ending.

Nobody will ever ask the Castros anything about their more or less famous deaths. In her conspiratorial path to Havana, Roberta Jacobson must have gone cursing the plane from Washington DC on which she met Rosa María Payá when she felt obliged to lie to the martyr’s daughter: “it’s something we can always put on the table” (the translation is mine, the deceit is hers). Always say always.

Do me a favour. If nobody is against this farce. This disingenuous vaseline applied by the victors is unnecessary. Do less of the LGTB posturing, be less culpable, with fewer dirty needs, and come out of the Castro closet with the oppressor’s pride (the shame assumed is ours). The old dead are not yet good luck charms for our memory. The new dead can now wait to be recycled into the future dead, who are coming.

The obsolete Castroism – except in the rest of the world – manages to survive because it knows many things. But the Czech Milan Kundera had the weakness of only knowing one thing. My fellow countrymen, you can finally hang up your Cuban passports. Now, the nation of the Castros, by the Castros and for Castros has finished being embargoed forever.

Translated by GH

21 January 2015

 

Cubamerica / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Cuba I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
Cuba two CUCs and 56 years, January 1st, 1959.
You can’t stand my own mind.
Cuba when will we end the human peace?
Go fuck yourself with your Revolution
I don’t feel good don’t brother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my left mind.
Cuba when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your uniform?
When will you look at myself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Castroists?
Cuba why are your libraries full of totalitarianism?
Cuba when will you send your eggs to Indianapolis?
I’m sick of your sane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my Gross looks?
Cuba after all it is you and I who are perfect not the ex world.
Your Marxism is too much for me.
You made me want to be a serf.
There must be some other way to settle this government.
Batista is in Target I don’t think he’ll come back it’s minister.
Are you being minister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come. To the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
Cuba still pushing I know what I’m doing.
Cuba the rum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
migration.
Cuba I feel sentimental about the Bolos.
Cuba I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.
I smoke Aromas every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the Raulists in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be transition.
You should have seen me reading Mao.
My psychoagent thinks I’m perfectly tight.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical treasons and Cardinal vibrations.
Cuba I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Sam after he came over
from The Obama House.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by The New York Times?
I’m obsessed by The New York Times.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the José Martí National Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Even the exile is serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am Cuba.
I am talking to myself again.

Original in English

27 January 2015

"I’ve seen them leave." The Castro Genocide, Cuban Documentary

12 March 2015

CNN: Castro Network News / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Orlando, Luis Pardo Lazo, 8 March 2015 — CNN is an anti-democratic and anti-American organ of complicity with Castro.

In the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists of the United States, it’s very clear that they have to respect the right to a fair trial of those incriminated, before releasing any privileged information to the public, since this can unfairly influence the legal result.

It’s clear that they have to think hard before reproaching people, above all before there have been formal judicial charges against them.

However, as CNN hates Bob Menendez (for commercial reasons), just as it hates all Cubans except those who support Castro (for commercial reasons), CNN has launched its juicy scoop in order to throw stones at the public prestige of someone who opposes the tyrannical resolutions of Barack Obama.

They also bribed The New York Times to publish dozens of pro-Castro editorials in complicity with the Cuban (and) American entrepreneurship, manipulating American citizens from the medium monopoly of malice.

I have come to the United States to witness the end of American democracy. How sad.

Soon I am leaving.

Translated by Regina Anavy

Rosa Maria Paya for Cuban Human Rights

24 January 2015

OLPL at Americas Society (NYC), March 5, 2015

We passed the book from hand to hand. A worn-out volume, despite being a new edition. An edition in Cuba means a foreign edition. As readers in revolutionary Cuba, we suffered from the oxygenating syndrome of xenophillia.

The title was “Less Than One.” The author, an exiled Soviet dissident. In the early 90s this mixture sounded perfect for us. To be an author, to become a dissident, to commit exile.

We worshiped every word of Joseph Brodsky, literally and literarily. We memorized sentences as we copied them by hand, with those remaining huge and hideous pencils imported by the ton to the Island from the Cold War Era.

“The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie.” But we were spontaneously sincere in the naïve nightmare of our unconsciousness. Dear and dreadful daylight dreamers.

“As failure goes, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence.” “The more one remembers, the closer perhaps one is to dying.” But we hadn’t failed in anything at all. And life, like literature, was elsewhere and still waiting to be written, both floating in a totalitarian perfect present tense, with little meaning to grasp and less memory to recall.

In the palindromic 1991, immortality was a common place taken for granted, as we dwelled not in Havana, but in city of books smuggled from abroad, while the so-called Special Period in Time of Peace was being dramatized by our omniscient omnipotent narrator, Fidel. No last name required after such an intimate and intimidating F, because calling him Castro was considered a first symptom of dissent. And dissent begets disaster in our proletarian’s paradise.

“There isn’t an executioner who isn’t scared of turning victim one day, nor is there the sorriest victim who would not acknowledge a mental ability to become an executioner.” “That is the ultimate triumph of the system: whether you beat it or join it, you feel equally guilty.” But none of us knew any executioner or victim back then, being both ourselves without yet noticing it.

The absence of all magnitude or quantity. The quality of a point of departure in reckoning, from which the graduation of every scale begins. The one and only whole entity between minus 1 and 1. Less than 1, more than minus 1. Not positive but still not negative, still useful as a “place-holder” to write all the other numerals. A closed cycle of zero revolutions per minute. A void paradoxically not devoid but full of properties. An unnatural number that had to be invented by the human mind, so that, as humanity itself, anything multiplied by it becomes it, including authors, dissidents, exiles.

Their years 2000s were soon to be our years zero. Arid arithmetic for a literarid field. Playing to be marginal squatters, positioning ourselves among sequestered cultural institutions that left zero space beyond duty and discipline, not even for delusion —not to mention disappointment— we were just amateurs in an asphyxiating atmosphere, where the State monopoly occupied every channel of information, creativity, criticism, distribution and legitimation. For Cuban intellectuals, these are the real Five Heroes of our time: the impossibility to break free and the urge to find a way out.

We arrived late to Cuban literature, to Cuban history, to Cuban socialism, to the Cuban Revolution. We arrived late to acquainting Fidel with Truth, to holding him accountable. Not to be the audience of his monologues any longer, but his surviving witnesses that through fiction will force him to dialogue. We stole a piece of his despotic pie to imagine by ourselves another Island in our image and likeness: the barbarity of books versus the orality of horror. We pretended to be fake foreigners in a hyper-realistic minefield, tantalizing the tiger’s teeth with our insulting innocence.

To narrate an obsolescent Fidel was an obscene obsession for our generation of zeros. After decadent decades of imposing the term “worms” in the official speech against the Cuban people, as authors we approached the delicate and dangerous beauty of “the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a machine-gun and Fidel.” Fetus or fossil, feast or funeral, among other fundamentalist F’s, we just typed. We tried, we were tried. Then, we were trapped. Then, trialed.

We developed an interest in bodies, in hidden desires under the hopeless green uniforms, in love and lust despite the Cuban faraway military interventions renamed as “worker’s internationalism.” We despised the rule of law understood as the rule of loyalty. From dynamization to dynamite. From the reasonable to the treasonable. From tradition to the untranslatable. From vocabulary to a kind of unkind vocubalary. From literature to limiterature. We were prone to pay the price and then, of course, to prevail in silence.

Mute and mutants as only zeros know how.

Generations, of course, do not exist. The 11 outlaws included in CUBA IN SPLINTERS (an anthology of O/R Books, New York 2014, translated by Hillary Gulley), behave like professionals of provocation, textrrorists between apathy and aphasia, focusing on the black holes of literature, history, socialism, revolution, fidel —the Five Heroes of our writing— digging into the uncomfortable and the unpleasant, cannibalizing our cultural cannon, perverting all political perceptions not to épater le bourgeois but épater le proletaire.

Quod scripsi, is crisis.

The communicating vessels between these short-stories are not bridges, but short-circuits: tensions among fictions must produce friction and fractions of fertile sense and nonsense, a bit of idiocy after so much ideology, from the Berlin Wall to the Bloody Jaws of the Florida Strait, from Fidel’s bodyguards to sex for sale at a tetric train station; snob Buddhism and stunt zombies; smoke of cannabis cubensis so our mind can emigrate north beyond the Castrophobic line of the horizon; Habaniroshima, mon amour: remake and collage, cut-up and remix, plagiarism taken to the paroxysm, the newrrative of the portrait of a family that never was but still is.

Zerotomy. Metastazero. Soulcialist sickstem.

Today the new markets expect the New Man to quit being a soldier and become a salesman. Bring down the wall, open up the wallet. But what was good for Americans since the 18th century is still not good enough for Cubans in the 21st century: second class citizens, having waited so long, democracy now, like heaven, can wait —a racism conceived by US academicians in their search of their lost Latin American left.

An extreme experience might be exhausting, but the humblest Cuban now has a weird wisdom that top public figures in the US lack, for we have seen things that you American people wouldn’t believe. Not like tears in the rain, but like tears in the ruins. So, let it read. Let it rip our clowntry in as many unsuspected splinters as feasible. Nuclear fission, nuisance fiction. Cubansummatum est.

Please purchase the paper or digital edition of the anthology here.

Original in English by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

6 March 2015