I had not yet been born in April 1961, when the socialist character of the Cuban process was declared.  “This is the socialist revolution of the humble, by the humble and for the humble…” Fidel Castro announced near the foreboding gates of the Colon Cemetery.  Many who listened to him, jubilant and optimistic, assumed that the first revolutionary objective would be to stop having humble people.  With this illusion, they went out to champion a future without poverty.

Observing the present audience for what was announced nearly fifty years ago, I wonder when prosperity will stop being seen as counterrevolutionary.  Will wanting to live in a house where the wind doesn’t tear the roof off stop being, some day, a petty bourgeois weakness?  All the material shortages that I observe beg the question of the common sense of this colossal upheaval in the history of the country, only to stop having the rich, at the expense of having so many poor.

If, at the very least, we were more free.  If all these materials needs were not also expressed in a long chain that makes every citizen a servant of the State.  If the condition of the humble was a choice, voluntarily assumed and practiced, in particular, by those who govern us.  But no.  The renewed exaltation of humility launched by Raúl Castro this January first confirms for us what we learned in decades of economic crisis: poverty is the road that leads to obedience.

When the eighth leak appeared in the dining room ceiling, you accepted the mission to go to Venezuela as a doctor.  You knew that with each month’s salary you’d never have been able to tear out the paneling and replace the worn out columns.  Also, the resale of some appliances you bought there would help pay for the cost of cement and rebar.  In Havana, your bank account would grow with the fifty convertible pesos you’d receive each month for your stay in Caracas.  Your wife ordered a laptop and your youngest son asked for Play Station.

The first months you slept badly with the sounds of gunfire coming into the small room shared with five other colleagues.  To chase away the nostalgia, you thought about your relatives’ faces when they’d learn about all the nice clothes you had gotten at a discount.  Meanwhile, the small bank account grew in Cuba, under the condition that you could enjoy it only at the end of your mission.

Someone in the group confessed one night that he was going to cross the border and take off for Miami. You listened to him with the trembling of one who can forget about the leak, the new roof, and the requested laptop, and use your savings to start a new life.  Suddenly you remembered the nurse who escaped and has never been able to get her family off the Island.  Deserters are punished with separation, marked by the impossibility of being reunited with their families.

So you spent your two years curing people and saving lives, suffering the separation, the fear and the shared housing.  With relief, you got news that your wife had started to buy the bags of cement to repair the roof.  When it was almost time for you to return, someone announced that an agreement to stay another six months could be made by signing a paper.  “No problem,” you thought, “with the extra money I’ll earn in that time, maybe I’ll have enough to repair the walls of the house.”

We keep a wary eye out for anyone who might approach our children lecherously, but few think to maintain the same vigilance in the face of the child abuse that focuses on minds rather than bodies.  The distortion of Cuban education to put ideology above all has reached an alarming point, even for those of us who were once taught by the same methods.  Simply looking at a textbook, or reviewing the system for grading students, we can see that doctrine is gaining ground to the detriment of knowledge.  In my son’s classroom, six photos of The Olive-Green Leader adorn the walls, while on his report card he is graded on his participation in political and patriotic activities.

I am reminded of my own time as a Little Pioneer, when I would read a communique or shout slogans, and still, today, I cannot overcome the feeling of having been raped.  But the feeling is so much stronger when I see that Teo, at thirteen, has already learned which opinions he shouldn’t express at school to avoid problems.  And to find that my own mask has now been extended to the face of my son, is more painful by far than the feeling that I myself was once the target of this same kind of rape.

Men succeed each other, ideologies collapse, leaders die and speeches get shorter; everything is under the repetitive cycle of the sun that sets and rises again.  When I look from my balcony towards the rising sun, I realize how small we are, how laughable are some peoples’ pretensions of superiority.

Here is the first sun of 2009, the golden circle of light that will survive us all.  I wish you a Happy New Year and may the rays of this dawn warm everyone.

Pablo Milanes and I share an unforgettable evening at the Tribuna Antiimperialista [Anti-Imperialist Grandstand].  He was on stage, singing his extensive repertoire, while I was hoisting a fabric sign with the name of Gorki.  His concert lasted nearly three hours, but the fabric raised by some of us impertinents took only seconds to be destroyed.  Despite being so close to the singer-songwriter of “Yolanda,” I thought, that August 28th, that thousands of kilometers separated my nonconformity from his apologetic leanings.  I was wrong.

I’ve read the interview Pablo gave to the magazine El Público and any one of his answers would lead to a beating if he expressed it in a central square in Havana.  His opinions seem to be those that led me to start this blog; some of his phrases I might well sign as my own.  When he says, “We are paralyzed in every sense, we make plans for a future that never even comes nearer,” it touches me more than all of his songs put together.  This future he speaks of was painted for us as an abundance of light with a musical score that included his voice crooning, “Cuba will.”  For the sake of reaching such an enormous mirage every sacrifice seemed small, even shutting up about our differences, stifling every vestige of criticism.

The colors ran over the aging face of Utopia and the Victory symphony was rearranged into a reggaeton of survival.  The songs of Pablo Milanés came to be like the hymns of old when we were more innocent and more gullible.  “Many people are afraid to speak,” he tells us now and with trembling knees I confirm that yes, the cost of an opinion is still too high.  Beyond the chords and taut strings of his guitar he modulated his best tune yesterday, the one that raises dissent and the finger of the citizen pointed at power.  It’s the same tune hummed by thousands of Cubans, but one that he has the capacity to modulate with his warm voice that once made us believe the opposite.

The tedium of this end of year drove me to go see the dreary spectacle of our parliamentarians in their final meeting of 2008.  The formula of posing problems without mentioning their true causes returned to the hall of the Palace of Conventions this December.  The whole style of speaking starts with an initial reference more or less as follows: “Our Revolution has done much to improve retail trade, although problems remain…”  Without this indispensable genuflection, one could fall into an unpermitted audaciousness, or seem to be hypercritical and ungrateful.

The final speech by Raúl Castro reaffirmed the idea of ending subsidies.  Hearing that phrase, we tend to think only of the end of the quota of rationed food we Cubans receive.  But the call to do away with symbolic prices and unnecessary “free” services is a double-edge sword which could end up hurting whomever wields it.  If we were to be consistent in eliminating paternalism, we’d need to start by reducing the burden of maintaining this obese state infrastructure that we feed from our own pockets.  Workers who produce steel, nickel, rum or tobacco, or who are employed in the bar of a hotel, receive a minuscule portion of the sale of their production or of the real cost of their services.  The rest goes directly to subsidize an insatiable State.

Between the symbolic price of a pound of rationed rice, and the enormous “slice” of our salaries taken by those who govern us, we are more the givers than the receivers of subsidies.  Eradicating them should be our slogan, not theirs.

A vague completion date, and the question of whether it will bring information for all, surrounds the submarine cable linking Cuba and Venezuela.   To all of us who complain about the poor connectivity found on the Island, they have an argument to shut us up: “We have to wait until the cable is ready.”  With so much riding on it, I’m going to list what this projected umbilical cord should bring us:

• Internet access for all, not based on privilege, with the opportunity for anyone to contract for a home connection.
• In primary and secondary schools and in universities, broadband for the students and time to access the network that is less limited than today.
• A reduction in costs at the cybercafés and internet-connected computers in the hotels, which today cost one-third of a monthly salary for one hour.
• The opportunity to use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Hi5 and more.
• Finally, that we can get our hands on services such as Skype, videoconferencing, sending large packets of information and even watching television on the internet.

If the blessed cable is not going to bring all that, please explain to me the reasons why we have to wait until 2011 for it.  I hope that at least a small fiber of its content reaches my freelance blogger hands; or will it be that the kilobytes that circulate in its interior will have, like a watermark: “Only for the trusted.”

Translator’s note:
The cost of the printer, 689.00 CUC [convertible pesos], is the equivalent of more than 3 years’ wages.
  

Today could be the 3rd of June or the 9th of September, because there are hardly any signs that it is Christmas.  Few, very few, offer holiday greetings in the street.  Compared to December 25th of last year, this is a lifeless day with fewer expectations for the future.  More than twelve months have passed since we predicted–in the privacy of family and friends–anticipated reforms that have turned out to be a mobile phone or a room in a hotel that we can’t afford.

Today the rooster will crow for a people whose actions are reduced to the deliberately complacent verb: to wait.   Meanwhile, my address book fills with the phone numbers of friends who have emigrated and our president jumps like a caged cat when they speak to him of imprisoned dissidents.  What little progress we’ve made in 2008!  What a ridiculous marching in place we’ve managed, right up to December.

Translator’s note
Cuba, like other Spanish-speaking countries, traditionally celebrates Christmas on December 24, Noche Buena [Good Night], which ends at midnight with La Misa del Gallo [The Mass of the Rooster ].  Tradition holds that the only time the rooster crowed at midnight was to announce the birth of Jesus.

If you don’t offer solutions, don’t you dare to use the weapon of criticism–that’s what some people tell me who, themselves, don’t offer a single remedy either.  Their tone reminds me of the boring Pioneer assemblies I had to attend during all my years of school.  When it came my turn to speak and my observations boiled over from personal things to criticisms of systemic things, someone would stop me and brusquely point out that a true revolutionary would offer solutions: Don’t complain.  Exercising judgment must be done in a constructive way, they would warn me, and with time I understood that it wasn’t a call to a worthwhile discussion but rather to conformity.

These interrupted critiques involved those problems for which not even proponents of the “useful critique” have a solution.   My slight knowledge of economic issues doesn’t allow me, for example, to venture an amendment to the unjust economic duality in which we have lived for fifteen years.  Nor do I have the scientific background to know how to resolve the wretched issue of the marabu weed growing everywhere.  Lack of experience in politics keeps me from being able to predict how effective the words of John Paul II would be: “Let Cuba open up to the world, and the world will open up to Cuba.”

My citizen’s sense of smell, however, has led me intuitively to discover the SOLUTION.  Only freedom of opinion will allow those who can advance remedies to dare to do so.  The economist who keeps a plan to restructure the Cuban economy in his drawer needs guarantees that he will not be punished for expressing his ideas.  All the political, social and foreign projects that are hidden because of the possible reprisals that their creators could suffer demand a space for respect.

Let everyone speak, no matter whether in complaint or in support of a proposal designed to address the problems.  Announce publicly that every Cuban can say what he thinks and propose solutions from whichever political stripe and ideological orientation he believes in.  Then they will see how the balsams appear, as complaint gives way to proposal, and how bad the chronic squashers of criticism will feel.

Generation Y and the other blogs on the Portal Desdecuba.com have been inaccessible for more than twenty-four hours. The causes of the blackout have not yet been determined, but I want to thank all those who have been concerned about the loss of our connection.

I regret giving you so many headaches, but I am happy to confirm that we can continue fighting off the attacks, the trolls, and even the software problems. A hug and we are going to recoup this lost day.

Yoani