Generation Y

What started as an personal impulse is becoming a meeting place for discussion and debate. Generación Y has managed to involve a great number of people all over the world who help me with updating, translations, and the diffusion of texts. The principal collaboration has been in publishing the posts since, as of the last week in March, I have not been able to access the site in either public cibercafés or hotels. So I send the texts by email, some friends publish them and send me –also by email– the comments left by the readers. I am a blind blogger, a cibernaut with a leaking raft that manages to keep afloat with the help of a spontaneous citizens network. 

All of the portal http://www.desdecuba.com continues to be blocked on the local public servers. I have made a copy of the message that the browsers show when I attempt access and I leave you an example here. I also know that it is not a total blackout. Friends who have internet access at their workplaces are able to visit the site, but that’s not much help to me since in those places, it is I who cannot enter. 

In spite of this, I have the same desire to write in this blog that I had in the beginning. I am now even more persistent, since what they prevent me from doing becomes more attractive to me. In order to overcome the connectivity problems and reach readers on the island, other friends have created a minidisk with the contents of the blog and they are distributing it free. I want to thank everyone for the support, the oars and the wind that allow me to stay on course.

I am doing an onomastic and simple study: How many members of Generation Y are part of Cuba’s power mechanisms today? I am under the impression that if I lift a stone the Yunieskys, Yordankas, and Yusimís would appear everywhere. On the street I turn my head every other head when someone calls to someone with a similar name to mine, but I don’t see a profusion of “y griegas” in positions that decide the country’s course. The National Assembly–which will convene in a few weeks–has a roster that barely shows this crazy letter that proceeds “z.” Also, one doesn’t find the capricious “y” among the managers, administrators or company leaders. Why if the penultimate space in the alphabet, this extravagant letter that is so rarely used in our Spanish, lets out a cry that will reach the imposing vowels and constants in the top ranks. The Y’s moment has arrived! It’s high time for the alphabet to begin at the end!

In your sneakers with the Nike logo on the tongue you sneer at my synthetic leather sandals, while I calculate that your Italian sunglasses cost you a month’s salary. You pull a pack of Marlboro cigarettes that you bought in Vía Uno out of your purse and offer me one, even though you know that I don’t smoke. We are going together to your house in Cerro–a small room in a crumbling mansion occupied by seven families. I enter the living room and your impeccable shoes seem out of place alongside a wicker chair without a back, a shapeless mattress covered by a gray sheet and walls that haven’t been painted since the grandfather died. She poured a cup of coffee for me into a cup without a handle, but I could only stare at the gold ring on her index finger. “Yadira,” I say to reprimand her, “you’ve got such opulent clothing but you don’t even have your own bathroom!” She smiles and I catch sight of a small ruby encrusted in her canine tooth. Leaving her house, I notice the strange combination of ostentation and misery that “decorates” our streets. I see pairs of Adidas, Kelme, and Wilson sneakers going in and out of the front doors of crumbling buildings on Reina Avenue, and my nose picks up a stench wafting from a nearby broken sewer along with the unmistakable scent of Christian Dior perfume. The lines that form outside of the boutiques attest to the quantity of money that arrives through remittances, illegal activity or diverting resources which sustains these conceited “peacocks.” Nobody wants to go without designer clothing, whether it is genuine or fake. I’ve been told that before the Adidas store moved to the corner of 1st Street and Avenue D in Vedado (hoping to double their profit), it sold more merchandise per square meter than any other Latin American subsidiary. Some of their products will be bought by people who don’t have their own home or who must struggle to eat everyday. These individuals prefer keeping their most “valuable” possessions on their own bodies. When she looks out from behind the lenses of UV sunglasses, the Point Zero cotton clothing, or the L’Oreal scent in her hair, Yadira doesn’t notice the missing tiles in her kitchen or the springs sticking out of her mattress. Those who meet her believe that she is a splendid young woman who wears designer clothing rather than the resident of a squalid solar, where every morning she must carry water to a small collective bathroom.

This Sunday in the news the secretary-general of the Cuban Workers Confederation announced a 1st of May celebration where the ‘creative ingenuity’ of our people will be recognized. His words were accompanied by the well-known images of thousands of people parading in a Plaza full of posters, flags, and multicolored clothing. Seeing so much exuberance, my old doubts returned about where all these bright and colorful things, so dazzling under the May sun, are manufactured. If we are guided by the words of Salvador Valdés Mesa, we would think the initiative comes from the citizens to design, paint and color the posters and clothing. However, we all know that it is not possible to buy, in Cuban pesos – the currency in which wages are received – neither a Cuban flag, nor oil or acrylic paint, let alone shirts or caps. Nor can one legally purchase a printer to achieve the perfect lettering that is displayed on the posters of the demonstrators. Where, then, do these signs come from that purport to be the fruit of mass spontaneity? I know the answer and I know that it has little to do with the courage of a worker who writes his demands on a canvas. Nor does it have to do with the decision of an independent trade union to organize its members to demand better working conditions. The majority of these signs are directed and designed by those who look back at them, “spellbound,” from the platform. They know that if the workers were left to themselves to make the posters, they would probably say other things.

You have not taken the red pill or the blue… but today you get up and reality appears purely decorative. You review the newspaper to rid yourself of this false taste and you confirm – on reading Granma – that fiction has officially become fact.

The news seems to go faster than life. Yesterday they called me from Spain - lately information travels abroad and then ricochets back to us – to tell me that it is no longer necessary to get an exit permit. As it happened, as soon as I received the news, I took myself off to the office of the Legal Adviser where I filled out the application to travel. Barely had I gotten over the thrill of it, when an official from Immigration clarified to me that none of this is true, the white card and the one hundred and fifty convertible pesos are still in effect. So bending the neck, I paid the tax and a swore a bit about rumors that do not materialize, and expectations that are not reali…

On Saturday I went to Pinar del Rio to enjoy the streets empty of cars, the friends I have there, and that group of stubborn people who publish the magazine Coexistence. I put my bones in an almendrón* and arrived at the bus station with an acute pain in my neck. In the evening I spoke for a while with Nestor, the young man they expelled from the university for collaborating on the new digital publication managed by Dagoberto Valdes. I wanted to say that having a university degree, even if it was free, is a heavy burden that doesn’t always yield satisfaction. Mine, for example, has lain for eight years behind a piece of furniture in my room. In it I read that I am a graduate in philology, although I am not authorized to do with language what I please. Huge Gothic letters certify that words are my kingdom, however they don’t warn me where the gags begin. Nestor, had he continued in his career, would have learned Roman law, he would have put on the toga and defended hundreds of the accused. His diploma would have had – like mine – the optimistic statement of a profession. However, in the ink of life, in the opening role, he would have known that the laws are as changeable and elastic as the opinions of those who write them. When the rector and the majority of his classmates voted to remove him from the University, they taught him how fickle is justice. Unwittingly, they saved him from dragging another title like the one I hide; as full of knowledge as of limits. *Translator’s note: Generally an American car from the 1950’s or earlier, now in use as a semi-fixed route shared taxi.

It gave me a little start to read the collection of papers devoted to Hector Zumbado on Penultimate Days and in the Blog of Enrisco. I fell into the story about how many we had given up for dead – this evil mania of burying people who are still breathing – to who was the most indefatigable partier, jokester, and badmouther of bureaucrats, functionaries, and administrators. Zumbado has given us all the best of his jokes, the most accurate impersonations: we come to believe that we have escaped from this absurdity, when in reality he observes us still from this “state of grace” in which he left a mysterious beating. In the midst of the buzz of homage, I managed to find a copy of his hilarious Lemonade which, in spite of its yellowed gazette pages, made me laugh for the umpteenth time. The most lacerating of his jokes I found in the pre-logue – a form that the author calls a mix of prologue and epilogue – where, with a tone that he wants to seem serious, he announced: “Due to the time in which Lemonade was written (1969-1971) – one of the most difficult economic periods we have had which required the introduction of a series of measures and controls in distribution (plus some deficiencies in the organization, plus some overflowing imagination in some administrators in the commercial area), many situations that arise (in the book “Lemonade”) are no longer valid because they have been overcome by the natural progress of the Revolution…” And there it is, the painful stab of the joke, the prophetic gag masked in negation. Zumbado knew it was not a turning point, that what seemed temporary and accidental in reality was systemic and permanent. Therefore, even today his stories are bitingly real… strikingly forceful. I was especially taken with his text on Chapucio*, that clumsy willful one who, “If administering a playground, why go through all the silliness of fixing the play equipment if the children, certainly, don’t protest, don’t send memorandums, don’t go in front of the assembly to demonstrate? They are always smiling and looking happy.” I note, then, that we continue to go through the same thing, although the officials have been fattened and call themselves managers. Only now we are without the whip of Zumbado and without the consolation of a refreshing lemonade. *Translator’s note: A person who says they can do or fix anything but who always makes it worse.

I am making a new university career. It is not related to any specialty but I can obtain a diploma of “Bachelor of Circumventing the Bureaucracy.” The subjects of study are the formalities and papers required to travel outside Cuba and the assignments carry a good dose of patience, meekness and mystery. To this crash course in “paperwork” I have not come empty handed, but have dragged a decade of experience in the turmoil of procedures. There are also the multiple clashes with officials and a slow acceptance of the bad smell of the offices. The experience of talking with bureaucrats – for those who always lack a document, a stamp or a signature – will allow me to finagle the highest grade in some areas. Nevertheless, I will have to overcome a certain predisposition to rage, an inconvenient fury when I am told, “Your paper has not come in time,” or, “Those who have to approve it are higher up.” The end result of this exercise will be a small white card that authorizes me to leave Cuba to collect the Ortega y Gasset prize. I stress that I am not trying to “travel,” as no Cuban uses this verb for the action of going abroad. We skip, cross, leave or go; but “to travel” is too small a word when leaping over the insularity we are talking about. Even the long-awaited approval I need is known as an “exit permit” and carries with it the sound of locks that open. I do not know how many hours have been accumulated in the lines, the legal birth certificates, the habit of requiring documents that aren’t needed, such as my vaccination card and the latest electricity bill. I do not know, but I have the feeling that the answer to my request to travel has already been decided and waits for me in a drawer. Nothing I can do could affect whether the key opens or closes the door. Meanwhile, I have come to believe that “exit” is possible.

I live in a utopia that is not mine. Before it, my grandparents crossed themselves and my parents gave their best years. Me, I took it on my shoulders without the power to shake it off. Some who don’t live it are trying to convince me – from a distance – that it must be preserved. But it drives one insane to live the fantasy of others, to be burdened with the weight of what others dreamt. Those who imposed on me – without asking – this mirage, I want to warn you, starting now, I do not think it will be passed on to my children.