At night he watches over the rows planted with malanga and the flock of lambs, with a short homemade shotgun. It is the work of an improvised gunsmith who welded a small diameter piece of pipe to a rustic chamber, with an irregular hammer sticking out. The sound of the ingenious device is enough, in the early hours of the morning, to send running anyone who tries to steal the harvest. When the sow gives birth, he calls his brother who lives in the village, and with this contrivance, created by necessity, they keep watch until sunrise.

Many farmers use illegal weapons that have been purchased or produced in an alternative way. Without them, the fruit of months of labor could end up in the hands of the “predators” of grain, elusive shadows who move in the darkness. Poverty has increased the stealing in the Cuban countryside and forced the villagers to safeguard their own resources. Hence the proliferation of aggressive dogs and manufactured shotguns, particularly on farms where there are cows. The pound of beef that sells for two convertible pesos in the black market feeds the thefts and illegal slaughter, despite the lengthy prison sentences that these crimes entail.

For the guardians of their own property, an official announcement has come as a surprise: …”in exceptional circumstances and only once (…) people native to and residing legally on the island, and who have in their control unlicensed firearms, will be able to obtain the required registration.” There exists, however, the tacit conviction that whomever publicly admits such possession, will find the response to be confiscation. Given this fear, few will confess to keeping the cold metal anywhere in their house, preferring the risk of not having papers to the insecurity of being left without protection. To our alarm, these rustic instruments also serve those who have neither farms nor animals to protect, lying in wait on the other side of the fence, inclined to shoot to take what belongs to others.

We become used to the inflated figures, the secrecy when something goes wrong, and a gross domestic product that never reflects the contents of our pockets. For decades the economic reports have had the ability to hide, through pages filled with numbers and analysis, the seriousness of the problems. Among those qualified in the inexact science of finance, there were some, such as Oscar Espinosa Chepe, who dared to unmask the falsity of certain numbers and who were punished with the “pajama plan” of unemployment and disgrace.

This week my reading of the serious and well-argued analysis published by Father Boris Moreno in New Word, the magazine of the Havana Archdiocese of the Catholic Church, has increased my anxiety about the collapse we are heading into. With the suggestive title, “Whence the Cuban ship?  A look at the economic environment,” the author warns us of a fall – a nosedive – in the material and financial state of the Island. Words that should terrify us, if not for the fact that our ears have become somewhat impervious to bad news about plunges in productivity and shortages

I agree with this holder of a Master’s degree in Economic Science that the first and most important step is “the government’s formal commitment to recognize the ability of all citizens to express their opinions without reprisals of any kind. We should eliminate in our environment the labels that restrict the exchange of ideas and opinions.” After reading this, I imagine my neighbor, a retired accountant, openly expressing his views about the need to allow private enterprise, without this earning him a repudiation rally in front of his door. It takes work to project something like this, I know, but I cherish the idea that some day – without fear that they will be accused of being “mercenaries in the pay of a foreign power” – thousands will express their ideas and propose solutions. What enormous capital Cuba would recover!

While the coffers are not going to be filled solely by proposals and reasoning, our experience tells us that voluntarism and exclusions have only contributed to emptying them.

I see police everywhere. I don’t know if they are stuck on my retina or if in recent months there has been an alarming growth in their numbers. They come in Mercedes Benz trucks, stand three at a time on the corners and even show up with their German shepherds at various places in the city. While hundreds of round modern cameras watch us from above, those in uniform control us on the broken sidewalks at street level. They come out of nowhere and disappear when we need them most. Astute in detecting a sack of cement transported without papers, they rarely emerge at night in the slums where the number of crimes grows and grows.

There are also those in plain clothes, those “guardian angels” with a permanent presence in any line, cultural center, or human gathering. They are no longer as easy to spot because they’ve changed their rayon pullovers, checked shirts and military haircuts for costumes ranging from braids with colored beads to letting their underwear show above the waist of their pants. They sport cell phones, sunglasses, and leather sandals, but still seem out of place with the expression of someone who does not blend into the situation they inform about. They go to the Film Festival but have never seen a Fellini film, they are in the art galleries but are incapable of saying whether a painting is figurative or abstract. In short, they have been taught to camouflage themselves but they can’t erase their sneer of contempt toward the “petit bourgeoisie weakness” that is art and its manifestations.

What I fear the most, however, is not this group with the metal badges on their chests, or those under cover who write reports, but the coercive police inside all of us. The one who blows the whistle of fear to warn us of what we do not dare, and who shakes the shackles of indifference each time we add to our critiques or opinions. The one who has attended the Academy of Self-Censorship and is a skilled soldier in showing us the roads that bring no trouble. The one with a Penal Code with at most a couple short articles: No. 1 “Don’t look for problems,” and No. 2 “What you do won’t change anything.” If we wake up one day wanting to silence the pounding of that one’s boots inside our head, then we remember the bars, the courts, the chill of a provincial prison. He doesn’t need to take a cudgel to our ribs, because he knows how to pluck the strings of fear, and with the phrase, “Stay calm, it’s better to wait,” he executes the karate kicks that leave our body immobilized, aching in anticipation.

He is eight years old and enormously confused.  This morning his mother put 25 centavos in his hand, telling him, “Here are five pesos.”  He looked at the shiny surface with the shield of the Republic on one side and on the back the tall thin tower of the city of Trinidad.  Although born in an economically schizophrenic country, he is still not used to the switch from Cuban pesos to their convertible relatives.  At school the teacher has never talked about the issue, but to explain it would take an entire course over a whole semester.  Nor do they explain much at home, as if the adults think it is normal that they mix two kinds of money in their wallets.

In Cuba there are four kinds of markets and two different types of money to pay for things in them.  Every morning the housewives detail in their heads – with a minimum of fuss – a plan for which currency they will use to buy what, in which places.  It’s an arithmetical operation that takes a few seconds, fifteen years after the implementation of dollarization and its subsequent “ghost,” the convertible peso.  The conversion is done constantly and there are sellers who accept both the symbolic tokens they pay our wages in, and the others with a value 24 times greater.  For a pineapple we can pay as much as 10 pesos in national money – a day’s wages – or about fifty centavos in the money commonly called “chavitos.”  Some tourists are not aware of such complexities and acquire the queen of fruits for ten convertible pesos.  That day, the trader closes his stall quickly and goes home happy for the mistake.

My son’s generation does not understand what it’s like to live with a single currency.  I think they have a special development in the area of the brain that eventually accepts the absurd, in the neural connections that handle the unacceptable.  They perform currency conversions with the ease of someone who has learned two languages since infancy and alternates them with little difficulty.  Except that the learning of several languages is always enriching, but taking for normal the financial duality is to accept that there are two possible lives.  One of them is flat and gray, like the national centavos, and the other – which is forbidden in all its extension to a good part of the population – seems full of colors and watermarks, like the style of the twenty convertible peso bill.

Translator’s Note:

Briefly, Cuba has two currencies.  Moneda nacional (national money or the Cuban peso) is the currency that wages are paid in and some goods are sold in.  The convertible pesos (CUC) is the currency tourists must exchange their dollars, euros, or other currencies for. Many goods are sold, even to Cubans, only in CUCs. One CUC is worth 24 Cuban pesos.  After the Revolution, possession of the U.S. dollar was outlawed in Cuba until 1993, when it was permitted.  The CUC replaced the U.S. dollar in 2004.  The slang name for CUCs, “chavitos,” is a play on Hugo Chavez’s name.

Rumors spread, murmurs become official notes and newspapers report – several weeks later – what the whole country already knows. We have gone from rationed information to a veritable “coming out” that flows in parallel with the censorship of the official media. Our glasnost has not been driven from offices and ministries, but has emerged in mobile phones, digital cameras and removable memories. The same black market that supplied powdered milk or detergent now offers illegal Internet connections and television programs that arrive through prohibited satellite dishes.

This is how we learned of the events in Venezuela during the last week. My own cell phone has been on the verge of collapse from so many messages telling me about the student protests and the closure of several television stations. I forward copies of these brief headlines to everyone in my address book, in a network that mimics viral transmission: I spread it to many and they in turn inoculate a hundred more with the information. There is no way to stop this form of broadcast news, because it does not use a fixed structure but mutates and adapts to each circumstance. It is anti-hegemonic, although the little word acquires different connotations in the Cuban case, where the hegemony has belonged to the newspaper Granma, the TV show The Round Table, and the DOR*.

We knew of the deaths in the psychiatric hospital days before the official announcement and we heard of the fate of those pushed out** in March 2009 through “radio bemba” – literally “lip radio” or Cuba’s gossip network – and one day we will know that the “end” has come, before they authorize the press to report it. The flow of information has quintupled, although it does not obey a government decision to inform us of major events, rather it is technological development that has allowed us to skip over triumphalist headlines and newcasts empty of content. We are increasingly less dependent on the ideological pap of the television news. I know hundreds of people who haven’t tuned into Cubavision and the rest of the national channels for months. They only watch forbidden television.

The screen of a Nokia or Motorola, the bright surface of a CD or the tiny little stick of a flash drive, shred our disinformation. On the other side of that veil of omissions and falsehoods – created over decades – there is an extension, unknown and new, that frightens and attracts us.

* The Cuban Communist Party Central Committee’s Department of Revolutionary Orientation that determines the information policy of every newspaper in the country.

Translator’s note
In March 2009 vice president Carlos Lage and Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque, were removed from office.

This Friday was complicated from the start, I won’t deny it. In the morning, we were missing Claudio, a photography professor at the Blogger Academy, because an agent – who barely deigned to show him a card with the initials DES (Department of State Security) – arrested him. We had a little party at our house after the classes to celebrate the first anniversary of Voces Cubanas, which in its brief life now has 26 sites. I remember that in the middle of the hugs and smiles, someone told me to be careful. “In the system as it is today, there is no way to protect yourself from attacks from the State,” I told him, with the intent to scare away my own fear.

Around six in the evening we were on our way to a family gathering. My sister was celebrating her 36th birthday; my father heard her first cry early in the morning on the day set aside to celebrate railroad workers. Even Teo, with his adolescent reluctance to participate in “old people’s” activities, agreed to come with us. We were expecting the usual birthday party, with photos, candles to blow out, and “Happy birthday to you, Yunia, may you enjoy many more.” But, the many eyes that were lurking had another plan for us. On Boyeros Avenue, a few yards from the Ministry of the Interior and Raul Castro’s office, three cars stopped the miserable Russian Lada we had taken at a corner.

“Don’t even think about going to 23rd Street Yoani, because the Union of Young Communists is having an event,” shouted some men who got out of the Chinese-made Geely, which reminded me of a sharp pain in my lumbar zone. I lived through something similar already last November and today I would not allow them to put me head first into another car, with my son. A huge man got out of the vehicle and started to repeat his threats, “What is your name?” was Reinaldo’s question which the man never bothered to respond to. From Teo’s lanky body rose the ironic phrase, “He doesn’t say his name because he is a coward.” Worse still, Teo, worse still, he doesn’t say his name because he is not recognized as an individual, but rather simply as a voice for others much higher up. A professional camera was filming our every move, waiting for an aggressive pose, a vulgar phrase, an excess of anger. The injection of terror was brief, the birthday found us bitter.

How can we emerge unscathed from all this? How can a citizen protect himself from a State that has the police, the courts, the rapid response brigades, the mass media, the capacity to defame and lie, the power to socially lynch him and turn him into someone defeated and apologetic? What were they thinking would happen on 23rd Street today that would make them arrest several bloggers?

I feel a terror that almost doesn’t let me type, but I want to tell those who today threatened me and my family, that when one reaches a certain level of panic, higher doses don’t make any difference. I will not stop writing, or Twittering; I have no plans to close my blog, nor abandon the practice of thinking with my own mind and – above all – I am not going to stop believing that they are much more frightened than I am.

It has been a long time since our identity has been contained on one Island. Being born and raised on this elongated territory is no longer the main criteria to carry its nationality. We are a people scattered across five continents, as if we had been sprayed over the canvas of the world map by the erratic hand of economic necessity and lack of freedom.

I know how it feels. I know how hard it is to go to the Cuban consulate in any country and be asked to sign your name in support of freedom for the Interior Ministry’s five agents – prisoners in the United States – while they do not even ask you if there’s anything they can do to help you. I have listened to a young man cry at an embassy in Europe while a bureaucrat repeats that he cannot return to his own country because he exceeded the eleven months he is allowed to be away. I have also witnessed it from the other side, the denial received by many here who apply for the White Card needed to board a plane and leave this Island. The travel restrictions have become routine and some have come to believe it should be this way, because to know other places is a perk that they give us, a prerogative that they award us.

Those few who decide who may enter and leave this archipelago have chosen the participants of the Nation and Emigration conference that starts today in the Palace of Conventions. I have read the debating points for the two day conference and I do not believe they represent the concerns and demands of the majority of Cuban emigrants. It jumps out at me that the topics do not include a requirement to put an end to the property confiscations for those who relocate to another country, nor do they mention the necessity to return the right to vote to expatriates. I don’t even find, in the discussion agenda, an announcement of the end of the limitations so many of the conference participants face to return and resettle in their own country.

Nor is the share of Cubans living on this Island, in all our plurality and hues, represented at the conference, rather it bears the official seal and rigidity of its organizers. Both groups – those inside and those outside – are circumscribed and screened to avoid “The Nation and Emigration” turning into a recitation of the migratory atrocities we all suffer. More than complaints and criticism, what the authorities who organized the meeting want to hear in that enormous room – where Parliament usually meets – is the tumultuous sound of applause.

Domestic life imposes unpleasant obligations. The faucet leaks, the lamp refuses to light the room, the lock on the door sticks, and one evil day, horrors!, the refrigerator breaks down. Terrified we discover that the freezer is dripping and the appliance’s typical humming sound is no more. My neighbor José Antonio lived through a tragedy of this magnitude last week.

Early in the morning he called the nearest Domestic Repair Unit, but either they didn’t answer or he got a busy signal. He decided to go there and was met by a girl who was meticulously polishing her fingernails. Distressed, he told her the story of his appliance and described its symptoms. He was about to venture a diagnosis but at that moment she interrupted him to say that surely it was the timer and that they didn’t have the spare part. She explained that the workshop had a waiting list that stretched a couple of months. Like an intelligent man with some real life experience, the needy client formulated the correct question in a suitable tone, “And is there no other way to resolve this?” The woman paused in her manicure and shouted to a mechanic.

After agreeing on a price, everyone was satisfied. By midday the refrigerator was working again and the repairman went home with the equivalent of nearly two month’s wages. That night, my neighbor, who is a barman at a five star hotel, took to work several bottles of rum purchased on the black market. With these, he dispatched the first of the mojitos and tasty piña coladas that the tourists drink. They did not suspect they were helping to fill the gap left by the refrigerator repair, an enormous hole in José Antonio’s budget.

Every night in the cabaret of a luxury hotel a European businessman goes from table to table making an unusual request. He approaches the guests and asks that when their bill comes, they let him pay it with the colored vouchers that he has in his pocket. In exchange, they will give him the amount in convertible pesos, which he can then turn into dollars or Euros which he can take far away. This man is a victim of the financial “Corralito” that prevents many foreign investors from taking their earnings out of the country. So that they don’t utterly despair, the Cuban authorities allow them to consume the length and breadth of the Island, paying with pieces of paper lacking any real worth.

Today the frozen funds drama touches many businessmen who, after the 1995 passage of the Foreign Investment Law, were ready to invest in our economy. They enjoyed the privilege of running a company, completely forbidden to those of us born here. They came to be a new business class in a country where the Revolutionary Offensive of 1968 had confiscated even the chairs of the shoeshine boys. The huge profits they were managing to extract turned them into very attractive targets for the hustlers, rental house landlords, and members of State Security. Many of them were seen in the most expensive restaurants, choosing appetizing dishes while accompanied by very young women. Others, the minority, gave additional gifts to their employees to compensate them for their low salaries in Cuban pesos paid by the State, through which the foreign companies contracted for their labor.

These representatives of a “corporate scouting party” were prepared to lose a little capital provided they could—starting now—be established in a place that one day would be like a pie cut into slices. However, those on the Island who signed contracts and drank the champagne with them, after an agreement, considered them just a necessary and provisional evil, a diversion that would be eradicated as soon as the Special Period ended. After all the guarantees promised a few months ago, they have learned that the coffers are empty, while hearing the repeated, “we cannot pay you.” Suddenly, these businessmen have begun to feel the impotence and the scream—half stuck in the throat—that we Cubans are burdened with every day. Still, they are so much less unprotected than we are, against the depredation of the State; a passport from another place allows them to get on a plane and forget everything.

Translator’s note: El Corralito was the common name given to the Argentine government’s freezing of bank accounts, and most strictly U.S. dollar deposits, between December 2001 and December 2002, when the nation was in a financial crisis. The word comes from the word “corral” which has the same meaning in Spanish and English.

The crazies are easy prey for the cunning, who shout painful taunts at them from street corners to exacerbate their delirium. We had one on my block with his two paper boats which he spent hours racing in a rare regatta that never went anywhere. His mother kept him calm with Benadryl and diazepam; anything, before sending him to the dementia warehouse known as Mazorra, the Havana psychiatric hospital.

The mind of this lady was filled with the images of what had been the mental clinic on Boyeros Street, with its accumulated terror and material impoverishment. The patients half naked, the walls smeared with human excrement, and the lack of supervision set the stage for the worst atrocities. The photos had been published in the magazines of that long ago 1959. Then, came the television reports: clean sheets, occupational therapy and even political billboards that changed the face of what had been a horror. Except that, like I said, the crazies are easy prey for the cunning.

Since the nineties, with the coming of the Special Period, the diversion of resources showed no mercy to Mazorra. The residents of nearby streets were well stocked through a black market in blankets, food, clothing, towels and medicine coming from the hospital. Those admitted there thought it was part of their everyday suffering—like in the film Gaslight—with the light bulbs missing in most rooms. Everything indispensable was stolen and no one noticed the broken windows, the clogged toilets, the broken beds. This time there was no journalist authorized to portray the misery.

The official press could not hide, however, the deaths of 26 patients—some say the true figure approaches 40—from hypothermia and the illnesses associated with neglect. They left this life on a cold day in January, while huddled together, body upon body, without the power to avoid this end. The cunning, for their part, built houses with the dividends from theft and thought no one would ever detect their embezzlement. Today, those responsible in the hospital are being investigated amid a police deployment to keep away the curious. No pictures have come out, but I’m tormented by the idea of how much they have come to resemble, in their helplessness, those patients whose faces we see in the photographs from the past.

Images taken from: http://cubalagrannacion.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/el-hospital-de-dementes-de-mazorra/