Helping To Promote Democracy Today

    



Raul Rivero was born in Morón, Cuba in 1945, he is one of the founders of Caimán Barbudo magazine, he worked alongside Nicolás Guillén ( the national poet laureate of Cuba ) was Moscow correspondent for Prensa Latina news agency; recieved the Cuban Natonal Poetry Award among others, and was one of the signers of the protest document tirled the Carta-Ruptura de los Diez, in 1991.


Read some of his work

"A Man Who Writes,"

Daily Life in Cuba

The Poet and the Despot

Diamantling the Real blockade

The 'broken wings' of oppressed poets

The common dream of a father in Cuba

The Poet and the Despot

Sunday, May 18, 2003; Page B06
RAUL RIVERO, Cuba's foremost independent journalist and one of its best poets, knew for years that he could be arrested at any moment by Fidel Castro's police, simply because he dared to report and write freely about his country. But he refused to be intimidated. "Nobody, no law, can make me take on the mentality of a gangster or other criminal simply because I report the arrest of a dissident or bring to light the prices of the basic alimentary products for survival in Cuba or edit a note saying that it seems like a disaster to me that more than 20,000 Cubans leave their homeland each year for exile in the United States," he wrote in 1999. "Nobody can make me feel like a criminal, an enemy target or a turncoat. . . . I am merely a man who writes. One who writes in the country where I was born."

Those brave words and others like them now offer slim comfort to Mr. Rivero's family and other advocates of democracy in Cuba. Last month Mr. Rivero was among 75 opposition activists, including 28 journalists, who were suddenly arrested, subjected to secret trials and given long prison sentences. Three other men who tried to hijack a ferry to the United States were summarily executed. The 57-year-old Mr. Rivero was taken from his home on a Monday, March 31; he was tried the following Friday, April 4, and sentenced on Monday, April 7, to 20 years for action "against the independence or the territorial integrity of the state." The evidence against him, in addition to testimony of a secret police informer, consisted of press clippings, a laptop, a tape recorder, a few books and two plastic chairs. The chairs, charged the prosecutor, were instruments of crime -- they had been used to seat two U.S. diplomats who visited Mr. Rivero.

The magnitude of the Cuban crackdown, launched while the world's attention was fixed on Iraq, is still sinking in across Latin America and the rest of the world. Mr. Rivero's story offers a sense of what is at stake. A onetime star correspondent for the state news agency, Mr. Rivero renounced the dictatorship a dozen years ago when he signed an intellectuals' petition to Mr. Castro asking him to free prisoners of conscience. He set out to be a free journalist, writing articles for U.S. and European newspapers and forming an independent news agency. He covered not just politics and human rights cases but social issues taboo in the Cuban press, such as the regime's treatment of gays.

Some analysts contend that Mr. Castro's crackdown was a shrewd gambit to head off any easing of the U.S. embargo on Cuba. In fact, there is a more straightforward explanation: The independent civil society of free journalists, democratic activists and human rights monitors had grown from a minor annoyance into a major threat to the regime. Tens of thousands of Cubans have signed the Varela petition, which calls for a legal referendum on freeing political prisoners and introducing freedom of speech and free elections. Mr. Castro watched in 1989 as similar peaceful citizens' movements brought down the rotting Communist governments of Eastern Europe; he resolved to act against Cuba's incipient velvet revolution before it was too late.

Policymakers in Washington and around the region are still debating how to respond; the U.S. expulsion of 14 Cuban diplomats last week was a gesture, but one unlikely to help the dissidents much. Some argue that now is the time to lift the embargo. Mr. Rivero can't speak up anymore -- he's locked up in the Ciego de Avila prison, some 300 miles south of Havana -- but an article he published a year ago offers a good answer. "The truth is that ordinary Cubans are more oppressed by a personal embargo, one that has transformed them into blindfolded and muzzled pawns," observed the poet. "In reality, Cubans want to remove the inequalities that exist between the people and their leaders before they deal with the problems between their country and the United States."


 

Diamantling the Real blockade

HAVANA -- A man riding the Chinese-made Forever brand bicycle under the Caribbean sun after eating a single slice of bread, washed down with very bad coffee, finds it difficult to ponder America's trade embargo against Cuba.

Such a man has lunch on his mind--his and his family's. For him, abstract thought is a luxury that requires time, information, and a reason to reflect on a subject that, at first sight, appears to be from another galaxy.

The truth is that ordinary Cubans are more oppressed by a personal embargo, one that has transformed them into blindfolded and muzzled pawns. The debate over the American embargo pales in comparison--removed to a far corner of the mind--to the obstructive domestic situation that envelops them. In this country, the real blockade, the one that affects the daily life of the people, is the internal governing system. It is the noose that ensures that Cuba remains immobilized and poor.

The old standoff between the two nations is beside the point to ordinary people; they desire a closer relationship with the U.S., where many of their families and friends live. However, no political process has created a smooth path toward such an ending. Thus, the stalemate between the two nations really concerns only Cubans who have time to contemplate lofty political questions.

These individuals read newspapers fabricated in the offices of the Communist Party; view only two television channels, both cut from the same cloth; and listen to radios that play the same worn-out speeches.

Cuba provides no free flow of information and its citizens receive and read only pure propaganda. While the public is suspicious of government proclamations, it has no means to be heard. Hence, its silence appears to sanction the situation.

In reality, Cubans want to remove the inequalities that exist between the people and their leaders before they deal with the problems between their country and the U.S. Ordinary citizens want to own a modest business, have access to a free press, organize political parties, remake society and liberate prisoners.

The authorities like to paint themselves as the victims of a powerful giant set on smothering a nation and its united people, but such a victim's face cannot be found when you look closely. The nation is not a united citizenry, but rather a mediocre country created through the universal gagging of its people. One can systematically catalog the ways that the authorities mistreat many of its people as terribly as they claim that Cuba's enemies treat her.

These officials should take the money spent trying to convince other nations about the generous nature of Cuba's public health and education systems and apply it to the needs of Cuba's people. In fact, medical services are becoming more precarious and the educational system has not advanced beyond a common system of political indoctrination.

Indeed, parents cannot really influence how schools shape their children. Whenever the government does address basic public welfare issues, its efforts merely produce dependent individuals who submit to the will of a self-selected group of leaders who are "elected" from time to time by fake elections.

The leaders' commitment to the sovereignty of the masses thus rings false. Talk about the Cubans' free will is in reality a capricious and criminal act against the people. In recent weeks, 36 human-rights activists, members of the alternative press and representatives of the emerging civil-rights movement have been imprisoned and may be tried.

We can all agree that human beings are not duty-bound to live according to one master or philosophy; that individuals must live freely, enjoying the right to a bountiful and joyful existence among family and friends.

But in Cuba one lives in the midst of a propaganda machine that infiltrates life on a daily basis; that emphasizes a climate of popular cheerfulness; that portrays the joy of a neutered horse, with its ability to befuddle the innocent, inspire the ignorant and comfort the frustrated.

Cubans are in the end consigned to hold fast to rigid and impossible schemes. As a result, hundreds of thousands of young adults are embarked on a future whose path is strewn with risky symbols and immense challenges. Sensing that the door has been slammed shut against their country's future, they work diligently merely for their individual good.


 

The 'broken wings' of oppressed poets

HAVANA -- Not even the most pompous bureaucrats in Cuban culture can conceal the power of exile literature, but they do manage to obscure "inxile'' literature.

That's natural, because Cuban writers who live and work in other countries have earned their places by dint of talent and ability in a complex and competitive world. And their names cannot be erased in one stroke by hatred, intolerance or decrees.

Yet the dozens of writers who remain in Cuba and don't take to the streets, waving little flags in support of the daily slogan, are still within range of officialdom's displeasure. Needless to say, there's no room for their books in Cuba's publishing houses, which -- as is well known -- belong to the state. There's not even a little space for a poem of theirs in a literary magazine. It's all a scientific design intended to silence the voices that don't harmonize with the choir.

Is that alienated poetry dead? Have the men and women who live and work in cities and have integrated into some of the patterns of the new society been silenced? It seems not.

This fall the dissident group Reflection held a poetry contest called Silver Spur. I worked as a juror, along with two poets from Villa Clara province.

The books we read and evaluated were at the same level as the books being published in Cuba and elsewhere in the hemisphere. But the poet Néstor Leliebre Camué, a native of Santiago de Cuba, cannot publish here a poem that ends:

Don't plunge into the sea/ for the love of God./ Wait. A fascinating brightness/ is rising from the land.

Official publications won't shelter this text from poetess Adela Soto of Pinar del Río province:

Look at me, out in the open,/ bound to the dry trunk of life,/ without land, without stars, without freedom or trees;/ counting every footstep with a weakening pulse/ and broken wings.

I'm not going to fill this column with the beautiful verses I found in the notebooks we read, but I do want to talk about the special situation in which these people find themselves in Cuba.

Some are independent journalists; others are human-rights activists, free-lance librarians or militants in opposition parties. That means that they're under permanent police watch and that their poetry, deemed to be subversive, is kept under a double lock.

Those are the real writers of the "inxile'' movement, baring their chests at the repressive density of government, protected only by their verses and the feeling of invincibility produced by the slivers of freedom they have won.

They are Cubans who, amid shortages and harassment, read Emilio Ballagas and José Lezama Lima, Heredia and Martí, Plácido, Walt Whitman and Rimbaud.

They are people who, fueled by a 5-peso pizza, board a train to go read a poem with friends in another province. People who make notes while traveling in the back of open trucks, reading the Bible or Rabindranath Tagore.

Deep in Cuba, they write poems, earning no compensation, in hermit-like enclaves, stubbornly, in a civilian society where they invent themselves and reconstruct the nation. Poet Díaz Cutiño of Las Tunas helps me to explain the poetic art of those writers:

I refuse. I refuse and remove/ my voice from the mortal choir;/ I stand against the fatal judgment/ that buries my pride in gray.


 

"A Man Who Writes,"
By Raúl Rivero

HAVANA -- The letter of the law concerning the protection of national
independence and the economy in Cuba allows the authorities in my
country to sentence me to prison because of the only sovereign act I
have performed since I gained the use of my reason: writing without
being dictated to.

The path I set out on a few years ago, after a total rupture with the
government's press and cultural media, has transformed me into a
different human being, someone who has liberated himself on his own,
someone who in threatened and hostile circumstances could begin the
journey toward individual freedom.

Fear, prison and harassment have served only to give more value to
these discoveries. They have contributed to the fact that my devotion
to the sovereignty of the individual is now much more than an idea or
a necessity; it is an untamable instinct.

And so an order written in the perishable ink of political trickery
and wrapped in a clumsy maneuver to make it seem that we, a small
group of journalists, were working in Cuba as allies of drug
traffickers and procurers and salaried mercenaries of the United
States, yields only a cocktail of repugnance in me.

The years in prison that the law promises with so much generosity must
be viewed with a consternation that goes beyond the fear of
confinement and punishment. It means presenting the Cuban nation as an
encysted tribe in the Caribbean, closed off from information and the
discussion of ideas, remote from evolution and change.

I have responded to the raised arm of this new law, to the insults
from the dark functionaries of official journalism, to the threatening
calls to my house -- I realize this when I am alone with my typewriter
-- with the joy of knowing I am free, the certainty that reporting
with objectivity and professionalism and writing my opinion about the
society in which I live cannot be a grave offense.

I cannot feel guilty. It is almost as if I were being accused of
breathing, or as if an eventual prison term had been predicted for me
because I love my daughters, my mother, my wife, my brother, my
friends.

I cannot assume I am a criminal because I recounted with precision the
drama of more than 300 political prisoners, or reported that a
building in Old Havana was demolished, or published an interview with
a Cuban who wants a pluralistic society complete with freedom of
expression.

No one, no law, can make me assume the mentality of a gangster or a
criminal because I report the arrest of a dissident or a lawbreaker,
or make known the prices of basic food products in Cuba, or write an
article saying it's a disaster that each year thousands and thousands
of Cubans go into exile, to the United States, and hundreds of others
living abroad try to remain wherever they happen to be.

No one can make me feel like a criminal, or an enemy agent, or someone
who does not love his country, or make me believe any of the other
absurd accusations the government uses to degrade and humiliate. I am
only a man who writes. And writes in the country where he was born,
and where his great-grandparents were born.

 

Daily Life in Cuba

Published by Le Monde, Paris, France, on January 2, 1999)

Habana.- When the head of a household gets up at dawn in present-day Cuba, he or she only faces two problems: lunch and dinner.

This somewhat bitter joke circulated in multiple sectors of the population in the early 1990's. Now, 1999 is about to begin, and the joke no longer seems funny. Conditions do not change, and the spark of cleverness has turned into a simmering fire.

Ordinary Cubans, who have no relatives in the United States, do not work in a foreign company or have no friends in a corporation, those Cubans who ride bicycles and get paid in national currency- the vast majority of the population- have to recur to three verbs which raise suspicion: "Inventar, resolver y escapar": To invent, to solve and to escape.

This is the formula. "Invento (I invent) because my cousin brings me hams from the countryside, and I sell them to my neighbors and my friends. The salary I make as a teacher lasts me the first ten days of the month, just like the products which I can buy under the ration card [libreta de abastecimientos]." So says Fernando, 38, married with two children, 11 and 6. Elia, his wife, works in a factory cafeteria, and can always bring something home, besides her monthly salary of 118 pesos (1).

"Clothing and shoes for the children are a tragedy. I do not know how, but I invent something, I have to invent"

Fernando's moonlighting makes him a criminal, because it is against Cuban law to engage in this type of commerce. The teacher does and is against the law, so he is careful; he feels at fault with society. Such a person cannot confront authority to claim his rights or demand respect. Thousands of Cubans, forced to engage in illegal work, such as Fernando, are effectively neutralized as citizens.

There is still a more complex category, linked to the verb resolver (to solve). "Guards from the factory steal ingredients. I make the paint in the back yard of a friend, and solve my problem. I make about a thousand pesos a month. It is risky. My freedom hangs from a thread [en un hilo], but I solve my family's problem and still have some money left to have a beer once in a while." Joel says that he is not interested in politics. He is 30, and feels well. Uneasy, but well.

To escape is something else.

Rolando Alvarez, almost 70, wrote. for three decades many praises of socialist society. He still loves journalism, although has retired, and receives 169 pesos a month.  "I do not regret anything I wrote. When I did, I believed in the project, and I still think it has many beautiful things that have transformed our society. Now, individually, in my old age, I escape, because I help in a "paladar"-private restaurant-. I wash dishes, wait on tables, whatever. And, at the end of the day, I take home something to eat or a few pesos, for my wife and me", speaking in his little apartment of downtown Havana. AAnd to be able to prepare a meal of rice and beans, just that, no vegetables or meat, I invest almost half my salary. A pound of black beans costs 20 pesos. A head of garlic 4. A bunch of peppers another 4. Onions are 10 a bunch and rice 5 a pound. I need oil and have to buy it from the store where they sell in dollars. Then I go there and change 50 pesos, because a bottle is $2.40 dollars. This is ready. From 80 to 85 pesos for a meal for two people. But we are calm. We have ours. I am satisfied." 

Socialism, who loves uniformity, has had to become flexible in this day and age. Transportation in Cuba begins with bicycles, continues with some native [criollos] tricycle called "bicitaxis" and includes huge trucks with bus cabins, called "camellos" (camels), to finish at high levels with Mercedes-Benz taxis.

In automotive matters, Cubans can reach up to a Russian Lada. Occasionally, a Cuban may get to ride in French Peugeots, because Cuban police has recently acquired, particularly in Havana, a modern fleet of these cars. Bus routes have eliminated over 50% of their trips, and cars, old and broken by the rigors of climate and poor condition in the streets, are being substituted, one by one, by donated vehicles from Spain, although one can see cars from Holland, Norway, Sweden as well as large Russian trucks, that pass as buses, and provide transportation to factories and work centers.

In 1996 American cars from the 1940's and 50's reappeared on the scene, now grafted with diesel engines [motores de petróleo]. These special taxis cover important routes within the Capital, and can carry up to six passengers. Fare is 10 Cuban pesos. It is now commonplace to see one of the old luxurious Cadillacs imported by local bourgeoisie, limping along an avenue, and contributing to pollution by emitting a large column of black smoke from its exhaust.

In rural areas, old trucks have been adapted to carry passengers, and travel between provincial capitals, municipalities and small towns.

"Had I dedicated the time I have lost waiting for a guagua (bus), or something else in which to transport myself, I would be a Doctor of Science or an intellectual. The wait extends for hours and hours, but at the end one reaches the destination." commented veterinarian Alfredo Vargas.

Tourists, foreign visitors, and the small number of Islanders who have money can use at least three different types of taxicabs. From the ever-aggressive Mercedes Benz, to the simpler oil-burning Citroen, less expensive and slower. Cuba has also, both in dollars or in their equivalent in national currency, the most cultured cabdrivers in Latin America. A wave of hundreds of retired professionals, or those who simply resigned from their jobs in the government, can take you anywhere in the city. This is why a tourist can ride along Havana's Malecón submerged in a thick debate about philosophy, art or economics. Or receiving a lesson of orthopedics, Marxism or cybernetics.

Ciro Trueba drives his Russian Moskvich along downtown's 23^rd Avenue, in the zone of El Vedado. "I graduated as an architect 27 years ago. My salary is 340 pesos a month. I am forced to work two or three hours a day as a cabdriver. A pair of shoes costs 250 and an avocado 10."

In Cuba, with the exception of some owners of small twelve seat restaurants and of minimal coffee, pizza and candy stores, the only employer is the State. Now, it is said, only half-jokingly, that when a Cuban gets offered a job, he does not ask how much is the salary, but how much he can steal.

Society has been taken over by the Robin Hood syndrome: the rogues who steal something from their workplace every day, those who resuelven, are seen with sympathy. Their crime, their sin, their actions, are not perceived by the community as a fault, but rather as a form of struggling for survival. This is why such people are known in all of Cuba as "luchadores", rogues in the most orthodox Spanish tradition. Simple and good people who have been forced to enter the shady side of life "because of the American blockade", according to government sympathizers. "Because of the Government's blockade, the draconian penal code, the eagerness to control everything, even the adjacent seas and the air we breathe", says Felix Velázquez, a 50 year old, unemployed, human rights activist, who lives "from my family's charity". In a scene full of misery and anguish, many forms of stealing, of crime in general, are accepted.

In November, a group of food service workers in Camaguey, held up a bank and took away the safe, which contained over 100 thousand pesos, and, in the same week , it was known that the provincial governor was fired from his post due to improperly managing several thousand dollars. Corruption, mischief, invention, the struggle, have left Cuban society, 40 years after the triumph of the legendary guerrillas from Sierra Maestra, in a quagmire. In a trap.

From day to day, the worst of the poor, Third World capitalism, which has been imported to the Island, advances. And the conquests of real socialism have dissolved in the inefficiency of the system. Meager production, an agriculture incapable of working, and the government's refusal to allow the people to take off the yoke of the state, have not allowed the start of a process of individual sovereignty

Education is free, but with a clear hue of indoctrination. A grade-school manual, distributed in the 1998 academic year, asks "Who builds the círculos infantiles (nurseries), schools and hospitals?" Carlos M. 32, government employee, asks: "What happened in Cuba before 1958? I am not religious, but I do not want my children to be educated under any dogmatic beliefs. In this day and age, that is a crime. Give them education, pure education, and let them choose their political color later . No more Lenin, Marx or any other imposed idea. Children must go to school to prepare for a profession, not to serve anyone or any ideology."

There is, there always has been in the last decades, a desire of the authorities to offer adequate public health services to the population. A health service network covers the island, which has one physician for every 400 persons. However, economic crisis, the disappearance of the Socialist bloc, and also, according to government officials, the American embargo, have left the system in ruins. Havana and other major cities have suffered periodic outbreaks of scabies and lice. Several diseases, such as tuberculosis and dengue, have been reborn, and several epidemics have produced victims among the general population. "I prefer to cure myself using home remedies, without leaving my room. To enter a hospital is torture. You have to bring your own towels and sheets, soap and food, and then call somebody abroad so that they can send medicine. Physicians are good, but paramedical service is a disaster. They get paid very little. There is a general lack of cleanliness and poor attention. The special clinic for foreigners and government officials is a different story. But I don't fit in there." Eliecer, railroad worker, 52.

The islands of cheap capitalism brought suddenly to the country, particularly to the so-called tourist poles, have resulted in an outbreak of a legion of young, beautiful, prostitutes, with a degree of education. With them, came the usual complement of pimps, panderers, employees of low-life hotels and clandestine bars. Also, private homes illegally rent rooms to facilitate the contact between local women and tourists. In 1996 women who charge in national currency arrived on the scene. A night runs from 50 to 100 pesos, in poorer houses and more dangerous bars, where there is no export-grade rum, but where plenty of homemade drinks, made with alcohol and sugar by-products, are available, such as those called "Chispa de tren" ("train sparks"), "Espérame en el suelo"("meet  me on the floor"), "Hueso de tigre" ("tiger bone") and "Salvése quien pueda" ("every man for himself").

Recently, the famous "jineteras" have been joined by a growing gang of boys waiting for homosexual tourists from all over the world, in zones which are already very popular, as well as a growing number of transvestite nightclubs which operate in this capital.

To this crude landscape, one must add the fact that most of the population lives without information. "Granma", a little daily paper published by the Communist party, sets editorial guidelines for the two television stations which start to broadcast at 6:00 PM, and for the radio network. Cubans who do not have access to a shortwave radio have a partial, "amputated" version of world events; every incident receives the appropriate ideological treatment in the laboratories of the Department of Revolutionary Orientation (DOR).

Since the State, as has been said here, owns everything, in Cuba one lives in what has been called "double morality". This means that you think one thing and say another or nothing at all, because a clash of opinions may, for common people, result in difficulties at work, problems with the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CFR) and the loss of the mediocre tranquillity in your life.. "I do things my way. I don't get involved in politics. I have enough problems trying to get food. I am quiet, at home, seeing everything, but silent". Pedro Aguirre, guard at a warehouse, 29.

The darkest zone of this trap at the end of the century is that which should have been drawn by the future. People have lost their faith. But they have lost it while working, serving guard duty, chanting slogans in support of a project which has now removed the ladder and left them hanging from the paintbrush.

It is known that one can live 20 days without food, but not a single one without faith. Cuba has begun to return to God. To several gods. The Catholic Church and the Afrocuban religions are those which have received the greatest number of believers in the past five years. There is a wait of several months long to baptize a child. Sects such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Rosicrucians grow, spiritualist centers overflow, in the same way as the nuclei of Bahai's and other denominations from India and Ceylon.

People look for individual solutions because they do not see a way out for society. The only escape comes through the 20,000 visas granted yearly by the United States, or from religious faith, which allows people to see somewhat beyond present-day problems. A present, reached from a past which many would rather not remember, and where the future is only a black hole, or a blurred and ambiguous landscape.

WHERE ARE WE GOING? 

Forty years are but a brief and diffuse time in the history of a nation. More than three generations of Cubans have been born in this time. From the dreams of human redemption sung by the bearded victors of 1959 and which- if they did not shake the whole world, at least were transmitted to millions of humans- nothing, not even ashes or dust, remains.

Trapped in their contradictions, in a limitless Utopia, delirious and mindless, the largest of the Antilles arrives at the end of the Millennium shoeless, homeless, dressed in rags and with a bellyful of great hunger. Little is left of the real socialism which, only ten years ago, still boasted about development, the future, quality of life and other such rhetorical concepts.

What is left is the daily nightmare of children, women, men and senior citizens, all trapped, with no link to an universe which is more and more unreachable for all of us who live in this Island. All ways seem to be closed. And the skies of our motherland are not brightened by the dose of rationality and sanity which could be expected from a ruling team who knows, better than anyone, the terrifying crisis they face and in which they are sinking, and dragging with them the Island, from one end to the other.

Forty years after, Cuba- fragmented, broken, lonely and going from one nightmare to another- can only wait for a miracle, and not precisely one of the Spring, even though miracles have lost all their prestige in this day and age, particularly in the fields of History, Politics and Social Sciences.