Land and its use has been a not insignificant factor and one of the fundamental causes of a conflict that has claimed many lives. According to the document the accord should in theory bring about the much hoped-for beginning of a new series of changes in the rural and agrarian situation in Colombia.

The announcement of the agreement was applauded and witnessed by representatives from Cuba and Norway, which serve as the guarantor countries, as well as Venezuela and Chile, which act as observers. What is unusual in all of this is that none of the parties involved in the peace process has confirmed that any of the basic issues has been definitively resolved. “Nothing has been agreed to until everything has been agreed to” is another way of saying that “nothing is agreed to.”

With this discreet semantic manipulation, thus ended the ninth in a series of conversations which will resume tomorrow, June 11, to discuss other critical issues such as the FARC’s participation in Colombia’s political life. It is a clever way to rechristen this band of eccentric misfits and iconoclasts, who want to be viewed as having become real partners in peace and admired luminaries trying to avoid going to prison (which is where they belong) by signing an accord which will allow them to enter Congress.

Ultimately, there is always something that must be sacrificed. I understand that, when one negotiates and struggles to secure mutual benefits and results conducive to national harmony, it is often advantageous to allow certain illegitimate values to triumph over some ethical, moral and even democratic principles.

The Cuban delegation understood this well. Inspired by the old fable about kissing a frog, it decided to bet on the miraculous possibility that these obscene guajacones (guerrilla outlaws) might become beautiful princesses, honorable officials, effective parliamentarians or grand heads of state.

The government in Havana was tripping over itself to not only to sell itself as a defender of regional peace, but also to try to profit from some democratic voices calling for a swift solution to the prolonged conflict. Lastly and most importantly, however, it wanted to make a lot of money.

Yes, you read that right: a lot of money. A significant part of the two million dollars that the FARC raised carrying out “nomological and nomothetical” operations such as kidnapping and drug trafficking is now safely hidden away and is reporting good returns. It was washed, rinsed and well ironed through the purchase of modern equipment and sophisticated instrumentation for humanitarian use in Cuban hospitals such as CIMEQ* and the Cira García Clinic.* It has also been invested as part of the Cuban contribution to joint ventures that the island maintains with industrial consortia and large hotel chains headquartered inside and outside Cuba.

Unlike Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, French aviator and author of the book The Little Prince, what is essential to the revolutionary government is not invisible to the eye; it is cash.

Translator’s note: CIMEQ is a hospital that treats high-ranking government officials and military officers, their families and foreign dignitaries. Patients at the Cira García Clinic, which caters to foreign health tourists, are overwhelmingly from overseas. Its most sought-after service is plastic surgery.

13 June 2013

Today, June 3, was his eighty-first birthday, which he has the strange habit of wanting to celebrate with his family. At this point I am not sure if the series of reforms the general has undertaken since he was crowned President of Cuba should be categorized as a success or a failure.

It would be unfair to deny his efforts at removing obstacles to the state by eliminating a large part of the unproductive state workforce. His measures in this regard, however, were aimed at generating publicity. Actual decentralization has been insignificant. They were intended to strengthen certain market forces. More importantly, they were aimed at transferring key decision making authority to friends and family members whom he considered “honest,” an effort that was conveniently thwarted by “discreet” loyalists.

For a long time the octogenarian soldier has deceived us by repeating like a parrot the claim that businesses run by the armed forces ministry were better organized and more productive, that militarizing the business sector would clean up an indifferent workforce and reduce corruption.

Such an enormous lie could not yield results. It was only an account transfer, a restructuring of power. On the Cuban asteroid many people know that military-run businesses, while listed on the payroll of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and run from the top down, do not operate based on reality – not in a social context much less in a physical one.

Do they generate benefits and produce goods and services? Yes, but only as a result of blind obedience (or exploitation or abuse or whatever you want to call it) from soldiers and recruits who work day after day without pay.

Economic production, with its many redundancies, barely covers its own production costs. As a result the militarization of the already disastrous spider web of Cuban businesses has caused the country to ascend structurally and economically to stratospheric levels of incomparable incompetence.

It is obvious that the General is no economist or anything else but a sadist, crook, manipulator and perfectionist. This simple reason explains why he controls the press, knowing they are not really journalists but historians, the cornerstones of glasnost.

It was Raul who, without renouncing intimidation as a means of repression, allowed explicit and growing criticism as means of catharsis and a way to encourage people to openly examine problems in order to correct them. Fair enough, but I do not know if talking about them is enough to correct them. Catharsis can relieve spiritual pain, but it does not change a system.

Many want to use complicate theories to explain why Raul tried this. Some have come to call it “Basic Thrust,” a reference to his relaxation of the old emigration law. This is why today we can embrace so many opponents, non-conformists and dissidents, who can now leave Cuba and return with demonstrable ease.

It is not a puzzle. The answer is so simple that my grandmother used to repeat it to me as a child: “The best place to corral a tree so that it does not feel like a prisoner is in a forest.
10 June 2013

The Ladies in White under attack by State Security and their mob

The dictators and their henchmen, as a rule, are extravagant, autocratic, narcissistic, hypochondriac, provocative, enigmatic and disturbing individuals. Because of this, and more, anyone who grew up in any of the links in the chain of a dictatorial regime, shares a psychosocial trauma that is difficult to cure.

Government violence starts to weaken the welfare state with the constant exercise of its own virtuosity to impose terror and creates uncertainty under the umbrella of authority. This validates the power and leaves citizens without any real possibility of using an internal or external entity to defend their rights. It is called — according to some scholars – legal helplessness.

Scientifically it has been shown that this damage affects all people regardless of social class to which each individual belongs. And it affects not only the psychological and family level, but also damnifies cultural and educational development.

I do not believe in left nor right; but that all dictatorships possess as their only ideology the practice of supremacy, and imposition of their rule to the extent that society ends up adopting passivity, submission and resignation as a natural phenomenon.

Totalitarianism, with absolute certainty is sexist, the  rules legally and reigns over the woman by whatever means.

I think many know the repeated humiliation of Cuba’s Ladies in White. But there is so much more; for example, Cuba’s psychiatric hospitals are stuffed with very descriptive records of horrific sexual assault by the authority, which not confronted legally, damages not only the body memory of each female victim, but also the shock becomes irreparable, and is extended to the children.

Countless women who have been affected in their individuality, in their environment, in their family, social and ethical surroundings. Hate, in these cases (without referring to the many mothers who have lost children in the sea), is a sensible and even necessary emotion.

Compelling reason forces me to believe that in order to discuss the future of Cuba and its transition, we should first be self-sufficient and unburden ourselves of the disguise, and with it, the desire to please.

I don’t know about others, but to me, I respect the view of those who are anxious to figure out how to outline a common moral discourse that encourages citizen exaltation; it sounds naive, false, ridiculous and even childish tome to hear them speak of Forgiveness as if this were an elegant, civilized and pragmatic response to State violence.

I wonder how could Forgiveness, by itself — if it could — not be the starting point for another period of violence, or how this same absolution could achieve the reconciliation of a society that for years seen their children confronted like bands of enemies.

I have read, and lately I hear with reiterated frequency, several formulas and examples, but I only trust two old tools that have historically proven to be more reliable than revenge, and more effective than tolerance: The law and justice.

1 June 2013

Let me clarify, I say that it is exceptional because one warm winter night, at the end of 2004, when the power of MININT and the frenzy of Raul was falling on me, Antonio approached me wife, took a two dollar bill from his wallet and looking into her eyes said, “They say it brings good luck; take it, you’re going to need it. Raul tried to do away with me; but my mother is alive, JJ’s isn’t.”

My relationship with Antonio was always affable, distant, and sincere, nothing more. His marriages, wives and children is not an issue here.

As a child — according to the bodyguards — Tony was shy, obsessive, curious and capricious; but his history teacher during the time he studied at La Lenin High School described him as a fickle student, not too neat, who didn’t wear his last name easily and suffered repeated identity crises and depression.Perhaps this frustration became a counterweight of advance and then deployment.

It’s worth pointing out that with the halo of mystery and security, a constant in his life during his student years, his teachers were active members of the general directorate of MININT personal security cross-dressing as teachers, who marked extensive gaps in the cognitive and instructive processes of the young Castro Soto del Valle.

When, under his father’s orders, they broke the shell of secretiveness, Antonia, eager to socialize, was rediscovered and emerged to the ordinary world with three attractive adjectives: famous, right and powerful; in other words, a potent magnet of attraction. What many are asking is why, not being the oldest, nor the youngest, nor the last, nor the preferred, it is he who is “without equal.”

Of course, the stereotype of beauty is influential: Antonio is blond, handsome, rich in stature and exaggerated in ego. It’s the manly image of any lead actor. And he’s famous as a good doctor.

Educated like a king, and fascinated by monarchies, he is a sophisticated mortal who has charm, elegance and good taste. Friendly when he wants to be and overwhelming when contradicted.

But the key to his success lies in the art of seduction. He knows well that his last name, more than an icon, is a commercial trademark and he handles masterfully and in detail his personal marketing.

His immodesty and glamor are undoubtedly his strongest attraction; he enjoys being different but repulses those who flatter him, he has temporary sensitivity for ordinary Cubans (whom, logically, he will inherit as subjects), those whose only property is their ID cards.

Tony is a cool guy, who born in half disaffection assume that, even though born in power, all human beings are like our environment and as such we should be understood.

23 May 2013

It is sad that Mr. José Graziano da Silva, director general of the United Nations Organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO, for its acronym in English), asserts that the credit has been possible thanks to the priority given by the Cuban government to guaranteeing its people’s right to food and the policies implemented to achieve this objective.

Nonsense, but explainable. It’s hard to see beyond the growth with its perfection that aims to show a government that distorts all its data and knows that for the vast majority of international organizations, the world is reduced to numbers. We are numbers and calculations; very dangerous arithmetic that some Cuban officials handle with excellence. My country is a place of impunity reigned over by an impeccable combination of politics and prostitution.

I don’t want to go overboard citing old familiar tactics used by the Cuban government to lobby and win votes in the different international level forums. It makes no difference if it’s the CDR, FMC, UNICEF, FAO, HRC, EU, UNDP, OEI, CARICOM … Every acronym is handled the same, national or international. When there are funds, nothing will be impossible because in island politics you just have to wait and what is won is lost and what is lost is won.

In the mid ’90s, a young neonatologist who worked in the Ramón González Coro OB-GYN Hospital in Havana Vedado, formerly the Sacred Heart clinic, was among the many selected to be part of a commission that would study what then was a TOP SECRET investigation.

Hiding a smile, and trying not to show her immense gratitude for such reliability, the talented doctor went to work. And counting on the full support of the Council of State itself, she thought that telling the truth would be the seed of what with great passion she called “My Revolution.”

The hurried exploration found that the Cuban infant born underweight, which later resulted in a considerable and irreversible decrease in size of the Cuban child, which even scientifically established standards considered “alarming.”

For this study, which lasted some time, this multidisciplinary team compiled a spreadsheet which took into account variables such as maternal age, health status assessment to detect pregnancy, treatment with nutritional supplements, weight gain in pregnancy , history of curettage, etc.. All these data were extracted from the records of pregnant women in doctors’ offices, and in the various departments of statistics for each local polyclinic.

The final report revealed that the factors associated with the preterm birth of many Cuban infants weighing under 2,500 grams, are inadequate nutrition of the future mother (this represented the highest percentage of cases studied), anemia during pregnancy and an inadequate time between births.

Since then, and as appropriate, the results were altered and the real results were shelved under lock and key. And my friend, who left medicine and has dedicated herself to painting, says that facial hair is not the only thing that connects Cuban officials with the Taliban.

21 May 2013

It surprised me, in that ministry there are several companies with more administrative staff than workers; but happy or alarmed was my “to be or not to be.”

The official press lies a little, although regularly, and as an established norm avoids part of reality. So I thought that this note would be published with the only objective of cleaning the stench of corruption that the wave of investigations and arrests that led the former head of this industry, Alejandro Francisco Roca Iglesia, to prison, along with his vice minister, Celio Hernandez and so many other officials. Especially knowing that, although the new minister of the branch is Dr. Maria del Carmen Concepcion Gonzalez, the one who has the upper hand in such a necessary institution in the foolish and never well-thought of engineering specialist in the applied chemistry of human nutrition, Deborah Castro Espín.

Anyway, the irony is liberating and as the old sailor’s saying goes, “When the dolphins leap the storm is coming.” I continued to keep my intellectual apathy busy and communicated with Havana using the overly expensive invention patented in 1876 by the British speech therapist Alexander Graham Bell.

“The Union of the Flesh” — and I quote almost verbatim someone who asked not to be revealed — “is the company that within this large conglomerate sold more last year. Supported, of course, by the Food Corporation SA (a mysterious Cuban capital private entity).

“Meat consumption grew, and both entities were responsible for producing and marketing meat products, plus all their derivatives.”

So far everything was going well, the scandalous is the rest. For a long time is hasn’t been profitable to produce a kilo of meat in Cuba, taking into account feed prices, the costs of caring for the animal, veterinary care and fuel. With all this an expensive product reaches Cuban processors. But the Cuban government didn’t calculate, or foresee the tangible increase, it has had since last year, in private restaurants (the paladares) and for that reason the MINAL was forced to innovative solutions to meet the pressing demand.

“We had no response,” my interlocutor told me stealthily, “and the ‘higher ups’ ordered ground beef to be mixed with small amounts of horse meat and texturized soy, to maintain an acceptable level of nutrition and not affect the typical cherry-red color of the fresh meat.

How dreadful, the Cuban officials lost respect and restraint; they gained irresponsibility, shamelessness and perversion. The fraud here is not in the mixing of the meat, if it’s not misleading or not properly informed.

It should be clarified that from the middle of 2012 to date, ground beef, selling at the price of steak priced in CUC, and that tourists and nationals enjoy, is fit for human consumption, but it is not ground beef. Indeed, in Cuba it’s never what it seems.

13 May 2013

A total misconception, they were women dressed in white with a flower in their hands. I stopped to watch, and a a fifty-something guy in a beige guayabera, his face distorted by shock and emotion, approached and slapped the hood of my car, and showing his G2 cars ordered me, with unusual kindness, “Get out of here, those are the Ladies in White.” I continued my slow march, determined to know who were those women.

Days later I learned that the same group of women were protesting near Revolution Square, just where I had demonstrated considering it to be the marketplace of Cubans, and that one of them (Berta Soler), was planning not to leave there until she could see her husband, detained and sick. But of course, the police and paramilitary forces evicted them using the always repugnant help of kicks and shoves.

By then, I knew they weren’t just a curiosity, it was a duty, a feeling, I approached the women who demand the release of their families, their loved ones, every Sunday, who even today now manage to upset the complacency of Cuban dictators. Who dares to love so much?

The first time I saw, in the distance, a stout brunette with braids, and a blonde with a sunhat, who turned out to be the angel who, when everything was dark, God placed in my path and whose earthly name was Laura Pollán.

Suddenly a “Down with the Castro brothers” interrupted my memories, it was the deep and serious voice of an ebony become woman, of a lady who for her tenderness and simplicity it is impossible for some to believe that she is an open book. Her smile is a hook; and her courage rhymes with beauty, but not with fakery.

For a second I feared to approach her, I thought of time and its ravages and that she wouldn’t remember me; but no, I was wrong, despite her world travels, and I received many signs of affection from Berta, still a soldier of hope, armed with her helplessness. Practical, rational, obstinate, direct, strong, good-natured, happy, loyal, charismatic and sweet, she is an excellent friend, a perfect fusion of defects and virtues, an authentic Cuban. This simple woman of indomitable spirit; with no pretension to power, practicing love for those who find no mercy. She is a human being immune to this fever of stardom that both swarms and atrophies.

I hugged and kissed the same woman who one Sunday, dressed in white, after attending Mass at Santa Rita Church in Havana, and marching down 5th Avenue, I met sitting on one of the old benches still zealously guarded in Gandhi Park in Miramar, that beautiful Havana neighborhood that resists continuing to be anchored to the era of the thaw.

1 May 2013

The Ten Years War surprised these migrants in Cuba and they joined the liberation forces. Many of them mixed with Spaniards, blacks and even mulattoes. From there was born the Chinese-Cuban.

The relations between the governments of Cuba and China have been up and down over the years but mostly down; but sometimes things go smoothly. Several Cuban leaders drive Geely cars — made in China — models also used by the National Revolutionary Police automotive troops and the G2 – State Security. The “kitsch” Cuban progeny — offspring of those in power — venture in what they believe to be new routes and go shopping in Hong Kong, experts in social themes exchanging opinions of “change” with certain regularity, businessmen of both countries sign galactic contracts, and high level delegations visit with such pleasure that the Cuban president even sang to Hu Juntao in Mandarin.

The new surreptitious business is “solidarity” with groups of Chinese who land on the island with regularity with which water drips from a broken pipe, constant drops, stimulating black market springs that move the well enshrined chain of the underground economy.

Some authorized contractors assert they are very calm customers, they don’t take hookers home and barely leave their rooms. They don’t behave as tourists, don’t go to the beach, don’t buy maracas or visit museums; throughout their stay on the island they spend their time muttering, and eating.

So much so that the new culinary specialty in the rooms-for-rent homes is to make a cup of rice with two and half cups of unsalted water, which makes a hideous mass which is then allowed to dry, add curry, make balls, and after frying it it’s called Rice Croquettes are called.

This has given rise to traveling salesmen who used to go door to door selling flowers, condoms, lobster or beef and who now support themselves selling rice (the little balls). It’s not illegal and they earn more, hence the refrain, “Take advantage of good fortune, when it’s rare,” (which, of course, rhymes in Spanish).

But housing agent who leads foreign clients to rental housing, the former immigration official for the Playa neighborhood, referring to the development of this lucrative market and new line of work, assured me with sarcastic ingenuity, “Nothing changes. The government sees nothing and tomorrow will say they didn’t know; but up to today it goes on and there’s no lack of “curry” in the hard currency stores. Look,” he continued, changing to a secure line and French, “What they know they don’t question. The reality is the Chinese are coveted customers, they travel  in small groups, stay in Cuba for 13-25 days, but before leaving, hello, what is important here is cash, everything is original and well-done, they pay up to 700 CUC for a Cuban passport, 200 for an identity card, and a thousand more to be included in the official civil registry, thus becoming duly legalized Chinese-Cuban citizens.  And now nationalized, they continue traveling into the future destined to our larger neighbor, ready to be welcomed by the Cuban Adjustment Act.”

The illegal traffic of Chinese using Cuba as a trampoline is a forbidden business that, tolerated, accepts accomplices, not witnesses.

24 April 2013

Many of you remember what happened in our country in the summer of 1989*. I’m referring to those trials that popular wits baptized, for the range of events and actors, “Tropicana show under the stars, first and second parts.” During those dark and sordid events, in certain circles of power a refrain that marked my life began to be heard: “Don’t believe anything you hear; only believe half of what you see.”

It is precisely because of this that today, at a distance of almost three years (since I left the island) and more than 90 miles, I can’t accept the different discourses coming from the island that describe an actuality that speaks much and says little.

Can we attest that the modifications in the travel and immigration law eased the entry to and exit from the country for Cuban citizens? Some assert that yes, they did; but just a few days ago the Cuban counsel in Moscow, under orders from Havana, refused permission for a gentleman in his 70s who, feeling destroyed, told me in an email, “… They continue to prevent my entering my beautiful island, I continue to be prevented from hugging my three children and meeting my three grandchildren who were born during the seven years they’ve prohibited my visiting Cuba.”

How, then, can we believe in the ends? It’s very true, the government of the island needs a change, but that doesn’t mean that it’s choking or dying; rather it is renewed, much to our regret. The abuse and threats are not remotely proof of their losing power.

Judges, prosecutors and lawyers in the exercise of their profession, assure that popular violence increases, irregular groups begin to take to the streets with relative impunity, and the issue of corruption exceeded the limits of unemployment. But of course, due to the divine lineage of unnamed persons involved in crimes of embezzlement, the Attorney General of the Republic of Cuba, which has the institutional mission of protecting the political and legal order of the State and Society,  was ordered to dismiss more than three thousand cases. A disturbing figure.

The country doesn’t appear to be doing well and there are no visible signs we can take as economically favorable. However some of my friends who are officials, but not passionate, who hold important positions in the central administration of the State, assure me that even though Cuba’s industries have no longer carry any weight, the economy is recovering and predictions for tourism are on the rise.

It’s difficult, from the United States, to understand how so many artists, scientists, farmers, housewives and workers whose only purpose in life is to survive day by day, and without belonging to either side, whether it be the Montagues or Capulets, can visualize a slight personal growth, and a subtle awakening of respect for individual liberty.

Right now, it seems like an hallucination to me; I’m not interested in become an echo of the deluded or frustrated, of the optimistic or pessimistic, the subjected or the believers. There are certain events that manage to change our course and, as my grandmother used to say, on the bus of life we are all passengers, even the driver.

I’m skeptical, unfortunately distance distorts events. Like St. Thomas, seeing is believing. And however things are going, I want to witness it in the first person singular, then I will ask for the absurd but established permission and tell you about it.

*Translator’s note: Highly decorated General Arnaldo Ochoa and others were tried and convicted of drug trafficking and executed. See “The day my mother lost her faith in the Cuban Revolution” by Yoani Sanchez, for another perspective.

19 April 2013

I am referring to the measure began as a response by the U.S. government to the expropriations, by Cuba, carried out against U.S. citizens and companies.

There’s no need to explain that it all happened before I was born, perhaps you weren’t either. The measure, pun intended, was understood by those affected, the dispossessed; and in certain legal circles it still stimulates vigorous debates over whether or not it violates the extraterritoriality of the law.

Perhaps to omit its history is a mistake; but I assume we all know it is very easy to Google to find a bibliographic reference. First it was a measure, then it was an ordinance that has been, in essence, the platform of many.

Some speakers use it with relative shamelessness to add that pinch of salt, or sugar (in controversy, it’s the same thing) that manages to catch the attention of whatever boring set. It’s magisterial how people continue to zigzag for or against the issue, depending on the audience, and so gain a loyal base of fans who on feeling pleased end up being complacent.

Cuba’s government maintains business relations with companies and governments of almost all UN member countries, the three observer states, and at least one of the so-called disputed territories. The island is also known for its chain of defaults, and for assuming commitments that it never meets.

The strategy they use is simple, after acquiring the needed amount in credits and/or loans, wham! in one breath they expel from the country under any pretext, the ousted employer or company and ban them from returning. Examples abound.

For the revolutionary government, “The Blockade” is the leitmotif that serves like a worn out prop in the staging of the biblical battle of David against Goliath, but in the hermetic Cuban shell the issue is not seen in the same way. Cuban entrepreneurs hallucinate about breaking the U.S. embargo, not for “patriotic” reasons but to feel themselves close to the longed for and prohibited.

The embargo law is what protects those U.S. farmers who manage to sell their products to Cuban companies. For them, although they ignore it, it’s recommended that they know that the embargo is the only real and legal instrument they have in order to get paid. Today, more than working, it’s an excellent relief that guarantees commercial seriousness on the part of the revolutionary government. Also, it assures, under the contractual time, that a little rice, a piece of chicken and a piece of bread reach Cuban homes.

Every law, new and old, generates a moral dilemma. Today, I’m in favor of the embargo.

9 April 2013