The market is almost empty. It’s still very early and someone is writing the new prices for a pound of pork on a blackboard. It seems a simple gesture, that of the hand that has changed only one digit in the price of the ribs, the legs, or the processed fat. But in reality, what is expressed on that slate — with its numbers traced in chalk — is a real market cataclysm. The internal Cuban economy suffers from a weakness such that the slightest price increase for a pound of steak or butter is enough to disrupt our fragile commercial framework. A few centavos added to the price of a food sends the thermometer of daily anxiety upward, raises the barometer of concern.

Indeed, a certain state of alarm is running through the country lately. Pork is scarce because of the dearth of feed; its import has declined and local production barely gets off the ground. The self-employment sector suffers from a scarcity of the product which forms the basis for the so-called “little boxes,” which almost always include rice, some kind of starch, and a little meat. This lunch “in hand” is the mainstay of many Cubans who work far from home, and also constitutes the basic unit for the private businesses selling ready-made meals. When the price of this lunchbox rises it pulls everything with it. The shoe salesman adds a bit to his merchandise to recoup his loss on the midday snack; the shopkeeper who paid more for her sandals tries to make up the difference from unsuspecting customers who don’t count their change; and the retired housewife writes to her son in Frankfurt or Miami asking for a bump in her remittance, because life is very expensive. And this whole sequence of problems and angst begins in a pigsty, the place where feed and care should be converted into pounds of meat, but are not.

I wasn’t yet old enough to go to school and I was at the park the neighbors in the area called “Carlos III,” although the maps insisted on labeling it “Carlos Marx.” My sister and I were playing in the dry fountain, jumping from one bench to another. At some point we glanced over at the site of the Masonic Lodge at the corner of Belascoain and the globe on its roof was throwing out gray smoke, slowing burning up in front of our eyes. I remember we shouted at my father, “Papi! The world is on fire!” and the three of us ran to the building guard to tell him. In a few minutes the fire trucks came and from that day the reproduction of the planet ceased to turn, its rotating mechanism stopped working… for decades.

In this same park from my childhood, the Critical Observatory* held a meeting yesterday, in solidarity with the worldwide movement of the outraged. Hours  before the demonstrators arrived, the area was taken by the political police as well as uniformed guards. Several activists and journalists were detained before they got there, and taken to distant neighborhoods so they could not participate. The event finally happened, although with marked haste and low attendance. They were able, however, to display a pair of anti-capitalist banners, take some photos, and connect, from a distance, with the current of discontent shaking countries like Spain, England and the United States. The attendees sang the Internationale and some habituates of the place discovered — just then — the face of the author of Das Kapital chiseled into the wall. Fifteen minutes later #12MGlobal ended in Havana and the children returned to take over the empty fountain, the benches, and the bust in relief of a man born in Germany in 1818. At night, prime time news would report the protests in London and Madrid, while remaining silent about the demonstration on our national territory.

Despite the limited number of attendees and the narrow ideology of the convocation, what happened yesterday is something that enriches Cuban civil society. The official sectarianism doesn’t distinguish between nonconformists on the left or right, suspicious of all who dare to criticize, regardless of their affiliation. In the offices of State Security they will have an open file on Jose Daniel Ferrer as well as Pedro Campos, they will follow the tracks of the Patriot Union of Cuba, as well as those of the Critical Observatory with suspicion. To totalitarianism, it doesn’t matter if its dissidents say they embrace the same doctrine as the once official manuals, criticizing alone is enough to land them in the same sack of enemies. This country stuck in political inertia needs to get moving, urgently needs to embark on the path of pluralism and democracy. Like the globe at the corner of Carlos III and Belascoaín, Cuba must begin to move. Perhaps at first it will turn to the left or to the right, it will stumble and waffle until it finds its own rhythm. But from now on, no one can impose a single direction, no one has the right to constrain it to a single path.

Translator’s note: “Critical Observatory” is a group challenging the Castro regime from the left. An article in which a member describes the group, in English, is here; and a report of Saturday’s protest from the same author is here.

During the last week, the official media have greatly emphasized the origin and workings of the Red Cross in Cuba. Around May 8th, the founding date of this humanitarian body, they published several reports about its helping character and neutrality. Prime time news has featured interviews with those who have acted with self-sacrifice to save victims of accidents and conflicts. Undoubtedly, there are stories of personal altruism and philanthropy that have saved a life or prevented injuries. But the reason for these tributes and chronicles is not just to commemorate and recognize the committee founded by Henri Dunant in 1863. National TV is also trying to clean up the lamentable image left by one of those Cuban volunteers during Benedict XVI’s Mass in Santiago de Cuba.

At this point, there are few people on this Island who haven’t seen the video where a man — wearing a Red Cross emblem — hits and beats with a stretcher Andrés Carrión, who had shouted an anti-system slogan. The scene elicits such revulsion, shows so much baseness, that even government supporters express their rejection of such practices. They are moved by the disproportion of power between someone who can’t defend himself, and another who slaps him and attacks him with first aid equipment. The incident led the International Committee of the Red Cross to request an explanation, and even to an unpublished note of apology from its Cuban counterpart. But it hasn’t been enough. What has become clear are not only the wrath of a paramilitary agent disguised as an aid worker, and the ideological rancor that is fomented at every pass with no consideration for the consequences. What has been revealed, also, is that the authorities of our country lack ethical limits when it comes to suppressing a different opinion. If, to camouflage their shock troops, they have to dress them like sports teams, “spontaneous students,” or a medical group, they will do so. They don’t hesitate to take in hand international emblems and even to use the prestige of foreign NGOs for political ends. This has to be known, enough with naivete.

Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t stand a chance: the wolf of intolerance can disguise itself as grandma, the mother who gave her the cakes, or even the woodsman himself who comes to her rescue.

On the ground, turned over, and with a huge hole in the bottom, lies the dumpster on the corner. It was put there just months ago, with its bulky gray body ready to swallow the garbage. But it didn’t resist. Vandalism, coupled with the poor quality of its material, have left it in an almost unusable state. One street farther down another ran into worse luck and disappeared, later being found near the Tulipan station. Two others, with their wheels ripped off and their lids missing, rest a few yards from the train line. According to an official from the Community Corporation, “as many as 50 dumpsters in one day” have been stolen. At night you see them full — with their stink, flies and feral cats — and in the morning they’re not there, all that’s left are the contents dumped in the street.

There are many ways to measure the physical state of a nation and one of them is listing what people loot from public spaces. I remember when, in the early nineties, we had to guard the light bulbs in the hallways and elevators, almost as if they were gold bars hanging from the ceiling. Pillaging has increasingly become a form of public protest in a gesture that combines predation and social retaliation against a State that has been — for too long — the omni-proprietor. Those raised by parents who lived by diverting resources from their workplaces, rarely hesitate to plunder. Rather, they become adults versed in “express theft,” in crimes born of both maliciousness and desperate need.

The dumpster’s wheels will make their way to the cart that brings waters to neighborhoods where the supply is unreliable. The plastic structure travels a longer route, it is melted down and turned into clothes pins, funnels to transfer fuel, or into orange juicers. In the absence of a wholesale market where raw materials can be bought, any object in the public street can end up transformed into a product to be sold. Not a trace is left, barely a few streaks of gray in a scrub brush recall the dumpster that had been on the other corner.

"Unanimity" - An artwork in a Havana gallery.

The last time the Plaza of the Revolution was full, crammed with people, was when Benedicto XVI offered his homily in Havana. The television broadcasters repeated, with a strange insistence, that attending this Mass were “believers and non-believers.” To ears not trained in Cuban official discourse, that affirmation might sound like a gesture of inclusion and tolerance. But, it was more a clarification — and not subtle in the least — that not everyone in the multitude was Catholic, nor could the Pope count on such a large flock among us. If you paid attention to every word spoken by the government representatives, Cubans were there because of “discipline,” out of “respect,” or because they are an “equable” people, but not, in fact, because of faith.

I wonder whether this May Day they will also throw out such contrasting adjectives. They could, for example, say that on this Workers’ Day both “Revolutionaries and Non-revolutionaries” are marching, which would not be absurd on a day that should have a labor and union tone, not a political one. Can you imagine the grave voice of the announcer affirming that in the flag-waving crowd there are both “employed and unemployed”? Of these, the latter would undoubtedly have to be the most energetic block, because the number of unemployed workers in 2012 has grown to 170 million throughout the Island. In front of the microphones they should make the distinction that in the mass of people facing the statue of Jose Marti are found “sympathizers and non-sympathizers” with Raul’s government. Because after all, who would believe that a million individuals are all in agreement with the administration of a president?

There will be no surprises nor nuances, but rather attempts to lump together hundreds of thousands of participants and present them as a unanimous chorus supporting the system. And May Day once again will be hijacked, like so many times before. From the podium those who salute will be precisely those who should be called out and criticized on the banners, not those who should be leading a workers‘ commemoration. The day will end without demands being made of this boss named “the State” to raise salaries, lower the cost of living, or improve working conditions. Instead, every little head seen from the Plaza’s tower will be counted as a round of applause. Every individual who marches will be taken as a faithful “believer” in the Party, as someone who has no doubts, no questions, no demands.

I knew they would go after him. When I spoke with José Daniel Ferrer for the first time, by phone, I immediately noticed his exceptionality. Shortly after, we talked around the table in our house and this impression was further confirmed. While outside night was coming on, the man from Palmarito de Cauto told us of the years he spent in prison, from the Black Spring of 2003 to mid-2011. The beatings, the denouncing, the inmates who respectfully called him “the politician” and the guards who tried to crush him by force. We spent hours listening to those stories, at times of horror and at others of true miracles. Like when he managed to hide a small radio, his most precious possession, from the searches until he himself smashed it against the floor, seconds before a guard confiscated it.

José Daniel, the leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), is today State Security’s main headache in the East of the country. He occupies that place — admirable but dangerous — in part because his every word projects honesty and determination. Good-natured, young, conciliatory, he has managed to revive a dissident movement languishing between repression and the exile of some of its members. His drawing power, and the respect many have for him, comes also from his perseverance and, in particular, from the fact that he is quicker to embrace than to distrust. He has become a human-bridge between several citizen projects and, right now, that makes him a sharp stone in the Cuban government’s shoe.

For 23 days this tireless Santiaguan has been detained. He can no longer traverse the steep roads connecting the towns of his region, nor respond to interviews, nor send messages via Twitter from his cell phone. Last Monday he declared a hunger strike in the police station where they are keeping him incommunicado.  His wife, Belkis Cantillo, still has no information about how much longer he will be under arrest, or even if they plan to file legal charges. Some of us, his friends, have a bad feeling. José Daniel Ferrer has come to have an ability to call people together that frightens the Cuban authorities and they will punish him harshly for that. They fear him because he could give Santiago de Cuba’s slogan, “Heroic City,” a new meaning in these times.

He holds the microphone pressed to his mouth and his dreadlocks swing restlessly across his back. Raudel Collazo is on stage: sweating, singing, talking, the whole time a chorus of applause joining the music. After the concert he returns to his house in Guines, to the narrow broken sidewalk along which he walks his daughter to school, to his mother with the white wrap around her head. The documentary Despertar (Awakening), directed by Anthony Bubaire and Ricardo Figueredo, explores the man who gives his body over to banned music. On the screen, it exposes the concerns that he voices in the lyrics of el Escuadron Patriota — the Patriot Squadron. Filling out this exploration, the camera also captures the everyday family and personal images that have been narrated in his songs.

Raudel, who in the well-known song “Decadence” put to music the anxieties of many Cubans, is now the star of this black-and-white film. A work that was censored at the most recent Young Filmmakers Exhibition, sponsored by the Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). The incident led to the resignation of the prominent filmmaker Fernando Perez, who presided over the event and who had tried to avoid other attempts at censorship. For 12 years, this independent audiovisual space has featured several creations addressing cultural, social and political issues that are taboo in Cuba. Thus, what happened at the beginning of April was a serious setback for the hotbed of daring it had become.

For foreign viewers it will be hard to detect, over its 45 minutes, the reason for demonizing this documentary. On the screen we see man who talks, loves, opines; someone who touches on themes like racism, the state of public health, or the physical condition of his home… There are no calls for social violence nor messages of hate; nor are there incitements to popular revolt. There, lying on a bed or eating with a friend, we see only an individual who has found, in music, a way of civic expression and, in the choruses of his songs, a way to reclaim the rights stripped from him. The censors, however, realize the “danger” posed by telling the Cuban public to wake up as citizens, of showing them the cry that is launched, when one emerges from silence.

* Next Friday, April 27 at 8 pm, there will be a premiere of the documentary Despertar, at Estado de SATS, Calle 1ra no. And 4606 between 46 and 60, Playa. Last Saturday’s projection was postponed because of difficulties with the weather.

Pieces of wood, big rocks, and in places pieces of concrete at the seashore.

We are on a school break. Mothers and children who want to go to the zoo, the aquarium or some other recreation area crowd the bus stops. In Old Havana there isn’t a single nook or cranny without those little ones demanding an ice cream or pulling on their grandmother’s skirt so she’ll buy them a pizza. Outside the amusement park a long line waits to ride the crazy cars and feel the wind in their hair on the roller coaster. Meanwhile, parents reach a trembling hand into their wallets. They know that in most cases only convertible pesos – hard currency – will do for candy and soft drinks, although the entrance fees for museums and movie theaters are in national money. The schools, until next Monday, will be silent vacant sites.

My son, who is at that awkward age between childhood and adolescence, also enjoys his week of vacation. Yesterday he wanted to swim for a while at Havana’s eastern beaches, and we went there with my father who hadn’t felt the sand on his feet for a decade. The sea was gorgeous, as always, the sun played its part up above, and even a few clouds offered us their shade in this sizzling April. Nature, in short, put the best spin on the afternoon. A mixture of apathy and neglect, however, has changed the coastal landscape I know so well from my own childhood. In the tourist area in front of the Tropicana Hotel, of course, it was impeccably clean with police making the rounds so that no Cuban would “bother” the foreigners. But outside that perimeter of comfort, the setting for natives is a real ecological disaster.

The sand is no longer a rolling area of soft waves. Near the sea it looks gray and compacted, while the wind has blown the finer grains into huge dunes covered with thorny plants. Between the street and what would be the backdrop for the summer beachgoers, there are now these mounds that must be scaled to take a dip. Rocks, pieces of concrete, and even lumber, hug the water’s edge along several areas of the shoreline. Boca Ciega, the part of the beach where families have been going for thirty years — and prostitutes with their clients for twenty — today is an area lacking in the minimal services of restrooms, snack bars and umbrellas. It looks like a battlefield after the bombing. Taking off your shoes to walk a bit is not a good idea, because of the glass and shards of metal. Not to mention the part known as Guanabo, where the sewage ditches drain into the sea. The worst is in the faces of the residents: an expression of neglect and abandonment, of the former glory turned into salt.

My son was paddling about in the water, while the adult that I am remembered all the sand castles built in that place. I thought of those diminutive forts from whose pointed towers the future, then, seemed better and more beautiful.

The sand has receded and accumulated in big dunes

Constructions destroyed by the sea and by hurricanes

Apathy and ecological damage jeopardize Havana's eastern beaches

The balustrades are shaped like naked women and the wrought iron gate is topped with stone slabs. The garden barely has room for a couple of feet of grass from which a diminutive Pekinese barks all day. From the front door you can see the line of the bar that divides the living room from the kitchen, with bottles filled with colored liquids. A plastic tank overlooks the roof, storing enough water for days of scarcity. The iron and glass windows reveal the figures moving within the house and at night also reflect the brightness of the TV. The entire lowercase “mansion” has been painted the vermillion color that today is a sign of prosperity. With this tone preferred by those who  make their way economically despite privations and bureaucratic absurdities.

Even on unpaved streets, these homes stand out, retouched by their own efforts and convertible pesos. Minuscule palaces with pretensions of grandeur suddenly popping into view. They leave us caught between surprise and optimism, on encountering them amid the twists and turns of La Platanito, La Timbre, Zamora, el Romerillo, and other rundown neighborhoods. Hard up against overflowing dumpsters or sewer ditches the ooze down the road, but within themselves these “doll houses” are like bubbles of well-being. They have these pretensions expressed in fanciful details such as columns shaped like tree branches, or plaster dwarfs guarding the gates. Extravagantly decorated tons of times, architecturally ridiculous many others, these imitation castles speak of a strong desire to live in a beautiful, personalized space. They are like the baroque walls of some mausoleum in a Havana cemetery, but this time for the enjoyment of life.

I love to stumble across these facades and see their occupants looking out from the small balconies. There is something in them, in the paint chosen to cover the walls and in the bell hanging over the door that gives me hope. I am comforted to know that the desire to progress materially was not erased by so many years of false egalitarianism and faked modesty. Some eagerness for prosperity remains within us and now this greed has a color, vermillion, that is impossible to hide.

A child of five starts school, but a blog of the same age has already taken more daring steps. Today I am making an effort to remember that quiet and fearful woman, from before April 9, 2007, who created Generation Y. But I can’t. Her face disappears, dissolving among all the beautiful and difficult moments I’ve experienced since I posted my first text on the web. I can no longer imagine myself without this accidental and personal diary. I have the impression that I have always, in one way or another, been writing a blog. When the indoctrination and the injustice reached intolerable points, my childish head glossed the reality–from the fringes–in ways I could never say out loud. The evasive adolescent I became did the same thing: narrating her daily life, trying to explain it and trying to escape it.

The truth is that when I left home that morning to hang my virtual page on the Internet, I never could have imagined how much this action would transform me. Now, whenever the apprehension that the Cuban political police are “infallible” assaults me, I exorcise this thought by telling myself that “they didn’t know, that day, they couldn’t even guess that I would create this site.”  What happened afterwards is already well known: the readers arrived and took over this space like citizens take over a public plaza; many others knocked on my door wanting help to create their own spaces of opinion; the first attacks appeared, as did the recognitions. Along the way I lost that 32-year-old mother who only spoke about “complicated issues” in a whisper, I misplaced the compulsive woman who barely knew how to debate or listen. This blog has been like experiencing — in the time and space of a single life — an infinity of parallel existences.

I have never again been able to walk the streets incognito. That gift of invisibility that I boasted of possessing fell by the wayside, between the hugs of those who recognized me and the attentive eyes of those whose job it is to watch me. I have paid an enormous personal and social price for these little vignettes of reality and yet I would do it again, taking my flash memory to the lobby of that hotel where I launched my inaugural post on the great world wide web.