Barrio Adentro Clinic in Venezuela -- Image taken from: http://paulagiraud.blogspot.com/

“You must turn in your passport!” So they told him on arriving in Caracas, to prevent him from making it to the border and deserting. In the same airport they read him the rules: “You cannot say that you are Cuban, you can’t walk down the street in your medical clothes, and it’s best to avoid interacting with Venezuelans.” Days later he understood that his mission was a political one, because more than curing some heart problem or lung infection, he was supposed to examine consciences, probe voting intentions.

In Venezuela he also came across the corruption of some of those leading the Barrio Adentro Project.  The “shrewd ones” here become the “scoundrels” there, grabbing power, influence, money, and even pressuring the female doctors and nurses who travel alone to become their concubines. They placed him together with six colleagues in a cramped room and warned them that if they were to die — victims of all the violence out there — they would be listed as deserters. But it didn’t depress him. At the end of the day he was only 28 and this was his first time escaping from parental protection, the extreme apathy of his neighborhood, and the shortages in the hospital where he worked.

A month after arriving, they gave him an identity card, telling him that with it he could vote in the upcoming elections. At a quick meeting someone spoke about the hard blow it would be to Cuba to lose such an important ally in Latin America. “You are soldiers of the fatherland,” they shouted at them, and as such, “you must guarantee that the red tide prevails at the polls.”

The days when he thought he would save lives or relieve suffering are long gone. He just wants to go home, return to the protection of his family, tell his friends the truth, but for now he can’t. Beforehand, he must stand in line at the polls, show his support for the Venezuelan Socialist Party, hit the screen with his thumb as a sign of agreement. He counts the days until the last Sunday in September, thinking that after that he can go home.

Ministry of Work and Social Security

Eight in the morning and the rails of the station at Factor and Tulipán still have the freshness of the dawn. The only train, coming from San Antonio de los Baños, is delayed. The elderly, seated on the walls, resell the newspapers bought very early and offer, as well, cigarettes at retail. This week they suffered a tough setback with the announcement that the distribution, on the ration book, of the packs of Titans and Aroma has come to an end. Bad news for those on the lowest rung of our informal market, those who sell their own cigarette ration to survive.

Among the absurdities of the centralized market in Cuba, was that only those born before 1955 received the rationed cigarettes. In my family, my father had an allotment but my mother, three years younger, got nothing. Half joking half serious, a friend told me that in the future they would deliver the final pack of subsidized cigarettes to a long-lived Cuban who had been born in the middle of the twentieth century. Can you imagine the ceremony? Flags waving, trumpets sounding, a ceremonial marching battalion approaching the ancient one and presenting him with the last rationed cigarettes.

For better or worse this is not going to happen. These who were the youngest when they started to receive subsidized nicotine, are just now entering their sixth decade of life. Those of us who never benefited from this supply feel that today there is one less thing to throw in our faces. I believe, however, that someone should compensate the elderly at the Tulipán station, along with all those the length and breadth of this island who shore up their lives with this little bit of marketing.

Aug. 26 in Miami: Juan Juan with his daughter, Indira, and wife, Consuelo

The day that Juan Juan Almeida announced the start of his hunger strike was like reliving the nightmare we’d experienced with the long fast of Guillermo Fariñas. “This is the worst of all decisions,” we, his friends who love him, told him, sure that he would not withstand the rigors of starvation, nor that the authorities would yield before his empty gut rebellion. Fortunately we were wrong. It turned out that the talkative JJ — as his close friends call him — was not only willing to take his chances arm wrestling with the government, but seemed willing to sacrifice himself for all of us, who have repeatedly been denied permission to travel outside this archipelago.

The jovial forty-three-year-old leaves us a painful but effective lesson, because although we have no elections to vote directly for those who govern us, nor courts to accept claims of police abuse,  much less means by which a citizen can denounce the immigration restrictions holding the national territory in their grip, we still have our bones, our skin, our stomach walls, to reclaim, by way of the fragile terrain of our bodies, the rights they have taken from us.

Although the telecommunications company ETESCA reported that the number of cell phone users will soon surpass one million, we remain handicapped with regards to this technology. To receive a domestic call is madness, configuring the texting can take hours of fighting with the operators, and finding a place that sells recharge cards is like the movie Mission Impossible. Like a teenager whose growing feet no longer fit in his shoes, our cellphone system has increased the number of subscribers but without the corresponding improvement in infrastructure. Well, the growth doesn’t follow an integrated development of the system, but is led by the desire to collect — at all costs — those colored convertible notes that simulate the dollar.

Despite recent reductions in the high rates, even a doctor can’t afford cellphone service, but the political police enjoy subsidized rates which they can pay in national currency. Nor is it possible to open an account and pay at the end of the month, we have to pay in advance to be able to communicate. Many of us feel defrauded by ETESCA, but the State monopoly doesn’t allow other competitors to offer us better and cheaper service. Meanwhile a solution appears, thousands of users work out a strange Morse code with cellphones: One ring, two, three… Don’t answer on the other end! Just run to the nearest phone.

The residents went to the shelter known as Venus, which is a few blocks from the central train station. They arrived there hoping theirs would be a short stay among the partitions and sheets hung up to form walls. They’ve spent more than 20 years, however, in the damp rooms full of bunk beds. Their children have grown up there, fallen in love, and procreated, while sharing the collective bathroom and the kitchen with the walls blackened by soot.

At first they believed they had relocated to a better place, but the hurricanes and deterioration have damaged the housing stock and every year thousands of people are added the list of victims. Over time, they’ve forgotten the sensation of opening the door to their own home, taking off their clothes in a room without thinking about the dozens of curious eyes watching, of taking a shower without someone pounding on the door desperately demanding their turn. They have forgotten how to live outside the shelter.

From the wall of the Malecón there is not much to look at. A blue dish that gets annoyed now and again and launches its foamy waves over its bordering avenue. There are no sailboats, just a couple of patched vessels authorized by the captain of the port. In summer, teenagers throw themselves into the warm waters, but in winter they fearfully shy away from the salt spray and cold wind. A boat plies the route from east to west each night; a shadow on the horizon preventing potential rafters from escaping across the Straits of Florida.

Just now we are in the months of the year when the coastal avenue comes to its greatest turbulence. But everything happens between the reef and the street; this vitality doesn’t even dream of extending to the wide and salty expanse on the other side. When did we start to live with our backs to the sea? At what moment did this part of the country, which is also ours, cease to belong to us? Eating fish, sailing on a yacht, looking back at the buildings from the cadence of a wave, enjoying the contrast of blues along the beginning of the first ridge. Chimeric actions in a coastal city, sharp delusions on an Island that appears to float in nothingness and not in the Caribbean.

I have the illusion that one day, in order to rent even a rowboat, it won’t be necessary to show a foreign passport. The sails will return to take over this bay, reminding us that we live in a maritime Havana, born between the cries of the corsairs and the clamor of the port. The red snapper will displace the catfish and carp on our plates and from the wall of the Malecón — our legs dangling over the limestone reef — we will greet a flotilla of boats coming and going from El Morro.

Fidel Castro’s return to public life after a four-year absence provokes conflicting emotions here. His reappearance surprised a people awaiting, with growing despair, the reforms announced by his brother Raúl. While some weave fantasies around his return, others are anxious about what will happen next.

The return of a famous figure is a familiar theme in life as in fiction — think Don Quixote, Casanova or Juan Domingo Perón. But another familiar theme is disappointment — of those who find that the person who returns is no longer the person who left, or at least not as we remember him. There is often a sense of despair surrounding those who insist on coming back. Fidel Castro is no exception to this flaw inherent in remakes.

The man who appeared on the anniversary of “Revolution Day” last week bore no resemblance to the sturdy soldier who handed over his office to his brother in July 2006. The stuttering old man with quivering hands was a shadow of the Greek-profiled military leader who, while a million voices chanted his name in the plaza, pardoned lives, announced executions, proclaimed laws that no one had been consulted on and declared the right of revolutionaries to make revolution. Although he has once again donned his olive-green military shirt, little is left of the man who used to dominate television programming for endless hours, keeping people in suspense from the other side of the screen.

The great orator of times long past now meets with an audience of young people in a tiny theater and reads them a summary of his latest reflections, already published in the press. Instead of arousing the fear that makes even the bravest tremble, he calls forth, at best, a tender compassion. After a young reporter calmly asked a question, she followed up with her greatest wish: “May I give you a kiss?” Where is the abyss that for so many years not even the most courageous dared to jump?
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A significant sign that Fidel Castro’s return to the microphones has not being going over well is that even his brother refused to echo, in his most recent speech to parliament, the former leader’s gloomy prognostication of a nuclear armageddon that will start when the United States launches a military attack against North Korea or Iran. Many analysts have pointed out that the man who was known as the Maximum Leader is hardly qualified to assess the innumerable problems in his own country, yet he turns his gaze to the mote in another’s eye. This pattern is familiar, with his discussions of the world’s environmental problems, the exhaustion of capitalism as a system and, most recently, predictions of nuclear war. Others see a veiled discontent in his apparent indifference toward events in Cuba. Yet this thinking forgets the maxim: Even if he doesn’t censure, if Caesar does not applaud, things go badly. It is unthinkable that Fidel Castro is unaware of the appetite for change that is devouring the Cuban political class; it would be naive to believe that he approves.

For years, so many lives and livelihoods have hung on the gestures of his hands, the way he raises his eyebrows or the twitch of his ears. Fidel watchers now see him as unpredictable, and many fear that the worst may happen if it occurs to him to rail against the reformers in front of the television cameras.

Perhaps this is why the impatient breed of new wolves do not want to stoke the anger of the old commander, who is about to turn 84. Some who intended to introduce more radical changes are now crouching in their spheres of power, waiting for his next relapse.

Meanwhile, those who are worried about the survival of “the process” are alarmed by the danger his obvious decline poses to the myth of the Cuban revolution personified, for 50 years, in this one man. Why doesn’t he stay quietly at home and let us work, some think, though they dare not even whisper it.

We had already started to remember him as something from the past, which was a noble way to forget him. Many were disposed to forgive his mistakes and failures. They had put him on some gray pedestal of the history of the 20th century, capturing his face at its best moment, along with the illustrious dead. But his sudden reappearance upended those efforts. He has come forward again to shamelessly display his infirmities and announce the end of the world, as if to convince us that life after him would be lacking in purpose.

In recent weeks, he who was once called The One, the Horse or simply He, has been presented to us stripped of his captivating charisma. Although he is once again in the news, it has been confirmed: Fidel Castro, fortunately, will never return.

Originally published in the Washington Post, August 5, 2010

After bypassing the limitations to reach cyberspace, we Cubans see the censorship that grips us from two different sides. One comes from the lack of political will on the part of our government to allow this Island mass access to the web of networks. It shows itself in blogs and filtered portals and in the prohibitive prices for an hour of surfing the WWW. The other – also painful – is that of services that exclude residents in our country under the justification of the anachronistic blockade/embargo. Those who think limiting the functionality of sites like Jaiku, Google Gears, and Appstore for my compatriots will have any effect on the authorities of my country are naïve. They know that those who govern us have satellite antennas in their homes, broadband, open Internet, iPhones full of applications, while we – the citizens – trip over screens that say “this service is not available in your country.”

Just as we get around the internal restrictions here, we also sneak through the closed gates of those who exclude us from abroad. For every lock they put on us there is a trick to picking it open. But it still frustrates me that after avoiding the State Security agents below my apartment, paying a third of a monthly salary for an hour of internet time, seeing the animosity in the faces of the guards at the hotels, to see that Revolico, Cubaencuentro, Cubanet and DesdeCuba continue in the long night of the censored sites, I go and type – like a conjurer of relief – a URL and instead of opening it seems to me that a wall has been raised on the other side.

A week ago Max Marambio, alias El Guatón – The Fatso – was due to come to this Island, appear before a court, explain certain matters. The owner of the joint-venture company Río Zaza, however, has preferred the protection of his Chilean homeland, as he is an expert – like no one else – in the unpredictable results of putting oneself in the hands of Cuban justice. Accused of bribery, embezzlement, forgery of bank documents and fraud, he who was once the favored protégé of the Maximum Leader just received – instead of pats on the back – a warrant for his arrest.

I miss Marambio even without having known him, because with his departure the number of families on this Island who can drink a glass of milk whenever they like has been greatly reduced. The informal market that supplied itself from his warehouses collapsed as soon as he left, and the underground networks that diverted his products either dried up or doubled their prices. When the lieutenant colonel turned manager escaped to Santiago de Chile, we realized the role that this man – forged at the right hand of power – played in what we put on our tables. He didn’t do it for altruism, clearly, but at least he diversified the boring local production and managed to make a tetrapack something that was not a collector’s item.

Marambio’s fortune was amassed where Cubans cannot invest a single centavo: in those joint venture companies opened to those with foreign passports but not to those with national ones. His personal history was a preview of what we will see, a prediction of how ranking military will transform themselves – dressed in suits and ties – into ideology-free entrepreneurs. Despite his agility with yesterday’s weapons – a Kalashnikov, slogans, Marxist dogma – we remember him for other strategies: bank accounts, trading favors, investments. His former comrades in the struggle will show him no clemency when judging him in court, because the paunchy Chilean ended up turning himself into a commercial competitor, not to mention that he knows too many stories – secret ones – about them.

She fans herself. Keeps shifting from right to left. With this movement my mother – almost oblivious – is teaching me the art of waiting, the exercise of patience to deal with the long lines that are waiting for me.