In Ciego de Avila, Cuba, 24 January 2011
To: Whom it may concern.
Subject: Formal resignation from the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC)
Disclaimer: I don’t care to detour to particular and depressing facts, being the last drops, and perhaps less than could have overwhelmed my disappointment.
Message: If there are reasons to spare, today there are words to spare.
Francis Sánchez
Writer
Ciego de Ávila – Cuba.
January 28 2011
“Man in the Clouds ” is my personal blog. My expectations are based on fulfilling the natural mandate of God to live and express myself as a rational social being, like any creature with free will. I believe my right to think and share my thoughts is a universal inalienable right. I am open to sharing, in this sense, works that are literary, informative and of a diverse nature, including from other authors when appropriate.
I have not the slightest chance of regular access to the internet, not even to email. I cannot read, much less moderate, the comments that readers leave on my site, though the latter doesn’t interest me. Although I would like to post more often, it’s impossible for the same reason.
Opening this blog and making my thoughts “visible” has had a very high cost to me in my “real” life in Cuba, in an inland area and a province where there is no tradition of this kind of independent action. For now, I will not describe the consequences. Suffice it to say that certain defamatory comments, certain personal attacks, are only the tip of the iceberg that weighs on me and my family.
I believe I can summarize the human dignity offered by Christ as an ethical basis in which I aspire to remain firm, a consistent being. And, as I myself expect, in this blog I can expect my work to be censored and must adjust to that.
I have never belonged to any political organization.
I belong to my family, period.
As an intellectual, the cloud I am in is just as easy: literature, freedom, and the agony of living inclined to goodness and truth.
Although tomorrow I could feel myself destroyed, reduced to less than dust, whatever happens, whatever is said, whatever is done to me, I believe that the clouds or the beauty in which I rest my thoughts will not let me contradict myself.
March 31 2011
The image of Mary, mother of Christ, which today makes a pilgrimage through the entire country announcing the message of the God’s love for man, came to the province of Ciego de Avila this Sunday, March 13, when it entered the town of Cunagua.
With the national tour of the Patroness of Cuba, the Cuban church celebrated the 400th anniversary of the discovery, in the Bay of Nipe, of the blessed image of the Virgin of Charity which has been venerated ever since in El Cobre.
So she returns to Cunagua, she who is also known as Virgin Mambisa, because of what happened here in 1952, then to mark the anniversary of the Republic. So this time, at the entrance of the village, a woman’s voice through the speakers recalled that event, citing the chronicles that were published over half a century ago:
“Procession circled the center at eight at night praying the rosary, confessions until two in the morning and a Communion Mass with 201 communicants. It had been in central Camaguey the most enthusiasm, generosity and charity. ”
Now, perhaps with no less enthusiasm and hope, the streets of the town in the north of Ciego de Avila province are filled again with devotion. From very early in the day excited residents gathered on both sides of the road.
The first Catholic communities from the rest of the province arrived in a convoy of cars, trucks and buses, and soon after the image of Our Lady arrived, escorted spontaneously by people all around her riding bicycles. Monsignor Mario Mestril, bishop of the diocese, said a few words to the crowd before the procession to the local temple where he was to celebrate Holy Mass in a warm atmosphere.
At the time of offering peace, the bishop made an exception in view of the significance of this day and didn’t skip, as is customary for Lent, inviting the community to exchange greetings. So I had the opportunity to wish the peace of Christ to those who were around me, including that large gentleman with the tight expression flanking me, who perhaps did not understand what it was and who, in response to my sincere attention, subsequently withdrew. Two days earlier, the most recent time I had been in contact, for just a second, with strangers, I had been robbed of my phone while boarding a bus, in an operation so professional that I was left in shock. For me, therefore, it was also a simple experience of overcoming fear, a cure or therapy of love for survivors that the Christian faith has always carried forward.
We share a day overflowing with signs. Faith in Christ the King is alive and, through the intercession of Mary, 400 years after the happy discovery on the waters of the Bay of Nipe, she walks the streets of Cuba.
March 17 2011
Photos: Francis Sánchez.
I have the excuse of two children so I can play outside. At home I say I’m going with them to please them and keep a close watch over them, the reality is that I escape, in this way, the tensions and the routine, or it might be, the idiotic world. Sometimes we just go out in the sun and kick a ball around. If it’s raining, we make goals in the street, with two stones on each side, and carry on like we’re in a swimming pool. But on the weekends, because school is out, we aspire to drastic solutions, one in particular: we take the road out of town. This we call “The excursion.” Usually then we add some boy from neighborhood, sometimes three or four if their parents give permission.
Clearly within the city there aren’t that many choices, nor within the family budget, to go looking for better options in other cities or resorts. However, we don’t think about that, we simply enjoy what we do. Riding bikes, in fifteen or twenty minutes we’ve “changed the channel” and are enjoying another landscape on our big screen. Instead of the chipped and stained colors of the houses, out there it is predominantly green, strongly speckled with flowers or chopped by the sharp gray of the rain, depending on the season.
We go looking for surprises. So we avoid the pastures which are almost always empty with their fences separating us from a slightly tentative plain. It’s more exciting for us to suddenly get visual pleasure, or that of the other senses, touch, smell and taste. We go after any dazzling fruit.
We discovered an abandoned coconut grove, where it appeared that every now and then people went to pull up some plant by the roots to transplant it – which explained the holes – to adorn a walkway or garden as is the custom now, saving people the anxiety, the distress of watching a tree grow.
We also found one day a city covered in weeds. We said it was the vestiges of an ancient civilization. R now, I am the only one who knows that it was a megaproject from the ‘80s sponsored by the First Party Secretary of the province: to make himself a “little beach” in the city, with the typical complex of a whole city hidden within an island, but with the unfortunate idea that at his own pleasure he would be able to divert a river, and that a system of canals would serve the town, and perhaps he might have managed it if the law of gravity hadn’t intervened.
Then the poor watercourse that could barely aspire to be called a stream failed such a demanding test, leaving an artificial beach that is no more than a puddle and some outbuildings mostly at the mercy of the grass. We played in a strange landscape where we certainly had the layers of other lost cities.
We get up to the most amazing things. The children are, of course, those who take on the most. I’ve brought only a knife, a pair of containers with water and little else. But Fredo de Jesus, for example, wants to live in a country where animals talk, where they filmed Alvin and the Chipmunks making it on the music scene, so he still has the ability to hear or believe that he hears animals talk when they are, or believe they are, alone. Perhaps a bird that has migrated from there… He also wants to be like Legolas, the elf from The Lord of the Rings and also use his bow to perfection.
Francito, like the magician Merlin, wants to invoke the spirit of fire with a spell and nothing else, putting out the palms of his hands to make a flame rise from the ground. His cousin, Enmanuel, older and without whom they can’t imagine a happy day, says, “the fire is beautiful.”
Fredo asks me if the shops don’t sell torches, and is this the time, when his mother isn’t watching, to make one. We share out trees and crannies in usufruct, between good and evil, pure and simple: everyone is good and has the right to believe that the others are ogres, trolls who must be expelled from the forest. We ride with care not to get a puncture. Francito makes the observation that in the paradise landscapes of movies you never see the spines, nor the ants, nor the tiny ticks!
Coincidentally, they all plan to graduate some day as explorers or conservationists.They collect amazements while I give a score on a scale of one to five. Almond shrubs in a sea of marabou weed and West Indian elms: Three points. Rundown bull without horns: Four. Giant centipede — any creature whose capture is effected without the use of a cap earns extra points — maximum score. Mashing and eating almonds by the ton ends up being our version of the coming of the dinosaurs to the green valley after the great cataclysm.
I let them talk when they get tired. This is the part where they share their experiences. Above all I keep quiet while it seems they cross the forest of social reality or rub against the dangerous edges. I learn. In particular I learn about the innocence that I would like to preserve even at the cost of my life, if it were possible. Today they travel the world freely and return.
Fredo offers his point of view: the dream consists of a great solution to all constraints. In dreams he has the freedom to be and do whatever he pleases. He says that when he wants to have adventures like Harry Potter, he uses his powers, the dream, and there you are. They agreed, but another notes that the ideal is to be able to leave, to earn money and get all the things necessary to live.
I remember a friend, a poet who spoke of the country as if it were a landscape that one passed through on the way to exile: the day you left you could come to visit, you could know it. They are happy to live in a healthy country, where there are no poisonous animals, where boa constrictors don’t swallow people, nor lions, nor crocodiles as in the Florida swamps and in Australia…
I think about what happiness is theirs, ignoring other environments which also grow at the expense of imagination and the Utopias, the literary the worst of all, and the morbid politics. My deepest desire unconfessed: that they not grow up. That they be good men, too. But that they walk among the snares of the world with firm step and not fall into the fallacy of being “useful to society,” where many end up turned into efficient deplorable instruments, those who become the long tentacles of injustice, like the opportunists, sycophants, snitches, bootlickers, always crawling under the dark cloud of power. That they avoid being poisoned by jealousy and the fear of living openly. That they never abuse, corner or humiliate another human being.
To Francito the argument of a harmless endemic fauna is especially appealing, as he is one of the few children who has been bitten by a Santa Maria Cuban boa, the almost extinct Cuban cousin of the viper that has a reputation for stupidity. (See photo above.)
It wasn’t too stupid, or it was tired, the sad specimen they use at the Cayo Coco resort for the visitors to take pictures, he took him out of a suitcase and even hung him around his neck. I insisted that he, ten at the time, not be left without an Indiana Jones souvenir, with such bad aim that, in the fraction of the second that it took me to turn on my camera, the boa decided to attack. Fortunately, as the doctor on duty at the hospital explained, there was no poison, but he refused to believe it. The photo, along with my regrets, would bring the victim an unexpected popularity among his friends in the neighborhood and at school.
“Watch out! How scary!” they exclaim running their eyes over the bushes. By now we’re at a natural pool in the bed of what was once a stream and should have become a canal according the Utopian agendas and absurdities of the bureaucracy, but they still don’t know that. Water collected since the last downpour remains among the stones.
They go swimming. Fear ties me to the rock from which I watch them. Splashing and laughing. What amuses them most is fleeing from a crocodile or an imaginary boa.
20 January 2011
Walking from the base camp Playa Inglés to the Ismaellillo Camp, on the south coast in Cienfuegos Province, took me about forty minutes. I stopped now and then to take a photo like a dream. There was no time to lose. I was overcome with the joy of a parent who sees that his son is happy playing football for the first time in an official event for children from ages 9 to 10. It was held during a school break between February 6 to 11: The Football Tournament for All Boys and Girls, sponsored by UNICEF and the Ministry of Education.
Walking with me were three mothers of players from Sancti Spiritus province, who had moved to be as close as possible to their children. At times I saved them from some half-dead cow, crab or lizard. Impromptu charcoal makers here and there, scratching out a living, guided us through the tangle of marabou weed, or “aroma,” as this plague that dominates the island countryside is also known.
About the tournament: All winners, happy. The provinces of Santiago de Cuba, Villa Clara and Granma took the top places in that order. Ciego de Avila improved from last year’s 14th place, moving up to a decent 8th place, with only 1 loss (to the champion), 3 draws and 3 wins. We had the peculiarity that each team had three girls, and in ours they were the defining factors in at least a couple of victories in penalty shootouts. From my cheerful and definitely impartial and paternalistic point of view, the captain of that team and Number 7 — with dreams of being like the famous footballers Guaje Villa and Cristiano Ronaldo — made the decisive goal in the final game, against Sancti Spiritus itself.
Luckily, at that culminating moment, the trio of colleagues and mothers who are friends, hid away not too far from there, removing the pressure from their little ones. It was a scratch, or the dream of a deep scratch on the diamond of happiness. You can’t give up feeling and holding the fragile carbon, what will be a petrified spark on the next day, because of the stains which form around the eyes.
I prefer to pass over the heartaches. When running on the field, or where there is the heart of a child, everything is perfect. For such a perfect balance, I would set aside, file away, any suspicions that championship can leave some defenseless innocents, in the hands of experts, teachers of very humble backgrounds who want to earn a trip or a “mission” at all costs. One could forget, at times, that they are children, supposedly fifth graders, who seem too large and mature, kicking a ball with an objective beyond the simple joy of playing.
February 23 2011
This February 23 marks the first anniversary of the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo after suffering a hunger strike that lasted 86 days. The official press hastened to say that it was just another fallen mercenary in service to the empire. But not everyone in the general public subjected to this propaganda saw it that way, even some avowed communists revealed their bewilderment in remarks circulated by email: can one give their own life, coldly, in exchange for money?
The old discredited argument against dissent, against differences, continues to transmit the classic standard of proof: supposedly all “others” are lacking not only good sense, true motives, but also lack the most minimal ideal or altruism. But now its lack of logic has left this argument without a leg. This victim was different, he had crossed the vast threshold of the pain of an entire people until he entered into death, carried forth by his own sturdy will, over to where Cubans, because of their culture and distinctive characteristics, do not charge or demand, but instead offer to give themselves freely to their fellow man. Apart from puppets, that other cartoonish idea of masochistic dissidents, that they are looking for ostracism and repression in return for a few perks they are thrown from the outside, does not even remotely fit the case. Zapata gave everything. He gave, and here this word acquires its full meaning, his life.
Absolute power, which is always marked by rigor mortis, does not permit even in theory a social actor who dissents legitimately. Seemingly the most elemental human condition is lost when a person questions or doubts the vertical power, receiving the exclusion that is reserved for monsters, that’s why the revolutionary songbook is full of dehumanizing terms such as “worm”, “scum”, “faction”, it has been used over the long course of Cuban history to institutionalize an overwhelming fear of disagreements.
One might ask the tribunal of untainted pure censors this question: what is the prototypical dissident for which they have planned, do they concede to a life the right to question, that those who choose to live could believe that a monolithic social model is unsustainable or impossible. Given this abundant reality and the ideological contradictions why don’t we see an opponent worthy of minimal respect emerge in the national arena, someone permitted to share the same space with them minus the stigma, and a judge that is chosen who will accept all parties: does some type of a priori approved opponent exist? A person who authentically challenges power and its axioms? Is there an application process to follow, some conditions to be met, at least on paper, which won’t cause oneself to deserve punishment or to have oneself compared to rats? Well no. This very complex reality and national history gives us the answer: it has not been planned for. In a Revolution, supposedly more sacred than the existence of the people caught in its vortex, one where the means disrupt the ends, simply put, a good citizen is “revolutionary” or they cease to be a citizen.
They corner and they crush the “vermin” on the pretext of preventing harm to human beings and the community. Denied as individuals the reasons or lack of reasons of the State that enforces a degraded standard of living, what mark of our uniqueness are we left, what tacit humanism, what borderline is there which can be used to avoid mistaking ourselves for the blind murderous deformities that illustrate the official bestiary. Harming oneself is the extreme attitude test, but also practically the only one that comes to a person already cornered and crushed in order to argue for their harmlessness and their human rights: actions like separating oneself from the sheep kept secure in a pen, the renunciation, the fasting or a tragic suicide… Zapata crossed those boundaries. Clearly, not even that was sufficient: official spokesmen cataloged it as perverse. Without a doubt, he made himself a martyr.
To continue the story starting from the same place. They had also wanted this February 23 to be for Pedro Arguelles’ birthday, one of the few prisoners who are left of the 75 condemned in spring of 2003, in spite of causing the government to promise last year to free all of them in November later that same year. So Arguelles had planned his visiting day, which occurs approximately every month and a half, for this date. Yolanda, his wife, had the bags prepared to bring to him, when she received his call: He decided to renounce this visit in order to pass his birthday in complete fasting as an homage to the memory of Orlando Zapata. He who has nothing, but still finds a way to find the strength and express himself civically, sacrificing the little that he still has.
Yolanda must wait another 45 days to see the man she loves and who makes her feel proud. “Stateless” usually encompasses peaceful dissent, here it’s synonymous with traitor and monster. Arguelles has seen his imprisonment prolonged including after the promise of the government, until arriving at that day which shared his birthday and the first anniversary of the death of Orlando Zapata, precisely for rejecting the only condition which until now they have given to him in order to leave the jail: Abandon his homeland.
We are having a wake for our cadaver and, at the bottom of the deep future, trembles a flame, an idea much more daunting than the open eyes of a dead man: the soul in torment from the nation “with all and for the good of all.”
Translated by Dodi 2.0
February 24 2011
Ciego de Avila, 4 November 2010
To: President of the Provincial UNEAC Committee, Ciego de Avila
Esteemed comrade:
The reason I am presenting this is to ask that the Provincial Committee, by my own request, remove me from the membership of UNEAC as quickly as possible.
This has not been a rash decision, nor part of a grievance or a particular event. It is the result of a long meditation on the role of UNEAC in our society, its function, its consistency with what I consider should be the role of an organization of artists in vanguard of creating and thinking, its commitment at any cost to the truth, and with the ancestral values of our identity, cultivated by an intelligentsia that made us proud with its attitude of fighting everything that did not have the people at the center of its concerns, that did not recognize that the people are the highest authority and the measure of legitimacy of any dream, plan and result.
In recent years I have waited to see UNEAC assume this civic, cultural and political responsibility. But I exhausted my willingness to wait, and I believe it is dishonest to continue to belong, for advantages of any kind, to an organization which which I now disagree in more than one essential way.
Please undertake the steps involved in this process and keep me informed of their progress.
For a Cuba that is authentically socialist!
With the highest consideration,
Félix Rodríguez Sánchez
Ciego de Avila, November 4, 2010
February 2 2011
Photos: Francis Sánchez
My watch was still running slow, probably because I needed to change the battery, so I went looking for a watchmakers when, about to turn a corner, I noticed that I was passing in front of a sort of bunkhouse, tenement block or similar poor dwelling. I remembered that there, years ago, lived Pedro Argüelles, one of the political prisoners convicted in summary trials in the dark spring of 2003. And the door was open. Some people bustled about in a family environment, filling or changing something in the narrow little living room where they could barely fit. His wife … was she still his wife? A quick glimpse inside was enough to see her running some home engineering operation just like she wore her age and her solitude. I went to greet her. A thin invisible line separated us.
It was the line of a fortuitous occasion and a door already open, but that separation, which at a simple glance seemed insignificant, surrounds like a moat those who dare dissent peacefully from a government which doesn’t permit individual liberties or fissures in power. Risking the step, to cross that dividing line, could only mean one thing: to fall, and I don’t know from what height — nobody knows until they touch bottom.
I sank myself in that grief that appears when feelings within the heart scrape against the fear of contagion, the instinct of self-preservation, and the passion or bravery that emanates from common human sense, with a difficult doubt to overcome. The doubt between finding myself before a temptation of demonic, self-destructive forces, or before a test of the angelic part of my soul where God still waits for payment on the debt that humanity has continued accumulating down the centuries of hate and injustice.
It all happened in a flash. A kiss and I ask her how she’s been. Such a curious sample of that liquid or gaseous state in which one can find any fellow man, resulting from the formula of colloquial greeting, ordinarily preferred and established in the street, but here it implicitly included her other half, or as it might be, him, someone sunk in a cell in the prison at Canaleta. This prison, which rises so close to the outskirts of this same city, shares its boundary with the cemetery inside the urban connection, like two complimentary variants of a city turned upside down.
He communicated with her sometimes by telephone. He was almost blind, he could only see out of one eye and very badly, to read he had to stick the paper to his face. And the day before he had been called, again, by Cardinal Jaime Ortega, with the proposal that the prelate had come whispering within earshot of the other prisoners sentenced throughout the country: march to exile. Argüelles — different from most of the others — had already rejected such an outcome, and this time — according to what she, his wife, was telling me — he refused even to come to the phone.
I’ve said that everything occurred in a flash. But I could also say that I followed my path as someone who has been stabbed and doesn’t know it, he cannot or does not want to know from where the blow came. Does anyone have the right to offer, gladly, exile to another? I felt wounded not only as the Catholic that I am–of little standing, I wouldn’t recommend myself for any papal indulgence, though Catholic to the end, prepared to respond before any request for this religious identity that marks me in my transit through life and the labyrinth of the world.
I felt that pain, that nausea of frustration, that abyss which can lock itself in the chest of any person, independent of his ideas and beliefs. The family, a country under construction, or at least in the limelight of preeminent personalities and institutions, is this where those who deny the dogma are torn from the body of the nation? I was the same supposed escape rejected by Socrates–offered, then, by his disciples with the best of intentions–and, before submitting himself to this social death he preferred to drink the hemlock.
Exile is not, and never has been, synonymous with freedom. It has never belonged to the tradition of change or travel freely chosen, in which human potential flowers positively, open up and at the same time penetrate the future, guaranteeing that beautiful concert of the pollenizing of cultures. Exile comes by force of the community’s reasoning, although it might point against all common sense, or through the blind reasoning of the strongest, punitive — despotically. In Cuban history there was always the torture rack that tyrants used to free themselves not only of their opponents but of their ideas or uncomfortable attitudes.
Because of this a founding act of the Republic of 1902 was to repatriate the bodies of exiled intellectuals. Thus were brought home, among others, the remains of the priest Félix Varela (1788-1853). About the “Cuban saint”, Martí said that “he came to die close to Cuba, as close to Cuba as he could,” meaning in Florida. Welcoming the martyr who had suffered deportation for aspiring to a freedom beyond that of the confessional of a singular faith, incorporating him into the nurturing soil as truly as he then could be, when he was already just “beloved dust”, did not mean, however, the end of the trauma that kept feeding itself through the generations to extraordinary levels. A trauma that today, in addition to the communities and in particular the intellectuals dispersed throughout the entire world, has converted Florida almost into a second island.
Among sad omens everywhere, the note published by the newspaper Granma on July 8, 2010 seemed hopeful. One word, most precious to every soul, and therefore widely used by political spokespeople, stood out from within this brief text: “liberty”. Perhaps it sounded different on hearing it, in the sense that the message could appear as fresh as the new life that we all want.
For the first time the Cuban Church was acting as a valid interlocutor before a State that just a little while ago proclaimed itself atheist, and undertook a promise that only earthly powers could achieve, announcing that within four months the “prisoners that remain of those who were detained in 2003 will be placed in liberty.” But in the following days we came to understand that the phrase that followed — “and they will be able to leave the country” — hid this obligation: that the prisoners would have to go directly from their cells to the airport.
Now in the form of a note in Granma, scars had been exposed, games of appearances and intrigues in which a hypothesis, apparently so controlled as to let a specific group of citizens go free, must be unwrapped. It’s worth doing a textual analysis. We are faced with a use, rarely seen in the monotonous official press, of the technique of the “chinese box”: a narrator passes a word to another so he can pass it on, and that one puts itself inside another narrative, and this one in another, thus successively, like those Russian folk nesting dolls, matryoshka.
We have Granma, being the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party, which won’t pronounce or emit such a serious decision, executable only at the highest level — including one we saw taken unwisely by the general-cum-president in a chat with the then-Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Miguel Ángel Moratinos — but it disregards the social content in the headline emphasizing the source of information, “Prensa Latina reported,” as if the agency founded by Cuba is reporting an event in a third country.
Then it turns out that the text, as evidenced by the header, belongs to the Archbishop of Havana, it is his “press release”. And, at last, the Catholic institution alleges that “the Cuban authorities advised”. Or it might be, says Granma, that the Prensa Latina agency says that the Archbishop of Havana says what the Cuban government said. A labyrinth, without a doubt. A huge game of echos, in a society where there has never been ample room for dialog and much less a choral concert, at the expense of citizens who despair in real life, hoping for hints of the future, a concept so impoverished of freedom, and therefore, truth.
The truth is the difficulty with which whatever twisted words might now come to disturb the compass of thought and experience, for example, of Martí, who would keep showing his own, suffered at the prow, between “the lives that now, in brutal exile, only hang by a thread?”[4]; because “in exile / all men and homes are shipwrecked / unsafe ships surrendered to the sea!“. From a letter to General Máximo Gómez, during the preparations for his final voyage to Cuba: “The respect for freedom and thought of others, even of the most miserable beings, is my fanaticism: if I die, or they kill me, it will be because of that.”[6]
Almost all the prisoners of the 2003 Black Spring have now left for distant shores. Among those who stayed behind bars, clinging to his irons, is Pedro Argüelles. Nothing would make one think, in the public life of his city, Ciego de Ávila, that here would come unfolding this drama that has at its center someone who can barely see the palms of his own hands. Or, almost nothing.
There is a notice stuck to the wall in the vestibule of the St Eugenio de La Palma Cathedral. It is a summary of the thought that the cardinal would offer the first of January of this year in the Havana Cathedral, celebrating the World Day of Peace. Whoever stuck their head in the local church could bring themselves up to date, standing in front of this piece of paper, near a bid that still stands, near a promise of “freedom” for the few who, like Argüelles, won’t accept a one-way ticket.
The cardinal, in January’s Mass that dealt with the message from Pope Benedict XVI with which he opened a new year — “Religious Freedom: Road to Peace” — when even the period the government had given to itself had expired, gave a review of the ideas of some liberties with names, and showed himself to be excited by the results of the mediation of the Church and in particular by his own role. The magazine “New Word“, by the Archdiocese of Havana, described his speech: it said “[he] has a ‘moral certitude’ that in the next few months other prisoners ‘sanctioned for some type of event connected with political postures or actions’ would be set free”. In addition, by the way, he invited his listeners to “free your hearts of old throwbacks and, feeling yourselves to truly be free, assume a vision in reconciliatory truth among all Cubans.”
What reconciliation is built on making the uniting nature of the Fatherland explode, exiling, launching into the sea precisely those who test the basics of love? That same cardinal has affirmed, illustratively, that “it never should have been necessary to renounce God to be able to enjoy one’s own rights.”[7] He brings about a turn to that closeness of meanings that so pleased the Apostle — Jose Marti — between heaven and Earth, feeling and reading “Patria” instead of “God” to distinguish what should be necessary and what should be indispensable.
It would seem that the satisfactory exit from conflict depended on a unilateral decision — Argüelles himself protested, a little while ago, when the government of his country offered him to the United States in a trade; he warned that he wasn’t available as a piece of merchandise. Everything indicated that a gift from the high levels of power, anticipated with that “press release” from the Archbishop, would — through a pious act — bring Cubans bravely closer to faith, in reconciliation or in a profound repatriation.
A message of such importance consisted of a very long distance phone call. But, at the end, it’s the will of an isolated individual, “shipwrecked” but not lost at sea, limited to what little he can perceive and feel between the twilights, who — paradoxically — the process comes to depend upon. It depends on how he reacts to the real or imaginary voices that invite him to step firmly with his next step.
Of course, if I could have spoken to him, I would not have commended him to martyrdom either, to resolve the Gordian knot of interests in a conflict that generally ends drowning the “most unhappy being”. I would pray that he might find at least a tranquil path by which he could make it through the storm with his wife at his side. But perhaps with him the solution isn’t barred, detained, nor faith; rather that in him, miraculously, although it might be for a second, they are sustained in the vacuum.
Translated by: JT and anonymous
February 5 2011
With regards to my previous post (“Lead us not into temptation”), today I returned to see Yolanda, Pedro Argüelles’s wife, a Lady in White, where I learned that Pedro Argüelles has been on a hunger strike for five days.
Her eyes teared up, fearing the worst, because she knows that he is very ill and is someone firm in his principles. I remember when we met at Mass and sometimes talked sitting on a park bench opposite the church. I cry out to all people of goodwill. It is not just to keep punishing him because he refuses to go into exile. Please, for the sake of mercy, for the sake of peace and hope, for the government to keep its promise, and for his own rights: Freedom for Pedro Argüelles!
6 February 2011
Saavedra Lazaro Gonzalez is a Cuban artist. His “interventions” on the email network with works from his “I-MEIL Gallery” often bring to the debate a quick dose of honesty, coherence and force, for which the national intellectual camp always seems unprepared. This is his “Journalism,” received in my in-box on January 28, as an offering for José Martí’s 158th birthday.
1 – Boss, there’s some guy outside called José Martí who says he wants to start a newspaper and give it the name “Fatherland.” What should I tell him?
2 – HA HA HA HA. Fuck! I’m pissing myself! A newspaper?! Tell him that if some day he gets an ISBN to come and see me… HA HA HA. A newspaper?
3 – Boss, Martí says you can stick the ISBN up your ass, that he’s going to start a blog called “Fatherland.” What should I tell him?
31 January 2011
Man In The Clouds 