Cuba blog girl is back in action!!!! For your reading pleasure.

[Jammyisme]

Abused
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y


We watch out for anyone approaching our children lecherously, but few take into account the groping that is focused on minds and not on bodies.  The ideological slant of Cuban education has reached an alarming point, even for those of us who were taught under the same methods.  Simply looking at a textbook or reviewing the system for assessing students, one can see doctrine gaining ground at the expense of knowledge.  In my son’s classroom, six photos of “Olive Green Leader” adorn the walls, while the report cards include grades for participation in political and patriotic activities.

It calls to mind my time as a Little Pioneer, reading a communique or shouting slogans, and I can’t get past feeling myself abused.  But the feeling is much stronger when I see that Teo—at thirteen—has learned which opinions should not be expressed at school to avoid problems.  To discover my own mask, extended now to the face of my son, is more painful than the abuse that was targeted at me.


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[Jammyisme]

When the eighth leak appeared in the dining room ceiling, you accepted the mission to go to Venezuela as a doctor.  You knew that with each month’s salary you’d never have been able to tear out the paneling and replace the worn out columns.  Also, the resale of some appliances you bought there would help pay for the cost of cement and rebar.  In Havana, your bank account would grow with the fifty convertible pesos you’d receive each month for your stay in Caracas.  Your wife ordered a laptop and your youngest son asked for more Play Station.

The first months you slept badly with the sounds of gunfire coming into the small room shared with five other colleagues.  To chase away the nostalgia, you thought about your relatives’ faces when they’d learn about all the nice clothes you had gotten at a discount.  Meanwhile, the small bank account grew in Cuba, under the condition that you could only enjoy it at the end of your mission.

Someone in the group confessed one night that he was going to cross the border and take off for Miami. You listened to him with the trembling of one who can fix the leak, put on a new roof, and supply the requested laptop, to use your savings to start a new life.  Suddenly you remembered the nurse who escaped and has never been able to get her family off the Island.  Deserters are punished with separation, marked by the impossibility of being reunited with their families.

So you spent your two years curing people and saving lives, suffering the separation, the fear and the shared housing.  With relief, you got news that your wife had started to buy the bags of cement to repair the roof.  When it was almost time for you to return, someone announced that an agreement to stay another six months could be made by signing a paper.  “No problem,” you thought, “with the extra money I’ll earn in that time, maybe I’ll have enough to repair the walls of the house.”

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[Jammyisme]

I had not yet been born in April 1961, when the socialist character of the Cuban process was declared.  “This is the socialist revolution of the humble, by the humble and for the humble…” Fidel Castro announced near the foreboding gates of the Colon Cemetery.  Many who listened to him, jubilant and optimistic, assumed that the first revolutionary objective would be to stop having humble people.  With this illusion, they went out to champion a future without poverty.

Observing the present audience for what was announced nearly fifty years ago, I wonder when prosperity will stop being seen as counterrevolutionary.  Will wanting to live in a house where the wind doesn’t tear the roof off stop being, some day, a petty bourgeois weakness?  All the material shortages that I observe beg the question of the common sense of this colossal upheaval in the history of the country, only to stop having the rich, at the expense of having so many poor.

If, at the very least, we were more free.  If all these materials needs were not also expressed in a long chain that makes every citizen a servant of the State.  If the condition of the humble was a choice, voluntarily assumed and practiced, in particular, by those who govern us.  But no.  The renewed exaltation of humility launched by Raúl Castro this January first confirms for us what we learned in decades of economic crisis: poverty is the road that leads to obedience.

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[Jammyisme]

The portal Desde Cuba, where this blog and others are housed, has come out with its statistics.  Even though I don’t put too much stock in the numbers, the fact is that the data are too good to hide.  I still believe that most of the people I meet in the street who tell me they read this site didn’t get here through an internet connection, but rather though copies on CDs, flash memories, and emails sent by family and friends abroad.

Those who have blocked the site from inside Cuba can take much of the responsibility for the increase in the number of hits.  With their clumsy actions, they don’t seem to notice that nothing is as attractive as that which is forbidden.

Enjoy the numbers, but don’t get caught up in the statistics… the best thing that has happened to us is not reflected in this curve that goes up and up.



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[Jammyisme]

Absence of color
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y


In this impressionistic picture I make of my reality, often I don’t give the precise color for each event.  The wide palette that makes the doubts, the disillusion and a certain haggard optimism, doesn’t have a shade that manages to represent the vacuum.  How do I draw the “nothing” that is lived for months on this Island, the parenthesis of events in which we are stuck.  The environment also has lost many shades, like the incandescent yellow of the rumors that haven’t been seen, since no one speculates on the next measures that Raúl Castro will approve.

The brown tone of the awaited and collapsing agrarian reform has not turned into the intense green of fruits and vegetables at more affordable prices.  Why mention the eradication of the “white card” that, not becoming a reality, maintains the dark dyes of the absurd Cuban migration.  Instead of winning nuances, on the official easel there is a canvas with the monochromatic spectacle of a single permitted speech.  With these elements, one could well paint a picture of gray on gray and would still be being triumphalistic.

Some think the visits of several foreign presidents add a golden color to the canvas, but these strokes fall on the painting of the chancellery and the government palace, not on the canvas of real life.  They are brushstrokes made outwards, by the skillful hand of the forger who with some retouches here and others there wants to authenticate the supposed changes.  Meanwhile, I still don’t find the color that expresses inertia, that captures the faded reality of a country stuck in time.

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Ene
 
09
 
2009
  More than the flu
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y


Hacker attacks are like those of the flu that hit us hard a couple times a year.  I thought that two weeks ago, when they attacked Generation Y and had it out of circulation for more than 24 hours.  It seems, however, that the colds are frequent and cause more than a simple fever.

Penúltimos Días, the blog of Ernesto Hernandez Busto is now under the influence of one of these infections. The best vaccine is solidarity, so we’re going to stay on top of it and keep posting on the web, to get the bacilli of censorship under control.

What is a DDoS?

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[Jammyisme]

Ene
 
16
 
2009
  Lady, I love you
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y


I am waiting on a bench in Parque Central for some friends who are already half an hour late.  It’s been a hard day and I have little desire to speak with anyone.  A boy, he can’t be more than 20, sits down next to me.  He speaks English badly but uses it to ask me where I’m from and if I understand Spanish.  My first impulse is to tell him to beat it, I’m not looking for jineteros hunting for tourists, but I let him advance his failed strategy of seduction.

I don’t know if it’s my pale skin that I inherited from two Spanish grandparents, but my passport is just as blue and Cuban as the one he has.  If not for his false impression that I’m a foreigner, he’d never come close to me.  I not a good match—obviously he can see that—but he calculates that even if I look like a poor stranger, at least I could get him a visa to emigrate.  Encouraged by my silence, he says in English, “Lady I love you,” and after such a declaration of love I can’t contain my laughter.  I  tell him in my worst Central Havana slang, “Don’t waste your bullets on me, I’m cubiche*.”  He jumps up like he’s been stung by red ants and starts insulting me.  I can hear him shouting, “This skinny thing looks like a foreigner but she’s from here and worth less than the national money.”  My day has suddenly changed and I begin to laugh, alone on the bench, a few meters from the marble Martí that adorns the park.

The rematch comes quickly for the frustrated Casanova.  A Nordic woman in shorts walks by and he repeats to her the same refrain he let loose on me.  She smiles and seems dazzled by his youth and his braids ending in colored beads.  I watch them leave together, while the lively youth declares his love, in a language in which he barely knows a dozen words.

Translator’s notes
The original title of this post is in English.
Jinetero/jinetera: prostitute or hustler.
Cubiche: Derogatory slang for a Cuban.

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Ene
 
15
 
2009
  Psychotherapy
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y
For almost a day the Comment Zone in the Spanish (i.e. the original) version of Generation Y has not been working.  This public square has accumulated such a huge number of opinions from its readers—more than three hundred thousand—that the database finally collapsed.  We should be happy for all the debate that occurs in these pages and not worry about what was only a temporary break.

Thanks for being patient and remember that in my condition of “blind blogger” I can’t solve the technical difficulties as quickly as I would like.  Also, I repeat, that my opinions are published only in this blog and in sites that have gained the credibility of their readers.  I am not responsible for chain emails, alleged texts that circulate on the web, or other types of messages that don’t appear under the banner of the red drawer.  The apocryphal under my name are only this:  falsehoods.

As the cracks of the shaky technology heal themselves, other bloggers offered their space in solidarity to continue the debate.  One commentator in particular, named Tseo, offered his blog to prolong the discussion at the URL http://generaciony.posterous.com

This virtual raft has taken on a little water, but nothing that points to a shipwreck.

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Ene
 
13
 
2009
  Celebration and mincemeat
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y


To mark the half century since the first of January 1959, we Cubans could buy, through the ration system, half a pound of ground beef.  The sense of humor that frequently saves us from neurosis did not spare the unexpected delicacy which was baptized as “the picadillo sent by Chavez,” an allusion to the obvious economic shoring-up that comes from Venezuela.

A political process of the magnitude of a socialist revolution should aspire, for its fiftieth anniversary, to more ambitious results and more pompous parties, but there is not much to give.  Although it seems a frivolity, for many Cubans the sale of that beef was the most significant event that happened lately.  Its flavor will be the memory we will keep of a gray December and a January equally haggard, where there were not even promises of possible improvements and reforms.

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[Jammyisme]

Come and live it
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y


Inspired by one of the many tourist advertisements, an idea occurred to me to attract visitors to the Island.  It is not an ecological tour to appreciate nature or an historic tour of the country’s plazas and monuments.  Stay “a lo cubano,” as a Cuban, could be the slogan of this tourist campaign, condemned in advance to lack interest for its possible target audience.  Come and live it, it would say on the cover of a ration book, which would be given to each of those who embark on this adventure.

Accommodations would not look like the luxurious rooms displayed by the hotels in Varadero or Cayo Coco, since our tour operators would suggest dingy rooms in Central Havana, tenements in Buena Vista and a crowded shelter for hurricane victims.  The tourists who buy this package wouldn’t use convertible currency, but for their expenses for a two week stay would have half the average monthly wage, three hundred Cuban pesos.  Thus, they could not ride in foreign currency taxis, or drive a rental car on the country’s roads.  The use of public transport would be obligatory for those interested in this new method of travel.

Restaurants would be forbidden to those who opt for this excursion and they would receive eighty grams of bread each day.  Maybe they’d even have the good fortune to enjoy half a pound of fish before they leave on their return flight.  To travel to other provinces they wouldn’t have the option of Viazul, but instead of spending three days in line for a ticket, they could be given the advantage of being able to buy a seat after only one day of waiting.  They would be prohibited from sailing on a yacht or renting a surfboard, so they wouldn’t be ending their stay ninety miles away rather than on our Caribbean “paradise.”

At the end of their stay, these risk-taking excursionists would get a diploma of “Connoisseurs of the Cuban Reality,” but they will have to come several more times to be declared “adapted” to our everyday absurdity.  They will leave thinner, sadder, and with an obsession with food, which they will satisfy in the supermarkets of their countries, and above all with a tremendous allergy to tourism ads.  The golden advertisements that show a Cuba of mulattas, rum, music and dancing will not be able to hide the panorama of collapsing buildings, frustration and inertia that they have already known and lived.

Translator’s note
300 Cuban pesos is about $12 U.S.

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Ene
 
17
 
2009
  A possible world, is better
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y


Faced with the promises of a future that never takes shape, I lean toward the prospects that begin today, toward the dreams that materialize on this day.  I already had my eyes focused on tomorrow, breathed in mouthfuls of possibilities and believed the illusion of what would come.  At this point, I’m betting only on the viable.

I got out of bed reversing one of those chimerical slogans–the kind we hear so much on TV–in order to make it more real.  A possible world is better, I said to myself, and began to feel that we are going to achieve it.  That the planet, my island and my city will find realizable solutions, not another barrage of utopias.

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[Jammyisme]

   Wow tuff stuff. Anyone reading this still?

[flopnfly]

I am   

[mojitomiss_cuba]

Me too 

[Beachlover too]

Me too.  The tourism post...really got to me.

thanks for keeping this up and running Jammy

[Jammyisme]

Its powerful stuff.  I agree.

[bmnichol]

I pop in for a read every now and then.

[Jammyisme]

Ene
 
20
 
2009
  We the People
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y


I’m post-modern and disbelieving: speeches put me to sleep and a leader standing at a podium is, for me, the height of tedium.  I associate microphones with calls to intransigence, and the praised oratory of some has always seemed to me like nothing but screams to deafen the “enemy.”  At public events I usually manage to slip away and I prefer the buzzing of a fly over listening to the promises of a politician.  I have had to hear so many harangues—many of them seemingly endless—that I’m not the best person to endure a new lecture.

For me, the voice that emerges from the podium brings more intolerance than concord, a greater helping of exasperation than of calls to harmony.  From the podiums I have seen predictions of invasions that never came, economic plans that were never met, and even expressions as discriminatory as, “Let the scum that leaves, leave!”  Which is why I was so confused with the serene statement  delivered today by Barack Obama, with his manner of carefully constructed arguments and invocations to harmony.

It seemed to me when reading it—I don’t have an illegal satellite dish to watch it on TV—that he condemned all the rhetoric to be left in the twentieth century.  We have started to say goodbye to that convulsed eloquence which no longer moves us.  I only hope that it will be, “We, the People” who will write the speeches from now on.

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[Jammyisme]

 


In mid-2007, Julito assured me that before August pork would be sold at ten pesos a pound, the daily salary of the average worker.  Not seeing his prediction come true, he was shouting last January about the exact date of the meat discount.  With his permanent smile, he assured me that we could acquire the precious meat—at a fairer price—by the summer months.  Then came the hurricanes and my neighbor’s prediction turned into a bitter prophecy or, even worse, a harmful naiveté.  I didn’t run into him for several weeks and couldn’t throw back in his face his excessive triumphalism.

Yesterday, Julito came up to my floor to talk about another topic.  His youngest daughter has just taken the path already charted by the previous one, after deserting in the midst of an artistic trip abroad.  The two have been reunited in one of the large U.S. cities and her father is not so much sad about the separation as happy about the future of his daughters.   Sitting in my living room he declared that he and his wife plan to reunite with the exiled part of the family.  “There we will be more useful,” he tells me in the tone of someone who’s already made a decision.

I had the urge to ask him if he wouldn’t wait for the meat discount, and afterwards fly to the family reunion.  But I know that as parents we don’t usually care for jokes about our children, so I preferred to ignore his past optimism.  I forgave him the fatigue his prediction caused me and even the appraisal of “pessimist” with which he’d greeted my suspicion.  Julito is one of those who even on the gangway of the airplane will continue to swallow his criticisms.  Later, in Boston, maybe he’ll read this blog and he’ll probably send me an email to confess that he never believed in anything, that he was just as skeptical as I am.

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