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

[Jammyisme]

Generation Y is a Blog inspired by people like me, with names that begin with or contain a "Y." Born in Cuba in the 1970s and 1980s, marked by schools in the countryside, Russian cartoons, illegal emigration and frustration. So I invite especially Yanisleidi, Yoandri, Yusimí, Yuniesky and others who drag their "Y's" to read my Blog and to write to me.



             
The cat’s hairy tail
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y , Octubre,17,2008


Although a crack down has been announced against the diversion of resources, price speculation and stealing food, lately the official market has also collapsed.  In a brief tour of state-run cafeterias in my neighborhood, I could see a reduction in what is available.  A convertible peso restaurant* specializing in fish doesn’t sell shrimp pizzas or rice with seafood.  Why?  Because now on this Island no supplies can escape to informal dealing, to the arms in the shadow of illegality which supported them, until it seemed one hundred percent State.

To maintain sales in the cafeterias and restaurants, obviously supplies from the black market were needed. Much of what was sold, under the guise of “official products,” in fact had been purchased by the employees themselves from informal sellers.* With the resources received from the food distribution companies, the public facilities could not have maintained a constant supply.  The waiters and managers of these places worked there primarily for the extra money they made, beyond their wages, by selling these illegal products. No longer able to obtain these dividends, they have lost interest in serving a full menu and the customers notice.

With its obsession for hunting the mouse, the cat has caught its own tail in the trap.  That hairy prolongation of lawlessness and corruption that, when it is cut off, bleeds dry in a short time.

Translator’s notes:

For an earlier Blog entry that gives more background on how employees of State enterprises increase their income, see The Corruption of Survival.

Convertible peso restaurant:  A restaurant that sets prices in CUCs, the money used by tourists and for many products sold to Cubans.  See the footnote to this entry for more information.

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[Jammyisme]

Me:  They have so little food its sad .    


Bouillon cubes
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y , Octubre,19,2008


I argued with a lady in line for malanga root.  She wanted to let her two friends cut in and I figured that if they did I wouldn’t get the ten pounds of food, rationed since the hurricanes.  In the end I let the two old ladies cut the line and didn’t even insult them when the clerk announced, “It’s closed, there’s no more!”  It depresses me to get into a fight over food which is probably why I’m so skinny.  In the pre-university where I studied, I never had the claws to grab for a better share and it always went to the strongest.  When I see myself reduced to fighting for food I feel badly and prefer to come home with an empty shopping bag.  Of course my family offers no thanks for my excessive pacifism.

To console them, I bought a few boxes of bouillon cubes, which has come to be the most common food for the vast majority of the people in this city.  When some confused tourist asks me what a typical Cuban dish is, I answer that I don’t remember, but I know the most common everyday recipes.  And I list them:  “Rice with a beef bouillon cube,” “rice with hot dog,” “rice with a bacon bouillon cube,” or the delicacy of “rice with a chicken and tomato bouillon cube.”  This last one has a color between pink and orange that is most amusing.

If we’re constantly fed pre-digested news on the television, canned speeches past their expiration date, little cubes of patience and waiting to get by day-to-day, why shouldn’t our plates reflect these same bitter flavors.

So I resign myself and buy the happy placebo that will make me believe my rice contains a tasty rib or a piece of chicken.  After the most “complicated” preparation, I put the steaming dish on the table.  My son, smelling the odor, asks me reproachfully, “Why didn’t you fight harder in the line for malanga?”

[Jammyisme]

The troubles of Lía
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y , Octubre,21,2008


You can be 23 years old and see with the clarity of someone who has lived a great deal.  It’s possible to have a raggedy old laptop fossilized by the heat and to write a blog without breaking any keys in the effort.  She manages to say the hardest things—things the majority of people only mumble at home—publicly, brazenly, and even sensually.  The one managing this unusual feat is Lía Villares, living in Luyanó, playing the guitar and wanting to change things.

One day she joined the name of her city to the chronic loss of red blood cells and began her blog, Habanemia.  In her case, the absence of hemoglobin was caused by the scarity of dreams for a generation that has been able to fantasize very little.  Lía was one of those who started school at the time when the Special Period was coming into our lives.  Children who don’t remember the ration book for manufactured products, with the unfavorable letter “E”, which my mother  guarded as if it were the most valuable thing in the house.  Those for whom it wasn’t common to drink milk with breakfast, who didn’t receive gifts on birthdays, and who listened, bewildered, to stories of former delicacies, related by the very old.

Lía’s large eyes speak of calm, and questions, thousands of questions at once.  In her blog she lets her hair down and is transformed.  She shouts, sings, shows the pan with oil, the only food obtainable in these days of scarcity.  Her angustiada fe de vida* [anguished faith of life] is shared with friends who gather at night in G Street, with books that distract from the ceiling falling in: “Me in my little house in Luyanó, falling to pieces like all of Havana, spending hours without the Internet and trying to sleep and to finish The Idiot.”

“It’s twenty times better to be a foreigner on this terrible Island than to be a Cuban who does things by the book” she tells us in one of her entries.  However, since Lía is not a “Cuban who does things by the book,” Habanemia has let her shake off this widespread maxim which she describes as, “inaction and silence. The collective inertia of a people lost in thought. ”

* From the poem “El ausente” [The Absent] by Eugenio Florit. Here is a music version by Ray Fernandez.

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[Jammyisme]

The impunity of the insane
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y , Octubre,25,2008


A large madman kicks the cars in the middle of Ayestarán Street.  His clothes are ragged and on his arms you can see the “answering” scars received from some vehicles.  Another lunatic walks around Central Havana offending the president and his brother, while a nutcase spits her dissatisfaction against three impassive police officers.

They make you want to enjoy the same impunity as the mad.  You want to stand on the corner and shout, “The emperor has no clothes,” like a little boy would.  But adulthood and sanity carry the burden of punishment.

Then we will behave like one demented or a child.

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Labels and lists
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y , Octubre,23,2008


Putting things in drawers and sorting and labeling them is not a task only for officials and bureaucrats.  There are some who take a special pleasure in hanging tags on citizens.  The art of listing us by categories has been a common practice in recent decades in Cuba.  One day you’re in the directory of the “obnoxious” or on the tame list of “collaborators.”  Denunciations can move us from the file drawer marked “followers” over to the difficult one marked “enemies.”  There are those on the list with the initials “CR”, which represents the adjective most commonly applied to those who think differently: Counterrevolutionary.

It trips up the archivists when they don’t know how to inventory someone.  It bothers them when the old categories don’t work for newly emerging phenomena.  These “opinion labelers” could use some new categories because almost nobody blinks any more when they’re labeled with “employee of the Empire.”   The bookshelf schematic where they have been arranging Cubans is full of termites but, sadly, we ourselves use the same epithets “they” invented.

I have refused to be on any list but even so I am on many!  I would prefer, however, the single file of those who want to end this ridiculous categorizing of citizens.  I’m confident that one day it will be enough for the people of this earth to know on which list we are all counted together.

That’s me.  And you, what list are you on?

 2 opiniones »

[Jammyisme]

Her views on the vote in the United Nations lol she thinks its a bunch of 

The green button
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y , Octubre,30,2008


Hands emerging from well-cut suits at the UN pressed the red, green or yellow button today to rule on the blockade/embargo *.  Over the last few weeks, television has thrown at us the entire collection of statistics, testimonies and analysis on the ravages of the trade restrictions affecting Cuba.  The issue has been so manipulated by politicians that, from down here, many have chosen to “press the off button… to make it shut up.”

Anticipating the outcome of the vote, I would like to refer to another siege in effect every day.  This one prevents me from entering or leaving my country freely, from associating with a political group or creating a small family business.  An internal blockade, constructed on a base of limitations, control and censorship, has cost Cubans countless material and spiritual losses.  I decide to go out for the newspaper Granma—which requires a huge effort—and try to find the outcome of today’s debate in the United Nations.  I go out into the street and what is most glaring are the continuing restrictions imposed on us by our leaders; the wall that no one in the UN will vote against today.

What if they let us press the button!  What if we could vote to rid ourselves of the fence that blockades us within the Island!  I would leave my finger on the green button for many days.

* I refuse to call it either of the coined terms; they already know how bad-mannered we linguists are about these things.  In my daily conversations I simply say, “the pretext,” the clumsy “justification” that makes those who block us in here feel so good.

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[Jammyisme]

             
Identified and exhibitionists
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y , Noviembre,3,2008


Contrary to secrecy and false identity, some of us alternative bloggers have put our identify cards next to the texts we write.  In the midst of so much self imposed disguise, showing my ID reminds me of the exhibitionist who opens his coat even though everyone knows what’s inside.

My fingerprint, my two last names and even the names of my parents appear on the little blue card that proves my existence.  To save the police wearing themselves out saying to me, “Identify yourself, citizen,” I show in advance the particulars of my life.  Claudia has also done this on her eclectic blog Octavo Cerco, and so has Lia, in her harangues on Habanemia, as well as some others who reveal their identities to scare away the fear.

Who knows if we manage to infect the trolls who, shielded by anonymity, try to crash our sites with their insults.  It’s unlikely, however, that the fever of self identification reaches those whose trade does not show its face.  By opening my coat I want to show these “anonymous guys” that I am more than 75090424120, a document laminated in plastic and an ink-stained thumb copied on paper.

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Terminations
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y , Noviembre,1,2008


“Twenty-three years and four abortions,” she’s telling everyone who wants to hear.  On her slim figure, maternity would wreck havoc, she tells me, while adjusting her short skirt around her hips.  For many years the termination of a pregnancy was the most common method of birth control for thousands of Cuban women.  In the eighties, condoms were an illusion and by the time they were available at all the pharmacies, men refused to use them.

I met this slender young woman from Villa Clara on a Yutong* bus bound for that province.  In the first hour of conversation she told me all the details of her truncated pregnancies.  “It doesn’t hurt much,” she told me, while winking at the driver who was looking at her legs in the rearview mirror.  In an almost forty minute tirade she wanted to explain her reasons, although I already knew them from others.  That she lives with her parents and shares a room with her sister; that of the men she’s been intimate with, some are married or don’t want to have children; that she wants to leave the country and it’s harder with a baby…  She ended by making it clear, “I have a friend in the gynecological hospital and she always fixes it for me.”

I was rattled by her illusion of leaving all her problems—housing, love or immigration—in the operating room, and pointed out that they are no longer doing abortions in hospitals.  The press hasn’t published it, just as no one has talked about the high number of dilation and curettages practiced until very recently, but for the last few months an internal directive has limited the number of terminations of pregnancy.  The reason is that the birth rate is falling and they want to try to increase it, even if it means forcing women to give birth.  She bit her lip in disbelief and declared with some cheek, “Don’t worry yourself, I took a nice gift to the doctor and left with a brand-new womb.”

The bus hit a rut and I noticed that the driver was still entranced with her thighs.  I was afraid we were going to crash and we‘d end up like another short trip, truncated between her legs.

Translator’s note:

[Jammyisme]

*Her thoughts on the American Election*

The street is not the same, nor are the neighbors who usually gossip in the lines at the markets; today they speak of universal themes.  They raise their eyebrows and point towards the north, while they make predictions about who will be elected at the polls in the U.S.  I don’t remember having lived through such a commotion during the Cuban presidential elections last February.

The cobbler in my building took a stand for one candidate and the old woman who sells flowers has been wearing a shirt with the Obama logo.  Our boring trajectory of two presidents in fifty years has exacerbated the curiosity over foreign elections.  We also know that the decision of U.S. voters will reverberate here and not so metaphorically as the flutter of a butterfly in the Amazon.  The remittances that allow thousands of Cuban families to get to the end of the month come primarily from the other shore, where a portion of this Island lives, and where the insults—“worms,” traitors” and “mafiosos”—have not managed to sever our emotional and family ties.  The political discourse of our own leaders would lose effectiveness without the United States in the role of the enemy.   Never, as today, has the destiny of Cuba been so clearly separated, and yet so dependent, on what happens ninety miles away.

So we are all waiting to see who will win this Tuesday, November 4th.  Those who have children who can come to visit them only every three years are confident that the Democratic candidate will be more flexible in allowing visits to the Island.  Others are betting that the heavy hand of the Republicans will manage to force the openings we have expected for decades.  In the face of the “uncertain prognosis” we show inside our country, there are those who assert that today’s results will either launch or derail, definitively, the cart of reforms in Cuba.

I would prefer that we drive ourselves, but very few want to exchange the work of the forecaster for the hard task of making things happen.  So when I write this post, the capricious vehicle of change seems to be stuck in a rut at the side of the road.  I have my doubts about whether what happens this Tuesday will get it moving.

[Jammyisme]

Short-cycle crops
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y , Noviembre,6,2008


The illusory solutions that were once called, the “Ten Million Ton Harvest,” the “Havana Cordon,” or  the “Food Plan,” have been transformed today into other utopias such as the Energy Revolution, Managerial Development, Oil in the Gulf Waters, or Exporting Human Capital.  They all encompass the same infantile delusion of wanting to cure the crumbling health of the Cuban economy with a single medicine.

I remember a lot of these failed chimeras, but it was the elimination of famine through the cultivation of microjet bananas that I experienced with special intensity.  I was in pre-university at a camp called the People’s Republic of Romania, even though by 1991 Ceausescu and Elena had already been executed.   I was working in the surrounding banana fields, which also served us as a love motel, as well as a cleaner alternative to the toilets in the dorm.  In the furrows, thousands of small hoses—these were the microjets—sprayed water all the time.  The plants yielded a few enormous and tasteless fruits which split their skins because of the disproportionate growth of the interior.  On our plates, these watery delicacies could not satisfy our hunger, any more than they could lift the country out of its crisis.

After the hurricanes, a new mirage has appeared in the style of the wet bananas of my adolescence.  They call it by the euphemism of “short-cycle crops” and propose to prioritize the planting of chives, garlic and Swiss chard over other crops that need more time and care.  With this agricultural strategy they intend to quickly fill the barren food stalls in the markets and calm the irritated Cuban people.  All the mouths that would prefer to bite down upon a yucca rather than an oregano leaf will have to make do with these fruits of immediacy.

I fear that this temporary measure will become permanent and the capricious pineapple, which needs months between planting and eating, will be replaced with three cycles of Chinese cabbage.  Forgive my lack of confidence but, given the ample record of agricultural and economic disasters, I cannot trust that this time they’ll hit the nail on the head.

Translator’s notes:

Ten Million Ton Harvest: In 1970 Cuban focused the resources of the entire country on harvesting a record 10 million tons of sugar cane, a goal which was not met. 

Havana Cordon: A plan begun in the late 1960s to plant coffee trees in a cordon around Havana and to grow coffee as an export crop.  Coffee did not grow well in the Havana environment.

Food Plan: A plan to achieve self-sufficiency in food production launched during the “Special Period” in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its support for Cuba.   The plan was not achieved.

Googling these terms will yield much more detailed information

[Milli]

  I look forward to each new installment- thanks for posting these Jammyisme.

[Jammyisme]

I appreciate youre reading these. Its my pleasure 

[Jammyisme]

Her thoughts on Hurricane Paloma

Vulture
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y , Noviembre,8,2008


In the book of names that reveal little or nothing about the soul of things, is written the hurricane Paloma [dove].   Its dreaded flight—Category 4—has more of the carrion-eater in pursuit of prey than of white wings flapping.  Cyclones are given tender epithets that are later added to the vocabulary of destruction.  They go and we are left with names like Ivan, Charlie, Denis or Gustav with which we associate things that seem equally destructive.  This is why our politicians and their economic plans have been so-called tropical storms or Category 5 hurricanes that took as many houses.

But today the sarcasm of the name is more cruel.  Paloma will flutter down over a wounded Island, sinking its beak into places that still show the wounds left by hurricanes in August and September.  It has the bare neck of the vultures, as common as they are absurd, and the blackness of its feathers does not bode well.

As for nature, it is better not to try to understand her.  She has both chaos and logic.  At the moment she has touched us with her confusion and madness.  Paloma will pass, leaving the Island in the same place, the destruction a little deeper and the dreams much farther off.

[Beachlover too]

That last sentence in the latest installment, says it all...and it breaks my heart.

[Jammyisme]

Hospitals. You bring everything?
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y , Noviembre,11,2008


A bucket in one hand, a pillow under my arm, and a fan balanced on my hip.  I enter the door of the oncology hospital and the backpack over my shoulder blocks the custodian from seeing my face.  It’s of little importance because the man is used to the fact that the patients’ families must bring everything, so my complicated structure of fans, bucket and pillowcase doesn’t surprise him.  He doesn’t know yet but, in a bag hanging off me somewhere, I’ve brought him bread and an omelet so he’ll let me stay after visiting hours.

I come into the room and Mónica is holding the hand of her mother, whose face is increasingly haggard.  She has cancer of the esophagus and there is little that can be done, although the woman still doesn’t know it.  I’ve never understood doctors’ refusals to inform one, directly, how little time is left before the end; but I respect the decision of the family, although I don’t join in the lie that she will soon be well.

The room has a thin light and in the air smells of pain.  I begin to unpack what I’ve brought.  I take out the little sack of detergent and the aromatic with which I’ll clean the bath; its aroma floods everything.  With the bucket we can bathe the lady, using the cup to pour, because the water faucet doesn’t work.  For the great scrubbing I brought a pair of yellow gloves, afraid of the germs that spread in a hospital.  Mónica tells me to continue unpacking and I extract the package of food and a puree especially for the sick.  The pillow has been a wonder and the set of clean sheets manages to cover the mattress, stained with successive effluvia.

The most welcome is the fan, which I connect to two peeled wires hanging from the wall.  I continue to unpack and come to the little bag of medical supplies.  I have obtained some needles appropriate for the IV, because the one in her arm is very thick and causes pain.   I also bought some gauze and cotton on the black market.  The most difficult thing—which cost me days and incredible swaps—is the suture thread for the surgery they are going to do tomorrow.  I also brought a box of disposable syringes since she yells to high heaven when she sees the nurse with a glass one.

To distract her, I’ve come loaded with a radio, and a nearby patient has brought a television.  My friend and her mom can watch the soap opera, while I look for the doctor and give him a gift sent by the sick woman’s husband.  When bedtime comes a cockroach crosses the wall near the bed and I remember that I also brought some insect spray.  In the backpack I still have some medicines and a little gift for the girl in the lab.  I have money in my pocket, because ambulances are for the most critical cases and when they send her home, evicted, we will need to take a Panataxi.

In front of our bed there’s an old woman who eats the watery soup she’s been given by the hospital staff.  Around her bed there’s no bag brought by her family and she doesn’t have a pillow for her head.  I position the fan so that she will also get the cool air and talk about the arrival of another hurricane.  Without her realizing it I touch the wood of the door frame, whether to expel the fear of disease or in horror at the conditions in the hospital, I don’t really know.  A woman passes by shouting that she has bread and ham for sale for the visitors and I lock myself in the bathroom which smells like jasmine after my cleaning

[Jammyisme]

To save the ants
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y , Noviembre,13,2008


My mother would take the bundle of clothes to the cement laundry room, where with a brush and soap she would bleach the shirts and clean the trousers.  My sister and I would be alarmed to see the danger faced by the naïve ants, crossing under the still dry sink.  We’d then start a race to save part of the imprudent anthill, unaware of the extermination that my mother would cause with her water and suds.  Those  girls are a little crazy, the neighbors would say, seeing us collect the minuscule insects that they didn’t even notice against the grey cement.

Given the time and the thousands of ants I couldn’t save from the debacle, I understood that the insignificant thing is always in danger of being swept away.  The revolutions and the wars sweep away the small, everything that doesn’t appear in the statistics or in the great history books.  The tiny things that give body and life to a society die when the faucet of violent changes and warlike conflicts is turned on.

The taste of a fruit lost to memory, an afternoon talking in the neighborhood with the mask removed, a calf trotting in the countryside without fear of being illegally sacrificed, a cold lemonade that doesn’t cost you an hour standing in line.  All of this is also part of the anthill, even these “cleaners” who want to clean up and shake up a country create what are the ills of tiny bugs.

I’m still that girl, frightened of those who want to change everything, distrustful of those who propose to sweep away traditional structures.  I trust the most the smallness of the ants, their constant walking and their slow possession of spaces.  They, who are still swept away by the streams of water, one day will turn off the faucets themselves.

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[Gambitt]

Hospitals. You bring everything?
Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y , Noviembre,11,2008

It's situations just like this, that the Dubois Foundation hopes to help with...  I can't count the nember of boxes of soap, detergent amd cleaning products that I've helped load into the containers!