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

[Jammyisme]

“It will be resolved in another way,” Jorge told his brother when he learned of the abolition of lunch at several workplaces. His job as a cook in a state agency had made him live on the margin of the symbolic salary he received every month. Thanks to the diversion of food and its subsequent sale in the black market, he managed to exchange his small house for a more ample one. He acquired a DVD player that let him avoid the boring television programming and even took his kids on vacation to Varadero in the past. His business was simple: he was in charge of providing rice to a kiosk that offered boxed lunches, he supplied oil—that he got from a warehouse—to an entrepreneur, and a sandwich seller paid him for those breads that never made it to the trays of the workers.

Now, everything seems to be over for this agile trader at the margins. Several ministries will begin to distribute 15 Cuban pesos for the employees to arrange for their own midday meal. The figure has surprised many, especially those who earn less than that amount for an eight hour working day. If the amount dedicated to lunch reaches such a number, then the Cuban State is recognizing that to cover the costs of food and transport they would have to pay, at least, three times this amount for each day of work.

Now Jorge is thinking about changing jobs within the same company and taking on the position of manager. Until a week ago, this was a job with too many responsibilities and too few “perks”, but suddenly it has become an attractive position. It will be in his hands to confirm how many days an employee worked and was entitled to the lunch payment. He is already planning to take a broad view towards employee absences and divide the lunch allotment between himself and the employee who didn’t come. He will happily change the sacks of beans and flour for the names and cards where attendance is recorded. Maybe by next year he’ll be able to take his family to the far off beach at Baracoa.

Octubre 2nd, 2009 |

[Jammyisme]

A broken bridge, the indigenous name and the feeling that the town of Taguayabón is stranded in the first years of the twentieth century. This is how I saw it three weeks ago when we transferred the blogger virus to Villa Clara province. The amazed eyes of those who had never sat in front of a computer connected to the web were looking through the blogs we brought copies of. To explain Google to them was complicated, because in this place the simple search for a birth certificate in the civil registry is already extremely difficult. Imagine the surprise when they discovered that with a simple click one can list all the references to a fact, a personality, a particular subject matter.

The new technologies in citizens’ hands was the central theme of a conversation Reinaldo and I had with about a dozen people, some of whom came from Camajuaní. When we left to go to another area, a flight of motorcycles—Suzukis*—glided along the small main street and the bordering routes. They interrogated several of the participants of that day of knowledge, intimidating the youngest, and even confiscated a horse that—I can assure you—had nothing to do with the Blogger Journey. The fear extinguished the virtual air flow that had briefly blown over the inhabitants of that Villa Clara land. The restless boys who don’t show their faces returned to play out their role and repeat the same old same old—about the CIA and the Pentagon being behind the alternative Cuban blogosphere. But the germ of Wordpress and Blogger had been planted under their skin. Tuesday, some inhabitants of Taguayabón called to confirm to me that, “We want to start publishing on the Internet.”

*Suzuki motorcycles are associated with the presence of State Security officers.

[Jammyisme]

In all the schools in the country, today is the ceremony for the first grade students to enroll in the Pioneer organization. The morning assembly lasts longer than usual, the parents accompany their children while they put on the neckerchiefs and shout, for the first time, the slogan, “Pioneers for communism, we will be like Che.” I also went through this on two occasions, once when I was enrolled in the OPJM* and the other on the day when I witnessed Teo being initiated. My recollections of the two are so different they seem to have occurred in diametrically opposite dimensions.

In my case it was the years of ideological fervor and, barely three feet tall, I was determined to give my life for the neckerchief they had just put on me. I felt touched by the hand of the Fatherland even though in reality I was only being added to the ranks of an ideology. The slogan of the organization I had just entered seemed like the magic words that would open all doors to me, though at that time I didn’t even know that the suffix “ism” forms nouns that mean “doctrine, sect, system.” Much less would I have wanted to be separated like Lybna who, because she was a Jehovah’s Witness, did not take “her vows” together with the rest of the children in the classroom. Around her hovered a cloud becoming darker, precisely because the blue cloth was not tied around her neck.

Twenty years passed and I was there with my son one morning in October to see him initiated into the Pioneer movement in which I no longer believed. The teacher walked up and down the ranks and asked the children to repeat the slogan about Che Guevara. Teo remained silent, with a pout that didn’t escape the eagle eyes of the principal. When they asked him why he didn’t say the slogan like the rest of the students he pointed out, with childish simplicity, “Because Che is dead and I don’t want to be dead.” I assumed my son was about to be entered into the ideological catalog under the worst of the letters, the “C” for counterrevolutionay. But no, the teacher laughed and gave him his first lesson in opportunism, “Ah Teo, repeat the slogan now, why make problems for yourself.”

*Jose Marti Pioneer Organization

[Jammyisme]

In the early morning they removed the first bricks from the exterior wall to sell—each one—at three pesos on the black market. Like an army of ants, the poorest people in the area took the old closed factory and began to dismantle it. On the corner some kids watched in case the police approached, while the parents sifted through the residue of the debris to extract the mortar. Deft hands knocked it down during the day and carried it away at night, these construction materials that would allow them to build their own homes. After three weeks, all that was left of the enormous building was the floor and some columns standing in a vacuum. Everything that could be used had been moved to the territory of needs, had gone to support the architecture of the emergency.

On an island where to acquire cement, blocks or steel is comparable to getting a bit of lunar dust, destroying in order to build has become common practice. There are specialists in extracting clay bricks intact after eighty years of being embedded in a wall, experts in peeling off the glazed tiles from a demolished mansion, and adroit “deconstructors” who extract the metal girders from the collapsed heaps. They use the reclaimed materials to build their own habitable spaces in a country where no one can buy, legally, a house. Their main “quarries” are those houses that have fallen down or workplaces abandoned for many years by the apathetic State. They fall on these with an efficiency in looting that one might want to see in the dozing bricklayers who work for wages.

Among these skilled recyclers, some have been killed by a collapsing roof or falling wall, riddled by too many holes in its base. But at times lady luck also smiles on them and they find a toilet without cracks, or an electric socket that, in their hurry, the owners of the demolished house couldn’t take with them. A few kilometers from the site of the looting a small dwelling of tin and zinc slowly begins to change. The tiled floor from a house that fell in at Neptuno and Aguila streets has been added, along with a piece of the exterior railing from an abandoned mansion on Linea Street, and even some stained glass from a convent in Old Havana. Inside this house, fruit of the pillaging, a family—equally plundered by life—dreams of the next factory that will be dismantled and loaded onto their shoulders.

The poem “Economic Plan” by Amaury Pacheco, read by the author.

[Jammyisme]

am a little delusional. Until a minute before the Maria Moors Cabot prize ceremony – held yesterday – I thought the Cuban government would change its decision and let me leave. So I saved the recording I made at the Immigration Office on Monday, October 12. Today, seeing that I am in the same place, I have decided to publish it, thinking especially of all those who are going through the same experience.

Emotion – having so much to say – did make me speak at a velocity difficult to subtitle, but I feel the relief of having said directly to those military uniforms everything I think about them and their absurd restrictions.

Forgive the problems with the video, but it is a completely amateur recording, like everything in this blog.

English Transcript of Video

[Informational text] The office with all the requirements for travel. Bureau of Immigration and Foreigners for the municipality of Plaza, at 17th Street, between J and K, Vedado.

Yoani: Who is last in line for information?

Clerk: Yoani?

Yoani: Well, I need to know if you have lifted the ban on my traveling that has been in effect for a year.

[Informational text] From here the recording is audio only.

Clerk: You still cannot travel.

Yoani: Still? And when will you lift this prohibition.? Do you have an idea? I need to know.

Clerk: Prohibition?

Yoani: Well, not allowing me to get on a plane is a prohibition.

Clerk: You are still not authorized to travel.

Yoani: And for what reason?

Clerk: I do not know the reason.

Yoani: I have no pending legal case, I’m not being prosecuted before a court. Pay attention to this citizen. I’ve already come many times. You know me here. What I want to know is if this prohibition is unending. If I will one day be able to leave the country. If I continue trying. What do I have to do?

You know this is a violation of my constitutional rights. You people are violating my rights as a citizen, the ability to travel, to leave and enter my country. It is very serious. That a military institution denies a fundamental right of a civilian citizen, it is like the right to an education, to food, the right to travel.

Clerk: At this time you cannot travel.

Yoani: Yes, I have heard it already, I repeat. But what I want is to have the person who made the decision give me the answer to my face.

Clerk: I am giving it to you.

Yoani: No you are not giving me the answer, you are repeating to me the same thing it says in those papers. Why can’t Yoani Sanchez leave the country? Why are you so afraid of my being outside of Cuba?

Clerk: At this time you cannot travel.

Yoani: Why don’t you want me to put one foot on a plane? What are you afraid of? What can this 110 pound person do? Create a tsunami? Why then won’t you let me leave the country?

Clerk: I already told you…

Yoani: You are being ridiculous. But no, I don’t want to repeat. You are making a travesty of life. This institution, that you represent, this permission to leave, some day this is going to end. My grandchildren are not going to live under these conditions. When I tell them the story of how the institutions of my country violated my rights, my right to travel, they’re not going to believe me. What will you tell your children? That you dedicated yourself to violating the rights of Cubans? Is that what you’ll say? Because really, I feel sorry for you for what you are going to have to tell your children in the future.

Me, no. I’ve never violated the rights of anyone. I only want to exercise my right. And act like a free person. Why can’t I? Why? Why do you routinely deny me permission? Who is the person who makes the decision? Why don’t they stop being a coward and show their face? And say to me, “Yoani Sanchez, you are not traveling for one, two, three…” But no.

No, you are saying to me, “No.” You are not giving me an explanation, the why. I am not being prosecuted in court. I have no pending cases, I’ve never been a soldier. I don’t have State secrets. I’m not even a doctor, and you have prohibited medical personal from leaving for five years. They need to be freed. I am none of that. I am a person dedicated to letters. Why can’t I leave. Ah… I do know why I can’t leave, but I am waiting for you people to tell me. Because you have an ideological filter. This country is a huge prison, with an ideological boundary. And the citizens here are judged by political colors. Here there are first citizens, and second, and in the fifth category… I don’t know what category I’m in but I must be in the basement, no? Why? Because of an ideological filter.

But one day this will end. Because this Nation has nothing to do with ideology, or with a party. This nation existed before you and it will exist after you. And then you are going to have to give an accounting of all the violations you visited upon Cubans. In truth, I’m very sorry but the future does not belong to you. The future is ours. I am 34-years-old, I am going to live it, I am going to live it. I am going to be very happy when I can travel freely. And all you are doing is tightening the rubber band. When I can step foot outside this country, the consequences will be much greater because you made it happen. Every day more people read my blog, because you also have made that happen. More people are amazed and greet me in the street, because you have caused that. With your prohibitions and your authoritarianism and your police watching everything. The only thing you’ve done is to make what I do more attractive. So then, if I have to thank anyone I have to thank the organs of State Security, the Ministry of the Interior, and Immigration who have contributed to the phenomenon of my blog growing bigger and bigger. Really, thanks very much!

[Jammyisme]

No one knows the mechanisms of censorship in Cuba better than those who write in the few newspapers of national circulation. The press here has been turned into a delicate profession required to measure adjectives, carefully weigh topics and often to hide personal opinions in order to keep a job. It is a life decision to be a journalist for the official media, I know, but I also know some who have been trapped in the twists and turns of complicity, waiting for the day when they can write what they think.


From the Juventude Rebelde newspaper office where Reinaldo worked until 1988, there is very little left because most of his colleagues now live in Miami, Mexico and Spain. Others have retired from the profession, disillusioned with the aborted glastnost and the consecutive calls for criticism, which ended up being bait for the most daring. José Alejandro Rodríguez survived all this and carried his personal battle into the “Receipt Requested” section where he published readers’ letters with their complaints and questions. Every time I read his crusade against bureaucracy and poor work, I sense the regressive countdown that will probably culminate in his professional silencing.


A few days ago José Alejandro could take no more. He took everything he has accumulated about the “excessive centralization” that the press on this Island is subject to and condemned the secrecy surrounding government decisions. In his article “Against the demons of kidnapped information” he used the language of an honest man who always believed in the possibility of humanizing the current system through the transparency of information. I respectfully differ with him, because what has been built on a foundation of hiding, condemning and filtering cannot survive the clear light that emanates from an incisive and free journalism.


The three pages of his harangue lasted just a few hours on the on-line version of Juventud Rebelde. The article was kidnapped by the shrewd hawks of orthodoxy, who know well the danger of a Nation that begins to learn everything you have hidden.

A copy of the article “Against the demons of kidnapped information” can be read here.

[Gambitt]

Against the demons of kidnapped information

I am going to dream, once again. I am going to imagine that I have never pondered it up to the weariness. I am going to believe that I come to release an unusual approach. I am going to become convinced of that creature is worth while keeping on fighting for this preterida so-called information, it captivates between silences and excessive control panel.

The mission of the journalist is to report; skylight that also to think, to recreate the reality, to describe, to narrate … but first of all to report. Because to open all the genres, forms and speeches of the journalism, first it is necessary to be informed … and to report.

The information is a duty of the journalist and it is a right of the citizen, of this historical subject who has supported this Revolution, and who as today never needs to know the area that he treads and pays, in the middle of multiple complexities. As today this Liborio never needs to define and to re-define the coordinated ones in which his life journeys. As today it never presses of the information to be able to interact with the society and to take part in her, as an active subject, and not as a "pigeon" – phrase much in vogue these days - for that he waits give him his exact dose of the information from above.

The problem, - and we it are living in Rebellious Youth - is that the information does not escape to the excessive centralization of our economy and of the society in general, a little that for anything has to be a fatidical genetic component of the socialism, as any they believe; rather it obstructs it in his democratic potentialities. Well above there is decided often what to say and to report, what not to say about the big topics of the society, even if the obstinate life should pass there below, with his complexities.

At this point, it gives sadness to state it, a minister can afford to push a request of a journalist back and cercenar the right to more information, assuming that already went to the Round table to unpack everything. Or rather quite what wants to be said. The hiperbolización of the Round table as the stage of the supreme information, is an offence to the necessary versatility and variety that distinguishes to the good journalism. This "mesaredondización" is a round contribution to the burocratización of the journalism, with the due respect for the companions of this space, who are not the persons in charge of the phenomenon.

Someone – I swear that does not imagine who is this anybody - who can decide that certain measurements in the socioeconomic stage should be put into practice, without a strategy informacional directed to the historical subject that will assume them. Examples remain of changes that have registered without the necessary information in our means: of the process of request and delivery of grounds in usufruct, something that supposedly dinamizará our agriculture, there was a moment, two, three … has had: or will there be yet?, in that it was possible neither to speak scarcely nor mention. It was said to me in this writing that it was coming of above.

There was not reflected in the means the rich process of debate promoted by Raúl two years ago, expression cimera of our socialistic democracy. It is not also possible today to mention the last one, in which militants of the Party and revolutionary beyond the card, debate the problems that bother his groups.

The press is summoned so that he accompanies gregariamente the promotion of the Resolution on the payment for results of the Department of Labour and Social Security. This editor gets excited in spite of caressing a rescue of the Law of Socialistic Distribution, which so much has moved away us: He interviews the vice-minister of the MTSS, creates expectations with that one of that those who should work more and better they will be able to win and to live better.

In the end, the application of the Resolution aborts, the bureaucrats refuse to complicate in the norms and the mobile forms of payment. The egalitarianism is easier, which it touches you. And nobody explains why the payment by yield is hindered in Cuba.

A reporter, for indication of his managers, comes to the Department of Economy and Planning so that, before the avalanche of rumours on the disappearance of the working dining rooms in the foreign press, with his schismatic and tendentious approaches in certain cases, this department confirms if it is true, and I based it, and if it is not true refute it. The minister delegates in the viceminister, the viceminister says to the reporter that it must consult it with the minister... There it begins the rally, until the viceminister confesses to the journalist that there is an experience in study, but it is not desirable to report of that "for the time being". A week, a work appears in Granma on this matter, and the reporter feels cheated. Will it be the concept of the "mesaredondización" or the "granmatitis"? Will it be that in Granma he acquires majestad supreme the information?

Examples would remain, of how many officials there is abrogated the right to decide what can find out, after looking up to receive the extremaunción of the already dead news. Almost nobody dares to inform himself the press and open horizontal relations without the consent of his Superiors. And often the genuflexa chain goes along along several levels and instances … until the news is already buried by the proper life.

It is true that the information is a double-edged weapon, because it reveals the lights, but also the dark holes of the reality. But the information is a public good, and we cannot replace it with the opportune authorized information, with the virtual information, with the information - propaganda or the suitable information, the information with tweezers, or since it wants to call him him. The information is an information.

In any case the information, with all his tones, with his clair-obscure ones, will always make us more effective ones and revolutionary ones, more concientes of the historical moment; more illustrious to discern the possible of the impossible thing, and more participativos; because everything – included the information - cannot be cooked from cenacles. The Cuban needs to look at the future, to know what happens, and not to walk to tientas and blindly, to favor of the crust of information. The Cuban needs to take part actively, to propose and to be born in mind, to heft between the good and evil, to strengthen his Revolution.

It is clear that I will not speak about the faults of the journalists, the more daring some, different more tired and conformists. In the measurement in which there persists this restrictive and control model of informative politics, our professionals will encourage more disappointments and hibernations between.

And without information, without participation of the historical subject, it is impossible to establish concientemente a fuller and democratic socialism.

After all this, we are not going to cut the veins of the profession. The revolutionary journalist has to keep on battling here and there. If the doors close you, this can be the news. An alternative before the stubbornness is to focus the phenomena from other not so institutional sources and so above, from the people that is the principal support of this Revolution. And to do it with commitment and seriousness.

Rebellious youth has gained good stretch and prestige in this Cuban fight against the demons of the kidnapped information. Are we going to step back? This is the biggest challenge for the new direction of this newspaper that is still not known, but that, finally we are all.

Published in: The Tone of the Voice | Updated 17/10/2009 15:56

[Jammyisme]

Mail boxes look like ballot boxes, they have a slot to insert the paper and its contents, it could be a letter or a ballot, which receive similar respect on this Island. Despite the limitations on correspondence, it turns out that it is easier to get one to its destination than it is to influence the course of the country with our vote. Hence, one of the most popular sports for my fellow countrymen is that of writing their complaints to the higher authorities, addressed precisely to those most responsible for our problems.

A woman writes a long lament about the sewer ditch that flows into the nearby school yard; the pizza seller denounces in writing the inspector who demands a percentage of revenues in exchange for not shutting down his kiosk; one patient needing surgery deposited his letter recounting the year he had been waiting to get into the operating room. The complaints are so numerous that in many ministries there is a department with several employees for the receipt of the letters. A true flood of sheets that repeat – over and over – the familiar heading, “By this means I turn to you…”

As a part of this, in time, the digital letter appeared, circulating through the intranet to several institutions. The intellectual debate of 2007 began in a similar way, and now we see the nonconformist opinions of various cultural personalities showing up. Parading across my screen have been the letter of the actor Armando Tomey, along with another from the literary critic Desiderio Navarro and a very good one from Luis Alberto Garcia, who played the role of Nicanor in the short films of Eduardo del Llano. This Chartism has become a substitute for the referendum needed to express our call for change.

Our epistolary tendency has similarities with the movement in nineteenth-century England which managed to get more than a million signatures to present the People’s Charter to the House of Commons. The Chartists then managed to press for the introduction of certain reforms, but I have the impression that our notes are worthless, mock ballots, ink that dissolves before the inertia of the State.

[Jammyisme]

I wore a red and white uniform, I was ten years old, and the subject of the “blockade” was barely mentioned in the ideological books they gave me at school. Those were optimistic times and we believed that the F1 cows* would give enough milk to flood the streets of the whole country. The future had those golden hues that never showed themselves in our faded reality but we were a too colorblind to notice. We thought we had discovered the formula to be among the most prosperous people on the planet, so that our children would live in a country with opportunities for all.


From the podium a bearded leader defiantly pointed to the North, because he counted on the pole of the Kremlin subsidy to vault over any obstacle to the construction of communism. “Despite the blockade…” we said, with the same conviction that in years past we’d talked about the ten million tons of sugar*, coffee growing all around the cities*, and a supposed industrialization of the country that never came. We had to cut short our dreams when the flow of oil and rubles abruptly stopped. The years came of beginning to explain the setbacks and comparing ourselves to the poorest nations in the region to make us feel, if not happy, at least satisfied.


As I began my adolescence, the issue of trade restrictions was on nearly every billboard in the country. At the political rallies we no longer shouted, “Cuba yes, Yankees no” but a new hard-to-rhyme slogan: “Down with the blockade.” I looked at my nearly empty plate and couldn’t imagine how they had managed to blockade our malangas, orange juice, bananas and lemons. I grew up repudiating the blockade, not because I swallowed the line about the country we could be if the blockade weren’t preventing it, but simply because they tried to explain that everything that wasn’t working was a result of it.


If my friends were leaving the country en masse, it was because of the United States policy of harassment; if the cockroaches were crawling all over the walls at the maternity hospital, it was the fault of the North Americans; even if a meeting at the university expelled a critical colleague, they explained to us that he had fallen under the ideological influence of the enemy. Today, everything begins and ends with the blockade. No one seems to remember the days when they promised us paradise, when they told us that nothing – not even the economic sanctions – would prevent us from leaving behind our underdevelopment.


Translator’s notes


F1 cows: A breed that is a cross of Holstein and Zebu (Cebu) cattle. Fidel believed these cattle would allow Cuba to export beef and dairy products. It didn’t work out; both meat and milk are severely rationed in Cuba.


Ten million tons of sugar: In 1970 Fidel turned the resources of the entire country to a achieving a record ten-million ton sugar harvest, even “rescheduling” Christmas for July so as not to interfere with the work. The target was missed and Cuba’s sugar crop has declined ever since; in 2009 the total was barely over one million tons.


Coffee growing in the cities: Fidel had a plan to grow coffee in Havana despite expert advice that the climate was unfavorable; it didn’t work out.

[Jammyisme]

 not know where to begin to tell what happened in the debate about the Internet that took place yesterday, organized by the magazine Temas. Undoubtedly, the blonde wig I put on allowed me to slip through the controlled entrance of the Fresa y Chocolate Cultural Center. That and high heels, lipstick, shiny earrings and an enormous, painfully-bright purse, transformed me into someone sufficiently different. Some friends came to tell me that I looked better like that, with a tightly-fitted short dress, a sexy walk and square-framed glasses. My apologies to them, the person whose role I acted didn’t last long and today I’ve returned to my disheveled and boring appearance.

They didn’t allow Claudia, Reinaldo, Eugenio, Ciro and other bloggers to enter. “The institution reserves the right of admission,” and my cyberspace colleagues showed the impertinence of those who have already been excluded from other places, but didn’t want to retreat, embarrassed and in silence. Inside, I managed to find a seat next to the panel of speakers. Some adroit eyes had already detected my reedy physiognomy and a camera filmed me with the insistence of one preparing a dossier.

A young writer asked to speak and lamented that so many had been prevented from entering; then someone came and mentioned terms such as “enemy,” “dangerous,” and “defend ourselves.” When finally I was called, I took the opportunity to ask what relationship there is between the limitations in bandwidth and the many websites censored for the Cuban public. There was applause when I finished. I swear I didn’t collude with any of them. Afterward, a university professor came up and questioned why I had received the Ortega y Gasset journalism prize. I still haven’t managed to find the relationship between my question and her analysis, but the paths of defamation are so twisted. At the end, several came up to me to give me hugs, one woman gave me just a touch of her hand and said “congratulations.” The crisp October night waited for me outside.

If all those not allowed access had managed to participate, that would have been a true space for debate about the web. What happened felt withered and shackled. Only one of the speakers mentioned concepts such as Web 2.0, social networks and Wikipedia. The rest was the anticipated vaccine against the perverse web, the repeated justifications for why Cubans cannot access it en masse. I took my phone and quickly Tweeted, “I think it would be best to organize another debate about the Internet, without the burden of censorship and exclusion.” This morning, with dark circles from having slept only three hours, I was delivering technical manuals in the second session of our Blogger Academy.

Some of the images in this video were taken by friendly hands in solidarity and are from inside the room.

[Jammyisme]

stopped for you because you’re white,” the taxi driver tells me after the tires screech in Reina Street around midnight. From his wide mulatto lips come the justifications, one after another, for why he doesn’t accept clients “of color” at this late hour. He looks for complicity in me, who was born in a majority black neighborhood and who loves skin the color of cinnamon. I barely listen to him. Those who discriminate against people like themselves especially bother me: the hotel doorman who berates the Cuban but lets a shouting gesturing tourist pass; the prostitute who will go, for ten convertible pesos, with a Canadian twice her age but doesn’t want to seem “defeated” by accepting a fellow Cuban; the Santiaguan who, once installed in Havana, mocks the accents of people from his own city.

Often I wake up and wish I was mixed, like Reinaldo and Teo, because when you look at my straight nose and my pale skin you think I have it easy. But it’s not true. There are many ways of being separate, because along with racism here we have discrimination based on social origin, the stigma of ideological affiliation, and the exclusion for not belonging to a family clan with power, influence or relationships. Not to mention the underestimation one receives in a macho society for having a pair of ovaries hidden in the middle of your belly. And so I am bothered by the dissertation of the driver who stopped the car because of the pallor of my skin. I want to get out, but it’s late, very late.

“What do you do?” he asks me under the streetlights of Belascoain Street. I’m a blogger, I warn him, and the lights of Carlos III Avenue show me his suspicious and fearful face. “Look, don’t go and tell what I just said,” he says, changing the indulgent tone he used when picking me up amid the gloom. “I don’t want you to publish later some nonsense about me on the Internet,” he clarifies, while grabbing his crotch in a gesture of power. My straight hair is no longer a reason to trust me, now my eyes don’t seem so almond-shaped, and when I explain—through my narrow lips—the subjects I deal with in my blog, it’s as if I am threatening him, razor in hand, a dangerous criminal. I confirm, then, that his spectrum of classification stigmatizes not only some shades of color, but also certain leanings of opinion, those tones which are not carried on the epidermis but that also lead, on this Island, to displays of segregation and rejection.

[Gambitt]

HAVANA, Nov 6 (Reuters) - Well-known Cuban blogger and government critic Yoani Sanchez said she and two fellow bloggers were detained briefly on Friday by security agents and accused of being "counter-revolutionaries" as they walked to a demonstration against violence.

Sanchez, 34, told Reuters the agents forced her and blogger Orlando Luis Pardo into a car as they neared the demonstration in Havana's Vedado district, took them to a spot near her home and dropped them off, throwing her purse on the street as they drove away.

"We were detained by three men who came in a black Chinese car," said Sanchez, who is known internationally for her "Generation Y" blog, which frequently criticizes Cuba's communist-led government.

Sanchez said she told people standing nearby they were being kidnapped, but the men told the bystanders: "They are counter-revolutionaries. Don't get involved."

"There was no chance to resist, they were strong men."

The men offered no explanation for the seizure, but Sanchez said she believes they were preventing her from attending the demonstration. "I'm flustered. It has been very intense," she said. She said she had a sore shoulder and back from the encounter, but no serious injuries.

Pardo was released with her and had no injuries, she said. Another blogger, Claudia Cadelo, was taken away in a separate police car and released unharmed at a different location.

Sanchez said they had gathered at her home to "reconstruct the events."

About 60 people attended the demonstration, which is a rare event in Cuba, and unfurled signs that said "No to violence. Join us." They milled around for a few minutes, gave no speeches and left without incident. One participant said the march was not aimed at Cuba, but at violence around the world.

Sanchez, who has won several international prizes for her blogs, but is little known in Cuba, where Internet access is limited. The Cuban government does not hide its distaste for Sanchez, who is occasionally attacked in the state-run press as an enemy of the state.

Cuba is said to have about 200 political prisoners, whom the government views as traitors working with the United States to toppled the Cuban government. (Reporting by Jeff Franks and Rosa Tania Valdes; editing by Todd Eastham)

[Jammyisme]

Near 23rd Street, just at the Avenida de los Presidentes roundabout, we saw a black car, made in China, pull up with three heavily built strangers. “Yoani, get in the car,” one told me while grabbing me forcefully by the wrist. The other two surrounded Claudia Cadelo, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and a friend who was accompanying us to the march against violence. The ironies of life, it was an evening filled with punches, shouts and obscenities on what should have passed as a day of peace and harmony. The same “aggressors” called for a patrol car which took my other two companions, Orlando and I were condemned to the car with yellow plates, the terrifying world of lawlessness and the impunity of Armageddon.

I refused to get into the bright Geely-made car and we demanded they show us identification or a warrant to take us. Of course they didn’t show us any papers to prove the legitimacy of our arrest. The curious crowded around and I shouted, “Help, these men want to kidnap us,” but they stopped those who wanted to intervene with a shout that revealed the whole ideological background of the operation, “Don’t mess with it, these are counterrevolutionaries.” In the face of our verbal resistance they made a phone call and said to someone who must have been the boss, “What do we do? They don’t want to get in the car.” I imagine the answer from the other side was unequivocal, because then came a flurry of punches and pushes, they got me with my head down and tried to push me into the car. I held onto the door… blows to my knuckles… I managed to take a paper one of them had in his pocket and put it in my mouth. Another flurry of punches so I would return the document to them.

Orlando was already inside, immobilized by a karate hold that kept his head pushed to the floor. One put his knee in my chest and the other, from the front seat, hit me in my kidneys and punched me in the head so I would open my mouth and spit out the paper. At one point I felt I would never leave that car. “This is as far as you’re going, Yoani,” “I’ve had enough of your antics,” said the one sitting beside the driver who was pulling my hair. In the back seat a rare spectacle was taking place: my legs were pointing up, my face reddened by the pressure and my aching body, on the other side Orlando brought down by a professional at beating people up. I just managed to grab, through his trousers, one’s testicles, in an act of desperation. I dug my nails in, thinking he was going to crush my chest until the last breath. “Kill me now,” I screamed, with the last inhalation I had left in me, and the one in front warned the younger one, “Let her breathe.”

I was listening to Orlando panting and the blows continued to rain down on us, I planned to open the door and throw myself out but there was no handle on the inside. We were at their mercy and hearing Orlando’s voice encouraged me. Later he told me it was the same for him hearing my choking words… they let him know, “Yoani is still alive.” We were left aching, lying in a street in Timba, a woman approached, “What has happened?”… “A kidnapping,” I managed to say. We cried in each others arms in the middle of the sidewalk, thinking about Teo, for God’s sake how am I going to explain all these bruises. How am I going to tell him that we live in a country where this can happen, how will I look at him and tell him that his mother, for writing a blog and putting her opinions in kilobytes, has been beaten up on a public street. How to describe the despotic faces of those who forced us into that car, their enjoyment that I could see as they beat us, their lifting my skirt as they dragged me half naked to the car.

I managed to see, however, the degree of fright of our assailants, the fear of the new, of what they cannot destroy because they don’t understand, the blustering terror of he who knows that his days are numbered.

[Jammyisme]

After an attack there are certain myopics who blame the victim herself for what happened. If it is a woman who has been raped, someone explains that her skirt was very short or that she strutted provocatively. If it is a robbery, there are those who will say a flashy purse or shiny earrings provoked the criminal’s greed. In the case of someone who has been the object of political repression, there is no lack of people who will justify it, saying that imprudence was the cause of such an “energetic” response. In the face of these attitudes, the victim feels doubly assaulted.

The dozens of eyes that watched as Orlando and I were forced into a car with blows would prefer not to testify, and so they put themselves on the side of the criminal.


The doctor who does not make a record of an act of physical mistreatment, having already been warned that in this “case” there must be no document to prove the injuries received, is violating his Hippocratic oath and, with that wink, becomes the culprit’s accomplice. To those who feel there should be more bruises and even fractures before they can feel compassion for the person attacked, not only are they quantifying the pain, they are also saying to the attacker, “You have to leave more signs, you must be more aggressive.”


Nor is there any shortage of those who are always going to assert that the victim inflicted the wounds upon herself, those who don’t want to listen to the screams or the laments right next to them, but who emphasize and publish what happens thousands of miles away, under another ideology, another government. They are the same non-believers who thought that UMAP* was an enjoyable camp, combining military preparation and farm work. Those who still continue to believe that executing three men* was justified to preserve socialism, and that when someone punches a nonconformist it is because the latter was asking for it with her critiques. The eternal justifiers of violence are not convinced by any evidence, not even the brief initials R.I.P. on white marble. For them, the victim is the cause, the aggressor the mere executor of an obligatory lesson, a simple judge and corrector of our deviations.

Brief medical report

I am recovering from the physical injuries resulting from the abduction of last Friday. The bruises are lessening and what bothers me the most now is a sharp pain in the lumbar region which obliges me to use a crutch. Last night I went to the clinic and they treated me for the pain and inflammation. It is nothing that my youth and good health cannot overcome. Fortunately, the blow they gave me when they forced my head to the floor of the car has not affected my eye, only the cheekbone and the brow. I hope to have recovered in a few days.


Thank you to friends and family who have looked after and supported me, the effects are fading, even the psychological ones which are the hardest. Orlando and Claudia are still in shock, but they are incredibly strong and also will overcome it. We have already begun to smile, the best medicine against abuse. The principal therapy for me remains this blog, and the thousands of topics still waiting to be touched on.

(Editor’s note: Post dictated by telephone)


Translator’s notes
UMAP = Military Units to Aid Production. Forced labor camps established in Cuba in 1965 under the banner of ideological rehabilitation. Inmates included a wide variety of “anti-social elements” as well as religious people and gays.


Executing three men = On April 2, 2003 a group of Cubans hijacked a ferry with about 50 people on it, planning to sail it to the United States. Just over a week later, Lorenzo Copello, Barbaro Sevilla and Jorge Martinez were executed for “grave acts of terrorism.”

[Jammyisme]

After what happened last Friday, I decided to bring to light a series of pictures of people who watch and harass me.

My relationship with the movies has always been from the seats in the shadow of a room where you can hear the sound of an old projector. It kept on like this until I started to live in my own movie, a type of thriller of the pursuers and the pursued, where it is up to me to escape and hide. The reason for this sudden change from spectator to protagonist has been this blog, located in this wide space—so little touched by celluloid—that is the Internet. I woke up two years ago with the desire to write the true script of my days, and not the rosy comedy they show in the official newspapers. I went, then, from watching movies to inhabiting one.

I have my doubts whether some day I’ll see the curtain come down and be able to leave the movie theater alive. The long film that we have been living for decades in Cuba does not seem to be close to the point where the credits are shown and the screen goes blank. However, the spectators are no longer interested in the interminable filmstrip shown by the authorized projectionists. Rather, they seem captivated by the vision of those who create a blog, a blank page where they record the questions, the frustrations and the joys of citizens.

Believing myself Kubrick or Tarantino, I have begun to post a testimony of these creatures who watch and harass us. Beings from the shadows who, like vampires, feed on our human happiness and inoculate us with terror through punches, threats and blackmail. Individuals trained in coercion who could not foresee their conversion into hunters who are hunted, faces trapped on camera, mobile phones, or in the curious retina of a citizen. Accustomed to gathering evidence for this dossier about each of us kept in some drawer, in some office, now they are surprised that we make an inventory of their gestures, their eyes, a meticulous record of their abuses.