Generación Y

Yoani Sánchez walks us through her “peculiar” passport (English subtitles)

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A few days ago I came across this recent video of Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez giving a camera a tour of her passport. It’s about the best illustration you could possibly ask for of the regime’s deliberate measures to keep the Cuban people from being exposed to life outside the communist bubble. Her passport is full of visas. Literally. There is nowhere to put a new stamp. And yet she hasn’t been able to use a single one of them to board a flight out of Cuba.

I downloaded the video and added it to my own YouTube channel for the sake of being able to add English subtitles. SO… here it is. If you don’t hve closed captions enabled, just click the “CC” icon in the YouTube player and select the English track. Subtitles should appear.

Cuban blogger Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo detained, tweets Yoani Sanchez

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Yoani Sanchez tweeted earlier today that Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo has been detained by Cuban authorities. Apparently, as he was being arrested, he had the good sense to dial her number and leave his cell phone in his pocket so she could listen in.

Yoani is now in the process of tracking Orlando down, going from police station to police station (and getting the run-around).

Follow Yoani on Twitter here (for her original Spanish tweets) or here (for tweets translated into English).

Follow Orlando here.

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UPDATE:  Orlando and Silvia, his girlfriend who was also detained, were released at 11 p.m. last night, according to Yoani.

Yoani Sanchez tweets that Orland Pardo is freed

Yoani Sánchez on the Cuban Communist Party’s new game plan

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An excellent post from Yoani Sánchez on the PCC’s latest release:

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En español:

Cuando se crece descifrando cada línea aparecida en los periódicos, se logra encontrar en medio de la retórica el grano de información que la motiva y la pizca de novedad que ésta oculta. De ahí que los cubanos seamos sabuesos de lo no expresado, peritos en descartar la palabrería y hallar –muy en el fondo– las reales razones que la mueven. El Proyecto de lineamientos para el VI Congreso del Partido Comunista es un buen ejercicio con el que afinar nuestros sentidos, un ejemplo paradigmático para evaluar la práctica de decir sin decir, que se ha constituido aquí en discurso de estado.

Haz click aquí para leer el post entero en Generación Y

In English:

When you grow up decoding each line that appears in the newspapers, you manage to find, among the rhetoric, the nugget of information that motivates, the hidden shreds of the news. We Cubans have become detectives of the unexpressed, experts in discarding the chatter and discovering — deep down — what is really driving things. The Draft Guidelines for the Communist Party’s VI Congress is a good exercise to sharpen our senses, a model example to evaluate the practice of speaking without speaking, which is what state discourse is here.

Click here to read the whole thing on Generación Y’s English site.

Uncomfortable Questions

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By Yoani Sanchez

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I skirt the edge of my building, avoiding walking under the balconies, because the kids throw condoms filled with urine to kill the boredom. A man with his daughter is carrying a bag that’s dripping a mix of grease, water and blood. They’re coming from the butcher’s, where the line announces that some rationed product came in this morning. The two climb the stairs happily carrying their trophy meat. The wife is probably already cutting the onions, while breathing a sigh of relief that the protein is back, after several days’ absence.

I’m behind them and I manage to hear the little girl ask, “Papi, how many chickens have you eaten in your life?” I see the bewildered face of the father, who’s made it to the sixth floor, sweating from every pore. His answer is a little brusque. “How would I know that? I don’t keep a count of the food.” But the young girl insists. Evidently she’s learning to multiply and divide, so she wants to take apart the world and explain it—completely—with pure numbers. “Papi, if you’re 53 and every month you get one pound of chicken at the butcher’s, you just have to know how many months you’ve lived. When you have that number you divide it by four pounds, which is more or less what a chicken usually weighs.”

I follow the mathematical formula she’s developed and I figure I’ve eaten 99 chickens in my 33 years. The man interrupts my calculations, telling her, “Sweetie, when I was born chickens weren’t rationed.” I start thinking about how I grew up with the shackles of rationing attached to both ankles but, thanks to the black market, the diversion of resources from State enterprises, the shops that sell only in convertible pesos, the trading of clothes for food, and a ton of parallel tracks, I don’t know the exact amount I’ve digested. I hurry past them and hear the doubting phrase from the little Pythagoras: “Oh, Papi, do you expect me to believe that before, in the butcher shops, they sold you all the chicken you wanted…”

This was originally written and published in Spanish by Yoani Sanchez and translated and posted in her English version blog. Since the castro regime continues to curtail her internet access and continues to block access to her blog and other internet sites in and out of Cuba, we are posting Yoani’s work in its entirety in solidarity and to help promote and distribute same.

Hourglass

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By Yoani Sanchez

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Every day I run into someone who’s been disillusioned and has withdrawn their support for the Cuban process. There are those who turn in their Communist Party cards and emigrate to their married daughters in Italy, or those who concentrate on the peaceful work of caring for their grandchildren and waiting in line for bread. They shift from betraying to conspiring, from monitoring to corruption, and even change their listening tastes from Radio Rebelde to Radio Martí. All this conversion—slow in some, dizzyingly fast in others—I sense it all around me, as if under the island sun thousands have shed their skin. However, this process of metamorphosis only happens in one direction. I haven’t run into anyone—and I know a lot of people—who has gone from disbelief to loyalty, who has begun to trust in the speeches after years of criticizing them.

Mathematics confronts us with certain infallible truths: the number of those dissatisfied grows, but the group of those who applaud gains no new “souls.” As in an hourglass, every day hundreds of the small particles of the disillusioned come to a stop just opposite the place where they once were. They slide down to the mound formed by us: the skeptics, the excluded and the immense chorus of the indifferent. Now there is no return to the side of confidence, because no hand will be able to turn the hourglass, raising up that which today is definitely down. The time to multiply and add passed a short while ago, now the abacuses operate always by subtracting, marking the interminable flight in a single direction.

This was originally written and published in Spanish by Yoani Sanchez and translated and posted in her English version blog. Since the castro regime continues to curtail her internet access and continues to block access to her blog and other internet sites in and out of Cuba, we are posting Yoani’s work in its entirety in solidarity and to help promote and distribute same.

Between the two walls

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BY Yoani Sanchez

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Today at 3 in the afternoon we managed to present Orlando Luís Pardo Lazo’s book. After sneaking through the alleys of Cerro to lose the two “securities” who were following us, we ended up at the Capitol and took a bus through the tunnel under the bay. Tension, fear and doubt joined us on our brief journey to the fortress of La Cabaña. Orlando was thinking of his mother, with her high blood pressure, frightened by the threatening phone calls. My mind was on Teo at his school, unaware of the fact that maybe nobody would be there when he returned home. Fortunately, they were only ghosts.

The police operation had—we understood it a posteriori—an intention to intimidate, but there was little they could do in front of the cameras of the foreign press and of the writers who were invited. We began, sitting on the grass, speaking with a group of fifteen people, and ended with the closing applause of more than forty. We were surprised by the presence and solidarity of several young writers and poets with books published by the official publishing house. Also by the attendance of some Latin American novelists who supported us with words and hugs. There were Gorki and Ciro of the group Porno Para Ricardo, Claudia Cadelo of the blog Octavo Cerco, Lía Villares, author of the blog Habanemia, Reinaldo Escobar, blogger of Desde Aqui, Claudio Madan and others whose names I won’t mention, so as not to cause them harm.

From the other side of the street a group of persecutors was filming, with a telephoto lens, everything that happened in the green esplanade. Several primary schools had been invited to fly kites in the same place and a raucous reggaetón started just at three in the afternoon. However, we managed to isolate ourselves from all that and enter the door of Boring Home; to raise ourselves a few centimeters above the dusty reality of the watched and the watchers. From where I was sitting, the wall of La Cabaña looked to me more deteriorated, full of small porosities that opened in the stone.

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This was originally written and published in Spanish by Yoani Sanchez and translated and posted in her English version blog. Since the castro regime continues to curtail her internet access and continues to block access to her blog and other internet sites in and out of Cuba, we are posting Yoani’s work in its entirety in solidarity and to help promote and distribute same.