Victor, the silent dean of Art Institute (ISA), next to the driver, without saying a single word; Danae and Rudy, leaders of the Student Union (FEU), to my right and behind me; Andy, also with the FEU, the only reasonable one, to my left. Miguel, the driver, mute at the helm. The car is driving all along the Malecon, at dawn.

I am talking to them, at least with the boys, who dare to speak. Danae, boastfully daring to speak says that he’s doing “the right thing to defend the Revolution.” Rudy, the only one who I’d spoken to before, tells me, when I ask him, that his name is Osvaldo. Why lie? All three are from Santiago, and Danae and Rudy study acting. Fifteen days earlier I had visited his class in search of actors with the permission of Omar Ali, the professor. They had acted some scenes from “Dream of a Summer’s Night”: Danae was dry and didn’t know any of his lines–it’s well known that he’s not at ISA for artistic reasons. I can’t remember Rudy from that day. Andy studies piano and was the only one who refused to assault me, faced with so many men going back and forth between violence and indifference. But none of these pitiful student representatives were among the more than 150 young people who went on a hunger strike at ISA in October of 2009.

That night–Thursday, May 26–I arrived at almost eleven o’clock at night at the entrance at the bottom of ISA, at Novena and 120th, that gives directly onto the courtyard. I noticed the guards of the different stairs of the residence were on full alert, despite the hour. And among them there wasn’t a single woman, contrary to usual. As I continued along the hallway, they would wave to accomplices. At the entrance to my stairway there was, coincidentally, the most robust of all, whom I knew by sight. “Your ID card.” I showed it to him. “You have to go see Victor, the dean.” Without looking me in the face he finished with, “You can’t go in.”

In Victor’s office was my trunk and two more bags with all my belongings, collected and held without my presence; missing nothing. The poor man, gentle in his manner, told me to collect everything, “There’s a car waiting to take you to the terminal and a ticket to Camagüey on the first bus.”

“But yesterday you told me that I had 48 hours to leave and that expires tomorrow afternoon,” I say.

“You have to go,” he answers.

Behind him came three leaders of the FEU, two guards and Miguel, the driver; there wasn’t a single woman among them. I picked up my things without any hurry and talked a lot with the boys of the FEU called together to throw me out. “They promised me a paper here tomorrow morning. I have to stay to collect it.”

Victor makes a phone call to consult on the situation, not saying who he is speaking to but answer is clear and repetitive: “You have to go.”

Andy and Danae tried to explain why my case was so sudden, Andy intelligently, Danae repeating slogans. “Look, this has been being analyzed for a while, we know of your problems in Santiago and Santa Clara, there’s no other alternative. And you have our full friendship!” said Danae. “Me, I respect your ideas, every person is different and think what you like, but you can’t do anything about this,” said Andy.

“What students in the FEU did you consult with about this? Can we go and ask them,” and they look to see how to take control again. “We are the FEU, we are the leaders, there’s no way to meet with anyone now, man,” Danae replies.

I finished getting my things and among us we carried everything to the car and got in. It’s a red van that I knew from before: I rode in it once when the ISA loaned it to me once to find several artists to participate in the student discussion forum. Now it’s the car in which I will complete my punishment.

From a distance I see a classmate looking at the scene, hiding behind a corner. I move away from the car and say to them, very loudly, “Please, take my things and take care of them; I don’t want to get in there. And if I do, it’s because you are forcing me. I will not resist, but I’m not going to go voluntarily.” I put my hands on my neck and they all burst out. Danae and Victor go around me and seem tense, like they’re looking where to grab me; the driver says don’t sweat it, he wants to go sleep; Rudy jokes; Andy warns me not to complicate things…

I don’t get in and when Danae is at the point of getting violent, and looks at Victor waiting for the order, I take out my cell phone and punch in a number. “Any force used against me is a kidnapping, and there are witnesses,” I declare.

Chaos. The dean loses his composure and also takes out his cell phone to ask for instructions. The driver remains silent and sits on a wall. The guards remain silent and leave. Andy keeps trying to convince me it’s for the better. Victor, alternately, gives me successive ultimatums and talks on the phone; it seems in the end he runs out of minutes because he goes into his office and keeps talking. The leaders of the FEU, lacking initiative, go after him.

I’ve been sending alarm messages, and some fellow students come down to see what’s happening or call my mobile. I sent a text message to Gisselle Candia, from my neighborhood and class, president of the FEU on my own faculty, and a very good friend for a long time; she’s sleeping in her room, two minutes from where this is going on, but doesn’t come down or call.

To those who do call or come down, I tell them, “Danae and the dean are the ones who are willing to hit me: record those names, please.” Where I am I can sense the discussion in Victor’s office: Andy the student who plays the piano shows, “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to participate in this, no.” Danae is upset because he heard me repeat his name on the phone. “Who told you I was going to hit you? Who told you that?”

It’s after 1:45 AM. A young guard comes near to negotiate, but the guy with the bushy mustache who’s watching the stairs calls emphatically calls, to get away from me. Victor gets out with a determined face and the guys behind him. Victor tries one last trick: he gets in the car and calmly calls me to sit by his side and talk. “I’m not a little kid, pal, come and talk here, outside, but I’m not getting in of my own free will. I’m here, come and get me.”

Victor gets out of the car and turns while Danae and Andy are still talking. It’s decided, one to the other: “Let’s go, let’s go.” Victor takes me by the left wrist, Danae by the back, some of the other two by the right arm, and they move forward to put me in the car, in the back seat. It’s synchornized like in the good cop shows. The directors of the FEU get in: Rudy at my back, Andy on my left and Danae on my right; Victor next to the driver. My cells phone doesn’t stop ringing, unstoppable. Faced with the worry of the boys about what I’m going to say about them, I ask them, “When I write about this, I will say that you grabbed me and put me in the car without doing visible physical damage to me, but against my well, does that seem good?” They fall silent. The car continues down Fifth Avenue, through the tunnel, and all along the Malecon, at dawn.

May 30 2011

The infinite Colon cemetery and its mausoleums of millionaires and politicians, La Milagrosa, half the country’s history buried in niches, the tunnels and two-story buildings, the tomb of Cecilian Valdes and that of the capital general, of the soldiers who died in Angola and the desolate of the ABC, the workers and employees close to president Menocal and the minister Carlos Miguel de Cespedes, the Masonic lodges with the monks and Cardinal Arteaga: men great and humble, friends and enemies, men of God and atheists, all placed, mourned, buried, remembered there side-by-side, with no great differences than that the miners guard the rest. There everyone goes, even those who kills, with the difference that the latter have their niches, and flowers from family and friends, and the others drier that they shower with hate.

On the western side of the bay of Santiago de Cuba below the cemetery, that of La Socapa and Cayo Granma, watered their graves on the steepest hillside, as if they were all sliding into eternity; in Bayamo the tombs of the once powerful cause panic, in their outrageous chapels of stairs under the level of the earth and skulls leaning out of the niches; on an intricate hill at the bottom of the land of Najasa, in Camaguey, there is one nearly invisible, of Spaniards who once went to try their luck in these parts; in Manati there still remains that made by the Marquis of San Miguel de Aguayo so his workers would not end up under some tree along the railroad tracks or in the middle of a cane field; in my Camaguey there are two special tombs, that of the cadaver of General Agramonte, burned by the hatred of the Spaniards over a century ago, and that of the Creole Dolores Rondon, famous for the poems that a lover of her youth redid every day on her grave, and also, there are the ghostly graves of those executed in the sixties, whom no one was allowed to inscribe in the books of the dead for fear that their names, noted there, would continue to conspire against the government that executed them.

But now, also, you have to visit the Santa Clara cemetery with gladioli and bitterness, because in this country they will continue to kill those who ask, with their voices alone, for a more just island. After the police beating almost on Mother’s Day, Juan Wifredo Soto, a humble man, one humble man more! has died. There is a mother in pain. There are many tense Cubans.

On the island there is the small of martyrdom, again.

May 8 2011

Cardenas, Ciudad Bandera — Flagship City — was not splashed by one drop from the Gulf of Mexico’s disaster created by BP. The contamination that saturates this stretch of land is caused by human activity in the ocean, the waste from Varadero beach, and the industrial presence along the shore including none other than the emblematic and prosperous distillery. Yet, the real disaster is the complete lack of concern of those who are supposed to respect and revere the place where our flag was first raised. All this in a country where there are laws to punish the flag itself.

Under these circumstances, the idea of attaining sustainable growth is more like the uncertainty of walking endlessly towards under-development without a sign of relief.

Cubans have not been taught to honor Cardenas as is the case with La Demajagua or Dos Rios. What happened in Cardenas in 1860, although of little influence on immediate political changes, was extremely relevant for the history of the island and at least two other countries: Spain and the USA. Yet, we, as people, are afraid to learn our history, the real one not the convenient heroic one that exists only in books and in the heads of some who benefit from their own version.

That year, the Spanish-Venezuelan Narciso Lopez entered the city of Cardenas. He waved in his hands the flag that has become our symbol to the human race and so it will be as long as we think the concept of nation is bigger than humanity itself. Back then, that idea did not call for too many emotions. The flag was just a rag designed by Teurbe-Tolon and it was meant to be carried by Lopez during his invasion of Cuba. It also provoked complex political associations for it resembled the one used by independent Texans years earlier to separate from Mexico and join the Union. The profuse blood shed of 1868 and the cautious American foreign policy turned a flag with northern flare into the flagship of an army of independent republicans.

In Cardenas, the population, Spaniards and Cubans alike, calmly allowed Narciso Lopez to land. People were not willing to change their world. Life was about getting by, as it is today, while the city grows thanks to tourism and the seashore rots under their nose. Maybe the citizens and officials of Cardenas think the city or the coastline do not belong to them. Perhaps they believe their space ends at the front door of their houses and offices. They are not yet convinced that the city, like the country, belongs to all of us.

Meanwhile, the flag in front of which we should kneel stands tall, two hundred meters away from a swamp of waste. A small swamp that pushes itself beyond the horizon all over the island.

Translated by: Wilfredo Dominguez

The post with which I inaugurated this blog was about how I could not enter the Cape of San Antonio in Guanahacabibes – in the far Western part of Cuba – for the simple reason that I was not a tourist.  At that time, the functionaries of the Ministry of Science, Technology, and the Environment denied me the entrance, just as the orders mandated they do so to every Cuban resident on the island. While I was getting over that frustrating trip, a few vehicles with tourist license plates swiftly passed by, heading towards the Cape. They braked right by me, asking (in Andalusian and Italian accents) the solicitous guard where their destination lay as he opened the entrance gate.

In the extreme opposite of the country, halfway from between Baracoa and the Yumuri river – on the North coast – there lies another one of those “border” spots. In it, some locally known cavers, carrying all sorts of official authorizations, waited for almost an hour under the mid-day sun until the official decided that they could pass towards the Maisi Point.

The Sabana-Camaguey archipelago, which borders the northern coast of the central provinces, is also prohibited.  It’s made up of a strip of hotels from Santa Maria Key to Paredon Grande, with very little terrestrial access -  some anti-ecological and enormously steep embankments from Caibarien to Turiguano – where vehicles which transport Cubans are carefully searched by police officers, who check to see how many documents people are carrying, or who make them get out of the car and stay there.  And you can’t just go in under the pretext of simple tourism.  If you don’t have a hotel reservation, or if you don’t have any credentials such as being an employee or participant in an already registered event, then you can’t go in.

The same thing occurs in Sabinal, which is less exploited touristically, and also in Romano Key, the largest and most conserved of the keys.  As if it wasn’t enough, there is at least one of those small islands which requires a double authorization project: Paredon Grande.  Any Cuban who gets there must show his/her permits, and since the terrestrial path goes through Coco Key (where in the entrance of Turiguano they already searched through the papers) then it turns out that you would get searched twice.

But on the Isle of Pines, which still has the official name of “Island of Youth”, it is an even more ironic case.  Up to well into the 20th century, Cuban sovereignty was not well defined in terms of this rugged area and with regards those supposed North-American colonizers.  And now, in the 21st century, for a national resident to access that minor southern island (the most extensive and inhospitable) it requires even more permits and processes, moreso than a European Union citizen trying to pass from one country to another.  And let’s not even mention Largo Key, which lies about 100 kilometers to the East:  I’ve only been able to see it from an airplane.

But it isn’t just land that is forbidden.  There are also bodies of water which surround the island (and which are supposedly considered territorial waters) which the authorities consider to be malignant for Cubans.  A couple of youths from Smith Key (or “Granma Key” as it is officially known) who are owners of boats which are used to explore the interior bay of Santiago de Cuba, opened their eyes wide in disbelief when I suggested to take a look into the exterior part of the bay, where the Morro Castle starts to rise.  “That’s forbidden”.  And this is a national mandate: any Cuban who is riding upon any sort of water vessel must be heavily armed with authorizations, if not he or she runs the risk of spending the night in a prison.

In all of these cases ecological protection, which is the justification for restricting or controlling the access to protected zones in the world, is discarded simply because of the differences which exist for a foreign citizen and a national resident who wants to visit any of these areas.  The foreign visitor would be content just to go in and take a quick look, while a Cuban, when he or she has no reservations (if the area is a hotel zone) could wait up to three months while searching for authorizations from up to half a dozen functionaries — and that really is a valid justification! And, mind you, this is always with the risk present of having such access being denied just because of trivial whims.

Where our internal exile is really colossal is in Caimanera, the city closest to the perimeter of the US Naval Base in Guantanamo.  We Cubans consider the territory where the Base is located to be part of our country, and we hope that one day it will really be that way.  Of course, we can’t enter that place, but in addition, those who run this country have really gone to the extreme, so much so that in Caimanera, a city which is fully national, no Cuban can get in unless they are pre-authorized and justified by an application filled out by any family they have who are residents of that town, and even they, the family, have to inform the authorities first.

The reason for so much discrimination is really shameful: trying to keep Cubans from leaving the country illegally (perhaps our island is a jail, which is supposed to be the only place where anyone can escape illegally from), protecting the environment,  (which they protect from us Cubans who go by foot, and not from foreigners who drive down such zones with their polluting automobiles which can easily exterminate any endangered species), and to prevent diversions of naval vessels and any provocations to the Base…

Out of all these excuses, and out of all the flagrant discrimination which they conceal, we can reach some painful conclusions.  The most obvious: that Cubans who are residents of their own country are not considered to be citizens who possess inviolable rights before the State (whose sole purpose is to guarantee these rights), and instead, our role is something very different.  We’re supposed to be people who live in a place where others rule, and where our value is below that of politics and the interests of our rulers.  The colossal fear which these individuals have of losing authority through illegal exits, improbable clandestine disembarkations, or through the psychological pressure of a conflict with the Naval Base, can never make sense in the 21st century to continue discriminating against its own citizens.  This only accelerates the need to get the leaders out of the way, for they have already lost the opportunity to fix things.  Today, the goal is very clear: tear down all the silent walls and discrimination which the fears of an older generation erected, be at peace with our own people, and reconstruct our pride.

When any Cuban can stare out to the sea from the Cape of San Antonio, without blushes or permits, then that will be a good sign.

Translated by Raul G.

There are many other travelers who don’t have tickets, and they don’t bother them, then why harass the young people?

Two months earlier, some of those same students boarded a train without tickets. That is normal in Cuba: the national railway doesn’t meet even twenty percent of passenger demand and there is a regulation that allows people who board without tickets to ride once they are on the train by paying double the established fare, to the delight of some industrious pockets. This system was applied to these boys, with the peculiarity that after having been squeezed (each one had to give a third of their monthly university stipend to stay aboard), they saw the money disappear into a pocket without getting any ticket or other proof of the transaction. So, it was the officials who got fatter.

What did they do then? They wrote about it in a letter to the State newspaper Juventud Rebelde, the national escape valve of anyone disgusted who can’t deal with the primary causes, and that let to a purification process in certain instances on the Cuban Railways. There were sanctions against a couple of people. We return to Scene 1.

The little train boss, fired up by that event, in a Mafia-like revenge decided to take it out on the Santa Clara university students, until one night we, forced by inevitable lack of transport, got on the train. Far from the station, the character noted our unmistakable presence and ordered us to get off. Faithful police and functionaries pushed us from car to car until they had us all cornered. And there, with shouts, threats of fines and jail cells, they demanded that we get off the train at the first stop.

We decided this was discrimination and vengeance and abuse and they had no right and in the end we decided to remain still and silent. We didn’t want to get off in Placetas. A girl explained to the police the reasons for the disobedience. The train boss swore definitely to stop it in Guayos: “I’m going to call the Party and whomever.” Instinctively, we move closer. The police smoke nervously, without looking us in the eye. A civilian with the suspicious air of a negotiator wants to know what we want. To go to Camagüey and pay what we owe. The shrieks of the train boss, obstinate about telephoning the station, feeling it all on the dark platform. Some hesitated: What if they arrest us? What if they kick us out of the University? No one answered the one who had spoken: his girlfriend looked at him and spit her gum out the window.

Welcome to the land of El Mayor*, says the most visible sign on the Camagüey train station. With our bags over our shoulders, still smiling still scared, we separate that morning at the station. We look back, the stopped train, its masters incapacitated and its servants hideous, in the early morning when some young men lost their fear.

*Translator’s Note: El Mayor is the nickname of Ignacio Agramonte (1841-1873), a hero of Camagüey in the fight for independence from Spain.

This magazine is also the end of many trips. In the province of Las Tunas, up north, I meet Christian essayist Frank Folgueira at his house, a stubborn historian focused on the history of another one of the towns – Manatí, which is also my birthplace – hit by the plague that is just ending. As if it were a national affliction, in Encrucijada de Villa Clara, in an old high roof wooden house from before the revolution, I meet Gabriel Barrenechea, suffocated by the gray vigilant atmosphere of his village, writing his stories and copious economics and political essays by hand.

Havana… and fourteen long flights of stairs to reach the apartment of two friendly Cubans, Yoani and Reinaldo, because La Rosa Blanca publishes some articles from Generation Y, which needs from channels like this one to be read in Cuba. Afterwards, down Tulipán street, we turn and continue for a couple of streets, in Nuevo Vedado, and underground – and under the sea which floods this island – we meet Rafael Alcides who breaks his self-imposed silence to offer us a few articles of unheard of tidiness.

A bit farther away, where Vedado and Downtown Havana meet, Yoss delivers dozens of writings of every kind, but always weighing more towards fantasy and science fiction, giving a breath of fresh air to the seriousness that national reality imposes on the magazine. I come back to Camagüey, and go to the only house where everything is discussed, freely and thoroughly, located in Agramonte, and I meet with the intellectual Rafael Almanza going through one of the thousands of pieces that make up his work.

Maybe, instead of coming back to Camagüey, I go from Havana to Pinar del Rio, where Dagoberto Valdés and Karina, Virgilio, Jesuhadín, Néstor, Servando and the others patiently try to inculcate a culture of tolerance in all Cubans. Or I’ll go to Bayamo, where my friend Ernesto Morales, who’s been just expelled from his post working as an official journalist – he’s finally managed to get that badge of recognition of his honesty and bravery – writes and blogs in the tense and isolated environment of the eastern provinces; or maybe to visit Elia, in Las Tunas, in search of Carlos Esquivel’s poems, a miraculous writer who has resisted the temptation of the big cities, and refuses to leave his indolent land.

From the work of all of them, and many others, comes La Rosa Blanca, which will later spread from computer to computer, from memory to memory, and even through old three and a half inch floppy disks, with the same silent fragility which characterizes its making. Here it is.

La Rosa Blanca 3.pdf

Translated by: Xavier Noguer

but without the Catholic clergy or the heroism: the town where my father and grandfather were born has been consuming itself for years in that bonfire of miserable and faded Macondos, which for almost a half century have been sizzling and crackling throughout this island.

Alcibiades’ store was the most prosperous in town.  Of the three or four there were, it was the best stocked:  fine canned fruit-preserves from Europe, wines, spicy sausages and hams, crackers, and soft drinks of the best domestic and international brands… you didn’t even have to go with the exact amount of money: no matter how poor the buyer was, it was enough to be a person of your word to take home all that was necessary, and pay later, with no hurry.

With that method of honest work and duty, which did work back then, my grandfather made up for his almost nonexistent academic education.  Long before the era of eternal promises had arrived, Alcibiades Constantín was already a respected member of the Order of Caballero de la Luz and the people of the region, who trusted in then President Grau San Martín’s sense of Cuban identity, had elected him to represent them.  His discreet economic prosperity allowed him to help the local 26 of July Movement rebels.  While he lived in Hatuey, he never ceased to work as a laborer in the Najasa sugar mill.

A short while ago, I returned to his town, the first one crossed by the central railroad line – to which it owes its existence – that goes from Camagüey to Oriente.  Of course, all dust and teetering wooden houses.  There’s nothing to eat on the streets, because there’s nothing to buy, except little government sandwiches surrounded by flies.  Every night, every evening, every weekend, bored men and the remaining youth get together in any old place, in a doorway or under the trees in the plaza to drink rum, talk about the lives they don’t lead, and drink rum.

An obedient creature showed up that morning in 1968 in my grandfather’s store, with a piece of paper in hand: “Alcibiades, starting today this is owned by the people.  Only thus will we all have a better future.”

* Translator’s note: Hatuey was a Taíno chieftain who has attained legendary status for having led an indigenous resistance in Cuba against the invading Spanish colonialists, thus gaining among Cubans the historical distinction of “First Rebel of the Americas”.  He was eventually captured by the Spaniards and burned at the stake.  There is also the Cuban town of the same name (presumably named after the chieftain) featured in this post, which the author makes use of as a pun.

Translated by: Yoyi el Monaguillo

It’s not pleasant to go to Guáimaro, the town with the most history in the Camagüey region, since the private buses that operate on the route from Camagüey take much more than an hour to arrive, and if one leaves from Las Tunas it’s almost the same.

I always passed through there in a hurry, headed somewhere else.  And that is what this town has always been, a place for passing through. Guáimaro is almost at the border that divides two very discordant regions, culturally and economically: Camagüey and Oriente (the East).

Guáimaro is well-known for the abundant livestock that has always roamed its plains. Although in the newspaper Adelante, the official voice of the Party in the province of Camagüey, it is prohibited to publish how much livestock there was in Camagüey prior to the Revolution, everyone knows that today only a shadow remains.  The milk, the meat and the cheese that comes out of here keeps a good part of the country alive.

What I related in the beginning, I saw on a Sunday, in the rápido that’s in front of the town’s terminal.  A rápido, anywhere in Cuba, is a type of cafeteria that is open 24 hours and is outdoors, with little tables covered by an awning and of course, alcoholic beverages sold in divisas (foreign currency); in other words, it’s not a place for the normal Cuban.  Later, I was told about the long, useless list that the authorities have compiled to track and monitor the teenagers who frequent the place.

The Guáimaro museum also opens at night. It is close to the road. It is the only house in Cuba where two constitutions have been signed, possibly the two most democratic. There were no more visitors. A few pieces of furniture, and graphics with brief information is all the visual tribute to the men who tried to turn a fertile farm into a country with civil liberties.  The cold that comes off the huge house is incapable of reviving the bitter sessions of 1869 and the jubilation of 1940.

Late at night I returned to the terminal, to wait for some type of transportation.  Meanwhile, the couples who had already been formed at el rapido began to slip apart.  Sleepy, I managed to get out of there aboard a truck at three in the morning.

Translated by: Antonio Trujillo

I have seen him on three occasions. On the first one, he smiled all the time: already his hunger strike, to demand Internet access for Cubans, had left its mark on his extremely lean body. He was cordial, although we didn’t know each other. A good man.

The second time – October or November 2008 – it was I who carried the load of my sincerity. I arrived at his house, the only one opened to me in Santa Clara, after being expelled with threats and violence from my Journalism studies at the University. A feverish Fariñas received me. “Tell me what we can do for you; we’ll go wherever you want.” The plural implied a courage that, just at that moment when I had been isolated, had the force of multitudes. In the improvised receiving room of his house in Condado, in one of the most modest and dreadful neighborhoods in Santa Clara, I breathed in the same straightforward determination that one senses in history books when reading about the bold men who at some point have wanted to make Cuba a better country.

The news of my preposterous second expulsion, signed by him, a hard-working, decent and respected journalist, resonated in hundreds of webs.

The third encounter was a very short time ago, behind the glass of the intensive care unit. The hunger strike for the political prisoners’ freedom has finished. I didn’t go very close – any germ on my clothes, in which I had just traveled more than three hundred kilometers, could be fatal to him. His gaze is lucid, amidst this era of geriatric dark clouds. He smiles thankfully at the visits of friends and acquaintances. His elderly mother takes care of him as if he had just been born; her alarm carries as much weight as her son’s tremendous decision. Fariñas takes advantage of the meager offerings on national TV; his mind is not that of a man who is ignorant of his environment, and even less of one indifferent about the future. Fariñas is full of ideas regarding what is happening in the country and what must happen so that the island where he insists on living – but living with dignity – will stop being the most incredible people-exporting paradise and the fief of one of the few governments in the western hemisphere – along with the African dictators of Burkina Faso and Equatorial Guinea, and the sultan of Morocco – obstinately asserting its own infiniteness.

The way out is guarded by copious and optimistic government propaganda.

More than fifty years ago, Che was among those who imposed their ideas amidst rivers of young blood from friends and enemies, of blasts and the smoke of gunpowder. Santa Clara, the city where comandante Guevara achieved his greatest glory, is full of tributes to the military man. But under those colossal monuments to violence, something has failed. An imperceptible crack, a tenuous and deep fissure that no one knows where it ends, goes around these streets: it starts under a hospital bed… and loses itself in the distance.

Translated by: Espirituana