Image taken from the “underblog” of Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos

In the snapshot of the Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos which will be taken of his visit to Cuba, there will be no room for nonconformist relatives. In front of the lens there will be the forced smiles of the ministers, the luster of the ministries and the feigned complacency of those who hold power. In the composition those who say “No” will be superfluous and skeptics will be excluded. Only happy faces will be allowed in front of the camera; those with dirty clothes will stay home, even though the washing machine of public discussion hasn’t been turned on for decades nor has detergent been allowed anywhere near the smelly utopia.

He who moves will not appear in the photo, because the resulting image will need to obtain political and economic support, not generate concern. Thus, the cobwebs will be whitewashed, the military uniforms hidden under protocol suits and – for one brief moment – they will appear younger than they really are. Thorny issues will be avoided. Why discomfit the visitor? And once he leaves some naughty child or other will get his smack on the head for bothering the guest. The syrupy family portrait of this visit will be in sepia because the contrasting tones of reality do not fit into the album of diplomacy.

With one of those silly little cameras used to take the same pictures tourists always take, the usual repetitive images will be taken: a school full of students with well-ironed uniforms, a factory with shiny modern machines, a nearly completed engineering project, and there will be no lack, of course, of the staged crowds, organized from above.

The negative will need to remain impeccable for later printing in the pages of history. If perhaps some inappropriate detail slips in, it will have to be fixed in Photoshop, retouching the photo of the already altered normality and editing the faces of those who did not come out smiling.

I 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!

Bypass machines that disconnect, the cries of babies that echo. Stamps that mark papers to deny and condemn; kilobytes that carry my voice on the Internet without my needing to move. Someone who frowns at me while talking on the walkie-talkie of control. A bird called Twitter who raises me up with his feet. Offices with uniformed people who confirm, “You may not travel at this time,” although I am already thousands of kilometers from here, in this virtual world that they cannot understand nor fence in.

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.

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

I search, without success, for a bottle of detergent to wash the glasses smeared with grease and fingerprints, which don’t yield to water and the dishcloth. Looking for the soapy liquid, I have walked part of Havana today, as the television announcers call on us to strengthen our hygiene before the advance of H1N1. The alert occasioned by the epidemic, however, has not caused the shops to lower the price of cleaning products, not even the cost of simple soap which is the equivalent of the wages for a full day’s work. Instead, the opposite has happened. The collapse in imports has been most notable in those that are used to bathe and disinfect.

The voice of the announcer calls on us to wash our hands often, use handkerchiefs when we sneeze and maintain good personal hygiene, but the reality forces us into filth. We lack face masks, running water in many houses, the simple possession of vitamin C to strengthen the organism, and cleanliness in public places. Thus, the so-called “swine flu” has fertile ground to reproduce. While it advances through our neighborhoods, the official media maintain their reserve and don’t mention the closed schools, the quarantined sites and the full hospitals.

This illusion of paradise is killing us. This wanting it to appear that we live better and that our statistics put us at the world average, cannot manage to hide the fragility of our society in the face of an epidemic that requires material resources in the hands of citizens. If soaping the body and having a bit of alcohol to sterilize the hands become luxuries, how can we stop the pandemic that is already upon us? If the September ration of soap never even reached the rationed market, how is it possible that on TV they call for hygiene without referring to the material resources to accomplish it. Is it that they haven’t noticed before that we are sinking into the dirt? They have to face the ravages of conjunctivitis, diarrhea, and the viruses to figure out that sanitation is not only a white coat and a stethoscope, but starts in the streets, with collecting the garbage, with showers in the houses and with a mother who cannot wash the plate her child will eat off.

Until the mid-eighties, one could find them find them throughout the national territory. For a quarter century they asserted their presence, aggressive exhibitionists. They seemed absolutely convinced. Optimists impervious to any discouragement, they always had the precise argument on hand to close the door to any defeatism, the tendentious commentary of the “enemy.” They affected an arrogant smile as a prelude to their answers, a didactic air filled with superiority and a look equal parts contemptuous and pious when they lavished their clarity on the confused. At time they showed surprise, amazed that people existed who did not understand that the bright future was on the point of arriving and establishing itself.

Now some of them, like experienced chameleons, have metamorphoses and are studying the rules of marketing to apply them in the joint venture companies with foreign capital where they occupy the positions of managers. They have the refine olfactory sense to smell the inevitable changes that are coming. When they’re along with someone excluded and critical, like me, they pat our shoulders while they whisper in our ears, “I’m with you.” In this, and other ways, the opportunists believe they are reserving a place in tomorrow, where they plan to wear whatever mask it takes for them to continue to benefit themselves.

The transmutation of this species, that preyed on those who thought differently, has contributed to a slight improvement in the spiritual climate of the nation. With the gradual disappearance of the inquisitors, the heretics are gaining confidence, which does not mean that the bonfires have been extinguished. The repressive institutions continue intact, the difference is now they lack arguments and can only wield their desire to stay in power, no longer as a social class that fights to claim their rights, but rather as a caste, a family clan that defends their own interests.

A broken bridge, the indigenous name and the feeling that the town of TaguayabĂłn 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.

“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.

They knocked on the door with a search warrant that Aldo’s mother could barely see. They went directly to the room to take the computer where the lyrics of those songs that circulate throughout the country are stored. There was no way to make the police see that this man with long hair and tattoos all over his body is not a delinquent. Those in uniforms do not like hip hop and a hairy “tatted up” man is what, to them, most resembles a criminal. They didn’t take into account that this one had been evoked by Juanes just a week ago in the Plaza of the Revolution when he mentioned the group Los Aldeanos. The news of the detention spread until the singer Silvio Rodriguez himself interceded for them to return the computer and to let him go home.

Aldo and Bian already have been isolated from almost everything, save this gift for music that the censorship has not managed to take from them. Some friends distributed printed sheets to denounce the exclusion of the popular duo and proposed that “these men be accepted as vital organs of the nation, it’s a question of honor.” But ours is a society admitted into intensive care with transplanted parts and a dialysis machine connected to the area where citizenship should be working. We live on an Island where they excise and amputate because a few diagnose that a member has gangrene when in reality it is, simply, different.

On having taken the musician and his computer—which lacks ownership papers as the vast majority do in Cuba—perhaps they were administering an injection of dread, the medication known to increase fear. But already it doesn’t work like before. Now, the apprehension is transformed in songs, in blogs, on discs that circulate hand to hand, while the confiscations and arrests only make it go further.