This text is my recreation and condensation, in English, of my décimas published this week in the Spanish edition of 14ymedio. Remember, this post —part of Ideological Deviation, my weekly column— is considered a crime by the Cuban government.
Díaz Canel has a wife whose tackiness knows no bounds. It’s not as cute as it sounds, in the midst of Cuba‘s strife, when she says that, in her life, he’s “The Dictator.” For sure! (Lis Cuesta is done with demure.) Cubans long to live in peace. That regime is a disease, and we are ready for the cure.
I will be brief. These terrifying words began many of the interminable speeches of the Mansplainer-in-Chief who, pistol in hand, took control of Cuba 62,000 millennia ago. With this introduction to my new column in 14ymedio, I propose to do exactly the same. (I’m referring to being brief, not to taking over the Island. I hope the results are not so devastating.)
The column will appear weekly under the banner Ideological Deviation, which in addition to being the title of my book of décimas, is a horrible legal concept with which the government frightened me in my childhood and youth in Havana, and for which any Cuban can still be imprisoned in the land I fled. The décima is a style of Spanish poetry created in the XVI century by Vicente Espinel. The format is 10 lines, eight-syllables each. It rhymes ABBAACCDDC. Jorge Drexler did a beautiful TEDx talk about it.
Does this mean that I am going to write an opinion column exclusively to the rhythm of the décima? Well, yes. The reason is simple: the meter and rhyme —and, hopefully, the content— will render them memorable. This will make it easier for them to be recited in morning assemblies at schools throughout the nation. From preschool to sixth grade! To infinity… and beyond! Pioneers for dropping bars, we will be like Espinel!
My octosyllables will come in a variety of tones and registers —lyrical, nostalgic, satirical, parodic, animal, vegetable, and mineral— which are my ways of thinking and feeling Cuba from a distance. Thinking and feeling are crimes in totalitarianism, and the Cuba that the Castros took for themselves is no exception. (Ah… and I aspired to write a presentation without mentioning that last name that produces gagging, nausea, hives).
I escaped in order to be, an action that in Spanish is split into two verbs: ser and estar. I fled in order to think and to feel. Beyond the seas and decades later, I admire those who are, who think, and who feel in Cuba. I could not imagine my life in my land, but I celebrate that there are those who can do it and do it every day, against the winds and the tides of an implacable regime. These verses, and those to come, are for you.
“The People,” “the Cuban Nation”
“The people,” “the Cuban nation” is not the same as “the State.” (No need for you to debate. Go on. Have a revelation.) The “Revolution,” that station in Dante’s Hell, is a trap: the government does kidnap the Cubans who dare protest; at Díaz Canel’s request, they get erased from the map.
***
The photo in this post shows Cuban artist and two-time Latin Grammy-winner rapper Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo, who has been detained at the maximum security Pinar del Río prison since May 2021 for his song “Patria y vida.”
We don’t talk about Castro (no, no, no). We don’t talk about Castro. But…
It’s been six decades. Sixty-two years of hunger, repression, and fear. (No one’s allowed to speak).
Castro walked in with a murderous grin. And he destroyed Cuba’s dreams.
Castro said, “Elections, what for?” (In 1959.) In doing so, he ruined us all. (Abuela, get the boats.) Let’s go to Miami now… but anyway:
We don’t talk about Castro (no, no, no). We don’t talk about Castro. But…
Hey! I grew up in fear of his endless stumbling, he was always on TV, muttering and mumbling. I associate him with the sound of exile.
It’s a heavy lift, with a pain so numbing. Abuela stayed in Cuba with the family wondering, grappling with prophecies they couldn’t understand. Do you understand?
A greasy beard, guards along his path. When he calls your name it all fades to black.
His spies see your dreams. They feast on your screams. But:
We don’t talk about Castro (no, no, no). We don’t talk about Castro.
Ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh. I knew it when I met him. I hated his repression. Ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh. And then I had to tell him, I had to go. Oh-na-na-na-na-na.
Havana, ooh, na-na. There’s a police state in Havana, ooh, na-na, and throughout Cuba, but Havana, ooh, na-na, is where the ruling Castro Junta, the dynasty, keeps dragging our country through the mud.
A dictatorship is ruling the island. Sixty-two years! They’re sentencing minors for daring to speak against the tyrant. His name’s Díaz Canel, but we call him “Singao.” He’s just a puppet. My friends are in prison or they were exiled.
Ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh. I knew it when I met him. I hated his repression. Ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh. And then I had to tell him, I had to go. Oh-na-na-na-na-na.
Havana, ooh, na-na. There’s a police state in Havana, ooh, na-na, and throughout Cuba, but Havana, ooh, na-na, is where the ruling Castro Junta, the dynasty, keeps dragging our country through the mud.
***
Here you can find the Spanish version of this parody.
I would like to congratulate everyone included on this list. And I would like to thank everyone who is working on publishing (more) Spanish books in the US.
I take this opportunity to celebrate the authors, illustrators, and editors —Sylvie Frank and Reka Simonsen— of the following books that I had the pleasure and the privilege to translate.
It would have been almost impossible to convict Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd without those painful almost nine minutes recorded by an American teenager: Darnella Frazier.
Right now, there’s a Cuban teenager, also, an AfroCuban teenager, whose name is Amanda Hernández. She is 17, and she has been under arrest since July 11th for recording the protests that took place in Cuba.
She was not taking part in the protests. It should have been her right. But she wasn’t taking part. She was recording and, for that, the Cuban regime threw her behind bars.
In December 2017, inspired by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical, I recreated Fidel Castro’s history as narrated by the Cuban people he subjugated for over five decades of dictatorship. (You can listen to that song here; trigger warning: it is in Spanish.)
Last week, using the same song, I wrote “Cuba for Foreign Correspondents and College Professors” to talk to those two demographic groups that, in spite of the overwhelming evidence, continue to give the benefit of the doubt to the Castro regime, which was recently inherited by Miguel Díaz Canel.
I have a couple of friends who have already included the song in their history unit on Cuba, alongside my articles “Cuba and the Art of Repression” and ”A Tale of Two Cities.” (They teach in middle and high school. So, come to think of it, this is really for educators K-16.) Feel free to include all these materials in your curriculum!
Cuba for Foreign Correspondents and College Professors
Havana just turned five hundred. The beautiful Havana: the city of my birth, the city of my upbringing, the city of my youth, the city of my fears, the city I fled, the city that simultaneously told me, taught me, that all men (and women, but don’t push it) were equal, and to be thankful to the revolution because under the previous dictatorship someone like me would not have been considered a person. The city where I learned that someone like me meant a citizen with characteristics and that both euphemisms were used to refer to people of color. The city where I was racially profiled daily by policemen (yes, they were all men) who were my skin tone or darker. The city where I was afraid of being shot for the crime of living while brown in a country that had, in theory, eradicated racism.
The city that made itself indistinguishable from its government. The city where I learned doublespeak. The city where I mastered the intricacies of body language. The city where I learned the importance of subtext. The city where domestic violence is normalized. The city where I learned to love. The city where I learned that love was acceptable as long as it didn’t cross racial lines.
The city where Celia Cruz was forbidden by its military junta. The city where I couldn’t read the writings of Guillermo Cabrera Infante because his books were banned. The city that hid I Love Lucy from its natural audience. The city that tried to erase all accomplishments of Cubans living abroad because they (now, we) were considered counterrevolutionaries. The city where this text could not be published in my youth or now. The city where all its inhabitants have the right to say that they viscerally hate the president . . . of the United States of America. The city where the paper of record, Granma, “the official publication of the Cuban Communist Party,” published racial epithets to refer to the previous president of the United States of America. The city that taught me—that taught you—to call a dictatorship a revolution.
The city that taught me the meaning of hate. The city that taught me (how) to hate. The city in which I was instructed to specifically hate my exiled family members who lived in the US, the very family that sent us money, food, vitamins, shoes, clothes; the very family without whom we could not have survived after the collapse of the Eastern Socialist bloc; the very family that we were not supposed to talk about; the very family that we were supposed to refer to as worms.
Oh, Havana, or what remains of the city that simultaneously told me that racism had been eradicated with the advent of the Castro dynasty and that it was not polite to talk about race.
The city that taught me that I was lesser than my white peers, that I had bad hair, that I had to marry a light-skinned person “to improve the race,” that white people who weren’t smart were “a waste of color and hair.” The city where my white friends told me how much they loved their racist grandparents and made a point of telling me how racist they (the grandparents) were. The city where the mother of a friend would look at her date’s gums to see if they were too dark; the city where I’d be told to cut my hair short so that it wouldn’t show my black ancestry.
When Americans ask me if I can go back to Havana . . . Americans don’t ask me if I have been to Havana, or if I plan to go to Havana. They ask me if I can go. Am I allowed to visit the city where my grandparents are buried? They rarely acknowledge the anomaly of the question. They rarely address who would need to allow me or why would I need to be allowed to go instead of just simply going. Sometimes, Americans are eager to tell me that they have an upcoming trip to the island. Is there a place they should visit? But how do you say politely that it is immoral to be treated like royalty in a country where the natives are treated as fifth-class citizens? That was true under Apartheid. Why isn’t it true under Castro and his acolytes? I have likened Cuba to Westworld, the HBO documentary that depicts a theme park where the visitors are afforded privileges that the locals couldn’t possibly dream of. I have shared that essay with potential travelers. They still go. And, when they do, they even have a great time in the city in which I did not want to become a father. The city that made me who I am. The city I had to escape to become who I am. The city in which I could not walk with my wife without facing the police harassment and subsequent humiliation of doing something that is doubly dangerous for a Cuban male of color: holding the hand of a white woman and holding the hand of a foreigner. Can I go? Now that the last name changed but the dictatorship remains the same? Do I want to go? To quote Barack Obama, one of its most recent visitors: “Nah, we straight.”
What is there to celebrate about a dilapidated city? What is there to celebrate about a city where its people would rather take a raft through ninety miles of sharks and uncertainty than to live one more day under a regime that has lasted over six decades? Why are we not collectively mourning this?
Back to the question: aside from shooting my mouth off in conversation and in print, which makes me persona non grata to the Cuban regime, there are (meta)physical impediments for me to visit or go back to Havana. First: one visits a zoo, a museum, a friend. But can one visit one’s past? Is it still there? Heraclitus reminded us that no one can swim twice in the same river because both the person and the body of water have changed. Likewise: Havana is not the same city it was two decades ago. And I am not the same man.
When my American friends and colleagues ask me how old I am, I respond that I am ageless. They think it a joke. But I mean it in a literal way: I belong to no generation. Since I fled Castro, I have lived outside the confines of time and space. That is precisely the mere condition of exile: to exist out of one’s natural time and space.
But the truth is that I do travel to Havana whenever I want. Through literature, film, and music, that is. It was of that Havana, which once was mine, that I thought about ten years ago when I lived in Rome for a couple of months. Now, in its five hundredth anniversary, I would like to evoke that city from afar with a poem I wrote then, and it continues to speak my truth.
The Lost Steps
to the Mallozzi-Sammartino
With these shoes
that know the dust of the eternal city,
and sensed the glory that was the Palatine,
and walked the insomniac trails
of the crumbled Ostia Antica,
and climbed hills and mountains and stamped
a profound mark that I wanted to be indelible
in the beautiful meadow near Colleferro,
and lived happily in the quiet shade
of the neighborhood devoted to two-headed Janus,
and stumbled almost memorably
among the cobblestones and the rocks that perhaps
with the passing of time and the passing of people
made uneven that ancient road
that indicated that all the paths in the world
would bring the traveler to the Rome of my longing,
and remember the whisper of the river
along those nightly walks besides Trastevere
with friends I would want to embrace as I write,
and scored a goal and then another and gave
a celestial pass and an unfair kick
on the shin of a guy who was speaking Italian
and was not my enemy, just an adversary
in an improvised pitch in the spacious backyard
of a sober academy
among adults who were, who would doubt it, just kids
who ran panting behind the soccer ball
while the spring imposed its ubiquitous charm,
and in their effort to step on commonplaces,
took a pilgrimage with this scribe in tow
to visit Pompeii,
to sniff around Herculaneum,
to cross the streets of Piano di Sorrento
and one day will return to the land of Dante
to recite the ancient and immortal verses
that we inherited, for our fortune, from Petrarch,
and that I will declaim with my Cuban accent
while the sun sets in the sublime Tuscany,
and a good wine is paired with even better company
and those beautiful nephews who are not related
to my son or to me, and I love from a distance,
remind me, what joy, that family, thank the heavens,
is not written in blood,
with these shoes that I am wearing right now, dear fellows,
I shall never walk the ruins of Havana.
***
Art (title): ¿Seremos como quién? (díptico)
Artist: Rafael López-Ramos
Acrylic and ink on canvas
36 1/2″ x 37″
Sunday morning, when I saw on Facebook that President Obama had spoken to Cuban “celebrity” Pánfilo, I figured it had to be a joke. Then I learned that the video had been uploaded and was being shared by the United States Embassy in Cuba. I clicked, and there was the leader of the free world and his Cuban interlocutor exchanging pleasantries with a familiarity that made me uncomfortable. At some point, “Pánfilo” offered Obama his house so that he could stay with his family, and even told him on which side of the bed “Michelle” should sleep. Ah, that famous Cuban hospitality! For a noticeable part of the conversation, “Pánfilo” addressed Mr. Obama in Spanish using the informal you. It may be a slip, but it was not accidental that his casual tone kicked in when he told Obama what he may and may not bring to Cuba in order to avoid a delay at the airport. It is no secret that the imperative sounds more commanding when it addresses “tú” instead of “usted.”
In those three and a half minutes of the sketch, the modus operandi of both governments became obvious. Obama wanted to show from the get-go his intention to speak to and with the Cuban people. He wanted Cubans to know that he gets it, and he sprinkled his conversation with a couple of localisms that were really never meant to be uttered by a head of state, no matter how cool he may be. On its end, the Cuban government made sure to place on the other side of the telephone someone who knows the exact limits of what is politically permissible. “Pánfilo,” aka Luis Silva, has a TV show in government-controlled television. He knows the script. While Obama, himself, is speaking from the actual Oval Office, his Cuban counterpart is an actor, in a (poorly) staged studio; his character, in ridiculous makeup, pretends to be someone several decades older (and semi-decrepit), signaling that the only way one can make mild social criticism in the island is with the protective cloak of advanced age, and confirming, once again, that Cuba is indeed a country for old men. It is not superficial that the buffoon doesn’t speak as or for himself. It is a sad reality that this humorless “Pánfilo” is Cuba’s most popular comedian. But that’s fodder for another essay.
As I watched the skit, I wondered out loud who is advising Mr. Obama on Cuba. If he really wanted to speak with the people, there was another Pánfilo he needed to hear from: the Afro-Cuban man who, in 2009, was imprisoned by the Castro regime for appearing drunk in a YouTube clip screaming what most Cubans are afraid to say while sober, that “what Cubans need is food” —not even freedom, just food! Still, his one minute and 21 seconds of fame earned him a two-year sentence in jail.
***
On Monday, during his joint press conference with Castro the Younger, President Obama, again, made his intentions clear: “I told President Castro that we are moving forward and not looking backwards.” Inspiring as it may sound, not looking backwards after 57 years of dictatorship is irresponsible and naive. We must not move to the future by sweeping the past under the rug. Cuba needs a Truth, Memory and Justice commission that documents, and acknowledges deaths and disappearances resulting from political violence.
President Obama has said he wouldn’t set foot on the island until human rights conditions improved. But political repression has increased since December 2014, when it was announced that there would be a thawing of relations. In the first two weeks of March 2016 alone, there were 526 political arrests on the island. Failing to mention the Ladies in White while in Cuba, or the systematic repression they face every Sunday when they go on their peaceful morning walks to draw attention to the regime’s violations of human rights is not only a blunder, but a morally objectionable omission. After decades of totalitarianism, Cubans need active solidarity, not platitudes. We have no use for subtlety at this point. We need concrete words and deeds.
President Obama, who is clearly concerned with making history, must understand that history is also made of images. Alas, 21st century history is also made of memes. And he has provided one for the ages: at the end of the historic press conference, Mr. Obama, ever the diplomat, approached Castro, shook his right hand, and attempted to put his left arm over the shoulder that generally has the stars of the uniformed general. Castro, in a textbook definition of “manhandling,” removed it like an Aikido master and raised it up, and Obama’s hand was left hanging awkwardly. This moment, which may seem trivial, captures the real power dynamic underneath all these exchanges. In the approach/avoid tango, Castro is leading.
***
We must un-Americanize the Cuba problem. It is unreasonable to ask President Obama to bring democracy to Cuba. It is not his job. As a Cuban native, it was my job, and I fled the island. It is the job of the entire Cuban population, and some Cuban citizens flee, some remain silent, some demand their rights, and some join the Castro mob in its daily repression of human rights by harassing and beating social justice activists. I do not expect Obama to bring about democracy in Cuba. I am, however, dismayed that he took his entire family on a vacation trip to an island in which repression is commonplace —as if it were a theme park. The sad part is that it is a theme park! Where else can you find a shrine to the Cold War that hasn’t ended? Where else can you see such beautiful ruins? Where else can you fetishize poverty and feel like a liberal? Have you not seen the photos from the New York Times special on Obama’s visit to Havana? The city may be crumbling, but look at the light!
Our problem is, of course, this article. As I write it, Cuban peaceful demonstrators have been forcibly arrested throughout the country, limiting their movement, association and visibility before, during and, most likely, after Obama’s cameo appearance in my homeland. The problem is that every piece written about Obama’s tour of old Havana or his eating the monthly meat ration of a Cuban at an independently owned restaurant is a distraction from Cuba’s real problem, which is not its relationship with the US, but its fundamental lack of freedoms from a dynastic tyranny.
The ever-growing legions of Cuban experts, and most importantly, time, will tell if President Obama’s trip to Cuba was ill-advised or a brilliant move. Until I’m proven wrong, I can only think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous dictum: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
*
Alexis Romay
Washington, DC
PS: This text was originally published on NBC News. You can read it in Spanish here.
Mixing Memory and Desire 