The cellphone rang nervously and I jumped in my chair. It had been more than a week since the telephone service was virtually cut off and suddenly that little gadget with its keys and screen gave a sign of life. "Camila Vallejo will be in Havana tomorrow," a voice on the other end said and hung up. After the days we lived through during the visit of Benedict XVI to Cuba, I confess that the news of a new arrival didn't raise my hopes.
We were still trying to complete the reports of the arrests during the papal days and the living room of my house was a hive of friends telling stories of cell blocks and house arrests. The vice president of the University of Chile's Student Federation (Fech) came at a bad time, I thought. But then I realized that the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the Young Communist Union had just begun, and it all started to make sense.
The two islands in which I live were all mixed up in my head: the Cuba of the official celebrations with smiles and slogans, and the other one, that of dissidents forced into cars and prevented from attending a Catholic Mass.
The tracks Camila Vallejo would follow once she arrived in our capital would be difficult, almost impossible, to know beforehand. On one side was the circle of protection -- and control -- that surrounded her, and on the other, the "long shadows of the watchers" who follow me everywhere.
To make it more difficult, the events on her agenda would occur inside schools or political institutions, where the public is winnowed to the most reliable. So Camila and I would travel in two dimensions that very rarely touch, in two worlds separate and incommunicado, between which all the bridges have been blown up.
But there remained at least one terrain where some type of dialogue was possible. I took my cell phone, the same one that had come to life just days before. I wrote a short text message and sent it to the phone number of the social network Twitter, an accidental and blind road numerous Cubans use to narrate the island in 140 characters. "I would like to talk with @Camila_Vallejo but the official circle around her is unassailable," read my short trill into cyberspace.
By then, two men in plaid shirts had prevented me from approaching the Auditorium of the University of Havana where she presented her book, We Can Change the World. As I approached, one of them questioned me: "Get lost, you will not gain entry here."
I confirmed, then, that there would be no blonde wig nor bushy mustache that would serve to as camouflage to allow me to sneak into the place. I resigned myself.
A few hours before my tweet appeared on the great World Wide Wed, Camila Vallejo visited with a group of young people from the University of Computer Sciences. She and Karol Cariola, secretary general of the Chilean Communist Youth, were met with a wave of smiling faces, applause and admiration.
In the audience, dozens of young people paid silent attention to her stories about the situation of education in Chile, the students' demands, and the details of the street protests. A University Federation that was not able to organize a single spontaneous March in the last 53 years, heard the anecdotes of asphalt and strikes that came to them from the south.
Among those listening were, without a doubt, the most promising computer scientists in our country, but also the police who crawl the Web. There was the creme de la creme of "Operation Truth," in charge of denigrating on the internet those with views contrary to the system, and attacking sites critical of the government of the island.
Camila and Karol talked opposite our virtual soldiers, before our riots of thought. Those who use not rubber bullets but insults, not fire hoses but stigmatization and slanders about the defenseless nonconformists.
The other meetings ended up marking the strictly official character of the charismatic Camila Vallejo's visit to our country. She exchanged opinions and hugs with the secretary general of the Young Communist Union of Cuba, the grayest of all the obedient leaders this organization has had. The Chilean was still enveloped in the glamor that always accompanies her, but subjected to the hidebound and obedient protocol of her Cuban counterpart.
A curious paradox, from her anti-hegemonic posture in her country, Camila passed to sharing a word and a smile with the hegemony of official Cuban thinking. She also shook hands with the current president of the University Student Federation (FEU), Carlos Alberto Rangel, who fulfills the sad role not of representing the interests of the student body to the powers-that-be, but rather the reverse.
So the leader of an organization without autonomy posed for a photo with the promising figure who, in 2011, shook Chilean reality and raised in passing strong sympathies and antipathies in the rest of the continent and the world. The Cuban FEU tried, in this way, to reap a share of the irreverent aura that accompanies Camila Vallejo, knowing that disobedience is a posture that, for five decades, has not resonated on the wide steps of the University of Havana.
Each handshake offered by these cadres formed in opportunism, was like an urgent ritual to appropriate the image of the young rebel. However, whenever their eyes met they realized that, had she been born here, they would have pushed her -- without mercy -- to exile, to prison, or to wearing a mask.
On her personal blog, Camila Vallejo had fanned the flames of the controversy before arriving in the largest of the Antilles. "Cuba is not a perfect society, nor does Chile have to follow its path," she declaimed, and this single phrase already marked a distance with relation to the most outdated postulates of our official discourse.
But she also made the mistake, as many do, of identifying our country with the government that directs it, our nation with the ideology in power. Camilla wanted to share with her readers a reflection "on the paradox of the discourse of those who criticize Cuba so rabidly, or those who feel love and respect for her," not realizing that in that statement she was incurring a confusion as hard to remove as the roots of marabou weed are from Cuban soil.
The so abundant reproaches are not directed at our national identity, nor at the palms that grow in the plains, nor at a culture that, in the last three centuries, has produced writers, artists and musicians of universal scope. The contrary opinions are not aimed "at Cuba" but rather directed to a government that has penalized differences in thinking and kidnapped our voice.
If the injustice of identifying the millions of people who inhabit this island with a sole ideology is not dismantled, then the sad situation of citizens born here being called "stateless" or "anti-Cubans" for having opinions different from those of the Communist Party will continue.
I invited Camila Vallejo for coffee, precisely to debate these injustices and misunderstandings. I did it via Twitter, because I am aware that trying to direct a word to her in public would be taken -- at the very least -- as an attack. But the hours passed and the sign of a possible meeting never came.
A week earlier Benedicto XVI had also declined to listen to other voices from our illegal civil society. The Ladies in White had asked Joseph Ratzinger for one minute of his time, in exchange the Cuban government arrested many of them and prevented many others from leaving their homes.
With the recently arrive geography student it wasn't necessary to trigger a wave of repression in the style already known as "Operation Vote of Silence," it was enough to lock the visitor in the official circle from which she could not extract herself. The rebel Camila obeyed these rules.
Later I learned from the press that -- like the pope -- she had been talking to Fidel Castro. She had been taken to the quasi-secret place where the elderly ex president writes his long and delirious texts. The patriarch of the Cuban Revolution received the young woman who, for a while, managed to infect him with her aura of youth, of the future.
The same Comandante en Jefe who dismantled all traces of student independence -- burdening it with controls, informants and purges -- declared his sympathy for the stories of rebellion told to him by Camila Vallejo. That man, who stood out in his own time at the university for his tendency to confront power, ended up cutting off all roads so the young people of today cannot do the same to him. He who shouted himself hoarse in his younger years yelling "Down with the dictatorship," ended up creating another and preventing the anti-government slogans.
The vice president of Fech left the meeting with him declaring that "all the Reflections Fidel has written constitute light and hope for Chile." She made it clear that an exchange of ideas and sips of coffee at my table was an impossibility. Official Cuba had abducted Camila Vallejo.
I picked up my phone again, the only and immediate way for people like me -- who, in a country like this, will never get one minute on television, nor space for some lines in the national newspapers -- to express an opinion. I sent another message, but without much hope: "Yesterday @Camila_Vallejo met with Fidel Castro. Does she have one minute for irreverent and rebellious youth?"
At the moment when I wrote these lines, I didn't know whether she had been able to read my tweet, or if she, too, is suffering the problems of lack of internet connectivity endured by so many Cubans. I had no more than sent this invitation when there was a frantic ring ring echoing in my pocket.
I confess that at that moment I thought it was a call from this 20-something of the perfect face and passionate talk who is a member of the Chilean Communist Party. But in reality the voice I heard on the other end was a woman desperate about the arrests in the east of the country.
She wanted to tell me how the political police raided the home of a dissident and took him, his wife, and various colleagues in the struggle away, along with a good part of his papers and books that they found in passing. She also told me about the three daughters of the marriage who were left in their grandmother's care, until we learn if their parents are going to be prosecuted for some crime or are only being detained to intimidate them into ceasing to express themselves.
The other Cuba that had not learned of Camila Vallejo broke in on my telephone, calling on me for greater attention and responsibility than some journalistic romp of pursuing a delegation that moved only in secure, filtered places. I could not determine the age of the woman who had called and described to me the repressive wave in Palma Soriano and Palmarito del Cauto. I never knew if she was mixed, black or white; young, mature, old... but in my fantasies I saw her with an almost perfect aspect, sculpted with the mastery of Greek statue.
As she spoke, I constructed in my mind some cheekbones and a magazine-perfect chin, dreamy chestnut locks, a discouragement-proof youth. But a sob broke my digressions, a whimpering on the phone unmade that perfectly proportioned face and confronted me with the decomposed face of the real Cuba. The face I had wanted Camila Vallejo to also see!
Follow Yoani Sanchez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/yoanifromcuba
http://www.ripoffreport.com/colleges-and-universities/camila-vallejo/camila-vallejo-camila-vallejo-7b520.htm
http://www.ripoffreport.com/colleges-and-universities/camila-vallejo/camila-vallejo-camila-vallejo-714de.htm
http://www.ripoffreport.com/public-schools/camila-vallejo/camila-vallejo-camila-vallejo-7f30f.htm
It must be said, too, that the American/European dominated 'human rights' agencies, which appear to be favourite cut and paste material with the vociferous Miami mafia who post here, are also wildly out of touch, pushing the forlorn hope that real Cubans would be stupid enough to follow the one-dimensional Yoani Sánchez into economic colonisation by the USA. Not in this century.
zenos said:
"while Sánchez is working to sell out her country to the near fascistic USA."
"one-dimensional Yoani Sánchez into economic colonisation by the USA."
"It must be said, too, that the American/European dominated 'human rights' agencies, which appear to be favourite cut and paste material with the vociferous Miami mafia who post here, are also wildly out of touch,"
CAN YOU PROVIDE PROOF OF YOUR STATEMENT WITH LINKS? OTHERWISE IS DEFAMATION, CALUMNY OR "CHISME"! I LIVE IN VENICE NOT MIAMI!
COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS: ATTACKS AGAINST INDEPENDENT PRESS IN CUBA
Official repression in Cuba remained the most intense in the hemisphere. Official censorship was codified in law and closely enforced. The government persecuted critical journalists with arbitrary arrests, short-term detentions, beatings, smear campaigns, surveillance, and social sanctions. Despite the island nation's low Internet penetration, the battle for free expression was being waged almost entirely online. The government enlisted a legion of official bloggers to counteract a vibrant independent blogosphere. A fiber-optic cable project would enable the introduction of high-speed Internet. The launch of broadband service, which faced delays in 2011, would improve the island's government-approved Internet connections, but would not extend connectivity to the general public.CPJ research found that Cuba and Iran led the list of countries from which journalists were forced to leave in 2010-11.
http://cpj.org/2012/02/attacks-on-the-press-in-2011-cuba.php
Video: Cuban Doctors Defection Comes at a Price - The Wall Street Journal’s Joel Millman reports on Cuba’s program of sending doctors abroad as missionaries—
The video tells the story of one Cuban doctor working in Gambia who took nine months to escape and now lives in Florida. His wife and child are still in Cuba and she lost her job at a hospital as a result of being blacklisted for five years because of his defection. Another downside is that, without their medical records and certifications (held by the Cuban government), Cuban doctors in the United States can only work as nurses or surgical assistants.
And even though Cuba lets 20,000 people emigrate annually, doctors rarely get permission to leave. Still, almost 1,600 doctors have defected since 2006 as a result of:
Cuba has been sending medical “brigades” to foreign countries since 1973, helping it to win friends abroad, to back “revolutionary” regimes. Estimates of what Cuba earns from its medical teams—revenue that Cuba’s central bank counts as “exports of services”—vary widely, running to as much as $8 billion a year. Many Cubans complain that the brigades have undermined Cuba’s ability to maintain a high standard of health care at home
http://www.good.is/post/video-cuban-doctors-defection-comes-at-a-price/
Not much was heard from dissidents during Pope Benedict XVI's recent visit to Cuba. They say that is because the government mounted a campaign of arrests and harassment to silence them. After the pope left, I was invited to a meeting that the country's best known Internet blogger, Yoani Sanchez, had with other critics of the government to share their experiences.
"I heard the car start moving with incredible speed," said Danilo Maldonado, waiving his arm tattooed with political drawings. "And when it turned like this, they grabbed me and shoved me inside." Maldonado, a graffiti artist, said he was held with other detainees for three days near Havana's airport.
Meeting in the shaded garden of one of their houses, these dissidents said the roundup coincided with the pope's March 26-28 visit, as he held mass in Havana and Santiago and met with President Raul Castro and his brother Fidel.
Some dissidents said they were were taken into detention, others say they were put under house arrest. Many of them said they were unable to use their cell phones.
CLICK LINK FOR VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT!
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/americas/Silenced-During-Papal-Visit-Cuban-Bloggers-and-Dissidents-Speak-Out-146170015.html
http://maleconazo.cubaverdad.net/video.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHQvyifbRfw&feature=plcp&context=C4ec1143VPvjVQa1PpcFOC0EF9MohjnLm-9bHQe_YVynXlWVm9_UQ=
There you are, with your tens of thousands of dollars in prize money, condemning the country in which you chose voluntarily to live. Imaginate!
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: DOCUMENT - CUBA: ROUTINE REPRESSION: POLITICAL SHORT-TERM DETENTIONS AND HARASSMENT IN CUBA- 2012
The Cuban government wages a permanent campaign of harassment and short-term detentions of political opponents to stop them from demanding respect for civil and political rights. Since Amnesty International’s last report on the respect for the freedom of expression in Cuba, published in June 2010, (Restrictions on freedom of expression in Cuba, Index: AMR 25/005/2010) the situation has further deteriorated with a steady increase in the number of arbitrary detentions. Criticism of the government is not tolerated in Cuba and it is routinely punished with arbitrary and short-term detentions, “acts of repudiation” (demonstrations led by government supporters with the alleged participation of state security officials aimed at harassing and intimidating government critics), intimidation, harassment and politically motivated criminal prosecutions.
The authorities continue to deny those wanting political change in Cuba their right to express and share their ideas freely and without reprisal or retaliation. Repression is routine. Peaceful demonstrators, independent journalists and human rights activists are routinely detained for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association, assembly and movement. Activists are often detained as a preventive measure to stop them from attending public demonstrations or private meetings.
CLICK LINK FOR ENTIRE REPORT!
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR25/007/2012/en/ccc6aeba-e892-4079-9e4a-63eebecd8a76/amr250072012en.html
Cuban anti-riot police acting against the Pakistani student protest:
http://youtu.be/ZKJqXMbLsxs
Cuba security agents aiming at protestors during the Maleconazo:
http://maleconazo.cubaverdad.net/
Che is indeed no "hero". He was a ruthless killer betrayed by Castro and abandoned by Castro.
I think your erroneous perception will be corrected visiting http://www.cubaverdad.net
The image is Che with a stick (striking Cubans) with a text saying "No Mas".
You are way off on interpreting the image and the name. You are right about Che.
This page you will make you change your mind:
http://cubaverdad.net/che_anatomia_de_un_mito.htm