Changes in Cuba
photo by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
“The day that Juan Juan Almeida announced the start of his hunger strike was like reliving the nightmare we’d experienced with the long fast of Guillermo Fariñas. “This is the worst of all decisions,” we, his friends who love him, told him, sure that he would not withstand the rigors of starvation, nor that the authorities would yield before his empty gut rebellion. Fortunately we were wrong. It turned out that the talkative JJ — as his close friends call him — was not only willing to take his chances arm wrestling with the government, but seemed willing to sacrifice himself for all of us, who have repeatedly been denied permission to travel outside this archipelago.
The jovial forty-three-year-old leaves us a painful but effective lesson, because although we have no elections to vote directly for those who govern us, nor courts to accept claims of police abuse, much less means by which a citizen can denounce the immigration restrictions holding the national territory in their grip, we still have our bones, our skin, our stomach walls, to reclaim, by way of the fragile terrain of our bodies, the rights they have taken from us.”
Could this victory be a sign of change? Earlier today, to my extreme surprise, I read that the Cuban rap duo “Los Aldeanos” are going to be allowed to travel to Miami to perform a concert. This is even more unexpected because the music/message of this group is explicit, honest, uncompromising, and critical of the Cuban government. They’re voice has been censored, their shows shut down, and permission to leave has always been denied–until now.
And if that’s not enough, the free-market reforms just announced have really got my hopes up (at the same time confusing me even more). The changes allow, “foreign investors to lease government land for up to 99 years – potentially touching off a golf-course building boom – and loosening state controls on commerce to let islanders grow and sell their own fruit and vegetables.”(HP)–giving the government a share (via taxes) of course. That second bit is extra surprising, (remember that in Cuba the government owns everything, 95% of the population is employed by the government) it’s not uncommon to find young Cubans selling what they themselves have planted and grown on the highways – cautiously cross-examining their customers in fear that they might be the National Revolutionary Police posing as a civilian. It appears that these vendors will no longer have to run into the forest in order to avoid being arrested when they see a police officer. How this will affect the black market (integral to survival for both the vendors and the customers)? It’s hard to say. I’m trying to remain optimistic.
