Cuban Dog Asks for Permission to Travel to Cuba

Is winter in New York and the streets are covered with snow. It has been like this for the last few weeks. Snow, rain –worst than acid rain to my mind-, cloudy days that give way to darkness at 4:30 pm. 24 hours after the beautiful white flakes stopped falling from the sky the urban landscape turns ugly. The streets covered by a browny soup of mud that comes from taxi tires and truck fenders waste. Even the dogs of Madison Avenue are wearing leather boots to save their feet from cold dirt.

I want to be in Havana. I have money in my pocket to go right now. Also, my mother has been begging me for a long time to visit her, nagging me and admonishing me for not doing so for the last five years. Not that I didn't want to do so or that I haven't tried, but I haven't been able because I have  been busy working or studying or simply didn't have the money. The reasons why I haven’t visited her for so long are several, but all of them have to do with a Cuban government permit that would allow me, a Cuban, to enter my country.

The permit to enter my own country has to be renewed every two years. It cost me about USD 200.00 and about three months of waiting. I usually send my Cuban passport through a travel agency to Cuba, were the Cuban Immigration Department review it and stamp it with a notice of authorization to get in. Even after that, when I get into Havana’s Jose Marti airport a functionary will check a list of blacklisted persons by the Ministry of Interior; people that were called “too repugnant to enter Cuba” by one of the destitute servants of the Cuban government. In order to be too repugnant to enter Cuba, or to leave it, is enough to publish something that the government doesn’t like, or to make a film, a painting, or take a picture not seen with good eyes by the Communist Party.

So I’ve been talking to my mother on a monthly base for the last five years paying USD 1.15 dollars a minute in Skype, which is more than three times as expensive as calling to Congo, USD 39.8 cents a minute. Airplane tickets from New York to Havana, if you can find a flight, are around USD 800.00 round trip, while flying to Dominican Republic is only around USD 400.00. Flying to Havana from New York City costs almost as much as flying to Johannesburg, South Africa.

I have the money, the will and the anxiety to flight. No that I really want to go to Cuba but I haven’t seen my mother, and my brother for five years. But my permit to enter the country expires in few days, exactly after February 1^st 2011, and I will have to pay another USD 200.00 and wait another three months in order to get permission to enter my own country. By doing so I will have paid more than USD 600.00 in the last five years; without being there even once. That if I’m not yet blacklisted by the Ministry of Interior as a “too repugnant person to enter Cuba”.

 I’m sick, tired and angry that the generation that governs Cuban keeps passing the baton of their failures and errors to my generation and newer generations. They, the government still in power, took these immigration measures after some situations that they themselves created or helped to create and that were situated in the context of the Cold War Era. They, the old generations in Cuba, are passing the tab of their own expenses to me and to my generation --like we don’t have already enough of our own. It is way time for them to realize once and for all that their problems are not our problems. We were born after the Revolution and we live in a different world that the one that they were born and lived into. There is no Cold War; there hasn’t been one for the last 20 years. What is out there is terrorism at a global scale. Domodedovo airport; in Russia, has been bombed by radical fanatics. The world is different and the conflicts and immigration problems between Cuba on one side, and the USA and rest of the world on the other doesn’t make any sense anymore –if they ever had.

But I still have to suffer the humiliations of being regarded as a sub-citizen by the Cuban government. Being cheated and robed; 20% of the money I have sent to my mother in Cuba for the last 5 years has been pocketed by the Cuban government. Like it wasn’t enough that she was going to expend it all in state owned shopping centers, the only shopping centers that exist in Cuba. She would have died without my help, so too the mothers and fathers of thousand of Cubans in the USA who sent billions of dollars to Cuba every year to support a parasitic society. Instead of being celebrated and receive a good treatment for our actions we are vexated and humiliated, as any Cuban who has been in the Cuban consulate in Washington asking for a travel permit can testify. I’m still want to go to Cuba; what a whore I’m. And how stupid the Cuban government is that they don’t realize –or do they after all? that if we can go without need to ask a permit we would fly more often and that means more money entering the country, helping not only to support the parasites but also investing in business so that they would change their way of life for one way of life really productive.

They, the government, argue that if they lift the permit to leave Cuba there will be a massive exodus. That is convenient to them too for two reasons, the first one being that by releasing the pressure created by more than a million lay-offs that are going to occur in the next months they would avoid a social explosion, another revolution. The other one is that if the Cubans that go out of Cuba are able to find jobs and make money they more likely will send most of it back and invest it in Cuba.The mentality of the immigrant is to succeed abroad in order to live better at home; get that Cuban government,

Lift the annoying, disgusting, humiliating policy of permits to travel to Cuba by Cubans, right now. Unconditionally. And please, don’t start with the so worn out argument of the embargo. The old generation has created the problem of the embargo. Is has never been the problem of my generation and I’m not willing to keep paying the high cost of the problems and conflicts that the old generation has created. After all, that is why we need a new government in Cuba, a government of young people representing the interests, needs and desires of the new generations. We need a new country.