La Jornada: Cuba, images of the resistance portray the fortitude in the face of US criminal harassment

The Cuban people are owners of their future because they conquered their past and are certain that their future is in their hands. It is not willing to be a colony after fully freeing itself from that condition with the triumph of Fidel Castro and the bearded onessaid journalist Luis Hernández Navarro, who together with photographer Jair Cabrera documented the reality of the island after the recent decree by the US government to further suffocate its economy.

Texts and images from the two collaborators of this publishing house, originating from an 11-day trip, were published in The Day and they are now gathered in the book Cuba, images of the resistance (La Jornada Editions).

The volume includes a presentation by journalist Rosa Miriam Elizalde, 11 texts by Hernández Navarro based on interviews with more than 50 people, and more than 60 photographs by Cabrera.

Hernández Navarro, coordinator of Opinion of this newspaper, recalled that on January 29, when President Donald Trump issued a decree whose purpose was to prohibit the delivery of fuel to Cuba, “American wet dreams saw this measure as the prelude to the fall of the Cuban government. They said that there were going to be protests, discontent, etc. Despite the enormous suffering that was inflicted on the people, Cuba and its revolution are still standing.”

He added that that same day, the director of The DayCarmen Lira, “told me: ‘I want you to go to Cuba’. We began all the necessary preparations and on February 3 we were already on the island, with dear Jair. We immediately started working and we didn’t stop for a single moment until we returned, and even here we continue working.”

Upon their arrival on the island, they met “with two people dear to the newspaper: comrade Omar González, former vice minister of Culture and a renowned intellectual, and comrade Rosa Miriam Elizalde, collaborator of this newspaper. They began to give us the details of what we expected and what could happen.”

The photographer Jair Cabrera said that his work consisted of “listening to the stories a little, because from the words that people say, you make the images. All the time I thought about how they want to see themselves, how a Cuban would portray themselves. I am Mexican, but from Iztapalapa, about which there are stigmas. I asked myself how I want to see myself as an Iztapalapa native and that is how I tried to portray Cubans, with all due respect.”

Cabrera related that “you could hear the 22-year-old girl saying ‘let the empire die’ and also hear the 10-year-old girl saying ‘Cuba resists and the United States is not going to tell us how to live.'”

Hernández Navarro highlighted the learning he had from the look of his partner in the coverage: “Jair’s eyes led me to see, being in the same place and time, many things that I had not perceived. What Jair claims as his origin in the neighborhood, which allowed him to have that sensitivity, was fundamental to understanding what was happening in an emotional, human key.

“A friend, upon seeing Jair’s photographs, told me that he is an alchemist who has managed to show us the Cuba that we want to see and not the one that the mainstream media wants to convey to us: full of garbage, dirt and destruction. There are photos of him where the garbage accumulates, but there is all the life around and all that reinforcement of the Cuban identity.”

Resilience, adaptability and inventiveness

The journalist details: “what we did was account for resistance and resilience. We found from the first moment, walking in the streets and talking to people, that Cubans have a great capacity for inventiveness and adaptation.

“As someone told us in Callejón de Hamel: ‘We Cubans are specialists in three things: in hurricanes, here every year they happen, they destroy and we continue dancing, drinking, doing our things and we move on; in baseball, well we know everything about the ball game, who are the best pitchers y shortstopsand we are specialists in crises, we have survived one after another.”

The journalist highlighted that the above “gave us the key to understanding what we found when speaking with the farmers in the cooperatives, with the neighbors in the popular neighborhoods of Havana, with the engineers in the thermoelectric plants: this enormous capacity for adaptation and inventiveness to get ahead.”

In one of the cooperatives, Hernández Navarro asked about a collection of photographs and “a farmer told us that they were people from there, a society that had been combatants from Cuba, who like him had gone to fight in Angola. Jair frames it and takes the testimony of what it meant to him. He finished his intervention by saying: ‘From Angola, the only thing we brought with us were the bones of our dead.'”

On another occasion, at the university they found a group of girls who were putting together a piece for some kind of dance tableau competition. Hernández Navarro discovered a key in that fact, “because in that moment of adversity, when people were supposed to be afraid, they were dancing, preparing for life to go on and on with joy.”

For the journalist, the island is “the object of a genocidal policy by the United States government. There is no other way to say it: leaving a people without electricity, without fuel, is wanting to condemn them to hunger, misery and disease.”

The hospitals where they treat children with cancer “have suffered a terrible setback. Talking with the doctors and health personnel of one of them, we could see their desperation and, at the same time, stories that give an idea of ​​the cooperation and solidarity of that people: the cooks brought ingredients from their family gardens, because backyard agriculture, garlic and onions have been greatly promoted to give flavor to the food and make life more pleasant for the sick, their families and the doctors.”

The journeyman envoys went to unusual places. One of them had to do with “an alleged stigma of the LGBT+ community towards Cuba. Jair clearly documented the people trans afro and drag queens living with families and children as something perfectly natural. For many years it was believed that Cuba was a staunch enemy of rock and today what we find is something completely different,” he commented.

In the park dedicated to John Lennon, photos were taken next to the musician’s sculpture. “We saw a bar called The Yellow Submarine, after the Beatles song, and in a restaurant, a trio suddenly started performing Imagine”.

Hernández Navarro concluded: “Cuba is open to all these cultural trends. This summarizes the vision of hope of Cubans: if in any bar, any place, that traditional trio is capable of interpreting Imagineis telling us that this is the future that Cubans want: a world where people live in peace.”

the book Cuba, images of the resistance It will be presented by the authors tomorrow at 8 p.m. and they will be accompanied by Eugenio Martínez Enríquez, Cuban ambassador to Mexico, the Cuban intellectual Omar González, and Pedro Miguel, a collaborator of this newspaper.

The appointment is at the Cuban embassy in Mexico, located at Presidente Masaryk number 554, Polanco neighborhood.