IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 104

ple (Guide for the development of workers’ assemblies regarding the MINAZ’s restructuring);
the revolutionary state subsidizes many essential
products for our people’s consumption… [Such]
transformation demands the greatest and most devoted dedicated from all, the fullest understanding, the greatest confidence, the enthusiasm and
dedication that any great project requires… [Let]
everyone participate, even the pioneers, who will
be the greatest beneficiaries of the advances we
are now advocating (Programmatic Document);
this project’s strategy has been crafted by the Comandante en Jefe (Fidel Castro)… (Program for
incorporation of 100,000 MINAZ workers to classes).”
When the time came to suffer the consequences
described in the testimonies collected by Álvarez
Rodríguez, there was little or no option for people
who saw their history dismantled piece by piece.
The decades since 1959 and the tone of the documents for this dismantling make it very clear that
what is being demanded, one more time, is silence.
It is difficult to establish the causes for so many
silences; we cannot simply believe that they are
the result of some sort of planning. Neither are individuals responsible for too zealously interpreting them in a way that might suggest reserve.
Limitless control of power coupled with minimal
responsibilities favors the generation of solutions
that eventually ignore the implicated human beings, and no one is ignored, unless his or her silence is guaranteed.
A lot of this happened in the phenomenon the
book La callada molienda describes. If Castroism
was able to so counterproductively shut down a
major part of our infrastructure for producing
sugar and its derivatives, it was because five decades of continuous silencing guaranteed that there
would be no appropriate reaction. Years after the
event, one of Álvarez Rodríguez’s interviewees
still wanted to remain anonymous, even though
her testimony was not among the most shocking.6
An incredible network of minutia conspires
against individual expression. They are also the
cause and result of Cuban social and political
practice over recent decades. How can people
evaluate their work after forty years of uninterrupted work if they live in poverty?

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When introducing Enrique Carrera Herrera,
Maylan Álvarez points out that he has no shoes.
But Enrique Carrera, who people tended to call
Macandó, was not a simple, impoverished retiree.
Enrique Carrera Herrera: I have 14 medals from
the State Council—the Militia Founder medal,
the Army Founder medal. Ah, and I have 14 medals for donating blood, more than 60 blood donations. I was a Delegate in the Matanzas Fire Prevention Department, the only one who left Matanzas. When people here would say: Wasting
time and breaking shoes, we were there: at the Escambray, Angola, the October Crisis. At Girón,
Fidel was in the Sau 100, at Playa Larga; I was in
the second one. I have a cap from that campaign
that I saved, because those berets are not like the
others. And he said to me: Negro, this is for going
all the way to the front. And I said back: Let’s go
to the front.”
How can anyone who has spent twenty or thirty
years as part of a prestigious work group feel
pride once the collective is disintegrated and its
members are dispersed without any acknowledgment whatsover?
Luis Gustavo Rojas Hernández began to cut cane
in 1969; he was doing it till they closed the Juan
Ávila mill. From the age of sixteen he belongs to
the Battalion of the 500 led by Reynaldo Castro,
“a brigade of working men… [any] man who
didn’t cut 500 arrobas (12, 500 lbs.) of sugar cane
could not be in the Bon de las 500.” Álvarez
Rodríguez asked him what happened with the
Bon.
Luis Gustavo Rojas Hernández: “When the Juan
de Ávila mill stop operating, the farm, which was
what paid us, ceased to exist. With no more farm,
the Bon also ceased to exist and folks went on to
join cooperatives. The Bon men were from different work centers. There were men from Matanzas, Limonar, from here, Alacranes, Bermejas,
Cabezas, from different places. But with neither
of the mills in operation, each guy sought out another work center: some went to the countryside
to their parents’ farms, their grandparents’ farms,
I don’t know.”
Pompously calling the process of closing the
mills and the subsequent dismissal of thousands
of unemployed workers the “Álvaro Reynoso