The Marketing of Yoani Sánchez: Translation as invention

Machetera and Manuel Talens - español

“There are no accidents.” – Sigmund Freud

As one might have expected, Bloomberg and Reuters dutifully shaded their reports on the recent visit to Cuba of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff with mentions of the Yoani Sánchez Twitter campaign to pressure Rousseff to intercede on Sánchez’s behalf and persuade the Cuban government to grant her an exit visa to attend a propaganda event in Brazil.

That’s not so surprising.  Sánchez is an egomaniac, for sure, insisting that anyone should care in the first place, when her compatriots Olga Salanueva and Adriana Pérez O’Connor have been denied entry visas by the United States for more than a decade to visit their husbands (Rene González Sehwerert and Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, two of the Cuban Five) unjustly imprisoned in the U.S.  - but if all she has to do is tweet and the press come running, judging the tweet as equal in value to Rousseff’s criticisms of the U.S. gulag at Guantánamo, well, that’s not really her fault – it’s just part of a marketing plan that counts on press complicity.

Ted Henken rolls snake eyes

Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Long story short.  Ted Henken, the quite white chair of the Black and Hispanic Studies department at Baruch College who calls himself “El Yuma” and writes a blog under the same title, recently returned from a trip to Cuba where he had gone to interview bloggers of all persuasions, but most especially his close personal friend, “La Yoa,” (Yoani Sánchez) whose cherished interview he saved for last.

September 12: 12 years too long for the Cuban Five

A State Department at the Service of Petty Interests: The Ongoing Torture of Adriana Pérez and her Husband, Gerardo Hernández

CORRECTIONS: The news that Gerardo Hernández received on his birthday, June 4, 2008, was not that the Supreme Court would refuse to hear the Cuban Five’s case, but that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals had reinstated his two life sentences, after a previous ruling had overturned them.  The Supreme Court’s announcement of the refusal to hear the Five’s case would come a year later, on June 15, 2009.  In a sense, the timing was even more cruel, petty and personal than outlined below.  The interview with Adriana Pérez, Gerardo’s wife, attributed in the article below to California’s La Opinión, was actually an Associated Press interview, from which La Opinión collected selected excerpts.

A State Department at the Service of Petty Interests:
Visa Denial as a Form of Torture

By Machetera

When the U.S. Government announced that it would deny Adriana Pérez a visa for the tenth time in eleven years in order to come from Cuba to the United States and visit her husband, Gerardo Hernández, incarcerated at the federal prison in Victorville, California, it carefully chose the date to break the news.  The denial was announced on July 15, the couple’s 21st wedding anniversary.  When the Supreme Court announced that it would refuse to hear the case of the Cuban Five, of whom Hernández is one, and the one facing the largest sentence, it chose the date with equal care: June 4, Hernández’s birthday.  The timing of both events was as certainly deliberate as it was petty – a stamp of the U.S. State Department, where cruelty and pettiness abound.

Pérez has not seen her husband for almost twelve years, starting since almost a year before a SWAT team tore down the door to his tiny apartment in Miami in September of 1998 and arrested him, answering his question about why he was being arrested with a snarling “You know why.”  So much for due process.  It would be only the first violation of its kind in a never-ending chain.

Adriana Pérez speaks with La República about the Cuban Five

This interview with Adriana Pérez, wife of Gerardo Hernández, one of the Cuban Five, is almost three years old, yet it has never been translated into English until now.  It is a critically important interview for understanding exactly how the U.S. government has engaged in extraordinary punishment tactics beyond the absurdly harsh sentences meted out to the Five in 2001.  It is also important for understanding how their punishment has been extended to their families, for the crime of solidarity with one another.  Finally, it is a remarkable expression of that very solidarity.

Adriana Pérez: “Cuba delivered information to the FBI about terrorist organizations and the United States arrested the five who’d obtained it.”

Saturday, October 21, 2006
Julio Castro & Javier Parra for laRepública.es

Translation by Machetera

On September 12, 1998, five Cuban citizens were arrested in the United States.  It was said that they were spies, terrorists at the service of the Cuban government; that they were infiltrators who were working against U.S. national security.  They were blamed for a series of crimes that later were proven to have no legal basis whatsoever, not even remotely connected to the real story, which was that they were trying to prevent the terrorist actions of various anti-revolutionary groups in Miami, obtaining information that Cuban security later passed to U.S. FBI agents in order to prevent the possible disasters which might be caused by these violent groups.  The five are: Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo, Ramón Labañino Salazar, René González Sehwerert, Antonio Guerrero Rodríguez and Fernando González Llort.  This has come to be known internationally as the case of the Cuban Five.