Was Sirley Avila Right?

Was Sirley Avila Right?
November 13, 2012
Haroldo Dilla Alfonso*

HAVANA TIMES — The story of Sirley Avila is well known. She was a
delegate to "People's Power" (the municipal council) in Majibacoa, the
least populated municipality in Cuba.

In previous years, her constituents had succeeded in appealing to the
government to establish a elementary school for their tiny village's
four students, who otherwise would have had to travel several miles
daily to go to another school.

Because of the present economic crisis, that order was rescinded. Sirley
therefore began a process of negotiations and demands, but she ran into
a wall of silence in that no one acknowledged her protests and no press
agency reported her demands.

She could only escape that confinement by appearing before the foreign
press and by throwing her hat back into the ring to seek re-election as
a municipal delegate.

Because of the first action, her name filled the headlines for quite a
few days. But in the pursuit of her second objective, she was defeated
after a pathetic exercise in gerrymandering that placed her at an
absolute disadvantage. "Now," she says, "I feel like an ordinary citizen
of this country, with the right — by the constitution — to go wherever
one needs to go to demand our rights."

Sirley Avila has been a very brave person. Only she, her relatives and
her adversaries know the amount of pressures, threats and trip-ups she
had to get around in a totalitarian system, and in one of the remotest
corners of the country.

For all that she deserves to be honored, especially if (as she stated)
she's continuing her grassroots work with the same dedication and
bravery. Because of this, Sirley has probably received applause from all
of the reasonable corners — with extremist and fundamentalist aside — on
the new Cuban political chessboard.

I join in that applause, and I would like — with all the modesty obliged
by the stature of this woman — derive three conclusions.

The first is that the cracks in the totalitarian system continue to
produce what the Granma newspaper once called "unusual circumstances" to
which the system has no capacity to react, or it does so with
increasingly more deficiencies.

The substitution of judicial proceedings against the opposition for
express short-term arrests, tolerance in the face of phenomena such as
the occupation of public facilities by religious groups and urban
"tribes," and the generalization of a climate in which people speak
their minds without ancestral fears, are all indicators of a change in
the relationship between state and society.

Sirley — who in the capacity of a delegate had one foot in society and
the other one in the state — knew how to take advantage of the cracks
and she touched the most sensitive nerves of the system. Only six years
ago, Sirley would have been dragged to the nearest police station.

The second issue is the terrible fragility of the system. It's like ice:
hard and cold but very brittle. This is why they perceived a
self-proclaimed "revolutionary" as posing a threat. This was someone who
didn't wave around any political slogan and who appealed to the right
wing international press when the local authorities clumsily closed all
roads to her in her wish to serve as a delegate to her municipal council.

This was not a voting district in the middle of the capital city;
instead, it was a small, remote municipality far from everything, one
that can't have any more than 600 voters. Yet the state reacted to what
they saw as a threat by adopting an insane scheme: altering the voting
district and the electoral lists.

Sirley did nor err in responding to this either: She forced the system
to reveal its worst instincts and roll around in them.

But there's something about which Sirley is only partly correct: The
idea that it's possible to maintain a school for four children is wrong.

Official statistics indicate that for years the government kept schools
in operation that had fewer children than the fingers on one's hand,
which speaks of an untenable situation.

The government's posturing that suggests 1,455 schools for only 4,588
children is an example of how wasteful and demagogic has become the
beautiful dream of education for everyone, which is now an expensive and
low quality service.

When Sirley defended the right of children to attend school, she took a
step into the future of Cuba. When she defended a school for four
children, she situated herself in a past that will not return.

What the Cuban state is obliged to do is ensure is universal access. If
this access is achieved by schools or boarding schools in larger towns,
or with a transportation system based on traction animals or motorized
vehicles, that's another discussion in which the community must be
involved and assume responsibility, as occurs in much of Latin America.

Cases like those experienced by the inhabitants of the Limones community
in Majibacoa are part of the drama of the million or so Cubans who live
in villages with 200 inhabitants or in scattered settlements.

They constitute what is known in demography as the "base line" of the
national population, swollen by agricultural workers and their families.

This is a segment of the population that was always poor, but never more
than now when the vast majority of them are losing the "revolutionary
achievements" that allowed them to live more comfortably over the last
fifty years (there are no longer sufficient quantities of subsidized
food, social services provision is being reduced, and jobs are becoming
fewer).

Rarely does one find people in these places who have family members
abroad or opportunities for small businesses. And although it's
foreseeable that some of them are benefiting from the redistribution of
land, this — without capital or technology — is only potential benefit
at the moment.

In short, they are part of the contingent of the "losers" of the
updating of the country's economic model. Together with marginal urban
residents, these are the new poor and the indigents of a mortgaged
revolution that Cuba's leaders want to prolong in a discourse that has
become pure ideological mist.
—–
(*) Published originally in Spanish by Cubaencuentro.com

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