By Manuel Vázquez Portal (tel: 53 778-1877).
From your
Cuba correspondent - Reporters Without
Borders -
The arrival of tourism and joint foreign-Cuban companies has turned "the
language of the enemy" into a vital tool of communication and those who
were not taught English are finding themselves at a disadvantage.
I've got a real talent for having back luck. I've always believed I could
fall over backwards and break my nose. And talking about bad luck, there's the
matter of English. In my home, everyone speaks it perfectly. But not me. My
unlucky star didn't want me to learn it properly or at the right time. Fidel
Castro got into a war, declared himself an enemy of the United States and banned
anything to do with that country, including its language, because it was the "language
of the enemy."
My older sisters learned it at convent school and my elder brother at
another religious school. When it came to me, I had to wrestle with "purging
the traitors from the ranks of education for the people" and didn't get a
teacher who could teach me properly.
At secondary school, I wasn't taught by Emilio Salgado, who was famous for
having studied at Oxford University, in England. Nor by Martica Buñuel,
who was supposed to have been educated by an English governess. I was taught by
Paco Sandoval, a carpenter whose only contact with the English language, they
said, was when he'd picked bananas for the American fruit company that used to
operate in Guantanamo province.
With an English teacher like that, it was up to me. Martica Buñuel
earned a living giving private lessons while waiting for her visa for the US,
but going to her house was very damning in the eyes of the ever-vigilant
revolutionary guards.
But Paco was a militant and a member of the committees for the defence of
the revolution, who had fought at the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and had been
in the underground fight against the Batista dictatorship. He didn't have the
slightest idea about English or about teaching, but he was a full-blooded
revolutionary.
Luis Ferrales, who was regional director of education at the time, came
across him one day chatting in broken English with a Jamaican who missed his
native tongue so much that he used to come by Paco's carpentry shop every
afternoon. There and then, Luis offered Paco a job as a teacher to replace the "gusanos"
(traitors), the teachers who had gone to live in the US and been thrown out of
the profession. He agreed for purely revolutionary reasons.
On his first day, Paco broke 14 sticks of chalk trying to write on the
blackboard and ranted angrily about it in front of us all as if he was scolding
a disobedient pupil made of wood. What else could be expected? The girls blushed
and the boys laughed. But a revolutionary grows strong in the face of adversity
and nobody really cared that Paco swore in the classroom or that he pronounced "yellow"
as "hello." The important thing was that we, the "seeds of the
revolution," understood he meant "yellow."
We had Paco Sandoval for three years, from 11 to 13. The Beatles were at the
height of their fame, but we weren't allowed to hear them. That would be an
ideological crime. The Rolling Stones were rivalling the popularity of the four
boys from Liverpool but we weren't allowed to hear them either, because it would
be a violation of "the sacred duties of a young revolutionary." We had
to stick to Paco's pronunciation.
The broken English he'd picked up in the banana fields of Guantanamo stayed
with us until just before we went to university. There, English was optional and
it was the done thing to choose Russian. It was, after all, the language of our
Russian brothers and even if all we could say was "niet panimayo" ("I
don't understand"), it'd help us get a scholarship to go to Bielorussia and
see snow for the first time.
At university, we didn't know Russian or English, and Spanish was an
enthusiastic whirl of slogans indispensable for good socialist communication.
That's how we graduated as engineers, doctors, architects and even linguists.
English was so looked down upon and supposedly so unnecessary that nobody
took it seriously. But time consumes us all and has no political opinion. Those
of us who don't learn English today have a lot of problems. The tourist boom,
the joint foreign-Cuban companies, prostitution and the desire to emigrate have
all pushed us out of the picture. What are you going to do when someone asks: "Do
you speak English?" However bold or desperate you are, you can't get out of
it by uttering the little phrase the fervent revolutionary Paco taught us so
clumsily: "Yes, aipiquingli."
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