Dissidents choosing to act like free people

Posted on Friday, 03.22.13

Fabiola Santiago: Dissidents choosing to act like free people
By Fabiola Santiago
fsantiago@MiamiHerald.com

NEW YORK — The first time I "met" Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo — aka @OLPL —
on that infinite and unpredictable public square that is the Internet,
he was tweeting from Havana.

It was a night in December 2011 and a flotilla from Miami's Movimiento
Democracia had sailed to international waters off Havana and staged a
fireworks display to show solidarity with dissidents being beaten up and
arrested.

When I signed on to Twitter, Cuban bloggers began to pop up in the feed.

"You can see the fireworks!" independent journalist Reinaldo Escobar
tweeted in Spanish.

"Ball of light on the horizon! And it's not the moon!" tweeted Escobar's
wife, blogger Yoani Sánchez, not as famous then as she is now.

I was incredulous. From what I thought I knew about Cuba, this
breaking-news reporting, American-style via Twitter, wasn't exactly
possible for people whose access to the Internet was prohibited, or in
the best circumstances, limited and under surveillance.

Then, as if he were reading my skeptical mind, entered @OLPL to the
tweeting fray — posting an image of the ball of light over Havana
rooftops that Sánchez had described. Equally interesting as the spot
news photo was Pardo's Twitter image, the portrait of a man with
hippie-styled long curls, topless, the Cuban flag draped off a shoulder.

Who was this university graduate in biochemistry who left science for
literature, tweets in English, penned heartfelt blog entries in poetic
Spanish, asked/begged that followers recharge his cellphone account?

At first simply a free-spirited soul who threw out enigmatic phrases
almost impossible to decipher, I came to know Pardo as a prolific
communicator so adept at outwitting his censors that he could confuse
friends, too.

I've been following Pardo — seeing the world through this provocateur's
eyes — and last week, I met him while he and Sánchez starred in the
conference The Revolution Recodified: Digital Culture and the Public
Sphere in Cuba at The New School and New York University.

And now I know what his American host, professor Ted Henken of Baruch
College, meant when he posted on his blog, El Yuma: "
Preparense-here-comes-orlando-aka-olpl."

Get ready … Pardo turns everything you might think you know upside down.

At the first news conference, he taunted journalists who asked about his
plans for the future by telling them he was staying in the United States
— and some rushed to tweet: "Orlando Luis Pardo says he's not going back
to Cuba."

I laughed heartily because I knew Pardo was bluffing; into his spiel he
had blurted out that perhaps he would stay with the girlfriend he had
landed in "Wilmania," which I'm sure many misunderstood as "Alemania"
(Germany).

Wilmania or Alemania, it was the imagination of the writer I'd seen
before trying to impose his irreverent nature.

The journalists, on the other hand, missed his larger point about his
fight to pursue whatever course he chooses.

"I am a citizen of the world," he said. Words that maybe to us who carry
a U.S.-passport, and thus are entitled to all the privileges that come
with first-world living, sound cliché.

But for Pardo, 41, his quest is to test the limits of a totalitarian
regime which gave him a passport and 24 months to roam and return, or
lose his citizenship.

"Maybe after 24 months I go back for one day and go out again," he said,
questioning why people of other nationalities are "just traveling" and
Cubans are put under a microscope and forced to define their living
arrangements.

To further make his point — and I also think, to get people thinking
about the ways in which two opposing sides can coincide — Pardo told the
story of how, when he visited Miami for a couple of days before coming
to New York, an anti-Castro journalist aggressively asked him the same
question as officials from Cuba's State Security: Was he staying abroad
or returning to Cuba? "The question of Castroism," he called it. "The
regime … coerces and limits you."

He's chosen to act like a free man, whether it's to use his Internet
skills to speak up against repression in Cuba — supporting the efforts
of the daughter of dissident leader Oswaldo Payá to demand an
international investigation of Payá's death — denouncing the new round
of violence against the Ladies in White, and the jailing of fellow
writers; or to confuse U.S. journalists filling in the blanks.

"We have selected to live a human life," he said, "and if that costs us
our life, that's OK."

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/03/22/3301547/fabiola-santiago-the-cuban-dissidents.html#storylink=misearch