Open Doors and Loose Ends

Open Doors and Loose Ends / Jeovany Jimenez Vega
Jeovany J. Vega, Translator: Unstated

After the hunger strike I went on last March, which led to our being
reinstated to practice medicine, I once again began to practice my
profession in Guanajay on May 7. Now, more than two months after
starting work, there are still a couple loose ends: if it is true that
they paid us the entire salary from those 66 months and allowed me to
begin from the third year of my specialty in Internal Medicine starting
in September, it's also very true that there is still no evidence in our
work files that they paid us that sum and that it derives from those
five and a half years being regarded as work years, which is what they
told us they would do and what was legally stipulated in Decree Law
268-2009 (amending the labor regime) in its Chapter V.

Also this Decree Law states that if an unjust administrative penalty is
revoked, the worker who suffered such prejudice must be publicly
vindicated before the assembly of partners in their workplace and this
is, in our case, a meeting convened by the administration, the party and
the union, as public as those that were held in 2006 to gratuitously
vilify us, where they set out why it was a mistake that they punished us
why they decided to overturn that ruling now.

This meeting, still not convened — which does not have to result in
anyone's hara kiri because, in particular, I do not need it — would find
me more mature than then and also, I hope, a little wiser. So no one
should expect that this mouth would speak a single word of hatred and
resentment, but I believe this exercise would be very healthy for
everyone and would speak more opening about the real position of the
political entities in this case.

A meeting of this kind, conducted with colleagues in an atmosphere of
quiet respect, would say a lot about the tolerance our government
publicly advocates today, because the lack of humility in recognizing
its errors has been one of the great scourges and this would open the
door for stories like ours which are repeated over and over again at any
time and place on this little island of ours. This would be an act to
vindicate us all. Meanwhile, Citizen Zero now patiently waits.

July 17 2012

http://translatingcuba.com/open-doors-and-loose-ends-jeovany-jimenez-vega/