Month: April 2014

Havana: The Poverty Behind the Glamour / Ivan Garcia

El-Fanguito-uno-de-los-barrios-marginales-de-La-Habana-620x330

View of El Fanguito, one of Havana’s slums

Just across from Cordoba park, in the Havana neighborhood of La Vibora, is nestled a luxury cafe called Villa Hernandez.  It is a stunning mansion built in the early 20th century and renovated in detail by its owner.

At the entrance, a friendly doorman shows clients the menu on a black leather-covered card.  A pina colada costs almost five dollars.  And a meal for three people not less than 70 cuc, the equivalent of four months’ salary for Zaida, employed by a dining room situated two blocks from the glamour of Villa Hernandez which attracts retired people, the elderly, and the poor from the area.

“It is not a dining room, it is a state restaurant for people of limited means. They call it ’Route 15,’ and the usual menu is white rice, an infamous pea porridge, and croquettes,” says Zaida.

Like the majority of the area’s residents, she has never sat on a stool in the Villa Hernandez bar to drink a mojito or to “nibble” tapas of Serrano ham.

A block from the dining room, on the corner of Acosta and Gelabert, in a house with high ceilings in danger of collapse, live 17 families crowded together.  The people have scrounged in order to transform the old rooms into dwellings.

The method for gaining space is to create lofts with wooden or concrete platforms between the walls. Each, on his own or according to his economic possibilities, has built bathrooms and kitchens without the assistance of an engineer or architect.

Even the old basement, where there once existed an animal stable, has been converted into a place that only with much imagination might be called a home.

The neighbors of the place see the Villa Hernandez restaurant as a foreign territory. “They have told me that they eat very well. I am ashamed to enter and ask about the menu. What for, if I have no money? At the end of the year they put up pretty decorations and a giant Santa Claus. I have told my children that this kind of restaurant is not within the reach of our pockets,” says Remigio.

Like small islets, in Havana there have emerged houses for rent, gymnasiums, tapas bars, cafes and private restaurants much like those that a poor Cuban only sees in foreign films.

There exists a nocturnal Havana with many lights, elegant designs and excess air conditioning which is usually the letter of introduction for the apparent success of the controversial economic reforms promoted by Raul Castro.

It is good that little private businesses emerge. The majority of the population approves cutting out by the roots dependence on the State, the main agent of the socialized misery that is lived in Cuba.

But old people, the retired, professionals, and state workers ask themselves when fair salary reforms will happen that will permit a worker to acquire a household appliance or drink a beer in a private bar.

“That’s what it’s about. Almost all we Cubans approve of people opening businesses. After all, in economic matters, the government has shown a lethal inefficiency. But there are two discussions: one is sold to potential foreign investors and another internal that keeps crushing the commitment to Marxism and to governing in order to favor the poorest,” says Amado, an engineer.

In the business field, the government has opened the door, but not completely.  In the promulgated economic guidelines, it is recognized that the small businesses are designed such that people do not accumulate great capital.

A large segment of party officials and the official press believes it sees in each private entrepreneur a future criminal.

At the moment, self-employment is surrounded with high taxes, the expansion of the opening of a wholesale market, and a legion of state inspectors who demand a multitude of parameters, as if it were anchored in Manhattan or Zurich and not in a nation that has short supplies of things from toothpaste and deodorant to even salt and eggs.

The regime takes advantage of the poor to sell the Cuban brand. “Marketing has been created that shows an island interspersed with images of tenements, mulattas dancing to reggaeton, happy young people drinking rum, US cars from the ’50’s, the National Hotel and luxury restaurants,” says Carlos, a sociologist.

Successful managers, like Enrique Nunez, owner of La Guarida, situated in the mostly black neighborhood of San Leopoldo in downtown Havana, also benefit from the environment in order to grow their businesses.

La Guarida was one of the locations in the film Strawberry and Chocolate by the deceased director Tomas Gutierrez Alea. There, among many others, have dined Queen Sofia of Spain, Diego Armando Maradona and US congressmen.

The dilapidated multifamily building where it is located, with sheets put out to dry on interior balconies and unemployed mulattos and blacks playing dominoes at the foot of the stairway, has become the particular stamp of La Guarida.

“Yes, it’s embarrassing. But to carry on culinary or hospitality businesses in ruinous neighborhoods replete with hustlers and prostitutes, is an added value that works.  Maybe that happens because Havana is still not a violent or dangerous city like Caracas. And the naive Europeans like that touch of modernity surrounded by African misery,” points out the owner of a bar in the old part of the capital.

While the governmental propaganda exaggerates the economic opening, Zaida asks if someday her salary in the State dining room will permit her to have a daiquiri in Villa Hernandez. For her, for now, it would be easier for it to snow in Cuba.

Ivan Garcia

Photo:  El Fanguito, old neighborhood of indigents in El Vedado, Havana, arose in 1935, at the mouth of the river Almendares, in the now-disappeared fishing village of Bongo and Gavilan. With Fidel Castro’s arrival in power, this and other Havana slums not only did not disappear but were growing. At any time, El Fanguito, La Timba, Los Pocitos, La Jata, Romerillo, El Canal, La Cuevita, Indalla, and La Corea, among others, are included in sightseeing tours through the capital, in order to be in tune with the fashion of mixing glamour with poverty, as occurs in Rio de Janeiro with the slums. The photo was taken from Cubanet (TQ).

Translated by mlk.

10 April 2014

Something That Goes Beyond the Law / Josue Rojas Marin, Cuban Law Association

Atty. Josue Rojas Marin

Some landlords from Santa Lucia beach in the Camaguey province find themselves confused before a measure imposed by officials from Immigration and Aliens. Since last year, they have made them sign a document obliging them to be responsible for the cars rented by tourist staying in their homes, in spite of the fact that they sign a rental contract with the agency.  As is logical, there is nothing in the law that imposes a responsibility for property that forms no part of the accommodation.

They also have to keep the home’s door wide open, as we say in good Cuban, in order not to obstruct a surprise inspection, abrogating to the inspectors the right to write or cross things out in the rental registry book, in spite of the fact that it is not they but the Municipal Housing Department that is responsible for controlling this document, so it is required that a responsible person not leave the dwelling unattended, even when there are no guests.

The landlords often suffer unexpected visits by police agents who also write in the registry books, conduct illegal searches, take the registry book without any legal process and return it whenever they want.

All that affects the rental activity and consequently their income.

Translated by mlk.
31 March 2014

Cuba Opens the Gates to Foreign Capital / Ivan Garcia

cuba-contenedores-620x330When a government’s financial figures are in the red, everything takes on new urgency. By now the formulas to address the problem are well-known. Often new tax measures are imposed while bloated public spending is slashed.

But if the goal is to attract American dollars, euros or other forms of hard currency, then any reforms must tempt likely foreign investors and Cuban exiles alike.

The situation is pressing. Venezuela, the spigot from which Cuba’s oil flows, is in a firestorm of criminal and political violence and economic chaos. China is an ideological partner but only makes loans if it can reap some benefit.

The Cuban government does not have a lot of room to maneuver. Its solution has been to open things up a little but not completely. Except in the areas of health, education and defense, Cuba is for sale.

The communist party’s propaganda experts have been trying to sugarcoat the message to its audience. In recent months government officials have been working to attract foreign capital by offering investors a more important role in the Cuban economy.

“Foreign financial resources would do more than provide a complementary role to domestic investment initiatives and would play an important role, even in areas such as agriculture, where foreign investment has been rare,” said Pedro San Jorge, Director of Economic Policy at the Ministry for Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment, in January.

In an interview with the newspaper Granma on March 17, José Luis Toledo Santander, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National Assembly of People’s Power for Constitutional and Legal Affairs, said the new law “will also provide for a range of investments so that those who wish may know the areas of interest in the country.”

“This action will also be a breakthrough in terms of the paperwork required to make an investment by creating a more streamlined process,” the official added in response to a common complaint by business people that the Cuban bureaucracy is too slow.

Toledo Santander said the new law “also includes incentives and tax exemptions in certain circumstances, as well as an easing of customs duties to encourage investment.”

He stressed that “the process of foreign investment will be introduced without the country relinquishing its sovereignty or its chosen social and political system: socialism. This new law will allow foreign investment to be better targeted so that it serves the best interests of national development without concessions or setbacks.”

On Saturday March 29 the national television news broadcast reported sometime after 1 PM that the single-voice Cuban parliament had unanimously passed a new foreign investment law without providing more details

The new law provides for an exception to one passed in 1995 which assigned foreign capital a “complimentary” role in Cuban state investments. This meant that foreign investors could hold no more than a 50% stake in any joint venture.

The proportion was higher when it came to technology and retail businesses but only because of a strong interest in these sectors on the part of military autocrats. Between 1996 and 2003 roughly 400 firms in the mining, hospitality, food, automotive and real estate sectors were created in Cuba with foreign capital.

All were small-scale and supervised closely by authorities. Now it’s a choice of life or death. Fidel Castro’s revolution generated many promises and speeches, but these did nothing to foster the economic development that the country needed.

Cuba imports everything from toothbrushes to ball-point pens. Large areas of arable land are overrun with the invasive Marabou weed, and produce little or nothing. In 2013 the government imported almost two billion dollars worth of food.

Since 1959 government leaders have continuously promised ample harvests of malanga, potatoes and oranges coffee as well as a glass of milk per person per day, but the inefficient economic system hampers any such nationial initiatives.

Finally the last trump card was played. It involved opening the gates by luring foreign investors with generous tax exemptions. They included Cubans living in the United States and Europe but not virulent anti-Castro Cuban-Americans from Florida.

If they toned down their strident anti-Castro rhetoric, then perhaps Alfonso Fanjul, Carlos Saladrigas and company might come under consideration also.

Of course, it is not all clear sailing. The U.S. embargo presents a powerful obstacle to any business venture on the island. And the Castro brothers are not serious business partners.

On the contrary. They have changed or corrected course at whim in response to shifting political dynamics. Of the roughly 400 foreign firms that existed in 1998, only about 200 remained in operation as of spring 2014.

Several foreign businessmen, including Canadians, have been threatened with imprisonment while others, like Chilean Max Marambio*, have had arrest warrants issued against them by Cuban prosecutors.

Raul Castro, who inherited power by decree from his brother Fidel in 2006, has tried to clean up government institutions and establish more legal coherence, abolishing absurd laws that prevented the Cubans renting hotel rooms, having mobile phones and selling their own homes and cars.

In January 2013 a new emigration law was adopted that made it easier for Cubans, including dissidents, to travel abroad. Internet access became available, though at jaw-dropping prices, and Peugeot cars went on sale, though priced as if they were Lamborghinis.

For many European and American politicians, Cuba is in the process of becoming a modern nation whose past sins as well, as it’s the lack of democracy and freedom of expression, must be forgiven. Others say it’s just a ploy to buy time.

The average Cuba, whose morning coffee does not include milk, who has only one hot meal a day and who wastes two hours a day commuting to and from work on the inefficient public transport system, is not likely to be impressed with the much hyped opportunities.

Those who open private restaurants or receive remittances from overseas can weather the storm. Those who work for the state — in other words, most people — are the ones having it the worst.

Although the regime may try to camouflage its new policies by resorting to various ideological stunts, the person on the street realizes that the new Cuban reality is nothing more than state capitalism painted over in red.

For a wide segment of the Cuban population, the new investment law is a distant echo. It is yet to be see if it bring them any benefits.

Ivan Garcia

Photo: Container ship entering Havana’s harbor. Operations at the Port of Havana will move once the port at Mariel is fully operational. Photo from Martí Noticias.

*Translator’s note: In 2010 Cuban prosecutors accused Marambio and his firm, Río Zaza, of corruption. Marambio claimed the actions were retribution on the part of Fidel and Raul Castro for his support for Marco Enríquez-Ominami, a candidate in Chile’s 2009 presidential election. Marambio filed suit with the International Court of Arbitration in Paris against his Cuban business partner, Coralsa, a state-owned juice and dairy company. On July 17 the court found in favor of Marambio and ordered Coralsa to pay over $17.5 million dollars in damages “for refusing to cooperate in good faith” in the process of liquidating Rio Zaza.

30 March 2014

The Means and the End / Regina Coyula

Much has been written about Zunzuneo and Piramideo and I’m not going to be an analyst. My reflection is simple: Could a mass messaging through Twitter subvert governments like those of Great Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Sweden, Costa Rica?

Beyond the well-known 15-M (May 15th) protests in  Spain, the student movement in Chile, and Occupy Wall Street in the very belly of the beast, the social networks have mobilized, have probably knocked down politicians, but they haven’t knocked down governments.

Where does this turn into a dangerous thing? In countries where a bad economy, lack of freedoms, or both, create the conditions. The Arab Spring is the best known referent. The displeasure of the Cuban government is not about the alleged violation of the telephone privacy of its citizens (that would be a colossal joke)  but precisely because the government knows very well the express or buried opinions of much of its citizens about the bad economy, the lack of freedoms, or both, and what they least want is that a significant group of them would organize themselves through this means.

And also, I believe, reacting in the face of the launch of Yoani Sanchez’s announced project–a new digital newspaper–a “means” that could align the feelings of citizens in response to the bad economy, the lack of freedoms, or both.

9 April 2014

Carromero’s Book and Death / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The most sinister part of Death Under Suspicion is that it is the testimony of a man condemned to death, because Ángel Carromero reports that, before finally being deported to his homeland to serve the rest of his sentence in Spain (in December 2012), a Cuban State Security official warned him that if he ever told the truth, he would also be extrajudicially executed, like Harold Cepero and Oswaldo Payá.

You can believe Ángel Carromero now or not. It doesn’t matter. But there are thousands of dead for us to believe this horror of the Cuban official.

The Castro regime only lies in public. In private, never.

Read the entire article in English here.

2 April 2014

Zunzuneo: Subversion or Breaking Censorship; / Odelin Alfonso Torna / HemosOido

HAVANA, Cuba — The Cuba-United States confrontation increased its pitch with the publication by the daily Granma of the article, Zunzuneo: The Noise of Subversion, commenting on a report by the AP news agency about ZunZuneo and Piramideo, two text message services (SMS) accused of having illegally complied a list of telephone numbers to which it sent unsolicited messages on innocent topics like sports and culture, but which later would become subversive messages to young people, considered “susceptible to political change.”

According to Granma, the cornerstone of the ZunZuneo plan — a network that emerged in February 2010 — was to access the “data and phone numbers of Cubacel users,” the branch with the most ETECSA users.  In the same paragraph, the Communist Party daily suggests: “It is not clear to the AP how the telephone numbers were obtained although it appears to indicate that it was done in an illicit manner.”

Maybe the AP does not know that the ETECSA database — guide of mobile and fixed (residential and commercial) telephone numbers — was leaked in early 2010 to laptop and desktop computers all over the Island.  And that, immediately, promotional texts began to appear issued by Cuban artistic groups or clubs and bulk messages — unsolicited — demanding freedom for the five Cuban spies.  I remember perfectly one that said:  “To love justice is to defend the five.  End injustice!  Freedom now!”

The official ETECSA database is updated every year. The latest version that circulates in the population accounts for 60 per cent of the mobile phones, some 200,000 users, not counting the residential sector. The weight of this application in megabytes is between 200 and 450 (by design) and can be copied in any digital format.

Is it possible that ZunZuneo got 25 thousand subscribers in less than six months without the need of a database as the AP well reflects?  Why not talk about the so popular data leakage by ETECSA and the proselytizing in its unsolicited text messages?

Thanks to a friend not tied to the internal oppositon or independent journalism, I subscribed to ZunZuneo in 2010.  It was all very simple, it just required sending an SMS to a phone number outside the border and you would receive news about sports, culture or science or technology.  Also, one could subscribe on the Internet, at a time when the number of connected Cubans was barely 2.9 percent of the population.

Often senior citizens receive in Cuba promotional messages about a reggaeton concert, also the “March of the Torches Parade in Havana — The Great Country” is convened through Cubacel, as happened January 27 this year.  Is this not, perhaps, the equivalent of infringing on “the laws of privacy” as Granma says of ZunZuneo?

Nothing is said about the database leak by Cubacel, software that has generated groups of clandestine users and even phantom prepaid top-ups within the informal Cuban market.

This Thursday, the US government responded to the AP’s accusations. White House spokesman Jay Carney confirmed that his government was involved in the program and that it even had been approved in Congress. But the spokesman for the State Department, Marie Harf, denied on Thursday that the social network was the product of a secret or undercover operation. “We were trying to expand the space for Cubans to express themselves,” said Harf.For his part, White House spokesman Jay Carney denied that ZunZuneo had an undercover nature although he clarified that the US president supports efforts to expand communications in Cuba.

AP and international media that have reproduced the “scandal” of ZunZuneo should know that the ZunZuneo application never was used for any “subversive” movement in Cuba. Instead, the Cuban government used the ETECSA database to send text messages advocating the liberation of the five spies or the attendance at pro-governmental political events.

About a year ago, the ZunZuneo messages stopped. Cubans still do not communicate freely.

Cubanet, April 8, 2014

Translated by mlk

Police Sharks / Tania Diaz Castro

Osvaldo Brito, Valdy, with his Florida baseball cap – Photo Tania Diaz Castro

HAVANA, Cuba, April – Osvaldo Esteban Brito Amat is another of the many Cubans, mostly youngsters, who every day jump into the sea looking for a better future.

“And the sharks? Aren’t you afraid of them?” I asked him while he told me about what happened to him when he tried to get to the coast of the US for the second time.

“No way. If you don’t take any risks in life, you won’t achieve anything. The sharks here, on land, do you more harm. They go around dressed as policemen and they don’t let you live.”

Everyone calls him Valdy and he was born 41 years ago in Ben Tre, one of the various communities forming part of Bauta Council, in the province of Artemisa next to the city of Havana.

Because of his height, blue eyes and his build, Valdy could be taken for a North American in any place in the world, although the sun has darkened his skin and he speaks in a very Cuban manner.

He boasts of never having been a good example of a revolutionary, because from when he was a child he never felt anything in his heart when he was made to repeat every morning before starting his classes: “Pioneers of communism, we will be like Ché.” He says that nothing that you are forced to do can be sincere.

“I think that ever since I was born I have dreamed of living in the USA,” he tells me. “I didn’t try to go earlier because of my mother. I promised her not to do anything crazy like going in a very risky way. But my mother died a year ago. So now it won’t hurt her if the worst happens. And if I succeed in getting there I am sure she would be very happy.”

“In Ben Tre, that small village, where scarcely three hundred people lived, working on miserable little plots and in the poorest of living conditions, many people remember the former North American landowners there in the fifties of the last century, the good wages they paid to the workers, and how they lost their lands and they left the country when Fidel Castro disappropriated them without offering any compensation.

“It’s the second time I have jumped into the sea, hardly ten days ago, at El Salado beach, at Baracoa. I was a kilometer from the Florida coast. I could almost smell Miami. I felt so happy to be able to open my eyes and try to make out its lights from afar. But they caught us. There were several of us, all youngsters and we almost cried when we saw the US coastguards’ boats on top of us.

“They treated us well. With respect. Just as the Cuban authorities did. They only asked us why did we want to leave. I told them the truth: because I don’t like socialism. I am a bird with four wings who wants to fly to liberty. To earn money by working, not looking for handouts offered by the Cuban government.

“I work for myself. I sell meat and pigs’ trotters, sausages, and some fruit, from my horse and cart; what I get from the community in order to earn an honest living. But that’s a criime in Cuba. That’s why I am familiar with jail. I am very familiar with it without being a criminal.”

“Of course I will try again. As they say, third time lucky.”

He showed me the baseball hat with Florida on it which they gave him in the US boat. For him it’s a trophy for his heroic act of confronting the sharks in the middle of the night. I ask him if he doesn’t think that they deserve to be welcomed into that great country and he looks at me with his deep blue eyes, filled with tears.

Cubanet, 8 April 2014

Translated by GH

A Dictatorship Exactly Like the Cuban? / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

OLPL in el nacional screen shot 9 april 2014There are countries that never recover from totalitarianism. They remain anthropologically backward, even though, after a more or less traumatic transition from dictatorship to democracy they end up being First World countries.

Faith in themselves and in society dies. A desolate loneliness is sown in the souls of the surviving citizens, whether they were victims or executioners. All hope is hopeless. Even God ends up suspected of a debacle against divinity. They flee their past like the plague. The word never regains its shine of a human thing and is devalued, like a bridge permanently in danger of collapse. They cease to be a society to become something far more sinister and silent. This is the transcendent triumph of totalitarians: once installed, they are irreversible in perpetuity.

This happened in my country, Cuba, although almost no Cuban is capable of recognizing it, perhaps to avoid his share of the blame.

This is happening in your country now, Venezuela, and half the world seems to accept it with a criminal complicity.

When the machinery of the State is the deliverer of a Dogma that must be imposed at any price, be it Mohammed or Marx, when the government hijacks the balances that resolve and evolve within a modern society, when the individual is worth less than an amorphous mass, when a whole life turns into a vaudeville theater where the intelligence apparatus is manipulating its script with puppets and deaths, then the damage to civilization ends up being constitutional. Genetic. Generation after generation. The human being is annihilated with a bullet to the head, or condemned to decades in prison, or to permanent exile.

Paternalistic despotism is that simple, half slanderous and half childish, in its radical simplicity. Like a boy who, in cold blood, opens the entrails of a worm or a lizard that he trapped in the garden. Fascist childhood, Eden of all extremisms—and exterminations.

There is something almost sanctifiable in these serial murderers in the name of socialism and only of socialism, whether of the 21st century or antiquity: there is no totalitarianism that hasn’t justified its genocides in the sacred name of a social good, with or without mixing God into the equation of corpses piled over corpses piled over corpses. Rude geology.

Whoever tires (of killing), loses. That is the limitless logic of the State gangs, be they Muslims or Marxists.

And that happened in my country, Cuba, which in a few months paid with thousands of deaths—and with an exile in the millions—for the barbaric beauty of a Revolution that was applauded throughout Latin America.

And that is happening in your country now, Venezuela, which unfortunately applauded the Fidelist feast of the anonymous dead of Cuba, those who half a century back died in the mountains or on the scaffold, also for you, trying—even with the assassination of the commander in chief—to spare you this massacre that today continues to excite the wicked international Left.

No dictatorship is exactly like the Cuban. But Castroism is exactly like all dictatorships.

8 April 2014

Dad, I Want to Go to La Yuma* / Victor Ariel Gonzalez

Josué Colomé Vázquez, son of Cuba’s Minister of the Interior. Photo from Josué’s Facebook page.

Havana, Cuba – It’s not too surprising that a son of Cuba’s Minister of the Interior recently arrived in the U.S. to stay. Josué Colomé–as this immigrant is named–is not the first descendent of a high official of the regime who decided to leave for “enemy” lands, and so join the thousands of Cubans who arrive in the United States each year in search of opportunity. It’s obvious that the Revolution that dad helped make isn’t good enough. Not even for him.

His father, General Abelardo Colomé Ibarra, is one of the historic leaders of the Cuban dictatorship. He serves in a key position, given that he’s the guardian of State Security, in charge of administering the repressive forces, watching friends and enemies alike, as well as executing exemplary sentences. That is, the largest jailer on the island-prison. The job of the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) one of the strongest currencies that sustains the regime: fear. The heads of this institution have always been dark characters who enjoy the greatest confidence of the Supreme Leader. MININT is the principle guarantor of the Cuban government (that is the Castro brothers) to exercise their absolute power.

Thus, although not unique, it’s a singular case of apostasy. The son of the General, who now awaits his residency in the U.S., is one of the few who know first hand the intimacies of the governmental summit. Josué has lived among luxuries and complete indifference, and could stay in Cuba enjoying his surname. However, he preferred to abandon ship.

But that’s not the most striking thing: his father having ears that hear everything, it’s tempting to wonder about the following: Did the General know that his son was preparing to escape? Did the chief of MININT participate in the plan in some way, or knowing it, did he look the other way?

It’s hard not to suspect it. The Cuban Minister of the Interior could sin at anything, but not naivete. It may never be clear what, if any, degree of involvement did the Cuban official have in the happy journey? Perhaps it’s not a crazy assumption that the young Josué, now a refugee in the USA (waiting on the Cuban Adjustment Act), had the help of his powerful father to get to his destination through a third country. Then, the “killer” Adjustment Law would have been very good for the family interests of the representative of the regime.

General and Minister of the Interior Abelardo ColoméIbarra with Raul Castro. Photo from Internet
General and Minister of the Interior Abelardo Colomé Ibarra with Raul Castro. Photo from Internet

*Translator’s note: “La Yuma” is what Cubans call the United States and other foreign countries.

Cubanet, 7 April 2014, Victor Ariel Gonzalez

Many Happy Returns! / Yoani Sanchez

Happy Blog-Birthday Generation Y!

At seven I had an incomplete smile. I was losing my baby teeth and also I read every sign I came across in the street. It was a time of learning and scraped knees from falls during games. Today, I once again blow out the same number of candles on an imaginary cake. This time it isn’t for me, but for the virtual creature that was born on 9 April 2007, and which in this time has experienced dentition, fevers, laughs and stumbles.

Generation Y is celebrating its birthday with almost one thousand published posts, about a million and a half comments, several friends lost, and others gained.

In this time, I have never suffered the horror of a blank page. Rather I feel that neither time nor Internet connectivity have sufficed to tell all that the Cuban reality has offered to my eyes. This blog now has a life of its own. It breathes in its readers and has a parallel existence where I can’t reach it, hide it, protect it. It has stood the tests of my initial fear, official demonization, the distrust of many, technological collapses and even the survival instinct that more than once told me to abandon it. Here it is with the bruises and experience of its seven years.

A new era will begin soon. Generation Y will move to its new home within a digital, collective and modern press. On the next birthday cake there will be other faces to include in the photo. Let’s blow out the candles for them now!

8 April 2014

The Voices of Cubans? / Miriam Celaya

Arrogance is a personality trait impossible to hide for those who suffer from it. In fact, it becomes more obvious when an arrogant individual tries to cover his proverbial petulance under a cloak of feigned humility. The worst of such a subject, however, is his histrionic ability that allows him to deceive considerable groups of people, particularly those who desperately need someone to speak “for them” or those who, quite the opposite, enjoy the blessing of authority.

In the case of Cuba, where freedom of speech, of the press, of information and of association are among the major shortages of this society, it is not difficult that, from time to time, some savior may appear self-proclaiming to be “the spokesperson for Cubans” which–it’s obvious–betrays immeasurable insolence, not only because it lacks the allocation of powers, but because it previously assumes an often repeated lie that, for some chumps, has become the truth: Cubans have no voice. Allow me, Mr. Arrogant and his troupe, to correct your mistake: Cuba’s Cubans do have a voice, what they lack is the means to be heard, not to mention the great number of deaf people in the world.

But, of course, a shining hero will always appear–usually with credentials and even with a pedigree–who, from his infinite wisdom, will quickly delve into the deeper intricacies of the Cuban reality and will be the only one capable to interpret it objectively because he, balanced and fair, “is not at the end of the spectrum”. Interestingly, these specimens proliferate virulently among accredited foreign journalists on the Island.

Since I don’t wish to be absolute, I suppose that there are those who are humble and even respectful of Cubans and of our reality, only I have never had the privilege of meeting them. It may be my bad luck, but, that said, to practice journalism in Cuba armed with credentials of a major media outlet and with the relative safety that your work will be published and–very important–duly financially rewarded, seems to have a hallucinogenic effect on some of them.

Such is the case of quasi-Cubanologist Fernando Ravsberg, to whom I will refer as “R” as an abbreviation, a journalist recently fallen from grace with his (ex) employer, the BBC, who has written a plaintive post following his clash with the powerful medium and, oh, surprise! after many years of working as a correspondent in Cuba and having collected his earnings has found that “he does not share their editorial judgment” as stated in his personal blog, Cartas Desde Cuba. R, inexplicably, took longer to find out the editorial standards of the BBC than to get acquainted with the intimacies of such a controversial society as that of Cuba. continue reading

R soaked us with “having tried to be the voice of ordinary Cubans,” of “the man on the street” through his blog. He says this with such conviction that there are even those who, besides himself, have believed it. And, since this man is not afraid and has taken his messianic mission very seriously, he is proposing that, “from now on, whoever has an interest in continuing to debate on the reality of the Island, will be able to do so through my personal page”. Very humble, R, seriously, and we should be thankful… where else could we do it otherwise?

I must confess that my stomach is not that strong, so I read R’s work only every now and then, and afterwards, I spend some time detoxing. For example, phrases like this sicken me: “We tried to decipher the keys to the psychiatric hospital crime, where some thirty patients died from hunger and cold”. In Cuban lingo R was really “discovering” warm water because that monstrous crime was in no way encrypted.

For most Cubans, and to every independent journalist who covered the story extensively and published serious review articles about the case, the essence of the events lies in the corrupt nature of the system, its officials and, in particular, the impunity of its practitioners and those who are foremost responsible: the dictatorial gerontocracy of over half a century, that is, the same one R awards great credit for the universal health care for Cubans.

In any moderately democratic country, more than one high official would have been blown out of the water over a similar scandal. OK, then, the events of the psychiatric hospital are just the sample button of the quality of health service offered to ordinary Cubans, common Cubans who have no access to hard currency clinics, or to the CIMEQ*, where the anointed and the leaders are cared for. Needless to say, mental patients are the most fragile and defenseless.

If R knew a tad more about the history of Cuba, he would know that, though as inadequate as it is today, Cuba had public health care since colonial times; therefore, it is not a Castro-innovation. And there were health care institutions that were eliminated by the revolution: I, as the daughter of a qualified laborer and a housewife, was born at Acción Médica (Coco and Rabí Streets, Santos Suárez, Havana) a clinic all the members of my family belonged to. Their service and their attentive care were both very good.

As for “low infant mortality” so highly advertised, many specialists question the accuracy of Cuban statistics. In fact, they are so fickle that they do not reflect the number of neonates who die before being entered in the records, because there is an official policy that guides registration of births when newborns are healthy and have at least some basic guarantees for survival.

I know testimonials from parents whose children were born with certain defects or conditions incompatible with life and remained hospitalized until their death, several days later, without ever being registered. Officially, these children are never born, so they go from the womb to their eternal sleep without the required red tape. Thus, officials prevent them from being a negative number in the fabulous statistics displayed to the world, but what does it matter, if even the World Health Organization recognizes the overwhelming success of revolutionary medicine and applauds it excitedly.

As for “universal education” comments are not needed. Every Cuban born in this process who has attended school in previous decades, and whose children and grandchildren have also been students in Cuba know only too well about the deteriorating quality of education, teachers and teaching facilities, more manifest in the last two decades, to say nothing of the indoctrination and the segregation of those who think differently than the official line.

If R considers this an achievement, he should also know that public and private education existed since colonial times on the Island, and that, since the eighteenth century, academic tradition was established in our country and lasted until the totalitarianism of this government turned it into a hostage to ideology and monopolized, generalized, and uniformed, to its detriment, all education.

As an example, my grandson Cesar, who is in first grade, learned about “the five heroes”, Che Guevara and F. Castro at school, however, they have never mentioned Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Ignacio Agramonte or any of the founding fathers of the Cuban nation to him… and even less the great civic figures in the history of this country.

Another issue would be what R calls “the world’s most efficient civil defense”. This already seems a hallucination as a result of an overdose …of something. What exactly is the “civil defense” for this brilliant journalist? The answer is a mystery, so we can only speculate. Could it be that he is referring to the spectral MTT**, whose only “proof” of existence is the work-day that all of this country’s state employees donate annually, but nobody knows where the money goes or how these funds are used?

Or is this what R calls the amorphous mass, grouped under the generic “CDR” whose only purpose is to pay the State a few cents monthly and to light up a bonfire once a year to display the collective hunger by consuming a repulsive (revolutionary) stew? Does R ignore that the CDR’s are today a pipe dream, just shreds of the most formidable organization that Castro I created in order to spy on us and get us to betray each other, which filled people with distrust, envy and hatred?

In criticizing the dissidence and some others of Cuba’s ills, R states he’s seeking a necessary “journalistic balance” (some euphemism!). R is just spewing the first thing that comes to mind or whatever is at hand, be it a stone or something less principled, which–far from achieving some balance–only results in murky half-truths or misrepresentations. It’s what happens whenever a “critic” attacks the effects, carefully avoiding pointing out the causes. Thus, R is playing with the chain, including some high links, but he keeps a very prudent distance from the monkey. That way, anyone can be an acrobat and keep the balance.

He does lash out at “the dissidence”, and how! This is what happens when, from his comfortable seat, R questions the finances that the same dissidence gets, since such an expert analyst of the Cuban reality must know, members of the dissidence are expelled from jobs and school and many lack any other income or livelihood.

At the same time, for R–and for the Cuban regime–it is obvious that any “dissent” is funded by the U.S. government: apparently, they have their proof. However, I don’t know of any dissident jailed for being “in the service of a foreign power”. Who could believe that the olive green satrapy would allow the existence of so many “mercenaries” when the mere act of protesting or making an anti-government poster has resulted in brutal reprisals or landed many Cubans in prison?

But we human beings always have something in common. Here’s where R and I are alike: I’m not “politically correct”. Indeed, some people think I’m not correct at all. Though I suspect we do not have the same concept of what is “political” or what is “correct”. For instance, R says on his blog “we analyzed the dissidence’s weaknesses” (because in his infinite virtue, R humbly overuses the plural and replaces the “I” with an unpretentious “we”, a common vice among speakers of the nomenclature).

At times, I have also criticized the proposal or program of my opponents, stipulating the reasons why I don’t share their views, which doesn’t mean I don’t respect or support them in their struggle against the regime and in favor of democracy, or do not recognize their values. Because, if we are talking about equilibrium, attacking the dissidence–the weakest link of the political chain in Cuba–is the easiest thing in the world; not allowing them a chance to reply is simply indecent.

As in every community or human group, it is true that not all the members of the dissidence are an example of virtue or honesty, but that does not imply that the opposition is a cesspool of detritus. R doesn’t even acknowledge the value of certain groups or individuals that have been performing staid and growing civic work within society and enjoy great prestige in their communities, as well as outside of Cuba.

Manipulating information, distorting and fragmenting reality to suit your fancy and raving against sectors and individuals who do not have the possibility or the means to defend themselves and who are at a total disadvantage against the longest dictatorship in this hemisphere is opportunism and mediocrity, but, above all, it is immoral and unethical.

Finally, if, as R says, “the chief diplomat of the U.S. in Cuba recommended that the State Department” should read his blog “to understand the real situation” in our country, revealed through a “secret cable” filtered through Wikileaks, our sincerest congratulations (to R, of course, because the State Department would just end up with yet another oblique interpretation from a foreigner who is thriving on the Cuban situation).

There is no doubt that R can still extract other advantages from his undeniable ability to sell himself as a specialist of the topics he writes about. Pity those souls who give him credit or pay for his work; it is well known that all spectacles need their public.

It is striking, however, that R considers as beneficial the acknowledgment he gets from the government he often condemns because it maintains the “criminal embargo” against the Island and, in addition, finances us, the sinister mercenary dissidence. Will he make up his mind, already and pick a side? Maybe neither; rather, the incident deeply flatters his ego and serves as a present for his arrogance, hence the gloating.

I think I’ve already overextended myself. Some might be of the opinion that so much effort was not worth it, as a very wise saying goes: to foolish words, deaf ears. I have decided this time to go with another: silence means consent. These twisted characters can end up doing a lot of harm.

For the rest, my regular readers know that this writer is characterized by the absence of hair follicles on her tongue [she will say whatever she thinks], a trait which will annoy some. What are we gonna do! It’s very hard for me to keep silent in the face of so much effrontery. Chauvinism aside, it especially irks me to see such cheap verbiage from a foreigner who, when it’s all said and done, does not hurt for Cuba, Cubans, or their distresses. As far as I’m concerned, if this man is the voice of Cubans, it would be better for us if he remained discretely silent.

*El Centro de Investigaciones Médico Quirúrgicas (Medical-Surgery Research Center, in Havana)
**The Territorial Troops Militia (Milicias de Tropas Territoriales)

Translated by Norma Whiting
4 April 2014

The Prisoners / Reinaldo Escobar

Not a week goes by that we don’t receive a phone call from some Cuban prison to denounce physical abuses, denial of visits, lack of medical care and other outrages. The vast majority are common prisoners, men and women, many of whom say they have been politicized in prison. The majority consider themselves totally innocent of the charges that sent them to prison, others accept their responsibility for the imputed events but feel they’ve received a disproportionate sentence.

It’s almost impossible to verify these complaints and this desire for objectivity from which we suffer keeps us from talking about every case. Our greatest treasure is the credibility we’ve achieved among our readers, but every call provokes a dilemma that makes us see ourselves as egotists or cowards, after listening to a Cuban behind bars spell his name–so we will get it right–and state the name and rank of the boss of his prison, the person who denies him medications, suspends his visits, or sends him to the punishment cell.

However serious the crime committed, no citizen should be helpless against the abuses of power. Whose duty is it to protect their rights?

7 April 2014