Nicaragua, From Guerrilla Sanctuary to Migratory Springboard for Cubans

Augusto César Sandino International Airport, in Managua, Nicaragua. (Twitter/@NonoBaBri)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, 11 April 2022 —  In my primary school there was a girl who bragged that her father was on a mission in Nicaragua. She appeared one day with a sophisticated bag to carry her snack and on another  day with some brightly colored hair clips that the military adviser had sent her from Managua. In my child’s mind, that country was a place of olive-green uniforms and bustling markets, the destination of revolutionaries chosen to fight and buy trinkets.

The father of that girl returned a couple of years later loaded with suitcases and boxes. They moved to a more affluent neighborhood and one day I saw him on television during a medal ceremony. That man probably did not see a combat by a long shot, but he introduced himself saying “I was on a mission in Nicaragua” and it was more than enough to open doors and dazzle those who had never left the Island.

The years passed and this week I learned that the grandson of that “proletarian internationalist” has just left Cuba through the Nicaraguan route. Unlike his grandfather, the young man had to amass dollar after dollar to pay the high sum that they now ask for a ticket to “the country of volcanoes.” He spent a couple of nights in a hotel and the next morning the coyote was waiting for him to guide him on the first leg of his route north.

He stopped only at a market in Managua to buy some food and a phone card, he avoided anyone in uniformed as much as he could, and when he crossed the border with Honduras he wrote to his mother: “first step achieved.” The land that provoked so many anecdotes, which he heard at the family table, was only a springboard to get closer to his dream of living in the United States. The nation that his grandfather proudly pointed out on a map and that the troubadours mentioned in their combative lyrics, barely passed through the retina of the young man obsessed with other latitudes.

In about 40 years the meaning of the name Nicaragua took a 360 degree turn in Cuba. If in the 1970s and 1980s that country seemed like the comrade that, in this hemisphere, was going to follow with its own imprint the footprint traced by the Cuban model, today it is seen as a country of passage from which it is necessary to leave at full speed. Daniel Ortega, then painted by official propaganda as a progressive and rebellious young man, is now a dandruff-covered dictator from whom his own citizens are fleeing.

“The borders kiss each other and start burning,” a Cuban singer-songwriter repeated at the time. And yes, they continue kissing but not to expand any revolutionary flame, nor for the North American “eagle” to take flight elsewhere, but to put land between Cubans and the country where they were born but in which they do not see themselves growing or aging.

Nicaragua has become synonymous with flight. For the grandchildren of those Cuban soldiers who accumulated merits and merchandise in Managua, the name of Augusto César Sandino is only that of the airport where they land after escaping from this Island.

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A Young Cuban Woman Spent Nine Months in Jail for Yelling on July 11th and No One Apologizes for her Abusive Arrest

Lázara Karenia González is sentenced to three years of “correctional labor without internment”. (Facebook/Kirenia Wilhelm Benitez)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, April 9, 2022–Lázara Karenia González, arrested for participating in the peaceful protests on July 11th (11J) in Cárdenas, Matanzas, was released on Friday after receiving her sentence of three years of “correctional labor without internment.” Thus, she will be able to remain outside of prison while serving her term of labor.

During the trial against protesters in that city, which took place on March 15th, the Prosecutor sought eight years in jail for the 28-year old, the only woman among the defendants.

As stated by activist Salomé García Bacallao of Justicia 11J, which compiles all the information about those arrested around that time and provides family support, González’s sisters, Kenia Chirino and Kirenia Wilhelm Benítez, “have not stopped denouncing, despite fear of reprisals.”

García Bacallao expressed her desire to “have contributed to her release” through her work, which included editing an article written by Orelvys Cabrera about González’s arrest “for a series published in Hypermedia Magazine, which includes videos collected by Inventario.”

Following his 37-day detention, the journalist fled to Russia and recently arrived in the U.S. He stated that he was “by Lázara Karenia’s side the entire time, without knowing it” and that he saw “how they arrested her… I recorded the arrest, her participation in the protest. She always remained peaceful, shouting the slogans we all did, ’Díaz-Canel motherfucker’, ’homeland and life’, ’freedom’, ’we are not afraid’, ’get out of power’.” continue reading

Those videos are proof of the violent arrest she suffered. Kenia Chirino has explained that on July 11th, her sister, Lázara Karenia was insulted by a woman from the other side of the street, “You are a ’gusana’ [worm]*, you are a ’gusana’ [worm], because look, with those clothes!”

On several social media publications, Chirino has stated that her sister is innocent and she was only defending herself, “But why do you speak to me like that? I don’t even know you. I haven’t done anything to you,” she said to the woman who was yelling at her. And at no time was there any physical aggression between them.

Activists and those close to González assure, in contrast, that the young woman was beaten by police and by a young woman named Nayelis Corrio, who used “a prohibited martial arts technique.”

Thus, García Bacallao concludes “Lázara Karenia is innocent and deserves absolution” and states that “the Cuban dictatorship has not offered any reparation for the damages they caused her, nor for the mistreatment she suffered. None of the state agents who participated in her arrest have been held accountable for the serious abuses they committed, despite having been identified.” On the contrary, she denounces, “they are presented as victims.”

*Translator’s note: The term gusano/gusana — meaning worm or maggot — is a derogatory first applied by Fidel Castro to ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and those who wanted to leave Cuba.

Translated by: Silvia Suárez

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Cuban Doctor Asks His Followers for Help to Finance His Departure From the Country

Pupo has been unemployed since the end of 2020. (Screen capture)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 12 April 2022 — “I made this decision to leave Cuba several months ago because I am aware that here it will be very difficult for me to practice my profession in a hospital,” says Alexander Raúl Pupo Casas, a protesting doctor who this week has publicly announced his desire to emigrate from the island.

“I was hoping that something would happen that would prevent me from having to leave my country. I like living here, not under this regime, but I like my country and I had to take some time to come to the conclusion of emigrating.”

Pupo has been unemployed since the end of 2020, shortly after, due to pressure, he announced his resignation from a position at the Ernesto Guevara hospital in Las Tunas, where he was doing his residency in Neurosurgery.

The young doctor’s problems began as a result of a publication critical of the Cuban government: “Where are the values ​​of our people, where is the Cuban rebellion, how long will we continue to silently endure being blackmailed to our faces?” he wrote at that time.

Shortly after, the doctor announced that he had been expelled from the hostel where he was staying and was anonymously accused of “instigating disorder and creating destabilizing campaigns and states of opinion of the institutional and civil order.” He was unable to continue his Neurosurgery specialty.

He tried to make a living by copying audiovisual materials onto USB sticks and external hard drives, but that didn’t work either. “They visited the owner of the house where I doing that work, at his workplace, and threatened him. So I was able to save my medical degree but I survive thanks to donations from friends and followers.”

“Sometimes I have to use ingenuity to survive but I have not had to commit a crime to achieve it,” he says. The future as a migrant is unknown, although he knows that in order to practice as a doctor again he will have to make an effort, but “working in other occupations would be an honor.”

“I haven’t been able to work here for more than two years. I don’t have family abroad and I’m appealing to my supporters. I don’t have property in Cuba to finance my departure from the country.” His communication this week asks for help to cover travel expenses. “Buy the ticket and leave the country, that’s what I need,” summarizes his goal.

“In Cuba there is a lot of fear, also justified due to the repression and the lack of law. We doctors know well what a dictatorship is because we live in authoritarian structures within the hospitals themselves. My colleagues have let me know of their solidarity, but the fear has kept many away from me. Though I haven’t felt alone.”

“I can only think that perhaps they could demand more regarding the rights of their patients and themselves,” he stresses. “I don’t blame them because it’s a credible and justified fear. There hasn’t been a single Cuban authority that has come out in defense of my rights.”

The exodus of health professionals is noticeable. “Very few here want to work but we have no other choice. We are slaves and we are prevented from leaving the country.” He had been regulated — the government’s term for those forbidden to leave the country — but the ban on his traveling abroad was recently lifted.

“Recently a gynecologist colleague from Holguín told me that an entire team of her specialty had emigrated. If this continues in a short time, Cuba is going to have a shortage of professionals. All this due to the disrespect that the Cuban regime has towards its doctors.”

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‘El Gato de Cuba’ Sentenced to Two Years in Prison for Contempt

The Cuban ’influencer’ was arrested for “having made fun of Miguel Díaz-Canel in his last direct broadcasts.” (Facebook)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 10 April 2022 — Yoandi Montiel Hernández, the ’influencer’ known as El Gato de Cuba, was sentenced to two years in prison for the crime of contempt, according to the opposition figure Osmay Pérez, who added that there is a possibility that the comedian will be released in the next three or five months.

“In today’s trial (Thursday, April 7), the Prosecutor’s Office asked for five years in prison for Yoandi Montiel, el Gato de Cuba, and the lawyers and the Prosecutor’s Office reached an agreement and gave him two years in prison,” Osmay said in a video posted on Youtube.

Montiel was arrested on April 12, 2021, at his home, where an operation from the Ministry of the Interior and some 20 police officers arrived. So far, he has been detained for about 11 months according to Osmay Pérez.

The regime opponent pointed out that the trial was scheduled for April 5th, and then it was postponed for Friday the 8th, but without warning the oral hearing was held this Thursday.

According to what his father, Lázaro Montiel, told Diario de Cuba El Gato was arrested for “having made fun of Miguel Díaz-Canel in his last direct broadcasts.” His mother has said that she only told “the truth.”

At the beginning of his detention, he was taken to the Villa Marista prison and in May of last year he was transferred to the Valle Grande prison, where he awaited his trial.

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In Addition to Chicken, US Farmers Want to Sell Wheat, Corn, Beans, Milk and Beer to Cuba

The Cubans ask to focus on increasing national production. (EFE)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Madrid, 7 April 2022 — The Cuba-US Agricultural Conference closed this Thursday with the request of US producers to expand trade “without the policies that hinder it,” according to one of them, Douglas Keesling, an agricultural businessman and representative of the Kansas State Farm Coalition.

Among the 25 members of the US group are producers, businessmen from different states and unions that harvest wheat, corn, beans, milk, rice, chicken, and other products, as well as exporters of beer and other beverages.

Since Wednesday, the US delegation has participated in the III Conference where they discussed with farmers from the Island the possibilities of sharing experiences and increasing trade.

The vice president of the Wheat Association of the North American country, Dalton Henry, said that among American agricultural businessmen there is “a lot of interest in getting closer to Cuban farmers” during a press conference before the end of his stay in the Cuban capital.

“We are hopeful that we can expand trade as other organizations in the US advocate for improved bilateral relations,” he said.

The businessman commented that “there is substantial trade between the two countries, especially in the agricultural sector and that trade takes place despite all the challenges.”

The US Department of Agriculture indicated that only in 2021 the United States doubled its chicken exports to Cuba, which amounted to 253 million dollars. This February, Cuba imported 31,212 tons of chicken from the neighboring country, the third highest figure in recent decades and 33% more than the previous month. continue reading

Keesling noted that the US exports more than 50% of the food it produces. And he considered that trade between his country and the Island would be “mutually beneficial” and said that he feels “optimistic.”

The North American businessmen and farmers also stated that the Cuban market is “very important” for them due to the proximity between the two countries, which is “key” for the commercialization of their products, and they trusted in the possibility of carrying out exchanges with Cuban scientists from the sector like they have done with other countries.

They said that they had the opportunity to visit the farms of Cuban farmers in the western provinces of Artemisa and Mayabeque and that they would like to receive them in the United States to show them how they use technologies in their productions.

The day before, Miguel Díaz-Canel made a new nod to the United States, a few hours after invoking a phrase by Fidel Castro to appeal for dialogue. “We have come here to improve our relations and also to end the embargo,” said the president, before the coalition made up of a hundred state agricultural organizations, corporations and producers from both countries conspired against US sanctions since 2018.

The Cuban president stressed the importance of the neighboring country’s agricultural sector “contributing what it can at such a complex time… We can learn a lot from you about the application of technology and the development of production methods that, we know, are very efficient,” he said in his speech at the Palace of the Revolution.

Paul Johnson, president of the Coalition, stated that both parties have “common objectives that allow them to achieve common results,” in response to Díaz-Canel, who insisted that “there is potential to forge paths and bridges together.”

US farmers said Wednesday they would like to sell more wheat and other farm products to the island, but the embargo makes it difficult for them.

“We’re paralyzed because of this embargo. We can’t even compete on equal terms with other providers around the world, because they can offer credit… that means a lot,” Johnson said.

The president of the Coalition insisted that they must find a way to “eliminate barriers.” The Reuters agency indicated that farmers affirm that the proximity of the United States and Cuba (about 90 miles), could cut shipping prices compared to products imported from Europe and other points.

The US embargo on Cuba has exemptions for the purchase of food products, but the US farmers and Cuban authorities consider that the conditions contravene the norms of normal international trade. Among the demands is that of paying in cash and in advance, an anomaly in the international context, but which has not prevented tons of food from arriving monthly in that direction.

Meanwhile, what the Cuban side demanded was to be able to export to raise money and buy other products that cannot be produced on the island. “We don’t want them to give us anything. We want the possibility of selling and buying,” cooperative member Abelardo Alvarez told Reuters.

According to data from the US Congressional Research Service, before 1959 Cuba was the ninth country in the export market for US agricultural products, while today it is below 50th.

The US National Association of State Departments of Agriculture maintains that without the embargo the exchanges would be around one billion dollars per year, compared to the current 250 million.

The readers of the report in Cubadebate, despite being favorable to the end of the sanctions and the increase in exchanges with the United States, interpret the movement as an attempt by the farmers to do export business and demand that efforts be put into national production.

“The only way to get out of the quagmire we are in is to rebuild and make sustainable the disappeared Cuban agricultural industry, first to satisfy internal needs by substituting unnecessary imports and, once this is achieved, to export our surpluses to the world market,” writes a commentator.

“As long as we continue thinking about the blockade and buying and spending those millions that could be allocated to other sectors and not investing to produce it here in the country, we will continue with the same discourse and the same scarcity,” comments another.

From very different positions, the Cuban economist Pedro Monreal, commented last Tuesday on the trade statistics between the two countries along the same lines: “Importing chicken meat from one market or another is an option. There are alternatives, but the question that should be answered is, why does Cuba hardly produce chicken meat? Jamaica produces almost all the chicken meat it consumes.

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‘They Want to Get Rich at the Expense of the Pain of Cubans’

There are still dozens of Cubans in Guyana, spending money that is beginning to be unsustainable for their families. (14ymedio)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Olea Gallardo, Havana, 8 April 2022 — Juan and Ernestina (fictitious names) arrived in Georgetown, Guyana, on March 15 to process their family reunification visas. They had been ’claimed’ by their daughter, Miriela, based in the United States since 2011, who also prefers to remain anonymous because she insists that her parents are “in the hands of a mafia.”

The process — mandatory since the United States Embassy in Cuba suspended services in 2017 after the appearance of diplomats with strange symptoms known as “Havana syndrome” — should have been simple, but it has become a trial of anguish and expense.

Before arriving in Guyana, the couple, who are around 70 years old, had “12 days of anguish,” says their daughter, first because there was no ticket on any airline. “We spent hundreds of dollars calling Copa [Airlines] and they didn’t sell us a ticket because, according to them, they were full until July.” Thanks to a contact, they got a flight with a stopover in Panama, at no less than almost 5,000 dollars each.

A few days after buying that ticket, the Panamanian Embassy in Havana announced that Cubans would need a transit visa to set foot on its territory traveling a third country. Although the decision, which provoked demonstrations for days in the vicinity of the consular headquarters and continues to be a source of protest, mainly affected those who planned to emigrate to the United States irregularly via Nicaragua, it also hit those who, like Juan and Ernestina, had undertaken a legal route. continue reading

Both had the consular interview between March 16 and 30, just the dates for which the immigration authorities forced the rescheduling of tickets , since the transit visa had to be requested 15 days in advance. At the last moment, the option of flying to Guyana via Trinidad and Tobago on Caribbean Airlines came up and they took it. Paying, yes, says Miriela, “another ridiculous price.”

Once in Guyana, the problems were far from diminishing. To begin with, the accommodation was not what they had been promised in the advertisement. “In theory, the hostel is a small house with all the minimum conditions. At first they tell you that they charge 90 dollars a day, but when you arrive, it turns out that they charged 100 a day for an apartment,” says Miriela. Similarly, the price included breakfast, lunch and dinner.

However, the quality and quantity of that “full board” was slight, so her parents had no choice but to go to a market to buy what they needed. With the excuse that the accommodation “is not in a very good area,” Miriela denounces, “they charge them to take them to a market far from there, by taxi.”

However, the serious part came with the clinical exams required by the US Embassy as a requirement to grant the visas. “My parents had the tests exactly 15 days ago and supposedly the results are not there,” says Miriela, who insists that “if you give them 200, 300, 400 dollars, depending on how hard you press them, or if they suppose that you have it, the analyzes appear in a matter of seconds.”

That clinic, International Medical Center, was certainly the subject of a scandal in November 2021, when its owner, Dr. Colin Roach, was murdered, a crime for which two employees were arrested, without their identity being revealed.

Miriela calculates that currently the clinic’s workers are 80% Cuban and the other 20% Guyanese and Venezuelan. For this woman from Sancti Spiritus, it is obvious that the clinic and the hostel are involved in “corruption.”

As an example, she relates how one Saturday from the lodging they offered to go to the medical center to collect the tests. “If the clinic only works from Monday to Friday, does it make any sense that the owner of a hostel, who has no relationship with the patient, shows up at her business with the results of the tests?” Miriela wonders “There is obviously influence peddling and an unequivocal link.”

Cuban Berta García Reyes, who went through the same ordeal of obtaining a family reunification visa a few months earlier, in December, argues that “the flow of people is so great that many Cubans don’t have time to get checked before going to their consular interview, so they are forced to reschedule an additional appointment at the embassy to bring the results of the medical checkup, which can take 10 or 12 days, and after bringing those results to the embassy, ​​you have to wait for them to give them to give you a date to finally pick up your visa.”

This, she explains, “has led people to turn to these corruption mechanisms in clinics to speed up their check-ups and results. And it is common for it to be in hostels where they are told who they should go to to resolve their case.”

García Reyes does not know the sum of money in all cases, but she does know “with certainty” that “there are those who have paid a thousand dollars for an accelerated and valid check-up.”

In her case, her problems began at the consular interview itself, when, to her surprise, she was told that she had to “complete and conclude the medical check-up,” even though she had already had those tests six days earlier. “At the hostel, I found out that they had called from the clinic to let them know that I had to go to the hospital,” says García Reyes.

At the clinic, the doctor told her that “a shadow” had been observed on the X-ray image and she diagnosed her with “cystic fibrosis,” and that she should therefore undergo a sputum test “for suspicion of tuberculosis.” There were also other Cubans there whose plates also turned out to be “suspicious,” the woman narrates, “and they had to undergo the same sputum analysis. In some cases they were asthmatic people, and there were also those with COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease]. They informed us that they had to follow the protocol, that is, the sputum test to rule out tuberculosis in all cases.”

All this was very alarming for García Reyes, because the results of the sputum test took between six and eight weeks, which, of course, delayed the time until she would be reunited with her daughter in the United States, but, above all, it made it made the whole process more expensive. “She had to continue to cover my lodging and food expenses – which until then was 45 dollars a day and, by having to extend the accommodation, they lowered it to 35 dollars a day – as well as other additional expenses, for transportation and telephone,” says Bertha.

Added to the anxiety produced by all this was one more concern: “Cubans always feel fear, especially when we are in the process of entering the United States and we believe that they can deport us for anything.”

So at first she went along with it, but it didn’t last long. “As the days went by, I felt I had to do something. We Cubans who were in that situation ended up connecting through the networks. I knew about cases that were in Guyana even before me, since the first week of December, and I also knew that the last sputum test for previous cases had been done on November 11, when the reagent ran out [to process the sputum sample].”

At that time, they concluded that “either the doctors at the clinic were incompetent, incapable of establishing an accurate diagnosis and proceeding accordingly, or else behind everything there was a business involving the clinic and the owners of the hostels, which benefited from the extension of the Cubans’ stay in Guyana.”

The rumor was that the clinic “accepted bribes in exchange for repeating X-rays or changing the results of medical examinations from those who were willing to pay for it.” Meanwhile, hostels were “keeping all their rooms occupied at full capacity.”

García Reyes alludes to the fact that the consular headquarters is fully aware of the situation. “We shared in the hostels with all the other Cubans, who arrived and left with their perfect medical results, those who, if we had tuberculosis, would have brought the disease to the United States. That clearly indicated to us that the medical personnel and even the embassy officials knew that we were not actually sick, so they were not even the least bit concerned or interested in resolving the situation.”

However, each time they pointed this out to officials, they were told that they were just “following protocol.”

“Many of us think that the rumors that began to spread in February (officially confirmed in March) about the restart of the consular services of the US Embassy in Havana were in some way influencing an increase in corruption among the medical centers in charge of doing exams for immigrants and the hostels where they stay, urging them to make the most of it while Cubans continue to be forced to do the paperwork in Guyana,” García Reyes details.

The wheel “began to unlock” for her after her statements to various US media, such as América TeVé and Telemundo, which publicized the problem. From there, congressmen like Marco Rubio also began to demand solutions for the Cubans stranded in Georgetown.

After Berta’s complaint to US television stations, and although without referring to the complaints, the Embassy authorized an additional doctor, Dr. Arya Devi Karyampudi, from St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, to perform medical examinations on visa applicants.

Until then, and since Colin Roach’s murder, only Dr. Yonnette Roach had been staffing the International Medical Center. She was the one who saw Juan and Ernestina.

In this regard, Miriela continues to express her doubts about the responsibility of the United States Embassy: “If they are rescheduling most of the appointments because they are showing up without the documents, isn’t it obvious that something is happening with the clinic? What are they going to do about it?”

On March 22, without referring to the complaints, the US consular section in Guyana added two other doctors: Zulfikar Bux, from St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, and Dev Persaud, from the Midway Specialty Care Center.

The delays, in any case, are not new, and for this reason last December the United States announced the increase in personnel at its diplomatic headquarters in Georgetown.

With not much success. Laments like those of Juan, Ernestina and Berta multiply in the Facebook group “Cubans united for family reunification,” many of them pointing directly to the consular headquarters as being responsible for the situation.

“You have to denounce these people, those from the embassy are in a plot with the hostels so that you have to spend more time here,” says Justo Toledo Luis. “When you go to the interview they ask you what hostel you are stayig in. Nobody leaves here in less than a month.”

Nierys Bermúdez refers to the owners of the hostels as “fraudsters,” charging guests $300 to “resolve” their medical check-up. “They want to get rich at the expense of Cubans’ pain, it’s too much,” she says, in the same vein as Zurileydis Domínguez Vichot: “What I think is that, as always, they make a lucrative deal off of our suffering.”

The criticism in the Facebook group has turned into praise, thanks and blessings since, this Wednesday, when the United States Embassy announced that it will resume processing in Havana the IR-5 category visas, which recognizes parents who are being claimed by US citizens.

In spite of everything, the diplomatic headquarters in Cuba insisted again that next month’s will be a “limited” resumption, which means that the Embassy in Georgetown “will continue to be the main place of processing for the majority of Cuban immigrant visa applicants.”

In addition, the embassy warned that applicants who have been notified before April 1, 2022 that their case is ready to be processed, will continue to be required to fly to Guyana. Those who have been notified after that date will have their interview scheduled in Havana.

“Given the limitations of their resources,” they added, they are not accepting “transfer requests from applicants.” They also do not have “an exact date” for when the diplomatic headquarters “will begin to process the full range of visa services for immigrants and non-immigrants,” but they assured that they will continue to provide “essential services to US citizens and a limited processing of emergency visas for nonimmigrants.”

For Berta García Reyes, the process was “without a doubt, the worst and most stressful experience” of her life, the cost of which “has been countless humiliations, mistreatment, indifference, contempt, helplessness, abandonment, anguish, to such an extent that some wanted to return to Cuba and wait for a new date.”

There are still dozens of Cubans in Guyana, spending money that is beginning to be unsustainable for their families. Miriela and her husband have spent 14,000 dollars, not counting the tickets from Guyana to the US. “And the old man’s interview is on April 22. Calculate how many dollars an average family needs for this process,” she laments with this newspaper. “Coming illegally to this country is cheaper than leaving through legal channels.”

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Magnicharters Airline Suspends Flights Between Cuba and Nicaragua as of June

The Mexican airline is a subsidiary of Magnicun and Magnibus and began operations in 1994. (Facebook)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 10 April 2022 — As of June 30, the Mexican commercial airline Magnicharters is ending its operations that connect Cuba with Mexico, which included a stopover for its route to Managua, in Nicaragua, according to the Cuban Directory. “Any doubt or clarification, travelers should verify it with the agency that has sold them the flight.”

The airline, a subsidiary of Magnicun and Magnibus and which began operations in 1994, assured that so far there have been no cancellations of its already scheduled flights. Including several tour operators from Mexico, led by Viajes Bojórquez, which promote flights to Havana during Holy Week. They have six weekly flights using Boeing 737-300 planes, with capacity for 136 passengers.

Magnicharters had become the way out of the Island, after without explanation, the Mexican Viva Aerobus announced the suspension of its flights from Cuba to Managua although it maintains the Monterrey-Havana route, which began operations this Saturday.

In that desperate struggle to leave Havana is Mayelin. Last February she saw her exit route cut short, when the Panamanian airline Copa Airlines let her know that it had rescheduled her flight for April. continue reading

“I couldn’t leave because Panama didn’t grant me a transit visa to leave with my son,” she tells 14ymedio. Her husband, who is in the United States, despaired at the ending of flights by Viva Aerobus and looked for other alternatives.

An acquaintance told them that there was a person, “one of those who buys all the seats on the plane and then sells them,” and through him she managed to buy tickets for this Monday. “The flight makes a stopover in Cancun and from there to Managua.” Her husband, who lives in the United States, paid $4,500 for her ticket for her and $1,500 for their son’s.

Last Wednesday, the governments of Cuba and Mexico concluded the fifteenth round of talks on the migration issue where both parties committed to “guaranteeing a regular, orderly and safe flow of travelers.”

The transit of Cuban migrants continues through Mexico. This Friday, nine natives of the island were arrested in the region of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the state of Oaxaca, as they were traveling hidden in a tractor-trailer with 46 people from Guatemala, five from El Salvador and 2 from Honduras, reported Migration in a statement.

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Less Petroleum from Venezuela but Cuban Gas Stations Are Still Operating

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary at a Havana gas station on Wednesday. A sharp drop in gasoline imports has yet to be felt at the pump.

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 6 April 2022 — Reuters reports that, in the first four months of 2022, Cuba imported 22,000 barrels of crude oil and gasoline from Venezuela, far less than it previously had, and is struggling to make up the difference.

Gas stations seem to be operating normally for now but the country still needs an average of about 100,000 barrels per day to meet consumer demand. Until recently, Cuba was importing about 70,000 barrels a day, almost a third of which was from Venezuela. The rest came mostly from Algeria and, to a lesser extent, Russia, Italy and the United Kingdom according to a report by Periodismo de Barrio.

U.S. sanctions plunged Venezuela into economic turmoil in 2019. At the time, PDSVA — that country’s state-owned oil company — was providing Cuba with 60,000 barrels of oil a day. That dropped to 44,000 barrels in 2020 and to only 21,000 in 2021. The situation worsened in the first quarter of this year, and the outlook remains bleak for Venezuela, but Washington has expressed a willingness to negotiate lifting some sanctions if Caracas meets some of its demands on human rights.

In negotiations held last month, Biden administration officials discussed the possibility of Venezuela increasing production to ease fuel shortages on the world market caused by economic sanctions on Russia.

Based on an agreement signed by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in 1999, Cuba provides Venezuela with medical services in exchange for petroleum, which in 2016 amounted to 100,000 barrels of oil a day. Havana can scarcely afford to purchase it at the market rate, especially now that prices are sky high. The cost of west Texas crude, the U.S. benchmark, is now at $102.80 a barrel, a 53% increase over the previous year. continue reading

According to the country’s energy minister, Liván Arronte, Cuba must pay 20% more in shipping fees and other costs than other countries in the region due to the U.S. embargo.

The state-run press reports that Cuba is meeting its goal of producing twenty-two million barrels a year but admits that this amount is not enough to meet the island’s economic needs or consumer demand.

“Cuban refineries are not fully operational. The Havana refinery — the only facility with a catalytic cracker — is operating at around 70% of capacity. The Cienfuegos refinery sporadically turns 10,000 barrels a day while the one in Santiago is out of service,” said Cuban energy expert Jorge Piñon at the University of Texas.

The island needs the fuel to produce electricity and, though most energy problems like these have been attributed to system failures and breakdowns at electric power plants, the fuel shortage threatens the country’s electrical energy system.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary on Wednesday, however, at the gas station on the corner of G and 25th streets in Havana’s Vedado district. Customers were waiting in line to refill their tanks as though all was normal. Meanwhile, at the nearby Tangana service station, a tanker truck was replenishing the underground storage tank.

The situation was very different two weeks ago when the Antonio Guiteras and Maximo Gomez power plans urged authorities to restrict retail gasoline and diesel sales to ensure that supplies for public transit and electrical generators would not be disrupted.

This set off the public’s alarm bells. For weeks there have rumors that gasoline would soon be available only for hard currency. Though authorities have denied the rumors, demand suddenly spiked 65% over previous weeks as people began waiting up to eight hours in service stations lines to buy gas.

The state oil company Cupet stated that the situation stabilized once the country’s electric power plants come back on line though the company did not rule out more problems in the near future.

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Cuba: The Old Guard

Masonic Lodge, corner General Navas and San José. (mapio.net)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 10 April 2022 — Memory is made of places, paths and faces. We go through them again and again, while the rum is spent and the tobacco is burned; taking advantage of the conversation with a stranger, during dreams and obsessions. The one who remembers knows that the world — his world — is constantly eroding into oblivion, and that every gesture or word we said, over time, gives way and withers. Smells that disappear, faces of people — often near and dear — that are no more than yellowish shadows, voices.

However, there is always something that resists loss. Each has his own: a phrase that serves as a code of honor; the last words of an uncle or a grandfather; a kiss; the taste of guarapo that we drank, when we were young, and that we never tasted again. Things so alive and so ours that we preserve them as a talisman.

If you ask me, the place is always the same: the veteran temple of the Freemasons, in my town, a collapsing mansion that I can see if I close my eyes. Rampant, solid, gritty, giving no respite to the cyclones that have wanted to knock it down.

When I was a child, my grandfather gave me his father’s Masonic jewels — a builder’s apron and a necklace with the silver square — I already had the pipe the old man had smoked all his life, some photos and a touchstone: being the great-grandson of a high-caliber Mason allowed me to play in the lodge gardens, browse among the columns and play dominoes with the elders. continue reading

To get to the temple I just had to open the door of my house and cross the street. There, a brotherhood of gentlemen in guayaberas was waiting for me, of musty and correct speech, who had organized the game of dominoes as a series of pitched battles. They allowed me to use their canes as magic wands, read leaning against the walls, and run around the corridors.

On Friday nights, some young people would come and lock themselves in a room that I thought was sacred, because they had never allowed me to enter. I saw everything from afar: the silence, the tranquility and the impeccable dress — inconceivable today, between poverty and carelessness — then, a complicit tobacco in the armchairs, a coffee perhaps.

The next day I peppered one of my gray-haired, smoking friends with questions. The old man explained to me as best he could — I was eleven or twelve years old — that free men of good will met in that place, that they were forbidden to talk about religion and politics, and that everything that was done and said within those walls was secret, so the order had been preserved for centuries by discretion and honor.

Then he led me to a wall full of portraits. They were old photos, moldy, pressed together. He pointed to the center of the wall and told me: that’s your great-grandfather. There he was, in a suit and with glasses very similar to the ones I’m wearing, smiling. They are the old guard — he continued — the teachers of forever, those who were here from the time of the mambises until we fell into disgrace.

They were the ones who had painted the constellations on the ceiling of the loggia, the ones who had commissioned the dark varnished seats and chairs. They had bought the encyclopedias that had survived the dust in a mighty wooden bookcase, next to the broken clock. The hands of those noble ghosts grasped the swords — lion-knobbed, flaming and solemn — that I played with.

To me they were gentlemen. People from another time. And although I never became a Mason, that mythology of honor and tradition, the value of a man’s word, the sense of homeland and duty, I learned from them, from the peculiar history of Freemasonry in Cuba. The bond I have with the Freemasons, familiar and remote, still makes me proud.

I don’t have to remind anyone that almost all of our founding fathers were members of the order; nor that much of the progress of small towns during the republic is due to them — music bands, asylums, charities — everyone knows that Machado was expelled from the lodge for being unworthy and murderous, and that they were persecuted again and again after 1959, like the priests in their parishes and the nuns in their convents.

With pain, those old men tell me that they have to open the minute books — documents prohibited for the uninitiated — so that the police can review them. Not to mention the countless infiltrators they are forced to tolerate, most of them unscrupulous and disrespectful young people, who will never understand the meaning of decency.

But I don’t want to embitter this page or the reader: there have always been informers and poor devils, and even those who pay them are disgusted. Let them fix them as they can with their conscience and with history.

I like to remember that the imprint of these ancient Cubans is there, available and alive. That behind this island of survival and impudence they want to turn us into, there is a lineage of calm gentlemen who play with their grandchildren and give them books as gifts. A family that is not yet crushed by exiles, prisons and boarding schools in the countryside. A fondness for our essentials — food, tobacco, Sunday afternoons — and the hope of its return.

It is a legacy of the old guard, the country that we yearn for with memory. We may have lost it, but we never forget it.

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Another Financial ‘Corralito’ of the Cuban Regime to Seize Deposits in CUC

This week the Central Bank of Cuba extended the term to exchange CUCs in pesos or foreign Currency. (14ymedio)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Elías Amor Bravo, Valencia, 3 April 2022 — In the history of the Cuban communist regime there have been several processes in which the State has appropriated people’s bank deposits and checking accounts. It happens that, with the passage of time, these operations that in Che’s time were simply changing the format of the bills, have now become a little more sophisticated, perhaps so that they will go unnoticed.

But the motive is the same as in 1960: to seize the financial capital of the people, to impoverish Cubans in order to swell the coffers of the state with economic resources that they do not have. Let’s go to the facts.

Why has the Central Bank of Cuba decided that fixed and certified term deposits in CUC* will now be extended until December 28, 2022? The decision is included in a recent resolution, number 74/2022 published in the Official Gazette No. 24 Extraordinary of March 30, 2022. continue reading

This decision has been surprising, because since the start of the Ordering Task**, the Central Bank reminded the population on several occasions of the deadlines stipulated for the exchange of currency during the currency unification process. On the one hand, commercial banks would continue to exchange convertible pesos (CUC) for Cuban pesos (CUP) in cash at bank branches until December 30, 2021, the date of the initial term of 180 days granted in the Resolution No. 178 of June 15, 2021 to carry out this operation, as published by that institution on its website expired six months later.

On the other hand, the same resolution established that it would only be until March 31, 2022 that the accounts in convertible pesos for on-demand savings, fixed-term deposits and certificates of deposit of natural persons would be kept in that currency. During this period, the holder could decide whether to convert the account to Cuban pesos or opt for the certificate of deposit in foreign currency, according to the conditions established for this product. There were no other alternatives for the destination of those deposits.

There was so much insistence on the urgency of this change that many people went to formalize the established exchange operations, even with significant losses in value. Already at that time, the price of the dollar against the peso in the informal market exceeded 100 units at times, completely eroding the purchasing power of the national currency. Opting for the exchange at that time was unprofitable, especially considering how little could be bought with Cuban pesos. Now, it’s worse.

Therefore, extending, as they have, the period to keep deposits in CUC until December of this year is a decision that entails risks for the holders of CUCs, and that the regime, only concerned about making cash for the State, cares little that this is so. The option of converting the account to Cuban pesos makes little sense, due to the loss of value affected since 2021 by the 77.3% inflation that has reduced the real value of the deposits to 30%.

On the other hand, turning these accounts into the deception of the certificate of deposit in foreign currency is even worse, if one takes into account that this type of format can become uncollectible, considering the prospects for the circulation of foreign currency in the national economy.

As has been pointed out on previous occasions, the certificate of deposit in MLC (freely convertible currency) is an example of a “financial corralito” [bank freeze] created by the regime to appropriate the currencies contained in these deposits in CUC or dollars or euros, which follow the same pattern.

This modality of certificates of deposit is inefficient for savings at times like the present, when exchange rates between currencies are distorted by inflation and the negative dynamics of the Cuban economy, with all its sectors paralyzed. If someone needs that money in foreign currency at some point, forget about the certificates because availability will last a long time. It would be a serious mistake.

In the case of “collaborators,” the resolution details that they may request, from their account in Cuban pesos, to fully or partially convert the balance they had at the end of December 2020 in their accounts in convertible pesos, to a certificate of deposit in foreign exchange. Here the corralito is ready.

In this case of collaborators, the power of attorney is allowed, in cases where the holder of the bank account is abroad, to convert the total or partial balance of the accounts into convertible pesos for on-demand savings, fixed time deposits and certificates of deposits in foreign currency, provided that the representation is accredited by special power of attorney. Such is the urgency that the authorities do not hesitate to impose limitations. The objective is to control those currencies deposited in the accounts, as soon as possible.

Finally, the resolution states that there will be no more terms, and, therefore, bank accounts for current savings, fixed-term deposits and certificates of deposits in convertible pesos of natural persons, in that currency, as of 28 December 2022, are automatically converted to Cuban pesos, at the exchange rate of twenty-four Cuban pesos for one convertible peso, in the modality and term originally contracted, and generate interest in this currency at the corresponding rate. A mandatory warning that involves many legal problems.

These postponements are coming to an end, but if the previous guidelines are followed, the first objective of the Ordering Task, the unification of the CUC with the CUP, should have happened long ago. The reason that led the communist leaders to cause the worst crisis in the Cuban economy in recent decades, is still kicking in the form of bank deposits.

However, now, the terrible tourist campaign, and the non-entry of foreign currency, has led the regime to start capturing the deposits in dollars and CUC, which are in the hands of natural persons, and they have put an end to the conversion processes, and in addition: in only two ways: receiving pesos that are worth nothing, or contracting an uncollectible. This is how much Cubans matter to the regime. The umpteenth financial corralito in the history of Cuba, and it will not be the last. And then they want people to trust the banks.

Translator’s notes:
* CUC = Cuban convertible pesos, one of two currencies used in Cuba between 1994 and 2021.
**Tarea ordenamiento = the [so-called] ‘Ordering Task’ which is a collection of measures that includes eliminating the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC), leaving the Cuban peso as the only national currency, raising prices, raising salaries (but not as much as prices), opening stores that take payment only in hard currency which must be in the form of specially issued pre-paid debit cards, and others. 

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Exodus of Reporters Strikes a Blow to the Independent Press in Cuba

The exiled Cuban journalists Mónica Baró, Víctor Ariel González, Yariel Valdés y José Ramírez Pantoja. (Collage)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, January 30, 2022 — Cuban independent journalism has had to reinvent itself several times. The police repression and draconian laws against freedom of expression maintained on the Island are not the only obstacles. Emigration is one of the biggest threats to a press that is also still being persecuted and demonized.

Work teams must rebuild themselves every so often because of the exodus of journalists, editors, and contributors. The bloodletting is constant and in the next months the phenomenon could accelerate due to the new Penal Code, which plans to punish, in a stricter manner, any project that receives financing from abroad, such as independent newspapers and magazines.

Many reporters do not continue practicing journalism once they are away from the Island. The numbers of exiles in the trade could even exceed one hundred in the last three years.

In 2016, the journalist José Ramírez Pantoja was the center of one of the most-talked-about cases of censorship within the official press. The reporter was fired from his job at Radio Holguín after being accused of reproducing on his blog the words of the vice president of the official newspaper Granma, Karina Marrón, who showed visionary concern over a possible social outbreak. continue reading

Out of work in the official sector, the reporter contributed to independent media, including 14ymedio, under a pseudonym to avoid major retaliations. However, State Security continued watching him closely. In 2019 he requested asylum in the United States. “They left me without work or sustenance without caring about the years that I worked as a journalist,” he said then.

Now, Pantoja is employed at the Cano Health Clinic and tells this newspaper that he would be delighted to take up once again his “full time journalistic work at a press outlet.” He believes that “from abroad there is greater freedom and security to practice a journalism in favor of a democratic Cuba without dictatorship.”

Pantoja enumerates the list of colleagues who have recently left the Island, including a well-known reporter, a “furious defender” of the Cuban regime, who now lives in Miami.

On his list there are even directors of provincial radio channels. “In sync with the social exodus, journalists are not remaining behind,” he stresses.

Mónica Baró graduated with a degree in journalism in 2012 from the University of Havana, and has contributed to sites such as Periodismo de Barrio and El Estornudo. She left Cuba in January of 2021 for Spain and from there keeps her eye and her pen on the Island. Her reports, in fact, have been key to assembling the scattered information about the detainees of July 11.

Baró has been able to keep practicing her profession on the site CiberCuba and feels “privileged,” because she knows other colleagues who haven’t been able to break into a media outlet. “It’s really difficult when you leave Cuba to find a job as a journalist to support yourself. There are a lot of stigmas regarding the capabilities of Cuban journalists.”

“Distance, of course, poses an obstacle to the practice of journalism, because nothing compares with the terrain, with living that reality. As much as you remain up to date with what’s happening, you have family in Cuba, or you are empathetic, I think that the experience is irreplaceable.”

However, “it’s necessary to ask what it is to practice journalism and what is Cuba. Is Cuba only a geographic territory or all of the Cuba that is spread all over the world? Is Cuban journalism only what is practiced on the Island or is it also what is practiced from exile?” she asks.

“The ideal for me to is practice journalism in Cuba but when I left it was practically impossible to practice the type of journalism that I was doing. What I was doing in my last months there was activism or resisting.” Baró felt that she could no longer continue reporting as before and recounts: between “becoming an activist 80 or 90% of the time or practicing journalism from a distance, I chose the challenge of distance.”

She warns that “when you leave you stop being attractive for many spaces; training programs expect you to return to Cuba to practice what you learned and that in some way cuts off your career and your training. They are basically asking you to return to a context where your safety is at risk.”

“I don’t know if journalism can be sustained much longer,” she stresses in face of the material scarcity that marks the lives of emigrants in their first years.

Entire editorial departments, internationally award-winning journalists, and even directors of media outlets are on the list of those who have settled abroad. Agencies like Hablemos Press succumbed in face of the exit of practically all its reporters, while other news sites have had to relocate their headquarters to Madrid, New York, or Mexico City.

This January, the reporter Yariel Valdés González recounted on his Facebook that he was joining the team of Telemundo 51 in Miami. “Every time that I passed on the highway near that tower I would tell myself: One day I will arrive,” he wrote in front of the channel building. “A great dream made reality since I came to this country, less than two years ago.”

Valdés was freed in March 2020 from an immigration center in Louisiana, after an Appeals Court ratified his political asylum case. While he was living on the Island, he was a contributor to the magazine Washington Blade, the United States’s oldest publication aimed at the LGBT community. Now, he smiles in a photo while holding in his hand his identification as an employee of Telemundo 51.

In other cases, emigration has served some to take up their original professions again. Víctor Ariel González was one of the founders of 14ymedio in May 2014, but previously he had graduated as a civil engineer from the José Antonio Echeverría Technological University of Havana, known as la Cujae. Several arrests and police operations led him to request asylum in the United States, where he arrived in 2015.

González got a job as an editor for the site Cubanet. His time with that outlet, headquartered in Miami and founded in 1994, kept him in contact with independent journalists on the Island. “The change was radical” in the manner of practicing journalism, he recalls. “For me journalism had been making the story” in contact with reality, something that wasn’t possible being abroad.

As an editor, it was his role to apply the editorial “scissors” to the texts that were arriving from Cuba and also to write informative notes. “I chose engineering since I was pre-university, afterwards I discovered journalism and I liked it, but when I arrived in the United States I was impressed by the highways, the buildings, and the structures. I knew that I didn’t want to dedicate myself forever to editing.”

“It was a beautiful moment because it also ended up being a personal rediscovery, like taking out of a drawer all that knowledge I had acquired during my engineering studies and realize that I still had it.” As time was passing engineering “took precedence over journalism,” he concludes.

The regime provokes this exodus by hindering journalism work with regulations, in the style of Decree 370, the dreaded Law 88 and a long list of regulations that penalize the independent exercise of journalism. State Security is dedicated to reinforcing the harassment of reporters and suggesting that they leave the country to put an end to so much pressure.

For Abraham Jiménez Enoa, leaving the Island was full of drama. For five years a travel ban weighed on him and finally at the beginning of 2022 he managed to travel the country for the first time and land in Madrid and then travel to Barcelona. In an article about his exile, which he published in Gatopardo magazine, he defines Cuba as a place where “independent journalists are treated like terrorists.”

Although the column he maintained in that publication was entitled From the Malecón and Jiménez Enoa always thought that “it would last until he left Cuba for the first time, and once he set foot in another place, this repository would have to be closed,” now he considers continue to collaborate with Gatopardo. “But no longer about my ’confinement’, I will leave that room closed and I will go to another.”

“Leaving Cuba is not the same as leaving any other country for the first time,” the journalist points out about the act of crossing national borders, perhaps in a nod to what, almost 80 years earlier, the poet Virgilio Piñera masterfully defined as “the damn circumstance of water everywhere”.

While Jiménez Enoa never ceases to be amazed by the lights he finds in the streets of Barcelona, ​​the bookstores full of titles and the variety of yogurts in the market, thousands of kilometers away, Rafael, a reporter who writes under a pseudonym for an independent media who tries to make his way through the convulsive legal waters of the Island, prepares his escape.

“Training a reporter is something that takes a long time,” says one of the editors of the project Rafael works on and who prefers to remain anonymous. “You must learn to collect information, manage data, take care of sources and get used to the editorial line of a media outlet. When a journalist leaves, you have to start from the beginning when a new one arrives. That is, if he arrives, because each day people are more afraid.”

After almost a year narrating the streets of Havana, the young man has decided to head for Nicaragua to reach the United States. His previous profession was a cook and a cousin awaits him in Miami who drives a truck for a living. Journalism could be just a brief chapter in his life. For the team that remains, his departure leaves a hole with a difficult solution.

Translated by: Sheilagh Herrera

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Cuban Prosecutor Adds ‘Alleged Previous Crimes’ to Lengthen Prison Sentences

The artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, with a Cuban flag, behind El Funky (left) and Maykel Castillo ’Osorbo’ (right), in a scene from the video clip of ’Patria y Vida’. (Screen capture)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 8 April 2022 — “This starts now.” With that phrase and a laugh, the rapper Maykel Castillo Osorbo responded when he was informed in prison this Thursday of the prosecutor’s request for ten years in prison that he faces, according to art curator Anamely Ramos speaking this Friday .

Ramos details in a Facebook post all the charges against both Osorbo and the leader of the San Isidro Movement, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, who has a request from the public ministry for seven years in prison. The first is accused of attack, contempt and public disorder; the second, of outrage against national symbols, contempt and public disorder.

Ramos argues that “It is obvious, the search for alleged previous crimes to extend the time they asked for,” noting that the “outrage against national symbols” does not even correspond to April 4, 2021, when according to the legal file there were the events for which they are accused, but rather to two years ago, when Alcántara performed the work Drapeau, with a Cuban flag. continue reading

In addition, she explains that it must be taken into account that the day before the date in question, on April 3, the police beat Osorbo “at the entrance of the Cuba y Chacón station, with several activists who accompanied him to look for Luis Manuel, who are witnesses and who were also beaten.” As a result, the rapper had to go to the polyclinic “when he was released at dawn.”

When they tried to arrest him on April 4 and handcuffed him, continues Ramos, “they didn’t [succeed]* and Maykel began to complain and the discussion began.”

Far from behaving violently, as stated in the prosecutor’s petition, in the video made public on social networks at that time it can be seen that the violence “begins with the policeman grabbing Maykel by the neck while he practically kept his hands up or behind him.”

“What Maykel reacted against that day, what the neighborhood people who defended him reacted against, was against the police violence that is a fact in Cuban streets and that was seen in all its crudeness on July 11,” Ramos asserts. .

The activist also mentions that “when people began to spontaneously gather in San Isidro and sing,” that same April 4, “State Security arrived,” which, Ramos says, “meant that the police would be sanctioned for trying to arbitrarily and violently stop Maykel, the same police officers who are accusing them today.”

Ramos notes that in the year that both activists have now been in prison, “many international organizations, personalities, governments and coalitions have demanded their release… When the court judges and sentences Maykel and Luis, it will not be doing so in the shadows, it will be doing it in front of the world and against the world.”

One of those organizations, Amnesty International (AI), also ruled this Friday on the prosecution requests for Osorbo and Alcántara. Erika Guevara-Rosas, director of AI for the Americas, tweeted that both “conscientious opponents” face these sentences “for protesting, making anti-establishment art, denouncing the repression and authoritarianism of a government that despises its people.”

Guevara-Rosas attached to his message the document with the request of the Cuban Prosecutor’s Office, which among other “crimes,” also speaks of insulting the country’s president, accusing the Government, in a live broadcast, of “the lack of medical resources ” during the pandemic and insulting the Ministry of the Interior and the security forces, among others.

The Ministry considers in the brief that its investigation has concluded and requests the Ordinary Criminal Section of the People’s Municipal Court of Central Havana to open the oral trial against the accused.

*Translator’s note: Maykel was handcuffed on one wrist when the crowd intervened and ‘rescued’ him. The image of him raising a single handcuffed fist has become iconic. The video linked to above, and again here, shows the scene.

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Apropos of “Ideological Deviation”

Maykel Castillo ‘Osorbo’ is in prison for singing and being one of the authors of the song ‘Patria y Vida’. (Screen capture)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Alexis Romay, New Jersey, 9 April 2022

I will be brief. These terrifying words began many of the interminable speeches of the Mansplainer-in-Chief who, pistol in hand, took control of Cuba 62,000 millennia ago.  With this introduction to my new column in 14ymedio, I propose to do exactly the same. (I’m referring to being brief, not to taking over the Island. I hope the results are not so devastating.)

The column will appear weekly under the banner Ideological Deviation, which in addition to being the title of my book of décimas, is a horrible legal concept with which the government frightened me in my childhood and youth in Havana, and for which any Cuban can still be imprisoned in the land I fled. The décima is a style of Spanish poetry created in the XVI century by Vicente Espinel. The format is 10 lines, eight-syllables each. It rhymes ABBAACCDDC. Jorge Drexler did a beautiful TEDx talk about it.

Does this mean that I am going to write an opinion column exclusively to the rhythm of the décima? Well, yes. The reason is simple: the meter and rhyme  —and, hopefully, the content— ​​will render them memorable. This will make it easier for them to be recited in morning assemblies at schools throughout the nation. From preschool to sixth grade! To infinity… and beyond! Pioneers for dropping bars, we will be like Espinel!

My octosyllables will come in a variety of tones and registers —lyrical, nostalgic, satirical, parodic, animal, vegetable, and mineral— which are my ways of thinking and feeling Cuba from a distance. Thinking and feeling are crimes in totalitarianism, and the Cuba that the Castros took for themselves is no exception. (Ah… and I aspired to write a presentation without mentioning that last name that produces gagging, nausea, hives).

I escaped in order to be, an action that in Spanish is split into two verbs: ser and estar. I fled in order to think and to feel. Beyond the seas and decades later, I admire those who are, who think, and who feel in Cuba. I could not imagine my life in my land, but I celebrate that there are those who can do it and do it every day, against the winds and the tides of an implacable regime. These verses, and those to come, are for you.

“The People,” “the Cuban Nation”

“The people,” “the Cuban nation”
is not the same as “the State.”
(No need for you to debate.
Go on. Have a revelation.)
The “Revolution,” that station
in Dante’s Hell, is a trap:
the government does kidnap
the Cubans who dare protest;
at Díaz-Canel’s request,
they get erased from the map.

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Author’s note: This text is my recreation and condensation, in English, of my décima(s) published this week in the Spanish edition of 14ymedio. Remember: this post is considered a crime by the Cuban government.

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

More Than Half of the Buses in Havana are Out of Service

The general director of transportation in Havana, Leandro Méndez Peña, admitted that only 45.7% of the buses are available in the capital. (14ymedio)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 8 April 2022 — The Havana authorities have not yet found a solution to the serious mobility problem that afflicts the capital province. This week, the general director of transport, Leandro Méndez Peña, admitted that only 45.7% of the buses are available, which means that there are more out of service than circulating on the streets.

To alleviate the situation, the Government plans to have the agencies with assigned cars contribute* to the transport of passengers, which would increase the available seats by 40,000 every day. However, the measure – which Méndez Peña recognizes as insufficient – ​​does not work due to the refusal of users of state vehicles to comply with this obligation.

The General Directorate of Provincial Transportation of Havana warned that the measures to be taken will be more severe with those who fail to comply with the order. “We are forced to increase the demand on the cars assigned by state entities so that they comply with what is established in these situations and provide service to the stops,” said Mendez Peña.

According to the official, the situation worsened with the fuel deficit of last week, when it was necessary to ration precisely to cover the needs of public transport. The work and school transport companies were affected, when they contribute 255 vehicles to the mobility of the province. continue reading

To ensure that the requirements are met, the authorities have provided for the presence of 290 inspectors and employees of the General Directorate of Transport in the 311 busiest pick-up points.

According to what they said, the Gacelas — shared/routed minivans — and private boteros [literally ’boatmen’ — taxi drivers] are being used to complement mobility, but the official press, present at the event, wanted to know more about the rates. The answer was that new prices are being studied stretch-by-stretch to “compensate private carriers for the expenses,” which will mean an increase in the cost of the journeys. Months ago, when the prices per route came up, the drivers began to use new tricks, such as dividing the routes, so as not to lose money.

The boteros complain that, with the fixed prices, they cannot cover the costs; while citizens complain about how expensive it is to travel and the tricks that drivers do to get more money from them than before.

*Translator’s note: One way this would be done would be through semi-formal ride-sharing/hitchhiking with drivers of government-owned cars obliged to stop and pick up passengers at established stops.

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Doctors Leave Cuba and it Affects the Infant Mortality Rate

In 2019, infant mortality in Cuba increased by more than 26% compared to the previous year. (Cubahora)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Madrid, 8 April 2022 — The infant mortality figures in Ciego de Ávila were very bad news last year, when the province closed 2021 with a rate of 13.8 dead babies per thousand births. For the first quarter of 2022 up to March 24, according to the authorities, six newborns died and there were 911 births, a mortality rate of 6.6 per thousand, Invasor reports this Thursday.

The official newspaper, which interviewed the director of Health in Ciego de Ávila, Nilka Pita Alemán, said that the outlook is bleak if one starts from there. “For the start, these numbers are not encouraging either, especially when the country’s purpose is not to exceed, as a rate, four deaths per thousand in 2022,” says the text, which as the only positive data reveals that there has been no maternal death.

The official outlines a problem: the exodus of Cubans leaving the Island is influencing the lack of specialized health professionals in the maternal and child area. Although there are obstetricians, there is a lack of pediatricians and clinicians, whose functions are being covered by general practitioners. “It happens that the very dynamics of the sector implies ups and downs in what we now consider an achievement, whether, for example, due to the exodus or maternity leave,” she explains.

Pita Alemán says that secondary care is the area with the worst situation, since it is impossible to cover the shifts. “Three people are needed to guarantee the third medical criterion and define the conduct. (…) Also, the number of nurses available is few,” she warns. As a consequence, neonatologist nurses and even intensive care nurses have had to change positions. “This year in the plan we request more places for nurses, in the medium-technical modality to guarantee speed in training,” he adds. continue reading

The specialist points out as a worrying cause the data that indicates that the number of babies born with low weight are increasing, although they survive longer than expected with those ranges. As the doctor explains, work has been done to improve the application of the protocols that control those born with low birth weight and the results are relatively positive.

“To date we have regressed in terms of low birth weight, we have 19 more children than in the same stage of the previous year. According to experts, this condition is exponentially proportional to death.

Pita Alemán says that the state authorities traveled to the province at the end of the year to discuss what was failing and, from there, the staff was trained to change some things. One of the factors that has been monitored the most in pregnant women as a result of this is heart disease and anemia, she reveals, since there is high maternal morbidity in women with these pathologies.

The specialist also points out that strategies are reviewed, such as checking whether women need income or material support due to their economic situation, as well as cases of teenage pregnancies. “We know that part of the success lies in increasing control over the processes, the clinics and the maternity homes,” she says.

Pita Alemán reveals that at the end of the year there was an outbreak of sepsis at the Antonio Luaces Iraola Provincial Hospital that led to the death of several children. The poor conditions of hospitals, especially with regard to hygiene, have been pointed out for a long time by the independent press, but the authorities have a hard time accepting that these conditions are the cause of deaths, as in this case

“In the Neonatology room, difficulties related to water, leaks in the delivery rooms and cesarean sections were eliminated,” says the official, who assures that the problems are being solved and there are better conditions, also in terms of sanitary material, but lacking is “the control so that everyone complies with what is established.” As an example, she gives the Morón hospital, where there was also an outbreak of sepsis that was resolved without deaths.

“When a lack of control or administrative negligence has been demonstrated, severe measures have been taken, among them, the removal from their posts of people in charge and specialists,” says the expert.

The interview corroborates what Ernesto René exposed in December in a comment on Invasor. René, a worker in the Pami maternal and child program for 34 years, spoke about the precarious situation of the project, due to disinvestment and lack of professionals “due to policies and decisions of its directors in the province, in a totally mistaken way and lacking in science and experience.”

“Valuable professionals such as obstetricians, pediatricians or clinical nurses, from primary and secondary care, have not been looked after and I believe that the motivations and barriers of the personnel who work in this sensitive area should be reviewed.”

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.