14ymedio

The President of Cuba’s National Assembly Lashes Out: ‘We’re Tired of Programs and Measures. Where is the Reality?’

The President of Cuba’s National Assembly of the People’s Power, Esteban Lazo. (@AsambleaCuba/Twitter)

14ymedio, Havana, 18 July 2023 — On Tuesday, Cuba’s Parliament held a session to take the pulse of the national economy for the current year and evaluate 2022 results. The outlook, judging by the data offered by the Vice Prime Minister for Economy and Planning, Leticia Morales, is discouraging: 45.48% annual inflation, only 1.8% growth — they had predicted 3% — barely 3% overall recovery and colossal losses in almost all relevant sectors.

The numbers enraged the President of the Assembly himself, Esteban Lazo, who launched into a diatribe against the inability of leaders to manage well and concluded that the government has “no money”. “We are already very tired of programs, measures, studies, diagnoses. And where is reality? And where is the solution to the problem? he asked before the disconcerted faces of parliamentarians.

“Today, the country does not have the resources to continue the current level of imports. Practically 100% of the ’family basket’ is imported.” “We don’t produce rice. . .100% of the beans are being imported,” enumerated Lazo, noting that in 2017 and 2018 they had these products, to spare.

Vice Prime Minister Morales, detailed the Island’s alarming financial situation, they were able to generate — in the first half of 2023 — only $1.282 billion dollars by exporting goods and services, meeting 37% of their target, which translates to a loss of $94 million, the effects of which will be noticeable in “activities that require hard currency.”

Cuba todo lo importa, no produce nada de nada. «¿Hasta cuándo vamos a estar en esta situación?». 😲

No lo ha dicho ni un medio independiente ni un opositor, sino Esteban Lazo, presidente de la Asamblea Nacional de #Cuba 🤯.

¿Qué opinas de estas palabras de Lazo? 🗣️💬 pic.twitter.com/RQhGIGVqs7

— El Toque (@eltoquecom) July 18, 2023

Cuba imports everything, it does not produce a thing. “How long will we be in this situation?” / It was not the independent media nor an opponent saying this, but rather Esteban Lazo, President of the National Assembly in #Cuba. / What is your opinion of Lazo’s words?

With regard to Gross Domestic Product, a data point not revealed by Morales — although last December the Minister of Economy, Alejandro Gil, predicted it would exceed 2.2 billion dollars — stated that not only were the 2019 pre-pandemic levels not reached, but there is a gap of 8% and, in some parameters, it declined to negative numbers. “The primary activities report negative values of 34.9%, the secondary -20%, and social -4.9%,” he explained. continue reading

“All this in the context of shortages and limitations to access fuel,” in addition to the “distortions with a clear trend toward dollarization and, in the case of non-state economic actors, with the retention of hard currency abroad to pay providers, without going through the national banking system,” he snapped.

Exports from micro, medium and small enterprises (mipymes) increased to 6.3 million dollars, but that is almost entirely due to the sale of charcoal (representing 0.2% of the country’s exports). Morales recognized that they should “push” the work of mipymes more and facilitate their access to raw materials with “fiscal and tributary policies” as incentives.

Detailing the Cuban business landscape, the Vice Prime Minister highlighted that there are 16,253 entities in the country: 2,422 state businesses, 5,138 cooperatives, 103 mixed enterprises, 8,590 mipymes and 596,000 self-employed people.

Important gains were made in the first half of the year, but in the same areas: tobacco, rum, and shellfish exports. However, neither sugar nor charcoal produced the expected revenues. One sector which has been unexpectedly disgraced is nickel, the exploitation of which is led by Sherritt, a Canadian company to which Cuba owes 362 million dollars.

Morales bemoaned that telecommunications, managed by Etecsa, a state monopoly, also reported a decline in revenue and a decline in “collection of foreign currency.” The explanation, she added, is the increase in the sale of services in pesos. “This is good for the population, but affects revenue,” she complained.

With regard to tourism, there isn’t room for optimism either: Cuba received, she said, 1.3 million visitors — 80% of the target for 2023 — but this estimate does not come remotely close to the 2019 figure. “In the case of domestic tourism, there have been 2.9 million tourists to date and we expect 7.6 million tourists by the end of the year,” she added.

Regarding inflation (45.48%), Morales confirmed what all Cubans can attest to: that 8% of inflation is concentrated in food, beverages, and transportation. To contain it, she promised — without details — a “macroeconomic stabilization program” with “diverse actions in specific areas.”

Several delegates took the floor to comment on the Vice Prime Minister’s report, and highlighted the tasks that always remain for the Cuban economy: the tension between the U.S. dollar, the peso and the freely convertible currency (MLC); the mediocrity of state businesses and the laborious rise of mipymes; and the lack of food sovereignty.

Far from the reality faced on Tuesday in Parliament is what happened last December, Alejandro Gil declared without a shred of doubt, “2023 will be better than 2022.”

Translated by: Silvia Suárez

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The Cuban Parliament Defines the Profile of Teenage Mothers: Poor, Black and Out of Work

A pregnant woman receives medical care in Cuba. (Interpress Service)

14ymedio, Havana, 19 July 2023 — The Cuban Parliament reported on Tuesday that in the first half of 2023 there were 7,953 pregnancies corresponding to women between 12 and 19 years of age, out of a total of 41,761 reported nationally. The situation is more worrying in the rural context, where, say the deputies, early mothers have a specific profile: poor, black and out of work.

The figure, which represents 18.9% of the total number of pregnant women in the country so far this year, exceeds by 291 (3.7%) the 7,662 early pregnancies of the same period in 2022. If the cases are analyzed by province, the percentage is even more alarming; 22.7% of those born in Las Tunas are born to underage mothers, while in Camagüey the number is 21.4%, in Granma, 20.4% and, in Holguín, 20.3%.

For Arelys Santana Bello, president of the Parliament’s Youth Care Committee, “social factors” intervene in the upturn of precocity. In the Cuban countryside, it is common for a minor to feel forced to have children, either to get out of poverty – if the father is able to respond economically for the child and his mother – or to emigrate, if the father is a foreigner.

“In the places visited by the deputies, mestizo and black adolescents, living in rural environments, detached from study and work, in low-income homes and in precarious conditions, were more prone to early pregnancies,” she explained.

There are other social factors that affect the problem, such as lack of access to sexual and reproductive health services, Santana said. The official also mentioned the “influence of gender inequities,” which limit the woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy. continue reading

She also regretted that, although educational and social communication actions are “prioritized,” these are “insufficient” due to the complexity involved in convincing rural minors to “adopt responsible behaviors.”

Adolescents resort less to the use of contraceptive methods than adult women, she said, leaving in the background the low availability of these supplies in the Island’s pharmacies.

In Cuba, teenage pregnancies not only have serious consequences for women’s health but also have a profound socioeconomic impact on families. After pregnancy, many young women are pressured to get married and have children, reducing their access to higher education or a decent job. On many occasions, the children end up being raised by grandparents.

The solutions to this problem that Parliament raised on Tuesday once again focus on the promotion and education of sexual health through the media and on the promise of strengthening the 168 municipal family planning services by adding staff and renewing the supply of contraceptives.

The deputies also proposed that emphasis should be on the continuity of studies for pregnant adolescents, who usually see their educational process interrupted. Similarly, it was proposed to create a maternal home in each municipality that doesn’t have this type of center.

Yamila González Ferrer, vice president of the Union of Jurists of Cuba, added that the issue is also legally complex. Marriage between a minor – usually a girl – and an adult remains, under Cuban law, a crime: “It is a crime of rape, because she is a minor. We need our doctors and teachers to be trained,” she concluded.

She also criticized the fact that, often, it is the parents of the teenager who encourage the relationship with older men and early pregnancy, despite the fact that voluntary interruption is legal.

For his part, Antonio Aja Díaz, director of the Center for Demographic Studies of the University of Havana, pointed out that fertility in Cuba has been decreasing in the last five decades. After the baby boom in 1960, the number of pregnancies began to decline, beginning in 1978. Currently, the general fertility rate on the Island is 1.4 children for each woman of childbearing age (15-49 years old), a figure that Aja relates to the indicators of developed countries and that he does not hesitate to attribute to the “policies of the Revolution.”

Commenting on the increase in the number of pregnant minors, Aja could not sustain his optimism and agreed with Santana and González: the alarming situation is a reflection of the “social problems” of Cuban families.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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The Disagreements of Cubans Explode in the Comments Published in the Official Press

A sleepy Salvador Valdés Mesa chaired the debates on the agricultural and food situation in Parliament. (Cubadebate)

14ymedio, Havana, 20 July 2023 — The comments of readers in the official Cuban press have become the sounding board of widespread unrest in a country corroded by inflation and scarcity. Faced with the inability of the authorities to manage the economy, citizens mock the parliamentary debates on price controls, which Cubadebate describes as a “complex but decisive battle for the future of the Revolution.”

“They can no longer continue to justify all their mistakes by mentioning the blockade, while some become millionaires at the expense of the sweat of those who work. If we don’t do something, this socialist revolution has very little left,” says a reader with the pseudonym pjodalr. Like him, dozens of users are expressing their frustrations.

It was no wonder, being one of the most sensitive issues for Cubans, that the voluntarist perspective of the leaders and the absence of solutions caused a flood of disagreements. Vladimir Regueiro, Minister of Finance and Prices, acknowledged to the deputies the lack of control of inflation, but then shielded himself behind the international panorama.

The price index, he said, grew by 39% at the end of 2022, while since the beginning of 2023, it has grown by 18%. If the percentage is compared to that of the first half of 2022, prices have increased by an alarming 45%. The minister indicated that there is a governmental “lack of objectivity” when it comes to prices and acknowledged that many times they were legislated without even knowing if the fixed cost was “real.” continue reading

After the intervention of Regueiro, the president of Parliament, Esteban Lazo, again placed the problem – as he did during the opening of the sessions – in the structural: “If there is no supply and production, we will not achieve effective control of prices,” he said.

The Parliament also discussed on Wednesday the unfortunate state of the agri-food sector. The situation is summarized in two words: “non-compliances and decreases,” says the report presented to the deputies. Without fuels, fertilizers or insecticides, the agricultural production has been catastrophic: 68% compliance with the plan. The production of meat, milk and eggs also failed.

For readers, the leaders live in a “futuristic” world, a “utopia” that never considers the present reality. “The unstoppable dollar and galloping inflation,” summarizes user Gilberto Reyes. “What is the State’s solution for the employee who has no money at all, or for retirees?”

“Pork meat at almost 500 pesos; a pound of rice at 200 pesos; a liter of oil, 700 and 800 pesos; what price controls are we talking about then?” said the reader identified as R. Meanwhile, user José Antonio Ruiz pushes his disgust to the limit: “It’s much ado about nothing. The same issues, the same reasons for the failures, the same explanations to try to alleviate the dissatisfactions of the population, the same justifications for the problems … without even being able to talk about expectations in the short term that give way to hope.”

“The only thing that has gone down in price is beer, and that has been achieved by the private enterprises, not the State,” mocked the reader Pepe, while another described the situation of the informal market as “total anarchy.” Some readers complained about Cubadebate’s censorship of their comments, such as Selma González, who reflected on the uselessness of the police in the face of crime in a comment that was “correct and adjusted to the subject” that the media eliminated.

The conclusion, after several days of parliamentary discussion, is clear: “What a waste! So much uncertainty!”

Cuban economist Pedro Monreal, who has closely followed the talks in Parliament, criticized the “nonsense” of the deputies’ opinions and their inaccuracies.

And he concluded: “It could have been the way the press reports it, but what we read today about the ’discussions’ in the committees of the National Assembly is reminiscent of a sitcom. It’s not clear if it is a problem of technical incapacity or of ’directives’ that have been taught.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Eighteen Cuban Passengers Are Prevented From Boarding a Condor Airline Flight in Varadero

Main entrance of the Juan Gualberto Gómez de Varadero International Airport. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Havana, 19 July 2023 — This Tuesday, 18 Cubans received some bad news. At Juan Gualberto Gómez de Varadero International Airport, passengers were unable to board the Condor airline flight to Frankfurt. In the German city, travelers would make a stopover to continue to Istanbul and later to Dubai, but they could not even complete the check-in process.

“We were told that the details of our second flight did not appear in the computer system,” one of the Cuban passengers who could not board the plane tells this newspaper. “Our first trip appeared on the computer without a problem, but since they didn’t manage to locate the second one, they didn’t even check us in,” said another traveler, on condition of anonymity.

“We paid more than 1,000 euros per person for a ticket. In my case I came from Santiago de Cuba, and now we don’t know what is going to happen to us, if they are going to return the money or reschedule the flight. Nobody says anything,” laments the man, who had to pay “more than 5,000 pesos for a private room” to stay one night in Varadero waiting for a solution.

Several crew members from the Condor flight, which took off at 10:45 at night, tried to intercede for the 18 Cubans and even “called Germany directly to solve the problem, but they couldn’t get the details of our second flight so they didn’t t allow us to board the plane,” he explained.

“We don’t understand the reason because we even have the reservation number and all the details of the second and third flights. Condor’s representatives told us that they couldn’t find the data. They didn’t even take our suitcases, and we never got to the boarding area,” he explains. continue reading

This Wednesday several of these travelers returned to the airport in search of answers, but so far no Condor employee has been able to tell them what will happen to their flights. “We have a 30-day tourism visa for Dubai, so there is no problem with that country. It’s outrageous that we haven’t been allowed to get on that plane.”

It’s not the first time that something like this has happened. Last November, a group of passengers who intended to travel to Belgrade from Varadero was rejected by Condor. Most were migrants who took advantage of the visa exemption that Serbia then provided to Cubans, to embark on the migratory route to countries in the European Union.

“We can confirm that on November 22, a total of 22 passengers were not accepted to board the plane from Varadero to Frankfurt, since we received information that their trip to Serbia was at risk as far as their entry into the country was concerned,” Magdalena Hauser, the airline’s director of communication, told this newspaper.

This year, despite the free visa in force until mid-April for Cubans, the situation of several groups of passengers from the Island who were not allowed to enter Serbian territory was also reported. They remained for days in overcrowded conditions at Belgrade international airport, and many were deported.

At the end of March, the consul and political advisor of the Serbian Embassy in Havana, Jelena Zivojinovic, confirmed to 14ymedio that from April 14, Cubans would need a tourism or work visa to travel to their country. The measure, aimed at containing illegal emigration, may be revoked “in the future” if the citizens of the Island “demonstrate” that they can travel to the Balkan nation and return to Cuba, the diplomat said at the time.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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The Bureaucracy of Death in Cuba, a Nightmare for Families of the Deceased

With its doors closed and an empty outdoor entrance, the funeral home remains abandoned and without hope of resuming its functions. (14ymedia)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 18 July 2023 — The residents of the Luyanó neighborhood in Havana have been without funeral services for two and a half years. Complaints have already begun to materialize in posts and comments on social media. However, with its doors closed and an empty outdoor entrance, the funeral home remains abandoned and without hope of resuming its functions.

“The deceased are sent to San Miguel del Padrón or La Víbora,” a neighbor — who witnesses how, and how often, someone comes by the premises to ask about the restart of services — tells this newspaper.

“Since the pandemic began, they announced that they would no longer be accepting deceased. But the pandemic is over and the funeral home is still completely closed,” she laments.

In funeral homes in other neighborhoods of the capital, the situation is very reminiscent of the times when health restrictions prevented more than two people from attending a burial. The explanation? The transportation crisis. “It is very difficult to go to a wake at a funeral home that is not the one in your neighborhood, if you have no transportation. People are very limited, especially older people. Now everyone has to settle for offering their condolences to the family, while the mourners are left practically alone in the room with the deceased.” continue reading

In funeral homes in other neighborhoods of the capital, the situation is very reminiscent of the times when sanitary restrictions prevented more than two people from attending a funeral

A Facebook post by a group of Luyanó residents questioned the measure of having the memorial services for the deceased held in other centers, if the neighborhood has its own funeral home. “They always have a different problem. When the bathrooms are backed up, leaks appear; they must be repaired, painted, or the cafeteria has no water. It’s all a lie,” commented an enraged user.

“It is our funeral home, where we have always watched over our relatives, friends and all our people from Luyanó, why can’t we have this funeral service available?” lamented another Internet user.

It is not the first time that the population has complained about the lack of funeral services on the Island. From corpses that must wait hours –sometimes days– for a hearse to transport them, to the shortage of coffins to bury them, the bureaucracy of death in Cuba becomes increasingly suffocating for those who must deal with it.

In the Sancti Spíritus province, the construction of a crematorium has been expected for at least two years. With an investment of just 5 million pesos, the project could ease the burden of the relatives who transport their deceased to Ciego de Ávila or Villa Clara to comply with the wishes of the deceased to be cremated.

However, so far, the project has seen two location changes, several complaints from architects and no facility has been built.

“This is about advanced technology that requires two gas burners: one at the bottom, which is where the first cremation of the deceased is carried out, and a second, located in the tower where the gases that can rise into the atmosphere can be burned, so that only vapor comes out,” Yoel Aquiles Martínez, director of the province’s Provincial Unit of Necrological Services, told the Escambray newspaper.

Now everyone has to settle for sending their condolences to the family, while the mourners are left practically alone in the wake room with the deceased

The crematorium would also provide incineration services for medical and biological waste derived from hospital care, such as surgical remains and chemical and biological products. The managers do not say, however, what has been the fate of this waste so far.

The facility, initially projected to be built in an area chosen by specialists and architects on the border with Jatibonico, is now planned to be built 300 meters from the La Rosita residential area, because this would reduce construction costs.

Although the director of Public Health in the province has already authorized the new location, it has been rejected by the Hygiene area, which alleges that the expulsion of toxic gases derived from the cremation processes could harm the health of the residents of the area.

While Sancti Spíritus remains one of the four Cuban provinces that lacks a crematorium, institutions extend the timing with their internal confrontations. However, official sources, once again, point to the embargo as the culprit.

Translated by Norma Whiting
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Cuban Activist Maykel Osorbo Sews His Mouth Shut in Protest of Mistreatment in Jail

Cuban rapper Maykel Castillo “Osorbo”. (Facebook)

EFE/14ymedio, Havana, 18 July 2023 — Cuban artist and dissident, Maykel Castillo aka Osorbo, sentenced to nine years in prison, sewed his mouth last week as a sign of protest against his mistreatment in prison, according to statements made to EFE on Tuesday by sources close to the opponent.

The coauthor of Patria y Vida — anthem of the July 2021 antigovernment protests and winner of two Latin Grammies — sutured his lips last Wednesday. A nurse removed the sutures the next day, according to the same sources.

Similarly, they reported that the dissident was sent to a punishment cell after sharing graphic materials related to his protest.

Last week, Cuban activist Anamely Ramos, exiled in the U.S. had shared on her Facebook profile that Osorbo had tattooed “Patria y Vida” on his forearm and was threatening to sew his mouth shut as a gesture of protest against the mistreatment he’s suffered in the Kilo 5 y Medio prison in Pinar del Río, where he has been held for two years.

“If on Friday you don’t hear from me, you know what happened: plantado in a cell, with my mouth sewn. That is war!” warned the musician during a phone call he had with Ramos, who stated that up until that point Castillo had approached prison as a career in “resistence” and had focused on reinventing himself, reading and “connection” with his people, but now he demands “respect”. continue reading

Ramos reminded us that for months she has been informing on Castillo’s situation in prison, where he has suffered “all kinds of abuses” and recurring violations of his rights.

It isn’t the first time the rapper has sewn his mouth shut in protest against the government, he also did so in August 2020.

In June of last year, artists Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Osorbo were convicted and sentenced to five and nine years in prison, respectively.

Otero Alcántara and Castillo were punished for crimes of disrespecting national symbols, contempt, public disorder in the former’s case, and contempt, assault, public disorder and defamation of institutions and organizations, heroes and martyrs, in Osorbo’s case.

The court proceedings were not linked to the 2021 antigovernment protests, but rather to events that occurred on April 4, 2021. On that day, according to the prosecutor, Castillo clashed with some agents, apparently because his companion was not wearing a mask.

According to what has been shared on social media by several activists, Castillo ended his statement during the trial telling the magistrate: “I expect that the sentence you decide, your honor, be that of your conscience.”

Translated by: Silvia Suárez

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Athletes Who Left Cuba Triumph Defending the Flag of Other Countries

Cuban athletes Roger Valentín Iribarne, Orlando Ortega, Arialis Gandulla, Reynier Mena and Yulenmis Aguilar. Collage (Instagram)

14ymedio, Havana, 18 July 2023 — Roger Valentín Iribarne achieved a personal mark this Sunday in the 110 meters in the hurdles with a time of 13.21 seconds in the Diamond League held in Silesia, Poland. The gold medal won by this Cuban for the Portuguese club Benfica is a reflection of the athletes who have left the Island and are achieving their goals in other countries, such as the hurdler Orlando Ortega, the sprinters Arialis Gandulla and Reynier Mena and the javelin thrower Yulenmis Aguilar.

Valentín’s sports development in Benfica has been upward. In the Diamond League he presented himself as the world leader of the 60 meters with hurdles after timing 7.59 seconds in Lisbon last January. In this way, he also surpassed the personal best record that he had achieved with Cuba in the indoor world championship held in Birmingham in 2018.

In September 2021, Valentín Iribarne asked for his dismissal from the Island’s national athletics team. There was no motivation for the 26-year-old, whose best mark had been 13.39 seconds. One of the last students of Professor Santiago Antúnez Contreras, the same coach who prepared the Olympic champions Anier García (Sydney 2000) and Dayron Robles (Beijing 2008), he got tired of the poor training conditions and the delays in state support.

This hurdler found the conditions to develop his potential in the Benfica club, so he made contact with them. In Cuba, the athletics crisis was notorious. “A selection that included two Olympic finalists in Atlanta 1996 and in London 2012 did not present an athlete in Tokyo 2020,” published Play-Off Magazine a few months after Valentín settled in Portugal. “To get an idea of the magnitude of the event, the last time Cuba did not qualify an athlete in 110 meters with hurdles to the Olympics was in Rome 1960. A streak of more than 60 years has been broken.” continue reading

“The club took care of all the procedures for us to get here,” Valentín said about his arrival at Benfica and that of Reynier Mena on the YouTube and Facebook program For Cuba and the World. “We didn’t have to pay anything.” Unlike the Island’s sports authorities, the Portuguese club gave him a home, food and everything he needed for training. The young man recognizes the work of his coach but rules out defending Cuba in an international event.

Orlando Ortega escaped during the Moscow Athletics World Cup in 2013 and prior to the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympic Games. This natural athlete from Artemis was considered to be the successor of medalist Dayron Robles, who also left the Island to settle in Monaco.

Ortega closed 2020 with an unprecedented double in the Spanish indoor championships played in Orense, Galicia, after winning both the 60 meters and the 60-meter hurdles. This ranked him as one of the best athletes in Spain that year.

This runner-up in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, bronze in the Qatar 2019 World Cup and in Berlin 2018, is recovering from an operation for a rupture in his tendon and hopes to be back next year.

Reynier Mena, who in Cuba was a legend, arrived in Portugal at the same club as Roger Valentín. In less than a year he showed his ability on the track. During his July 2022 demonstration at La Chaux de Fonds, this sprinter broke the 10-second barrier in the 100 meters flat with a time of 9.99 seconds, and in the 200 meters he recorded 19.63 seconds.

Mena requested sports leave in 2021 on the Island, and since it was announced, he has confirmed to 14ymedio that his goal was to “continue training in the sport.” Last May he reaffirmed his good level at the Citta Di Savona International Meeting with his best time of the season, 19.95 seconds in the 200-meter test, surpassing Yancarlos Martínez (20.44 seconds).

During an indoor event in the capital of Kazakhstan, Astana, the Portuguese-nationalized Cuban sprinter Arialis Gandulla won the flat 60 meters with a time of 7.18 seconds, making her the third athlete with the best record of the year.

Meanwhile, the javelinist Yulenmis Aguilar was expelled from the Cuban national team in 2018. That was the “prize” she received after obtaining the bronze medal at the Central American and Caribbean Games in Colombia. They simply told her that “they didn’t count on her for the next season.”

Aguilar suffered a lot because of this decision. Her sporting life became “an ordeal,” and the injuries she had in her knees, shoulders and elbows forced her to retire for five months. “I didn’t want to know anything about the sport. I went into a depression and began to gain a lot of weight,” she told La Voz de Galicia.

She contacted coach Raimundo Fernández, who runs the A Coruña School of Javelinists and traveled to Spain. “Her first six months here were an ordeal of physiotherapists, doctors and rehabilitators,” Fernández stressed.

Yulenmis Aguilar recovered and last year set a record for Spain in javelin throwing with 64.17 meters, a mark that placed her as sixth in the world ranking. Her desire is to compete for the country in which she found support to recover.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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The State BioCubaFarma Group Recognizes a Deficit of 40 Percent of Medicines in Cuba

A pharmacy on Enramadas Street in Santiago de Cuba. (14ymedio)

EFE/14ymedio, Havana, 18 July 2023 — The State Group of the Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industries (BioCubaFarma) recognized, on Tuesday, a deficit of 40% in the basic table of medicines in Cuba.

The president of the business group, Eduardo Martínez, explained in a session in the Cuban Parliament that the deficit currently includes 251 drugs, according to the Prensa Latina news agency.

Martínez said that the insufficiency covers imported and domestically produced medicines and pointed out problems with access to financing due to the direct effects of the United States economic embargo.

He mentioned in this regard that the usual suppliers stopped supplying due to the embargo, to which is added the global deficit of some raw materials and materials for pharmaceutical use.

There are no raw materials or the materials necessary for production, said the director of the pharmaceutical group in charge of supplying 369 basic medicines to the national health system. continue reading

Last May, the director of Operations and Technology of BioCubaFarma, Rita María García, told the official press that the plant – which is allocated 60% of the production of basic medicines at the national level – managed to reactivate some drug production lines of medications in high-demand among the population, with the arrival of inputs purchased by the Government and other “managements,” without specifying whether they corresponded to donations.

Among the drugs that were to be manufactured again are the injectables of aminophylline, labetalol, fenoterol and morphine of 10 and 20 milligrams (mg), of wide hospital use for patients in intensive care. The laboratories dedicated to the manufacture of these drugs were paralyzed for almost four months because they did not have containers — such as ampules, plungers or casings — due to the shortage of glass.

BioCubaFarma has 46 companies, 115 production lines and more than 19,000 workers, according to Prensa Latina.

The shortage of basic products, such as food and medicines, was one of the main economic elements in the anti-government protests of July 11, 2021, the largest in decades.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Cristina Vives, Independent Art Curator in Cuba: ‘What We Do Is Seen With Suspicion’

Vives reports that in 2014 they realized that they had to be more “aggressive” publicly and decided to position themselves on social networks. (EFE)

EFE (via 14ymedio), Laura Becquer, Havana, 16 July 2023 — – Promoting art independently and privately in Cuba continues to be seen with “suspicion” and leaves those who are dedicated to that activity in a certain situation of “vulnerability,” says curator Cristina Vives, with 30 years of experience in the sector, speaking in an interview with EFE.

“Thirty years after being independent and successful, what we do is viewed with suspicion, and that is directly proportional to being controlled, observed and questioned all the time,” says Vives from her studio in Havana, a magnet in the country’s art world.

This family project, which began with Vives and her husband, the renowned Cuban photographer José Alberto Figueroa, arose in the midst of the deep crisis of the Special Period of the 90s in Cuba. Now it also includes their daughter, Cristina Figueroa.

For Vives, going beyond the framework of state institutions at that time, with the collapse of the socialist bloc in Europe and the economic, political and social bewilderment that it meant for Cuba, was a “suicidal leap.” But she has “never” regretted the decision.

“Since the end of the 80s there was a galloping crisis of cultural institutions in which many of the most prominent artists left the country looking for other paths, avoiding censorship and creative limitations. Everything was in decline,” she recalls. continue reading

It is in that panorama that Vives and Figueroa set up a studio in their apartment in the Havana neighborhood of Vedado, an initiative that is currently a benchmark for the private management of contemporary art on the Island.

“We surround ourselves with the most outstanding, novel, groundbreaking and curious of Cuban art of the 90s, and we fill the space with works of young creators such as Tania Bruguera, Belkys Ayón and Raúl Cordero, among others, who left the Art Institute between 1992 and 1994,” Vives says.

She emphasizes that the studio, later named Figueroa-Vives, also arose from the “frustration of a great attempt to collaborate with the cultural institutions. That’s when we said, ’no more’.”

“The years have passed, and it’s no surprise how we think and act. We can be uncomfortable, but now they’re used to it; there is more tolerance,” she continues.

Her trajectory, with a dozen exhibitions in Cuba and other countries, several explorations and a network of collaborators, does not guarantee anything. “We continue to walk a tightrope,” says this Cuban curator.

“We will always be vulnerable, as long as we are not a recognized, legally respected and supported institution,” laments Vives, who, even so, specifies that “if there is something to defend, it is the ability not to be afraid.”

Despite the three decades that have passed, Vives establishes comparisons between the current situation and that of its beginnings. Now, she points out, there are “sensitive loopholes in cultural leadership and in the strength of the institutions,” something that, together with the “almost massive exodus of a lot of artistic talent,” reminds her of the Special Period.

“Second acts (of a crisis) are impossible to resist,” comments the curator, who talks about the need to reinvent herself and the feeling of continuing to move in a “space of vulnerability.”

Vives feels that now “it is easier” for them to dialogue with the new generations who run some cultural institutions of the Cuban State because “they come with a spirit where ideological guilt does not touch them.”

They are not so contaminated,” says her daughter, who is in charge of the online shows of the family art studio.

In 2014 they realized that they had to be more “aggressive” publicly and decided to position themselves on social networks and manage a website so that their message reached many more people and could connect with more galleries on and off the Island.

“If you believe in art, you support it. And we have done that by trying to unite our ability to curate exhibitions with the help of entities like the Embassy of Norway and that of Spain, which have supported us a lot,” she explains.

This collaboration has allowed them to achieve visibility even outside Cuba and also to maintain the projects, says Figueroa, who points out the recent joint exhibitions between artists from the Island and the Spanish studio Nave Oporto.

Both have a very clear purpose 30 years after throwing themselves into this “suicide”: “To get the (artists) who are (in Cuba) to breathe and produce, and those who have left to return.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Have Patience, the Part To Fix the Water Pump ‘Is Coming by Boat’ and Will Arrive in Cuba in a Month

Havana residents in the municipality of Playa expect to be without water for a month. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Havana, 13 July 2023 — Some residents of the municipality of Playa in Havana have spent five consecutive days without water, this newspaper has learned. The suspension of the service adds to the long list of breakdowns suffered by the entire capital, and the government assures that work is being done to offer solutions.

“We have been without water for five days, and not even a single watertruck has made an appearance,” said one of the residents, who attributes the suspension of the water supply cycle to a break in the pump due to lightning. “After almost a week, we have almost no water left in the tank.”

The resident, owner of a private home full of Spanish tourists staying until the weekend, regrets that the restoration of the service will take between twenty days and a month, since the part that the pump needs is not available in the country and its replacement “is coming by boat.”

The discomfort of the residents of Playa, in the absence of ways to solve the water supply problem, contradicts the reports offered this Wednesday by the official media Granma, which says that the Aguas de La Habana Company has already taken charge of the situation. continue reading

“Extending the cycles” of water supply, spacing its distribution and temporarily alleviating the shortage with tanker trucks are two of the main measures adopted, the company reported.

It also recognized the poor situation of water supply services in districts such as Cerro, Plaza de la Revolución, Diez de Octubre, Centro Habana and Habana Vieja, which persists due to the deficit in the central system.

The populations west and south of Havana are recovering thanks to the installation of the necessary equipment, but the company has not been able to offer a solution to the eastern municipalities.

This insufferable situation inspired singer Luis Alberto Vicet Vives, known as “La Crema,” to upload a music video on his YouTube channel on Thursday that criticizes the deficient water and electricity services. He approached the subject matter with his usual humor, claiming that the services are stable and assuring that the hardships are not suffered by “the manager.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Giving Hotels and National Resources to Foreigners Will Not Pay Cuba’s Huge Debt

Ricardo Cabrisas, Deputy Prime Minister of Cuba, during the renegotiation of the debt with the Paris Club in 2020. (Cubadebate)

14ymedio, Juan Izquierdo, Havana, 15 July 2023 — The option of resolving Cuba’s external debt with the transfer of domestic resources to foreign companies, defended this Wednesday by the pro-government professor Juan Triana Cordoví, has been refuted by economist Pedro Monreal. Triana considers this option a way to refinance and “revitalize” socialism on the Island; for Monreal, it poses the risk of “being insufficient and undermining sovereignty.”

Triana, who teaches Economics at the University of Havana and writes a column in OnCuba, raises the need to renegotiate the Island’s debt and clean up the image of the country, which has become “one of the highest risks in the region” in terms of investment.

To do this, he suggests that, in a hypothetical negotiation, one could make use of the “assets” that in theory belong to the “people of Cuba,” although they are specifically managed by their “administrator”: the State. Triana refers, first of all, to hotels, which he prefers not to deliver completely to foreign companies but to turn them into owners of “part of the shares.”

He also alludes to the 2,417 state companies, of which – he calculates – only 12 (0.4% of the total) are really “strategic” and carry the weight of the national economy. Triana recommends that these companies that “decide the game” do not touch each other, partly because some of them are already shared with foreign entities: this is the case of the Canadian Sherritt International, whose debt to the Island is paid by the overexploitation of Cuban nickel and cobalt mines; Havana Club, managed together with the French Pernod Ricard; and Habanos, which is partly owned by Spain. continue reading

The negotiation would be done with the rest of the state companies, which could be saved from their financial mediocrity if they are shared with foreign investors, who would work, without intending to, to “save” socialism on the Island.

To these two elements, Triana adds idle lands and idle plots in cities, where there are already “several buildings built by capitalist real estate companies,” such as the Miramar Business Center. The formula of the exchange of assets, the professor acknowledges, could be questioned, but after all, he concludes, “it’s something that began more than thirty years ago when that first contract was signed with a foreign capitalist and in just a few months the first five-star hotel in Varadero was born.”

However, Triana does not place the key to taking the step in the will of the State, which conveniently blocks the economic movements of the country, but in “consensus” with the people, to whom he recommends “explaining” what is intended to be done.

Precisely from this erroneous argument – to assume that the Cuban people have some control over the management of the national economy – Monreal starts to refute Triana’s suggestion. In a series of Twitter threads, the economist explains not only why the massive exchange of assets to pay off the debt is impracticable, but also the serious political risk it entails for Cuba.

Affirming that the people own the state assets is, at the very least, a “controversial” budget when it comes to reasoning the possibility of an economic opening. “Power,” says Monreal, means the ability to “decide a difference” and have a specific “property.”

“It could be difficult to validate the exercise of the power of the people, specifically of the wage earners, within the framework of an economic package such as the ’arrangement’ that has ’compressed’ wages and that disproportionately puts the cost of the adjustment on the workers,” Monreal summarizes. “Explanations to the people are problematic when they are politically treated as a ’clay’ to mold and not as an active subject (citizens) with effective capacity to promote or stop public policy proposals.”

In addition, the Cuban people do not have “effective citizen spaces for criticism of the Government,” which makes it impossible for them to participate in decision-making.

The economic aspect of the problem is even more serious, and to analyze it, Monreal refers to the data that reflect the great “scale” of the Cuban foreign debt, whose “recent worsening” leaves very little room for action, even for the State.

The economist starts from a central and unquestionable argument: “Cuba’s accumulated external debt is today greater than the Gross Domestic Product,” and the hyper-devaluation of the Cuban peso in 2021, after the Ordering Task*, was the final blow to the country’s ability to assume reimbursement in the current situation.

The country had to disburse 1.606 billion dollars to pay for debt service in 2022, at the same time that it recorded a deficit of 1.629 billion in its current account, which reflects a total income (exports of goods and services) lower than expenses. These alarming data point to a “severe contraction of the resources” to confront the debt.

The increasing deterioration of the current account has an impact on the foreign exchange reserves that Cuba has, says Monreal. In addition – and although the official data offered by Havana are outdated – the current crisis precedes the coronavirus pandemic, one of the usual pretexts the regime uses to justify the impoverishment of the country, and it is related to a “sudden increase in short-term debt,” which complicated the conditions of payment to creditors.

That stagnation put Cuba between a rock and a hard place in front of international banks and their suppliers, including the Paris Club. The information published by this last body exposed the different renegotiations that the Havana regime has been forced to undertake with its creditors since 2020.

Looking for a payment solution based on the exchange of assets is dangerous economically, says Monreal, especially because, considering the scale of the problem, what Cuba can offer is “relatively small.” Therefore, he insists, the real balance of such a measure would be paid politically and would not free Cuba from its status as an “international pariah” for its economic discredit.

What is left for Cuba – which has already delivered, as Triana observes, its “crown jewels”: minerals, tobacco and rum – are health services, communications, the domestic market in dollars and its dominance over remittances from abroad. The Cuban State is limited, Monreal maintains, in negotiating these remaining assets, in part because it has always kept them under strict control.

The market remains in pesos, which would have to be “sweetened” to have some attraction for the foreign investor, through tax privileges. However, this process would be an obstacle, the economist considers, if you want to “privatize” state enterprises progressively, a process, Monreal says, that is characteristic of all the reform processes initiated by the communist parties in power, “with disparate results.”

The alternative could be, proposes Monreal, the agricultural sector: to promote private agricultural production to guarantee the supply of food in national currency and allow producers to carry out operations, even with large companies outside the Island.

This transfer of state agricultural assets to the national private sector – a system that Monreal calls “officially approved” – could be beneficial, if accompanied by other measures, to reduce the external debt. The result? A double benefit: to guarantee the food sovereignty that Cubans crave so much and, in short, to protect national sovereignty.

*The Ordering Task is a collection of measures that include 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 a broad range of other measures targeted to different elements of the Cuban economy.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Cubans Will Be Without Hot Dogs until August

Maintenance work at the Sancti Spíritus factory forced the production of sausages to stop. (Escambray)

14ymedio, Havana, 15 July 2023 — Hot dogs, the great lifeline of the Cuban family table, will decrease in stores in the coming weeks after the temporary closing at the Sancti Spíritus sausage factory, the only one of its kind in Cuba. The industry stopped the engines in order to carry out “extensive” maintenance, which will last until the beginning of August, the director of the Business Unit, Luis Ignacio Sariol Maceda, told the Escambray provincial newspaper this Friday.

The official explained that since the inauguration of the plant, in 2019, machinery imported from Italy had not received maintenance and the deterioration was already reflected in production volumes. Initially, the technology had a capacity to produce eight tons, a figure that had been reduced to just two due to “technical problems”.

This problem had already been exposed in September 2022, when the plant managers indicated that they barely worked part-time due to the lack of spare parts for the machinery. The official press then assured that the necessary parts to restore capacity to factory levels had already been imported and that the only thing left to do was “resolve” the supply of meat in the face of the livestock debacle.

Nine months later, Sariol Maceda has indicated that they already have the “advice of Italian specialists” to review the production line of one of the foods most in demand by Cubans. The official explained that they have allocated 500,000 euros to obtain most of the pieces, “many of which are already in the UEB Perros Calientes de Sancti Spíritus itself and the rest are in the process of arrival”. The importing of the cooling shower and the purchase of special bearings for the vacuum pump are still pending. continue reading

Although national production depends on a single factory, American brands and, to a lesser extent, Brazilian brands, enter the market

The shutdown of this plant represents a hard blow to Cubans’ diet, who largely depend on this sausage, which can be obtained at relatively affordable prices. Nor does it require special conditions for its conservation, apart from refrigeration, and it can be prepared using several recipes.

Although national production depends on a single factory, American and Brazilian brands enter the markets, the latter ones to a lesser extent. The latest presentations shipped from the US are more similar to sausages, in larger packages of up to three kilograms. However, they are only available in networks of freely convertible currency (MLC) stores, or online sales sites designed for Cubans residing abroad to buy food for their relatives on the Island.

We are hoping that no setbacks occur, added the director, so that the repair schedule is not interrupted and the plant is reactivated at the end of July or the first days of August. To date, the work on the refrigeration system has been completed and the materials have been changed to meet the temperature requirements in the sausage manufacturing process.

At the moment, the factory is dedicated to the preparation of other foods, including salami and 60 tons of ground beef per month destined for medical and children’s diets and for the rationed ‘family baskets’.

The plant is the great meat consumer in Sancti Spíritus, leaving popular markets and even informal commerce without supply. However, due to the fall in the sector, they have sought raw materials to manufacture sausages, previously made with pork, minced chicken or beef. Last September, they detailed that the formula for this sausage includes 50% of these types of meat, plus 50% starch and water.

Translated by Norma Whiting
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A Little Dictionary for K

It was also a harmonic gesture that, at 91, Kundera has donated his books and papers to Brno, his native town. (EFE)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 16 June 2023 – Books. I have just read that, over the last few years, Milan Kundera has lost his memory. It’s dramatic that the only real tool that the novelist can count on is so volatile, it overflows and wears out, the years take it from us. I read Kundera for the first time aged 18 or 19. I remember the book itself perfectly – and it makes me sad to think that one day I will forget it – ripped apart, withered, a book whose pages I let fall out at one time by accident.

It was, of course, the story of the confused love between Tomás and Teresa, Franz and Sabina, and the mysterious crossings over of those lives – it was not their remoteness that made me feel less familiar with them.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – very easy to read but very difficult to understand, according to its author – it was the first novel I bought after leaving my country. I wrapped it in newspaper, disguised the cover, so that when I returned no one would take from me this book that was finally mine. When I finally left my house, my city and my things for the last time, it remained behind. I’m not thinking of going back to get it. Ten years have passed since I last opened that book – as a youth, of whom only a ghost remains – when I came across a sentence: “The eternal return is the heaviest burden”.

Escape. After all the love affairs, the books swapped and lost, the conversations in which nothing much is said, the university evenings, the coffee and the pedantic clouds of smoke, what is left to the reader, of Kundera? It’s the feeling that the books have made an older person of them, they have offered them the memory of a man who aspired to have no biography and whose life itself was, in the end, the story of a century.

To read him in a communist country, where his books enjoyed the ’privilege’ of censorship, was to count upon having a manual for survival in this ochre, gelatinous world that produced communism. And nevertheless, the great lesson that I learnt from Kundera was to escape. To run away from all the leaflets and compromised literature, the parties and ideologies, to reject those who expect a simplistic narrative in black and white or in black and red, a pro or anti-government novel, a story through which the publishers can exploit you as exotic, combative, militant, a martyr of freedom. And even further: not to enter into anyone’s club where they have conveniently already received an audience and applause, on one side or another, or found people to whom they could sell the petty drama of the exile or of the conformist. continue reading

Dissident. I imagine that Kundera hated the word dissident more than any other. The perverse implications of this term – separate, unorthodox, Cain-like – sound like the uttered revenge of someone who remained, an insult from the ’right-minded’. No one wants to be defined as kind of tumour or a leper that was obliged to leave the country. No one wants their books to be marked out for their bitterness or neglect. Dissident no: I’m a novelist, said Kundera too many times. Opposition to communism isn’t dissidence, but individualism and autonomy. The price is solitude. Nothing more tempting.

Complexity. When a writer abandons the shell imposed on him by his environment – the regime, history, the goodbyes, other writers – only the fabric of memory remains. In this dark room, in the coldness of Paris or some other city, out walking with a woman or smoking alone in a cafe, the words come back to you again. “I want my literature to be united with life and for this reason I defend it from every possible attack”. That is the only true liberty, the only true homeland that a novelist can aspire to. All the rest are fictions that are much less useful than any you could invent, and that no one would read.

Music. To open oneself up to the infinite possibilities of a novel and live for months or years inside the world you’re creating – it can’t be compared with any other job. I find an example in the interview that Joaquín Soler Serrano conducted with Kundera in 1980. He remembers his musician father – the writer himself made a living by playing the piano in restaurants – and offers this lesson: have respect for ’form’ that can only be learnt from music: the changes of rhythm, counterpoint and motifs, the subtlety of composing a book to arrive at the echo, the only echo that remains when memory is gone.

Laughter and forgetting. “Optimism is the opium of the people” writes the protagonist of The Joke, in a postcard to his communist girlfriend. At one time I met a young Czech girl and asked her to pronounce the original title, Žert. It sounded – I wouldn’t know how to pronounce it today – like a gob of spit, a rebellious guffaw, which encapsulated not only that novel itself but also the whole of Kundera’s work and his attitude to austere authority. I demanded she repeat the sound over and over many times. She didn’t get, what for me was the revelation of that word, so elastic and remote, perhaps because to understand one’s own language one also needs to abandon it. I don’t know what happened to the girl, who went back to Prague shorty after.

Finale. You learn how to live and how to write from Kundera. You learn an ethic and a certain kind of healthy cynicism, a mistrust of power and its messengers – success, money, party membership card – and the vertigo of entering into one’s own solitude. The fact that, at 91 he has donated his books and papers to the city of Brno, his native town, was also a harmonic gesture. Or at least a way of saving his memory – the heaviest burden – before death came looking for him.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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The Cuban Film School Rejects the Imposition of a New Director and Asks for ‘Transparency’

The Academic Council refuses to recognize the new directive and warns about the violation of statutes. (Facebook/International School of Film and Television)

14ymedio, Havana, 17 July 2023 — The Academic Council of the International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños (EICTV), in Mayabeque, expressed its disagreement with the imposition, by the Ministry of Culture, of Waldo Ramírez as the new director of the center. The measure, described as “abrupt, arbitrary and silent,” adds to the list of recent clashes between the guild of filmmakers and the cultural authorities of the Island.

“We didn’t know about the appointment because of the way it happened, and we demand a transparent decision-making process,” said the statement, which was signed by 13 members of the Council.

The arrival of Ramírez – founder of Televisión Serrana, in Santiago de Cuba, and representative on the Island of the Venezuelan multinational network Telesur – to EICTV is the indirect consequence of the dismissal of Ramón Samada from the presidency of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) and the assumption of the office by the vice president of the Institute, Susana Molina, former director of EICTV.

Numerous filmmakers, teachers and students linked to the school have also expressed personally, on their social networks, their non-recognition of the new directive, protected by the statutes of the institution. They also demand that “the proper selection process” be carried out in a transparent and “consensual” way, with the opinion of the student body – which includes foreign students – and the workers. continue reading

The community of teachers, graduates and filmmakers linked to EICTV also opened a petition, so that all those involved with the School can express their support for the Academic Council with their signatures. “We believe in the possibility of restoring a useful and necessary art for our nations, as well as promoting it in the only way we believe possible: by creating a free cinema,” the statement concludes.

The Cuban Filmmaker Assembly also commented this Sunday on the decisions of ICAIC. In their statement they made it clear that “Cuban cinema does not belong to a ministry or an institution. They [the institutions] have to put themselves at the service of the artists and not the other way around.”

Critic and film professor Gustavo Arcos also shared his opinion regarding the debate on his Facebook account. “It is not Samada, it is the structure that puts and removes Samada that must be reviewed, transformed or, if necessary, deleted. Managers and officials make mistakes; no one is perfect, but there is a system, a model of order and command that has sustained, for too long, that institutional violence that we have once again just perceived.”

It is not the first time that EICTV has caused headaches for art officials in Cuba. Last May, some students, mostly foreigners, had complained about the poor conditions of the school by writing on the walls of the center “Down with the leadership. Thieves.” Cuban writer Wendy Guerra, a graduate of the center and currently residing in the United States, then warned that the film school “is a non-governmental institution” where Cuban students and “some young foreigners” receive scholarships or pay for their training, so it is natural that a “minimum of conditions” is required for their stay.

At the end of June, the discomfort of the filmmakers caused more than a hundred directors, screenwriters and actors to have a meeting with leaders of the Ministry of Culture and the Communist Party to face the controversy unleashed by the censorship and unauthorized dissemination of the documentary La Habana de Fito, by filmmaker Juan Pin Vilar.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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‘Cuban Film Institute President Is Released From Office’ After the Scandal Over the Censorship of ‘Havana de Fito’

Ramón Samada Suárez during his visit to Animados ICAIC in 2020. (Facebook/Animados ICAIC)

14ymedio, Havana, July 16, 2023 — The Board of Directors of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) decided to “release from office” the president of that institution, Ramón Samada Suárez. According to the official statement published this Saturday on the entity’s Facebook page, his departure was due to a “personal request.”

Although the brief note details that in the meeting, where Samada’s end as president of ICAIC was decided, “acknowledgment was expressed for the results of his work in recent years,” the language of the text points to the official’s fall from grace.

The Assembly of Cuban Filmmakers reacted this Sunday to Samada’s departure, assuring that “he has been a valid interlocutor on this route and we know of the interest, energy and time he has dedicated to improving the ecosystem of Cuban cinema.” The creators added that “Cuban Cinema does not belong to a Ministry or an institution. [The institution] has to put itself at the service of the artists and not the other way around.”

The director of the Gibara International Film Festival, Sergio Benvenuto Solás, reacted along the same lines. “We all know that a ’personal request’ is has no value when it comes to pictures.” The artist specified that what happened to Samada was a “dismissal” that “at this political moment, it is an irresponsible act of the Ministry of Culture and of the authorities that have approved it.”

Benvenuto Solás considered that this is a “person who has been disrespected, because it is absolutely public that it was not his decision to show Fito’s Havana documentary,” alluding to the broadcast on national television of this material without the consent of its director, an act “unanimously repudiated by the guild and whose erratic decision does not culminate in generating rejection.” continue reading

But the official is also criticized for his repressive attitudes. In November 2015, during a meeting of the G-20 group of filmmakers, the then director of ICAIC, Roberto Smith and Samada tried to expel the activist Eliécer Ávila from the premises, alleging that he was a “counterrevolutionary.” Several filmmakers argued that the meeting was “open to the public” to which Samada replied: “Yes, but not for the counterrevolutionaries.”

Now, the dismissal of Samada occurs in the midst of a new turn of the screw in the censorship suffered by artistic creation on the Island. At the end of April dozens of Cuban filmmakers attacked the “cultural institutions” for suspending the screening of Havana de Fito , a documentary directed by Juan Pin Vilar, together with the audiovisual Existe by Fernando Fraguela and Yulier Rodríguez, and El encargado , by Ricardo Figueredo, at the headquarters of the theater group El Ciervo Encantado.

The filmmakers were criticized for “not offering public and satisfactory information about this decision,” in addition to the fact that “an unfinished copy of the documentary [La Habana de Fito ] was later presented on a Cuban television program, ignoring the refusal of its director and its producer, and with the explicit purpose of discrediting them.”

The filmmakers’ malaise made it possible for more than a hundred directors, screenwriters and actors to hold a meeting with leaders of the Ministry of Culture and the Communist Party at the end of June to address the controversy unleashed by censorship against Pin Vilar. Subsequently, the film director, Miguel Coyula, released recordings of various fragments of the meeting with officials, including Alpidio Alonso and Fernando Rojas, Minister and Vice Minister of Culture, respectively, as well as Vice Prime Minister Inés María Chapman and the head of the ideological department. of the Communist Party, Rogelio Polanco.

Along with the announcement of Samada’s departure from the presidency of Icaic, it was also reported that the vice president of Icaic, Susana Molina, will assume the direction of the institution. The official previously served as director of the International Film and Television School, located in San Antonio de los Baños.

The same statement said that Waldo Ramírez de la Ribera would take over as director of the Superior Council of the New Latin American Cinema Foundation. His past as founder of Televisión Serrana was highlighted, he served as Cuba’s representative on the multinational channel Telesur and, more recently, as first vice president of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television.

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