Author: Iván García

Vladimiro, son of the Communist leader Blas Roca, had to sell his house in Neuvo Vedado. With the money he bought a crappy apartment and with the rest he survives. He’s about to turn 72, has never received the pension that he has a right to because he flew MIGs and worked in State institute.

Fidel Castro was implacable with the first waves of dissent. In addition to jailing them, he expelled them from the dignified and well-paid jobs And refused them a check on retirement. Others were forced to live in exile.

Bonne, the only black person in the group, was a university professor and prominent intellectual. He is almost blind and between the memory loss and shortages, waits for God to take him in his house in the Rio Verde neighborhood.

Martha Beatriz, a distinguished economist, is trying to weather the storm at the front of a network of social communicators, for which she receives insults and violence from State Security.

If the autocratic state doesn’t care about historical dissidents, who should watch over them? The younger dissidents? The current opponents should find ways to help the elderly dissidents.

It is just and humane. And is not acting like the government with the hundreds of thousands of men and women who, in their youth, didn’t hesitate to offer their energies and even their lived to his Revolution, and when they get old they are abandoned to their fate, with few exceptions.

To repair the unjust reality in the ranks of the dissidents, independent journalists Jose A. Fornaris and Odelin Alfonso are trying to do something. “We are working on how to create a support fund destined to the older opponents so they will receive at least 50 convertible pesos a month. Also this fund would cover a stipend for colleagues who are incapacitated by accident or illness,” said Fornaris, head of an association of free Cuban journalists.

For his part, Alfonso thinks that a kind of pension fund, “Every journalist who publishes his works and is paid, will voluntarily donate a portion. It’s sad how older dissidents are living.”

Implementing the project would allow dozens of opponents in their seventies to squeak by with dignity. Tania Diaz Castro, poet and journalist, was in the front lines in the hard years of the 1980s, when few dared to dissent against Castroism.

Their names should not be forgotten. Ricardo Bofill, Reinaldo Bragado, Rolando Cartaya and Marta Frayde, among others, gave birth to a party in favor of human rights.

Díaz Castro, a member of that party, never imagined that many years later Cuba would remain a totalitarian country. She lives in Santa Fe, to the west of Havana, surrounded by books and dogs. She survives writing reports for digital sites and with the dollars her children are able to send her from abroad.

And she is not the worst off. A few blocks from her home lives Manuel Gutierrez, in the opposition since the 1980s and founder of a dissident party. Now over 70, he earns a living working the land and tending goats.

He lives in a miserable hut of tiles and rough cement. But he does not complain. “That’s what happened to me. Worse off than me are the less known dissidents. It was my choice, to stay in Cuba and fight for change,” he said, trying to hide the tremor in his hands, due to unaddressed Alzheimer’s.

The current dissidence cannot and must not forget the past. When the current dissidents were afraid and silently accepted the regime’s public verbal lynchings of those brave opponents, they were speaking for all Cubans.

Now, we dissidents and independent journalists who don’t yet have grey hair, should concern ourselves with those who came before and opened the way for us. If the present is less repressive on the island, it’s precisely because of the old dissidents.

Iván García

Photo: Gladys Linares Blanco, 72, a teacher by profession, is a prominent opponent who thanks to her conversion to an independent journalist, can more or less survive in Havana, where she lives. Another who survives thanks to his collaborations in digital media is the lawyer Rene Gomez Manzano, a former colleague of Felix Bonne Carcasses, Martha Beatriz Roque and Vladimiro Roca Antunez in the Working Group of the Internal Dissidence, the four writers of The Nation Belongs to Everyone. Unlike Gladys, René has been invited to events in the US and Spain, among other countries. The photo was taken from a Cuban Una cubana fuera de serie.

5 November 2014

The faculty is first rate. And although it costs 20 CUC to register and another 10 CUC a month for tuition, the school is no longer accepting new students due to lack of capacity.

Adriana, a civil engineer, enrolled her eleven-year-old daughter in the school. “It’s quite expensive,” she says, “but thanks to help from the girl’s grandmother, who lives overseas, I can afford to pay for these English classes.”

It costs Osvaldo, a private-sector worker, a bit more. “I enrolled my two sons,” he says. “The sacrifice is worth it; they get a lot of personal attention and the teaching methods are excellent.”

Each student is given an 8-gigabyte flash drive with learning materials, textbooks, exercise books, pencils, pens and a light blue bag. Erasmus, who teaches classes for children, notes, “In the two years the school has been operating, the reception has been tremendous. Over 80 people attend the Monday and Friday evening classes. We guarantee students will learn both forms of English — the UK and the US versions — as well as idioms used in cities like New York and Miami.”

In a spacious porticoed house with a carefully tended rose garden half a mile from the  Britannia private school, Adela teaches English to children, adolescents and adults for 10 CUC per month.

“I give classes three times a week in two different time slots. On September 10 I had to stop enrolling students. In addition to the 10 CUC a month, the first month costs 8 CUC, which covers textbooks, specialized DVDs and other material,” explains Adela.

In Tenth of October alone — with 213,000 inhabitants, it is Havana’s most populous district — there are sixty private English language schools.

“In addition to these there are eleven or twelve state-run schools that offer language classes at night,” says Gregorio, a local high school English teacher. “In addition to price, the main difference between these and the private schools is quality. The classes taught at the private schools are much better than those at state schools.”

Havana probably has more English language classes per capita than any other city on the planet. This was not always the case. In the 1970s and 1980s there were a few state-run foreign language schools in English, German, French or Russian.

By the mid-1980s English language classes were being suppressed in Cuban schools. “It was crazy,” recalls Renato, a philologist. “Russian was adopted but it didn’t enjoy widespread acceptance in spite of the fact that Radio Rebelde broadcast Russian courses.”

But with the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, English language instruction returned to school curricula. With new regulations in 1994 providing greater options for self-employment, hundreds of teachers, interpreters and translators of the language of Shakespeare began giving classes as a way to earn money and improve their quality of life.

Twice a week, Marlén gives English lessons to about twenty students, all under the age of twelve. “I charge 5 CUC a month. I worked as part of a team translating books and articles for Fidel Castro. But I am retired and my 300 Cuban peso a month pension is not enough to live comfortably.”

You wil find that prices run the gamut in Havana, from 1 CUC per class, or 3 CUC a month, to 10 or 15 CUC a month in private academies or well-equipped homes.

According to Carlos, a sociologist, the demand for classes in English and other foreign languages for younger kids and adolescents is driven by the desire of many parents to prepare their children for emigration in the future.

“Not since before 1959, when there were schools throughout Havana offering free English language classes, have so many students of all ages been studying English in such a serious and in-depth way. It is taught in state schools but the classes are poor quality. Behind the high-demand is a desire to be prepared to work, study or live in the United States, Canada or some other English-speaking country. No self-respecting professional — whether he or she is an engineer, programmer or high-tech worker — can avoid the study of the English language. Knowing how to speak English is essential in today’s world.”

Juan Antonio, a Cuban-American living in Miami, knows firsthand the importance of English. “I spent four years working in low-paying jobs because I had not mastered the language. That’s why I send money to my nephews and nieces, so that they can learn English from an early age,” he says. “When it comes time to leave, they will have opportunities for better jobs.”

With the new winds blowing through the island, among the goals a bright young man like Jonathan has is to learn English well enough to attend an American university.

“Young Cubans are always preparing because we hope to get scholarships to study at American or European universities. A degree from any prestigious university is an advantage that will allow us to find good-paying jobs. It’s no longer enough just to emigrate. After arriving, I want to thrive,” says Jonathan.

Comfortable schools with modern teaching methods, such as Britannia in Havana’s Santa Catalina Avenue, offer the quality that those who see their future in an English-speaking country are looking for.

Iván García

Photo from Martí Noticias

23 October 2014

Indeed, to be an opponent on the island is an act of unquestionable value. Hanging in the air of the Republic is a dark law that sanctions with up to twenty years behind bars those who oppose the regime or write without permission.

But the repression, fierce or subtle, the lack of public space, has transformed the dissidents into a group of coffee klatchers, without support in their neighborhoods.

The evidence of their incompetence is that they’re out of sync with the average Cuban. Never before in the 55 years of the Castro brothers’ government, has the percentage the citizenry who disapprove been higher.

Any survey or conversation with people on the street serves to confirm it. But political proselytizing has failed to organize that anger.

Their interests are different although they sound analogous. Carlos, a carpenter, also wants democracy. He feels that the military autocracy has hijacked the future of his family with unfulfilled promises. Be he has no confidence in the discourse and narrative of the Cuban opposition.

In the old taxis in Havana, in the lines for bureaucratic paperwork, or at a baseball stadium, people talk to you without hesitation about a radical change to improve the economy and the precarious quality of life.

Some have read or heard about an opposition paper. But it does not excite them. They see it as distant as a government minister. Although the dissidents are neighbors on their same block, they have done little for his district or municipality.

They are disconnected, like a cosmonaut from the Earth. The particular world of dissent is to generate news, report meetings, make suggestions or report police abuse, but they lack a basic foundation to become legitimate actors for the future that is upon us.

The fate of the Island will be decided in the next five years. Perhaps earlier. The great majority of those in European Union, the United States and Latin America also want a democratic Cuba.

But the opposition’s raw material to manage the future is tenuous. So the strategy of the international community is to agree to a bizarre transition from totalitarianism to authoritarianism with Castro supporters. According to their perception, it is the least bad way.

On issues ranging from the repression to the shamelessness, the opposition has degenerated into a “swallow” dissent who at the first change ask for political asylum, preferably in the United States.

Those who remain are tough, but have adapted to the rules dictated by the regime.

There is an unwritten law of what can be done within the magical realism of autocracy.

The elderly rulers have gone from an anachronistic and authoritarian totalitarian system to another with a veneer of modernity and more flexible laws.

In 2014 you won’t be sent to prison for writing articles critical of the government. The most that will happen is a short detention in a police dungeon, an act of repudiation, or screams on the public street from an enraged assassin.

Depending on the circumstances, the dissidence is allowed to hold discussions, forums and debates in private homes. For two years, just for dissenting, Sonia Garro and her husband Ramón Alejandro Munoz, both black, have been held in jail. Another dozen activists are also prisoners or awaiting sentencing.

But the playing field is much wider today than before 2003. Since February 2013, most opponents and independent journalists are allowed to travel abroad.

A golden opportunity for more effective political lobbying. And they are not taking advantage of it. Everything stays in sterile encounters. Probably the most consistent program is led by Antonio G. Rodiles with his Citizen Demand For Another Cuba.

 (http://www.porotracuba.org/demanda-citizen-by-another-Cuba-2/).

It is reasonable, because it has a grip on reality and not in the political science fiction of other groups with their outlandish appeals. Rodiles uses a primary logic.

If we want Cuba to change, the government must ratify the United Nations’ international covenants signed in 2008. This is the gateway to legalizing a future civil society where, in addition to freedoms and human rights, there is political pluralism.

All opponents should support Rodiles and the Campaign for Another Cuba. But egos and grandstanding prevails. Each dissident leader is surrounded by a cloud of minions who defend their project as if it were an island under siege.

In turn, they attack and discredit contrary proposals. The worst of these brawls is that they don’t generate any credible proposals. Just bluster and platitudes. And behind them are the special services with their strategy of division.

Unfortunately, the Lades in White, an organization whose street marches in 2010 forced the government to release the 75 dissidents imprisoned in the 2003 Black Spring, has been split by intrigues and intemperate personalities.

This scrapping also extends to other dissident groups. More than an internal crisis or one of leadership, the Cuban opposition suffers from paralysis and the inability to join with the citizens.

When I read that some opposition groups claim to have the support of thousands of followers, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. An event that triggers a massive protest needs capable leaders Any event that triggers a massive protest only need capable leaders. And that is what we’re lacking.

Iván García

Photo: Antonio G. Rodiles, Coyula Regina and Ivan Garcia in a panel of independent journalism in Cuba organized by Estado de SATS in Havana on September 4, 2014.

9 October 2014

The poet Virgilio Piñera blamed Cubans’ misfortune on our insularity. “The damned circumstance of water everywhere,” he wrote in “The Isle in Weight.”

He was probably right. Not having control over one’s future and with an average monthly salary of twenty dollars a month means that for some people the only option for improving their quality of life is to obtain a visa.

Regardless of ideology, race or education, almost no one wants to travel abroad to visit museums and learn about other peoples and cultures.

Whether they be members of the regime or the opposition, their purpose in travelling is to come back with lots of stuff and a decent amount of money.

When you talk to some dissidents who have travelled to the United States or Europe, they describe how comfortable their hotels were, how much they ate and how advanced the technologies they encountered were.

They go into great detail when talking about the luxurious stores or the prices of home appliances. Government officials do this as well; it is only in speeches and public forums that they condemn capitalism.

A year and a half after passage of an emigration law allowing Cubans to travel overseas more easily, fifty independent journalists have been to various countries.

I am waiting to read more reports on Cubanet from the likes of David Canela and Alberto talking about what they have seen in American cities they have visited. A lot of people have been to Florida but I have not anything on the aspirations of the latest generation of Cubans living on the other shore. And those who go to Madrid don’t usually venture out to Cañada Real, preferring Lavapies or Chueca instead.*

They cite a lack of time, though they always find time to visit the Ño que Barato store in Miami. I do not know if it is from apathy or spiritual poverty but, with rare exceptions, independent journalists do not write about the men and women from the places they have had the privilege to visit.

Preoccupied with academic get-togethers, my colleagues are missing a golden opportunity by not reporting on life and local customs of the populations in these localities.

You can’t ask an ordinary Cuban to join the activism in support of a democratic society, when the supposed dissident and journalist leaders, dazed by trips abroad, have disengaged from political proselytizing in their communities.

The merit now is in accumulating flight hours and visas. It is important to participate in academic events and economic forums or to pass courses at prestigious universities.

But I wonder who will support guys like Cecilio, medical specialist, to learn to fight for his rights to a fair wage, or to convince him that if the Castro autocracy approves the UN covenants, it will open a door to a democratic society.

Not even in the most difficult years of the so-called Special Period have we seen so many Cubans dreaming of leaving the country on either a permanent or temporary basis. They see the future outside their homeland.

A visa to the developed world is their priority. Cuba is hurting. It is a real tragedy that every year more than twenty thousand of our fellow citizens leave in a legal and orderly way for the United States.

In the first months of 2014 fourteen thousand Cubans crossed the border between Mexico and the United States. No one knows if the forty thousand people who have left the island since the new emigration law took effect on January 14, 2013 will return.

In addition to these numbers, there are also the hundreds if not thousands of people who take to the sea in rubber rafts. We are more of an island than ever.

At this rate, there will be no one to defend the hijacked rights and face off with the Castro brothers. The regime could win the case by default. It is already winning.

Iván García

*Translator’s note: Cañada Real is a shantytown on the outskirts of Madrid known for crime and drug trafficking. Lavapies is a neighborhood in central Madrid with a large immigrant population. Chueca is a square in central Madrid popular with members of the gay community.

20 September 2014

There is also a faction of corrupt bureaucrats and white-collar swindlers on the island who are experts at looting the public coffers. They carry red Communist Party membership cards in their wallets and parrot the harangues of the regime but use financial strategies to embezzle money, food and commodities.

Hugo (a pseudonym) is one of them. He works in a state grocery store and over the course of eighteen years has been careful to cover his tracks. He does not blow thousands of dollars on a quinceniera party or dine at fancy restaurants.

“I fly under the radar,” says Hugo. “There are three types of criminals in Cuba: the thieves who steal from people, the administrators who steal from the state and the consumer, and the high-level officials who through business dealings and illegal activity get hold of anywhere from hundreds of thousands of dollars to a couple of million. The closer they are to the seat of power, the faster the banknotes and the perks pile up. A government minister might spend two weeks at a Varadero resort without paying one cent. His position gives him access to food baskets, a cell phone and a free internet account. These people are the upper class. We — the directors, administrators and business managers — are the middle class,” he says with a straight face.

If you establish good relationships with people in power and are adept at not getting caught, it’s smooth sailing.

“It never pays to show off. But if you know how to walk a tightrope, you can buy a car, a house or a holiday in Cayo Coco or Varadero,” says Hugo.

This summer the wily storekeeper booked a week in a five star hotel. But in Cuba the heads of the “mafia cartels” which control the restaurant industry, foreign trade and tourism are the exceptions.

Much more common are families like Ruben’s, who works eight hours in an office and whose vacations are always more of the same. “A lot of television, a little beach time, dominoes and cheap rum with neighborhood friends,” he says as he cools off in front of a Chinese electric fan.

The military is probably the most privileged caste in Cuba. Joel (a pseudonym) is an official at the Ministry of the Interior. Every year he rents a cabin at a military villa. “I never spend more than a thousand pesos (40 dollars).”

In addition to having their Suzuki motorcycles and mobile phones provided by the state, the security agents who harass dissidents are able to buy clothes and food at modest prices and summer in military-owned villas scattered throughout the island.

While officials like Joel enjoy nice vacations, primary school teacher Elisa looks forward to payday so she can afford the 60 pesos it costs for two seats on the bus to take her eight-year-old daughter to the beach east of the capital.

“Every year a guy who works at a state-owned enterprise gets a bus so those of us from the neighborhood can go to the beach or the aquarium. It costs 30 pesos a person,” notes Elisa. “Teachers are essential to any society but in Cuba educators earn poverty-level wages and we cannot afford to rent a house on the beach or stay in a hotel.”

The problem with summer vacations in Cuba is not a lack of options. It is an issue of hierarchy, influence and hard currency.

Ivan Garcia

16 August 2014

He is a cross between a tropical rogue and a guy with a nose for business. He is dressed in a Lacoste polo shirt and a pair of Timberland moccasins. A Swiss Tissot watch cost him six-hundred dollars at an airport duty-free shop.

“Money brings you neither health nor happiness but it makes you feel good, different. Knowing you have money in your wallet and enough to eat is a big deal in this country. Then, if you live in a nice house and own a car, you can afford certain luxuries, like drinking Scotch and sleeping with young girls without having to be a police informer or a senior official in the regime. Solvency raises your self-esteem,” says Humberto, who has wanted to be businessman since he was young.

“At the time of the Revolution I was the owner of an high-end apartment in Vedado. When communism came along, like everyone else I learned to fake it. I was never a member of the militia or a militant, so the goverment tried every trick it could to get me to give up my apartment. They wanted me to exchange it for an awful place in Alamar, as though I were crazy,” says Humberto. “These people,” he adds while making a gesture as though stroking an imaginary beard, “love to talk about the poor but they like to live like the bourgeoisie.”

“In the building where I live there are military officers and government leaders. During the Soviet era there were also technical specialists from the USSR, East Germany and North Korea living there. I have never known more savvy businesspeople than the ’comrades from the communist bloc.’ The used to buy and sell everything. They even set up a small bank,” he notes with a smile.

Things have not always gone so well. He was jailed in the 1980s, accused of illegal economic activity. “After my release from prison I had to sweep parks. When my children were grown, I got them out of the country. They have lived overseas for a long time. My grandchildren are foreigners. I stay here because I prefer to live in Havana, the city where I was born,” says Humberto.

During the 1990s — the tough years of the “Special Period” — Humberto began renting his apartment to foreigners. “Almost all private business was illegal, from dealing in art to buying and selling houses and cars. But after 2010 the government expanded the private sector and I got a hospitality license.”

He lives in a house with his wife and rents out his apartment. “The prices vary depending on the length of stay and the time of year. In peak season I rent it for 60 CUC a day. The apartment has four bedrooms, air-conditioning throughout, a big living room and remodeled bathrooms with hot and cold running water,” says Humberto.

In general he only rents to couples, women and older men. “I don’t like renting to young men or bachelors. They turn your house into a brothel. I don’t rent to Cubans because, on top of being messy, they walk off with things. They have stolen everything but the electricity itself from me. That’s why I only rent to foreigners.”

Humberto considers himself to be a good friend, a better father and a lousy husband. “I have never been stingy. I take care of my parents and I have discreetly helped dissident family members and friends. As long as this regime exists, business people like me will always be treated like suspects and possible criminals. To be a real small businessman you have to live in a climate of democracy.

The night has engulfed Havana. From the bar at La Torre the view is spectacular. You see all the lights but none of the misery.

Ivan Garcia

Video: Views of Havana from La Torre Restaurant where Ivan talked with Humberto. The video was made by Winston Smith and uploaded to YouTube in July 2013.
2 August 2014

She doesn’t know what her future vocation will be. But, in he,r the Party has a good prospect of a political commissar. Wanting to investigate other aspects less publicized in the national media, I posed the following questions.

What could you tell me about Stalin’s brutal purges, that cost the Soviet people millions of lives? Did you know that the application of agricultural collectivization caused a famine and between 7 and 10 million deaths in Ukraine, the so-called Holodomor? Have you read about the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact where in a secret clause Hitler and Stalin shared out the Baltic republics and the Eastern European zone?

Have you read or heard about the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish soldiers by elite Soviet troops. Did you know that the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, like many other intellectuals, was imprisoned in the Gulag just for thinking differently?

Don’t you think that the Soviet Union was an imperialistic nation, because it occupied a part of Eastern Europe as a trophy of war and installed puppet governments? Have you studied the Soviet aggression in Czechoslovakia in 1968, or Afghanistan in 1970?

Did they ever tell you that by the decision by Nikita Kruschhev and Fidel Castro, 42 medium-range atomic missiles that would have provoked a nuclear war were installed in Cuba? Did you know that, just like the United States has a military base against the will of the Cuban people, Fidel Castro without consulting the people authorized a military training center with Soviet troops and an electronic espionage base on the outskirts of Havana?

To each of the questions, the young woman answered evasively, “No, I don’t know that. No, I haven’t read that or they didn’t teach us that in school?”

It’s well-known that the teaching methods in Cuba try to equip its students with a Marxist vision and exalt Fidel Castro and his Revolution. In rigorously tested subjects, the method used is not lying, but no admitting that you have the information or not telling the whole truth.

Although the Soviet Union disappeared from the map more than 20 years ago, and said adios to its bizarre ideology, the education on the island continues to zealously hold to the Soviet narrative.

Manuel, who graduated in philosophy, recognizes that in his university history studies there was no emphasis on Perestroika and Glastnost. “The teachers slide over that stage. They tell us that Gorbachev was a traitor, that he dismantled the Soviet power and influence stone by stone. Communism’s undertaker. A pariah.”

In the Cuban power structure there is a powerful nucleus that still remembers the Soviet period with nostalgia. General Raul Castro, at the head of Cubans’ destiny, is a great admirer of Russian communism.

In a visit to the apartment of Juan Juan Almeida, soneof the guerrilla commander, when he lived in Neuvo Vedado, Juan Juan told me that in the anteroom of General Castro’s office at the Ministry of the Armed Forces, there was a painting of Stalin, the butcher of Georgia.

In the discourse of the old “apparatchiks” (leaders), raised in the severe Party schools, the old Soviet Cuba persists.

Joel, a retired officer, longs for the trips to Moscow and visit the Kremlin mausoleum, where Lenin lies embalmed. At his house, on a wooden shelf, there’s a collection of books by Boris Polevoi, Nicolai Ostrovski and Iliá Ehrenburg, among others who wrote about the exploits of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War.

Carlos, sociologist, considers “that the Soviet Union might seem like an old newspaper, but it is not dead yet. People no longer remember the corned beef, the applesauce or the nesting dolls. It is in the power structure where the Soviet era is missed.

The love story toward the USSR among the intellectual and political sector is long-standing in the country. Many who swear to be nationalists standing firm, accuse people who admire the lifestyle and institutional structure of the United States of being annexationists.

But where annexationism really exists is in Communism. Not only did they import the ideology, they also tried to clone the Soviet model in a Caribbean archipelago 6,000 miles away.

And those who applauded the theory of a Soviet Cuba weren’t stupid or illiterate. Among them were intellectuals of stature like Nicolás Guillen, Salvador García Agüero and Juan Marinello, members of the People’s Socialist Party.

With the coming to power of Fidel Castro, the political opportunism of the bearded ones coupled with the communist imagery of skilled men in labor unions and the Marxist proselytizing in various academic and intellectual sectors of the nation.

Despite the Cuban government’s affinity for the Soviets, among a wide segment of the citizenry, the Russian culture doesn’t go down well. Nor are they cool with their fashions and customs, their food and religious beliefs.

What the Soviet Union left was were hundreds of marriages between Russians and Cubans. And names like Ivan, Tatiana, Vladimer, Irina, Boris, Natasha… Little else.

Although the stale political dinosaurs treat Russia royally in the media, and the nomenklatura endeavors to reactivate new pacts, the Eurasian company remains a distant and exotic music for ordinary people.

But, by geography and culture, Cubans continue to look north.

Ivan Garcia

Photo: Pro-Soviet books by the English Dean Hewlett Johnson (1874-1966) and the American communist politician Earl Browder (1891-1973), on sale in bookstores in Havana, taken in Cuba in 1945

25 July 2014

The military regime quite often resorts to demagogic rhetoric. It eschews the military uniform and takes on the role of victim when talking about the economic and financial embargo that the United States has imposed on Cuba since 1962.

But the embargo does not justify establishing a string of regulations that affect family well-being, private businesses and the quality of life for a wide segment of the population.

Simply put, they are applying a set of prohibitions and laws in order increase sales in the chain of hard-currency stores operated as military businesses. It is a disgrace.

It is monopoly in its purest form. The government would now find itself hard pressed to explain how these measures are benefitting its citizens. Its aberrant customs rules, prohibitions on retail sales of imported clothing and high taxes on the self-employed are anti-populist edicts.

I asked twenty-eight people — friends, neighbors, taxi drivers, public and private sector workers — if they approved of these regulations. Regardless of their political beliefs, the verdict was unanimous: all twenty-eight were opposed to the current measures as well as to those scheduled to take effect on September 1.

Some 80% of Cubans have a relative or friend in the United States or Europe. Some benefit from regular shipments of clothes, food, appliances, video games, computer tablets or smart phones. Others receive occasional shipments.

But it is black market commerce, driven scarcity and a system of economic production that does not satisfy demand, the most important provider of the things people need.

HP laptops, plasma-screen TVs, instant soups and even major league baseball hats arrive on the island from Miami, as do Russian car parts and cloned satellite TV cards, which are banned by the Cuban government.

What businessmen, politicians and exiles living in the United States do not mention when expressing support for relaxing or repealing the embargo is the regime’s obsession with controlling our private lives.

We must navigate an internet packed with filters, watch TV channels that the government authorizes, read books over which the mullahs of censorship pass judgment and pay extortionist prices for cell phone service.

We should be talking more often about the internal blockade the government imposes on its citizens.

Is it legal for a nation to stifle illegal commerce? Yes, it is. But before punishing people, it should provide by offering range of products and prices for the domestic market, living wages and efficient services.

This is not the case in Cuba. State workers earn around twenty dollars a month. The “basic basket” of goods that a ration book covers barely lasts ten days. Putting two meals a day on the table is a luxury in many homes.

The State has become an insatiable overseer. It owns industries that provide us with overpriced mayonnaise, canned tuna and queso blanco.

At no meeting of the boring and monotonous National Assembly did I hear any delegate demand that the state set fair prices. Food prices in Cuban hard currency stores are higher than those in New York.

The price of flat-screen TV or a computer is two and a half times what it is in Miami. Tiles and bathroom fixtures are five times as expensive. And a Peugeot 508 sells for an exorbitant price, comparable to that of a Ferrari.

Thanks to mules, relatives in Florida send us everything from powdered milk to sanitary pads because the state cannot satisfy the monthly demand of women or offer such products for sale at affordable prices.

This is what it’s about. The new measures attempting to stop trafficking by mules are intended to benefit state enterprises and businesses, and to increase their sales, though what becomes of the profits is never revealed.

They are only hampering the transfer of small ticket items, however, not of dollars. Greenbacks are still welcome. The more, the merrier.

Before the Obama administration relaxes that relic of the Cold War called the embargo, those speaking on behalf of the Cuban people should ask Raul Castro for greater freedom and economic independence for his citizens.

And don’t get me started on the denial of political rights. That’s another story.

Photo: From Univision Colorado.

 *Translator’s note: Slang term for couriers of goods from overseas.

18 July 2014