A line outside a currency exchange (Cadeca) in Havana. (14ymedio)
14ymedio, Elías Amor Bravo, Economist, 17 October 2022 — The official voice of the party has finally spoken. Like Don Rafael del Junco in that radio serial of the great Félix B. Caignet that paralyzed the country for a long time, the official state newspaper Granma talked about the foreign exchange market in order to blame the informal market and inflation for everything bad. And it has done so with arguments that are more political than technical, with evidence that is more propaganda than scientific. Let’s take a look. What it has always done is nothing more and nothing less than what we could expect.
According to Granma’s official analysis, “in the nation’s current conditions, it’s essential to capture a greater number of currencies, formalizing their entry into the financial system, stabilizing the exchange rate and making it the only one, for both natural and legal persons.” [A ’natural person’ is an individual human being, while a ’legal person’ can be an entity.]
Wrong. A greater influx of foreign exchange doesn’t guarantee control of the financial system, nor will exchange rate stability be achieved. So what does Granma want? Let no one be mistaken: to fill the state coffers and then allocate these funds to the regime’s objectives, which, as we know, have little to do with ordinary Cubans.
This idea was what led Cuban Minister of Economy and Planning Gil two months ago, to improvise a new exchange rate for the purchase of foreign exchange by the State (1 USD per 120 CUP), as he said at that time, to establish an exchange market in the country aimed at “increasing foreign exchange income and gradually advancing in the recovery of the economy.” This is the first thing, of course. The second thing has already been seen. Quarterly GDP growth fell from 10.7% in the first quarter to 1.7% in the second, a full-fledged collapse of the economy, dragged down by the terrible results in agriculture, sugar and manufacturing. continue reading
The communists cannot understand, under such conditions, how in a very short time the official exchange rate collapsed compared to the informal market, which at one point reached 200 Cuban pesos/US dollar. There were many reasons for the failure, but it was clear that the simple sale of foreign exchange, limited in amount and only for natural persons, was not going to go very far, as in fact happened.
It is useless for Granma to launch all kinds of attacks against the informal market, which they describe as a “crooked and illegal” business. Although Granma doesn’t recognize it, the informal market has been the winner of this whole process, and unless the State represses or eliminates it, it will continue to be so. Basically because this market, unlike the state of Minister Gil, provides its services to the population without limits, regulations or ties. Granma says, belittling the agents of the informal market, that “it is the only exchange service that is now profitable and open at midnight outside the CADECA [the state exchange service], attending to the line and then selling places in line at 1,000 or 2,000 CUP, or even at dollars.”
“They started shouting ‘take the flag away from him!’ and ‘let’s kill him!'”, says Pons, who had to dodge the punches and did not attack anyone. (Navarre Television)
14ymedio, Havana, 15 October 2022 — Lázaro Luis Pons Pérez, a Cuban who has lived in Navarra for ten years, took to the streets of Pamplona on October 12 with the Spanish flag draped around his shoulders.
In the center of the city, a group of left-wing Basque nationalists, or abertzales, protested against the celebration of Hispanic Heritage Day. When they saw Pons with the Spanish flag, they began to insult him: “N__, go back to your country, you can’t be here: this isn’t Spain.” Pons remained firm and serene.
“I didn’t go out to provoke anyone,” says the man, interviewed by 14ymedio. “Above all, I am Cuban,” he clarified over the phone, “but I have the right to walk the streets with the flag of this country, which I also feel I’m a part of.”
The abertzales tried to snatch the flag from him to burn it, since one of the postulates of their ideology is independence from Spain. One of them approached Pons and spit at him. He spat back and then they tried to hit him.
“They started yelling ‘take the flag away from him!’ and ‘let’s kill him!’, says Pons, who had to dodge the punches and did not attack any of them. The nationalists did not dare to confront him directly, they cornered him in a group and jumped close to him without being able to snatch his flag.
At the same time, one of the demonstrators approached a Navarra Television cameraman, who was recording the scene, and broke his camera. The video, however, was able to be broadcast on the local network. continue reading
One of the ‘abertzales’ approached him and spit at him. He spat back and then they tried to hit him. (Navarre Television)
“I know them,” he says, “it’s not the first time I’ve seen them.” Pons is the founder of the Cuban Association in Navarra (Acuna) and it is common for nationalists to try to sabotage their demonstrations and make their appearance shouting slogans in favor of the Revolution, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
“The best thing in the world is respect,” he points out, “In this country, everyone chooses their own ideology. There is freedom to think and act for oneself. I respect them, even if I don’t agree with them and even if, to the contrary, they are true instigators.”
The assailants dispersed and Pons returned to his house to avoid another confrontation. “If nothing in Cuba prevented me from saying ‘Down with Fidel!’ Now I’m not going to shut up because of them,” he assures.
For Pons, celebrating Columbus Day is remembering Cuba’s links with the country that welcomed him in exile. In addition, the date also evokes, due to its proximity to Cuban Independence Day, the date Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his slaves and invited them to fight for freedom.
“It is the same freedom that I have now achieved in Spain,” says the man, who worked as a teacher at the School of Sports Initiation (EIDE) and at the Higher Institute of Advanced Athletic Training (ESPA) in Villa Clara.
“When the 11J protests took place, a group of Cubans met spontaneously in Pamplona. Ever since that moment we knew we should create an association”
He is still capable of reciting Santa Clara streets and locating his old neighborhood accurately, near Cardiocentro, not far from Parque Vidal.
He emigrated thanks to his marriage to a Spanish citizen with whom he fell in love in Cuba. “My wife supports me and defends our cause. She is Spanish and Navarrese, but she is also very Cuban,” he says.
“When the 11J protests took place, a group of Cubans met spontaneously in Pamplona. Many journalists interviewed us about what was happening in Cuba. Ever since that moment, we knew we had to create an association.”
This is how Acuna was born, of which Pons turned out to be vice president. Its objectives are to help Cuban political prisoners with food, money and whatever can be sent to their families. In addition, they welcome recent emigrants to look for jobs, food and lodging in Navarra.
Cubans state that violence only begets more violent actions, but that it may be Cuba’s only alternative at this point. “You have to fight in the streets,” he says, “and unfortunately, it won’t be peaceful. The streets are the only way: until they hand over power.”
The racist and xenophobic aggression of the Basque nationalists has given more visibility to exile from the Island. (Navarra Television)
Concerned about the infiltration of Cuban State Security agents in Spain, Pons also denounces that many companies launder money from the Island’s dictatorship in Europe. “There is a lot of complicity: those spies would never have entered en masse if it weren’t for the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez,” he says.
Cuban diplomacy promotes reactions and attacks such as that of the abertzales – frequently extolled by the Cuban official press – in Pamplona, says Pons. “When we managed to get the Navarra government to cancel some aid it had for the regime, the consul himself told me to forget about going to Cuba.”
“Why should I want to go?” says Pons, whose mother died last year and who has little family left in Santa Clara. “When I went to see her, three years ago, I visited many friends. They all had resigned and sad faces. I came back and told my wife: I’m not going anymore.”
Pons’s work does not stop. The racist and xenophobic aggression of the Basque nationalists has given more visibility to exiles from Cuba and demonstrates, for mankind, the intolerance that characterizes the Spanish radical left: the same one that finances the Cuban regime with public funds.
There is another sector: the one that has a romantic vision of the Revolution. “One has to explain history in detail to those, because they think that Cubans are protesting against the ‘blockade’.”
“We are alone,” laments Pons, commenting on the complicity of many governments with the Cuban regime. “I always tell my colleagues in Cuba not to expect anything from the European Union or the United States, that they could have supported Cuban democracy a long time ago and they don’t because they just don’t feel like it.”
“It is important to clarify that I have no ties to any political party here or anywhere. My association is one: Acuna,” he says, since several political representatives have contacted him since October 12 asking about him and asking what they can do for Cuba.
“I don’t want anything,” he says, “only that those who do it, stop sending money to Díaz-Canel. We alone have to walk the path to freedom.”
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A carton of eggs on the underground market can go for as much as 1,700 pesos, half the monthly salary of a minimum wage worker. (14ymedio).sdsd
14ymedio, Havana, October 14, 2022 — Many readers were surprised when, just a month ago, Cuba’s official media outlets were suggesting people turn to quail eggs as an effective, economical and nutritional alternative to chicken. Though eggs have been in noticeably short supply in stores for months, no one knew just how scarce they were until Invasor, a newspaper in Ciego de Avila province, published an article on Friday.
“The country needs about six million eggs a day to meet its basic needs and we are only getting two or three,” says Katia Leyda Martinez Arnaez, director of the province’s Poultry Company.
The article describes a dire situation. In Ciego de Avila, one of Cuba’s top three poultry-producing provinces, more than half its hens are not laying eggs. More specifically, only 43% of hens lay one egg a day while 57% lay none. Although the data is sobering, the article highlights the fact that it is almost a miracle the hens are laying any eggs at all.
“Considering that chickens go several days without food; that those which do get fed subsist on a protein mixture which is in very short supply; that some go without water for extended periods of time due power outages; that some are not exposed to light long enough to stimulate egg production; that they are fed at irregular hours due to delays in feed delivery; that enfeebled hens remain on the production line fourteen months longer than proscribed; then the fact that 43 out of every 100 hens manage to overcome this stress and lay an egg may sound like encouraging news,” the article states. continue reading
The company admits that, although it managed to produce 126 million eggs one year, it had set a goal of 100 million by 2022. By the end of September, however, it had only delivered 60 million. In the words of its director, “It’s going to be our worst year ever, without a doubt.”
According to the head of production, the eggs slated for delivery in September did not arrive in Ciego de Avila until the 29th. This follows several months in which output was reduced, so consumers cannot expect to see additional supplies. The eggs are distributed in several provinces where the situation is even worse. For example, Holguin and Santiago did not see August’s delivery until September 7.
The article also notes that the problem of late deliveries has been going on for five months, with April and May’s supplies not arriving in Guantanamo until June.
Ciego de Avila is not an isolated case. Martinez Aranez says the situation in Santiago de Cuba is even worse due to the feed shortage: “It’s difficult to import raw materials, produce the feed and transport it.” Only 10% of the hens in the province are laying eggs on a daily basis.
The company director explains that getting the feed to where it needs to be is one of the issues. Normally, it starts out in Cienfuegos but, in a effort to cut costs, it now only goes as far as Santiago. However, the situation has gotten even worse because the cost of fuel is raising the price of an egg, which officials increased from two pesos to almost three.
“As a result, the company has not only failed to turn a profit by trying to feed its birds at any cost, it has incurred eight million in losses,” says the director.
To lessen the blow to the poultry industry, efforts are now being made to augment the supply with the so-called Creole egg, a locally produced commodity, raised by individuals, which would not have to be shipped to other provinces. The goal of the plan, which would not be put in place until next year, would be to reduce losses by bringing these eggs to market. This would first involve distributing hens to rural areas, though it is not yet clear how this would be done.
Eggs on the island are produced principally by individual families for their own consumption, with chickens traditionally being fed kitchen scraps. But with the country in a deep economic crisis, this has become much less feasible.
To cope, some families turn to the informal market, where a carton of thirty eggs can go for as much as 1,700 pesos, half the monthly salary of a minimum-wage worker.
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Pork has become more than 20% more expensive in the last year. (14ymedio)
14ymedio, Madrid, 14 October 2022 — Inflation in Cuba reached its ceiling in April this year, but prices don’t stop rising compared to 2021. The monthly increase in consumer prices, 2.33%, continued in August but is more moderate than in July (3.35%) and June (2.83%), and much lower than in April and May, when it was 3.54% and 3.55% respectively.
However, far from taking a break, the year-on-year variation rises and already stands at 34.31%, compared to 32.32% last month. According to official data, prices have already risen by 20.01% so far this year.
Once again, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is pushed by the rise in the prices of food and non-alcoholic beverages, which increase by 2.74%. Although apparently the situation improves compared to last month, when they grew by 4.67%, the accumulated variation in the year is 30.89%, and compared to last year, Cubans are paying 54.19% more than in 2021 for these products, which are of primary importance.
In detail, lamb is the product that increased the most this month, with an increase of 5.04%. It’s followed, curiously, by garlic, with 3.81%, together with rice (which increases its price again by 2.74%), the only plant product that is more expensive in a prominent way. Pork, although the price increases again but discreetly (2.70% this month), accumulates a huge annual increase, with 20.53%, well above all the selected food indicators. continue reading
Restaurants and hotels are the sector that registers the highest increase this August, with 3.67%, and in annual and year-on-year terms, it’s the second area with the highest increase, with 27.72% in 2022, and 36.88% compared to last year.
Also in general terms, alcoholic beverages and tobacco are on the podium of products that push the rise of the CPI. This month they rose less, 1.85% (compared to 6% in July), but together since January they reached 21.60%, and the year-on-year variation is almost 40%.
One of the services that increased its prices the most this August, which is also essential for citizens, is transport. Prices increased by 2.43%, and although the year-on-year increase is not as high as those mentioned above, it costs Cubans 16.64% more to use transport than a year ago.
The transports that recorded the highest increases, possibly stimulated by the holiday period and fuel shortage, were interprovincial, especially taxis, with a monthly variation of 19.26% and other types (vans, trucks, etc.), with 13.18%.
The spectacular rise in culture and recreation is striking. Cubans who wish to attend a performance, concert or museum must pay up to 67.96% more than in 2021, despite the fact that in August the increase was only 0.95%.
In an intermediate sector of increases are furniture and household items, housing services, various goods, and services and education. All of them register increases of between 1.25% and 1.54%, with year-on-year increases of between 9.76% and 11.68%.
In the line are communications (0.03% monthly and 0.09% both accumulated and year-on-year) and health, which grows by 0.18% and accumulates 0.95% compared to the previous one. Finally, clothing and footwear increased this month by only 0.43%, although so far in 2022 the growth is 2.39% compared to the previous year’s 4.15%.
All in all, there is no section that doesn’t record increases, and Cubans continue to see how their salaries are increasingly serving them less. According to Cuban economist Pedro Monreal, “now 100 pesos are needed to buy food that cost 65 pesos in August 2021 (according to official data).”
In the black market, where most Cubans are supplied, the situation is much worse. American economist Steve Hanke, who creates balance sheets taking into account the parallel economy, pointed out on October 5 that the increase in the CPI at the end of September was approximately 208% year-on-year, with Cuba being the second country with the highest price increase in the world, after Venezuela and far ahead of Sudan and Zimbabwe.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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The threat becomes more emphatic by addressing parents who “used” their minor children, for having neglected “their duties of protection.” (EFE/Yander Zamora)
14ymedio, Havana, 15 October 2022 — On Friday, the Attorney General’s Office of the Republic of Cuba issued a harsh warning against those who participated in the recent protests over the long blackouts after the passage of Hurricane Ian. In his statement, he said he was investigating the facts that “disturbed public order and citizen tranquillity.”
As already happened with July 11, 2021 (11J), the Prosecutor’s Office attributes to the demonstrators the “setting fire to facilities, the execution of acts of vandalism, the closure of public roads in order to prevent the movement of vehicles and people, attacks and offenses against officials and law enforcement agencies, and incitement to violence.”
The threat becomes more emphatic by addressing parents who “used” their minor children, whom the institution accuses of having neglected “their duties of protection, assistance, education and care towards them.”
The Prosecutor’s Office affirms that “they will receive the appropriate legal-criminal response.”
The statement doesn’t provide information on how many Cubans have been accused or imprisoned during the protests. On October 7, the organization Justice 11J published an update on detainees, based on the statements of their relatives and other information. continue reading
According to the NGO, they will be prosecuted for the crimes of public disorder, contempt and resistance, although it can’t accurately provide the number of people imprisoned, which is around thirty according to several organizations.
Justicia 11J offered to send families any audiovisual material or document that could be useful in the trials and claimed “the cooperation of civil society, the independent press and the accredited foreign press to visualize this injustice.”
This Wednesday, a neighbor of Bejucal, in the province of Mayabeque, told 14ymedio that during the protests that took place in that municipality on Monday night there was no police repression. However, the next day the parents were summoned to the schools for a meeting with the municipal prosecutors.
There they were warned that “the law covered them,” and they would serve two to seven years in prison if they allowed their minor children to participate in the protests. In addition, those who were over 16 years old would be sentenced to house arrest.
The new Criminal Code stipulates, in article 407, that it’s a crime “to induce a person under the age of eighteen to leave his home, miss school, reject the educational work inherent in the national education system or breach his duties related to respect and love for the Homeland.”
The sanction provides for “deprivation of freedom of six months or one year, or a fine of one hundred to three hundred assessments, or both,” and no longer than two to seven years in prison, as the Bejucal prosecutors threaten.
The passage of Hurricane Ian exacerbated the energy crisis in the island and sparked a new wave of protests against blackouts and shortages.
Some neighborhoods in Havana were out of power for up to six consecutive days after the hurricane. The blackouts lasted twelve hours in some parts of the country. The independent media ProyectoInventorio has recorded about a hundred in the last fifteen days from testimonies and videos disseminated on social networks.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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The corner of Galiano and San Lázaro in Havana crumble away without restoration. (14ymedio)
14ymedio, Elías Amor Bravo Economist, 15 October 2022 — With the Cuban economy’s GDP in the second quarter practically stagnant, 1.7% compared to the same period of the previous year; with CPI inflation climbing to 32% also in a year-on-year rate in August; with the blackouts that don’t cease, the depreciation of the Cuban peso in informal markets, the difficulty with choosing a combination of economic policies that puts an end to the process of deterioration suffered by the Cuban economy, like sugar and manufacturing, and in the face of a new default on the tourism plan, the Cuban communist leaders remain unmoved, incapable of choosing a combination of economic policies that can put an end to the process of deterioration suffered by the Cuban economy.
The bad thing is that the worst is yet to come. While in other Latin American countries the pre-pandemic GDP levels have recovered, efforts are made by central banks to control the increase in inflation, and the depreciation of exchange rates and adjustment measures are adopted to face the new global competitive scenario, in Cuba no one does anything. The people live every day with the anguish of what to eat, and the regime remains stuck in its obsolete, failed communist model, unable to provide solutions to problems.
This is a differential element that Cubans who can travel abroad immediately see as soon as they get off the plane. Nobody understands what is happening on the Island, and therefore, the protests are increasing, the banging of pots and pans in protest is heard daily, louder and louder, and people have lost their fear of talking.
And instead of acting to eliminate daily anguish in the population, adopting economic policies that facilitate the take-off of productive forces, the regime is the same as always: take the doberman dogs for a walk and put fear into the population, from the rapid response brigades, to the Black Berets, through the prosecutor’s office. continue reading
Once again, the machinery of repression and communist control is put at the service of the single party to prevent Cubans from exercising their rights and freedoms. It’s the worst possible path, before the astonished gaze of the international community.
Consequence: fewer and fewer friends. The regime has looked for them and reacts clumsily and slowly, as when the other day it abstained, along with China, in the United Nations vote against Putin’s referendums in the conquered areas of Ukraine. With friends like that, anyone can go party.
With everything, the international allies of the Cuban communist regime are being diluted, and bank demands arise for unpaid debts, for which the communist organisation is not prepared and which will mean a real blow to the waterline when, perhaps soon, the sanctions are known.
What’s coming is not good, and it is necessary prepare. The friends of this aimless and futureless Cuba disappear. Unlike that honeymoon of Fidel Castro and Chávez that saved the regime after the Special Period, now no one appears willing to sustain an economic system without the capacity for indebtedness. There are only a few old communists left in Europe who are reluctant to recognize the failure of their dreams, if they ever had them, and when other countries visit the Island, their leaders are received by Raúl Castro, who, by the way, gives signs of life, as happened during the visit of of Vietnam’s minister of public security.
The Cuban economy is not here to play cat and mouse. Sooner rather than later it will have to face an internal and external agenda, for which the current leaders have no answer, nor do they want to offer one. Installed in defending the communist ideological model, they haven’t realized that the world is going any other way, and that any decision that has to be made, doesn’t allow for delay.
They should listen to their Vietnamese colleague. In five years that country overcame food famines and is now the number one exporter of rice in Asia, ahead of China. Cuban communists don’t want to believe it but reforms in property rights can change the direction of a country. Cuban communists don’t dare. For good reason.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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Carlos Manuel Pupo Rodríguez, 67, was sentenced to six years in prison for participating in the huge demonstrations of 11 July 2021 (Facebook)
14ymedio, Havana, 14 October 2022 – On Thursday the Cuba Archive organisation requested the international community to mediate in the case of the political prisoner Carlos Manuel Pupo Rodríguez, national coordinator of the Union for a Free Cuba Party.
Pupo Rodríguez, who is serving his sentence at the Kilo Cinco y Medio prison in Pinar del Río — where the anti-establishment rapper Maykel Osorbo is also being held — was given an emergency transfer this week to the Provincial Abel Santamaría hospital where, after pleas from his family, he dropped his hunger strike.
“They have kept him locked in a small cell, deprived of water, medical help, telephone calls and family visits”, says the NGO, which has its headquarters in Washington; this must therefore qualify his case as one of cruel punishment on the part of State Security. continue reading
In the document, Cuba Archive also requires, from specialists on torture and cruel treatment at the UN, from the International Red Cross and from the inter-American Commission on Human Rights, that they demand the immediate release of Pupo, and of all political prisoners in Cuba. In addition, they ask that all these international agencies carry out inspections in detention centres without prior notice.
Similarly, they ask that the Cuban media reflect on the realities of what’s happening in the prison system, and that public servants safeguard any archives which evidence the abuse of human rights. In their message, the NGO recapitulates that since the start of the Castro dictatorship, there have been at least 1,748 registered deaths of dissidents in custody, 27 of them through hunger strikes.
The organisation also mentions the case of another Cuban prisoner Andy Reyes, a 27 year-old who went on hunger strike after being sentenced to 25 years for a crime he insisted he was innocent of. “He died on the fifty-second day of his strike, demanding a lawsuit review in the face of a judicial system which is subordinate to a one-party communist regime and which lacks legal guarantees”.
Likewise, they remind us that the Council for Reporting on Human Rights in Cuba has estimated that “over a thousand prisoners have lost their lives in the past decade through beatings, torture, ill-treatment, inhumane conditions and lack of medical attention”, a situation which brings some political prisoners to declare hunger strike.
Pupo Rodríguez is one of the political prisoners in particular danger. He has been on hunger strike twice, most recently for 21 days after being sentenced to six years for taking part in the 11 July 2021 demonstrations in San Antonio de los Baños (Artemisa).
Besides calling for democratic nations to cease all actions which legitimise, finance and support the Cuban dictatorship, and instead to impose sanctions upon all of the agents of repression — including judges, attorneys and police — Cuba Archive demands that the Cuban regime “dismantles their repressive apparatus and allows for a peaceful transition to democracy”.
The NGO rebukes the Cuban regime, not only for the fact that it enjoys “complete impunity”, but that it occupies seats in distinguished organisations, for example its elected membership on the UN Council for Human Rights (2021-2023) and the Executive Council of the Panamerican Organization for Health (2020-2023).
Neither the Red Cross nor any other international body are able to monitor compliance to human rights law in the more than 100 large prisons in Cuba, just as they not able to do so in the 150 smaller penitentiaries and 300 police centres. Nor does the Cuban government even provide information to families of detainees or families of those who die in prison.
Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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The Cubans were trying to go to Mexicali, in Baja California, to cross to the United States. (Screen capture)
14ymedio, Havana, 12 October 2022 — On Tuesday, a group of 50 Cubans took the driver of their tourist bus hostage in the Mexican state of Veracruz, so as not to be arrested by officers of the National Guard. The officers, who intended to deliver them to the National Institute of Migration, intercepted the vehicle on a section of the Transisthmic road, which connects the municipalities of Sayula de Alemán with Acayucan.
“In Acayucan they deport you; we’re not going there,” the Cubans warned the National Guard and said they intended to continue their journey to Mexicali and cross to the United States from there. One of the migrants said that each Cuban paid 2,500 pesos (75 dollars) for transport.
An officer confirmed to 14ymedio that there were several children in the group and that “although the people presented residence permits and free transit passes, these were for the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca.”
By insisting that their situation be resolved by Migration, the Cubans cornered the driver and removed the keys to the bus. In support of the National Guard, other vehicles arrived, but this further bothered those detained. After five hours of negotiations, they were allowed to return to the state of Oaxaca, with a warning that a recurrence of transit without permission would be penalized. continue reading
National Guard officers reached an agreement with the Cubans to return to the state of Oaxaca, where they have permission to transit. (Captura)
Migration did not issue any report on the incident, nor details about the arrests, this Tuesday, of 29 other migrants after a pursuit in the city of Córdoba.
Last April, lawyer José Luis Pérez Jiménez complained that the arrest of Cubans and their internment in the Acayucan Migration centre became a way of raising money for the coffers of the officials.
Wilmer Mantos, a 27-year-old Cuban who was in detention in Acayucan, told 14ymedio that this place “is a prison where human rights don’t exist: they take away your cell phone, your papers, and you eat because you’re hungry, but the food is rotten and there’s almost no water or medical assistance.”
In their transit through Mexico to reach the United States, Cubans have had to face arbitrary detentions, violations of their human rights and extortion. On the last day of September, a group of 14 migrants from the Island reported that a senior Migration official demanded $70,000 from them to not be deported.
The Cubans were detained in Campeche and transferred to Mexico City, and despite having legal protection, they were detained for several days. They are currently on their way to the U.S. border.
Nearly 200,000 Cubans have arrived by land in the United States and more than 6,000 by sea since October 2021.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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There is now a kind of Cuban colony in the Balkans, as “the cost of living is much lower than in most European countries” says Diana. (Facebook/Cubans in Serbia)
14ymedio, Havana, 15 October 2022 – – Not many Cubans could tell you where Serbia is on the map. Even fewer could say that Belgrade is the capital, or tell you anything about the many wars and divisions which determined its present shape. The memory of the Soviet era and the power of one solo leader, Marshall Tito, for too many years, seems to be the only thing the Balkan country has in common with the tropical one.
If Cubans are interested in Serbia, it is for just one reason: it is one of the few countries which don’t require a visa for people from the island and, because of its nearness — and potential entry point — to the European Union, is an ideal destination for emigration.
“I knew about Serbia from Cuban friends who had emigrated in previous years”, Diana, a young woman from Havana living in Novi Sad, a city on the shores of the Danube, tells 14ymedio.” It was a long, costly journey, but I made it”.
The Cuban and Serbian governments have ties from the times of the old Yugoslavia, so that, when Diana tells her neighbours where she comes from, more than one of them mentions Fidel Castro and talks about the island as an old “brother country”. continue reading
“My family in Cuba could not place Serbia geographically”, notes the young woman. A grandfather spoke about Yugoslavia and she was worried: the Balkans have historically been a region in conflict, with wars and corrupt governments. The territory’s fragmentation continued at least until Montenegro and Kosovo recently became independent.
“Nevertheless, I decided to take the risk”, Diana confirmed, saying she very much likes the country, which has received a flood of migrants in recent years.
Technically, Cubans have the possibility of staying in Serbia for 90 days without a visa being required, although, lately, they are being asked for a letter of invitation including the address where they are accommodated, as well as a person who “takes responsibility” for them at the airport.
As most of them don’t go back to the island, the country’s government added a requirement to show their financial solvency, and a warning that the immigration authorities have the power to refuse Cubans entry to the country” because of abuse of the visa-free policy”.
In spite of the difficulties, there is now a kind of Cuban colony in the Balkans. “The cost of living is much lower than in most European countries” says Diana. “It isn’t difficult to find work and get somewhere to live”.
Many Cuban young people now work in the service sector, in bars and restaurants, or as cleaners or construction workers. It is unusual for them to study in the universities and, if they want to get another type of work, it is essential to be able to speak Serbian.
Tastes in food and clothes are not so different to the Cuban, they are orthodox Christians and live like the rest of the Europeans. Diana comments that “Although some aspects of the culture are different, the communist past sees to it that some references and customs don’t seem so strange”.
“The climate is a surprise” she says, “although you get used to it after the first winter. In summer it goes up to 40 degrees and there are heatwaves. The strangest thing is not to be near the sea, which used to be part of my daily life”.
The Serbians are welcoming and show they are different to the “cold Europeans”. “They speak a little Spanish because they like Latin music and Mexican novels; that the television here has rebroadcast for years”.
Like other Central European countries formerly in the Soviet Bloc, Serbia sees its future allied with the West (Ailén Rivero)
“The laws are quite flexible for the migrants” Diana explains. “Serbia has welcomed many Syrian refugees and, with the war, also Ukrainians. Some people also come from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, because they prefer the legal and political flexibility here compared to their own countries”.
The Balkan nation was considered a kind of “oasis” in relation to the covid-19 pandemic restrictions. The young woman was surprised that “You didn’t have to use a mask, or get vaccinated”. This encouraged tourism.
After decades of armed conflict, Serbia opted for neutrality in its external relations, which has been brought into question by the war between Russia and Ukraine.”In spite of the recent shared cultural history with the countries of the old Soviet Union, Serbia hopes to be admitted into the European Union”, said Diana, and for that reason the best thing for the government is “not to get involved” with Putin.
“Like other Central European countries belonging to the Soviet bloc, Serbian society sees its future in alliance with the West and its way of life as a priority, rather than the Russian paradigm”, she says.
The Cubans, fed up with the politics of their own country, try to put up with the delicate status quo in Serbia and concentrate on their wellbeing. Although she is doing well in Novi Sad, Diana — who dreamt of living for a time in St.Petersburg and seeing the paintings in the Hermitage Museum — does not rule out moving to another country when the mood calms down a bit in the region.
“After all”, she says, “if nothing ties me to Cuba, right now nothing ties me to Serbia either”.
Translated by GH
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
Lorca, with swimmers from the Havana Yacht Club, 1930. (Federico García Lorca Foundation Archive / FGL Centre, Granada)
14ymedio, Manuel Llorente, Madrid, 14 October 2022 — Federico García Lorca’s first adventure in the Americas could not have been more beneficial for him. The young man who, with a broken heart, embarked for the United States in 1929, bore no resemblance to the man who returned to Cádiz on 30 June 1930 aboard the steamer Manuel Arnús. While in the United States, he wrote A Poet in New York, a book which he handed over to José Bergamín shortly before he was assassinated in 1936, and which Bergamín published in 1940. With this collection, and in this collection, Federico extended himself further than in any other of his collected works.
In New York he witnessed the stock market crash and was protected by friends, but it was in Cuba where he began to smile again. Lorca spent 98 wild and intense days on the island, a period which the writer and journalist Victor Amela unpacks in his novel If I Should Become Lost (Destino), a title which makes reference to a fragment in a letter from 1930 in which Lorca wrote: “This island is a paradise. Cuba. If I should become lost, look for me in Andalucía or in Cuba”.
Why write about these three months? “Because Federico García Lorca had confessed, upon leaving Cuba, that he had lived the best days of his life there. It had been from March to June of 1930. Lorca was dynamic, happy, in full enjoyment of his senses, and the sumptuousness of Cuba had afforded him every sensory pleasure: the negro son music, the rum, the ice cream and the Havana cocktails, the exuberance of the landscape and the beauty of the men and women of all skin colours. Behind the tragedy and sorrow of his murder, I wanted to get to know more about this tropical, party-animal Lorca. And then to tell his story”, Víctor Amela told La Lectura.
If I Should Become Lost, by Víctor Amela, is published by Destino.
To begin with, Lorca had travelled to Cuba in order to give three lectures during the course of one week, but he ended up delivering nine in those 98 days, during which he also attended cult ceremonies, enjoyed himself by day and by night, and he wrote and sketched. “He frequented the roguish Teatro Alhambra, which encouraged him to complete El Público (The Audience) there — a homosexual drama in which he makes peace with his intimate self”. And La Leyenda del Tiempo (The Legend of Time) which Camarón de la Isla later made popular. continue reading
“Lorca lost himself in Cuba and then found himself again, discarding all the old worn out prejudices. He gave tribute to the talents of the island in his musical poem Son, written during a voyage of discovery by train, crossing the island by night from Havana to Santiago (’I shall go to Santiago’)”.
One particularly important poem in the Lorca canon – Ode to Walt Whitman – was also completed in Cuba, recalls Professor and Doctor of History of Art, José Luis Plaza Chillón, author of the recent study El Apocalipsis según Federico García Lorca. Los dibujos de Nueva York (The Apocalypse according to Federico García Lorca: The New York Sketches) (Comares).
A completely different man then, from the one who had arrived in New York in 1929 — a man who’d been abandoned by his lover, the sculptor Emilio Aladrén, who had preferred a woman to him, and who’d been “snubbed by his intimate friend Salvador Dalí, for having gone to Paris with Buñuel and for having criticised his Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads). Lorca had sunk into a depression, and in order to distract him from his sorrows, and fearing he might commit suicide, his family had put him on a transatlantic voyage to New York, accompanied by Fernando de los Ríos as guardian”, claims Amela.
But what he finds there in that great American symbol of modern progress isn’t good. “New York greets the unhappy Lorca with the suicides that result from the crash of 1929 — such a terrifying sight. He is nauseated by the crudity of modern capitalism and the Anglo Saxon protestant coldness, and can only identify with the suffering he finds among the black people of Harlem, the children, and the poor”.
That journey is very important in the overall radical trajectory of his poetry. Ian Gibson, one of the greatest authorities on the poet of Granada, analyses it thus: “Before he goes to New York he’s already entering the orbit of surrealism, with pressure from Dalí and Buñuel in Paris. The screenplay he writes in New York as a response to Un Chien Andalou — titled Journey to the Moon — is clearly already surrealist. And the poems, often diatribes against the cruelty of the modern world, have an immense power. In these poems, apart from the odd exception, Spain hardly ever appears. As far as theatre is concerned, it seems that he began writing El Público — his most surrealist play — in New York, and it would be completed in Cuba”.
After 10 months in New York, on his way back to Spain he stopped off in Cuba, “where he gets back his beloved language, the sunshine and the colours, his Catholic virgins (combined with Yoruban/Nigerian saints), sensuality and beauty… In that sparkling Cuba, Federico felt more at home and back to his roots than he’d ever felt”, notes Amela.
Cuba, where he turned 32, entered into all of his pores, it saw him coming. Not only the climate and that outdoor life. With his gift for making friends he discovered well-known people like the Loynaz family who lived off the private income of their millionaire mother in the the finca ’Casa Encantada’, where they preferred to use carbide gas lamps over electric light. Enrique Loynaz used to sleep in a coffin, Dulce María (who was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 1992) besides being a lawyer collected teacups and teaspoons, Carlos Manuel would tie up one of the family dogs to the piano so that it would listen to his recital… And Flor, homosexual and poet, Federico’s favourite. He called her “my Cuban virgin”.
They both loved religious imagery, and together they would travel at high speed in an open-top Fiat 1930, driven by her, with Federico dressed in a 100% cotton drill white suit. Their relationship was so strong that the poet agreed to include various suggestions of hers in his play Yerma; he even ended up giving her the original manuscript as a present. Dulce María and Flor, with Fidel Castro in power, went on to draw a state pension. Flor ended up on her own, with a shotgun (for fear of being axed to death like her maternal grandparents) and 40 dogs.
“Lorca had many romantic flings in Cuba and he had great freedom to be who he was. There, he liberated himself from everything, it would seem. His lectures were an instant success and everyone wanted to have their photograph taken with him. There are thousands of anecdotes, many of which I heard myself sur place when I was there in 1986 preparing the second volume of my biography of the poet”, says Gibson.
Lorca with a newspaper seller in Havana. (Federico García Lorca Foundation Archive / FGL Centre, Granada)
Lorca even spent one night in a cell after a binge. He was rescued from there by Luis Cardoza y Aragón, a Guatemalan writer, who had been working for barely a few weeks at his country’s embassy in Havana, according to Víctor Amela. Lorca even had one or two moles operated on in the Fortún y Souza clinic in Havana.
In Cuba he met a young poet and student of law, José Lezama Lima, who also stretched language to its limits. Years later, that same author of the immense hieroglyphic that is Paradiso recalled of Lorca, that, after attending his last lecture in Havana: “His voice took on a deep intonation like that of a bell being struck by a finely-tuned clapper that all of a sudden stopped the excessive prolongation of the echoes”. Luis Cardoza was more direct: “His laughter was a naked girl”.
On the eighth of March 1930, the day after his arrival in the port of the Caribbean capital onboard the steamer Cuba, the poet wrote to his family: “My arrival in Havana has been quite an event, because these people are extravagant like no other. Havana is a marvel, both the old and the new. It’s like a mixture of Málaga and Cádiz, but much more cheerful and relaxed for its being in the tropics.
Weeks later he gave an account of a crocodile hunt. “I saw a fantastic number of crocodiles four or six metres long”; but he didn’t comment on the fact that he’d attended a demonstration against the installation of telephones, as the Cuban Telephone Company had installed fruit machine “one-armed bandits” with their shop-based apparatus, from which the business owners earned nothing.
Lorca’s stay in New York and Cuba was in reality an escape which José Luis Plaza Chillón compared to those of other exiles: André Gide in Tunisia, Jean Genet in Morocco, Pierre Loti in Turkey, E. M Forster in India, Henry de Montherlant in Spain. “The literature of the twentieth century written by homosexuals often presents the theme of exile, most commonly one which entails a personal banishment. Lorca, like other great artists exiled in modernity (Gauguin, Rimbaud, Kafka) becomes a prototypical creator for understanding part of the quest of the twentieth century”.
‘Son’ of the Cuban Negroes
When the full moon comes
I shall go to Santiago de Cuba
I’ll go to Santiago,
In a car of black water.
I’ll go to Santiago.
The palm roofs will sing.
I’ll go to Santiago.
When the palm wishes to be a stork,
I’ll go to Santiago.
And when the banana tree wishes to be a jellyfish,
I’ll go to Santiago.
I’ll go to Santiago
With the blonde head of Fonseca.
I’ll go to Santiago.
And with the pink of Romeo and Juliet
I’ll go to Santiago.
Oh Cuba! Oh rhythm of dry seed!
I’ll go to Santiago.
Oh warm waist and a drop of Madeira!
I’ll go to Santiago.
Harp of living trunks, croc, tobacco flower!
I’ll go to Santiago.
I always said I’d go to Santiago
In a car of black water.
I’ll go to Santiago.
A breeze, and alcohol in its wheels,
I’ll go to Santiago.
My chorus in the shadows,
I’ll go to Santiago.
The sea drowned in the sand,
I’ll go to Santiago.
White heat, dead fruit,
I’ll go to Santiago.
Oh bovine coolness of the reed grass!
Oh Cuba! Oh curve of sigh and mud!
I’ll go to Santiago.
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Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on 10 October 2022 in the cultural supplement La Lectura of the Spanish national daily El Mundo. Reproduced here with permission.
Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
To try to avoid irregularities with livestock breeding and trade, the Cuban Government established fines of up to 20,000 pesos. (14ymedio)
14ymedio, Havana, 12 October 2022 — The theft of cattle in Sancti Spíritus has multiplied 25 times this year compared to last year. The figures are official, made public during a meeting of the vice president of Cuba, Salvador Valdés Mesa, with the agricultural producers of that province. According to an article published in the state newspaper Granma, in September alone 292 of these crimes occurred in that territory. So far this year, 1,249 head of cattle were affected, compared to 48 in 2021.
All this, despite the new sanctions approved by the Government last August to try to avoid irregularities with the breeding and trade of livestock, which entail fines of up to 20,000 pesos.
Valdés Mesa assured that “intensive work has begun with the organs of the Ministry of the Interior,” “a regular livestock count has been established” and “surveillance and control guards have been intensified” to avoid these criminal acts.
The vice president didn’t miss an opportunity to blame the ranchers: “There’s a lot of indiscipline; you have to control and register the country’s vaccinated cows. And if the farmer doesn’t come to register, you have to go to his land to inspect. We have to put order in the field.” continue reading
However, it wasn’t the only problem that was on the agenda. In the face of the “cold” season, Sancti Spíritus faces other obstacles. For example, a deficit in planting. Compared to the planned 5,974 hectares, 5,550 hectares were planted. The “non-compliance,” the authorities said, “is caused by fuel constraints and rain.”
In the same meeting, they emphasized “the need to use organic fertilizers such as worm humus, since there won’t be any chemical products: neither fertilizers nor pesticides.”
Although the officials assured that agricultural companies in the province “don’t report non-payments to producers,” they recognize that the Dairy Company owes 1,453 producers a total of 329,453 pesos, and the Meat Company owes 91 producers a total of 43,048 pesos.
As for tobacco, it was spoken, in the usual communist tone, of “the importance of production in the territory given the considerable loss suffered at the largest tobacco centers in the province of Pinar del Río,” as a result of the scourge of Hurricane Ian, on September 27.
There were also words at the meeting for sugar production. The representative of Azcuba in Sancti Spíritus, Aselio Sánchez Cadalso, recalled that the Uruguay sugar mill, “the colossus of Jatibonico,” will no longer grind cane, but only the Agroindustrial Azucarera Melanio Hernández Company. The harvest begins on December 10, with 21,254 tons of sugar foreseen.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
Sovereign Plus is conceived as a booster vaccine. (Granma)
14ymedio, Havana, 13 October 2022 — This Wednesday, almost three months after Belarus agreed to buy the Cuban Soberana Plus vaccine, the first batches of the drug arrived in the European country. According to the Twitter account of the Finlay Institute of Vaccines in Havana, a “regulatory agency” also registered Sovereign 02 for future use.
This July, Belarus became the first country in Europe to approve the use of Cuban vaccines to achieve the immunization of its citizens against COVID-19. According to Cuba’s new ambassador to Minsk, Santiago Pérez, the news was received with enthusiasm by the press, which argued that “Cuban vaccines have proven their effectiveness.”
The authorities of both countries have not given details about the number of vaccines included in the agreement nor about the amount paid by the Belorussian Government.
In the case of Soberana Plus, it is a “booster” vaccine, and on the Island it has been applied after one of the other two national products, Soberana 02 and Abdala, or to patients recovered from the coronavirus. continue reading
Given the suspicions raised in the most critical sectors of the country by the purchase of a drug not approved by the World Health Organization, the authorities emphasized that “all vaccines used [in Belarus], regardless of the manufacturer, [have been] registered and authorized for use, and are immunobiological drugs of high efficacy and safety.”
A Cuban delegation at the Business Forum held recently in that country met with the Deputy Minister of Health, Dimitri Cherednichenko, to establish more links on issues of “drug production, professional exchanges and joint scientific research,” according to a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cuba.
In July of this year, another delegation of Cuban officials visited Dimitry Vladimírovich, director of the Expertise and Testing Centre of the Belorussian Ministry of Health. During the appointment, Vladimírovich presented Vicente Vérez Bencomo, director of the Finlay Institute, with the certificate that endorsed the use of Sovereign Plus in his country.
On that occasion, the Island officials took the opportunity to negotiate subsequent contracts with the Belorussian Minister of Health, Dmitry Pinevichs, who considered “issues related to cooperation in the field of the circulation of medicines and medical products, in particular the location of Cuban medicines and vaccines in the territory of Belarus, as well as the possibility of exporting Belorussian pharmaceutical products to Cuba.”
On July 26, the day the agreement for the purchase of Sovereign Plus was signed, the president of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, referred to the date in congratulations to Miguel Díaz-Canel, assuring him that the “economic and commercial cooperation” of his Government with the Island was guaranteed.
Like Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Mexico, Belarus is part of the list of Cuban allies who opt for the purchase of the drug against COVID-19. With vaccines, the Island also sends the promise of political and even military support.
Not in vain has the sale of vaccines worldwide been preceded by a propaganda campaign that has included concerts, academic events and diplomatic delegations at medical symposia.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
The photograph of the Cuban dictator, smiling while smoking and revealing a Rolex under his sleeve, was denounced by singer Aymée Nuviola. (Capture/Instagram)
14ymedio, Havana, 14 October 2022 — The Lepple jewelry store, located in the German city of Esslingen am Neckar, in the region of Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg state, apologized Thursday for having used an image of Fidel Castro to promote the luxury watch brand Rolex.
“The portrait of Fidel Castro has been removed and discarded this Thursday morning,” Lepple’s owner assured 14ymedio. “We were not aware of all the terrible crimes attributed to Castro and we have made sure that this image will never again be used in any promotion or activity of the store,” he explained.
He clarified that the Rolex brand had nothing to do with the use of the image, nor had he recommended its use in Leppel’s showcase. Neither the photograph nor Fidel Castro “are involved in any way with Rolex”.
“We send our deepest apologies to those who may have been offended by our use of this image,” he concluded.
The photograph of the Cuban dictator, smiling while smoking and revealing a Rolex under his sleeve, was denounced on her social networks by singer Aymée Nuviola, who discovered it while strolling through Esslingen. continue reading
It is no surprise that Castro is associated with all kinds of products, including luxury ones, which some brands and establishments, both on the island and worldwide, take advantage of for advertising. The most emblematic product is undoubtedly the Cohiba cigar and its various products, which Castro had manufactured in 1967 to entertain leaders and diplomats allied with the regime, and which has just generated almost three million euros in revenues for Habanos, S.A.
Revolution watch magazine published an article in 2018 that explored Castro’s relationships with “the Crown,” the symbol of Rolex. Several photographs show him wearing the celebrated Rolex Submariner 5513, which he used for scuba diving, one of his favorite pastimes.
Also, like the Cohiba cigar, Castro used to give watches of this brand to prominent officials and loyal agents. This is attested to by the testimony of Norberto Fuentes in his book Dulces guerreros cubanos [Sweet Cuban Warriors] (1999), which refers to the “disgraceful Cuban wearers of Rolexes,” himself among them.
“The Rolexes displayed from the windows of the Ladas fulfilled an important assignment,” Fuentes said of the “top brass” of the regime. “They were the attributes, the insignia. They fulfilled the important task of enhancing our dignity, which — like all legitimate dignity — is physical. The crème de la crème of the fraternity of the revolutionary combatants.”
The attachment of the leaders of the revolution to their Rolexes was such that when Ernesto Guevara was captured in Bolivia in 1967, the Argentinean was wearing two of these watches on his wrist. One belonged to a dead commander, the other was his own. One of Guevara’s last requests to Captain Gary Prado, the Bolivian military officer who captured him, was to guard his watches for when he was released.
Some time later, in 1983, Prado sent the Argentinean’s watch to his family in Havana. In exchange for the souvenir, the Castro government gave him a new Rolex.
Translated by: Hombre de Paz
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
The pandemic has taken away the desire of many students for a medical degree, poorly paid and with poor working conditions. (Granma)
14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, 14 October 2022 — A few weeks ago she got married, in a white, short suit, with flowers and many photos. But the celebration for Kirenia, 22 years old, was in the simple formal procedure for her to reside in Madrid with her husband, a young Cuban who is also a nationalized-Spaniard. Behind her will be her medical career, almost about to conclude, which she abandons for fear that Cuba’s social services will hinder her exit.
“It’s been the most difficult decision of my life because I love my career,” says Kirenia, an outstanding student not only in her course but also throughout the University of Medical Sciences of Ciego de Ávila. Her parents supported her from the first moment and encouraged her to leave before obtaining her degree. “I have several classmates who are doing the same thing.”
Kirenia doesn’t know if she will one day be able to graduate as a doctor in Spain, but she will not do so in Cuba. “My grandfather and grandmother are retired doctors and have to work, because their pensions are not enough,” she tells 14ymedio. “Washing dishes in a café in Madrid I can probably live better than them.” continue reading
The winner of many school contests in her teenage days, Kirenia now no longer has a “head for books and studies” because she only thinks about the moment when the plane takes off and she can look from the window at how the lights of the Island move away.
“Since I made the decision, I can’t even sleep. I have the feeling that something is going to happen that is going to stop me from leaving, but my family tells me that I have to calm down and that everything is going to be fine.” Kirenia already announced at the Faculty her decision to leave her career but attributed her departure to a pregnancy and the need to spend more time with her husband and future baby.
However, the truth is that she can’t imagine “working more than twelve hours a day in a hospital where there are no medicines, the toilets are so dirty that many doctors spend their entire day without even urinating, and they earn a little more than 4,000 pesos that don’t serve for much.”
Together with other colleagues they have created a WhatsApp group where they exchange any scholarship opportunity to leave Cuba. “There are more than twenty, most of them are third, fourth and fifth year medical students. If they are given a scholarship, they are willing to leave medical school” and join the almost 200,000 Cubans who have arrived in the United States since last October, or, unspecified, those who have left for other countries.
The Faculty of Medicine has been one of the jewels in the educational crown in Cuba for the last 60 years. The mass graduation of health workers is part of the official policy and is displayed as one of the great achievements of the revolutionary process, in addition to providing doctors to medical missions abroad, one of the main sources for hard currency on the Island.
In six decades, between 1959 and 2019, Cuba graduated 376,608 people in different branches of the Medical Sciences, of which 171,362 were doctors. The number of those who have left their profession to exercise other economically more rewarding professions and those who have emigrated is handled with secrecy, but in hospitals there is often a shortage of qualified staff and specialists.
Artemisa province is a dramatic case: more than 20 medical students from the same year abandoned their studies, all together. “It’s not just to take advantage of Nicaragua’s no-visa policy,” Inés, the friend of one of these deserters, explains to this newspaper. “It’s also because the rumor that they will be ’regulated’ [that is denied permission to leave the country] once they earn the degree is getting stronger, and they are afraid,” she adds in reference to the ban on leaving the country that the Government applies to students who finish strategic careers, such as Medicine.
On the other hand, in the provincial hospital, “several health workers have requested exit permits and, once granted, have emigrated permanently,” says the same source. “Some ask to be discharged; others leave without doing so because they [the authorities] can delay it, and others have taken advantage of gaps in the system; for example, that they’re in their last year of specialty and have not been ’regulated’.”
In the case of Yander, age 24, the reasons for requesting dismissal from the Victoria de Girón Faculty of Medical Sciences, in Havana, were different. He entered the first year of the program a few months before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. All students were, in one way or another, sent to support hospitals in the face of the large avalanche of people infected with the virus.
“I had hardly any experience and I had to face situations that I don’t want to live through again,” he tells 14ymedio. “The main problem for me was not the fear of getting sick; I got infected twice. I also didn’t make this decision from seeing so many people die without being able to do much to help them, because even oxygen was scarce.”
Yander got tired of the health authorities using students and recent graduates “as if they were furniture… Nobody was asking us anything. They moved us back and forth to support here and there, but the conditions in which we worked were terrible. There was a week that I could only eat bread with something and a juice that I don’t even know what it was because it only tasted like water with sugar.”
“The situation of doctors is something that you have to experience to see.” The young man decided to end his career as a doctor on the day that “a companion was upset because his mother with cancer was dying, and we didn’t even have a painkiller to give her. The man assaulted me and a nurse with a chair.” That night, when he returned home, Yander hung up his white coat for good.
He now has a business selling birds in Cerro. “What I learned at the Faculty I use a lot in the care of these animals, and I also sell hamsters, turtles and rabbits, in addition to the food they need.” The days when business goes badly, Yander still earns what a doctor achieves in a week. “I don’t miss it at all; rather I feel that I was saved from disaster.”
Economic problems also tipped the balance for Nelson Sánchez Ramos’ daughter. “We decided that the best thing for our daughter is to abandon her studies,” this man wrote on his Facebook account. “The disparity between what a professional earns who must study six years to save lives and what the frontmen of the regime receive, makes you reflect on your future and the future of this country.”
Sánchez’s wife, a graduate of Medicine, ” was forced to stop practicing the profession because it’s very difficult for her to get used to living on a salary” that doesn’t even guarantee a regular breakfast. “My girl lost motivation for her studies and now she has to make a huge effort as many university students in this country do, to graduate from a profession that they may abandon in the future to be able to fulfill their dreams, or for something as basic as guaranteeing an adequate diet for her and her children.”
Wage contrasts are obvious between what a doctor earns and what the members of the Ministry of the Interior earn. “Cubans interested in training as prison officials will receive 6,690 pesos of monthly salary, after a course of five and a half months, while a newly graduated doctor earns 4,610 pesos; a resident studying his specialty receives 5,060; and in the case of doctors with finished specialties, the salary ranges between 5,560 and 5,810,” concludes Sánchez.
Others abandon their studies to use all their energies to leave the country. “My son left Medicine in his fifth year and sold everything he had to pay for the ticket to Nicaragua. He has already been in the United States for three months and works in a brigade of builders. His friends at the Faculty see him as a hero,” says Frank Vilaú, father of a 26-year-old boy. “Now he is earning enough to help his girlfriend, who also left medical school, to get out of Cuba.”
But the exodus is not only happening in university education and, specifically, in the faculties of Medicine but also at all educational levels. René, a 45-year-old father from Havana and about to leave for the United States with his children through the family reunification program, visited the youngest’s high school to communicate to the teacher that the child would no longer continue attending classes because of the imminent departure.
“The teacher almost burst into tears and told me: ’No one is going to be left here. I have several students who are in the same situation, and other teachers have also told me that the same thing is happening in their classrooms.’”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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In Güines, on Monday, locals set fire to three rubbish skips
14ymedio, Havana, 11 October 2022 – One of the most talked-about protests of Monday night took place in Güines, Mayabeque, where locals from the areas of El Reparto and Leguina came out onto the street to demand the restoring of electricity — accompanied by the banging of pans and insults shouted towards the Cuban government.
At one particular point the demonstrators closed-off one street and set fire to three rubbish skips.
“It all grew quite ugly”, said one witness to 14ymedio, withholding his identity because “you already know how they’re going after everyone at the moment”. He even deleted a WhatsApp video of the protests that he’d been sent, for fear of being detained.
“You couldn’t hardly see anything, but you could hear the shouting: ’put the power back on, you prick!’ ’Diaz-Canal asshole!’ and stuff like that”, said the man, who added that the police arrived with “a truckload of special troops, but they couldn’t get out of the vehicle”. What awaited them, according to his account, was a mob with machetes in hand, who threw rocks, glass doorknobs and excrement at them.
After the retreat of these troops, he continues, another vehicle arrived, with “kids from the Servicio Militar, dressed in civilian clothing and with big sticks in their hands”, to whom the people shouted: “Come on then with your sticks! We’re going to kill you right here, just like they did in the time of the mambise guerillas! Shoot, assholes, shoot, ’cos no one here is scared anymore!” This contingent also “had to retreat”. continue reading
Another neighbour tells of how they pushed him into one of the trucks on one side and he escaped out the other side, but that the forces “took away a lot of people”.
This neighbour says that there hadn’t been any power for the whole day, and he warned that: “If they cut it off as night falls you know what’s gonna happen here. Because things are already overheated.” And he showed his outrage with the authorities: “There has to be nothing left for them now, something’s got to give, the moment has to finally arrive for them now.”
Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
14ymedio, Elías Amor Bravo, Economist, 17 October 2022 — The official voice of the party has finally spoken. Like Don Rafael del Junco in that radio serial of the great Félix B. Caignet that paralyzed the country for a long time, the official state newspaper Granma talked about the foreign exchange market in order to blame the informal market and inflation for everything bad. And it has done so with arguments that are more political than technical, with evidence that is more propaganda than scientific. Let’s take a look. What it has always done is nothing more and nothing less than what we could expect.
