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14ymedio, Havana, 24 December 2021 — Only a few times before has it been so difficult to compile this list with the 14 most relevant faces of the year in Cuba now ending. The twelve months that have elapsed so far have been marked by an infinity of events and thousands of protagonists who have shaped a 2021 that will be remembered for a long time. A wave of deaths due to covid-19, popular protests, extreme repression, musical soundtracks that shook an entire nation and the beginning of a new migratory exodus are some of the crucial moments that we have lived through.

The list that 14ymedio draws up every year-end has, on this occasion, a greater number of groups, movements and platforms. More than a list of figures, it is a collective face, to which many have added their imprint and have helped define its features. There will be those who miss a name, but those on the list make up the convulsed and hopeful countenance of a nation that is changing.

We present the anatomy of 2021.

1. Archipiélago: Yunior García, Saily González, Daniela Rojo, David Martínez

2.  Agent Fernando, a doctor at the service of State Security

3.  ‘Patria y Vida’, the latest anthem for the freedom of Cuba

4.  Luis Robles, the ‘young man with the placard’

5. Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, one year harassed by Cuban State Security

6. Silvio Rodríguez, in ambiguity until the end

7. The 11J prisoners, detained for shouting “freedom” in Cuba

8. Lines as an instrument of social control

9. The fleeing athletes

10. The generals RIP

11. Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, the powerful son-in-law comes out of the shadows

12. Kenny Fernández Delgado, another rebel priest

13. The rebel doctors of Holguín: Manuel Guerra and others

14. Marino Murillo, the man who sowed chaos with ‘Ordering Task’

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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, Havana, 29 December 2021 — Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, Raúl Castro’s former son-in-law who is known as the “Tsar of Gaesa,” joined the list of deputies this October, when he joined Parliament in a ceremony in Remedios (Villa Clara). Former division general and born in 1960, the military man was elected with 98.5% of the votes cast by the delegates and replaces the late Antonio Pérez Santos.

Months before, during the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), in a “no brainer” López-Calleja joined the Political Bureau. was the arrival at the Political Bureau of López-Calleja. Analysts had been foreseeing the rise of the military man to positions closer to the top of Cuban power for years. His presence in the Political Bureau is the closest of any member of the family clan, at least in a formal and public way, at the top of the PCC.

Until then, López-Calleja was a man with a discreet profile and, although he was a member of the Party’s Central Committee and executive president of the very powerful Grupo de Administración Empresarial, SA (Gaesa), he had remained in the shadows.

Yes, the United States had noticed him, and in September 2020 added him to the list of those sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a relationship that includes people and organizations with which United States citizens and residents permanent staff are prohibited from doing business. The measure also freezes the individual’s accounts in the country if he had any.

His leadership of Gaesa, which controls foreign exchange stores, hotels, real estate investments, construction companies, port services, remittance and currency exchange agencies, customs services and electronic commerce made him the head of the Cuban economy, all of it, under the military boot.

But his rise to the political table had a separate interpretation. Some analysts have wanted to see in this a masterful move by Raúl Castro. According to this theory, Díaz-Canel is a burned-out politician who has no popular acceptance and must be replaced very soon.

López-Calleja is over 60, which is now the maximum age for a president in Cuba, but not for a prime minister. Marrero, on the other hand, who runs Tourism and is therefore closely linked to Gaesa, could occupy the position of president. The tandem looms.

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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, Havana, 24 December 2021 — Bárbara Farrat, the mother of 17-year-old Jonathan Torres Farrat who was imprisoned after the July 11 (11J) protests, was released after being under arrest for several hours, after she was detained when she tried to leave her home this Friday morning. “She went down to the corner to look for cigarettes and the patrol car that was turning the corner took her away,” Torres Farrat’s girlfriend, Daimy Morales Moré, reported to 14ymedio .

Morales explained that Farrat’s husband, Orlando Ramírez, came out to find out what was going on but the officers did not give him reasons for the arrest. “Orlandito ran down to ask questions and they told him that they were taking her to the Aguilera police unit. He then went there to ask about her but they did not want to give him any information,” he added.

Bárbara Farrat lives with her family on Calzada de Diez de Octubre and since her son was arrested on August 13, she has been tireless in the fight to achieve his freedom and also that of the others imprisoned because of the 11J protests.

On Friday morning, her home was surrounded by a police operation, the family said. On several occasions, State Security agents have threatened Farrat with prosecution for sedition if she continues to post on social media about her son’s situation.

Minutes after leaving the police station, Orlando Ramírez told this newspaper that “in the same entrance” of the Aguilera station he could see the moment when a patrol was taking Farrat to another place. “She tried to tell me something but the windows were up, and the patrol car was escorted by a State Security captain who was riding his motorcycle. At the station they told me that she was never there,” he said. continue reading

14ymedio, Havana, 27 December 2021 — They did not belong to any opposition organization within the island nor, as the official media claimed in a foreseeable smear campaign, were they instigated by the “enemy” from outside. Simply, together with thousands of compatriots in dozens of cities throughout the island, they decided to go out into the streets infected by the images from San Antonio de los Baños that, that July 11, spread like wildfire on social networks.

“We are not afraid,” “we want freedom,” “we are more,” “down with the dictatorship” and “homeland and life” were some of the cries that sounded in those spontaneous demonstrations. The first jug of cold water for those events, unpublished in 62 years –  the antecedent is the Maleconazo in 1994, but only in Central Havana – was the declaration of the president Miguel Díaz-Canel that same afternoon: “The combat order is given.”

The internet blackout established by the state telecommunications company Etecsa, at the service of the State, that day and the following days, generated confusion about the balance of the repression. At first, non-governmental organizations counted more than 5,000 detainees. Ultimately, there was one dead, Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, shot in the back by a policeman in the Havana neighborhood of La Güinera, in Arroyo Naranjo, on July 12. continue reading

14ymedio, Havana, 26 December 2021 – The singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez recognized this year, for the first time, that Cuba “could be” a dictatorship. He did not do so on his blog, Segunda Cita – where he makes room for different but monotonous voices, all pro-government – but in a Chilean magazine, Culto, in an interview that was later reproduced by the official media Cubadebate.

In it, he also said that there are “orthodox sectors of the Cuban Government that have obstructed changes,” although he released the designated president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, from being a part of this, saying he understands the “need to break a certain inertia” and that is why he approved certain laws.

At the same time, and in a regular speech, he pointed to the United States as the origin of the island’s ills: “They have been suffocating Cuba for more than 60 years, attacking it, slandering it, and when it defends itself, it is a dictatorship. It may be so. That they have forced it to be so to some extent. Who forced it? The greatest dictatorship on the planet: that of selfishness, that of money, that which does not believe in love but in usury.” continue reading

We know the agent Fernando — whose real name is Carlos Leonardo Vázquez González, a doctor by profession — as a mock nemesis of Yunior García Aguilera. The Cuban regime took this doctor out of the closet at the beginning of November to discredit the playwright and the visible face of the Archipiélago, whom he had met in a workshop in Madrid that promoted democracy in Cuba.

Revealing his status as a spy at the service of the regime was a necessary gesture to present García Aguilera as a person trained in what the Government calls “soft coups” and which consists of organizing peaceful protests to overthrow the Government.

The task assigned 25 years ago to Vázquez González was to infiltrate the opposition to gain their trust, something he achieved thanks to his profession as a doctor, even managing to be at Oswaldo Payá’s funeral, along with Guillermo Coco Fariñas.

Before his trip to Spain to participate in the Saint Louis University workshop, agent Fernando visited Fidel Castro’s grave to swear to him to “defend the Revolution to the last consequences,” according to what he told the state newspaper Granma, which dedicated a comprehensive eulogy to him once his identity was revealed.

Reinaldo Escobar, editor-in-chief of 14ymedio, also participated in those seminars on democracy in Cuba, and witnessed the strange attitude of the spy, very insistent when approaching former Spanish president Felipe González, to whom he gave a box of cigars, but very quiet in his participation. García Aguilera also said he remembered him and wished he might be “a better doctor than an undercover agent.”

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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, Havana, 26 December 2021 — Before being arrested on July 11 , without having had time to participate in the protests that day, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, leader of the San Isidro Movement (MSI), had long been subjected to permanent harassment by the political police.

Specifically, since November 26, 2020, when State Security evicted more than a dozen activists quartered for freedom from number 955 of Damas Street , in Old Havana, the artist’s home and headquarters of the MSI. by rapper Denis Solís (today, by the way, in forced exile in Serbia). From there he left on a stretcher, after several days on a hunger and thirst strike.

The artist did not spend a day without State Security surveillance since then, but he never stopped participating in different initiatives, for example the launch, in March, of a platform called, like the song, Patria y Vida (Homeland and Life).

Shortly after, on April 25, Otero Alcántara went on hunger and thirst strike again to demand that his rights be respected, after a month of police siege of his home. The activist also demanded the return of his artistic works or compensation for those that were destroyed by the political police.

After several days of fasting, in the early morning of May 2, he was taken from his home against his will and taken to the Calixto García hospital, where he remained for almost a month with hardly any outside continue reading

14ymedio, Havana, 25 December 2021 — Luis Robles Elizastigui turned 29 on December 2 at Combinado del Este, a maximum security prison, two days before the first anniversary of his arrest. His crime: holding up a placard on the central Boulevard of San Rafael in Havana that read: “Freedom, no more repression, #FreeDenis” (referring to rapper Denis Solís, sentenced to eight months in prison in a summary trial and today exiled in Serbia).

The images of his solitary demonstration, disseminated on social networks, were immortalized, two months later, in the video clip for Patria y Vida (Homeland and Life). At the same time, the images are only incriminating evidence presented by the Prosecutor’s Office in the trial, held on December 16 in Marianao, Havana, in which he was prosecuted for enemy resistance and propaganda.

In the video, however, it is observed that he did not struggle with the agents who detained him, nor was there any reference to any enemy on his poster, and that the passers-by who surrounded him tried to defend him from the police.

A graduate in Computer Science and with a son, readers learned more about Luis Robles thanks to his brother, Landy Fernández Elizastigui, who became the communication channel of the “young man with the placard” with the outside world. Fernández has not stopped denouncing the mistreatment Robles has received in prison and, despite threats from State Security, he is not afraid to defend his brother publicly.

In an interview with 14ymedio, Fernández said that his brother “has always thought differently about the regime.” We were able to verify this in a video of Luis Robles recorded a few days before his protest and disseminated by the family last July, when the authorities, due to the 11J demonstrations, had already suspended the trial of the boy sine die.

In it, Robles called for “a change in the system,” since communism, “a destroyer of souls,” he said, had turned Cuba into “a true hell”…This generation is not willing to continue bearing it,” he said. “This is our time and we have to take advantage of it.”

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

14ymedio, Havana, 27 December 2021 — If there was a collective, massive and omnipresent “organization” throughout 2021 in Cuba, it is the line. It is not that it is a novelty, but neither the failed “Ordering Task”, in force since the first day of the year, nor the end of the harsh mobility restrictions due to the pandemic have reduced the problem of shortages, shortages and, consequently, the crowds that form in front of the shops.

Lines for bread, lines for frozen chicken, lines for cheese and jams. Lines in stores that take payments in Cuban pesos or in foreign currency. Hours and hours of lining up, in short, to buy anything: potatoes , intimates, medicines, ice cream, preserves, gasoline, toys, shoes, appliances and even plastic bags.

The lines usually form in the early morning, but sometimes even days earlier. The excitement of Cubans to the “mark” their place in a line when  long “disappeared” products are “brought out” — the line has its own jargon, it is only comparable to disappointment when the items for sale run out prematurely. continue reading

14ymedio, Havana, 23 December 2021 — Great concern reigned this Thursday among the relatives of the 15 July 12th protesters in La Güinera, regarding the sentences of 12 to 30 years requested by the Prosecutor’s Office for the crime of sedition. According to the mothers interviewed by 14ymedio, the Havana court where the trial was held between December 14 and 16 has verbally ratified the prosecution’s requests, without delivering any brief. On the other hand, legal sources assure that the sentences have not yet been communicated.

The protest in La Güinera, which began around four in the afternoon on Monday the 12th, was a replica of the popular protests that shocked the entire country on Sunday, July 11.

In an attempt to clarify the confusing situation created by the lack of transparency of Justice, this newspaper has contacted the group Justicia 11J [Justice 11July], which works on arrests for political reasons in Cuba and compiles, with all possible rigor, exhaustive information on the trials. This platform, which works closely with the Cubalex legal information center, is not aware that the court has delivered its judgments in the La Güinera case.

The situation is the same with the lawyer Eloy Viera, who states that “what is legally established in these cases is that the sentences are not offered verbally but days later in writing… What we can assure so far is that the trials were held and the defendants await the document that legally determines the sanction they must comply with,” he said.

The excessive requests of the Prosecutor’s Office contrast with the impunity accorded so far to Police Second Lieutenant Yoennis Pelegrín Hernández, who shot Diubis Laurencio Tejeda in the back on July 12 when he was participating in the La Güinera demonstration. The authorities opened an investigation more than two months ago and, although it was leaked that the agent would be tried for murder and injuries, no continue reading

14ymedio, Havana, 23 December 2021 — Spain sold anti-riot equipment to Cuba in the first half of 2021 for an amount of 350,000 euros, according to a recent report presented to the Spanish Congress in Madrid by the Secretary of State for Commerce.

Although the authorization of the export to Havana was made before the massive protests that occurred on July 11 on the island, the document does not explain if the shipment arrived before that date or if the delivery was suspended for fear that it would be used to suppress peaceful demonstrations, according to El País.

The Spanish newspaper also specifies that the consummated sales between January and June include Albania with a purchase of 78,948 euros, but in that period, in addition to Cuba, the list of authorized operations that were carried out included the Democratic Republic of the Congo, at 4.6 million euros; Togo, at 306,150 and Tunisia, with 111,000.

Other Latin American countries that received police and military equipment from Spain in 2021 were Peru and Colombia, the latter with imports worth 59,645,534 euros. Among the materials imported by the Colombian Defense Ministry were bombs, torpedoes, rockets, missiles and aircraft, according to the newspaper Público.

It is not the first time that Madrid has sold defense equipment to Havana. In 2014, a report by the defunct Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness recorded an export of 3,170,228 euros to the Island, which included, among other equipment, “gas masks” and “armored suits.” continue reading

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 23 December 2021 -“There is rum and cigarettes,” an old man proclaims as he walks from one corner to another on Reina de La Habana street. “Rum at 600 and cigarettes at 100,” he details to a passerby who approaches, interested.

“That rum is not homemade, is it?” Asks the young man. “Oh no! It’s from the ration book at the bodega (ration store), and I am selling it to see if I can make it to the end of the year,” the seller replies. In portals and corners of the capital, the same scene is repeated: retirees who try to get some money from the sale of this alcoholic drink acquired “by the ration book” and highly sought after on the Island these days in the absence of beers or ciders. And the same with cigarettes.

The “regulated” distribution includes, per person, one bottle of rum in a one and a half liter plastic bottle priced at 132 pesos, and four boxes of strong H. Upmann brand cigarettes, at 17.50 pesos each. Under the table, products are resold at five times their cost.

“Bocoy Rum, sealed from the ration store, 1.5 liters at 700 pesos. Víbora [neighborhood] (I do not deliver), private parties.” Ads like this have filled classified sites and social media. Another Facebook user jokes about the distribution of the drink: “1.5 of rum from the ration store at the end of the year to have the people anesthetized. Too late, carry on.” continue reading

Francisco Silva Herrera, general director of merchandise sales of the Ministry of Internal Trade, declared this Monday that 655,000 boxes were destined to guarantee rum sales. The enthusiasm for the idea of ​​buying a bottle of rum and then being able to resell it did not last long, since the drink is not of good quality

“I have not been able to off load the rum, nobody wants to buy it because everybody already knows that it is bad,” confesses a neighbor in Luyanó. “I’ll see if a miracle happens and I get the ingredients to make a crema de vie [eggnog].”

In any case, the sale of rum on the rationed market once again awakens the ghosts of the Special Period. During the crisis of the 90s, the product, one of the emblems of the national industry, was also sold in a controlled manner for each nuclear family. Eggs or chicken could be missing, but the alcohol arrived on time.

“Why so much rum?” laments another resident of Centro Habana. “If they really want to help, let them give us a piece of meat for the 31st.”

The inflation resulting from the so-called Ordering Task has caused many Cubans to go out to sell what they have on hand, since it is almost the end of the year and many still do not know that they are going to have dinner on December 31st. Not without consequences.

Mario, a resident of Havana’s El Vedado neighborhood, was fined 8,000 pesos this week for selling the cigarettes from his rationed share. The young man had them displayed in the window of his house and the inspector who sanctioned him posed as a shopper.

“You can’t sell any of the products that are distributed in the ration store,” the official informed him. “Well, I don’t understand it. If I don’t smoke, why can’t I sell them to solve other needs?” Mario dared to answer, who insists that he will demand punishment from the relevant authorities.

Despite the fact that not all Cubans drink alcohol or smoke, everyone will receive this year-end rum and cigarettes that they are not allowed to sell. Meanwhile, the government’s response to the population’s concerns about food shortages and high prices has been the announcement that an additional one pound of chicken and three pounds of rice per person will be distributed.

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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.