14ymedio – Page 283 – Translating Cuba

Cuba Detained 757 People on July 11, Including 13 Minors

A young man is arrested by police and State Security agents in the July 11 protests in Havana. (Screen capture)

14ymedio, Havana, 23 July 2021 — As of this Friday, the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH) has registered 757 people detained since the demonstrations on July 11 in dozens of cities throughout the island. In a face-to-face and virtual press conference, the director of the organization with headquarters in Madrid, Alejandro González Raga, detailed that of those arrested, 13 are minors .

For the Observatory, its director said, it is difficult to accept the figure of a single person dying in the riots, the only one recognized by the regime, “basically because it comes from a government that has never accepted anything in the direction of clarifying facts,” always preferring to appeal “to interference in the internal affairs of the Island” and that “it considers that anyone who opposes it” falls into a subcategory of human being “against whom” any type of violence can be used.”

The demands of the peaceful protesters that Sunday, González Raga said, “are inalienable rights” that should not only be recognized but also guaranteed by the Cuban government. Instead, he continues, the regime ordered “a hunt throughout the national territory” for people who had participated in the protests, using “all available instruments from its long inventory of articles of repression” and even continue reading

releasing “new technology.”

The OCDH noted that those arrested were identified through videos posted on social networks and were taken to “ad hoc detention centers,” some of them, prisons that were previously unused.

The number of detainees — 601 men and 156 women — the organization specified, was collected “amid digital blackouts” and “intimidation campaigns.” To arrest “a peaceful opponent,” González Raga said, the government uses “spectacular military operations” in which it uses more than 20 agents, patrols and trained dogs. “They are not arresting a delinquent, or a murderer, or a criminal,” he said.

The director of the OCDH conceded that in some places there were “events of public disorder,” but they are not the vast majority. Meanwhile, the news that the organization has is that all the people who have been tried have been accused of “public disorder,” sentenced to one year in jail or held under house arrest with precautionary measures until they are tried.

The Government is also prosecuting some arrested, they reported, for “transmission of epidemics,”,when, denounced the Observatory, the Government has just summoned its “acolytes” to participate in “tumultuous marches,” which are in no way different from those held on July 11.

That the relatives are not informed where the detainees are being held, is “forced disappearance” said González Raga — something denounced by the UN last week — “arbitrary detention” and “torture.”

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What is Cuba Going to Celebrate This 26th of July?

Raúl Castro embraces his successor on the July 26, 2019. (EFE)

14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, 22 July 2021 — For many years, Fidel Castro’s speeches at the events of July 26, the anniversary of the attack on the Moncada barracks, became a source of speculation for the “fidelologists.” Everyone wanted to predict what would be the presumed tiller of the Commander-in-Chief, both in international politics and in domestic affairs.

On the 26th of July 1989, the “maximum leader” predicted the end of the Soviet Union and in 1993 he announced the dollarization of the economy, or to put it more closely to the discourse, the decriminalization of the possession of dollars. Years passed and on July 26, 2007, in the former cattle province of Camagüey, Raúl Castro proclaimed that every Cuban had the right to have, at least, a glass of milk for breakfast.

These are the reasons why Cubans now await, with some expectation, what President-designate Miguel Díaz-Canel will say on such an important date, especially after the July 11 protests and their aftermath of arrests. continue reading

There are two aspects in the forecasts: the opening and the closing.

When one speaks of “opening,” one can suppose the announcement of measures at the economic level, such as the definitive burial of that State entity called Acopio, allowing agricultural producers to decide what to produce and at what prices to sell. Or another thing, to finally start up the many-times-announced small and medium-sized companies (SMEs). If it were more demanding or more optimistic, it could be expected that private companies would be allowed to import for commercial purposes and that professionals could practice their specialties working as self-employed.

Politically, the least that could be expected, which deserves to be classified as open-minded, would be the immediate and unconditional release of all those detained during the protests, either through the recourse of a pardon, an amnesty or a release from prison. Apologies for the repression should not be expected, but rather acts of greatness based on “revolutionary generosity.”

When talking how the speech might close, it is easier to imagine. It will suffice to repeat the old slogans: “No one surrenders here” and that we cannot trust the imperialism [the United States] not ’one little bit,” and that we must “rigorously apply revolutionary justice against the enemies paid by the empire.”

What they cannot do is act or speak as if nothing had happened. That is why it is worth speculating about what they will say on July 26, and even wondering about the selection of the location for the central ceremony, which is traditionally chosen to reward compliant provinces, will take into account the detail of where there were fewer protests, or if they will reward those who were more combative against those who protested.

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Costa Rica Expands the Special Category of Asylum for Cubans

Cuban migrants stranded in Paso Canoas, in 2016. (EFE)

14ymedio, Havana, 22 July 2021 – On Tuesday, the Costa Rican government expanded the scope of the special category of asylum for Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans, which it began to implement in mid-November of last year. In order to protect those who are denied refuge and “are in a vulnerable condition,” the General Directorate of Migration and Foreigners (DGME) extended the measure.

The procedure will take into account those migrants who “have requested refugee recognition after January 1, 2010 and before March 18, 2022” and remained “continuously in the national territory during the same period. In addition, to qualify there must be proof that that person was denied shelter between January 1, 2010 and December 15, 2021.

With this new expansion of the special category, the Costa Rican authorities intend to provide migrants with legal permanence in the country and provide the corresponding documentation so that they can carry out work activities. Applications will be received until February 28, 2022. continue reading

The DGME justified the decision based on its migration statistics projections for this year, in which it estimates that some 26,863 people from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela “could benefit from this category.”

Migration added that there were months in which few applicants were reported, such as February, when only 597 people completed the paperwork for the category, so it determined to make these “modifications, in order to achieve greater access to the category.”

In 2020 the immigration authorities states that the situation in these three countries prompts it “to carry out a differentiated approach to the migratory situation of people who, due to their own situations, will not receive refuge or the authorization of legal permanence, but who will not leave the national territory, both due to the situation of the global pandemic caused by Covid 19, and the precarious situation in their countries of origin.”

In addition, they note that, since 2014, Costa Rica has registered a considerable increase in applications under refugee status by Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Cubans. Regarding the latter, they say that “they are changing their migratory behavior” and are seeking to establish themselves in the Central American country.

In 2018, Cuba and Costa Rica signed an agreement on migration matters to enhance cooperation between both countries in the fight against irregular migration, human smuggling and trafficking, as well as associated crimes.

At the beginning of last June, a group of at least 150 Cubans who were traveling irregularly on three buses in southern Costa Rica was intercepted by immigration agents. The island’s nationals declared to the authorities that their intention was to continue to Costa Rica’s northern border on their way to the United States.

Hundreds of nationals of the Island who live in countries such as Guyana, Suriname, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Ecuador, are heading to the north of Mexico to cross the border and request political asylum in the United States, after the election of Joe Biden and the announcement of a more tolerant policy on immigration.

Between 2015 and 2016, thousands of Cuban migrants were stranded for several months in Costa Rica and other Central American countries waiting to be able to continue their journey to the United States and after Nicaragua decided to close its border with Costa Rica on the grounds of avoiding a humanitarian crisis and illegal emigration.

The wave of Cuban migrants to the United States grew by almost 80% in that period, in the face of the fear that the thaw between Washington and Havana would put an end to the migratory advantages enjoyed by Cubans under the Wet foot/dry foot policy, eliminated in 2017 by Barack Obama.

Months later, the migrants were able to fly to the southern border of the United States thanks to exceptional coordination by the governments of Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala and Panama.

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Silvio Rodriguez Will Ask for ‘Amnesty’ for Cubans Arrested Who ‘Were Not Violent’

The government-supporting Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez, in 2019. (EFE / Archive)

14ymedio, Havana, 22 July 2021 — The playwright and actor Yunior García Aguilera said that Silvio Rodríguez promised to “advocate for the release of all the prisoners who participated in the protests.” The young artist met the official singer-songwriter this Wednesday in his recording studios – called Ojalá for its most famous song – after having urged him to do so through an “open letter to the owner of a lost unicorn.”

García Aguilera himself commented about the meeting on his networks, in which, he says, “neither invited the other to renounce their positions or principles.”

“We are focused on how to contribute, right now, to the good of Cuban society, as a whole,” wrote the playwright, who asserted that the singer “pledged” in front of him and the wives of each of them, to advocate for the detainees. “He gave his word, convincingly, that he will do everything in his power to achieve that goal,” Garcia Aguilera said.

Silvio Rodríguez, however, qualified this commitment in his version of the meeting, also published continue reading

on Facebook. After referring, without further details, to an occasion in which he requested amnesty for prisoners in the so-called Anti-Imperialist Tribune, thanks to which, supposedly, 70 prisoners were released, he said: “I do not know how many prisoners there will be now, they say hundreds. I ask the same for those who were not violent and I keep my word.”

For the singer, “the most painful” part of the meeting, which he described as “good” and “fraternal,” was “hearing that they, as a generation, no longer felt part of the Cuban process but something else.” He did not allude to an announcement that García Aguilera had made in his post: the coming together of both in “a project (in due course it will be made public) that could serve for the beginning of a truly plural, inclusive, civic, respectful and broad debate.”

In the letter sent to Rodríguez via social networks, García Aguilera told him that he would have loved “that on November 27, when hundreds of young people went in search of a real and transformative dialogue, you would have come with your guitar, to sing with us , in the midst of so much uncertainty.”

“From time to time you surprise us with genuinely revolutionary opinions (in the deep sense of that term) and you return to mend our dreams and hopes,” he questioned. “But I’ll be honest: other times you raise an unbridgeable chasm between your utopias and ours. Not everything you say is a lie, nor is what many of my friends and I defend a lie.”

For this reason, he asked him: “Give us those 15 minutes that the ICRT denied us,” in reference to the demonstration of some artists on July 11 in front of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television, artists who ended up imprisoned by the Police.

On his social networks, Yunior García has been very critical of the repression of the regime since last July 11, showing solidarity with those detained after the protests. “How dictatorships are alike! It does not matter what color they are presented to us or with what hand they give the orders!” he wrote this Tuesday.

Two days earlier, he sent a harsh message to “the silent left” that defends the Cuban government in the world. In it, he ruled that the power in Cuba, which he describes as “sinister”, “is not on the left.” “The state monopoly capitalism in Cuba uses the word ’socialism’ to support a class dictatorship that despises the poor,” he argued in his post. On July 11, he continued, the Government mobilized the military and Black Berets “to defend their stores in foreign currency, their air-conditioned offices, their cars, their mansions with swimming pools, their positions, their privileges. And they sent a group of poor Cubans to repress other Cubans who have nothing.”

In addition, he notes that “the Power cut off our internet, threw us in trucks, in patrol cars, locked up hundreds of us (there are no official figures) and then came out with the greatest cynicism in Cuban history to deny in front of the world a social outbreak unprecedented in this archipelago, in almost 100 years … of solitude.”

In Cuba there is no democracy, he declared, “neither socialist nor of any other kind,” and told socialist sympathizers that “Cuba is more complex than a semi-destroyed colonial Havana where you walk around in a convertible with a cigar, a mulatto woman and a Che shirt … Let’s grow up! — The United States is not interested in sending its troops to this country, we don’t have oil!” he wrote. “The bourgeois with Bolshevik berets and the Cuban thinki tanks have sold them a soap opera that has nothing to do with the reality of this country.”

When most of García Aguilera’s friends, he said, fleeing Cuba, hear the word left, “their stomachs turn over.” When they hear it, “they remember the failed, controlling, inefficient, corrupt, fake, macho, vigilant system … that made them jump into a sea full of sharks, that made them cross the Central American jungles looking for LIBERTAD [sic],” a word that, he asserts, cannot coexist with “left.”

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The Anguish of the Relatives of the Young People Arrested in Cuba on July 11

Nine days after the first protests, the government has not provided numbers for those injured and detained. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Havana, 20July 2021 — “They are young, they are not criminals or bandits who went to throw stones or loot stores, they went to fight for the things they lack, that they are drowning.” Berta Baruch, 58, is one of the mothers who gathered on Monday in front of the 100th y Aldabó prison, in Havana, to find out the whereabouts of her children, detained after the protests on July 11.

Her daughter Yanay Bárbara Solaya (39 years old), her niece Annia Romero Fonseca (47 years old) and her son, Mikel López Romero (27 years old), took to the streets of Centro Habana that Sunday. They were arrested that same day. According to the niece in a last call she made, they were arrested around 8:45 pm on Avenida Carlos III and taken to the Zanja police unit.

“They are decent, hard-working people, they don’t have a criminal record,” Baruch told 14ymedio,” and now they tell us that they have to go to court and that we have to find a lawyer.” The woman received a complaint number and the crime they are charged with: disturbance of public order.

The family, who lives in La Lisa (Havana), waited for a demonstration in the municipality, after seeing on the networks how protests had multiplied since the first one that took place, in San Antonio de los Baños. But when they saw that it wasn’t happening, the three members continue reading

left for the center of the capital.

“I’m on Facebook day and night looking for the videos where she appears because I would like the video of when they were arrested,” she says. “It makes me very helpless to see how they tear gas them inthe face, I saw them there helping each other. I would have liked to have been there to have defended and protected them and it makes me angry to see many men who were filming, instead of helping to keep the police from taking them away.” Berta is desperate: “I am very distressed, I am very anguished, I have no more to give.”

Heissy Celaya Pérez is in the same situation, as the mother of Amanda Hernández, who, at 17, is one of the minors who have been detained since that Sunday.

Celaya learned of the arrest from the young woman herself, a senior high school student and dancer. “She called me to tell me that she had to get out of the car that was taking her to her dance classes on the corner of Prado and Malecón because there were many people on the street and the car could not move forward,” she tells this newspaper while waiting in a line to hire a lawyer for her daughter.” There he warned me that I would be walking back home.”

Knowing the situation, Celaya, who was working, asked Amanda to hurry, but the girl “evidently, on her return, took out her phone and started filming the protests.” Five minutes later,s he called her again, “hysterical, breaking into tears,” to tell her that they were putting her in a police car.

After that call, she did not hear from his daughter for more than 24 hours and since then, she has not seen her or been allowed to speak with her. “The next day I managed to reach the fourth station in Cerro, at Infanta and Manglar,” she continues. “There they told me that my daughter had been transferred to 100th y Aldabó”, a piece of news that felt like a bucket of cold water but did not paralyze her. “On the same Monday I flew over there. They told me to bring toiletries, as if she were a common prisoner,” she laments.

Hernández is charged with the same accusation made against Berta Baruch’s relatives: public disorder. Her little daughter, she says, “is experiencing the same thing and hugs me every five minutes and says I love you when she sees me like this.”

Other testimonies are those reported by the relatives of the young Gabriel Alfonso González, detained in the vicinity of the Havana Capitol, and those of Daniela Rojo, mother of two children aged four and seven who are now in the care of their grandmother.

Because they not only arrested well-known activists, such as José Daniel Ferrer, leader of the Unpacu, and the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, but anonymous Cubans who simply peacefully manifested a desire for change. “I am destroyed,” Celaya confesses.

“Daniela is not a traitor, nor does she support an interventionist aggression against Cuba,” wrote Rioger Guilarte in his networks defending the cause of his friend. “Neither is she pro-imperialist nor is she a ’worm’*. Daniela is an anti-communist and does not mince words. She is a dissident, because dissent is a vital option for development and evolution, it is an ideological decision and not a crime.”

If there are detainees who are outraged, it is precisely the youngest, who abounded in the protests. The activist Salomé García Bacallao has compiled a list of the nine minors arrested from the demonstrations: in addition to Amanda Hernández Celaya, there are Brandon David Becerra (17 years old), Giancarlos Álvarez Arriete (17), Glenda de la Caridad Marrero Cartaya (15), Jonathan Pérez Ramos (16), Katherin Acosta (17), Leosvani Giménez Guzmán (15), Luis Manuel Díaz (16) and Yanquier Sardiña Franco (16).

“Education in Cuba is compulsory up to the upper secondary level, therefore it follows that all those under 18 are students,” García Bacallao wrote in a Facebook post. “When is the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Cuba going to be interested in these minors? For some of them, the station where they are detained is not even known, so they are considered disappeared.”

Nine days after the first protests, the government has not provided a number of injuries and detainees. To date, the legal organization Cubalex documents a total of 34 victims of forced disappearance – the United Nations last week estimated them at 187 – and a total of 500 detainees, although other independent lists determine that 530 have been arrested. Laritza Diversent, executive director of the NGO, detailed this Monday to Cibercuba that, of all those arrested, 74 have already been released and for 108 the detention center where they are held is known; the whereabouts of another 284 remain to be confirmed.

On its networks, Cubalex issued a call to collaborate to those who have any information about or charges against those arrested since July 11.

Translator’s note: “Worms” (gusanos), is a term Fidel Castro chose to describe the first wave of people who left Cuba after the Revolution, and it has been repeatedly applied to anyone who doesn’t support the government ever since.

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Released and Awaiting Trial, Cuban Chess Player Arian Gonzalez

González receiving a prize in Portugal in 2020. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Luz Escobar, Havana, July 22, 2021 — The Spanish-Cuban Grand Master Arián González was released this Thursday after spending more than ten days in detention on the island for participating in the protests of July 11, his wife Massiel Hernández confirmed to 14ymedio. The chess player, who faces trial soon, is charged with the crime of “disrespect,” Hernández said.

At the time of his release, González was in La Pendiente prison, in the province of Villa Clara, where he was held after his arrest and carried out a hunger strike for several days.

The 32-year-old chess player, residing in Orense, Spain, arrived on the island at the beginning of July to take care of his mother, who is diabetic and lives in the Villa Clara municipality of Camajuaní. Like so many thousands of others, he joined the demonstrations last week, with the difference that he did it alone, and got no support from of any of his neighbors. continue reading

Regarding González’s arrest, his colleague Leinier Domínguez said: “I know that in addition to being a brilliant and talented chess player, he is an excellent person. Far from being a criminal, he is right at the other extreme, the good one, that of virtue and decency.”

In turn, former world chess champion Garry Kaspárov asked the Spanish authorities on Wednesday to comment on the case of Grand Master Arián González.

“Are there updates on the arrest in Cuba of a Cuban/Spanish citizen, Grandmaster Arian González? He was there visiting his ill mother. Has Spain been silent about the latest crackdown on human rights in Cuba?” he wrote on Twitter.

Kasparov thus responded to another message on social media in which the Ecuadorian chess player Carla Heredia had tagged him. “Our friend and colleague GM Arian González needs us, chess players around the world to speak up. Hopefully Kasparov can send his solidarity to Arian and bring attention to this case,” commented Heredia.

At the moment, different groups and entities have expressed their concern about the situation of the chess player. Meanwhile the Embassy and the Consulate General of Spain in Havana contend that they are limited because he is a person who has dual nationality.

On social media, several chess players criticized the arrests recorded during the protests on the island against the increasing food shortages during the pandemic. One of them, Sandro Pozo Vera, asked “all the people of Camaguey in exile” to share his post “to get our brave brother out of prison,” referring to González.

For its part, the Liceo Academia Postal de Orense club, where González plays, sent a letter to the Cuban ambassador in Madrid conveying its “concern and desire” that “as soon as possible” the chess player can return to Galicia, where He has lived for about five years, after a long stay in Catalonia.

The Spanish Chess Federation also contacted both the Higher Sports Council and the Cuban Chess Federation to check on González’s situation.

The chess player, who won the Spanish University Championship and who combines chess classes with law practice, planned to return to Galicia in August and compete in the Marcote Chess Memorial, which will take place from August 15 to 22.

Translated by Tomás A.

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‘The Government of Cuba is a Macabre Thing’, says Chess Player Leinier Domiguez

The chess player, living in the United States since 2018, confesses that he was always pessimistic about solutions. (@STLChessClub)

14ymedio, Havana, July 20, 2021 — Cuban chess player Leinier Domínguez is the latest figure to speak out against the repression unleashed as a result of the protests on July 11 in more than 40 cities in the country and has called for the release of all detainees.

In a Facebook post on Tuesday, he refers in particular to his colleague Arián González, a native of Santa Clara and a resident of Orense, Spain, who arrived on the island at the beginning of July to take care of his mother, a diabetic, and who like so many thousands, joined the demonstrations.

Domínguez is forceful in his rejection of the accusations of the regime that calls the protesters “criminals”: “Those of us who’ve lived part or most of our lives in Cuba know that the reality is that people can no longer take it, and have begun to lose their fear,” he says.

About González, he says: “I know that in addition to being a brilliant and talented chess player, he is an excellent person. Far from being a criminal, he’s right at the other extreme, the good one, that of virtue and decency.”

And about the evangelical pastors he knows, he says: “Criminals? Opportunists? Not even remotely continue reading

close. They are humble and very decent people, who live mostly serving others and preaching the Gospel. Right now they are in prison and have little children who cry for them, and run to the door al the time hoping that it will be their father returning home.

“I was convinced a long time ago that the Government of Cuba is a macabre thing,” the Grand Master says in his post, in which he recalls that he had never expressed himself politically in public.

“The famous Revolution and its leaders were given a status that is above human beings, almost divine, beyond all ordinary respect,” argues the Grand Master. “This ignores of course that human nature is not good and therefore every government of men will always have problems to a lesser or greater degree. But in any case, the logical consequence of that revolutionary ideology is that no one has the right to think otherwise, and they use the power to literally crush (in the name of the just and infallible revolutionary cause) everything that opposes it.”

For Domínguez, this is the root of the problem and “what has led to the destruction of the country from almost every imaginable point of view.”

The chess player, settled in the United States since 2018, confesses that he was always pessimistic about solutions. “I always thought that we Cubans simply do not protest (with some exceptions of people with great courage). Most either leave (among whom I obviously include myself) or remain silent in Cuba and try to survive. But that changed just a few days ago, when thousands of Cubans practically all over the island got tired of it and took to the streets to demand freedom.”

Translated by Tomás A.

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Remittances to Cuba: A Detailed and Cogent Explanation

Many families use remittance money to remodel their homes. (14ymedio)

Elías Amor Bravo, Economist, July 21, 2021 – President Biden has ordered his Administration to carry out a rigorous study of the remittances that are sent from the United States to Cuba. The objective is to determine how residents of the United States can send money to the country without benefiting the framework of the communist regime. The idea is that remittances should serve to provide a better quality of life for Cubans and not benefit the regime, an idea that stumbles over unquestionable facts.

The Cuban economy is completely controlled and determined by the state. The means of production are state-owned and the loopholes that exist for private enterprise are very narrow and complex because they require resorting to the black market while also operating in the crosshairs of State Security.

This being the case, this Remittances Working Group created by Biden will have a difficult time solving the Sudoku puzzle that will allow “identifying the most effective way to send remittances directly to the Cuban people.” without going through the control of the regime. Others have tried it before, and ended up throwing in the towel. continue reading

There is no doubt the remittances that Cubans living in the United States send to their relatives on the island have become the main source of foreign exchange for the Cuban economy during the pandemic. Without tourists, without oil from Venezuela to re-export, with limited income from doctors posted abroad, without foreign investment and exports of goods, the regime has devised a series of measures to drain this flow of remittances into the state coffers.

At each step taken by the control mechanisms established by the United States Administration to ensure that remittances reached the desired destination, the Cuban regime responded with harsh slaps, showing its absolute opposition to losing control of the money that enters the country by this route. There have been months of intense boxing, in which no one has emerged victorious. Only the people of Cuba who have relatives abroad have been harmed by the measures that have been adopted, on both sides of the Straits of Florida.

The subject of remittances and their effects is well known in the economic literature. So President Biden’s working group would do well to read all the work published by The Havana Consulting Group in recent years, where they work out the dynamics of the economic processes behind such financing.

By way of summary, I advance some conclusions. Remittances are necessary for many Cuban families to get out of situations of misery. But they cannot be used as investment capital or allocated to businesses except in a few cases. Nor can they easily be used for housing, because there is no legal framework for it.

Remittances tend to be spent on essential goods bought in MLC (Freely Convertible Currency) stores, and when they reach a certain level, families use them to indulge in some additional pleasure, in privately run but state-owned restaurants or hotels.

In general, they do not involve improvements in domestic equipment, in the motorization index or even help to finance bank loans, due to the prices and the insecurity that such expenditures generate, almost always associated with explaining where the money comes from. For all these reasons, a good part of the money from remittances moves in informal markets, both in exchange and goods. Even under these conditions, the state exercises its control.

The most obvious example is that the communist economy of Cuba has been prepared by the government to reduce and drain the remittances that reach Cubans, but it is incapable of generating added value with them.

For this reason, remittances in Cuba have not meant an improvement in economic development, well-being, or development of the population, as occurs in other countries, but rather they generate a vicious cycle of dependency that can in no way be considered positive for the national economy.

From the above, it can be concluded that 80-90% of the remittances that arrive in Cuba end up in the hands of the regime, recycled for its operations, almost always of unproductive current expenditure. It is unavoidable. The owner of the productive assets of the country all he has to do is open his hands so that the dollars fall. The control exercised by the communist government over the financial and banking system is absolute. Banks in fact function as state offices with direct links to state security as information agents.

Moreover, communications and new technologies are also under state control, because they are also owned by them. Sending money to Cuba through the financial system and new technologies is to place it directly in the coffers of the state, which Biden does not want to benefit with remittances. If others have failed in this endeavor, what are the possibilities now that the money of Cubans who fled the country which they didn’t want to live in, will serve to support its authoritarian government?

The protests that have rocked the island since July 11 may be a valid argument to advance this issue. Chronic shortages of basic products, restrictions on civil liberties, and the government’s poor management of the Task Order, coupled with the outbreak of the coronavirus, have increased levels of social unrest to unexpected heights. And the government knows it. Its violent and uncontrolled reaction is disproportionate to the social protests that are fully justified by the economic situation. Ceding numantine* positions in matters of reserves is within reach because the regime needs them.

But if nothing is expected from a government used to getting away with it for 63 years, perhaps a little more proactivity could be interesting. Suspending remittances for a time until those responsible for the repression of the demonstrations are identified, or stopping any shipment until the more than 500 who were detained after the protests leave prison, can be a good way to start playing with a firm hand, a game that the communist regime will have lost before it started.

Its dependence on remittances in the current environment in which Venezuela can no longer meet its commitments is critical. Linking the continuity of remittances to steps that the regime would never take on its own initiative can be a good lesson for everyone to understand what is first and foremost in the framework of relations between the United States and Cuba.

It is the carrot and stick doctrine that authoritarian regimes reluctant to grant reforms are perfect for. Then there will be time to facilitate a supposed development of diplomatic and consular relations between the two countries.

If the White House succeeds in its endeavor, so be it. Everything that can contribute to facilitate a transition to democracy, freedoms, and human rights for Cubans is primary.

Someone could say that remittances are essential for the Cubans who receive them and they would be absolutely right.

But freedom, democracy, and political pluralism are fundamental for all Cubans. And that is the message that has to be transmitted to the tyranny. Let’s see if they want to understand.

*Translator’s note: The Spanish expression Defensa numantina may be used to indicate any desperate, suicidal last stand against invading forces. (Source: Wikipedia)

Tomás A.

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Cuban Agriculture and Valdes Mesa, Where the Water Enters the Coconut

Salvador Antonio Valdés Mesa, first vice president of Cuba’s Council of State Council. (Trabajadores)

Elías Amor Bravo, Economist, July 23, 2021 – Valdés Mesa seems to have finally discovered “where the water enters the coconut.” Cuba’s State newspaper Granma took a headline from a phrase he used in a meeting with farmers in the provinces of Sancti Spiritus and Ciego de Ávila: “The first one who has to win is the agricultural producer.”

Yes. He’s right. Since the time of the French physiocrat Juan Francisco Quesnay back in the 18th century it has been known that the land has to win, basically because otherwise it is abandoned. That’s easy. Physiocracy* encouraged economic thought for decades to place agriculture at the center of economies, and well into industrialization and later, classical economists relied on agriculture to explain their various models. There is no doubt that the agricultural sector has to produce, and also to be efficient doing so — to earn money, to be profitable.

In Cuba, Valdés Mesa, who judging by his age must have known the flourishing Cuban agriculture before 1959, must be suffering from the unbearable feeling that he is witnessing the end of an economic model that never served any purpose. continue reading

His visits to provinces throughout the country to evaluate the conduct of agricultural production and its immediate prospects must have shown him the harsh reality of failure. For example Ciego de Ávila, with sufficient water reserves due to its geography and water table, as well as workers experienced in the agricultural sector, is trying to boost agricultural production, but gives the impression it is unable to achieve even a self-sufficient supply of food.

Therefore, seeing that the case is lost, wherever he goes Valdés Mesa launches into the same “harangues” (which have already been referred to in earlier entries in this blog). Now, in his rally speeches, attended by everyone from prominent party members, the Minister of Agriculture, and provincial governors, to leaders of state-owned companies and a long list of authorities, everyone listens carefully, applauds, and supports everything the communist leader says.

In this final act, he has returned to the idea that the first and most important thing that farmers and other agricultural producers must achieve “is to produce more food for the people,” and for them “they must win.”

Isn’t it strange that no one looked surprised at these assertions, since it’s well-known that if Cuban agriculture doesn’t produce more, it’s not because of the farmers, but because of the innumerable impediments, obstacles and interferences that the regime imposes to subjugate the producers and limit their earnings to prevent them from getting rich.

It’s one thing to say there are difficulties and shortcomings, as Valdés Mesa does, but another that those problems are always there, that they’re never adequately addressed, and that Cubans continually complain that food doesn’t come. This is something that has to be solved. Now.

The harangue of the old communist leader to increase production addressed the question of the fit of the famous 63 measures approved by the regime to try to boost the agricultural sector, which are not giving the predicted results, since food is still lacking. It’s not strange that the authorities are concerned, because the engines that drove the protests of July 11 are still there, and, at least for the moment, no solution has been found to correct the mess.

That’s why Valdés Mesa said that “this process is slow” and added that “we lack dynamism, we have bureaucracy, and the biggest obstacle is that we haven’t had the capacity to reach all the producers, and if someone should be clear about the measures it is the agricultural producer.”

It’s good that occasionally someone from the regime accepts responsibility, even if it is with a small mouth and a quiet voice. The truth is that immediately afterward, the blockade was trotted out as the first cause of all the evils, to which were added the financial difficulties and the importation of products and services that are necessary. And back to square one, because if we weren’t facing an inefficient agricultural sector, these problems would surely not exist.

The key is that Cuban land produce and make money, as the French Physiocrats of the 18th century wanted. The good thing is that the farmers clearly understand this, and some brave people, annoyed by the tone of his assertions, told Valdés Mesa so.

Cubans have lost their fear, and this is manifested even in notes published by Granma, which admit positions that in many cases are contrary to those of the regime.

What is inconceivable is that areas of Cuban geography specially prepared for agriculture have difficulty achieving stable and continuous production. It would be necessary to consider whether the current design based on mini-industries, or socialist state companies, such as Agropecuaria La Cuba, Isla de Turiguanó Livestock, and Ceballos Agroindustrial, is the most appropriate to produce more. Without a doubt, less state economy and more empowered private sector would provide much better results.

The farmers (such as Jaime de León López, from El Vaquerito Credit and Services Cooperative (CCS); Martín Alonso Gómez, from Reinaldo Maning CCS; Rolando Macías Cárdenas, from CCS José Antonio Echeverría; and Carlos Blanco Sánchez, director of Agropecuaria La Cuba) who participated in the event know that in order to increase production, another less interventionist model is needed, with fewer obstacles, and from which the state withdraws, granting decision-making capacity to the private sector. And above all, to make money, that the land be profitable, and that the scale can be increased through investments.

Needed structural transformations are being delayed unjustifiably and prevent achieving rational and efficient production processes that allow the farmer to “win”, as Valdés Mesa said. The calls of the communist leader to avoid “empty lands”, to promote productive centers, to comply with crop diversification plans, and in short, to follow the 63 measures approved by the government, sounded like an empty coconut after explaining his idea of where the water enters. One more waste of time, and problems that don’t allow procrastination.

*Translator’s note: Physiocracy is an economic theory developed by a group of 18th-century Age of Enlightenment French economists who believed that the wealth of nations derived solely from the value of “land agriculture” or “land development” and that agricultural products should be highly priced. Wikipedia

Translated by Tomás A.

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Spanish Justice Suspends Bailout of Plus Ultra, the Airline of Maduro’s Partners

An aircraft of the Spanish airline Plus Ultra. (EFE / EDUARDO CAEVRO / Archive)

14ymedio, Madrid, July 21, 2021 — On Thursday a Madrid court suspended as a precautionary measure a loan of 34 million euros from the Spanish Government to the Spanish-Venezuelan airline Plus Ultra, which was part of a bailout of 53 million euros approved last March.

The resolution is a response to the complaint filed by the opposition parties Vox and Partido Popular against the administration of Pedro Sánchez and the State Society of Industrial Participations, in which they alleged that the company did not meet the requirements established in the regulations to receive public aid, because “it is not a strategic company with relevance in its sector nor are its losses caused by Covid-19”.

According to Vozpópuli published at the time, Plus Ultra operates long-distance flights between Spain and Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, and the owners and managers are related to the Maduro government. continue reading

The Spanish media outlet recalled that, despite the fact that the company is registered on Spanish soil, 47% of its capital is in Venezuelan hands. For this reason, its strategic nature was in doubt from the beginning “from any perspective.”

Also, the company has accumulated losses since its founding in 2011, according to the digital newspaper based on the Insight View tool. “In 2019, the last financial year before the pandemic, the airline had sales of 63.5 million euros but registered a net loss of 2.11 million,” details Vozpópuli.

The airline Plus Ultra, which began operating in 2015, announced two years later flights from Barcelona to Havana, in a shared code* with the state-owned Cubana de Aviación.

A few months ago, Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when reporting the dispatch of a health brigade to Gabon, revealed that it was using charter flights from this company to transfer Cuban doctors to their international missions.

The Spanish newspaper ABC later reported this information [April 25, 2021], detailing the ins and outs of the agreement between the airline and the Cuban Ministry of Tourism.

*Translator’s note: Code sharing is a marketing arrangement in which an airline places its designator code on a flight operated by another airline, and sells tickets for that flight.

Tramslated by Tomás A.

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Amanda Hernandez Celaya, 17, Arrested in Cuba on July 11, Acquitted

The family sent a message of gratitude to all those who reported on the young woman’s case. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Havana, 22 July 2021 — The young woman Amanda Hernández Celaya, arrested on July 11 in the heat of the protests that shook the country, was acquitted this Thursday for lack of evidence after a summary trial was carried out in Havana, as confirmed to 14ymedio by members of her family.

Hernández was charged with the same offense as the other participants in the protests, “public disorder.” The teenager had been released during the night of July 20, under a precautionary measure of house arrest, after spending ten days in prison at the 100th y Aldabó station, unable to communicate with her family or receive visitors.

The family sent a message of gratitude to all who denounced the case of the young woman, who is completing her last year of high school in Havana and is also training to be a dancer.

Heissy Celaya Pérez, Hernández’s mother, learned of her daughter’s arrest through the young woman’s own voice, as she managed to make a call at the time of the arrest. After that communication, during which Hernández was crying continue reading

, her mother did not hear from her for more than 24 hours.

The following day the mother managed to reach the fourth station in Havana’s Cerro municipality, at Infanta and Manglar, where she learned that her daughter had been transferred to 100^th y Aldabó. Most of the calls for support were made by the mother through social networks and international organizations.

Among those arrested in the July 11 protests, many were teenagers, including reports of the arrests of minors.

The activist Salomé García Bacallao compiled a list with at least nine detained minors. In addition to Hernández Celaya, they included Brandon David Becerra (17 years old), Giancarlos Álvarez Arriete (17), Glenda de la Caridad Marrero Cartaya (15), Jonathan Pérez Ramos (16), Katherin Acosta (17), Leosvani Giménez Guzmán (15), Luis Manuel Díaz (16) and Yanquier Sardiña Franco (16).

The trials of participants in the massive protests continue. The actor Carlos Alejandro Rodriguez Halley denounced on his Facebook account that his friend, the artist Alexander Diego Gil, “has just been sentenced to ten months of deprivation of liberty in a circus trial.”

The young man also raised several questions: “What should we do at this time? Should we remain silent? Should we expect something from the artists who are silent? Should we settle for injustice? Should we endure a dictatorship that clings to power without it mattering to them that a whole country has risen up demanding that they withdraw from power? (…) What is going to happen to all the relatives of all the victims of the Cuban dictatorship today? When will real justice be done? ”

Gil’s arrest was also denounced by filmmaker Carlos Lechuga: “This boy is a good man. An artist with a special sensitivity. (…) Immediate freedom for Alexander. For his health, the health of his mother and the country “.

Lechuga also took advantage of his letter to request “immediate freedom for all 11J [11 July] prisoners and political prisoners.”

Twelve days after the first protests, the government has not provided a number of those injured and detained. The legal organization Cubalex documents to date a total of more than 600 people, all victims of repression and among whom are both the detained and disappeared.

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Cuba Is Yours

Demonstration this July 11 in Alqízar, Artemisa. (Screen capture)

14ymedio, Federico Hernández Aguilar, San Salvador, 22 July 2021 — Cuba is yours, brother. This island belongs to you, sister. Your face is reflected in its waters. In the blue of its skies, the clouds of your dreams are roaming. But in this island land they have wanted — how redundant! — to isolate you, they have wanted to drown your voice for many years, to muzzle your conscience, to force you to embrace a destiny that was not, is not, has never been yours.

For more than six decades, equivalent to the entire life of a human being, hundreds, thousands of Cubans were born, grew up and died breathing a rarefied air, contaminated by the hegemonic discourse of a group of privileged people who came to believe they were eternally in power.

And yet, sister, brother: do you hear, do you perceive, have you seen how the wind has turned on the coasts, have you observed how intensely the sun has renewed itself on the horizon? On July 11, you turned history upside down. You made your footsteps echo from one corner to the other of the island that was always yours and whose possession you now claim.

They were so determined to instill fear in you that they ended up continue reading

snatching it away from you. They never knew how much strength they were giving to your yearning for freedom when they silenced you, when they locked you in cold dungeons, when they covered you with chains. Today they know. Today the fear is theirs.

You have taken the fear out of your little house and put it in their official residences. You no longer tremble; they do. Their power, once so immense, is now blurred, and you have achieved this by putting your feet on the street, joining the spontaneous march of others who have also discovered that the future belongs to them.

José Martí looks at you from the height of his white statue. His thought, lucid, crosses your memory and makes your lungs expand: “Like bones to the human body, the axle to the wheel, the wing to the bird, and the air to the wing, so is liberty the essence of life. Whatever is done without it is imperfect.”

And you have had enough of the imposed imperfections, of the undeserved poverty, of the hunger that eats away at the entrails, of the yearning, the longing, that eats away at the soul.

Martí watches. He greets your heroic deed with the power of a word that tyranny tried to usurp, but that today recovers its original brilliance in the cries of freedom that make your heart vibrate. That hero thus offers you the warmth of his breath; he affirms your ankles; he pushes you to the unprecedented struggle. And you watch him lean from his pedestal to whisper in your ear: “He who lives in an autocratic creed is the same as an oyster in its shell, which only sees the prison that encloses it and believes, in the dark, that this is the world; freedom gives wings to the oyster.”

And it is true, brother, sister of Cuba: you have grown wings. In vain did they think they were going to turn this island into your shell. In moments you have reached the elevation that Martí wished for the people for whom he bled to death at Dos Ríos. Between him and you there is a real, indestructible bridge, stronger than any ideology to connect your aspirations with those of every man or woman who loves and defends freedom, their own and that of others.

Cuba is yours, sister. The nation belongs to you, brother. It is present in that woman who demands bread for her children, in the rebelliousness of that young man who demands respect for his dreams, in the slogan of that group of poets, musicians, journalists, citizens who, together, shoulder to shoulder, go out today to the public square to chant the pair of words that is burying 62 years of opprobrium: “¡Patria Y Vida!” [Homeland and Life].

And so it is. Do not doubt it. Because life is yours, brother, sister of Cuba, yours will also be the homeland!

Translated by: Hombre de Paz

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Cuba Needs a New Political Language, Says Filmmaker Fernando Perez

Filmmaker Fernando Pérez during an interview with this newspaper. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Havana, 22 July 2021 — Cuban filmmaker Fernando Pérez said that to overcome the crisis in Cuba that led to the July 11 protests a “new political language” needs to be built without violence and without the dark “acts of repudiation,” he stressed in an interview with AFP news agency.

The multi-awarded director, winner of a Goya for his film La vida es silbar (1999) and the Biznaga de Oro award for best film for Últimos días en La Habana (2017), considered that with “the social crisis that the country is going through, there has to be an explosion, which I tell you, I don’t know how far it’s going to go”.

During his participation on November 27 in the demonstration of hundreds of artists and creators, which took place in front of the Ministry of Culture in Havana to demand freedom of expression, he lamented the breakdown of dialogue. “I felt that something was really changing in our reality,” he told AFP, referring to the fact that the 300 participants in the protest “are asking for what I call a new language.”

For Pérez, a director who is very close to the new generations, they should not be “only of words but of attitudes, of solutions, of radical changes in our country”, for which he considered that they should include “freedom of expression, respect for those who think differently and open independent spaces, not only in art but also in other spheres of reality.” continue reading

The demonstrations, warned the Cuban filmmaker, respond to the “lack of that new language, of that new attitude of a country that has to open up to the participation of these young people, because they are not the future, they are the present”. They are the result of “the pandemic, the new order, the blockade…The phenomenon is there, what I saw in front of the Capitol. It is a rebellious attitude that I share”.

The multi-awarded director took time to talk about the contradictions of Cuban cinema. He defended, he said, the policy of “propaganda” to turn it into a “cultural fact”.

“The development of that policy has faced elements of freedom, of regression, of contradiction,” he said, referring to the so-called ’Five Grey Years’ between 1971 and 1976. A period in which “everything was confused, reduced to an ideological view, really very overwhelming, very closed, which has left very deep marks, some of which are irreparable.”

Pérez has been for many years the standard bearer of the new generations of filmmakers on the island, and in 2012 he resigned as director of the Muestra de Cine Joven, an annual meeting that brings together and disseminates proposals of new audiovisual creators. “Not being able to demonstrate in practice the inclusive coherence that I have proposed for the show, I have taken the personal decision not to continue at the head of it,” he said then and after several acts of official censorship.

Translated by: Hombre de Paz

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A New Generation of Cubans Will Not Be Silenced

“No More MLC [stores that require payment in hard currency], the people are hungry. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 22 July 2021 — The month of July has borne witness to a number of events that have been turning points in Cuba’s history: Fidel Castro’s assault on the Moncada Barracks in July 1953, which ignited the revolution; the execution of the revolutionary general Arnaldo Ochoa that shocked many Cubans in 1989; and the sinking of a tugboat with dozens of people on board heading for Miami in 1994, in what became the climax of the rafters’ exodus. To these historic July dates, we now add the day when we Cubans took back the streets, our streets.

Sunday, July 11, began like any other summer day on this island: hot, long lines to buy food and uncertainty dominating daily life. Then the first live Facebook videos of protests from the small town of San Antonio de los Baños, southwest of Havana, started appearing on social media. On our phone screens, we watched crowds chanting “freedom,” “we want help” and “we are not afraid,” as well as insults against President Miguel Díaz-Canel. These were new scenes for us, and the excitement was contagious.

Mr. Díaz-Canel and his entourage went to San Antonio de los Baños to re-enact the scene of Fidel Castro arriving to calm the masses at the 1994 protest in Havana known as the “Maleconazo” — until now the only widespread social upheaval that several generations of Cubans had ever seen. But Mr. Díaz-Canel’s game plan did not work. continue reading

By the time the presidential caravan reached San Antonio de los Baños, the protests had already spread, including to Palma Soriano, in the province of Santiago de Cuba on the other side of the island. Large crowds of neighbors took to the plazas of Cárdenas and Matanzas, and groups of young people approached the capitol in Havana.

“We gathered on a corner of El Vedado” — a neighborhood in Havana — “and we began to speak the same language,” said a 32-year-old man, Alejandro, who was among the dozens of Habaneros who went to the headquarters of the Cuban Parliament chanting that three-syllable word as loudly as they could: libertad.

Many of those who called for Mr. Díaz-Canel’s resignation and the end of the dictatorship were born after the 1994 Maleconazo or were children at the time, with no memory of that revolt. But that doesn’t matter because, unlike that outbreak, the goal of these protests is not to escape the island’s economic crisis on a raft, but to bring about change on the island.

To be sure, the restrictions brought on by the pandemic have exhausted an already worn-down population. But young Cubans are not protesting solely against the pandemic curfews, the cut in commercial flights that allowed them to escape to another country, or the shops that accept only foreign currencies even though the people are paid in Cuban pesos. These protests are fueled by the desire for freedom, the hope of living in a country with opportunities, the fear of becoming the weak and silent shadows that their grandparents have become.

These young Cubans don’t want to be the grandchildren of a revolution that has aged so badly that Cubans are forced to risk their lives crossing the Florida Straits for a chance at a decent life.

They protest because the official myth that the Cuban people had been saved by some bearded men who came down from the Sierra Maestra is no longer relevant to them. They have grown up watching the bellies of Communist officials grow while they have difficulty putting food on the table. They no longer fear risking their lives in the streets, because they are slowly losing their lives anyway, waiting in long lines to buy food, traveling on crowded buses and enduring prolonged power outages.

One image encapsulated how the official narrative of Fidel Castro’s revolution was completely shattered: Several young people hoisted a bloody Cuban flag atop an overturned police vehicle in the middle of the street. Unlike the patriarchs of the revolution, they didn’t sport beards and olive-green uniforms, but they have become the new symbol of this island. They took to the streets because they believed that the streets belonged to them.

In past protests, the regime depended on its loyal army of state workers, members of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution and the Raúl Castro worshipers to foil the demonstrations — indeed, loyalists were encouraged to hit back at the demonstrators with sticks and stones. But in the first hours of this wave of protests, few loyalists showed up. Instead, Mr. Díaz-Canel unleashed his uniformed security forces to quell the demonstrations.

Unsurprisingly, the security forces detained hundreds of people. The government has militarized streets across the country and restricted the internet to make people on and off the island believe that there is nothing to be seen. In other words, they did what dictatorships do.

Many Cubans had come to believe that the dictatorship would be eternal, that the island was cursed forever, that our only options were to flee or to remain silent. Others were convinced that Cubans were incapable of rebellion, that the brave had left and an apathetic and silent mass was all that remained behind. But the silence has been broken. And the voices that broke it belong, above all, to young Cubans clamoring for profound changes in their country.

The near future is full of uncertainty. Little by little, the number of deaths, arrests and forced disappearances will become known. To help in this task, it is urgent that social organizations create hotlines in which the families of the missing can offer their information in an effort to locate their loved ones. The United Nations and the European Union have called on the Cuban government to respect the right to protest and to release all of those who have been detained for demonstrating. It’s unlikely that the regime will heed their calls. But one thing is clear: Cubans have tasted freedom, and there’s no turning back. We will not be silenced again.

Yoani Sánchez (@yoanisanchez) hosts the podcast Ventana 14 and is the director of the digital newspaper 14ymedio. This article was translated by Erin Goodman from the Spanish, for the New York Times.

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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in The New York Times .

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The Reporters of ‘La Hora de Cuba’ Were Released Under a Precautionary Sentence of House Arrest

Photo of journalist Henry Constantín Ferreiro (left) and the designer Neife Rigau (right). (La Hora de Cuba)

14ymedio, Havana, July 21, 2021 — The journalist Henry Constantín Ferreiro, the designer Neife Rigau, and the photographer Iris Mariño, from the independent media La Hora de Cuba, were released this Wednesday under a precautionary sentence of house arrest, after being arrested in the demonstrations on July 11 in Camagüey.

As reported by La Hora de Cuba on social media, the three communicators “face the identical charge of public disorder, for trying to cover the protests . . . We thank everyone for the campaign for their release,” the independent publication added.

Mariño, who is also an actress, confirmed shortly after being released that she is being prevented from leaving her home. During a live broadcast on her Facebook profile, she thanked all the people who joined on social media to campaign for her release.

“There are still people who are detained; please continue to unite your voices so that those people go free, people who went to a march of peace and love,” she added, acknowledging that she had lived through very difficult continue reading

days.

The journalists of La Hora de Cuba are frequently harassed by the police, who prevent them from carrying out their work. Constantín and Mariño were threatened with prosecution for the crime of “usurpation of legal capacity”* for their journalistic work.

After learning of the journalists’ arrest on July 11, the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) demanded the immediate release of Constantín, Rigau, and Mariño, who had been imprisoned in the police unit known as Second Station.

Regarding Rigau and Mariño, the IAPA reported that it learned from sources close to the police that they could be released “under a condition of house arrest for an indefinite period.” But for Constantín, who is the vice president of the IAPA on the island and the director of La Hora de Cuba, they were going to press charges against him and take him to trial.

On Sunday, July 11, the police raided Constantín’s home and seized cell phones, a computer, and money.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) demanded last week the release of the independent media’s reporters and others under arrest, urging the government to release them “immediately and unconditionally.”

“The Cuban authorities have responded to the largest anti-government protests in the country in decades with expected hostility, attacks on members of the press, and interruptions in internet service,” said Ana Cristina Núñez, CPJ investigative reporter for Central and South America.

The CPJ revealed that the regime has also prohibited other journalists from leaving their homes, including 14ymedio reporter Luz Escobar, and at least 26 members of the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and Press (ICLEP).

*Translator’s note: “Usurpation of legal capacity” is the term used in Cuba to define practicing a profession without a license; however the government refuses to license the independent practice of many professions, including journalism and law..

Translated by Tomás A.

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