14ymedio – Page 304 – Translating Cuba

Insatiable, Etecsa Seeks to Take Over Remittance Business in Cuba

On March 10, a resolution was published in the Official Gazette that allows the enabling of a mobile wallet managed by Etecsa. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Havana, 19 March 2021 — “Two recharges with bonus in a single month, they must be very hard up for money,” thinks Lázaro Miguel, a 27-year-old young man who makes a living in Havana updating mobile operating systems and selling vouchers for cell phones. So far this year, his work has multiplied because the state telecommunications monopoly Etecsa has launched two recharge offers every month from abroad with an additional bonus.

“Normally a monthly offer was made on significant days or holidays, but now in less than 30 days two have been launched and that is because they are desperate to get fresh money,” says the young entrepreneur who shares a small table at the foot of a staircase with another self-employed person also dedicated to mobile phone service in Centro Habana, a few steps from Plaza de Carlos III.

“When there is a recharge with money from abroad we make good money but now with the monetary unification it is difficult to calculate how much we are really going to have for ourselves,” he warns. To buy these offers, you need an international card, Visa, MasterCard or another card, which allows you to make purchases on internet payment gateways. continue reading

Lázaro Miguel has a brother in Madrid and, together with a friend, they have devised a simple service. “They offer to deliver remittances in pesos at the door of clients’ homes in Cuba.” In Spain they collect these remittances in euros and use the money to buy telephone recharges, which Lázaro Miguel resells in pesos on the island. Those pesos, less the commission charged by the two brothers and the friend, will be delivered to relatives in Cuba.

The triangulation of remittance-recharge-remittance money is a common business that has gained strength on the island after the withdrawal of Western Union, the main financial company in charge of channeling the money sent by emigrants to their families on the island. With the closure of that company, popular creativity has appealed to cryptocurrencies, bank transfers and the use of telephone recharges as a way to get cash.

According to calculations made by an expert who participated in negotiations with Etecsa, this company obtained gross total revenues of about 260 million dollars in 2015. After deducting expenses (40 million), the monopoly was left with a net profit of 220 million. This was five years ago and, according to the same source, the profitability of the state monopoly, which keeps its income secret, has grown substantially since then.

The company seems to have discovered a new vein with the management of emigrants’ remittances. On March 10, Resolution 116/2021 of the Central Bank of Cuba (BCC) was published in the Official Gazette of the Republic , which paves the way to turn the communications monopoly into a new way to send remittances to the Island.

In the text of the new legislation it is clear that Etecsa asked the BCC for a “modification of the license granted” previously for its payment management and in this way to “include among the activities authorized to develop, the enabling of a mobile wallet as part of the operation of the Transfermóvil platform.” With the new resolution, natural and legal persons will be able to manage with their bank accounts from their cell phones and make payments on national electronic commerce platforms.

Although Etecsa has not provided many details about its new service and the legal document does not clarify all the gaps about the announcement, apparently, the money that is recharged as a balance from abroad, is reflected in pesos on the mobile line, can be used to pay for basic services and purchase combos on digital platforms.

It is specified that the income in the mobile wallet will have as a source “the magnetic cards associated with the bank accounts” on the Island and “the balance they have associated with their mobile phone service.” The resolution also makes it clear that the use of the money will be solely electronic.

Around March 8, Women’s Day, the state monopoly launched one of its well-known top-up offers with bonuses included. Every month, Etecsa promotes for several days the possibility of buying from abroad credits for mobile phone customers on the Island, but these options are not available to residents within the Island, although there is no shortage of tricks to access them as well.

“You pay me in Cuban pesos and I’ll top-up in dollars,” offers a witty informal merchant in various ads on classified sites. “For 800 CUP I give you a 500 balance + 1 GB bonus + 50 minutes + 50 SMS”, he explains in the text that sends potential customers to a WhatsApp account “for more details.”

“Not all dollars are the same, some dollars are more than others,” warns Fonseca, a telecommunications agent who provides his services on one of the busiest avenues in Centro Habana, Calle Reina. “People come with their card in MLC (freely convertible currency) to see if they can recharge with a bonus, but those fulas [dollars] don’t work, they have to be the outsiders, the fresh ones.”

With the magnetic cards of Cuban banks, all state-owned, you cannot buy the recharges with vouchers that are sold through digital portals. These offers are not even marketed in the Etecsa offices for clients of national bank accounts in foreign currency. “You have to buy them with Visa, Mastercard or other foreign cards,” reiterates an employee of the monopoly’s office in the town of Guanabo, east of Havana.

The new electronic wallet service may not solve this difficulty because it will only initially allow payments in Cuban pesos within the country, but it is a hope for those who seek to promote the mobility of virtual money without going through long lines at banks or ATMs.

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Will the Next Congress of the PCC Clear up the Doubt About Property: “Coming” or “Going”?

The VIII Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba will be held between April 16^th and 19^th, 2021. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, 17 March 2021 –With one month remaining until the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), it has been reported that in the process of updating the 274 Guidelines approved in the Seventh Congress, only 17 will remain, 165 will be modified, 92 will be eliminated and 18 will be added, so that the new document will only have 200 guidelines.

A suggestion is being made to modify 80 paragraphs of the 342 being proposed regarding the document of the Conceptualization of the Economic Model.

It should be assumed that this last writing has a hierarchical level higher than the guidelines, therefore, any variance in the wording of a given topic, however slight, will need to be read with great care.

In the five years that have elapsed since the previous great partisan edict, neither the issue of the practical application of the Guidelines (liniments in popular slang) nor the theoretical formulation of the conceptualization have constituted material for debate in the official or in the independent press, and even less so on the street. “Who cares?” Thalía would have asked in the popular theme song. continue reading

I would like to point out the evolution that this issue has had since April 2011, when in the Sixth Congress of the PCC approved that “in non-state matters of management, the concentration of property in legal or natural persons will not be allowed”

At the risk of appearing too optimistic, I would like to point out how the issue of property concentration will remain both in the new guidelines and in the rewriting of the Conceptualization of the model.

Since it is a core issue, I would like to point out the evolution that this issue has had since April 2011, when in the Sixth Congress of the PCC approved that “in non-state matters of management, the concentration of property in legal or natural persons will not be allowed”

It turns out that after five years, on 18 May 2017, to be more precise, the Third Plenary of the Central Committee of the PCC agreed to raise the issue to the next congress in this way: “In non-state management issues, the concentration of property or material and financial wealth in non-state natural or legal persons will not be allowed. Continue updating regulations to prevent them from contradicting the principles of our socialism”.

Perhaps the most significant thing is that “material and financial wealth” was added and that the prohibition was based on “the principles of our socialism”.

When presenting the Conceptualization approved as a proposal at that same meeting of the PCC, the wording of the problem required two paragraphs:

“The appropriation by the holders of non-state forms of ownership and management of part of the surplus of the results of the work of contracted people takes place in a social context in which socialist relations of production prevail, as opposed to social systems based on the exploitation of the work of others”.

“Consequently, the concentration of property and material and financial wealth in non-state natural or legal persons is the object of regulation, so as not to allow it to run counter to the principles of our socialism.”

Here, “what was prohibited” (not allowed) became “subject to regulation”.

It is noticeable that in the highest instance where these details are discussed there are two positions: one, that of prohibiting the concentration of property, and the other, that of only regulating it

However, in April 2016, at the conclusion of the Seventh Congress, the paragraph in the Guidelines was approved in this way: “In non-state forms of management, the concentration of property and wealth in legal or natural persons will not be allowed, but will be regulated”.

And in the Conceptualization approved by that same congress: “The concentration of property and wealth in non-state natural or legal persons is not allowed in accordance with the legislation, in a manner consistent with the principles of our socialism”.

In this back and forth it is noticeable that in the highest instance where these details are discussed there are two positions: one, that of prohibiting the concentration of property, and the other, that of only regulating it and at the same time including in what is prohibited or regulated “material and financial wealth”.

The question of whether the existence of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) will be approved in the next congress depends entirely on how this point is written, both in the Conceptualization and in the Guidelines.

The formal approval of SMEs is a point of no return in the often slowed down economic reforms suggested by specialists and demanded by entrepreneurs. Small and medium-sized companies that have a wholesale market and the right to export and import; entities with legal personality backed by laws that protect the freedom to produce goods or provide services, to set prices and hire workforce without being subject to taxes that suck dry their profits.

We’ll need to see if it will follow the line that there can be nothing “that runs counter to the principles of our socialism”.

Translated by Norma Whiting

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Cuban Government Will Not Allow Karla Perez to Return to the Island Because She is “An Instrument” of Subversion

Pérez had to return to Costa Rica this Thursday after being stranded for several hours at Panama’s Tocumen International Airport. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Havana, 19 March 2021 – Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made it clear this Friday that it will not allow the young journalist Karla Pérez to return to the country because she is “an instrument” at the service of the United States to “destabilize” the country.

“They are using an emigrant with several years outside of Cuba” to “carry out a media campaign,” said Yaira Jiménez Roig, the ministry’s director of Communication and Image, at a press conference.

According to the official, Pérez’s close ties with her “mentor” Eliécer Ávila are known. Ávila is the founder of the opposition group Somos+ (We Are More) and has been a resident of the United States for three years. “She is an instrument, it is not the first time she has been used” for “actions outside the law and destabilizing against Cuba.” continue reading

Pérez had to return to Costa Rica this Thursday after being stranded for several hours at Panama’s Tocumen International Airport, after being refused permission to board her plane to the island.

The journalist, expelled from the University of Santa Clara “for political reasons” in 2017, had an appointment with immigration this Friday to process her request for refugee status in the Central American country.

“They gave her a card that accredits her status as a refugee applicant, which serves as a legal identity document for all essential things in that country,” Lizet González, Pérez’s mother, told 14ymedio speaking from Cienfuegos.

The Cuban government also expressed its rejection of what it called a “media show” of five independent activists and journalists who appeared the day before at the ministry’s headquarters in Havana, and demanded to know the reasons they denied Pérez entry to the island. The official spokeswoman said that the event was “a spearhead” and pointed to the independent media ADN Cuba. “It is a digital, anti-Cuban publication, financed by the US Government and supported by federal funds.”

Jiménez dedicated most of her speech to exposing how ADN Cuba [Cuba’s DNA], non-governmental organizations, activists, influencers and politicians, “fabricated” what happened with Karla Pérez on social media and misrepresented it “in order to generate manipulated perceptions of reality.”

However, she made little reference to the entry ban. “Now they are simply trying to reinstall her in the country for subversive purposes,” she said. “Her stay in Costa Rica was not by chance; there is even a deputy there who maintains a strong relationship with violent groups in Miami.”

She finished her explanation by stating that “in Cuba, as in all countries, there are immigration laws that establish regulations in the legal framework and that govern the action of the immigration authorities. We have the same right as any other country to defend ourselves.”

In April 2017, when Pérez was a first-year journalism student in Santa Clara, she received a phone call to notify her of her expulsion from the Marta Abreu University. The young woman was linked to the Somos+ movement and had published criticisms of the Government on digital sites.

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Cuba: The Darkest of All Springs

A Cuban soldier stands guard next to the US Interests Office in Havana, on front of a sign with the number 75, placed in solidarity with the 75 dissidents detained in the 2003 Black Spring. (EFE)

14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Generation Y, Havana, 20 March 2021 — They arrived at dawn and in many cases they even seized the family photos. It was March 2003 and the news emerged in pieces as the police searches dragged on and neighbors began to speak out about the patrols, the uniformed men and the arrests. Those days would later be known as the Black Spring, a repressive wave that left deep wounds but also shaped the current face of dissidence on the Island.

Those were times when Cuban officialdom was emboldened. With a still active Fidel Castro at the helm and a constant inflow of petrodollars from Venezuela, the Cuban regime believed that it could touch the sky with its hands and control every cloud. Since the beginning of the century, it had launched one ‘offensive’ after another, in energy and the social sphere with the recruitment of thousands of young people who also dispensed gasoline at the service stations, distributed refrigerators or doled out blows in an act of repudiation. The economic reforms that the crisis of the Special Period forced had also been halted.

The war in Iraq was beginning and it seemed to Castro that international attention was going to be entirely focused on the conflict that was emerging in the Middle East. After all, he had gotten away with it on previous occasions when complicity, the fear of making Havana uncomfortable, or ideological sympathies silenced more than one arrest and convictions of dissidents or excesses in prisons. The repressive offensive of that March was a way of saying that the times of absolute control within the country were back even though the dreaded Soviet bear was no longer supporting it. The “top leader” wanted to send a strong message. continue reading

But the raids did not go as calculated by the autocrat. International rejection was unanimous. Even old allies of the Plaza of the Revolution, such as the Portuguese writer José Saramago, made it clear that patience and collusion had come to an end. “I have come this far. From now on, Cuba will continue on its way, I will stay,” declared the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature as a result of the arrests of 75 opponents and independent journalists, a phrase that was never published in the official media of the Island, which continued to speak of “unrestricted” support for the offensive “against the enemy.”

That year was the date of one of the most important ruptures around the globe of the illusions of those who continued to believe that a just and beautiful revolution had been installed in the Caribbean. Those who had any doubt that those bearded men who came down from the mountain ended up building a dictatorship in which dissent was synonymous with betrayal, found the spring of 2003 more powerful evidence than any other argument. It was not necessary to say much, it was enough to read the judicial records against the detainees where owning certain books, having a typewriter or receiving correspondence from abroad were all described as crimes.

But those arrests and subsequent convictions not only had a definitive influence on how the world viewed the Cuban system, but also on the subsequent dissident movement that was formed on the island. The rejection of the measures and the demand for the liberation of the 75 became a flag that united, like few previous causes, the Cuban opposition. The Ladies in White Movement played a defining role in that confluence and the new groups that were born in the heat of the demands were less partisan and more focused on human rights. The independent press multiplied. Castroism had planted the tree where hangs the rope of its own international loss of prestige and of the social discontent that today has it in check, surrounded by criticism and stripped of all greatness.

Eighteen years later, the Cuban regime has had time to acknowledge that that blow of intolerance only brought it problems. It created dozens of heroes, brought together wills and gave rise to the emergence of a much broader and more plural critical sector than the one that existed before that March 2003. Although the Gag Law — under which the Group of 75 was tried — is still in force, the arm of power is fragile, discredited and has hardly any allies. Now it would take tens or hundreds of early mornings like those of the March 2003 to shut down all the voices that oppose it.

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Cuba: Leave, Protest or Surrender

For those loyal to a repressive regime, leaving or protesting are the only, and mutually, exclusive options. (EFE/Archive)

14ymedio, José Azel, Miami, 17 March 2021 — Exit, Voice, Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States* is the title of a book published in 1970 by economist and political scientist Albert O. Hirschman. The author was born in Germany in 1915 and lived a full and adventurous life. After receiving degrees from the Sorbonne and Harvard, he volunteered to fight on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War.

During WWII Hirschman helped many prominent European intellectuals escape from occupied France across the Pyrenees to Portugal. He served in the U.S. Army’s Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA.

Hirschman held distinguished academic posts at Yale, Columbia, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study. In 2001 he was named one of the 100 Best American Intellectuals. He died in the United States in 2012 at age 97.

Exit, Voice, Loyalty became an influential and must-read book for social scientists. Hirschman’s thesis proposed that an individual in an unfulfilling or failed relationship has three choices: he can walk away, complain or suffer silence. continue reading

The choices are applicable in business, personal and political relationships. Though Hirschman focused mainly on organizations, political parties and consumer choices, his work is essential for understanding how immigrants and exiles choose between escape, opposition or silent resistance.

According to Hirschman, “exit” means walking away, leaving one’s country, moving to another nation state. “Voice” is akin to protest, choosing to articulate discontent. And “loyalty” implies submittal, pledging allegiance to a governmental regime or its ideology. It is worth reflecting here on the alternatives available to the citizens of oppressive regimes such as those of Cuba, Venezuela and other countries where the option to protest has been curtailed.

Bear in mind that, even in repressive regimes, there is always a certain loyalty to the government. All regimes need at least a modicum of acceptance from some sectors of the population to maintain the legitimacy and operational capabilities of their institutions. If there were no loyalty, the political and economic institutions of the regime, such as the armed forces, could not operate or survive. This leaves to “leaving” and “protesting” as the only, and mutually exclusive, options.

In Hirschman’s analysis, protest is an effort by citizens to change the regime’s practices. He defines it as any attempt to change, rather than escape. Protest is a complex concept because, he write, “it can manifest itself from weak complaints to violent protests.” He also points out that if those with the most influence escape, the protest loses its most important voices.

When leaving is not an option, then protest become the only possible choice. In Hirschman’s view, “protest increases in importance the opportunities to leave diminish.” On the other hand, the easier the option to leave is, the less the incentive there is to protest. “Therefore, the possibility of leaving can stunt the development of the art of protesting.” Knowing this, oppressive regimes have sought to remove their political enemies and critics from the national conversation.

Hirschman’s formulation of leaving, protesting, or submitting is powerful and valid. However, it overlooks the possibility of staying and resisting without protesting. For example, working as little as possible in the socialist system. He also did not mention the option of leaving in order to mount a more forceful protest. This was the case with my generation of Cuban exiles who left the country in search of the means and opportunities to return and overthrow the oppressive regime in Cuba. The landing by Brigade 2506 in 1961 and other actions undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s are examples of this approach.

Today our voices are older older and muffled. But we remain loyal to freedom.

*Translator’s note: For this article the book’s title was translated into Spanish as “Marcharse, protestar o someterse” (Leave, Protest or Surrender).

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Cuban State Security Props Up a Building in Ruins

State Security agent who prevented reporter Luz Escobar from leaving her home on March 8. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Camila, Havana, March 14, 2021 — One afternoon I was summoned to the principal’s office. The teacher at the front of the class looked confused. I was his best pupil. I had not failed a single test. I had even been head-of-detachment the year before. In short, a puntualita, a well-behaved student. And puntualitas never got summoned to the principal’s office. My teacher was perplexed by the accusatory tone of the other teacher standing in the doorway. “Leave everything here and go see the principal,” he ordered.

“Did you say there is no freedom of expression here?” she asked.

Suddenly I realized the gravity of my situation, not because of what I had said but because of the consequences. They would write up a report on me — a “stain,” as they called it — and attach it with a clip to my school file.

In a matter of minutes, I was overcome with the fears of a typical 14-year-old. I worried my mother would scold me for saying such things (though not for thinking them) as she does to this day. I would not be going to ’La Lenin’, the [country’s most prestigious] high school which she hoped would be my stepping stone to a college degree. I realized I had just lost nine grades, nine-years worth of perfect conduct. continue reading

“You say these things because your family lives overseas,” the principal added. “You don’t know what they mean. It’s what you hear them say when they come here.”

I remembered a comment I had made a few days earlier. It was not in response to anything someone had said. It was not part of a discussion. I said that in Cuba there was no freedom of expression in the way someone might say the bread at the corner store smells like stale flour.

At that age I had a naive understanding of what freedom of expression meant: to say what you want, where you want, without fear of reprisal. I knew the meaning of what I had said but not its implication. And right there, standing in the principal’s office, with both hands clasped behind my back, I understood that in Cuba there are definitely things that cannot be said. The principal explained why.

The call came one night last summer as I was listening to the news. I had earlier put a voice, a face and a name — a fake name but a name nonetheless — to the officer in whose presence I suddenly felt. I had been waiting for his call for a long time. Not because I thought I was guilty — nothing could be further from my mind — but because I saw how journalists who work for independent media were being treated. I assumed that at some point it would be my turn but in my naivete, and I say this with all sincerity, the prospect did not scare me.

But a bit more than a year earlier, arbitrary arrests of journalists were happening more frequently. There were stories of being blindfolded, heads pressed to the floor, of being interrogated for hours, placed under house arrest, summoned to a police station where they took your statement as if you were a criminal.

It was then that I began feeling uncertain. What would the experience be like? What would they ask me? Would my hands shake? Would my voice crack? Would I break down in tears? Would I give in to extortion out of fear? No matter how much I tried to prepare myself psychologically, no matter how much I played out possible scenarios, only in the moment, when I was face-to-face with them, would I know my limits.

I have an image in my head of a Cuban journalist who locked herself in the bathroom when she came home after an interrogation. Until then, I had thought only about the moment itself, of the desperation for it to end. The image lodged itself within me. An interrogation in a house of detention or a police station eventually comes an end but the anxiety never ends.

The new dilemma becomes whether to base your behavior on the fact that you now have “a ’compañero’ who watches your every move” (and by this I mean anything from buying food in the underground market to wearing the surgical mask correctly, any detail for which you are nominally committing a crime in this country), or letting everything go to hell because, if you choose the first option, there is no chance of having a healthy life.

It is the rage you feel after the interrogation that really gets to you, not the interrogation itself. In the moment, you feel no emotion. You focus on what they are saying to you, on what they want you to say versus what you are saying. How to respond when you do respond. What they deserve to hear and when to say nothing. In the end, it does not matter what you say because nothing will convince them to end the questioning.

“You are a pingúa,” was the reaction of the friends I told. By pingúa — a term derived from pinga, slang for penis, connoting manliness — they mean brave. Bravery is saying yes when you have have the option of saying no, without consequences, and that is not the case.

In an interrogation we do not have that decision-making power. Missing one appointment leads to missing another, and another, and another. The same as agreeing to be questioned and disappointing them because they expect the perfect conduct you displayed in your early years. It is a loop that you only get out of by leaving the country or by giving up independent journalism.

A friend stayed with me the morning of my first interrogation. We talked about different things, nothing important, anything to distract me from the seriousness of the situation. I ate something. I prepared my bag, taking out the keys, the cell phone, the tiny photos that I always keep in my wallet. I was surprised at how calm I felt. I went through the exercise of recalling in detail the afternoon in the principal’s office, when I was in high school. I was comforted in the knowledge that now, almost two decades later, I was still right.

I adopted the mantra that it was not about me as an individual. To State Security we are just weeds to be yanked out by the root to prevent us, at all costs, from disrupting the balance of power that props up a government and a system in which fewer and fewer people believe. We are just tools they use to achieve their ends.

“We don’t want you to lose your job. You need some of that to survive but it can’t be all there is,” they suggested.

State Security did not care, or did not seem to care, if you, the journalist, were investigating how much the president got in salary and benefits, or where the money was coming from to build the Fidel Castro Study Center in the middle of a pandemic.

They didn’t care if you were reporting on how the children and grandchildren of high-ranking military officials acquired properties, businesses and Cuban-owned companies registered in offshore tax havens, or how many people have contracted and died from Covid-19. All they cared about was finding out where the money you earned as an independent journalist came from.

They use this bit of information, which they share with gossipy neighbors who ask how much you earn or if you now spend in US dollars, to allege that the US State Department is subsidizing independent Cuban journalism. It also allows them to continue playing the victim. They remind you that they can also use this information to open a criminal case against you, which could result in fines or imprisonment under the Law for the Protection of National Independence and the Economy. The gag law.

As far as they are concerned, we exist, think and live by their grace. They constantly convey the message that we are subject to their power — a ludicrous kind of power but power nonetheless — with the capacity to screw up our lives. They use their revolutionary yardstick to measure our fidelity, our loyalty, our submission to their government. Not only journalists but anyone who does not fit within their scheme of things. By that logic, to State Security we are all potential dissidents.

What could be more closed-minded or intransigent than that?

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Editor’s note: A version of this article was published in English by the UK-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), which supports independent journalism in countries without freedom of the press. In this case, the journalist has not been identified for security reasons.

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Deserter From Nicaraguan Anti-Riot Police Reveals He Was Trained By Cubans

Julio César Espinoza Gallegos, in an interview for the Nicaraguan channel “Noticias 12.” (Capture)

14ymedio, Havana, March 17, 2021 — Julio César Espinoza Gallegos deserted from the Nicaraguan police in August of 2018, four months after the beginning of the big repression in April, but only now has he spoken with his country’s press, which he told, among other things, that his training was carried out by Cuban officials.

“I passed my anti-riot course with Cuban people and the training is for psychological preparation: that we go forward, forward, and never back. One is prepared for those types of shocks,” he told Nicaraguainvestiga.com.

“They had come to Nicaragua with the objective of training men and not women. They would say that if we were going to back down, we had better get out of the ranks of the Police,” he says from his new residence in Costa Rica, where he exiled himself in November 2020 because of the threats he was receiving.

Espinoza, who is now 32, joined the corps in 2012, in the Department of Special Police Operations (DOEP). Today, he considers himself tricked by the Sandinista propaganda that, he says, insisted to new agents upon their entry on how much the government of Daniel Ortega does for each one of them and that convinces them that the protests by Nicaraguans are “sheer madness.” continue reading

As part of his training, the ex-agent speaks of mentions of a supposed Yellow Revolution. “They knew that at any moment what happened in April was going to blow up, because the anti-riot police were prepared for that,” he says.

In April of 2018, when Nicaraguans began their protests against social security reforms, Espinoza joined as a reinforcement. “They send me to Masaya, which is where it blows up, and I end up injured by a stone-throwing,” he says. That was what kept him apart during three months of active repression.

In that period, and especially starting from the incident in which various opposition figures were killed in a home in a fire started by police and paramilitaries, is when, he says, he opened his eyes and realized that he had not sworn to repress the population, for which reason he decided to resign.

“The commissioner…tells me to work with them because they’re going to promote me, they’re going to give me rank, they’re going to assign me a vehicle and a weapon. I tell them no,” he remembers. At that moment, two intelligence people from El Chipote, the feared prison of the Somoza era, interrogated him and warned him of the consequences if he didn’t return to work.

As he says, a few days later they came to find and arrest his entire family. Espinoza was accused of terrorism, vandalism, kidnapping, and treason.

“Because I didn’t want to repress, they take these reprisals against me,” he says now from an exile which the pandemic has complicated and while he waits for a response on his asylum request.

Although it wasn’t until this crisis that Espinoza left the corps, he accuses the police of having “bloodstained hands” since long before and maintains that those who participate do so because “they like to kill… The police isn’t a job that is going to fire you, in the police you have to receive orders and if you have to kill, you’re going to kill,” he affirms.

Nicaragua will go to the ballot box on November 7, a process that many fear will be irregular. This Sunday, the ex-guerrilla and ex-Sandinista minister of health Dora María Téllez, now a fierce critic of the regime, asked the European Union to take measures before a fraud can consume them. “The Ortega regime doesn’t understand sweet words, the Ortega regime understands blunt messages,” she said.

According to the EFE agency, this Tuesday the Commission of Good Will, made up of Nicaraguan intellectuals, announced a plan to unite the opposition, with the goal of confronting the elections as one bloc. The group finds itself “adjusting the strategy for the rapprochement of the democratic opposition blocs, for which reason working sessions are being developed with the support of the Organization of Independent Professionals of Nicaragua and the Protest Group for Nicaragua.”

Translated by: Sheilagh Herrera

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Cuban Mothers Complain: TV Cannot Replace the Classroom Teacher

Cuban parents are increasingly concerned, the longer TV replaces the classroom teacher. (ACN)

14ymedio, Luz Escobar, Havana, 16 March 2021 — Elena Meriño’s work table has changed its geography since her children have stopped going to school. Mountains of books and notebooks and loose sheets of homework pile up alongside her work commitments. Since the coronavirus pandemic arrived in Cuba a year ago, the dining room of her apartment became her office, and the living room, the classroom of her children who are now in second and fifth grade.

The pictures on the main wall of the room were taken down to mount the blackboard that helps them keep the order of the day and better visualize the exercises. A small table and its chairs were installed at the foot of the television, where children watch teleclasses almost daily.

“We accommodate ourselves here as best we can, two friends of the children who live in the building and who do not have a television come over. The mother cannot look after them while they’re watching the classes because she spends the day on the street working. She makes cookies at night and then she spends the day going from door to door, knocking to sell her product. As it was within my power to help her, I offered myself, although it really is complicated for me,” says Meriño while giving the children an exercise. continue reading

In Cuba, the first closure of schools was decreed at the end of March 2020 as a result of the start of the pandemic, which has caused 62,206 infections and 373 deaths since its beginning a year ago.

“The teacher is irreplaceable,” Eugenio González Pérez, Deputy Minister of Education, told the official press, insisting on the importance of watching teleclasses “as a complement.” However, the parents’ concern increases as this alternative to school lengthens in time.

“At the end of the day I am their teacher,” says the mother, while complaining that this year the television classes “go very fast”, especially the subject of Mathematics. When the course was suspended “they working on calculations above number 12,” she explains, but they have started with something else without concluding that topic.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, I’m worried the children won’t learn well and these grades are important because they are the basis for everything that comes afterwards. I can’t even complain, I remember that content perfectly and I can help my children and some of his friends, but I don’t even want to imagine what the parents who don’t understand it are going through and of course, it is impossible for them to explain it to their children. The worst thing is that I am already imagining the restart of school, whenever they decide to start, with the teachers skipping over all the content and passing all the children without their having the knowledge,” she reflects.

Yenia Del Monte lives in a small room in the La Timba neighborhood with her three children, her brother, her mother and her grandmother. She has been divorced from the father of her children for two years, so between her and the children’s grandmother they have assumed the upbringing of the little ones. At noon no one is in that room because the zinc roof heats up and everyone goes out to the common patio to get some fresh air while the children play.

Del Monte has an old television that still works but she cannot see the signal from the Educational Channel on it because she has not been able to buy the decoder box for the digital signal, the only way it has worked since it had its analog blackout. The mother also has no money to pay for a private teacher and even less for a computer where her children can watch teleclasses online.

“I have chosen to forget about everything that has to do with school because otherwise I was going to go crazy. At first I would struggle with that and I would run from one house to another so that the children were up to date, but no one can live that way. I spend the day fighting for money so that they can eat at home and looking for where to buy food, I don’t have a minute for anything else. Either they eat or they learn and well, they can learn later in school, but if they don’t eat, they go hungry,” laments this 26-year-old mother.

Del Monte’s mother, a young grandmother, is clear: “All of this has been a total disaster, they are counting on that we all have the same resources at home and it is not like that.”

She also wants to make clear her opinion about teleclasses: “Children at this age are not prepared to learn without a teacher in front of them. If they do not have a mother or someone by their side, they are left without learning. Few children are motivated yo study at this age and the content is hard. I hope that when they return to school they will dedicate time to consolidate what they had already taught before starting to teach the new things.”

Another of the concerned mothers is Amparo Santos. She is in charge of a teenage daughter who started in the seventh grade this year and she has also become the teacher at home, like so many other mothers, and outraged by the quality of the teleclasses that the Ministry of Education has made available to the students.

“The math classes are very difficult and they are also very hurried. All the parents in my daughter’s classroom think the same, but we have to find solutions. I think they are not well thought out, they assign homework exercises that they never explain. The answers are in the book, but not everyone knows how to calculate them,” explains Santos, who confesses herself privileged because when she was a student, mathematics was her favorite subject.

Santos has observed in the case of her daughter and her friends that many of them find it difficult to learn new content in just half an hour and without having a teacher in front of them. These are topics that the kids have never seen and they explain it too quickly.

The teacher in her teleclass does not take time to explain the homework, so the parents do not know if the children solved the exercises well. “If I’m honest, the teleclasses have been of little use to me, I have to explain everything to the child. They go very fast, every day is new content and to top it off they assign a lot of independent work that is impossible to do in a week.”

Alina Ibarra does not have the same luck as Santos and Meriño. A barely graduated pedagogist in the specialty of Spanish-Literature, she does not have at her hands the tools to explain fifth-grade mathematics to her 10-year-old daughter. She also does not have time because, although she spends the day at home, her workday is twelve hours.

“I work editing and translating documents online and I am a single mother so I have no choice but to work tirelessly to support my small family that is made up of my child and my grandmother,” she says.

“What I did was find a private teacher. He charges me 50 pesos an hour, but I had no choice, the alternative was for the child to remain without learning. I am lucky that I can pay for this service, which is also excellent, because I know that there are other mothers who have had to resign themselves and watch how their children spend the day at home without learning anything at all,” says Ibarra.

“The issue is that for fifth grade they are giving a lot of new content and they go very fast, it is not like before that it was only about homework. To top it off, there are many teleclasses that I have seen where the teachers have terrible diction and I don’t even know if he understands what they say. Although in the classroom we have created a WhatsApp group and the teacher does everything to help us, nothing replaces the teacher in front of a classroom,” declares Ibarra, a statement that coincides with the testimony of other parents consulted by this newspaper.

Ibarra notes that at first she tried on her own to teach her daughter at home, but was unsuccessful. Her idea was to download all the audiovisual material from the free Cubaeduca portal and then teach classes with the girl at night, but the website does not always update the schedule on a weekly basis. Between those setbacks and the few hours she had available to dedicate to it, she ended up hiring the private teacher.

The Ministry of Education recently reported that this March 15 began a “new grid” in the programming of the Educational Channel which includes the subjects that were not being taught so far and they promise to correct some of these problems pointed out by parents. It will be aimed at all the provinces and municipalities that are in the phase of limited Covid transmission, except Pinar del Río, which will have its own program.

Among the new subjects that are already being transmitted are sixth grade Geography; English, from third to sixth; History, seventh and eighth; and Chemistry, Physics, and Biology, in twelfth grade.

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Cuba: Tourism Plummets 95.5% in Cuba Compared to Last Year

Tourists upon arrival at Jardines del Rey International Airport. (Capture)

14ymedio, Madrid, 17 March 2021 — The collapse of tourism in Cuba as a result of the pandemic has colossal magnitudes. The arrival of travelers to the island has fallen by 95.5% in the first two months of 2021 compared to the same period of the previous year, according to the academic and university professor José Luis Perelló told the Chinese state agency Xinhua .

“During the first two months of 2021, some 35,600 international travelers arrived on the island, representing 4.5% of the 792,507 foreign visitors for the same period as of the end of February 2020,” he said.

Although a plummet in the numbers for this key sector for the national economy was expected, as in the rest of the world, the figure far exceeds the world average, set this January by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) at a drop of 74%. According to these data, in Europe, despite the activity in the sector over the summer, it touched figures that exceeded 70%. Asia, due to strict border closures, reached 84% and the Middle East 75%. continue reading

America was the least affected region, with a 69% drop. The most spectacular data that is known is that of Venice, which lost 99% of visitors, numbers that are explained by its rapid transition from being one of the most tourist-centric cities in the world to one of the main epicenters of the pandemic .

Cuba’s poor results come at a time when the border is open and, although there are travel limitations, tourism is strongly promoted and encouraged by the authorities, who urgently need to recover the foreign exchange received by second most profitable industry — after the sale of medical services to other countries — and they expected to do so in the high season from November to March.

To that end, the airports were reopened, first in outlying tourist centers and later, on November 15, in Havana. However, epidemiological data began to spiral out of control, coinciding precisely with the return of travelers and Cuba is currently experiencing the worst of the coronavirus and is beginning to see its health systems overwhelmed.

However, the Cuban government trusts that vaccinations will allow Europeans to recover; among the main sources for tourism are Spain, Germany, England and France, according to Perelló.

Of all of these, the most promising is, in any case, the United Kingdom, where the rate of vaccination advances by leaps and bounds and there are already more than 25 million immunizations among almost 90 million British people, although less than 3% of the population is fully vaccinated with two doses. In addition, the country has strong restrictions, having suffered a terrible third wave, which it hopes to be able to ease in June.

Worse are the other three, Spain has fully vaccinated just under 4%, and with France and Germany at 3.4% and 3.7% respectively. In addition, all of them suspended the process with AstraZeneca for a few days, waiting for the European Medicines Agency to confirm the safety of this vaccine. About thirty people who were administered among the 17 million injected doses have suffered intravenous thrombosis, although the first versions indicate that this vaccine is safe and that the benefit outweighs the eventual risk.

Cuba has tried to attract tourists with a supply of vaccines, which it provides for free upon arrival on the island. But Cuba’s own vaccine, Soberana 02, is not yet available and it is doubtful that tourists, who are receiving the vaccine for free in their countries of origin see this as an incentive to pay for a vacation to Cuba, to which we must add the cost of a PCR test before traveling to the Island and the cost of paying the Cuban government for medical insurance, which has always been mandatory but now includes Covid coverage.

Tourism depends not only on this landscape. The internal situation also must be taken into account. Cuba is experiencing one of the worst moments of the pandemic and, although in recent months it was able to maintain good figures selling the image of a safe destination, now that prestige is at risk. The Island is the only country that has not started the vaccination process and will not do so until the summer. In addition, current case numbers are, by far, much worse than in previous waves, which may have an impact on international perceptions.

The ills of tourism in Cuba, according to the national authorities themselves, did not begin with the pandemic. Last year, the island was already experiencing a very strong setback, due in part to the records achieved in previous years.

In 2017, the mark of 4.7 million visitors was reached but last year, just before the pandemic began, it was known that 2019 closed with a drop of 8.5% compared to the previous year. At that time, tourism revenues, which were already much worse than in recent times, accounted for 10% of gross domestic product.

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Walter Martinez, the ‘Hero’ of Cuban Journalism in Cuba Has Fallen From Grace

In Cuban journalism schools, where Martínez was also cited as an example of a “committed reporter,” his work is no longer mentioned. (VTV)

14ymedio, Havana, 17 March 2021 — Revered by Fidel Castro and a frequent face on Cuban screens, the journalist Walter Martínez has disappeared for months from the TeleSur channel broadcasts on the island. His accumulated faults and his most critical positions towards the Nicolás Maduro regime have terminated his program Dossier.

Martínez went from being a frequently mentioned source in the official Cuban media to being silenced, after accusing the director of TeleSur, Patricia Villegas, of running the multinational network in a despotic way. The presenter also called out Villegas for claiming powers over the Venezuelan ruler and for handling large amounts of money.

In addition, the reporter accused the directors of Venezolana de Televisión (VTV) of faults and last June insisted that Nicolás Maduro had publicly mocked him. “He did not have the guts to say: ’Walter Martínez, you’re out’, he used a euphemism attacking the work of the elderly,” Martinez wrote on his Twitter account at that time. continue reading

The journalist insists that the reasons that the channel has offered for the exit of his program are only a “disguise” with a “false positive,” supposedly to protect him from the virus, but that they mask “acts of censorship for issuing opinions and for denouncing attacks and non-payment of professional fees.” A month earlier, he had denounced that the president of VTV prevented him from entering the channel.

In Cuban journalism schools, where Martínez was also cited as an example of a “committed reporter,” his work has not been mentioned. “Two years ago he was an idol at the Havana School of Communication and now when I planned to include him in my thesis, the tutor recommended not to do it,” a student told 14ymedio.

“At first there were rumors but with everything related to the pandemic, many thought that the program had gone off the air due to internal adjustments byTeleSur, ” a reporter from Tribuna de La Habana, who preferred to remain anonymous, explained to this newspaper. “But little by little it has come to be known that he is no longer seen as a trustworthy person in Cuba.”

“They made as an idol, but with the same power that they raised him up they sank him because he is very mouthy, and here they cannot handle people like that well. It was believed that he was a protégé of Fidel Castro and it turns out that they erased him as if he had never existed,” adds the source.

During Castro’s long convalescence, which began in July 2006 and lasted until his death in November 2016, Martínez was able to interview and meet with him on several occasions. The former Cuban leader also referred to Dossier in a glowing way.

In April 2014, Martínez was awarded the Félix Elmuza Distinction, conferred by the Council of State at the request of the Cuban Journalists Union. During the award ceremony, “his contribution to disseminating the truth, with authentic information and professional ethics, was praised in an outstanding manner,” according to the official press.

The Uruguayan-Venezuelan journalist, who was also a correspondent from several armed conflicts, became known on the island for his program Dossier, which was initially included in a selection of the TeleSur programming that was broadcast on Cuban television and later, on a broader grid of the multinational chain.

“He had many followers among retirees and people who still maintain their loyalty to the Government,” acknowledges a seller of audiovisual materials on Infanta Street, in Havana. “He had his audience among those who support the system but who prefer that type of journalism rather than that offered by the presenters on national television.”

“But now many of those people have been left without the program and without an explanation of what happened with Walter Martínez,” the vendor said. “In any case, his best moment was when there were no ways to be informed other than watch Dossier or the Primetime News, but since Cubans have internet on their mobiles, fewer and fewer people have watched him.”

TeleSur is a channel that was born with the participation of the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Venezuela, but in recent years the chain has suffered from the deep Venezuelan economic crisis and the dropping of its signal in several countries including Bolivia and Ecuador.

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Cuba Today: No Pension Checks in One Sancti Spiritus Neighborhood Because the Postman’s Bike Has a Flat Tire

The postman who previously served the neighborhood was fired a few months ago for charging mandatory tips.

14ymedio, Mercedes García, Sancti Spíritus 17 March 2021 — The means of transport used by Correos de Cuba (the Cuban Postal Service) for home deliveries is the bicycle. And not only to bring the press, parcels or correspondence, but also checks to pensioners. In Sancti Spíritus, at least 27,000 retirees, more than 70%, depend on this service to receive Social Security payments. Most couriers have to supply their own bicycle.

Neighborhoods like La Esperanza have spent years with the same postman, who is already like a member of the families, infallible in his deliveries. In contrast, the residents of the VientoNegro neighborhood have not enjoyed the same fate.

For starters, their postman was fired a few months ago for charging mandatory tips. “At the beginning, when he started, almost everyone who receives a check on a monthly basis gave him a five or ten peso tip out of gratitude,” a resident of Viento Negro tells this newspaper. “But then he made that a mandatory fine for everyone and people complained to the Post Office and they dumped him.” continue reading

At first, the new postman did not give any problems. However, the deliveries suddenly stopped coming. When Luis Alberto, a resident of Bartolomé Masó street, did not receive the press for several days, he went to the Post Office to ask. The answer seemed amazing: “They told me that the problem was that the postman who attends my area has a flat tire on his bike and that until that is fixed there are no deliveries.”

In addition, they made the excuse that “as it’s a new year, there must be a new contract,” and in addition there are “the new rates” because of the ‘Ordering Task*’. Luis Alberto appeared to renew his contract “and at least advance that process,” but it did little to help.

“To my surprise they gave me the same argument, that they cannot do it until the postman solves the flat tire problem,” he explains. “They say it takes a long time, because there are no tires anywhere.”

“And what happens if I have to receive parcels?” Well, they would notify him and he would have to go pick them up himself. Luis Alberto, disgusted, also complains about the poor state of the facilities in the Post Office: “They have a tremendous mess, no one can imagine its like inside, tremendously bad appearance, everything thrown every which way on the floor and one thing on top of another. Now I understand why many things are lost and do not reach their destination.”

Luis Alberto Laments that now the only option left for him to read the newspaper is to go to the post office on the boulevard in the morning, “Where there’s a lady who sits outside and sells them for three pesos,” he says, or to go outside the the amusement park (los caballitos), where there is also another reseller. Both in the city center, far from his home.

*Translator’s note: The [so-called] ‘Ordering Task’ [Tarea ordenamiento] is a collection of measures that includes eliminating the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC), leaving the Cuban peso as the only national currency, raising prices, raising salaries and pensions (but not as much as prices), opening stores that take payment only in hard currency, which must be in the form of specially issued pre-paid debit cards, and others.

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The Failure of an Operation: I Continue to Do Journalism in Cuba

State Security agent who was part of the State Security surveillance operation on March 8 and 12. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Luz Escobar, Havana, 15 March 2021 — “You can’t go out today.” It is the ninth day in a short span this year that I get the same blunt message from a State Security agent who prevents me from crossing the threshold of the building.

Decried by various international organizations, besieging independent journalists and activists has been the dominant repressive strategy in recent months, along with arbitrary arrests lasting several hours.

I’m one of those who has suffered from it from time to time since December 2014, when artist Tania Bruguera called for a performance without permission in the Plaza of the Revolution. In addition, since May 2019, a ban on leaving the country has been weighing on me, and I have been the victim of several arbitrary arrests, suspension of my cell phone line and threats to my family members. continue reading

However, the harassment escalated since last November. During that time, almost a score of artists from the San Isidro Movement (MSI)were imprisoned and some of them went on hunger strikes for the release of rapper Denis Solís, sentenced in a summary trial to eight months in prison for an alleged crime of “disrespect”.

Decried by various international organizations, besieging independent journalists and activists has been the dominant repressive strategy in recent months

But the State Security agent who identified himself as Ramses did not provide any reason last November 23^rd to prevent me from leaving my building with my two daughters. He didn’t know why he was doing it, he told me. He was only following orders.

“We are not going to allow you to influence the public space”, he told me on November 25^th, once again blocking my way.

The following day, the political police, disguised as cleaning men, violently evicted the MSI activists from their headquarters, and on the 27^th, a peaceful demonstration of 300 artists in front of the Ministry of Culture ended in a meeting of about thirty of them with the vice minister Fernando Rojas.

Since then, they have not given me a break. In December, they didn’t let me leave the house for a whole week. “You can’t go out”, they repeated every day. On the 10th, fed up, I told the officer on duty: “Tomorrow I’m going to leave whether you like it or not, this is turned into an abuse”, and he remained silent. On December 11^th I was able to hit the street.

In December, they didn’t let me leave the house for a whole week. “You can’t go out,” they repeated every day

On January 27^th, two months after the demonstration, a new “siege” of my front door began that would last four days in a row. That Wednesday, several members of the 27N group once again planted themselves before the Ministry, located in El Vedado, to attend a meeting with Rojas and demand the release of some of his colleagues who had been arrested early that morning. Within hours they were violently evicted and transferred by bus to a police unit.

On February 2^nd and 22^nd, the operation was repeated for no apparent reason. That time, they also cut my mobile service. In no case do the officers give explanations, but repressive acts do not fail to take place on significant dates, such as International Human Rights Day or the anniversary of the death of Fidel Castro.

“Luzbely, you can’t go out today.” Again, the order was issued on March 8^th, International Women’s Day, which is why the agent on duty, a skinny man she had never seen before, felt compelled to cynically say goodbye: “Congratulations!”

On March 12^th, I ran into the same guy. The night before, on national television, the presenter Humberto López denounced, during his spot on the News program that some opponents had planned a protest in the Plaza de la Revolución, something completely false.

This March 15^th is the third day of this month that I am under surveillance. This Monday’s agent is accompanied by two female officers and he refused to show me his ID. He says that I have already seen him “at other times”.

Translated by Norma Whiting
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New Information Comes to Light About Cuban Medical Missions in Mexico

Five hundred doctors arrived in Mexico in December and 160 of them returned to Cuba at the beginning of March. (Screen capture)

14ymedio, Havana, March 16, 2021 — Mexico has paid over six million dollars for 585 Cuban doctors who were working in the country from April 24th to July 24th last year.

In total, it wasn’t only the 135 million pesos, as stated by The Secretary of State for Health, Oliva Lopez Arrellano, nor the 135,875,000 which was indicated afterwards by the head of government in the capital, Claudia Sheinbaum, but actually nearly 15 millions more. Altogether, they paid 150,759,867 pesos (over seven million, five hundred thousand dollars).

The information was provided by the Mexican digital media La Silla Rota (The Broken Chair) following a request through the transparency website InfoCDMX – in which public institutions are, in theory, legally obliged to respond – after a delay of half a year (the application was made September 8th, apparently).

According to this media, the figures provided by the city did not include the Cubans accommodation and food, which were also charged to Mexico: a total of 14,844,785 pesos (some 744,000 dollars). continue reading

The InfoCDMX response also set out that the Henry Reeve Brigade contingent was accommodated in 292 rooms in two hotels: the Benidorm, in Colonia Roma district, and the Fiesta Inn, in the Central Historic area.

The Silla Rota was surprised to note that “Although the Cuban doctors left on July 24th, according to official information, the billing dates are different… In the Benidorm, the bill was produced on July 10, 2020, and in the Fiesta Inn, on July 29”.

That’s not the only inconsistency in the contractual data relating to the Cuban missions in Mexico. For a start, the latest data publicised only refers to 585 nurses who worked in the capital, not to the nearly 200 more who went to Veracruz on the same dates, about whose costs nothing is known.

Nor is it known how much the Mexican government paid for the five hundred doctors who came from the island in December. 160 of them went back to Cuba this March, but nothing is known about the rest of them.

Neither is it known which government department paid the money. The transparency response named the Secretary of State of the Mexican capital city, but we know that both the postholder, Lopez Arellano, and the head of the City government Sheinbaum emphasised that the Cubans were hired “through an agreement with Insabi”, the Institute of Health and Wellbeing set up by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and which has been widely criticised in the country over the distribution of drugs for children suffering from cancer.

Given the opaque way in which both governments have dealt with this matter, the only recourse for the Mexican media has been to go to the government transparency websites. Last September, Latinus (a digital platform in Mexico) managed to find out there that all of the nearly 700 doctors who arrived in Mexico in April to help fight the Covid-19 pandemic, 585 of them in the capital, and the rest in Veracruz, were working without immigration permission.

This digital medium, based in the United States, indicated that there is no evidence of these doctors having a “proper documented” stay in Mexico, such as “temporary residence documents, or temporary or permanent study permits”, nor any document indicating a legal status for the health workers in the National Migration Institute (INM) database, nor could they find “details of Cuban nationals, in May this year, having obtained any of the documents cited, and in which they had entered information that they were in the health and support services sector”, as communicated by the INM Director.

Getting into the transparency websites is not infallible, but nevertheless, La Silla Rota explains that it made various requests for information which were not replied to by InfoCDMX.

Last November, they say, the site removed the inspection process, and so, it did not provide the itemised information requested by the digital medium “by date of arrival, speciality, medical institution or investigation centre to which they were sent (federal entity), as well as what were their duties, pay and benefits, and, as applicable, their date of exit and exit location from the country. Also, if their stay is extended, for how long and the documentation for that.”

Translated by GH

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Tania Bruguera Denounces a Six-Hour Kidnapping by Cuban State Security

In a live broadcast on her social networks after her release, the activist said that “Cuba is not the same”, “things have changed” and asked the regime to also change its repressive methods. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Havana, 16 March 2021 — The artist Tania Bruguera denounced, this Tuesday, that she was kidnapped for almost six hours by State Security when she was walking with a friend near her home in Havana. In a live broadcast on Facebook after her release, the activist said that the purpose of her communication was to denounce what “many Cubans who lose their fear” are going through with the regime.

Bruguera insisted on pointing out that what she experienced is nothing more than a sample of how the Government, with all the strength and power it has, attacks a human being for thinking differently.

“I am quite careful when I use words, in this case I will consciously say that what happened to me today was a kidnapping,” she said when she began the story of how she was approached by four plainclothes officers and taken to the Infanta police station in a private car that “did not have any sign of belonging to any organization.” continue reading

“I am quite careful when I use words, in this case I will consciously say that what happened to me today was a kidnapping”

At the police station, according to her account, State Security “spoke to themselves”, she preferred to spend those hours in silence, while the agents wanted to “create division, fear and mistrust among the different people who, today, are working so that things change.”

She stressed that the important thing is to understand “what is the system that the Government is using” to scare people who “are doing what they think should be done” and are not afraid to make their positions known. In this regard, Bruguera told 14ymedio that the methods the regime uses to coerce and “scare people are no longer working.”

“Today we have people who are being threatened that they wull lose their jobs, friends whose children are harassed at school because their parents think differently, people who have been mistreated and defamed on Cuban television. What happened today is not an isolated case, it is a mediocre, absurd exercise of power and belongs to the 20th century and not the 21st,” she said at another point in the video posted on Facebook.

The artist made it clear that “Cuba is not the same,” “things have changed” and asked the regime to also change its repressive methods. “We must stop, once and for all, the political violence that exists.” She also advocated starting work “on a law against political violence against citizens. Here everyone has the right to think as they want and to be respected as such.”

Bruguera took the moment to call for the union of civil society: “Today’s Cuba depends on us, that we are above this silly disunity and those little egos and that we are all together to build that Cuba that we are beginning to experience, a Cuba with democracy where everyone has the right to exist. ”

The artist told this newspaper that what the Government fears the most is “the union between different groups, between people who think differently and the possibility that very diverse people can reach common points of agreements to work together. There is a history of more than 60 years where, each time this has happened, they have attacked to create discord and division between the groups, because it is what they fear the most.”

“I will continue working for that Cuba, I will continue to do what I believe is necessary so that the abuse and political violence in Cuba cease and so that the right to have rights is respected.”

“I am going to continue working for that Cuba, I am going to continue doing what I think is necessary for the abuse and political violence in Cuba to stop and for the right to have rights to be respected,” the artist said at the end of the broadcast on her social networks.

When Bruguera was kidnapped by State Security she was with the artist Juliana Rabelo to show her a delicatessen on the corner by her house. Rabelo asked the agents who they were and where they were taking Bruguera and only received the answer: “Keep your distance, Yulaisy.”

After learning that the activist was missing, Carolina Barrero, Camila Lobón and Rabelo filed a writ of habeas corpus in favor of Tania Bruguera before the Provincial Court of the capital.

Bruguera was one of the artists who stood on November 27 in front of the Ministry of Culture to demand dialogue after the arrests of Denis Solis and the strike by the San Isidro Movement. Since then she has been arrested and interrogated several times for hours. In addition, she has been prevented from leaving her home, which is why the artist has considered herself to be on “house arrest without any explanation” during those days.

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Private Activities in Certain Areas Will Need Permission from Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior

Notary Office at 20 de Mayo Street, Havana. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Havana | 1 March 2021 — The Ministry of the Interior will have the last word in carrying out some social, economic and political activities in certain areas of Havana. The authorities justify the creation of the rule based on the need “to guarantee the protection and fulfillment of the missions related to security and internal order”.

With this decision, taken by the Council of Ministers and published in the Official Gazette on February 24, technical installations, construction, repair or work maintenance, and licenses for the exercise of the different forms of non-state management will require a ministerial authorization, as well as changes in use, transfer and transmission of real estate, homes, premises, land and spaces.

The standard defines two categories to be applied in the different areas it establishes: “to consult” and “to inform”. continue reading

In the case of those that are subject to consultation, there are productive and service, political, cultural, sports, recreational and religious activities when they are carried out on public roads. In the second case, it will be enough to report the fulfillment of the activities according to the established norms.

The largest number of government, political, tourist and diplomatic entities are concentrated in the affected areas and roads of interest.

The largest number of government, political, tourist and diplomatic entities are concentrated in the affected areas and roads of interest

The largest number of government, political, tourist and diplomatic entities are concentrated in the affected areas and roads of interest. The areas are located in the popular councils Siboney-Atabey, Cubanacán, La Coronela, Plaza, Vedado, Príncipe, Colón Nuevo Vedado, Ceiba-Kohly, Vedado-Malecón, Sevillano and Tallapiedra, as well as others in the municipalities of Marianao, La Lisa and Boyeros.

The new regulation means a return to the practice of requiring an authorization to exchange or acquire a home in what in previous years were called “frozen areas”. At that time, the entity that gave the go-ahead was the Directorate of Personal Security of the Ministry of the Interior.

The decree does not specify whether the procedures to open a privately owned business in the so-called areas to be consulted can be carried out in the “single window” created to streamline paperwork and bureaucratic processes and defined as “an innovative tool” for the management of the private sector.

In addition, it is determined that the urban nucleus of Antilla (Holguín) also has special regulations, since the place “constitutes an area of high significance for tourism and is located in the municipality of Antilla, in the province of Holguín.” Currently, Gaviota is building a luxury hotel in this area, at the entrance to the Great Bay of Nipe.

Translated by Norma Whiting

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