Cuban authorities, as has been their custom for years, have launched a new campaign against the U.S. embargo, taking advantage of the start of high-level United Nations General Assembly sessions. The worn-out script began with a press conference by Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Minister of Foreign Affairs, in Havana on September 20. The only thing that could be called new was the announcement that the cumulative damage to the economy is now calculated to be one 1.76 trillion dollars. It is not known where he got this figure or how it was calculated.

Of course, the minister omitted the fact that the United States is one of Cuba’s principal commercial trading partners and that, according to official statistical annuals, supplied more than 4.1 billion dollars in food products from 2001 to 2002, making it the main provider of these commodities during this period.

He also forgot to mention that, thanks to President Obama’s easing of restrictions, approximately 400,000 members of the Cuban community arrive in that country annually. They provide substantial help to their families and friends, and their remittances constitute 85% of one of the chief sources of hard-currency earnings for Cuba. There has also been an easing in restrictions limiting the direct shipment of packages and money meant to aid family members. All this disproves the fallacy that the embargo has stiffened under the Obama administration.

If the Cuban government is not purchasing medications, it is because of its perennial financial insolvency. All the world’s other countries are willing to sell Cuba all the goods its requires — including products from the United States — provided it can pay. This is the real problem for the Elder of the Antilles, now a parasite state.

In addition to the damage brought on by the embargo, it would be appropriate to evaluate the disasters caused by a regime which for fifty-three years has destroyed the very foundations of the nation.

It is worth asking how much the destruction of the sugar industry, the backbone of the economy, has cost the country. Or the destruction of the livestock sector, another national treasure, now devastated to the point of not being able to guarantee that children over seven years old have a liter of milk or a piece of meat, something Cubans hardly recognize anymore.

One should consider the destruction of coffee and cocoa production, and the fact that a prominently agricultural country now imports 80% of its food, including such staples as yucca (cassava) to supply the tourism industry, as has been recently reported in the official press.

Perhaps the American embargo is responsible for the poor quality of new construction, which develops leaks immediately after completion and has many other problems. Are U.S. administrations responsible for Cubans not having access to the internet and the human knowledge to be gained from it?

Is the United States responsible for the continued decapitalization of Cuba, or for the fact that it invests half of what other Latin American countries do, causing it to sink progressively into backwardness?

Can external factors be blamed because people in the principal inland cities have to get around in wagons and carts pulled by horses, or because farmers have access only to old hoes and mule teams?

Have external factors caused the destruction of a large part of the roadway infrastructure and the housing supply? Are they responsible for the insignificant amount of housing construction, which has led to overcrowding for generations of Cubans? Or that 50% to 60% of piped water is lost due to the poor condition of water mains and the inadequate state of plumbing in homes? Or that the nation’s electrical energy system is showing signs of collapse due to obsolete Soviet and Czech thermo-electrical plants, most of which have been in use for forty years without adequate maintenance, and some of which are fueled by high-sulfur heating oil?

Is it because of an imperialist plot that the health care system is falling to pieces, as Cuban doctors recently claimed? Or that Calixto García Hospital finds itself in a calamitous state, with only ten of its thirty operating rooms even able to function. Or that, meanwhile, the other great “achievement” of the revolution — education — is marked by a drop in the quality of instruction?

Perhaps it is because of a sinister CIA scheme that Cuba will have an unsustainable population base by 2035, with more than 34% of the populace over 60 years of age, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

One might mention the many calamities resulting from completely irrational decisions taken over the course of the last fifty-three years which have cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars. These would include programs such as the character deforming country schools, the Cordón de La Habana, the Revolutionary offensive of 1968, the Harvest of Ten Million, the social workers, the emerging and comprehensive teachers, and many more of the mad ideas that seem to have been schemes intended to ruin the country.

Was it an international plot to fragment Cuban society by separating families and causing personal upheaval by forcing people to abandon their homeland? Who is to blame for the growing marginalization of society, the runaway growth of corruption at all levels, the fifth largest rate of incarceration in the world, or the acceptance of new moral and ethical codes which justify any actions as means of survival in the the jungle that Cuba has become? All this has resulted in the greatest loss of moral values of all time.

It is clear that, by the time he realized that the country was on the edge of a precipice, President Raúl Castro was already aware of many of these problems. However, his commitment to the past seems not to have allowed him to take effective measures to rectify, at least in some way, all the damage caused to the nation that was unrelated to external factors.

It is hoped that the resolution on the embargo, which is scheduled for a vote on for November 13, will once again condemn it. We have never supported the embargo, which has been used by the Cuban government as a justification for all its failures and repression.

However, to condemn only the embargo is a decision that would not take into account the most important aspect of the Cuban experience, which is the blockade imposed by authorities preventing the people from realizing their potential and from enjoying their rights. We, therefore, feel it would be fitting that the resolution to be approved, in addition to condensing the American embargo, also demand that the Cuban government take the following steps:

That it promote freedom for Cubans, respect for human rights and the introduction of real economic reforms to allow them to fulfill their creative capabilities;

That the National Assembly of People’s Power ratify the the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, endorsed in writing by the government on December 10, 2008.

Democratic countries would make a great contribution to the Cuban people if a balanced resolution were approved in the current session of the United Nations General Assembly.

Translated from Cubaencuentro

Oscar Espinosa Chepe, Havana
25 September 2012

“Lady of Support” to the Ladies in White Sonia Garro Alfonso, after being beaten by the Castro regime police.

For years it has been the practice of totalitarianism to try to divert attention from the complicated situation that exists in Cuba by showing the problems that exist in other countries, often exaggerating them to make people believe our own are not that serious. This is done by taking advantage of the disinformation possible through a strict monopoly on the media.

Recently, with increasing economic, social, environmental and demographic hardships, and the loss of human values, this misleading conduct has increased. It’s an unusual day when the newspapers, TV and radio don’t emphasize the problems elsewhere such as high levels of unemployment in Europe and other places and the size of the prison population in the United States, when the misery and marginality in Cuba are much higher and this island is one of the six places in the world with the highest number of prisoners per capita, consisting mainly of young people — the famous New Man! — those of mixed race and blacks, who face the greatest socio-economic problems and so are forced into crime.

With the greatest desire for misrepresentation, on July 2 the newspaper Granma had a front page article highlighting the increase of 350 cases of hate crimes in Sweden in 2011 over 2010. Most of these crimes were verbal threats and physical violence against homosexuals, the newspaper said. Swedish law is very severe with regards to these acts of racial and gender discrimination, which are classified as hate crimes.

In this country there are many abuses committed against people of certain social groups, races, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, nationality or political affiliation.

In Cuba no information is provided about such crimes, although just for having different political preferences from the Government makes a person a third-class citizen, and they are discriminated against socially, monitored and constantly harassed by the political police, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, and informers, and can even become victims of “acts of repudiation” with insults and even physical aggression, with no consequences for those who commit these despicable actions.

It is really alarming, therefore, that the Cuban press, instead of reporting on these outrages, lends itself to defaming Sweden, the country with the highest level of equality on the planet, with a Gini index of 25.0 for 2000-2011, according to the 2011 Human Development Report prepared by the United Nations Development Program.

Similarly, the other Northern European nations — Norway, Holland, Denmark, Finland — enjoy the world’s highest living standards, combining a broad political democracy with measures of social protection — the social safety net — recognized as the highest and most humane, providing a reference point for all governments and people in the world.

Of course the government does not publish Cuba’s Gini index, as several Latin American nations do. But it’s obvious that income differences are considerable and do not respond to the labor output of the citizens, but the luck of having family and friends abroad, political ties that lead to work abroad, and to the results of semi-legal or illegal activities.

Moreover, the policy of concealing the terrible conditions of life exists in Cuba’s allies, such as North Korea and Iran, where all the rights of the population are violated, particularly those of women; in Iran for example women can be sentenced to be stoned to death for marital infidelity.

The government also hides issues like the terrible personal safety situation in Venezuela, which with Hugo Chavez’s policies has become one of the most dangerous countries on the planet. In 1998, just before Chavez came to power, that South American nation had 19 homicides for every 100,000 people, an index that rose to 75 in 2009, according to the report on Observed Violence in Venezuela, and consistent with the 2007-2008 Human Development Report, a situation that hasn’t changed.

Instead of looking for the speck in its neighbors’ eyes, the Cuban media should recommend solutions to serious national problems, which deepen and diversify along with the growing multifaceted crisis prevailing in the country.

From Diario de Cuba.

11 July 2012