The BBC Hires Translating Cuba Blogger Regina Coyula!

Malecón de La Habana

Translated from BBC Mundo:

Bienvenido Voces desde Cuba, el nuevo blog de BBC Mundo

[Welcome “Voices from Cuba,” BBC Mundo’s new blog]

The deed is done. Today the blog about Cuba that we’ve been talking about for some weeks is born; a new space shared by many voices, of different generations and with different political viewpoints.

In “Voices from Cuba” you will find stories that present the reality of the island beyond the headlines of the international press.

And as we have been promising, both those believe in the Revolution as well as those who criticize it. The country of the new private businesses and of the activists. The island  where a Communist Party and an increasingly unequal society converge.

The writer Leonardo Padura, opposition blogger Regina Coyula, the government journalist Yuris Nórido and the young entrepreneur Alejandro Rodriguez are the first to participate and are the headline team of this new blog. But we will also have guest bloggers.

The idea is to reflect the daily life of Cuba and Cubans, people’s feelings, from an individual prism in a plural space, where differences of opinion are respected.

Obviously, the bloggers will choose their own topics and those who wish to can respond to the entries of the other collaborators.

Like all material published in the BBC, the opinions must be backed up with verifiable data. They cannot offend, defame or incite to violence, and  to any accusation the right of reply will be offered.

But enough with the introduction, we present you the new Voices from Cuba, in their own words and in the order in which they will appear. The first entry will be on Thursday.

Hernando Álvarez, BBC Mundo, @alvarezhdo

(Site manager’s note: We don’t usually translate the BBC, but this is a momentous day and a huge achievement for our beloved blogger Regina Coyula. Congratulations to Regina and to the BBC for setting out to present the news from Cuba in the voices of Cubans on the Island.)

13 May 2014

 

Saga of the Official “Journalist,” “Admitted Terrorists,” and a Cat / Miriam Celaya

Reading a newly released item this Thursday, May 8th, on page 4 of the newspaper Juventud Rebelde (Terrorism, the True Face of Zunzuneo, by Amaury del Valle), brought to mind a lively flamenco-rumba that a Spanish singer made popular on the radio in the decade between 1970 and 1980. Perhaps some 50-something readers might remember its funny lyrics, about an individual who was upset because someone had called him “a cat”, which he considered an insult because “cats eat mice, mice eat cheese, cheese comes from milk, milk comes from a cow, a cow has two horns, Oh, oh, oh, I’ll kill him!” Cuckold (horned) was for him the true meaning hiding behind the nickname “cat” He was obviously being labeled cuckold, hence he made the association between such opposing ideas as a cat and a cow’s horns.

However, the newspaper article I referred to faithfully mimics the attitude of the song’s cuckold: it associates. Without doubt, the presence and intentions of the four suspected terrorists from Miami recently arrested in Cuba, with the networks Zunzuneo and Piramideo, which have engendered so much talk these few weeks. So, Zunzuneo and Piramideo are as “terrorists” as the four delinquents who were captured. In fact, the idea is not so far-fetched; the Cuban regime feels real terror in the face of information and the new communication technologies. continue reading

In order to understand how the author of the article arrived at such a brilliant conclusion — going forward I will refer to him by his initials, AV — it is necessary to undertake a scholarly effort not as entertaining as the song I remember, that is, we have to read and analyze the article so we can understand how AV’s stretched his imagination so he can have an ending like that of the cat and the horns.

AV recounts the events, following with the logic that Cubans must take as the only and unquestionable truth. He doesn’t need to offer any proof, the official lies are enough. No trial is necessary, the “confession” of guilt and the official testimony are more than enough. It doesn’t matter if they do it in a more crudely and in an increasingly worse way.

As stated, the four captured terrorists came “with a dangerous plan that had been brewing for over a year” and “slipped into the country” with the intention to attack military installations”. They intended to “provoke violent actions and sow chaos” to create “social unrest”.

It would seem that the offenders’ entry must have been illegal, given that no one can “slip in” by way of an airport gate, with all the controls at customs, borders and all the other security measures that exist. It is also unclear what danger could result from a terrorist plot against military installations, since in Cuba, according to the General-President himself, we enjoy military invulnerability. In any case, it would be a suicide attack, right? Finally, it is not clear how four wretched terrorists could possibly be able to provoke violent actions, chaos or subversion against millions of “revolutionary” Cubans. Undoubtedly, this time the creators of the myth have gone a bit far.

Following AV’s saga, the four bad guys were caught under the coaching of three other terrorists, also Miami residents with a long pedigree of actions against Cuba, who are — in turn — friends of the worst one of them, Posada Carriles (one of the subjects who has offered the most in practice towards the ideology and strategies of the power of the Castros for decades).

From that point, AV starts a long narration of Posada Carriles’ long terrorist sheet and all his avatars between 1973 and the present, and he also takes a tour of Magriñá’s actions. They — we are told– were the ones who “encouraged and financed” these four dunces who were just captured here.

And how does all this relate to Zunzuneo and Piramideo? Because, as AV states, “It’s too coincidental that the idea of perpetrating terrorist attacks that result in violent actions are precisely the plans that have been orchestrated in other regions of the world”. As if Cuba had the same geo-political, economic or strategic importance as that of Syria, the Ukraine and Venezuela.

AV also notes that, “It is very curious that these terrorist plans have been organized when there already existed, along the same lines, other secret plans which have already been uncovered, such as USAID and various U.S. agencies, to use modern technologies like the internet, e-mail, and cellular phone text messages, which would be used to organize supposed support networks to be mobilized in case of social upheaval.” The “empire” is an essential ingredient in the Castro’s sour soup.

AV concludes that the actions that the detainees planned against Cuban military facilities “are very similar” to the objectives pursued by the Zunzuneo and Piramideo networks, thus creating “a false statement of opinion about the Cuban reality”. With this, AV considered as “proven” the “progression of the plans orchestrated against Cuba”. In both cases, ultimately aimed at justifying “foreign military action” in our country (??!!). Pure terrorism.

And for this complicated concoction to be complete, AV’s exorcism could not lack the mention of the “violent opposition” in Venezuela, like Leopoldo López and María Corina Machado, as well as “the irrelevant mercenaries advocating panic and death in Cuba”. Mission accomplished, AV. You took pains, and you sure earned a week’s bonus at the People’s Camping.

In conclusion, the matter does not have, not even close, the joke of the cat I mentioned at the beginning of this posting. It really isn’t funny at all. It is clear that the government, through its mouthpieces, has started a phase to “soften” public opinion, which usually precedes raids against dissident sectors and general worsening of the repression within the Island.

Because, as conspiracy theories go, we have to remember that the Castro regime and its sympathizers work the same as old marriages, and after such a prolonged coexistence many things are predictable. So it is a suspicious coincidence that, with such a difficult stretch that the Cuban economy is undergoing, with the growing social discontent and disillusionment, with the increasing exodus, deteriorating social services, lack of liquidity, the regime’s desperate need for foreign exchange and other clouds that darken the environment, a new “saving enemy aggression” has appeared on the Castro’s political horizon, useful to justify nationalist entrenchments and repression.

Neither does the worsening of mobile services seem to be a coincidence, despite the excuses offered by the (military) state enterprise in charge of those markets, or the fact that this pidgin article gets published in the official press just after the recent announcement made by blogger Yoani Sánchez of the impending debut of her digital newspaper. It must be uncomfortable for the olive green hosts that a new means of digital independent media is surfacing on the Island, just as more Cubans are getting access to mobile phone service with text messages and e-mail. It is a good idea to keep alert; the Castro-dogs must already be plotting what would be the most expeditious way to silence the criticizing voices within Cuba.

In any case, there are too many theories and guesses about the advocates of this old, outdated system, but nothing is going to save a system that has proved its inefficiency. Imaginary or real terrorists might not be the ones that will spoil the Castros’ rule, and their loyal servants will be surprised in the new Cuba, which we will have one day, who will truly be their masters.

But, as with cheating in a marriage, it is better that the cuckold himself learns of the deception, so I take the opportunity to send a personal message to the writer at Juventud (young?) Rebelde (rebel?) Amaury, you are a real cat!

Translated by Norma Whiting

9 May 2014

Does D.C. Stand for “Donate to Castro?” / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

#Cubanow advertisement

Snoozing on the Washington, D.C. subway early one morning with my dreams still flitting between Franz Kafka and Stephen King after a evening filled with nightmares of State Security bursting into the apartment I’m staying in—which is near to where they shot The Exorcist—I finally wake up when I see the CubaNow banners through the train’s windows.

CubaNow is a media campaign run by a group of young Cuban-Americans who prefer not to disclose the source of their funding. Their secrecy echoes the recent scandal of USAID’s not “undercover” but “discrete” operations with the ZunZuneo project, an SMS network designed to work in Cuba. Their secrecy is also a reminder of the opacity with which the Havana government operates, in its domestic matters that ought to be in public view, as well as its smuggling of weapons on civilian ships, and its spies in the United States disguised as scholars, entrepreneurs, and even Pentagon analysts.

It’s curious how similar the political propaganda is starting to look in the capital cities of those two once irreconcilable enemies. continue reading

Perhaps CubaNow is a part of the pressures that President Obama needs to feel before he takes each controversial step, even though his administration has already shown enough signs of goodwill towards Castro’s Cuba, as these banners implicitly recognize. For their part, the leaders over in the Plaza de la Revolución have always rejected any rapprochement that does not fit with their monolithic model for continued power.

“It’s time to try something new,” suggest the CubaNow banners. Also, “It’s time to bring the discussion of politics between the United States and Cuba into the 21st century.” Then they add a quote from the blogger and famous Cuban dissident Yoani Sánchez, plus a photo that I took of her.

As far as I know, we were never asked whether we wanted to lend our support to this campaign. As compensation, CubaNow ought to do a better job of launching itself in today’s Cuba, where the people need something more than economic concessions, in a denaturalized nation that has lived for 55 years under a single press, a single party, and a single person.

From Sampsonia Way Magazine

12 May 2014

Repression by Episodes / Yoani Sanchez

Photo from http://www.ojocientifico.com/

What does the insect caught in the web feel as it watches its predator approach? What are its thoughts in the seconds between the anticipation of the attack and death? It must be a lot like the days in which a repressive trap is built around an individual, a group, a society. Similar to that script that builds the justifications for a blow, molding public opinion, filling in the archive that will later be presented to the press or the courts.

The current strategy against the Cuban opposition resembles the slow creep of the spider’s legs toward its victim.

We are living in a soap opera episode-by-episode, an attempt to demonize technologies and the dissidence, who knows if to repeat those dark days of the Black Spring of March 2003. The blow approaches, in the insistence in which the press repeats certain refrains, its obsession with themes like Zunzuneo and trying to link it with the violence of four supposed terrorists recently discovered in the country. Like in a bad TV show, the threads are showing in the tying together of mobile phones, Twitter, death and war. Fortunately these soap operas barely work any more on a Cuban public too focused on their daily needs, overwhelmed by material shortages, saturated with ideology and obsessed more with escapism than with civic consciousness.

The trap is almost set. Will it be used? Who knows. But there’s not much that can be done to stop it, except to denounce it. At the end of the story the spider is always bigger, stronger, more imposing.

12 May 2014

Looking for the Origin / Fernando Damaso

Photo: Rebeca

There is constant talk and articles about the need to rescue values, the good habits, and eradicate social indiscipline and rudeness. It’s true and should be done, but no one talks or writes about the real origins: the loss of civility and morals.

Most citizens, in the early months of the political, economic and social experiment, accepted and even applauded that the right to elect our leaders every four years was removed, as was the right to publicly state an opinion, to have parties and political organizations, to educate our children according to our desires, and, something terrible, they allowed someone, like a feudal lord from another eta, to decide who was Cuban and who wasn’t, which partitioned the nation and is a national shame. continue reading

In addition, the state banished what they called bourgeois values and put in their place a double standard, awarding mediocrity, unconditional support, betrayal, jealousy, envy, rudeness, lack of respect, citizen violence and other evils.

Time has passed and they are trying to forget these barbarities, suggesting, without asking forgiveness, a clean slate, as if it never happened and affected the fabric of our society, but the facts are there. It’s a pity that our ruling historians dare not address them.

You always reap what you sow. A generation that lost civic and moral values and was left fanatic and vulgar, passed it on to their children and they to theirs, in a continuous chain of all these evils. Here are the results.

They suggest that the family and school are crucial to the rescue of the missing values, but what is lacking is a different family, where the members practice civility and morality, rather than the fractured current one, accustomed to putting the individual first, far from social and national interests, although they attend the rallies, vote unanimously for everything put in front of them and even participate, with enthusiasm, in the massive parades. It is, simply, their way of not looking for problems and solving their own.

9 May 2014

GABO RELOADED / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Of García Márquez and other Demons
By Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Prolific, brilliant, celebrity, provocateur, agent, incisive, insidious, one of the last intellectual icons of the Latin American left has died: Gabriel García Márquez, el Gabo.

His claim on immortality is supported by a Nobel Prize, which owed a lot to the Latin American literary “Boom” of the 1960’-1970s which in turn owes a lot to that totalitarian regime still called “the Cuban Revolution.”

In the early 1980’s Cuban adolescents read and loved García Márquez. In Castro’s Cuba, García Márquez’s books held a mirror up to  Cuba’s “official culture,” dictated by Fidel Castro, that also reflected  the Soviet Union and its Socialist Realism. Castro was obsessed with his control of the island’s cultural affairs, and even the best Cuban writers of the time were forced to imitate the worse of Soviet propaganda, stopped writing, such as poet Dulce María Loynaz, playwright René Ariza, and the novelist Reinaldo Arenas, jailed or fled in exile such as Heberto Padilla, Lydia Cabrera, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. There were many others. continue reading

In his 1982 Nobel Prize speech, García Márquez courageously recounted the repression of Latin America’s military dictatorships, civil wars that led to genocides, and the state terror that killed hundreds of thousands and forced millions to leave for Europe and the United States.

I was in secondary school at the time.  I had read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and like many other young Cubans considered Gabo the most important writer in the Spanish language of all times.

As my generation grew up and began to express our own truths, it became our turn to be repressed. (I haven’t been able to work or publish in Cuba since 2008, when I created a blog Lunes de Post-Revolución.) In 2003 during the Black Spring, when three young Cubans were shot and 75 political dissidents were arrested and sentenced to 28 years in prison, García Márquez took notice of this other face of his friend Fidel Castro.

When writer Susan Sontag asked him about it, García Márquez answered: “I can no longer calculate the number of prisoners, dissidents and conspirators whom I have silently helped to get out of jail or emigrate from Cuba during the last 20 years.  Many of them do not even know that I helped, but it is enough that some know and my conscience is at peace.”

The word “but” is quite a dangerous monosyllable for anyone living under a monolithic ideology. In Cuba, Fidel Castro’s speeches are baroque rhetoric incarnated; he could speak for hours. Only for García Márquez was there an intellectual hidden in his speeches-in-chief. García Márquez fell in love in the time of the Revolution and got lost in its totalitarian translation for the free world.
Gabo had to believe that the crimes of Castroism were justified by “historical necessity,” Fidel’s wisdom, and other Marxist or “magical” categories. Otherwise, his fidelity over more than five decades cannot be understood. Nor can the considerable time he spent in Cuba, enjoying the mansion and other privileges he was provided, while ignoring the plight of Cubans —repressed writers included— all around him.

After half a century of solitude and without much sense of solidarity with pro-democracy and human-rights activists in Cuba, Gabo has died, and now there’s no one left with his intellectual firepower to provide cover for the Leader Maximum.

Editor’s note: Original post is in English

10 May 2014

The Guantanamo Way of Life or The United States of Americastro / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

47271972-monument-colonAt the beginning of the Revolution, when he realized that his “Soviet brothers” would not launch a nuclear war against “Yankee imperialism,” and after blatantly collaborating in the anti-Castro plot that killed President JFK, Fidel Castro had his hands free to make the United States whatever he pleased according to the historical period.

Now that technically he is no longer among the living, we Cubans can finally confess to ourselves: in many ways, Fidel Castro was the equine caudillo not only of those who endured the barbaric boot of island socialism, but also of those who believed they had escaped the Stable-State when they crossed themselves before the Statue of Liberty or Miami’s Freedom Tower. continue reading

But in a totalitarian Revolution, like the recurring nightmares of childhood, no one ever quite escapes. And we have that awful Oedipus complex called Cuban-American culture to prove it.

To make matters worse, there is some kind of perverse plagiarism in the Capitol in Washington DC, compared with the exceptional trashiness of the original, there, a little south of Miami and the Keys and their historic horizon, in a Havana also, subtly, DC (Después [after] Castro). Meanwhile the obelisk of the American capital–where Cuban spies sojourn, generation after generation–now presents a rough reflection of the war monolith in the Plaza of the Revolution.

Those who most collaborated with continental Castroism, pretending exactly the opposite, may be precisely those irreconcilably anti-Castro, among whom we find, as is now obvious, the paranoid patria of Fidel Castro himself, who had more infiltrators and agents in “extremist” exile than in his sacrosanct Department of State Security.

Not to mention the American Academy, whose textbooks are written with the same Revolutionary rhetoric, a rhetoric that implies the right of Cubans to live without rights in order to preserve our “sovereignty” a short 90 miles from the USA. And with a Yankee naval base — the crude Guantanamo — standing against bellicosity!

I wonder why it hasn’t occurred to any “pro-democracy” Cuban to launch a media campaign or to lobby Congress to demilitarize this base as old as a landmine, which could well be returned immediately to the non-Castro Cuba of the rest of the world, the lost pariahs of our post-national diaspora, wandering natives, so at least we could go back to that bit of non-communist Cuba, creating there an exclusive civic-commercial enclave, Taiwan-style or like the Panama Canal Free Zone.

I wonder why we don’t ask ourselves what the Castro clan could do in the face of this Taiwaintánamo City which, without ceasing to be U.S. territory, would exemplify the concrete Cuba of a future as capitalist as it is democratic, without the anthropological defects of Castroism.

I suspect that at this point in a history without histology, we Cubans lack political imagination. Our exhausted chanting in the key of Socialism-sharp-major, conguita of a cool-Castrosim, was constitutionally forced into our bodies. Castro castrated us, to the point where we no longer find even his Cadaver-in-Chief very difficult, after that civil war that lead to State slaughter when the international community abandoned us.

The United States should pay this moral — and mortal — debt now. Better late than never Mr. President.

It’s painful to say it, but the Cuban exile — and the more radical it is, the more prone to the ridiculous — was always easy to manipulate according to the criminal convenience of the ex-Commander-in-Chief, particularly with regards to the hieratic milestones of anti-Catroism, as well as the emigration stampedes within the Island and the extremely limited Embargo Act intended to “asphyxiate” the Havana government. A government which, over more than half a century of Democratic and Republican administrations in the White House, made a mockery of such “emphysema,” trafficking funds to international terrorism left and right. They arrived only through violence and only through violence will they go.

Of course, before the start of the lobbying for Taiwantánamo City, one would have to wonder at what point does Fidel Castro no longer serve as the good villain of the film before and after the Cold War, the sympathetic assassin of Hollywood and The New York Times. And yet, perhaps Special Agent 01-01-1959 not so secretly safeguarded the most intimate — and intimidating — interests of Washington DC .

The mistake of Fidel Castro, so distant from the Cuban people, and the fate of the United States of America, suddenly seem to be under only one sun: A despotic pluribus unum, novus ordo seclorum invisible but indivisible, with liberty and justice for none.

From Diario de Cuba

28 April 2014

For Venezuela From Venezuela / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

The Cuban people will go down in history as the people who most contributed to Latin American disintegration. Disguised by the ideological hatred of capitalism, we bit into the core of fratricidal hatred on our continent. This guilt today covers several generations, irreversibly anthropologically damaged. There is no forgiveness capable of freeing us from this criminal responsibility.

Since January 1959, a bourgeois and pro-democratic revolution, with strong hints of urban terrorism and a certain Cuban-style Protestantism, was re-channeled by Fidel Castro into an agrarian and anti-imperialist process, and ultimately turned into a dictatorship of the proletariat and an extreme alliance with Moscow in the context of the Cold War. continue reading

The United States did nothing to avoid the artificial radicalization of the Revolution. Rather, great arrogance and a touch of ignorance led to the victimhood with which we Cubans justify a regime of injustice and impunity: massive social programs but not for those human beings who weigh in with an opinion (whether for or against, discipline in the face of despotism was always the key to survival in times of revolution).

Thus, Castro took thousands and thousands of lives, not only of his opponents (many of them armed), but also of Cuban revolutionaries, the majority executed extra-judicially — many of them were tried after they were shot — as soon as they manifested the least symptom of dissent to the official totalitarian discourse.

Cuban society came unhinged within a few months. No press remained. No religion one could publicly confess. No independent education, only that imposed “for free” by the State. Nor was there personalized healthcare. Nor commercial brands. Nor “human rights,” a term that still today sounds like an insult within Cuba. All exchange of international currency was abolished. We could not leave nor enter the country. We could not connect by phone with the outside nor receive a letter without being fired from our jobs.

Those who could flee, fled. We are still fleeing. It is our permanent plebiscite before a government that never listened to its own people: flight as a reaction to asphyxiating Fidel-ity. Those who remained on the island shut up or went to prison with long sentences — and terribly cruel tortures — like those that made Nelson Mandela, for example, a global icon.

We non-Castroite Cubans never became icons of anything. We were simply “worms,” “traitors,” “scum,” the “lumpen” of the “first free territory in America.” In American academia, especially, where Castroism had been “politically correct” from the very beginning, the greatest Cuban intellectuals, like the exiled and ultimately suicidal Reinaldo Arenas, never found shelter.

Then we imposed death on Asia, Africa and the Americas. We tried to spark 1,959 Vietnams all over the planet, possibly with nuclear missiles installed in Cuba behind the backs of the Cuban people. We invaded sovereign nations like Venezuela, and forever traumatized the fragile democracies of the hemisphere in the interest of a violent seizure of power, in uprisings or false populist movements that implied the scaffold for class enemies.

Just around the time our failure was obvious, with the fall of the global Socialist Camp, we used the money from other genocidal powers — such as Libya, North Korea and Iran — to encourage the false socialist democracies of the 21st century. Finally, it’s now Venezuela’s turn. A country that for many decades has been on Cuba’s death row, as General Angel Vivas reminded us a few days ago from his besieged home.

The Venezuelan people slept, like so many in the region. And in addition, it was a nation that evolved in its incessant clamor for a more just social system and less political demagoguery; this sequel we’ve dragged with us in Latin America since independence only bequeathed to us its retrograde string of caudillos.

Free Cubans, in Cuba and in exile, deplored Hugo Chavez from before his triumphant election. We never believed in his cynical smile. We didn’t even trust his most transparent election. Cubans know that the butcher’s hand of Castro never fails. But the world labelled us, then, reactionaries, “Batistianos” (half a century after Batista), and “Washington’s mercenaries” (as, in effect, many of us had no choice, having lacked a country in perpetuity). And, still worse, they spat in our face the stigma of being the intestinal traitors of the universal cause of Revolution.

Today Venezuela has taken to the streets, it “has had enough and has begun to march,” to the scorn of Ernest “Ché” Guevara, Salvado Allende, and other victims of Castroism still not recognized as such. In Venezuela the exploding popular tide is not political, but rather one of founding resistance. There where dictators and democrats have failed, the Venezuelan people understood that they were looking at their last chance. The alternatives to Chavezism, with or without cancer, were becoming obvious to Venezuelans after a decade of decline: Castroism in perpetuity or Castroism in perpetuity. They would never escape this monolithic idiocy if they didn’t escape it now.

Venezuelans are a lovely and free people, as were Cubans. It is now that they have to break the chains of constitutional fatigue. The Castro regime has never before been in such danger of finally beginning to disappear, with or without octogenarian Castros dictating their death ordeals from an interred, inhuman Havana.

Your freedom is now or now, Venezuela, still miraculously alive in this terrible trance were even vengeance seems like a virtue.

1 March 2014, From El Nacional, Venezuela

Editor’s note: This article was uploaded to the site on 3 March but apparently never appeared. Our apologies.

A Hero and a Villain / Angel Santiesteban

The citation document sent to Angel Lazaro Santiesteban Prats to put him in prison.

To be a Cuban dissident in prison — who doesn’t tremble at denouncing the Castro dictatorship — and to be designated by Reporters without Borders as one of the “100 Heroes of Information,” is not only an immense honor but also makes Angel Santiesteban-Prats worthy of some “benefits” that only Raul Castro’s state security knows about and can grant.

And yes, Angel Santiesteban — before knowing that he was one of the 100 Heroes — suspected that something had happened. Mysteriously, that day Officer Abat came to the settlement to order the guards to have more control and security over him. Later, when he knew about this, he understood that it was apprehension and fear that made them send the officer to order such measures. continue reading

Not being satisfied with increasing the harassment of Angel, they decided to “honor” him. Nor were they original in this; they repeated a “detail”: The next Friday again all the prisoners would leave on pass, and Angel would remain alone with all those jailers, which the poor Cuban people are obliged to pay. He must be a very important prisoner to make them pay so much for the salaries of his many “guards,” a privilege that he shares with Raul Castro himself.

But before State Security knew that they held a hero in prison, already they strove to transcend the brilliant Kafka, speculating on new chapters of “The Trial” against Angel.

Not even Franz himself would have been able to imagine that the review of the judgment, delivered on July 4, 2013, to which they never responded, was archived because one paper was missing. They would respond when the state investigated. Then they went back to start the proceedings. This time the Court answered the Minister of Justice, who was the one who accepted the request for review, that the number 444/2012 didn’t correspond with the name of Angel Santiesteban.

They said that from the First Chamber of State Security, which was where it materialized. They are blatantly delaying the delivery of the file; they are hiding it because they know that they don’t have any proof that sustains the claim. This coming week, the attorney, Lourdes Arzua, who replaced the disabled Amelia Rodriguez Cala, returned to present herself in the Department of Revision of the Ministry of Justice, in order to point out and insist on the petition of the file from the Tribunal. Now we will see what they come out with this time. The capacity they have to manipulate and violate the law is infinite.

These days they have also confiscated a legal construction that Angel had in Vedado, Plaza Municipality. Part of the money he earned from his books went into that construction. Before going to prison, they had already seized an apartment, also in Vedado; it went to State Security. He didn’t want to denounce it because he felt ashamed to raise his voice for material goods when his country has lost things that are needed more: liberty and spirituality.

Raul Castro, you have not taken me seriously when I told you so many times that the free world has its eyes on Angel Santiesteban. There can only be heroes if there are villains. You yourself already have recognized that he is a political prisoner when you offered him “freedom” in exchange for renouncing his political position. You never imagined that an intellectual would not cede to blackmail and violence to make him desist from his convictions.

All that arbitrariness and violations of his rights do nothing but increase his strength and demonstrate that all those denunciations are true. Only a dictatorship imprisons those who oppose it; only a dictatorship uses Justice as a weapon to impart vengeance.

If you were a democratic president in a country where rights prevailed, Angel or anyone could call you a dictator or whatever occurs to them, and they wouldn’t go to jail for that. A democratic president can be upset or angry about what is said about him, but just by being the leader of a democratic state, he knows that this is the price he pays for having power in a system where freedom and rights prevail.

Only some days ago, you yourself said at the closing of the Eighth Congress of UNEAC, that “it’s very good that everyone has said what they think, although I do not agree; but I respect those who disagree, because I am an absolute enemy of unanimity.” Pretty words, certainly. Now comes the moment to put them into practice.

Grant Angel Santiesteban a fair trial with all the procedural guarantees; return to him the goods that were confiscated without a reason; free him until this new trial is held, when he will be absolved, because there is no proof against him and he DIDN’T commit any of the crimes that they impute to him. Show that your regime is not a dictatorship; free all the political prisoners and stop the harassment and the use of violence against the dignified Ladies in White; call for free and multiparty elections; stop the harassment of the independent press and all its journalists.

It’s up to you to show that you don’t erase with your elbow what you sign with your fist.

The Editor

Have Amnesty International declare the dissident Cuban Angel Santiesteban a prisoner of conscience.

To sign the petition, follow the link.

Translated by Regina Anavy

3 May 2014

The Collapse of ETECSA / Lourdes Gomez

ETECSA (Telecommunications Company of Cuba) telephone office on Callejón del Carmen, in Santiago de Cuba

“The mobile phone you are calling is turned off or is out of the coverage area,” is the response Cuban mobile phone users commonly receive these days. As a result of the cellular blackout and lack of official information, rumors run rampant. All the blame has fallen on the Nauta email system, for taking over the lines.

Finally, on Thursday, April 24, on the national TV news, Hilda Maria Arias, the director of mobile services of ETECSA, the only Cuban telephone company, said: “The problem that most people have encountered is access to the base stations, which is the component of the mobile network closest to the user, through which the signal passes; and data transfers are consuming more resources of that network.” continue reading

The Cuban mobile phone system is the world’s most expensive, and users have no guarantee of receiving services: the monopoly on communication promotes the imposition of abusive prices but does not guarantee anything.

“You send an SMS and arrives the next day, it seems that ETECSA misjudged the mails and now we’re paying the consequences,” says Pedro Ramirez, a 34-year-old craftsman. “Most Cubans don’t have a landline, this service is essential even if its only texting and ringing.”

It certainly seems that they did not expect such a large influx into Nauta mail, opened on March 3: “100,000 new customers have come just for Nauta mail since the service opened, and we are talking about nearly one-third of what we envisioned for the entire year, “said the official. “For more than a year we studied and implemented the processes of needed investments, but did not calculate the fast pace of demand in the short time in which it showed up.”

Not only was the technological part of the business’s infrastructure not ready, but the social as well: access to the offices has become almost impossible due to the long lines for mail and internet.

In the main ETECSA office in Santiago de Cuba, located on Carmen Alley, a user waiting in line who requested anonymity, said: “I just came to pay the phone bill, and you get stuck here for an hour among internet users, those refilling their cell phones, and now the emails. I don’t know how they will do it, but this doesn’t work. They charge too much, don’t take complaints, and we have to put up with it because there’s no competition.”

The solution to network congestion, according to the official, will come within a “short time” because the investments have already been made. But the population does not believe it. The uncertainty continues. For many, the real solution would be to create another telephone company that competes with the outdated monopoly, but already on the TV Roundtable show dedicated to foreign investment it has been stated that telecommunications is not a priority.

So Cubans continue to dream of having normal connection services with the world, as the government makes fun of us, while charging us dearly.

Lourdes Gomez, Santiago de Cuba, May 1, 2014

From Diario de Cuba

6 May 2014

Are the Castros Using Civil Crimes to Imprison Their Opponents? / Angel Santiesteban

The Cuban writer and blogger, Angel Santiesteban-Prats, imprisoned since 2013 by the Castro brothers’ regime, spoke from prison in an exclusive interview with “Zoom to the News” of NTN24.

The dissident, who is serving a sentence of five years for supposed charges of inter-family violence, criticized the Castro regime and said “I don’t believe in the alleged intention of political opening.”

He even claimed that “as in my case, the Castros are using civil crimes to imprison their opponents.”

“In no moment will there be an opening for a national consensus”: Santiesteban.

[site manager: Our apologies, this video is not translated.]

Translated by Regina Anavy

6 May 2014

Passports, They Can’t Or They Don’t Want To? / Juan Juan Almeida

Raonel Valdes Valhuerdis, the Cuban accused of carrying out the greatest gold theft in the history of Florida, arrived in the United States this Wednesday under extradition. Detained in Belize when he tried to cross the border on his way to Mexico.

What is striking is his name being on the lists of the most wanted criminals and although the Revolutionary government asserts it does not encourage criminals, at the time of his arrest, the bandit was carrying a Cuban passport in his name issued December 28, 2012 by the Office of Cuban Interests in Washington, two months after the fugitive committed the armed robbery in Miami.

It all seems to indicate, and the facts speak for themselves, that the Cuban consulate in Washington hinders the consular processing of normal citizens but readily accepts common criminals.

Translated by mlk.
8 May 2014

A New Festival in Santiago de Cuba / Juan Juan Almeida

May, the month of flowers.  In order to be in tune, and to pretend that everything runs smoothly and without bumps, cultivators and florists from Havana, Granma, Guantanamo and Santiago de Cuba participated this past weekend in the Festival of Flowers. According to what the press says, the objective of the event is to exchange experiences about the marketing and manufacture of flower arrangements. The newspaper report insists that the recently unveiled Festival of Flowers serves to show a new image of florists and to develop the culture of the use of flowers in society.

I don’t understand; for years they repeatedly nagged us that the culture of flowers was a bourgeois leftover and, to the contrary, flowers of yore are imported, beautiful for sure, but the price besides being prohibitive is in CUC.  Do not let yourselves be confused, such a Festival is to please someone. Palace whim.

Translated by mlk.

6 May 2014