Category: Ricardo Fernandez

“My parents are from Esmeralda and they say that their world is gone, but I have not even been able to find out if they managed to evacuate in time,” explains Roxana, a woman in Camagüey with two children whose home was also damaged. “We lost many roof tiles and the yard is devastated, with all the trees on the ground,” she laments.

When her turn in line arrives, Roxana opens her bag and takes out three cell phones. “They are from my neighbors, who can’t come here and urgently need to receive calls from their children in Miami,” she says. She plugs in each phone and watches with relief as the battery bars grow. “One, two, three …” she says softly.

Those behind her in line try to rush those in front of the prized outlet. “Don’t wait to fill the battery, just take a little bit and leave something for the rest, everyone has the need to communicate,” complains a man.

A pregnant woman approaches to ask to be be allowed to cut the line, but a hullabaloo ensues. “Everyone here has a different tragedy. The person who doesn’t have missing relatives is a missing person for their family,” complains another who is waiting.

The nurses come and go trying to get around the line that fills the hallway. Medical staff dislike the crowds that fill the corridors, but they understand that, for many, electricity is now the best cure, the most sought after remedy.

Between 2004 and 2014, the Government imported 52,292 generators at a value of 1.3 billion dollars. The commissioning of these units was one of the last campaigns promoted by Fidel Castro. Over time, the deterioration and theft of fuel has diminished their use, but in moments of massive electrical cuts they regain their importance.

“Last night they brought in an extension with multiple sockets and the load was so heavy that they burned out the outlet,” complains polyclinic security staffer Rodolfo Ramírez Esquivel to 14ymedio,” so we only allow people to connect equipment and not extensions.”

However, the need to recharge the devices is so pressing that many people ignore the recommendations. “I brought an eight-outlet powerstrip and put it in my backpack with the cellphones of my entire family without them noticing, because outside the backpack I was charging two more,” says a resident.

Everyone fears that the electricity cuts will be prolonged due to the serious damages suffered by the electrical lines in Camagüey province. Some have tried alternative ways to recharge their cellphones without having to go to the polyclinics.

“Days before the hurricane a cousin emailed me a trick to charge a cell phone with a 9-volt battery, so I started looking around my house and I found one that solved the problem a little,” says a young man standing in line with his mother to use the clinic’s outlets.

The damage to poles, transformers and cables has been so extensive in the central and eastern part of the country that Raúl Castro, who is also president of the National Defense Council, ordered that support brigades be created in each municipality to “guarantee the restoration of the electricity” according to an official note.

Those in Camagüey who are starting their third day without power greeted the news with displeasure. The weather is still humid although the rains have stopped. The streets remain covered with a mixture of mud, leaves and tree branches. On the stands in the markets there is nothing but bananas and some tiny papayas that must have fallen due to the winds.

A woman walks past the polyclinic with a bag of eggs and a group surrounds her to inquire anxiously where she bought them. Provisions are unavailable and agriculture in the area has suffered a devastating blow that will take months to recover. Most affected are bananas, but beans and vegetables have also suffered.

The chicken farms on the outskirts of the city are the scene of massive deaths, several of them have lost their roofs and are flooded, according to testimonies of several farmers in the area. Hopefully there will be images circulating in the next few days, when neighbors recharge their mobiles and send them out.

Every kilowatt is worth whatever people ask for it and more, in a city where public transport has been cancelled and electric motorbikes are the only way that many can get around.

“There are places where they do not let you connect to recharge [a motorbike], but there are always people willing to help,” explains Yusnier Ramirez, a young man in line to recharge his cell phone at the medical post in front of Plaza Méndez. “There are also those who recharge their motorbikes, but for that we have to pay,” he says.

The urgency to reactivate cell phones grows due to the failures in city’s fixed-line phone network.

“I’ve been waiting for more than two hours,” says another Camagüeyan outside an emergency room. The young man tried to use a rustic solar panel to revive his device, but was unsuccessful. “This polyclinic looks like a disaster zone, but the consultation rooms are empty,” he explains. “We are all here to recharge our mobiles.”

The reaction to the article, which has been circulating by e-mail between pastors and parishioners, lies in the fact that sources cited by the Associated Press journalist are close to the Cuban Government, so they have retained a number of “privileges” that should be inalienable rights for all Cubans.

Pastor Bernardo de Quesada of the Apostolic Movement believes that the report is “counterproductive” and “very loose with regards to the reality of religion in Cuba.”

The religious leader says, “Many of those who were interviewed did not speak truthfully and the journalist wrote it with marked apologies to the communist system.” He also claims that Rodríguez only included “a part” of his statements.

For Dagoberto Valdés, director of the Coexistence Study Center and a well-known Catholic layman, “it is common” to confuse freedom of belief, freedom of worship and religious freedom but “they are not the same”

“When I was interviewed, I didn’t express the ideas that were written,” he adds.

For Dagoberto Valdés, director of the Coexistence Study Center and a well-known lay Catholic, “it is common” to confuse freedom of belief, freedom of worship and religious freedom, but clarifies “they are not the same.”

“In the first decades of the Revolution we were persecuted for the simple fact of believing, professing a religion was a crime. Today we have gained that space, but we were not given it by the goodwill of government leaders,” says Valdés.

He acknowledges that a majority of people can regularly attend their religious ceremonies without being persecuted, but asserts that religious freedom is much more than that. “When Lieutenant Colonel Osvaldo (head of State Security’s Technical Department of Investigations in the province of Pinar del Río) threatened me in his office, he said that I was crossing the line between Christianity and the counterrevolution with the Coexistence Study Center.”

Kiri Kankhwende, a spokesman for Christian Solidarity Worldwide, accused the churches of not wanting to speak out because of government pressure.

The Office of Religious Affairs of the Communist Party is in charge of monitoring the religious. The organization holds periodic meetings with the main spiritual representatives of each municipality with the aim of avoiding possible disagreements.

“Once a dissident was attending my congregation and shortly afterwards a State Security agent came to threaten me with blocking my travel from the country if I was a member of the Church,” says a Pinar del Rio pastor on condition of anonymity.

“For those who do not travel, they pressure them with the illegality of their structures, because not even the legal churches have permission to build temples and we have to say that we are building houses even if inside we turn it into a hall to bring the church together,” he added.

Raúl Risco is a dissident lawyer who is not allowed to go to church to celebrate his faith

Raúl Risco is a dissident lawyer who is not allowed to go to church to celebrate his faith. “Many times I have been mistreated or expelled by pastors too fearful of losing government concessions,” in Pinar del Rio, where he resides, he says. Now, to avoid reprisals against him or the community, he practices his faith without attending the meetings of his congregation.

For Pastor Bernardo de Quesada the demolitions of Protestant temples have nothing to do with the supposed “illegality of the constructions” but with the impossibility of obtaining permits to build them. “Who will be more illegal, the church that is not legalized or the state that does not allow it?” asks the religious leader from Camagüey.

“We have experienced all kinds of repression, from threats to parishioners to their expulsion from their schools or jobs for attending our churches, to massive arrests and physical violence against those who were there on the day of the demolition of our temple,” says Dignora Marrero, who belongs to the same congregation. “That is our reality and not the one that the Government tries to present.”

On the island, despite the climate and the limited access to raw materials, an increasing number of producers are making artisanal wines, from the fermentation of fruits such as guava, orange, papaya, pineapple, soursop and mango.

The new place in Pinar del Rio, situated at No. 8 Gerardo Medina Street, seeks to enhance the inventiveness of winemaking and has capacity for 26 customers. “We prioritize the local production of artisan wines,” the manager, Julio Corrales Banos, told the official press.

On the opening day, however, only the industrial wines made in the province were on offer because of the lack of an agreement with the area’s producers. The absence of a legal framework that allows the state to contract directly for the products of these entrepreneurs is limiting local activity.

Artemisa and Mayabeque are currently the only provinces that have greater flexibility in contracts with the private sector.  Raúl Castro’s government has given autonomy to the Administration Councils of the provincial Assemblies of People’s Power to experiment with another type of management.

For winemakers from Pinar del Rio, being able to count on something like this would mean a considerable jump in profits due to the increase in demand that has been noticed in the region in recent years.

For the moment, the sale of privately managed wines is carried out from doorways and informal stands on the busiest streets of the city. Some thirty producers sell wine, the majority of which are of excellent quality, despite not meeting the international standards for the inclusion of sugar in the fruit fermentation process.

The wines that are produced in the Island have high degrees of Brix, a unit of measurement of the sugars present in a drink, and are usually sweet or semi-sweet, with a low volume of alcohol.

Ernesto Reinoso, 81 years old, produces 26 Vinos de Rey in a traditional way. “If the objective was to create a space where the people of Pinar del Rio can consume wines, they would have to look at the prices, because the wines we sell are very cheap, 1 Cuban convertible peso (roughly $1 US) a bottle,” he says about the new place.

At the head of the first stage of the Casa de los Vinos was Julio del Llano, a retired winemaker regrets that no private producer was invited to the opening. Del Llano, the third generation of winemakers in his family, is a promoter of quality among producers and was the first in the territory to register his brand.

“We winemakers will have to continue marketing through self-employed workers, as we have done until today,” concludes Del Llano, who has won multiple awards in national quality contests.

In February of last year, in the 25th Artisan Wine Festival, celebrated at the Agricultural Fair of Rancho Boyeros (Havana), a contest was held in eight categories: white, rosé, red, sparkling, dry, semi-dry, sweet and semi-sweet. Luis Bermúdez Rodríguez won the grand prize with a sample of semi-sweet wine made from pineapple and banana, 2013, with 12.8 degrees of Brix.

People who inherit land can be part of the opposition, but even so, the government has ways to pressure them not to be. Among these, the strongest are the requirement to be associated with a cooperative with a “legal personality” because otherwise they cannot buy supplies and services or sell their crops.

There is still no private sector in Cuba capable of buying one farmer’s entire production, nor is there a legal market where you can buy fertilizer or supplies if you are not affiliated with the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP).

RF.  Does that mean that the peasantry is in agreement with the Cuban system?

RPC. The fact that they can not belong to the active opposition does not mean that they do not oppose the system, but the farmer does not have freedom or autonomy. Despite the mechanisms used by the government to indoctrinate and repress the peasantry (cooperatives, ANAP and other institutions of that type), farmers are not completely subjugated. You have to be at a meeting of the cooperative, which convenes monthly, to see the high level of dissatisfaction and the harshness in the well-founded opinions expressed by the members.

RF.  How have the farmers changed their position on the government?

RPC. Initially the peasantry supported the Revolution because it brought some benefits, but the accounts have been made clear over time. For example, in the case of tobacco, the state buys the first quintal (more than 70% quality) for 2,574 pesos, for which you need 1,300 cuttings, with a large expenditure of resources in planting, cultivation, harvesting and drying.

But that quintal of tobacco contains 12,800 leaves (80 cujes of 160 leaves each) and if we figure that for a first quality cigar you need only three leaves, the quintal is the equivalent of 4,266 cigars for export, and an amount equal or more in hard currency.

So they pay the farmer 102 Cuban convertible pesos (CUC, about $102 US), when the real value of the production is 45 times higher. These absurd inequalities mean that from their work they earn barely enough to live, which is why they have awakened to the reality of the system; although they can not protest openly.

RF.  Are there opponents with ties to the countryside?

RPC. I am one of them. I cannot be an owner, but I do cultivate land with my stepfather, who is an owner. Many opponents work in agriculture, some out of necessity and others for love. Although government pressures have made themselves felt, with threats to the owners who employ dissidents, the farmers no longer let themselves be intimidated.

For example, State Security periodically threatens my stepfather, saying they will take away his land if I keep working on it; but he defends his position with my right to work and live together because I am his family.

Gone are the days when being an opponent was a stigma for society. The peasants don’t hire people based on whether they are communists or opponents, they look for work performance regardless of political position.

RF.  How has it been for you linking agricultural work with the opposition?

RPC. Sometimes it is a bit complicated because some underestimate the farmers, associating them with terms such as peasant or brutish; but there are a lot of smart people working in the fields.

The place, 19 kilometers from Pinar del Rio, had been a military unit of the Youth Labor Army (WCY), then in 1994 became a Battalion Task Force that housed those who came to support tobacco workers, and in 1995 it became a warehouse for oilcloth.

In 2002, after the hurricanes, they used it to receive the victims from Santa Damiana, Forteza and Rio Seco, who had no means to rebuild their own homes. Within a month of being there, they received a visit from Carlos Lage Davila, accompanied by former first secretary of the Party in the province, Maria del Carmen Concepcion, and other government and party officials.

At first, the mass organizations delivered lunch and dinner to residents, who were seen by a family doctor daily. Then-delegate Sergio Carrelegua visited them frequently and at meetings urged them to be patient and assured them that the promises would be fulfilled. “A few months later the attentions and promises disappeared,” recalls Sanchez, now married with a daughter of six who has known no other home. “Over time the roofs began to deteriorate and the solution from the delegate was to remove the roofs over the bathrooms and use them to replace the broken tiles over the bedrooms, so the toilets have no roof.”

The situation gets worse in the spring because of the rains, and for the elderly, whose health is delicate, dampness is a greater risk. “In the rainy season you have to do everything (even the physiological needs) in your bedroom,” says an old woman to illustrate the “hell” she is living in.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve gone to the municipal government to demand that they help us, but they don’t do anything,” says Arelys Rodriguez, Sanchez’s wife, while showing off the poor hygienic-sanitary conditions of the outdoor bathrooms. “I have to carry water from the neighbors’ house, because the raised tanks are uncovered and are filled with decomposing frogs, bats and even pigeons. I’d die before I drank that water,” she says with disgust.

Sanchez talks about his effort in agriculture, the work he does as a laborer, hoping that a relative living in the United States will help get her out of the hostel and he can buy a house. Meanwhile, her little daughter Thalia flits around her. That little girl, with her innate curiosity and boundless naiveté, manages to help Sanchez forget for a moment the neglect and misery that surrounds her.

“I have a light on my cap so the customers don’t have to walk to the spotlight when they want to buy, but then I realized it worked as a kind of promotion,” said Luis, who started selling a thermos of coffee in June of 2013 and now has increased production fivefold. “I got the idea of varying the menu preparing cortadito from a taxi driver they call loco, because I saw it in Havana. Since then I added chocolate, cappuccino and café bombón. The chocolate intensifies the flavor of the coffee and the cappuccino follows the traditional standards, the bombóm (a mix of condensed milk, chocolate and coffee) leaves a pleasant taste in the mouth.

Without his having to hawk his products, the customers come to him. “The best advertising is the quality,” he says. “When it’s a large bill and I don’t have change I just give them a free coffee. I don’t lose money because I end up winning customers,” he says.

Luis does not mince words when he talks about the origin of the coffee he serves. “I sell 100% Café Soler,” he says, while showing us the logo he designed himself, “harvested by my family, roasted and steeped by me. I don’t have that many plants so I’m not forced to deliver the coffee [to the state]; but it’s enough for me for the year,” he says, referring to the parcel he owns in Sumidero in the municipality of Minas de Matahambre.

The state monopolies are the only legal buyers of the beans and to enforce that control there is a framework of laws that equate trafficking in coffee with crimes such as theft or illegal departures from the country.

The only legal way to market coffee is to buy it in the state’s Hard Currency Collection Stores and the high prices mean the business is not viable, so the self-employed generally turn to the informal market.

“The hardest thing to get is disposable cups. There is no place to buy them, I have to rely on the good will of neighbors and friends who bring them to me from abroad,” he comments, while serving coffee.

Cabrera worked as a buyer for the Pinar del Rio Fuel Company which belongs to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, work that, out of fear, he made compatible with selling coffee. “Many are afraid to trade a job for a business. I decided to take this step as long as the earnings are stable and the work shifts didn’t interfere with sales.”

With characteristic island humor and the amiability of someone who even lights the cigarettes of those who like to smoke while they drink their coffee, Cabrera knows how to relax the disaffected and cheer up the reticent. “What series bills do you want?” he jokes with someone who rejects coins in change. “My goal is to make the customer happy even with the change,” he says.

Generally sales end at 9:00 in the morning and then the preparations begin for the next day: roasting the coffee, grinding it, cleaning the thermoses with chlorine and washing the many towels used to wipe up the drips, removing the stains from the white coat he wears while selling and, finally, doing the accounts. This ends Luis Armando Cabrera’s day, and he does not repent becoming a small businessman.

This means that it is impossible for any farmer to manually clear his 66 acres of marabou. It is when using technology that the odyssey begins. Typically, a crawler-type tractor—operating on tracks instead of wheels—with front blades is used to cordon off the marabou and burn it. But the farmer has no right to directly contract for this service with state entities, which are the ones who own the heavy equipment. Thus, the application has to go through the board of the cooperative, but it turns out that the tractors are broken or belong to companies that they cannot contract with. The solution: wait for a miracle to happen while “doing something” with the land for fear of having it taken away.

It is likely that, given the delays, then end up resorting to private individuals with their exorbitant rates. So the farmer has to go to the bank for a loan and on asking for the promised credit, the producer discovers that they won’t give you more than 20,000 Cuban pesos (about $800 dollars), if you don’t have anything to put down as collateral. With that money you might be able to pay to clean up about half your allotted land, so you make an inventory of the few things you can pawn: The house? An engine? The old tractor?

If you managed to burn the marabou, the government guarantees you at least five years of suffering chasing after herbicides and tools to control the persistent shoots. Every time you prepare your land you will have to turn to the black market in fuel because what the state has assigned you is barely a symbolic amount.

The legal alternative would be to buy the gas sold in hard currency on the highways by Cupet, but this could cost you 3,000 Cuban pesos for a day’s work, because a tractor with the plowing attachment can consume 120 liters of diesel a day. That is if the farmer owns an old tractor, because if not, it again becomes the story of an impossibility, that of contracting with a state enterprise. Then you have to add the expense of the contract with the private owner and the fuel.

When the farmer, finally, manages to have cleaned his land for production, you can see that a new chain of obstacles and problems opens before his eyes. He will have to sow on dry land, because pumping water is a privilege with too many conditions attached: availability of surface or well water, electricity or fossil fuel, a turbine with capacity and an irrigation system.

Opting for the state “technology package”—which includes seed, fertilizer and pest controls—implies selling the production to the state company Acopio at extremely low prices (in comparison to what private buyers will pay). In addition, they don’t deliver all the components of the package at the same time.

When the time comes to market the products, the farmer will find that if the buyers are individuals they cannot buy the entire crop, and the State Collection System of Agricultural Products will leave many of the fruits to rot in the field while the population in the city lacks them.

See also:

Decree-Law 300 Will Not Make the Land Produce / Dimas Castellano

Beans, ah, the beans! / 14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez

Land Leases, a “Half-ownership” / 14ymedio, Juan Carlos Fernandez

Crisis in Agriculture: Land for Those Who Work It / Dimas Castellanos

So it seemed the letter of protest from the National Bureau of the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP), seemed like a joke to us, that is the coffee “producers”; a letter that rejected the measures proposed by the US State Department, and accused them of wanting to influence Cuban farmers and distance them from the state.

Such a reaction is what we would expect, because it was too good to be true.

We know that the state monopolies in Cuba are not willing to lose the lush profits they earn at the cost of our work. But the gesture of support from the US government made me feel respected. This opening could serve as a mechanism of pressure on the island’s government, because the only way to negotiate with the United States would be through the producers whose rights have never been recognized.

So my confusion was great when I read that Nespresso plans to begin importing Cuban coffee to the United States this fall.

In Cuba there is no flexibility to allow coffee growers to negotiate, on the contrary. The 7^th Cuban Communist Party Congress reaffirmed that there will be none of the long-expected, and necessary, changes. So, are the regulations of the State Department dancing in sync to the conga rhythm of the Cuban monopolies? Or is Nespresso being miserably deceived?

It has not been disclosed how this trademark, belonging to the transnational company Nestle, will negotiate directly with Cuban producers. The island’s famers don’t even have the right to sell directly to Cuban government entities. The Cuban state does not do business with natural persons, rather they create cooperatives (for example the UBPC, CPA and CCS) with legal standing as intermediaries.

In practice, for example, if a producer needs inputs they have to apply to the cooperative, because they can’t buy them directly from the entity that sells them. This type of practice involves delays and inefficiencies, as well as increasing costs for the coffee grower, since the cooperative applies a tax to each transaction processed.

When a company makes a purchase from a producer, it writes a check to the cooperative which pays the farmer, after collecting the tax, a mechanism that is also applied when the sale is between producers.

This is the reality we dreamt would change with United States government’s new policy of empowering Cuban entrepreneurs. It could be that Nespresso is being deceived by some artifice of the Cuban authorities, or it could be that the intransigence of the Cuban state has managed to break the good intentions of the Obama Administration.

But there is one thing we can be sure of: the new Cuban Nespresso Grand Cru, Cafecito de Cuba, will have the flavor of broken dreams, because it will be done at the cost of our rights.

In addition, the Cuban governments demands that the church councils submit all the data on the preachers involved before offering them a visa, and if they are found to be associated with any NGO in their countries of origin that does not sympathize with “the Cuban cause,” the request is denied. If everything for one pastor is “in order,” according to their preferences, but the event has also invited other pastors who dissent from the communist process, the visa will probably be denied. Faced with this stark reality, the Christian community has been forced to hide foreign pastors who are invited to preach at their events.

This generates persecution by the Department of Immigration and Aliens, which levies heavy fines on offending churches or pressures their guests to leave the conference venue. On many occasions we have seen police operations mounted to stop pastors, as if they were drug dealers, who manage to make it to our activities.

How can the Church hide these preachers? It requires a great deal of audacity. The basic thing is to omit the names in the conference programs that are made public, and to have the guests travel on a tourist visa (sometimes through a third country) and reach the island by way of an airport in another province.

When they enter with a tourist visa (at least in theory) they can move freely around the country. That means it is not illegal for them to be in one of our churches and, if found with microphone in hand, we can always claim that they are “witnessing” (a term in Christian speech that is similar to preaching) rather than lecturing. As a security measure, these preachings are not made public through audios or videos, in case they might appear on social networks and become incriminating evidence against us.

While this happens with pastors of all nationalities, most abused are the Americans, because they provide most of the financial support for our congregations. This support is not some “Machiavellian plan of the Empire.” The Cuban Evangelical Church has had its roots in American congregations since 1900, when they began sending evangelists to our country, who established what we know today.

By denying US religious pastors visas, the Cuban government “punishes” the rebellious churches twice, because not only do they prevent their members from listening to the words of the guest, but they also cut off all possible financial aid.

That this happens in our country is contrary to the Constitution, which states in Chapter 1 Article 8: “The State recognizes, respects and guarantees religious freedom. In the Republic of Cuba, religious institutions are separate from the state. The different beliefs and religions enjoy equal consideration.”

How much longer will we have to wait for our religious freedom to be recognized and guaranteed? And above all: What is the government waiting for to start respecting our rights?