Havana, Cuba. For years Mariela Castro Espín Has tried to take credit for numerous  efforts on behalf of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (LGBT) community in Cuba. Forgetting that this community has its Own Voice.

These uncertain efforts have won her international awards and recognition, before she has even achieved what is now her most ambitious project. Which is to declare to those who do not know the Cuban issue, that the project authored by Mariela had been initiated by her late mother Vilma Espin.

The constant appearance of Castro Espín before the national and international media are not showing, much less is giving voice to, the (LGBT) Cuban community. On the contrary, they are only providing an opportunity for the voice of the daughter of current Cuban President, Raul Castro Ruz, enthroned in an ill-fated Revolution that has only managed to put the community that she pretends to lead at a disadvantage. Continue reading →

Havana, Cuba: The May rains have already started throughout the country and the in June hurricane season begins, extending until November.

The Cuban authorities and Civil Defense have recently launched the 2013 Meteor Exercise, preparation intended to corroborate the availability of all the factors involved in times of natural disasters. It is clear that this organization is run by the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) and which have a structure from the nation top to bottom.

Authorities of the Institute of Meteorology say the hurricane season for Cuba and the Caribbean this year be a big one. So they predict that the island will be hit by any of these phenomena. The solidarity of the national response is immediate with things like this, far different from the government indolence that abandons countless families of disaster victims like this.

They are only there to lend a gaze to the eastern provinces and especially to Santiago de Cuba so that we can see a false reality of a city totally recovered.

The Civil Defense and the authorities in power more than ensure the preservation of human life. They have the obligation to provide to Cuban population with secure decent housing. We recall that the situation of the state of the buildings on the island is one of the problems that constantly checkmates the Cuban family.

The drought is palpable on the island and the lack of rain is well-known, but it is necessary to take urgent measures to preserve not only human lives as I said earlier but to put all of our goods in safekeeping. And to take as one of the main measures not walking around in places that are underpinned by danger of collapse.

It is our duty in this season for the sake of the Cuban family to preserve our lives. Not to highlight the role of the authorities but to comply with the first right of every man. Always remembering that our nation needs people committed to build the immediate future for our children and our future families if they can enjoy safe homes that can be a garrison in these catastrophes.

By Ignacio Estrada

20 May 2013

Tomas Estrada Palma

With my little note I just want to remember those who wrote history bequeathing the Cuban nation a date that today unites Cubans inside and outside the island.

Independence Day is one of the many festivals they have tried to rip from the memory of our nation. Like they have also ripped from one of our capital’s main arteries the name of the person who was the first president of that fledgling republic, leaving only his shoes and an empty pedestal never occupied by any Cuban.

Palma’s empty pedestal, only his shoes remain. Photo: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Don Tomas Estrada Palma is a man worth remembering like those who drew their machetes for a May 20 that was entered into history as a day of glory. I know this date has been erased by those who have tried to show a history not told by our ancestors. The nascent Republic of 1902 is still worthy of being celebrated and is one of the indelible marks of our identity.

Blessed be they day of May 20, the birth date of our Republic of Cuba, island nation that jealously guards the key to the Gulf.

Today we have a Republic, today we have a Nation, today we have independence but our nation weeps to see the Cuban family disintegrate and see it abandoned to the whims of a few in olive-green who have been able to put themselves above all the interests of a group, that only cares for the throne and the perpetuation of its name.

20 May 2013

The “International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia” (International Day Against Homophobia) is celebrated every year on May 17. A date that serves as a reminder that different sexual orientations and gender identities are still cause for discrimination in some countries.

During this day different activities are undertaken to promote respect for sexual diversity worldwide. Its objective is to articulate actions and reflection to combat physical, moral or symbolic violence linked to sexual orientation or gender identity. Homophobia takes different forms depending on the geographical and social space, so that responses to it must also be different.

On May 17, 1990 the General Assembly of the World Health Organization (WHO) removed homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses.

17 May 2013

To avoid its being used for electoral ends in the face of the July 7 elections, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Transvestite Transexual and Intersexual (LGBTTTI) Pride March has been postponed by its organizers.

The Gay Pride Committee, which has put on this event for at least ten years, informed via social networks that the march usually held in May, would be rescheduled.

In addition, the Pride Committee reported that there was an intention among a group of entrepreneurs active in businesses whose clients belong to the gay environment in Puebla, to hold their own march, which is planned for May.

In regards to this the member activists of the Pride Committee said that the mobilization has marked commercial intentions and is not an event calling on civility, acceptance, visibility and respect.

The document mentions that ten years since its creation, the Pride Committee continues working with events such as the Anti-Homophobia Week and the LGBTTTI Cultural Week, to inform and generate the agenda of the vulnerable groups it represents.

10 May 2013

Massiel, Heart of Iron

By Ignacio Estrada

Havana, Cuba — As announced by the official website of the National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX) the next gala against Homophobia will feature a special performance by the renowned singer La Massiel.

The artistic gala will take place at the government Karl Mark Theater, a place that in the last three years as been the site of this important event. The performance of La Massiel on the island is followed by the community of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (LGBT) who feel themselves acknowledged by her songs.

For years La Massiel has been held into a community setting where recognized artists of the Cuban transvestite world perform. On this occasion the stage will be shared with others, with the National Orchestra of Juan Formell and Los Van Van in addition to the Tropicana Dance Company and Latin Dance under the usual direction of artistic director and choreographer Carlos Rey.

Massiel’s performance brings to the island one of the most recognizable voices in support of LGBT rights. And she has been known to not respond to any invitation from the Cuban government but is appearing at the request of one of the Cuban speakers who participated in the conduct of previous events.

The content of La Massiel’s performance in Havana won’t be known until she arrives, nor whether she will be traveling to the city of Ciego de Avila, the province that is the site of the Official Day of Struggle Against Homophobia.

La Massiel’s presence in Cuba despite not being invited by CENESEX serves to clean up the recent work of this center a little. It is an entity that has lost adherents and sympathizers because of its failure to deliver on false promises.

The show is already marked in advance as the best of the shows, but also brings with it rumors of a theft of some items, the money earmarked for the show and the suspension of some of the usual artists. Comments that can not be ruled out but that continue among the officialistas from fear.

22 April 2013

By Ignacio Estrada

Havana, Cuba – In recent days, correspondents from Cuban television and newspaper correspondents from accredited foreign media in the capital undertook an unusual journey through different prisons.

The reporting reflects only what the Cuban government wants to show the world in the face of their constant refusal to let the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights into the country, along with international officials of other agencies such as the Red Cross.

The deterioration of the Cuban prison system and the constant violations of inmate rights is reported by alternative media that exists on the island, denunciations that are narrated via telephone in often broken voices, people sobbing to themselves and another large number of their families and a smaller number through third parties.

Cuba is the Latin American nation with more prisons and a prison population mostly young, for crimes that include prison sentences just for eating beef.

If the accredited media want to talk about the island prison system they would have to take as a reference the countless testimonies of the many people graduate from prison and now despite being released can not get  their jobs back. Or better still to describe each of the punishment cells in which many have tried to to end their lives out of despair and others have lost their lives in some cases in unknown situations.

Those who have been in prison fall into things like this, they become accomplices of those who often repeat intimidating phrases like this: The Cockroach when he’s in the hen’s beak doesn’t make demands! A speech about explaining to the accused that they are trapped by the prison system.

A question to ask the National Bureau of Prisons is what is the annual number of self-attacks in prisons, a number that will never be revealed because it would show the mental imbalance and fears in a figure that is constantly growing. When we touch this issue we are not referring to something unknown, we are talking about a reality and that is the reason that hundreds of prisoners are admitted to hospitals each year and in most cases require surgery.

The self-attacks are described derisively by the jailers themselves unscrupulously labeling those who opt for this kind of protest of the system as “Tragics,” cutting their veins, swallowing barbed wires, sticking pins in their eyes, burning and mutilating parts of their bodies, injecting feces and urine into their legs and even voluntarily injecting themselves with HIV/AIDS; these are all some of the ways in which the Cuban prison population constantly attacks their own lives.

I respect each colleague of both the domestic and foreign press but there are things that piss me off and make me lose my faith at times in the work they do. Is it perhaps that Raul Castro and even the brand new Cuban vice president, are not calling on the press to be objective and fill the role of true communicators or the Cuban reality?  Lying is the same thing they did in ’fifty-nine. Everything continues to be a false government disguised by a puppet press.

I promise in a second paper to describe the Cuban jails where prisoners with HIV/AIDS serve their sentences. Prisons that now total six which together have an inmate population that excludes 500 inmates.

22 April 2013

By Ignacio Estrada

Havana, Cuba. While the Catholic Church stumbles before the growing number of child abuse scandals, the Cuban clergy seems immune to this epidemic.

The fact is that so far this Pandora’s Box has not been opened on the island. I don’t think that’s a reason to think that events like this could not have happened on our land. We would only have to dig and put our ears to the ground to hear the rumors of our grandmothers and grandfathers or even ourselves a little more what happens when we serve at mass.

With my note I don’t mean to accuse any priest or religious but if I pushed the drops would begin to fall. I am convinced that at some point someone started to talk and others thought about how, like in other countries, what the church can give in exchange for their silence.

That’s if the Cuban government, shrewd and cautious like always in its communications between church and state doesn’t think to collect evidence or those small and insignificant anomalies and ask for favors in return or better yet ask for the complicity of the Church and the Cuban Catholic hierarchy.

I know a large number of priests and religious of both sexes and I know some people like the opposite sex and some have occasional and spontaneous relationships but the largest number of these I know are gay.

As a Catholic, as a homosexual and as a Cuban I am going to be talking and this is the ground I stand on. I know cases like these exist and I simply try with my note to call attention to this abomination.

No matter what we are, nor the preferences we have, child abuse must end now. The Cuban and Universal Church should immediately receive an injection of renewal and delouse faults like these, that exonerate those who have not committed these offenses and sit on the bench next to those who have committed them but remain the silent.

I know that those who answer the call of vocation never cease to be men and women, I understand human matter and we are not ones to criticize. The fact that acts like these are committed should not because we, as the faithful, justify our one. On the contrary, we must fix on the true teaching of Jesus Christ.

To allow God that is really our Cuban church is far from any scandal like this. To allow God to enthrone the new Pope with the name of Francis I comes to repair our church and tidy up our home.

22 April 2013

By Ignacio Estrada

Havana, Cuba — Some time ago I listened to a doctor from from Villa Clara narrate her life as a medical aid worker, in the Republic of Venezuela.

I listened carefully to each of her stories. Gossip that she perhaps told me in confidence between friends, but the mere fact of the imminent threat of the spread of red tide and the enthronement in Venezuela of Cubanization makes me see myself obliged to recreate one of these stories.

According to the doctor friend who served as a volunteer in Venezuela for more than five years and managed to become head of a Medical Mission to one of the parishes and that the role of the doctors was more than saving lives and, on occasion, they served as thermometers of Venezuelan society .

When I use the word thermometer, an instrument known for measuring environmental and body temperatures. It is because this also the work of the  majority of medical aid workers to provide services to measure the state of opinion of the Venezuelan people. Information that is collected and passed to the intelligence services and the government so that they know where they need to work and how to change that state of opinion.

Perhaps what for many is not important for others is novel and what a pleasure for it to be both, Important and Novel. Who can imagine the Cuban army of white coats doing intelligence work in a foreign country? Work is not unknown by the authorities in power who try to win converts.

According to what my friend told me things weren’t left there; during times of presidential campaigns they also had to work to win votes for the official President. And this vote is won by explaining to people that the benefit they receive from healthcare and other things is free thanks to former President Chavez and the humanitarian work of the government. These chats take place in the clinics and while traveling around the the neighborhoods to deliver medications, and the conversations also serve to threaten the beneficiaries that if Chavismo ceases to exist all the projects will cease to exist.

This work is repeated whenever Medical Mission Cubans are in Venezuela, many of them looking for what they can not achieve in their own country for their families with their profession. The Cubanization is one of the key factors and principle support and bastion of Chavismo Venezuela.

This same friend in one of our many conversations, also told me about where she lived with another compatriot in her profession. According to her, this other doctor was serving on a Medical Mission on Margarita Island, one of the opposition stronghold states in Venezuela. It turns out that the opposition mayor once visited the Diagnostic Center that was under her charge on this island. And seeing the poor conditions there promised to send help the next day to improve the waiting room, and fix the air conditioning and the consulting room.

The aid appeared quickly but the doctor could not receive it under threat of her superiors that she would be deported to Cuba and Medical Mission suspended for receiving help from the opposition. It would seem stupid but but it’s not, because on signing on the Cuban doctors would realize that not everything is like they say, and I am more than convinced that they exchange the improvements for their families for what they are forced to endure.

This doctor knew how to use one of the beneficiaries of her attentions and through him asked the Mayor that please not to send the aid the following morning, thanking him but he was sincere in the reason he attended and the opposition mayor heard her and didn’t fail to fulfill his promise to help the cooperative.

I do not advocate violence, or the witch hunt, but at times like these I sympathize with the Venezuelan nation and call for the social order and the restoration of democracy. I am one of the many Cubans who do not want to export the model that has failed our nation to another country in our America, I am one of those who wants Cubans to travel freely and conquer new areas and earn their livings with dignity but without trampling the suffering of others.

I apologize to God first and secondly to my friend, a doctor who for safety I don’t say her name name to reveal her stories, but just knowing that there are people who need to hear these truths is bigger than any secrets and I am convinced that someday she will be relieved by having used me to fix who knows what collateral damage that has been caused.

To say Enough is Enough of Cubanization in Venezuela, it not to close the doors of this nation to freedom-loving Cubans. It is to close off those who by deceit come to trample and usurp the rights that it is up to citizens to decide for themselves and that is the right to take back the future of our nation be it any of the existing models.

22 April 2013

Havana, Cuba — The increase in youth violence and police lawlessness are issues constantly criticized by the inhabitants of the municipality of Cruces in the province of Cienfuegos.

According to residents of this southern municipality, youth violence constantly fills the streets and has already caused deaths, without specifying numbers. According to some, most altercations occur late at night and early in the morning. The main stage for these events is the centrally located Martí Park and the Paseo del Prado.

The use of sharp and cutting weapons known as “Armas Blancas” — a term for knives — is the most frequent in these tumultuous quarrels in which local police don’t get involved and when they do they arrive after the altercation. This has happened on a number of occasions at the Cosmopolitan discotheque which belongs to the Cuban chain Palmares.

The inhabitants of this town are afraid to go out into the streets and publicly blame the police for the lawlessness, along with the sale of alcoholic beverages and lack of security around the recreational facilities to prevent those who go there from bringing weapons on their bodies.

By Ignacio Estrada

14 March 2013