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

Havana, Cuba — The Cuban population living with HIV recently received nutirtional help from United Nations Global Fund to Fight AIDS/HIV.

The benefit is being delivered to the sick through the commercial network after several months of unjustified absence. According to a source who works as a representative of the agency in Havana, the previous assistance has been affected by the increase in new cases of carriers of the illness.

The source also said that the new aid that has already been distributed would only be renewed for twenty-four more months. For years the UN program has maintained this food aid to the island and at times this benefit has been affected due to poor management on the part of the Cuban authorities. They cleverly insert themselves into the plan for aid to new cases, causing a shortfall of aid ahead of schedule.

It is clear that this aid is distributed for free and in principle it covers the food needs of the sick population with products such as juices, cereals, canned meat and vegetable fat. The products have dwindled as the epidemiological situation of the island has grown, until the point where the aid only includes canned meat and vegetable oil.

The recently delivered aid only provides a total of 22 small cans of sausages which must last for a yea; the vegetable oil has not been delivered. One of the beneficiaries asked how it was possible to live with two cans of sausage per month, noting that each of these cans contained no more than six sausages.

People living with HIV/AIDS in Cuba who receive the UN food aid, receive a “basic food basket” that is described as inadequate. It is a diet that places this affected population at a disadvantage in terms of quality, quantity and weight, according to where they reside.

By Ignacio Estrada

22 April 2013

Alfredo Guevara

By: Ignacio Estrada

Havana, Cuba — Around 11:00 in the morning last Friday, April 19, while Latin America was following the inauguration of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the distinguished intellectual and communist Alfredo Guevara died in the Cuban capital.

Guevara’s death was first announced on the multi-national news channel TeleSur and later on a cultural segment broadcast on the afternoon news. The news was further broadcast in prime time on the National News on Cuban Television (NTV), highlighting the role he occupied, the high positions in Cuban culture he held, and remembering his path as a student and his communist militancy.

Alfredo Guevara is known as one of the wealthiest Cubans in recent times, a fortune due in large part to his chairmanship of the New Latin American Film Festival and his career as a diplomat. Guevara’s wealth is exceeded, according to some, by that of the Prima Ballerina Absolute Alicia Alonso and the renowned Havana Historian Eusebio Leal.

What is true is that the next edition of the Havana Film Festival will not enjoy the presence of Alfredo Guevara, an absence that could mark an era of deterioration of this important event held every year in December.

Alfredo Guevara’s body was cremated at his request, and his ashes were scattered on the steps of the University of Havana in a ceremony attended by members of the diplomatic corp, advisers to the Cuban president, artist friends and family. Guevara’s ashes ascended the university steps before being scattered from the hands of his granddaughter.

The absence from the ceremony of the Castro family, close to the intellectual, is something that is even wondered about on Cuba’s streets, because the close ties of friendship that bind the children of former President Fidel Castro and the Cuban incumbent are well-known, children with whom he customarily went out to dinner and shared a few drinks in one of the most expensive businesses in Old Havana, the Mama Ines Restaurant. This business belongs to Ireneo, a renowned former chef to the Castro family.

Meanwhile, the national television broadcast recalled the final interview Alfredo Guevara gave to Amaury Perez Vidal, director of the television show “Con dos se quieren… basta” (When there is true affection, two is more than enough).

22 April 2013

By: Ignacio Estrada

Havana, Cuba. There have not been many Cubans since the immigration reforms who have taken a plane to the democratic world, to fulfill the role of true doves or pigeons, messengers from a nation that through them sends a message to each person who is a lover of freedom.

The country is proud to see them sending the message of a nation that for years longed to describe it, and has been forced to do so through alternative media. The real-time Cuba is being told in these moment by those who did not hesitate for a moment to board the first aircraft to, go to fulfill a noble task which, rather than enrichment, we will see what consequences it brings them when they return to our island?

There are many who cackle and try with the old tricks of the past to distort this reality that is already being experienced by the protagonists, followed by countless citizens of this universe and collected in the few media that exist.

People who pose as doves or pigeons have names, and no matter how much time they spend burning the midnight oil like many say, confronting the Cuban regime. The important thing is not only are journalists, writers, administrators, bloggers and human rights activists, above all this. They are courageous Cubans who do not hesitate for a moment, to call things by their name.

Each one is an example of the wider thinking of Cuban civil society, from the intelligentsia to those who peacefully take to the streets to demand the release of their loved ones armed with the unique weapon of a gladiolus.

Berta Soler, Yoani Sanchez, Rosa Maria Paya, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo and Eleicer Avila belong to different generations and also have different thoughts and political currents. But only one truth unites them and that’s what matters, it is this which makes them the protagonists of what I now want to call a real Operation Truth.

The recognition was not enough to honor these who weren’t even for an instant those who cried, “I won’t travel!” “I’ll want to see what happens to the first ones who travel and who then return, and then I’ll travel!” Words that many repeated although looking at some of those boarding one of those steel birds, which for decades has been the dream of Cubans.

What each expresses during their journey, the way in which they do it, is as if they are fully entitled to exercise the right of freedom of expression. A right that is only paraphrased in the alternative media on the island.

I am also one of those who wish to travel, I am among those who want to narrate our daily lives not only as a communicator, nor as Cuban more than this, I would like to do it from my point of view as a person living with HIV/AIDS for 12 years. I have a passport, but I have no money now, I trust in God and friends I also, at the right time, will be able to leave and tell the truth of the community.

Whoever criticizes, criticize the history already written. We will only achieve part of it when with tears, sweat and blood we can also write our own page.

In my note I do not want to ask a vow of silence from anyone, on the contrary I want to urge them to write beyond any personal grudge or professional envy. We don’t all have to thing and say we have the right to be diverse.

We recognize that these Cubans are in these moments those who are fulfilling Pope John Paul’s words, Open the Doors of Cuba to the World. Making their way through the democratic world.

25 March 2013

By: Ignacio Estrada. Photos: Ignacio Estrada.

Havana, 5 February 2013. Last Sunday, February 3, the disabled minor Keylis Caridad Alemán Rodríguez, received as a gift a donation made in the name of the Cuban National Council of Churches.

The donation was given to the minor in the presence of her mother Yamayki Rodríguez, the same day her daughter turned sixteen. Keylis could get the gift of a new wheelchair; alleviating her lack of one will allow her to resume her daily activities.

The donation was possible because of the efforts of the organization the Cuban League Against AIDS with the Cuban Council of Churches, an institution that did not hesitate for a second in facilitating the acquisition without any cost to the child.

The new wheelchair was received by the disabled child with joy and she gave thanks for the gift with tears in her eyes, grateful that her situation — which was so dire — was improved.

Yamayki said she was thankful for what her daughter received, and at that moment remembered everything that Keylis had had to deal with since she was very little, describing everything from her heart surgery to the malformations in her hips, knees and ankles.

Keylis sent a recorded message of thanks to the Cuban Council of Churches and I cite it: I thank this institution for allowing me to navigate again… a message that ended with tears in her eyes.

Keylis Caridad Alemán Rodríguez lives at No. 38 Agramonte Street in the municipality of Santo Domingo in the province of Villa Clara.

7 February 2013