His own neighbor watches him. No one has confirmed it, he hasn’t read it any report, and he doesn’t have any friends in the police who have warned him. He’s simply not stupid. Whenever he opens the gate to his house, a white head peers out from next door. For every five times that he comes and goes, at least three times he runs into the old man who lives in the next apartment pretending to water the plants in the passage. The pots are overflowing, but the improvised watcher continues to add more and more water. Also he asks questions, a lot of questions, on the most imponderable topics: Um… what you have in that bag, where did you buy it? It’s been some time since you visited your mother-in-law, right? So he has his own private informer, an intelligence cell — of just one member — focused on his existence.

The informing neighbor spent Father’s Day alone. None of his children came by to celebrate with him. The truth is, no one ever visits him, other than two men with military haircuts. Because the old man is reputed to be someone whom even his own family doesn’t support. He is “more alone than the stroke of one,” say the other residents in the crumbling building. In the middle of the afternoon the watched knocked on the door of the watcher to give him a piece of cake. “So you can try it, my daughters brought it”… he said, savoring the victory of feeling satisfied and visited. A short flash of guilt shone from the eyes of the nosy one. By nightfall he was already back at his post, checking who entered and left the adjoining home.

In an unwritten, but very frequent, formula, most of the people involved in the betrayal of other Cubans also exhibit a great frustration in their personal lives. Not that every unhappy person becomes an informant for State Security, but failure is a breeding ground that the recruiters of informers take advantage of. With these individuals they develop shock troops willing to destroy others. In the neighborhoods, the extremists tend to be those with the most disastrous family and emotional lives. It’s not a rule… that’s clear… but it’s true more often than not!

To his neighbor, retired, resentful and alone, they have assigned the task to watch him. They have given him power over his life, an ascendancy that he enjoys and savors every day. The power to ruin smiles, to write reports that one day will haul off to prison this unbearably happy father and husband who lives on the other side of the wall.

17 June 2013

Canadian James McTurk convicted of child abuse in Cuba. Photo: The Star.

Just three weeks ago several of us Cuban activists visited Stockholm to participate in the Internet Freedom Forum. The highlights of our stay there were not only during the sessions of the technology event, but also throughout the program of parallel activities. It was extremely interesting to visit ECPAT, an NGO that focuses on the fight against pornography, prostitution and child trafficking. As often happens, the explanation of its work led us to reflect on the impact of such reprehensible incidents on the Cuban reality as well. The first thing that caught my eye was the absence of an entity or NGO that is dedicated specifically to that topic on the island, at least as far as the public knows, but there is no doubt that before the Universal Periodic Review at the United Nations some official group has designated itself advocate for victims of sexual predators.

If the wall of the Malecón could speak… it would tell us of all those young people between 16 and 18 who offer their bodies to tourists for a few dollars. Although there are even more children in the meat trade, it is at that age that the lack of legal protection is total, because under the law prevailing in Cuba they are considered adults. As a result, they are left out of any statistics and, in consequence, of any prevention and protection program offered by international agencies such as UNICEF. Cases of forced teen sex by stepfathers, uncles, older siblings or close relatives abound in Cuban towns. A girl of twelve, thirteen or fourteen pregnant by an adult, is perceived as common especially in rural areas of the country. Not to mention that carnal relations between teachers and students in junior and senior high schools have become a normal part of our existence.

Recently the Canadian James McTurk was convicted in Toronto for several sexual offenses against children in Cuba, including some as young as three. The story has not been published in the national media, but the predator was in our country 31 times between 2009 and 2012. It’s not credible that immigration authorities so skilled in detecting whether Cubans can enter their own country, and customs officials trained to find a laptop or a mobile phone on luggage, didn’t realized that something was wrong with that man. It is also sad that, given this is one of the evils that afflict our society, a group of alarmed parents is not even allowed to form a group of citizens to denounce pedophiles and to support solidarity for the victims of these criminals. Amid so many social issues that are touching the emerging civil society of this island, such as the dual currency, low wages, and the need for political and party reform, it is also urgent to tackle such a sensitive problem. We must say to all these foreign and domestic abusers, “With our children, NO!”

16 June 2013

Playa Siboney, the telephone company’s work for the fiber optic cable.

The residents of Siboney have reasons to be sad and upset, very upset. Hurricane Sandy devastated a good part of their coastal infrastructure, destroying houses, throwing up huge rocks on the shore, and seriously damaging the area’s vegetation. More than eight months after this hellish morning when the storm affected them, very little has been done by the State to reconstruct the place. Some locals have restores a part of the walls that surround their houses which the strong winds toppled. Although there are bulldozers and trucks carrying stones and dirt everywhere, they are not focused on once again raising the ruined village. They have, instead, a more pointed objective: the fiber optic cable that links this region of Cuba to Venezuela.

Several owners of private restaurants and rooms or houses for rent are complaining about the decline in international tourism after the debacle of Sandy. “The foreigners come with the idea of staying a week or more, but when they see the state of things these days they leave after two days… if they even stay that long.” the natural beauty of the place makes its current situation more dramatic. Facing a sea so blue it looks like a retouched postcard, many people try to make a living however they can. “But at least you will soon have the Internet, with the cable so close”… I provoke them, in search of information, as well. The reaction when the tendon that cost more than 70 million dollars is mentioned, comes loaded with pure skepticism. “With this cable they’ve protected even us!” says a lady with eyes almost the same color as the Caribbean, glancing about as she talks.

A  “coffin of concrete and metal” is the first place the fiber optic cable touches ground in Cuba.

The point where the so-called ALBA-1 touched land in 2011, shows no benefit of the data that circulates through it. A “sarcophagus” of concrete with a heavy metal cover, serves as the first “stop” of the cable that also links to neighboring Jamaica. A guard keeps his eyes on the place where so many kilobytes enter and leave. The irreverent hurricane from last October passed, ripping apart the previous box from where the end of the cable was guarded, leaving entirely open the framework fibers and its cover. The next morning after the incident, local residents looked out curious to see the place’s “new tenant.” Heavy equipment immediately appeared to recover it and make a small causeway under which it ran. After some weeks of work carried out by a brigade from ETECSA Telecommunications Company, the work is now in the hands of the Armed Forces (MINFAR).

As hope is the last thing to die, or so the older people there insist on recalling, the neighbors of Siboney are still waiting for the miracle of reconstruction and connectivity. “This could be the people with best Internet access in all of Cuba,” says a young man fishing from a cliff.” But I can not tell if he’s making a joke or is serious, as the harsh sun forces his face into a permanent grin. The truth is that this place still in ruins, could become more prosperous and have more opportunities to have access to the web.

Private businesses could attract more visitors with ads in cyberspace, they would have better information about upcoming weather patterns, and who knows, they might even launch a crowdfunding campaign to restore the nearby beach. But that’s a dream too far, I’m assured by an old man chewing tobacco and wearing an olive green cap that comes down over his ears.

Away from the beach… near the Internet

Less than ten miles from where the fiber optic cable made landfall is one of the Internet cafés in the city of Santiago de Cuba. The air-conditioned room with four computers and an attendant employed to watch what each user does in front of the screen. The stratospheric prices for most people (4.50 CUC for an hour), means there are no lines access the site. It’s time to do some testing on the connectivity and the sites allowed or not allowed.

Among the sites censored on this connection are Cubaencuentro, Cubanet and Revolico. Perhaps also other portals and sites are under the same “loop,” so it will be very useful for users to help rebuild the list of banned sites.

The good news is, sites that can be read without difficulty include:  Café Fuerte, Penultimos Días, Diario de Cuba and El País, as well as the sites of Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders.

A speed test of the new connection, resulted in the data shown in the following image:

In summary, although this is not the Internet we dreamed of, given it high prices, censored sites and the inability to connect from home, at least it’s a crack that has opened the wall of disconnection. Now it is up to us to force this slit to become a door… may we live to see it.

10 June 2013

Paradise

They’re no longer dressed in blue uniforms and some boys even show off their rebellious manes. Hair that no teacher will demand they cut — at least for the next few weeks — hair that will ultimately fall to the razor of Obligatory Military Service. They still look like students, but very soon many of them will be marching with rifles slung over their shoulders. They are young men who just, days ago, finished their school days at different high schools all over Cuba. The college entrance exams are long past and this week they’ve learned who will have a place in higher education.

Just outside the schools, the lists of the accepted and unaccepted speak for themselves. José Miguel Pérez High school — in the Plaza of the Revolution municipality — could be a good example to explain the situation. This educational center is one of the best performing high schools in the capital. A situation partly due to the professional and economic composition of the neighborhood, which means many parents can afford after-school tutors (we refer to these as “dishtowels” — they clean things up). Despite these advantages, the end-of-year statistics for this school are more alarming than satisfying.

Of  233 12th grade students in this high school, 222 took the entrance exams and only 162 managed to pass all tests. The rest will have to go to a second round, or content themselves with failure. The highest number of low marks was in Math, in which only 51 students achieved a score of between 90 and 100 points. In the applications for careers, teaching specialties are repeatedly put down as a back-up choice; “To guarantee getting a place, even if the tests don’t go well,” these potential teachers of tomorrow say, with a certain indecency.

Statistics from José Miguel Pérez High School

Categories L to R: Total Students in Grade 12; Passed All Subjects; Failed One or More Subjects; Did Not Appear

The beginning and end (?) of a mistake

The young people who completed secondary school this year are the products of the educational experiments led off by the so-called Battle of Ideas. They are 17 and 18 today, so they started junior high as the “Emergent Teachers” program was gaining strength, a program that put hastily trained young people barely out of their teens — if that — at the front of the classroom. Today’s graduates were educated in classrooms where television and VCRs were the protagonists, for lack of sufficiently trained teachers. At the most difficult times they could count on receiving at least 60% of their classes from a screen. They also went through puberty at a time of rising ideological indoctrination. While it is true that this has always been inherent in teaching in Cuba over the past five decades in, its climax came after the Elian Gonzalez case. Fidel Castro took advantage of that event in the late nineties to impart a twist to the political discourse in all aspects of national life.

Those who graduated from the twelfth grade a few weeks ag, are the first batch who did not have to go to boarding schools in the countryside. Encouraging news for the young people themselves and especially for their parents. However, the readjustment for teachers caused by the change forced many of them to rethink careers based on study, books and binders. The teachers who came from these schools in the countryside had to adapt to new conditions. Despite the difficulties of the former regime of internment, for the teachers these countryside schools were sites of direct contact with the farmers who sold or traded for agricultural products. One of the few incentives for working in such a place was being able to take some bananas, taro, pork or fruit to the city at a much cheaper price than in the markets of Havana. The loss of that little privilege discouraged some teachers from continuing on the path of teaching.

Memorize or question?

The countless hours lost in the classroom to teacher absenteeism is another of the hallmarks of recent graduates. To this we have to add the decline of the investigative character of science instruction, due to the deterioration or absence of chemistry, physics and biology labs. In many high schools chemistry experiments were practically canceled due to the shortages and fear that students would have access to the chemicals. Physical education, computer science and English were the biggest losers in the exodus of teachers to other areas of employment. High school education emphasized rote learning of dates, names, events, without progress in creating their own opinions, a spirit of asking questions, or the capacity of discernment. Graduates can hold in their heads the years and important days of our country’s history, but fail to form their own opinion about what it all means.

The quality of handwriting, spelling and the correct use of Spanish also fell short as educational objectives. This coming September, university classrooms will see students with serious deficiencies in all three areas. But that does not mean that they will be faced with excessive demands or be unable to complete their programs of study. They will attend a University whose quality of teaching is far from that once exhibited in Cuba. In the 2013 ranking of Latin American universities, the University of Havana fell from position 54 to 81, another sign pointing to the urgent need to review the entire educational model. The educational level of the new entrants to higher education, has forced them to lower the bar.

The tinkering with the alchemy of learning, the successive experiments marked more by the voluntarism than scientific analysis, the excessive presence of ideology in every subject, the encouragement of docile, rather than questioning, minds, students’ limited access to updated materials (read internet) and the educational fraud that flourishes where ethics is absent, are all undermining one of the main pillars of national identity: that which consists of knowledge, academics and teaching. But a problem can not be remedied unless we confess that it exists. So while they continue speaking in a triumphalist tone about Cuban education, it will continue to sink into mediocrity, into material and pedagogical deterioration.

6 June 2013

The Poster for British Week in Havana

London has come to Havana. During this week of British Culture that is celebrated from the first of June in our country, even the climate has decided to be in sync with that of the other Island. Grey skies, drizzle, mist at dawn. All we lack is the silhouette of Sherlock Holmes sneaking around a corner or a magician knocking with this staff on the wood of our door. They are days of great music and a chance to appreciate unusual schedule in the movie theaters. Since last Tuesday they have been showing a selection that includes the 2013 Oscar winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man, and also the biographical film Marley, about the life of the famous reggae singer and composer. The selection of cartoons for kids and teens will probably attract a good audience at a time when many are on vacation from school.

I have been enjoying some of the programming not only for me but also for many others. Especially thinking about those young Cubans , or forty years ago, secretly listened to an English quartet which the official media now play everywhere. The striking colors and the design of the poster for this “British Week” has evoked for me the iconography of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, and also the delightful adventurers in the Yellow Submarine. So some of us have also taken it as a tribute to those battered Beatlemaniacs from back then. These days, however, the greatest comfort comes from the window cracked open to let in this fresh air that comes to us from the outside. This gift of sensing that culture can make the Atlantic seem narrower, the passing years shorter, the losses recoverable.

5 June 2013

El Pais newspaper from a Nauta cybercafé

In 1993 Fidel Castro found himself on the ropes with the economic crisis and accepted the circulation of the dollar in Cuban territory. Until then, possessing foreign currency could cost you several years in prison. “The enemy’s money” came to stay, although years later it would be replaced by substitute called the “convertible peso” or CUC. Among the most notable details of the decree that authorized the dual currency — the CUC and the Cuban peso — were the motives for doing so. The Official Gazette recognized that this measure “contributes positively to reducing the number of incidents characterized as punishable which will relieve and support the work of the police and the courts. That is, it would save work for prosecutors and judges if people were allowed to carry dollars. However, the key lay in the date chosen for the new law to take effect: August 13, the birthday of the Maximum Leader.

Two decades have passed since that time and Cuban society is still gripped by monetary schizophrenia. Fidel Castro no longer holds the post of president but it seems that his brother is also given to mixing legal relaxations with the family calendar. On June 3 he commemorated not only the 82 years of his life, but he also put an end to a strategy of excessive control of Internet access. Just a few hours from the end of this day, the 118 cybercafés with public connections to the web opened. A somewhat bitter birthday gift for the General who had been delaying however possible the conversion of Cubans into internauts. Most likely this small step toward information flexibility will also happen with the legalization of the dollar: it will not be reversed.

Since this morning, Tuesday, the new public Internet sites began to operate with Internet and Intranet service. At a cost of 4.50 convertible pesos, a little more than $4.50 US, the user can access cyberspace for one hour. You can also choose to surf the national intranet for 0.60 CUC, or access “.cu” email only for 1.50 CUC an hour. In various tests performed — undetected, so far — none of the pages considered political were censored. With a minimum connection speed of 512 KBPS, the interface that welcomes the user as soon as the computer is turned on is called Nauta. Although all the workings and installed programs run on Microsoft Windows.

On opening day Internet portals accessible from the new locations included those such as El Nuevo Herald, news sites in the style of Diario de Cuba, and several blogs critical of the government written from the Island. The high cost of the service, in a country where the average monthly wage is around 17 dollars, seems to be the key constraint. This contradicts the deputy minister of communications who recently declared that “it will not be the market that regulates access to knowledge in our country.” To date, those who have hard currency — authorized to circulate by the former president — will be able to afford entry to social networks, to classified ad sites, and the tempting employment or scholarship sites where you can register to try to emigrate.

Curiously both measures — the legalization of the dollar and this timid opening to the Internet, have been the fruit more of pressure than the government’s desire for openness. To allow Cubans to possess convertible currency was a decision taken in the face of evidence that in the informal market the so-called “greens” circulated every day more strongly at the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties. A similar situation happens now with the information that flows from the vast World Wide Web. Pirate connections to the web on one side and the advance of the clandestine webs of audiovisual distribution on the other, confirm the futility of stemming the tide of kilobytes.

The first users who tried the cybercafés this morning were surprised at the speed of the connection, but lamented the excessive costs. Several official reporters hovered around the tables of a local center in the Vedado neighborhood trying to capture snapshots of Havanans throwing themselves en masse on the keyboards. Instead, they found a few cautious clients sizing up the limits of the new service. Each one had to show their ID card and sign a contract before seating themselves in front of a computer screen. A contract that clarified that the service should not be used for “actions that can be considered (…) harmful or detrimental to public security.” A sword of Damocles that could be interpreted also from political and ideological considerations.

From birthday to birthday, so go changes in Cuba. Twenty years ago it was the dollar… today the Internet.

5 June 2013

My suitcase is parked in a corner, the tiny gifts that traveled inside it already in the hands of friends and relatives. The anecdotes — for their part — will need more time, because there are so many I could spend the rest of my life parsing their details. I’m back now. Beginning to feel the peculiarities of a Cuba that in my three months absence has barely changed. The number of uniforms was the first thing that jumped out at me: soldiers, customs, police… why do you see so many uniforms simply on landing at José Martí Airport? Why is there this feeling of so few civilians and so many soldiers? After the dimmed lights of the halls, the none too friendly question of a supposed doctor interested to know if I had been in Africa. Where are you coming from, honey? She jerked her head around noticing my blue passport with the shield of the republic on its cover.

Outside, a group of colleagues and family waited for me. The embrace of my son, the most cherished. Then having again entered my own space and the unique pace at which life transpires here. Catching up with the stories, events in the neighborhood, the city and the country. I’m back. With an energy that the daily stumbling blocks try to cut short, but with enough left over to undertake new projects. One stage of my life is ending and another is emerging. I have seen the solidarity, I have felt it and now I also have the duty to tell my compatriots on the Island that we are not alone.

I have brought so many good memories: the sea in Lima, the Templo Mayor in Mexico City, the Freedom Tower in Miami, the beauty of Rio de Janeiro, the affection of so many friends in Italy, Madrid with its Museo del Prado and its Cibeles Plaza, Amsterdam and the canals running through it, Stockholm and the cyber-activists from the whole world I met there, Berlin and the graffiti that covers what was once a wall dividing Germany, Oslo surrounded by green, New York that never sleeps, Geneva with its diplomats and the United Nations headquarters, Gdansk laden with recent history, and Prague, beautiful, unique. All these places, with their lights and shadows, their grave problems and their moments for leisure and laughter, I have brought with me to Havana.

I am back and I am not the same person. Something of each place where I was stayed with me, and the hugs and words of encouragement I received are here today, with me.

3 June 2013

A few years ago the list of twitterers from Cuba had barely a dozen… and now?… many more! [CLICK ON IMAGE TO GO TO LIST.]

People who from Cuba send tweets into cyberspace.

CLICK HERE FOR YOANI’S LIST OF TWITTERERS FROM CUBA.

26 May 2013