Festivals, Festivals, Always Festivals / Yoani Sanchez

6a00d8341bfb1653ef019b02cf1d16970d-550wiThere were no great crowds of long lines outside the movie theaters and it didn’t feel like December because of the high temperatures and strong sun. These are the days of the New Latin American Film Festival, but the whole context is very different from 35 years ago when it was founded. The loss of importance of this cultural event is obvious, as is people’s reduced expectations round the Coral awards for the best films. But.. what has changed more? The Festival or us?

The competition faced in Cuba for any movie is much greater now. Despite our material and technical limitations, our society has seen its access to films, documentaries and TV programs other than those broadcast by the official media skyrocket. Movie theaters have ceded space before home projections or private salons with flat screens and plastic chairs.

Despite recent prohibitions on the film circuit operated by the self-employed, the phenomenon of “non-institutional programming” is unstoppable. So the Festival of New Latin American Cinema is not a film oasis in the wasteland of Soviet films we experienced in the 80s. Now it must compete with more commercial and dynamic offerings that address a broad spectrum of tastes.

In the illegal market “combos” or “packages” proliferate, selections of series, reality shows and audience participation films. There are also abundant scientific and historic documentaries and big screen releases. We Cubans are true “Pirates of the Caribbean” when it comes time to copy and distribute recently released movies from other countries. One week after the film Avatar took New York by storm, the savvy marketers in our own backyard were offering a lesser quality — but similar impact — copy on local networks.

“The Festival” (period… as we call it), had a clear ideological focus from the beginning to promote creations filled with social criticism, a reflection of regional problems or the historic memory of the dictatorships that plagued Latin America. Hence, its current problems in competing for an audience that increasingly wants lighter entertainment — humorous or simply frivolous. From a mass phenomenon, the Festival has become an elite event that tries to compensate for the excess of Hollywood movies, today available everywhere.

Another element that marks the decline of this film event is the death of its creator and inspiration. Along with all that might have been controversial in the life of Alfredo Guevara, the Festival director, his drive and his personal relations shaped this film festival each December. Like every creature made in the image and likeness of man, the Festival received a very hard blow with the death of its principal author. However, in Cuba we’re already used to the survival of the most inert phenomena, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise in this case that there is another ad infinitum extension, another living-dead.

For the filmmakers as well, the Havana event has declined in importance. It has become more of a get-together, mojitos in the gardens of the Hotel Nacional, or simply a walk though this theme park of the past that we have become. But to get a Coral award feels more like a remembrance than a present honor. Other places, other festivals, have gained in prestige and media reach in recent decades, to the detriment of an event that hasn’t known how to keep up with the times.

Its political filter remains an impediment to the rejuvenation of the Festival. Although criticism has gained a space in its offerings, and its directors are not part of the institutional framework, it remains far from being a space without censorship. Another point on which it can’t compete — not even close — is with the underground movie networks, packed with controversial materials. But 35 years on, the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema continues.

However, it is worth asking whether this is evidence of its good health or the stubbornness of its organizers. Unable to compete with the illegal — and international — networks of film distribution, rocked by the passing of its creator, and given its apparent loss of popularity, this event needs to be renewed. Otherwise, it could end up like that moment of the year when we dust off our nostalgia, going to theaters with broken seats and noisy projectors, to evoke that time when we could only see good movies in December. Two weeks for longing and remembrance.

13 December 2013

A Moment of Zen in the Midst of Chaos / Ailer Gonzalez [Video]

Please click on the image to watch the video
Please click on the image to watch the video

After the violent arrest of her husband, Antonio Rodiles, at the Human Rights Conference sponsored by Estado de Sats, Ailer Gonzalez chose a moment of non-violence in the midst of the madness. As children, still in their uniforms and taken out of school to spend the day harassing human rights advocates swirled around her, Ailer sat quietly under the Havana sun…

Note: At the beginning of the video in the bottom left Antonio’s mother (green dress and cane) can be seen walking back to the house after the arrest with one of the conference participants who then turns back to talk to Ailer. The other adults in video are primarily plainclothes State Security agents working for the Ministry of the Interior. The flag the children are waving (other than Cuba’s) is Venezuela’s.

Repression Against Demonstrators Reaches Barbaric Levels

MIAMI, Florida, December 12, 2013, www.cubanet.org — The worst consequences of Cuban military repression were suffered on Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day, on the eastern part of the island. More than 130 arrests were made and about 160 peaceful demonstrators beaten according to the leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), José Daniel Ferrer, as part of preliminary action.

A member of the Ladies in White from Santiago de Cuba, Arlenis Alarcon Perez, had to be operated on as a result of being kicked by paramilitary groups. She is in serious condition and remains in intensive care at the Military Hospital after injuries to her solar plexus caused internal bleeding. The operation was performed late last night. The solar plexus is a vascular network that can burst from sudden physical blows according to the activist Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello.

Arlenis Pérez Alarcón lives at Castillo Duanie between 14th and Piñeiro streets in the Luis Dagnés district of Santiago de Cuba. She has been a member of the Ladies in White for about two months.

Meanwhile, in a telephone conversation with martinoticias.com José Daniel Ferrer, speaking from the Palmarito of Cauto district in Mella, Santiago de Cuba province, confirmed the use of tear gas against civilians, including children, in various parts of eastern Cuba. Ferrer said that in the Mafo district in Contramaestre the home of peaceful opposition figure Ovid Martin Castellanos was attacked twice. Ferrer said that many activists were in very poor condition in places where the attacks took place, Ferrer said.

Three drunken men attacked demonstrators. One of them was injured in the process and required medical attention according to the head of UNPACU.

Thursday, December 12, 2013, CubaNet

Fear of the Word / Yoani Sanchez

These are bad times for the word, gray days for a philologist. The main problem is not the abundance of vulgar expressions, which can even be revealing in a linguistic and sociological analysis. The saddest thing is the decline of articulate speech, the fear of pronouncing words, the expanding silence. “A man who is a man doesn’t talk too much,” a vendor told me this morning when I insisted on knowing if the cupcakes were guava or coconut. Later I received a grunt when I inquired of an official about her office’s opening hours. To top off the day, I got nothing more than shrugged shoulders when asking where the bathroom was in a coffee shop.

What is happening with the language? Why this aversion to expressing oneself in a coherent manner with well-structured phrases? The tendency to monosyllables is quite worrying, as is the use of signs instead of sentences with subjects and predicates. Who said so many people talking is a sign of weakness? Do adjectives show laziness? The phenomenon is widespread among young men because in the macho code loquacity is at odds with virility. A punch, a sneer, or simple babbling, have replaced fluid and well enunciated conversation.

“I’m not going to discuss it…” boasted a man, yesterday, to a teenager trying to tell him something. Meanwhile, the latter was shouting, and instead of using words he was waving his hands around as a warning, the preferred code of slaps. The worst thing is that for the vast majority who witnessed the altercation, that individual was doing the right thing: don’t talk too much and get on with the fight. Because for many, talking is giving in, arguing is a sign of weakness, trying to convince people is cowardly. Instead, they prefer shouts and insults, perhaps an inheritance from so much aggressive political discourse. They opt for the almost animal growl and the slap.

These are bad times for the word, party days for silence.

13 December 2013

The Contradictory Spirit of Nostalgia / Camilo Ernesto Olivera

HAVANA, Cuba, December, www.cubanet.org — Between 1977 and 1978 Cubans living in the United States were able for the first time to return to the island to visit relatives. When my great uncle and great aunt came to our house, my father, who was an official in the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), could not be present. As a member of the Communist Party and the armed forces he had to obey orders, which were to refuse to greet them.

I remember as a child that my aunt and uncle stayed for lunch. There were tears in my aunt’s eyes when she saw the steaming, aromatic pot of black beans placed on the table. She said that, since she had left Cuba, she had not had beans and rice like the kind they make here. She later asked that we accompany her in a prayer of thanks. Even my uncle, who was not very religious, joined in — something I was only able to full understand years later.

In 1990 a group of students were returning home from Poland on a Cubana de Aviación flight. During a layover in Gander, Newfoundland almost all of them decided to take advantage of Canada’s then-generous asylum laws. More than twenty years later a member of the group was returning to Cuba as a tourist. He was travelling in economy class and his flight had several unscheduled layovers before landing at the Holguín airport.

His friend told us that during the last leg of the trip he managed to fall asleep. When they opened the hatchway door, a burst of steam and the penetrating odor of wet grass and rotting trash told him he had arrived in Cuba. This smell, so familiar during his childhood and adolescence, had been almost forgotten during the two decades he had lived in Canada.

At the moment they opened the hatchway door, all the memories came rushing back. An overwhelming sense of joy and sadness came over him. Later, surrounded by the love of family and friends, he managed to momentarily overcome this feeling. While in Banes he saw traces of the town’s devastation, the result of three hurricanes: one in 2008, another in 2012 and the main one, which has been destroying it since 1959. He also passed the homes of his childhood friends. Many were gone. The facades of others have or had been defaced with signs and placards stigmatizing their owners for opposing the government.

Recently, a young woman who was my first wife and one of my best friends in adolescence was visiting. She said, “Everything is more or less the same as when I left, but the decay of the houses and the people is evident. Now there are hard-currency stores for people with money, but the anguish and resignation have become became endemic.”

While we were having a beer to relieve the noontime heat, my friend used her mobile phone to show me the exact moment that she lost her internet connection. “I was chatting on Facebook and suddenly the whole screen froze. Then someone came up to me and said we were arriving in Cuba.”

She also told me, “I cannot understand how it is possible to feel nostalgia for a country where time has virtually stood still, like the image on my cell phone. It hurts me every minute, every house I knew from childhood that no longer exists, because it has been destroyed, because the rice dish of rice with black beans seems so different to me here. It feels like I am going back into my past, like I’m going to a cemetery to transfer a beloved family member from the crypt to the ossuary. ”

She took my hands and squeezed them hard between hers. It was as if she were trying to cling to nostalgia, drifting between love for what was and homelessness. Then we closed our eyes and let ourselves go.

December 11, 2013, Cubanet

NADAVIDADES (Nada Christmas) / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

From Julian del Casal (1863-1893) all he kept was the winterphilia.

Weekly chronicles long for months of Cuban winter so the pleasure of silence can reign supreme on streets which would barely feel like Havana after twilight:

[…]  would that snow would begin to fall so tree rings and white caps on evergreen mountains would turn into the shroud of snowy folds we would all wear.

Storyline: After 1998, Cuban Christmases have become less and less worthwhile and plausible for me.  The subtle and old glow of a December 24-25 Christmas Eve has been lost.  Before, a certain floating sacrosanctness came from resisting the prohibition by official decree. Now the sadness has become all too tangible.

As Cuba blends in more substantially with the rest of the world, and as “demagoguery ” and  “democracy” endure or elude or mockery, and as people feel more enthusiastic the day after or maybe the day before committing suicide, I instinctively realize our future is doomed to repeat the same empty and repressive performance.

We live in an uninhabited Havana forsaken even by languishing films like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” which movie houses never failed to play ever so punctually at every year’s end.

December 2002 caught me by surprise at The International Book Fair in Guadalajara (Jalisco, Mexico).  Starting the first days of the month, the city became filled with red flowers which I couldn’t name and ridiculously mixed up with all the artificial bric-a-brac decorations.

A civil servant and Cubanophile asked in good faith how revolutionary Cuba decorated for Christmas (the good man reminded me of a John Lennon Christmas tune).  Back then, regretfully, I hadn’t a clue about the value of applying rhetorical diplomatic language, so I rebuffed him but later regretted doing so.  I subsequently apologized with an e-mail and said, “we hang flags and miniature Fidel faces on our Christmas trees.”

Indeed, for the past couple of years, I have seen them once again at currency exchange locations in the city of Havana.  They look like Christmas stamps of Comrade Fidel.  The beard looks grey and is somewhat reminiscent of St. Nick.  The olive-green fatigues are the Santa Claus uniform.  The background is awash with a sea of human reindeer parading just in front of la Plaza of la Revolution.

It was the end of 2002 and a brave and soft-spoken poetess from Matanzas wrote me a poem about the embers and aftertaste of love as a Christmas gift; an unpleasant post-Padilla style nightmare flavor remains whenever I re-read her words:

[…] They cut short our childhood with empty slogans,

with tales of the sea and useless prisons.

They tore our hands away from building sand castles,

kept our legs from running ahead of death,

kept our voices from singing psalms, and our eyes from looking up at the stars.

They made us turn austere and sinister.

They wanted to erase our souls until all we had left with was weeping and rage

and the need to use memory as a shield to guard against so many lies.

Today everything is stuck in a void and a thickened peace clings to the night [….]

In December of that year, my friend the poetess and I had our 31st birthday.  Joseph Brodsky was also 31 when he wrote “December 24, 1971″ (the very year my friend the poetess and I were born):

[…] Void.  But standing in front of the void you can see

a sudden light appearing from nowhere.

If only the Monster knew that the stronger he is,

the more believable and inevitable the miracle becomes […]

Meanwhile, the Cuban press recounts memorable patriotic events time and time again. Obviously, the State rejects the absence of memory: According to Ricardo Piglia, what’s in the boxing ring is fiction authors vs. state fiction.  Just luck (bad) we are again reading recycled headlines and eye-witness accounts about the local Herod Fulgencio Batista’s bloody Christmas crimes which, despite being nearly half a century old, still seems useful garnish for the Revolution’s amniotic fluid.

From solstice to saturnalia, under papal license or puritanical prohibition, from mangers to despotism, or to the beat of Christmas carols or reggaeton, perhaps Christmas in Cuba lands me in a turn-of-the-century chronicle where a longed for millennium of winter would finally make it possible for us to enjoy the silence of twilight streets before they become Havana’s:

[…] what better shroud than snow for people who yawn from hunger and agonize from consumption?

From Penultimos Dias

Translated by: JCD  (Merry Christmas, 2013) 

30 November 2013

All Pay Homage to Mandela in Cuba / Ivan Garcia

Mandela-600x330For Josefina, a 71 year-old housewife and south-of-Havana local, first comes Jesus Christ then Mandela.  She’d been cooking supper when the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize winner’s death broke through on the radio.

“Among books set by my bedside, I have a biography of Mandela which I’ve read three times.  Jesus Christ, Mandela and Martí are the three men whose principles and convictions I most respect,” is what Josefina tells us while sifting for the best grains of rice to make her supper dish.

On the island, authorities have officially declared three days of national mourning following Mandela’s death, and President Raúl Castro has sent his message of condolence to South African President Jacob Zumba.  In the missive, Castro II noted that, “one must not refer to Mandela in the past tense.”  During our three days of national mourning, all government buildings and military compounds will fly the Cuban flag at half-mast.

Produced by Telesur Network, Cuban television station channel 6 aired a documentary about Mandela’s life.  And just after 10 p.m., the station also broadcast the film Invictus starring Morgan Freeman in the role of Mandela.

On a scale from one-to-ten, if you ask any Cuban to pick and rate any idol, few would mention a modern political figure.  Most would bet on celebrities, musicians, or sports figures like Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo.

In Cuba like in most nations around the world, politicians are rated very low. But when you speak about Mandela that is another thing.

Look, some people are loyal to Castro while others idolize Che.  Ask anyone and many just simply hate both of them.  But with Mandela something unique happens: Irrespective of ideology and religion, all revere him.

Niurka a Cuban doctor, spent two years volunteering her medical expertise in South Africa. “I was deep in South Africa, a great nation very rich and where people from different ethnicities coexist with different beliefs and different cultures. In spite of the differences everyone respects Mandela. After my return in 1997, I was involved in an event where Mandela shared a few words of gratitude with us. He was a cordial man who would look at a person’s eyes while he spoke to them. His diction was perfect and he was soft spoken which is something that caught my attention. I belong to that Cuban generation who grew up with Fidel Castro shouting slogans from a soapbox using sometimes profane language. Mandela’s image is forever engraved in my sight.

Even at the heart of his opposition, Mandela was able to gain considerable ground.  And in Cuba, Antonio Rodiles — Director of Estado de Sats, a cultural and social project where diverse aspects converge, and perhaps the most promising Cuban dissident — considers that Nelson Mandela’s political legacy is nothing less than remarkable.

Rodile comments, “Following 27 years of imprisonment, Mandela’s message was about constructive dialogue and remained free of hatred.  We could all stand to learn from him.  Cuba is Mandela’s friend, but what’s more, he might also become the example our government needs so opposing factions can learn to mend ways and work on behalf of the Cuban nation like Mandela did when confronted with critical moments in South Africa’s development.”

At night on Avenida G in Vedado, youth of any sort — emo rockers, freaks, hard rockers, haggard hippies, reggaetoneros and Joaquín Sabina, Pablo Milanés or Fito Páez groupies — are loaded on Parkisonil pills and cheap rum but what they celebrate with irreverence and spontaneity is Mandela.

A life-long self-ascribed friki, Osmany, 36, hums a popular 80s tune which demanded the South African leader be set free, and also takes the opportunity to show me a tattoo on his back quoting the first black President of South Africa:     ’What kind of freedom can you offer me when as people we are not granted the right to public assembly? Only a free assembly of men can negotiate.’  “Like Mandela, I too want to be a free man,” says Osmany.

Cuba is a country where no one agrees on anything and everyone insists on being right.  But men like José Martí and Nelson Mandela are examples that live beyond the good and evil in us.

Iván García

Photo credit: Greg Bartley Camera Press, taken from the New York Times.

Translated by: Adriana Correa and JCD

7 December 2013

Towards a Just Cause

Heberprot-P 75  Human recombinant epidermal growth factor

Heber Biotec, S.A. Havana, Cuba

Last November, a group of Cubans and part of the exiled Cuban community living in the United States, co-published a document named A Humanitarian Appeal  which I already submitted here. Given the importance of the publication and level of interest shown by many who still wish to add their names to the petition, I am submitting the link directly: http://www.change.org/es-LA/peticiones/demanda-humanitaria

Translated by: JCD

12 December 2013

Humanitarian Demand / Rosa Maria Rodriguez

In recent weeks we have heard some information in the United States media about the possibility of selling medicines produced in Cuba in that country, particularly Heberprot-P, a drug for the treatment of diabetic foot. On the other hand, the Cuban authorities continue to express themselves about the obstacles facing them in buying certain medications and medical instruments produced in the US, due to the restrictions occasioned by the politics of the US embargo on the island.

There are different opinions about this issue, both for and against, dismissing the urgencies of those priorities which should be considered: the diabetics in the United States who could be treated with Heberprot-P avoiding, in some cases, dangerous amputations of their extremities, and of patients in Cuba who can’t access treatments to cure them or to improve their quality of life because some medications and specialized instruments produced in the U.S. can not be purchased by Cuba.

Faced with any discussion on this issue, it is important to take into account Articles 12 and 15 of the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the “Declaration on the Use of Scientific and Technological Progress in the Interests of Peace and for the benefit of humanity,” among other things.

For all these reasons, the undersigned, Cubans and Cuban Americans, members of independent civil society and citizens in general, affirm our determination to support, from a vision of respect for human rights, the possible analysis that would permit the expansion of everything related to scientific exchanges in the areas of drug development and medical techniques. Also, the marketing of medicines and specialized instruments for these purposes, in order to meet the medical care needs of people who need to be treated in both countries.

Julio Aleaga Pesant — Indepedent Journalist

Hildebrando Chaviano Montes — Indepedent Journalist

Manuel Cuesta Morúa — Progressive Arc

Siro del Castillo Domínguez — Solidarity with Cuban Workers

Gisela Delgado Sablón — Independent Libraries

Eduardo Díaz Fleitas — Pinar del Rio Democratic Alliance

Reinaldo Escobar Casas — Indepedent Journalist

René Hernández Bequet — Cuban Christian Democratic Party

Rafael León Rodríguez — Cuba Democracy Project

Susana Más Iglesias — Indepedent Journalist

Eduardo Mesa — Emmanuel Mounier Center

Marcelino Miyares Sotolongo — Cuban Christian Democratic Party

Héctor Palacios Ruiz — Liberal Union of the Republic of Cuba

Oscar Peña — Cuban Pro Human Rights Movement

Pedro Pérez Castro — Solidarity with Cuban Workers

Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado — Cuba Democracy Project

Wilfredo Vallín Almeida — Cuban Law Association

21 November 2013

Repression at Estado de SATS (Video)

This video was taken in the street outside the home of Antonio Rodiles, which is also the headquarters of Estado de SATS, where a Conference on Human Rights was being held in honor or World Human Rights Day.

The man in the blue shirt with glasses is Antonio Rodiles, director of Estado de SATS. The woman appearing next to him in a black dress early in the video, and sitting on the street later in the video, is Ailer Gonzalez, Antonio’s wife and also one of the active coordinators of Estado de SATS. The older woman in the long green dress holding a cane is Antonio’s mother.

The children (in and out of school uniform) were taken out of school to spend the day “repudiating” the Estado de Sats Human Rights Conference (a government spokesperson claimed they were having a “sports day” on this residential street and that Antonio was abusing the children when he was arrested).

Either Planet / Cuban Law Association, Rodrigo Chavez

Lic. Rodrigo Chávez

For my eldest son, Roylier Javier Chávez Dubrocq.

Countless conversations will never happen given the pigheaded, volatile and dim-witted habit our government has for maintaining a monopolistic grip and control on the flow of information, or should I say, disinformation.  Essentially, the State not only keeps us in the dark about our legitimate rights, but is sole proprietor of our intimacy and our ability to move or even think.

My son is back where the four condemned Cuban “anti-terrorists and Heroes of the Cuban Republic,” as they are better known back here, are imprisoned. Thing is: on this planet, all Cuba is like a prison and subjected to the whimsy of just a few.  By whimsy I mean the sort of fanciful cravings and doings of the few that are concealed from view but completely inhibit the people’s access — let alone execution — to even the most basic of rights.

From that other planet — where all rights are seen, heard and spoken — we are routinely exposed to movies and TV shows where legal recourse and due process are recognized.  On that other planet, all information is publicly shared among  nations.  Routine comparison to what has been called a revolution here really ends up sounding like a complete misnomer.

Big difference: My son is now poignantly aware of what I told him years ago and he can effectively measure the difference between what he studied here but experiences as his true life over there.

For this reason, whenever we speak his words are upbeat but always underscore that the Cuba yearned for should be one where democracy, freedom and ample human rights are given.

We’ll get there one day, son.  Surely we will.

Translated by: JCD

9 December 2013

Karl Poort’s Photos of Havana in the Depths of “The Special Period”

6

In 1994, when he visited Havana, Karel Poort from the Netherlands took these photos that he has shared with Cuba Material.They are photos of Old Havana and Central Havana before dollarization. All the buildings and establishments in them were later restored and reconstructed to house hard currency trade. Before this time, three decades of socialist experiments had turned them into the ruins shown to us in the photographs of Karel Poort.

1

2

3

4

5

From the blog Cuba Material

More Than 300 Opponents Arested on International Human Rights Day

detenciones-dia-derechos-humanos-AFPHAVANA, Dec. 11, 2013 , Let’s Talk Press / www.cubanet.org.- Repressive forces of Raul Castro’s military regime arrested several correspondents from the Hablemos (We Speak) Press Information Center  who were trying to take pictures of the repression against activists and opponents gathered on Tuesday, 10 December to conduct activities for the International Day of Human Rights.

Among the correspondents detained, now released, are Magaly Norvis Otero , Tamara Rodriguez, William Cacer, Ignacio González, Jorge Alberto Liriano and Roberto de Jesús Guerra, arrested in different areas of the capital.

The arrests, which lasted between five and seven hours, were carried out by officials of the Department of State Security (DSE ), the political police, the Directorate General of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR ) and the General Directorate of Counter Intelligence, all from the Ministry of the Interior.

Rodriguez, Cacer and Gonzalez were arrested near Coppelia Ice Cream, located on 23rd Street and L in El Vedado. At this site, Berta Soler, spokeswoman for the Ladies in White Movement, had called for her group to stage “a demonstration to the world that the military regime of President General Raúl Castro does not respect human rights.”

Otero and Guerra were arrested at noon Tuesday in Infanta Street at the corner of Santa Marta, Central Havana, coming out of the headquarters of Hablemos Press, which remained besieged by agents of the political police from the early hours of the morning.

The correspondent reported that Jorge Alberto Liriano was arrested in the town Santiago de las Vegas, Rancho Boyeros municipality, Havana, on traveling to the center of the capital, and he affirmed that he was beaten by the security agent known as Gaston.

The correspondents detainees were transferred to the 4th Unit of the National Police in the Cerro municipality in Havana, and others to the Detention Center known as Vivac, also in the capital. State Security Agents and the People’s Revolutionary Police (PNR) violently prevented correspondents Raúl Ramírez Puig and Odalys Pérez Valdes from Guines, Mayabeque Province, from leaving their homes to travel to Havana, Puig reported in a phone conversation.

Meanwhile correspondents in Sancti Spiritu, Guantánamo and Holguín reported harassment and repression suffered this day when the world celebrated the International Day of Human Rights.

A correspondent at Estado de Sats

Pablo Morales, Hablemos Press correspondent in Havana, said Tuesday night that by managed to enter the house that is the site of the Estado de Sats Project, located at No. 4606 1st Avenue between Calles 46 and 60, in Miramar  Playa Municipality where activists and organizers performed different activities for the 65th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as they were repudiated from outside the housing by about 400 supporters of the Castro regime.

Morales said that, on Tuesday morning, “a dozen activists were violently arrested by the political police while trying to enter Estado de Sats,” which remained under siege by police officers, State Security and Rapid Response Brigades (BRR).

We still do not have an exact figure of how many people were detained Tuesday. It is estimated to be over 300.

The repressors also cut phone service to dissidents to block communications.

Soler and some 80 Ladies in White in Havana were arrested and beaten, along with dozens of activists and opponents who tried to gather at Coppelia Ice Cream.

“Cultural activities”

The authorities of the regime organized youth activities in the same places that the opposition had gathered, for the purpose of repudiating them.

In addition to repression in Havana, dozens of activists, opponents and dissidents were arrested and beaten in Pinar del Rio, Matanzas, Santa Clara, Cienfuegos  Camaguey, Holguin and Santiago de Cuba provinces, according to reports from independent journalists.

In the town of Velasco, Holguin province, BRR members stormed the home of Damaris Garcia  located at 2501 No. 29th Street between Calle 23 and 32, Manuel Fajardo neighborhood, where 31 opponents had gathered.

“They have been hitting us, throwing stones, sticks, paint and even beating the children who are here with us,” said Garcia and the activist Rafael Friman.

However, a report published Tuesday by the official Communist Party newspaper Granma said that “There has never been a single case of murder, torture or extrajudicial execution  has never been a death squad or an Operation Condor” on the island.

Cubanet, 12 December 2013