Translating Cuba

Disjointed Impressions / Regina Coyula

An old woman with a cane got on a Route 69 bus with seats set aside for pregnant women and the physically handicapped. Despite showing her card from ACLIFIM (the Cuban Association for People with a Physical or Motor Disability), and her entreaty and those of others who were riding standing up, no passenger gave up their seat. A woman who didn’t move gave a soliloquy about how she hadn’t eaten breakfast and needed to sit down; the rest didn’t even offer a reason.

When I wander away from home I define the country that I encounter with one word: jaded. In the country portrayed in the news, a tourism worker is publicly recognized for returning a wallet containing a passport and $2,500, which a tourist left behind in his bureau; our doctors intern in the Mato Grosso in order to take health care where it was never available before, not for the possibility of improving the living conditions that their salary does not provide them.

Theft and fraud are crimes that are often not reported because they happen within the illegality of so-called “resolving by the left” (the Cuban equivalent of the expression “under the table” — i.e. in the black market); I’ve lost count of the times that cashiers in hard-currency stores “accidentally” didn’t give me change. I’ve lost count of the times that in the produce market the grocer “made a mistake” with the weight, but never in my favor.

Television is full of public-service messages: keep off the grass; pay your bus fare; avoid noise pollution; don’t litter; save water; make politenesss fashionable – say “Good morning,” “please,” and “thank you.” But when you turn off the set and give yourself a reality check, reality tells you that the “New Man,” that result of successive pedagogical experiments, is more interested in his personal well-being.

All these years of solidarity by decree have produced a predatory, unscrupulous individual (coarse and vulgar as well), who will survive this government more successfully than I. I would tell my readers, as did the popular Consuelo Vidal in his “Behind the Facade” (this is pre-television history): “Look over there!” and point to Russia.

In a speech last week the Secretary of Cuban Unions exhorted workers not to steal, consistent with the example set by the General-President in his talk about corruption and poor social behavior. In what other country do leaders give such messages in their speeches?

These disjointed impressions and something the so-called economy convinced me that not only did they not create a better society, but this experiment failed.

Translated by Tomás A.

23 September 2013

How a Rose Became a Cathedral / Rebeca Monzo

I have always known names were important. I would not be the same person if I were not called Rebeca. At least that’s what I think. I have two names, as does almost everyone of my generation. But if right now I heard my other name called out, I would not turn around because I would assume they were calling someone else. So it is with everything, especially streets and businesses.

When the restaurant La Rosa Negra (The Black Rose) opened, I thought the name sounded odd. Some people asked, “Why black and not another color?” When I finally looked into it, I was told that it was a rented space and, when they began construction, the landlord had specifically asked that this name be used because it was the name of a book he had read and very much enjoyed. The lessees obliged since it was really only a detail.

As soon as it opened its doors, people were impressed with the quality, the service and the wonderful group of people who made up the staff. This generated an ever-expanding and loyal clientele, who got used to the unusual name. It was the owners and staff — with their hospitality and affability — who made the “budding” rose famous at home and abroad.

Not all of the path was strewn with rose petals, however, and all too soon the thorns began to appear. Seeing the tremendous success the restaurant had achieved, the building’s owner decided to void the lease in order to take over the now flourishing and well-established business. But that wasn’t the worst of it. He wanted to keep the name since it had been his idea. Not a good thing for any new business.

Finding it impossible to convince the landlord to let them keep the name — arguing it was their efforts which had given it the prestige it now enjoys — the restaurant’s owners instead opted to buy an old house in Vedado and convert it into a beautiful new restaurant: La Catedral (The Cathedral). They are not getting the old logo but everyone who helped make La Rosa Negra famous is moving with them. I am absolutely certain that everyone will follow them to La Catedral since in the last two years everyone — customers, owners and staff — feel we have become a family.

For those who live here and those who are thinking of visiting Havana after November 2 of this year, I suggest making note of the new address: Calle 8 (8th Street), between Calzada and 5th in Vedado. You will thank me for the recommendation.

22 September 2013

Cuba: The Bitterness of its Sugar / Ivan Garcia

Carrying sacks of sugar – Taken from the Repeating Islands Blog

In 23 years, Cuba has gone from being one of the world’s sugar refining nations to importing the sweet grass for the consumption of the tourist sector. If in 1990, in the dawning of that silent war that was the “Special Period,” 8.2 million tons of sugar were produced, in 2013 a little less than one million was produced.

This year the sugar harvest was 11% less than predicted in the state plan. Only with that fabulous capacity that the official media have to cushion failures, did they adorn the disaster with tinges of optimism.

A peripatetic television reader said that, in spite of a deficit in the production of 133 thousand tons, “the sugar harvest of 2012-2013 was the best in the last nine years.” According to the official version, the poor results indicated “difficulties in efficiency due to technological obsolescence in the agricultural industry and machinery, poor organization and indiscipline.”

The sugar harvest fiasco is a hard economic blow. A ton of sugar on the world market is valued at 400 dollars. Therefore, the rickety state finances lost an income of 53.2 million dollars.

President Raul Castro has tried to revitalize the formerly premier national industry by making butcher cuts. In 2012 he closed the enormous bureaucratic apparatus of the Ministry of Sugar and, with a third of the employees, created a state enterprise called Azcuba.

The entity announced that it aspired to an increase of 20% in the sugar production with respect to the prior harvest of 1.4 tons. The possibility was studied of managing a center in the province of Cienfuegos with the Brazilian firm Odebrecht.

The preparation of the harvest was thoroughly planned: petroleum to be consumed by means of transport, inputs for cane cutters, pieces of spare machine parts for the mills and output that should be obtained per 33-acre tract sowed with cane.

The forecast was a resounding failure. I asked a sugar industry expert why, for a long time, the sugar production has not exceeded the barrier of 2 million tons. Currently he is retired, but for several years he worked in the Ministry of Sugar, in days gone by a powerful institution, with a millionaire budget and a structure surpassed only by the Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior.

In that time, the official traveled half the world, buying equipment and machinery. “If you want to know what has stopped working in the current sugar campaigns, you have to do a little history. After 1911 in the Cuban republic, sugar production fluctuated between 5 and 7 million tons. They were harvests that rarely took three months. The productivity per hectare was among the best on the planet. At the level of Hawaii or any sugar power of that time. The Cuban industry was a jewel, with a world class efficiency. With the arrival of Fidel Castro into power in 1959, there began the slow decline of our premier industry.”

The specialist continues his story. “Blunders and volunteerism succeeded each other in abundance. The lack of spare parts for the machinery of the mills and the insufficient training of technical personnel in the mills, who occupied important posts thanks to their political loyalty, were undermining the sugar industry. Castro involved himself in the sector on an authoritarian basis. His plans and fantasies caused a lot of damage. By pure whim, he substituted the cane variety that was planted in the fields, very resistant to plagues and with high sucrose volume. The ’Ten Million Ton Sugar Harvest’ in 1969-1970, was the coup de grace. Those consequences are still taking their toll on the production of sugar.”

According to the expert, Castro was like a devastating hurricane, a noxious plague. “He not only planned the cold campaign in a wrong way, the subproducts that the cane generates were also wasted. Sugar powers like Brazil take advantage of it all. The cane is not only sugar or alcohol. It serves to produce furniture, medicine and animal protein, among other features.”

In the Cold War years, when Cuba allied with the communist countries of Eastern Europe, the island sold its sugar production at a preferential price. Inputs, fertilizers and machines were not lacking. In the Holguin province, some 800 kilometers east of Havana, with Russian technology, a factory was built that produced cane cuttings.

By the end of the 20th century, all the sugar machinery was being dismantled. In 2002, the government put into place a plan of plant conversion. Of the 156 existing plants, 71 produced sugar; 14, sugar and molasses for livestock feed; and of the 71 others, 5 would be converted into museums, 5 would be kept in reserve, and the other 61 would be dismantled. But in 2005 government sources reported that between 40 and 50 of the still active plants would be closed.

In October 2002, Fidel Castro designed a reordering of the sugar industry and named it Alvaro Reinoso’s Task (he was a considered a founding father of the scientific agriculture in the island in the 19th century). In a public speech he said that in the coming weeks schools would be opened for no fewer than 90 thousand industry workers. In an undercover manner, thousands of sugarcane workers were forced out of work.

Today, dozens of sugar mills and its warehouses are considered scrap. Along with the “company towns” around them, where people subsist eating little and badly and consuming alcohol in alarming quantities.

Via the rationing book people get five pounds of sugar per person. In the black market the prices of this commodity is almost prohibitive in a country where the average monthly salary is $20 dollars. The cost of a pound of white or refined sugar is $8 Cuban pesos (40¢ US), and $6 Cuban pesos (30¢ US) for raw or dark sugar. Due to its awful quality, there have been more than a few occasions where the tourism industry has had to import refined sugar from the Dominican Republic and Brazil.

When the history is retold about the leading and monumental failures of Fidel Castro’s revolution, the sugar industry will be in first place. From a great exporter in the past to an importer in the present. That’s a bitter reality.

By Ivan Garcia

Translated by mlk

22 September 2013

Cuban Sport Fades Away / Ivan Garcia

The defection of Cuban athletes is no longer news. And gone are the front-page headlines announcing epic victories and world championships.

The state coffers are empty. The sports schools no longer turn out strings of champions like sausages. In the last Olympic Games in London 2012, we finished in 16th place.

Underline that result. It is likely that from now on the performance will get worse. The problem is not that the population has become sedentary or obese. Or that Cubans have given up their love of sports.

No. What has happened is a quiet revolution within the sports movement in Cuba. Athletes have become tired of being handled like puppets for the regime’s propaganda.

They also want to earn lavish salaries like their peers in the world, to be free to sign with any major team, and to manage their earnings without state interference.

So they leave Cuba. And will continue leaving: baseball players, boxers, volleyballers, track and field athletes, and competitors from other disciplines.

The government of General Raúl Castro does not want to open the gate. From now on, it is the State that designates who will compete in a foreign league, and how much money they should be paid.

The olive green mandarins have again miscalculated. They are trying to design a structure similar to that of Cuban contractors abroad — to manage contracts and pocket the lion’s share. Like doctors and civilian advisers, athletes will be a commodity. A way to bring dollars into the government’s deflated accounts.

They have forgotten Fidel Castro’s once fierce speech against professionalism. Rent-an-athlete is now welcome, as long as the athlete is as meek as a sheep.

But times are different. Olympic champion Dayron Robles has gotten tired of being manipulated by remote control. Robles has charted a new course: that of the independent athlete. He has the intransigent national sports directors against the ropes.

Taking advantage of loopholes in the January 13 immigration reform, Dayron intends to compete freely in the Diamond League, without having to defect from his homeland or give up competing in future international tournaments under the Cuban flag.

The Cuban authorities are unwilling to accept his decision or negotiate a way out. Dayron Robles will mark a turning point in the Cuban sports movement.

The authorities are at a crossroads. If they yield to him, they could set a bad precedent, and in the short-term lose control of the salaries of athletes allowed to compete in foreign leagues.

That’s the key. The regime knows that it can bring in several hundred million dollars annually by hiring out athletes. The ideal would be to levy a reasonable tax on wages for athletes competing on foreign clubs. And allow athletes to manage as they see fit the money they earn with their sweat and talent.

It would be good for both sides. No one would be forced to leave Cuba. But in an autocracy, reasonableness is a bad word. The government’s intransigent position led to this quagmire.

Due to wrong policies, about a thousand athletes have been forced to defect. Athletes on the island are not unaware of the success of Yasser Puig, Yoennis Céspedes and Osmany Juantorena, among many others.

They also want to compete with the best and earn wages commensurate with their athletic caliber. In their country they earn the salaries of laborers. Few can start a restaurant when they retire, like Mireya Luis, Raúl Diago, or Javier Sotomayor.

They only have two choices: become coaches or political commissioners in the style of the sinister Alberto Juantorena. The downward spiral of Cuban sport is attributable to the stubbornness of the regime, which seeks to control sports contracts from a desk and only with its consent.

Already in the last Olympics Cuba was not represented in team sports. The performance of the men’s volleyball team in the World League, with one win and seven defeats, is the price paid for this intolerance.

Every year sports stars leave. The fans cheer. But there are other avenues to explore. The country does not belong to the Castros. It is everyone’s. Each of us born on this island must reclaim what we consider our inalienable rights.

It is a hard choice. The scribes of the official press defame those athletes who freely decide to separate from the Cuban sports movement. The IOC and the international federations can and should mediate the dispute.

Athletes like Robles are entitled not to be slaves. Congratulations to Dayron.

Iván García

Photo: Taken from Últimas Noticias, Venezuela.

Translated by Tomás A.

12 September 2013

Update on Angel Santiesteban / Lia Villares

155810_10151872193487320_363521142_n — Photo from Aimara Pérez

For his friends, colleagues, and all who are interested in continuing, in some way, to help: Right now Angel Santiesteban is better [after having been admitted to the hospital for dengue fever], and is no longer in the hospital. They took him back to the military facility, where is he very weak from the time he was without good food.

From Lia Villares’ Facebook

23 September 2013

Where the Boss is Judge and Jury / Cuban Law Association, Eliocer Cutino Rodriguez

Lic. Eliocer Cutiño Rodríguez

Many people work in the TRD* chain of shops, subject to what may be called military regulations. A vast number of those workers are unaware of the rights which could help them in the face of possible violations of labor discipline.

How could a process be fair in which, per Resolution 1072 of 2011 which regulates this activity, the person who issues the sanction is the same person who addresses the initial claim?

Setting aside, obviously, the possibility that this person recognizes that he made a mistake in the first place and the affected party gets a favorable response.

Nevertheless, workers who appeal – because they disagree with the outcome – would only have the route of going back to their immediate bosses who disciplined them in the first place, without having the slightest possibility of the judicial system hearing the matter and perhaps resolving it in accordance with the law, which by constitutional mandates would apply to this situation.

It is a process lacking in transparency and impartiality, which has been abolished for many years in the contemporary legal world. This idea could be tried among the TRD workers in the discussion of the future Workers’ Code in this country and perhaps lay a new foundation for what, on the issue of labor discipline, the military institutions have encouraged, completely alienated from the institutions that administer the law such as the Popular Courts.

*Translator’s note: TRD is the acronym for “Tiendas de Recuperacion de Divisas”; literally “Stores for Recovering Hard Currency.” These are the stores operated by the State which sell only in hard currency (Cuban Convertible Pesos, or CUC). They are the only source of many basic products available legally nowhere else (as well as luxuries), and are designed to “recover” the cash sent to Cubans as remittances from friends and family abroad, a function clearly stated in the name the State has chosen to give them.

Translated by GH

20 September 2013

My Memory of Oscar Espinosa Chepe / Reinaldo Escobar

Óscar Espinosa Chepe

When I heard this morning that Oscar Espinosa Chepe had died, some memories of the prominent Cuban economist came to mind. I had the privilege, the pleasure, of meeting him in person; he offered a master class on the Cuban economy in our Blogger Academy and participated on one occasion in the taping of our show, Citizens’ Reasons.

On several occasions I visited him at home where he always received me surrounded by books and an immense collection of paper, where only he seemed to know exactly how to find each document. Many were the times I consulted with him by phone on the definition of some concept, an exact date, or something even more valuable, his personal assessment of some matter. I always received from him a response filled with wisdom and tinged with a sincere affection.

But among all these memories, I don’t know why, that which stands out is his spontaneous smile when he heard an idea that seemed suggestive, or when he remembered some anecdote from his life filled with accomplishments. His wife, the journalist Miriam Leyva, was his guardian angel, she assisted him in everything and constantly defended him from anything that could affect him. She knows better than anyone what that smile represented.

23 September 2013

Urban Predators / Fernando Damaso

Photo by Rebeca

For some time, concerned and alarmed by the rampant deterioration of the buildings in the city, I have dedicated some time to exploring its municipalities: Central Havana, Cerro, Diez de Octubre and the neighborhood of El Vedado, in Plaza. The ruinous state of what were once were magnificent examples of the different types of architecture is a source of pain and sadness, but even more so are the jewels demolished, mutilated, damaged and transformed for the worse, both by the authorities and the population, in a display of ignorance, irresponsibility, indifference and disinterest for the urban richness, violating all established norms and regulations.

Here, as in other cases, the laws, decrees and regulations have been “wet paper” — worthless — ignored by those who had the duty to uphold and enforce: the constituted authorities at different levels, from the municipality to the nation. The damage is done and is irreversible and, worst of all, it has not yet been halted, despite recent and too late attempts to do so, more formal than real, which are usually objects of propaganda by the official press.

Like many citizens, I ask myself: Who will pay for all these crimes committed against city’s patrimony? Will those responsible ever be tried and punished, both those directly responsible (the administrators, company directors, etc.) and those ultimately responsible, which were those who were in charge over the last fifty-four years? It is right and just to punish citizens who violate the laws and regulations regarding the decoration and buildings, but it would be even more right and just, to also punish those who ordered or allowed (and who still are) demolitions, mistreatments, mutilations and transformations of valuable buildings and similar atrocities.

When a country, the government in power is the first to not value or respect the main components of national identity, including the architecture, it is highly unlikely that the majority of citizens will do so. There’s good fishing in troubled waters! In order to demand, you have to start by setting a good example.

23 September 2013

Cuban Fast Food / Ivan Garcia

As there is no McDonald’s or Burger King, Cuban fast food is flour fritters and home-made pizza.

Bread with croquettes of uncertain origin are also popular, and donuts filled with guayaba, condensed milk or chocolate. A vast number of families on the island only prepare one hot meal a day, at night.

They have strong black coffee with sugar for breakfast. And some plain bread, or with oil and garlic. Lunch is whatever appears, depending on what money is available. It could equally be a snack in a private cafe or a disgusting bread and pork in a state eatery.

The star “fast foods” in the Havana streets are the croquettes and fritters. A perfect “wild card”. Since they are cheap, they have become the “peoples’ food”. You can serve it for breakfast or lunch and for dinner for the poorest folk.

Noelvis has become and expert fritter-maker. He works 12 hours a day. “I sell up to 900 fritters a day. My profits are around $400 or $500 pesos. I also sell loose croquettes for a peso or bread with two croquettes for five. A fritter costs a peso. I prepare some dough with white flour and add well-chopped chives, garlic and some off-the-shelf seasoning. The secret is that I don’t use yeast to make the pastry rise. I fry them in boiling oil and when I spoon them into a pot, I try to make sure they aren’t very big. I let them fry long enough so that when they cool they don’t go sticky and caramelized. After some hours they are crispy.

A packet of ten croquettes sells for 5 pesos in the state-owned fish shops. The fritter sellers buys them for resale. “I get a profit, half and half.” says Noelvis. Their ingredients are unknown. The nylon bags where they come in don’t tell the ingredients. Cubans call them “croquettes to be deciphered”.

Ricardo works in a factory where they make croquettes and gives an assurance that they are chicken based. “They use all of it, from the skin to the bones. They grind it well and make a dough. The hygiene measures are good. The people who prepare food wear rubber gloves.”

Their flavor varies. Sometimes they have a distant aftertaste of chicken, other times fish. Or they taste of nothing. They seem like plastic, artificial croquettes. But if they are eaten fully fried they don’t taste bad.

Before she leaves her house, Diana drinks a coffee and when she walks to her pre-university institute she religiously breakfasts on two flour fritters and a croquette. “To keep my figure I eat just one croquette without bread. Although with so much saturated fat it’s a little difficult. My parents give me six pesos a day, and with this money I can only buy croquettes and fritters. The lifesaver for many people.”

Another staple of “fast food” are the churros. They were always sold thin, long and powered in sugar. Yamila, who owns a churro station in the Luyano town, says that they are made of wheat flour and if you add a “yucca mixture they taste better. But right now the trend is to prepare them in a fatter mold and two fingers in width. After, they are filled with a thick marmalade, condensed milk or chocolate syrup. The profits increase significantly due to the flavors”.

Filled churros are the latest trend in Havana. Their prices are expensive for the middle class pocket. A churro filled with guava, mango, coconut or chocolate is approximately $5 pesos and $10 for the ones filled with condensed mild or tuna fish.

“Children are the best customers, although adults also buy often. If you want good sales you have to get a place in a central avenue or close to a children’s park as is my case”, says Eusebio. The market competition is aggressive. In his zone, there are three churro posts; so they have to become creative. “I have family in the United States and they have told me that at McDonald’s they don’t only sell hamburgers, they also do promotions. They offer children’s menus and they give toys or balloons so that gave me an idea. In my post, I will install a TV and the clerks will be dressed as clowns. If you buy three churros, you’ll get another one free”.

Perhaps you can’t compare the “fast typical Cuban food” with a Big Mac or a Pollo Tropical meal in Miami, but we can also sell ours in bulk.

Ivan Garcia

Picture – Filled churros which are now in trend in Cuba, they also like them in. countries like Spain, Mexico, Peru, USA and England. These were taken from “Los Churros: A Secret History”.

Translated by GH

21 September 2013

PITTSBURGHABANA / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

I’m already leaving Pittsburgh as if to say I am already leaving Havana. The city of hundreds of bridges, and a downtown that imitates Manhattan’s, and a steel paste coagulated in the lungs of half of the 20th century, until the slave labor in China ruined its metallurgical industry and saved that of tomato sauce. And the Penguins. And the Pirates. And the Steelers.

I’m already leaving Pittsburgh, as if to say I am already leaving the United States.

I never wanted to know the name of its rivers. That would be treason. I name the rivers when they themselves reveal their names. And they revealed them to me, one by one by one. And in the three cases it was the secret name of love. That is why I hush now. For mercy. For prudence. Because to abandon a city where one has loved is to bury in her an unknown sliver of our heart.

Here I leave it to you, Pittsburgh, so when the archeologists bring down your mountains and uncover the fossil homes with parquet floors and sinister little windows, your parks and highways still at a human scale; your hospitals, where the silence is broken only by helicopters that travel between life and death. Your universities, where even the glances are carnal and where freedom would be tangible except in books where they talk guiltily about the Cuban Revolution (and where the teachers admire Castro but denigrate the Department of State in neighboring Washington DC).

Here I leave you my Havana heart Pittsburgh; the one that you couldn’t steal after months of seclusion. The one illuminated by your northern solitude in the wee hours of the night; naked between the blinds of the crazy moon; but that now has to continue north, always north, like someone who flees blindly from the malefic magnetism of an island south of all the socialisms.

The beauty of the United States of America starts with the anachronistic feel of this city; it even looks like Pittsburgh but, really, it no longer is. The multitudes, the drunks, the almost childishly innocent bars, the pornographic websites, the community festivals and the teenagers’ tattoos (almost always fake), the pills that get you high (almost always fatal), a blimp that almost never catches fire and falls to the ground (like in my nightmares resurrected from childhood), the food that is better than most cities because it’s less American, the fluffy snow that I didn’t see, but for which I will return one of these Novembers and deeply bury myself in; like in the womb of a loved one.

It’s hard to say this, but the light in Pittsburgh allows an explosion of colors that is unthinkable in the tropics. The greens here are ephemeral and absolute. The sun is rough but noble. The fall announces itself a few days after the end of spring. I have worn an overcoat in August. I have breathed pollen. I have started the novel to end all Cuban novels. I have been happy.

Goodbye my female friend, goodbye my male friend. I could not even decipher the grammar your gender. Don’t forget my steps and bike rides through the North Side, Pittsburgh. Do not laugh at the day I heard fireworks, and I thought they were gunshots and threw myself on the floor of my room; the day when I was poisoned by a shampoo, and I thought of the silly immortality of coming to die here; alone in a huge house where the fire alarms do not even let you fry a fish-stick.

I must declare your airport the smallest in the world, and the jitteriest too. Through those jetways my wonderful memories of eternity come and go through the air.

No Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and no Wright House either.

You and me, insomniacs, accomplices in the desire and the wish to keep on surviving here; away from the suffocating concept of motherland. Incognito so that I don’t hear the despotic voices of my countrymen. In the antipodes of the Cuban Revolution.

Pittsburghabana, mon amour.

Translated by: LYD

Homosexual Prisoners Suffer Abuse and Discrimination / Frank E. Carranza Lopez in the blog of Wendy Iriepa and Ignacio Estrada

By Frank E. Carranza Lopez, Agencia Decoro

(www.miscelaneasdecuba.net) — The alarming news came to us from Fausto de la Caridad Urbay, President of the LGBT Liberal Youth of Cuba Front.

He is denied visits to gay prisoners at the HIV/AIDS special prison, located a mile from the Maraguaco highway to San Jose de las Lajas in the province Mayabeque. This prison has 5 internal sections, four for men and one for women.

On 2 August 2013, he went to Section #2, medium security (the most populous of the prison) to visit for four hours with family and friends of the inmates. For years inmates have enjoyed this privilege without hindrance. Most inmates are gay and along with visits from their family receive visits from their respective partners.

Imagine the astonishment of the visitors when, after waiting some hours for official entry, they were told that by superior orders only family members could visit and no one else. The discontent caused quite a commotion, followed by crude threats from the officials of internal order (FOI), to which the families responded by asking to see the director of the penitentiary, Jorge Luis Castillo. He did not show his face and instead sent his second in command, who called himself Álvaro, and who, upset and disrespectful to the gay community, told them, and I quote, “Castillo is Castillo and I’m me and I don’t care to allow gay partners to visit here and if you don’t like it you can complain as much as or wherever you want and it won’t do you any good, I’m in charge here.”

After several minutes of protest, he decided to pass on the food the visitors had brought, warning that this would be the last time and not to take the trouble of returning.

Many of those prisoners are of the type called charity cases (with no family), and only receive visits from their homosexual partners.

Currently the discontent within the facility is growing, daily irritation increases, after the surprise inspection of high officials from the Cuban Interior Ministry (MININT) triggered by a complaint issued on June 27 by CUBANET, any return of the previous visitors makes things worse.

The repression increased, the food returned to its original inedible and indescribable state, vitamin K disappeared again along with injectable Dipirona, and as if that weren’t enough it seems the deputy director of the prison, Señor Álvaro, carried out a coup d’etat against his superior and won, playing the part of the Grim Reaper with the threads of the lives of the inmates who require specialized care given their state as patients with HIV/AIDS.

10 August 2013

Latest Cuban Ministry of Health Statistics for HIV/AIDS / Wendy Iriepa and Ignacio Estrada

Total number of people living with HIV/AIDS: 18,261
Total foreigners detected: 675

Havana:
Total Persons with HIV/AIDS: 8,660
Diagnosed 2012: 625
Total AIDS Cases: 3,765
People Living with HIV/AIDS: 6,982
Ambulatory Care System: 5,988

Total deaths: 1,434
Deaths from AIDS: 1,321
Deaths from Other Causes: 113

Children in the Study: 74
HIV-positive children: 16

Average Age of Most Affected: 20 – 24

Infected practicing transactional sex: 641, which is 7.3% of infected cases .

Province with greatest number of persons engaged in prostitution:
Las Tunas with 116 cases; 27.4 %
Holguin 138 cases; 17.5 %
Camagüey 130 cases;17 %
Cienfuegos 74 cases; 17 %
Isle of Youth 25 cases; 14.4 %
Santa Clara – Figure Unconfirmed
Santiago de Cuba – Figure Unconfirmed
Guantanamo – Figure Unconfirmed
Havana – Population cannot be estimated because of transience.

In 2012 in Cuba 108 HIV-positive women gave birth.

Major Causes of Death :
– Poor Adherence to Therapeutics
– Loss of Observation
– Late Diagnosis

Cuba keeps open a total of 3 Sanitariums from a total of 14 that existed from the 1980s through 2005.

Cuba today has a total of 6 Prisons for Prisoners with HIV/AIDS compared to one existing at the end of the 1990s in the city of Santa Clara.

With a varying criminal population, between 400-675 inmates have HIV/AID; fewer of them are women. One of the routes of infection is self-inoculation [in regular prisons to escape that prison environment].

Cuba offers Antiretroviral Treatment to about 5,000 people. They have a CD4 cell count below 350.

Cuba has never been able to reduce nor has it shown a reduction in the rate of diagnosis since the diagnosis of the first cases. This figure is constantly growing.

8 July 2013

Merchant, That Dirty Word / Yoani Sanchez

If reality could personify itself, climb into a body, have physical contours. If a society could be represented by a living being, ours would be a growing adolescent. Someone who will stretch out his arms and legs and throw off paternalism to become an adult. But that beardless boy is wearing clothes so tight they hardly let him breathe. Our daily life has been compressed by the corset of a legality with excessive prohibitions and by an ideology as outdated as it is dysfunctional. This is how I would draw the Cuba of today, this pubescent but repressed form would represent the context I live in.

The governmental trend is not moving to recognize our needs for economic and political expansion. Rather it is trying try to squeeze us into absurd molds. This is the case with the limited occupations allowed to self-employed workers, the sector that in any other country would be classified as “private.” Instead of expanding the number of licenses to included many other productive activities and services, the authorities are trying to cut reality to fit within the accepted list. The law doesn’t work to encourage creativity and talent, but rather to constrain the limits of entrepreneurship.

The latest example of this contradiction is seen in the operations against those who sell imported clothes, primarily from Ecuador and Panama. According to the official media, many of these merchants are licensed as “Tailors,” which allows them to market articles coming from their own sewing machines; and instead they offer industrially manufactured blouses, pants and bags. Violators are punished by confiscation of their merchandise plus heavy fines. The inspectors attempt, in this way, to force our reality into the straitjacket regulated by the Official Gazette.

Why, instead of so much persecution, don’t they authorize the work of “merchant.” Buying, transporting and reselling articles in high-demand should not be a crime, but rather a regulated activity that also contributes to the treasury through taxes. To deny this key piece in the machinery of any society is to misunderstand how to structure its economic fabric. The legal framework of a nation shouldn’t condemn it to the infancy of timbiriches — tiny Mom-and-Pop stands — and to the manufacture and sale of churros, but rather it should help us expand professionally and materially. As long as the Cuban government doesn’t accept the ABCs of development, our reality must grow and stretch its arms towards illegalities and the underground market.

22 September 2013