Warning Signal / Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antunez

Archive photo

By: Jorge Luis García Pérez Antúnez, Orlando Zapata Tamayo National Civic Resistance and Civil Disobedience Front. FNRC-OZT

Attention, attention: Never has Cuba been so close to freedom, but never like now has danger loomed that can be cut short and mediated by opportunistic efforts, lacks of faith and even the occasional traitor added to this clear and shameful pact with the Castros…

If we do not stop this dirty and unpatriotic plot in time the results will be the huge fraud-change fraud where the continuity of the Castro regime will be guaranteed when descendants of the leaders of the regime and certain opportunists from here and there will divide up the nation like the booty of corsairs and pirates.

We won’t allow them to eliminate the Cuban resistance. The memory of our fallen and the sacrifice of our compatriots deserve respect and they can’t sit at a negotiating table. I speak on behalf of those who are opposed to a reconciliation without justice first.

As one of the most important Cuban resistance slogans say: I do want real change.

Placetas, 18 July 2013.

19 July 2013

Castro vs. the Cuban People: Where was the President? / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Photo courtesy of Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Photo courtesy of Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

With a speech that lasted 35 minutes, Commander in Chief Raúl Castro destroyed the very last traces of the New Man that would complete the 1959 Castroist revolution. In doing so he created a paradox in which a leader accused the masses of living without moral and civic values: Without honesty or decency or shame or modesty or honor or sensitivity or solidarity.

Raúl Castro (who is also the First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party and President of the Council of State) made this condemnatory speech on July 7 during the 8th Legislature of the National Parliament. At times, the General seemed to be on the verge of ordering an ethnic cleansing of the Cuban nation. He threatened to impose discipline at any cost, even though we Cubans are used to that after more than half a century of watching the government use repression as a mechanism for creating consensus and governability.

So, the governing elite is now discovering that the island is in ruins, and that its raw human material is reprobate at best, guilty of: Theft, impunity, squatting, black-market dealing, noncompliance with working hours, illegal slaughter of livestock and endangered species, breeding animals in the city, hoarding products in short supply and reselling them at higher prices, illegal gambling, bribery and perks, harassment of tourists, computer hacking, drunkenness, swearing, and littering in public (as well as defecating and urinating in parks and on the street), graffiti, pounding music, academic fraud, vandalization of phone booths and pylons and even drains and traffic signs…

For speeches similar to Raúl Castro’s most recent one (what we can call a Cubanicide), many people who are critical of the socialist system have been officially punished with ostracism, stigmatization, jail, exile, and death.

The question that never gets answered is this: Where were brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro while Cuba was falling to pieces? Were they ignorant or inefficient or indolent?

From Sampsonia Way Magazine

22 July 2013

One Year After the Scaffold / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Oswaldo Paya at the entrance of the National Assembly of Popular Power in Havana. (CUBAOUT.WORDPRESS.COM)
Oswaldo Paya at the entrance of the National Assembly of Popular Power in Havana. (CUBAOUT.WORDPRESS.COM)

I waited until the end of the line, after hundreds of mourners had filed past his casket. It was the month of July, criminally hot. In the Savior of the World parish in Havana’s Cerro municipality, the wake was being held for the founder of the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL): Oswaldo Payá, 1952-2012.

I bent over the glass of the humble box. There was the national flag, with its ever repressive geometry of blue and white bars, and that red triangle with the star like a predatory eye. The odor of dead flowers was unbearable, along with the hypocritical incense of a Church whose Cardinal is today almost a minister of the already fifty-year-old Communist government, turning his back to the faithful as at so many other times in our national history.

I looked at the face of Oswaldo Payá. He had a bruise on his left cheek. Among the Cuban exile, he was accused of being a supporter of the Castro regime for working for a peaceful transition to democracy :from law to law,” one that would redeem the truth and not end up in the fraud-change of exchanging one military caudillo for another in a suit in tie. In the ranks of the opposition, he was criticized for the virtuoso vehemence of this convictions. The loneliness of that fresh corpse was typical of our martyrs.

I thought about how the life of the young MCL leader named Harold Cepero had been claimed along with his. And at this point it was as if Oswaldo Payá looked at me with guilt, without needing to open his eyelids, heavy as backdrops.

At that moment I had a sweeping vision, inspired by the radio address I had just heard in the voice of his even younger daughter, Rosa María Payá, who announced to the world, with pain but great self-possession, that after decades of surveillance and constant threats, her father had been attacked, as demonstrated by the text messages sent to Sweden and Spain by the two foreign survivors of the “accident.”

In my vision, Oswaldo Payá was taken from the rental car he was traveling in and tried in situ by a military court, which condemned him to death without letting him speak, to satisfy the old personal vengeance of the Commander in Chief of the Revolution who never forgave him for being a free and happy man inside Cuba, capable of collecting more than 25,000 signatures against him, of speaking without fear but without hatred in his heart on receiving the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, and being on the point of receiving of receiving the greatly deserved Nobel Peace Prize (a title that Fidel Castro always coveted for himself).

Then, a trickle of blood began to flow from the left ear of Oswaldo Payá, streaming down his neck to settle in the pocket of his shirt. No one else saw it in the church packed with opponents of the regime, foreign press and infiltrated secret agents (all indistinguishable in more ways than one). Without realizing it I started to cry. The tears ran down my cheeks, I was powerless to control them. People called me from abroad and I reported crying, although I wouldn’t say I felt sad; I was just devastated. What had begun with some guerrillas who executed without trail since long before 1959, now ended with a State assassination, meanwhile investors in the free world are already counting their money to invest, seeing themselves investing as the saviors of the last totalitarian utopia on Earth.

The MCL’s Varela Project, the idea of reducing the tyranny by ordering it to comply with its own legislation, still exists today, and no Cuban official (not today and not tomorrow) will have legitimacy as long as the National Assembly of People’s Power does not comply with what it stipulates, and recognizes that this citizen’s petition came to them from within the framework of the constitution. This legacy of Oswaldo Payá will survive the Castro brothers. And even the capitalism-without-human-right that is being tested today in order to enthrone it after the Castros.

It is quite possible their crime will go unpunished in legal terms. But the lives of Harold Cepero and Oswaldo Payá (having been torn away as in my vision or in some other cruel way) are already a living gospel, patrimony of all Cubans, so that the violence of the State will be incinerated in Cuba along with the last of the green-executioner uniforms of State Security.

Translated from Diario de Cuba. Note: This is a longer version of an article that appeared a few days ago in the Prague Post.

22 July 2013

Just Another Sunday / Rebeca Monzo

Due to media secrecy, which is institutionalized here on “my beloved planet,” we have had to find out about this mess, involving Cuba’s “sugary missiles” on board a North Korean ship, in snippets from here and there.  Naturally, this has exacerbated our native tendency towards speculative imagination.

In the end, another Sunday has caught us by surprise which, for me, is the most boring day of the week.  I always promised myself that if one day a gentleman suitor should approach me named Domingo*, and I like him so much that I couldn’t leave him, I’d call him Tito.  Maybe something similar happens to you, especially in the evening hours, when the imminence of a new Monday at work approaches us.

Well, if you’re also a member of the club for those who can’t stand Sundays, why not spend a little time today on your family and flatter them with a simple yet delicious recipe made by your own hands, thus turning Sunday into something less ordinary?  Here you have my suggestion:

Coffee custard

Ingredients:

1 liter of fresh milk

1 cup of sugar

4 tablespoons of cornstarch

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

4 eggs

1 demitasse of brewed instant coffee

1 cinnamon stick

1 lemon peel

Procedure:

Boil the milk together with the cinnamon and lemon peel.  Lower to medium heat and add the four egg yolks and cornstarch, which should be dissolved in a small amount of milk or water.  Pour this mix into the milk, while gently stirring it with a wooden spoon to prevent lumps from forming.  Once you have a smooth consistency, add the vanilla extract and coffee, while gently stirring.  Lower the heat.  Make a meringue with the egg whites of the four eggs.  Remember: it’s two teaspoons of sugar for each egg white.  You can add lemon zest.  Once it’s ready, bring small dollops of the meringue to a flame with a fork, to make toasted meringues to decorate the custard with.

Bon apétit!

* Translator’s note: Domingo is a common first name in the Spanish-speaking world ; domingo is also the Spanish word for Sunday.

 Translated by: Yoyi el Monaguillo

21 July 2013

Waiting for “the boat” / Miriam Celaya

Ghost ship. Graphic taken from the internet

These days, mothers of babies are in search of disposable diapers, missing from almost all stores of Havana. Shortage crises of such articles take place every once in a while, a product that is so useful, and needed so desperately by mothers today, and despite being marketed only in convertible currency. Gone are the days when women had to boil with soap again and again our children’s antiseptic cloth diapers, and hang them in the sun to keep them pure. Fortunately, these days women have left behind slave labor to take up, as far as possible, the benefits of innovations, however expensive that may imply in Cuba.

But the same is true with other essential items, such as sanitary napkins and cleaning articles like mopping cloths, descaling products, toothpaste, detergents and toilet paper, among others, whose intermittent disappearances from store shelves become a nuisance to the people, given how much time is wasted in pursuing such products, going from store to store, many times without results.

On the other hand, some other popular products that are more “economical”, such as butter — for months absent at the foreign currency stores, the only place where it could be purchased — some chopped poultry (such as Canadian chopped turkey, the most popular), hot dogs, and many others, without any explanation on the part of store management… and even fewer explanations through the official “information” media.

Cubans, with a deep awareness of insularity, sown from the very beginning of the colony, without information about what drives these empty spaces on store shelves, and for decades used to not having anything produced here and everything coming “from outside”, have coined a phrase, half joke and half truth, to explain the shortages: “the boat has not arrived”. A kind of imaginary vessel that could come full of anything that has disappeared, from flour, needed to make bread (oh, the favored bread, the first point in the Cuban political agenda!) even the spices that caused so many wars in antiquity and, for many here, almost entirely unknown, or oil with which we cook our humble daily rice. Just comment anywhere that there is a shortage of anything for the popular answer to make its appearance: “they are waiting for the boat…”

A grocer in my neighborhood is of the opinion that we don’t need for the boat to arrive, but a flotilla to take us all out of this Island, while an illegal loudmouthed street vendor of air freshener and clothespins disagrees and has an easier solution: “Nah, with just one boat they can take all of THEM and their relatives, and you will see that then there won’t be any shortages!” In our Cuban cryptic language we all know who “THEY” are. These are quaint touches of everyday life that begin and end in such a castaway complicity as sterile as the system itself.

So, these days, Havana mothers anxiously await “the boat” of disposable diapers with which to alleviate, at least to the extent allowed by each pocketbook, the burden of keeping babies clean and neat, without ruining hands, nails, and wasting time in the process. And meanwhile, they pray that soap and many other cleaning products won’t fall in the cycle of disappearances, just in case the ever-awaited “boat” is delayed.

Translated by Norma Whiting
19 July 2013

Dances / Regina Coyula

Young people want a break in the routine. They are on vacation. What are the options?

Rafael, 19, is a student. His Federation of University Student (FEU) card facilitated his entry into some places for a lower price. La Cecilia, El Diablo TunTun, Café Cantante at the National Theater are in this category, but if you don’t arrive early, other more savvy college students fill the FEU quota of five or ten Cuban pesos (~ 20¢ to 40¢ USD) per person, and the entry fee stays the same but in Cuban Convertible Pesos (about $5 to $10 USD).*

Several places are the trendsetters. Once a month Parque Villalón brings together the lovers of electronic music with the DJ Lejardi y Analógica with their Fiestas Uniks. It’s a public park, it’s free, and the urban tribes of G Street go down to Villalón for lack of anything better. Both projects have spaces in the Tropical Gardens for twenty pesos.

The rock is concentrated at the Maxim Rock, with an almost always metalcore sound, and the Yellow Submarine and Stairway to Heaven has nostalgic rock. Cover bands alternate with recorded music, there are also bands with original music. In these places the entry price between 30 and 75 Cuban pesos.

The Alamar Amphitheater and the Metropolitan Park are places for hip hop. Apparently, they are the least favored, with both places weather dependent.

The young trova have the Casona de Línea. Trova and fusion music alternate in many places: Café Cantante, El Sauce, La Cecilia, Morro-Cabaña Park, Barbaram … At Café Bertolt Brecht and La Zorra y El Cuervo mix jazz and fusion. Entry is between 25 and 100 Cuban pesos.

Projects like PMM, Havanashow, Fiestahabana, with recorded music, powerful equipment, smoke machines and foam are a good party idea for many young people. The Copa Room of the Riviera, El Pedregal, at 3rd and 8th and at 7th and 22nd are some of the places where these projects are presented. The price of these parties varies between 3 and 5 CUCs, although they usually have more economical presentations for youth activities.

Timba and reggaeton dancers have the Salon Rosado at the Tropical, and the Casa de la Musica on Galiano with live groups; here the prices are from 50 Cuban pesos at the Salon Rosado, up to 10 CUC in the Casa de la Musica, if the artists are famous like Baby Lores or Gente d Zone.

Private businesses begin to appear in the list of preferences. Buddha bar at the back of La Cabaña with an excellent price (25 Cuban pesos) and good atmosphere, is very popular despite its remote location.

The nightclubs in the hotels and recreational centers are big. You can also forget about distance and the carrying on if you get a stereo, put the amplifiers facing the street and torment the neighbors according to the decibels your equipment puts out. It’s free and all, ‘n’ nothin’ happens.

Translator’s note: The average monthly wage in Cuba is less than 500 Cuban pesos. 1 CUC is worth about 24 Cuban pesos.

19 July 2013

Cyber-bembes / Rosa Maria Rodriguez

http://actualidad.rt.com/actualidad/view/84710-rusia-agencia-internet-reglas

On June 4, the 118 Internet centers that had been announced in the State press begin operating in Cuba. As I receive the newspaper Granma on Mondays I get Juventud Rebelde, Trabajadores and Tribuna de La Habana, several days earlier I began to search the newspaper, which should have information about the places that would offer the services, the addresses, but as of the writing of this text, nothing has appeared; why?

The downpours of the five days prior to the date in the western provinces drowned my ability to access the network during that time in places where usually I connect and so I do not know if in the foreign press showed the list to which I refer. Maybe the leaders hoped that foreign tourists come to navigate the Cuban cyber waters and for this they maintained discretion.

The fact is that the government media did not pay much attention to the issue. It could be that the silence that is due to a Party direction, perhaps thinking, from their disconnected cloud, that it might produce social congestion at these access points and are trying to avoid it with silence.

It is also possible that, on the contrary, they forgot to coordinate with the newspaper editors — which is unlikely — in order to “give abundant air” to the news in question. There is also possible, even more remote, if we take into account the tight control over the media by the authorities, and that the indifference is due to how distant the Internet is for the majority of the citizens, the excessive process of computer and telephone equipment, and that computers are almost never offered for sale in this country. Generally computers are imported by the minority of Cubans who can travel abroad.

The so-called southern television (TeleSUR) that is weighs on me to mention, committed and manipulated and whose north is leftist propaganda, mentioned the fact with great media fanfare on one of their news broadcasts, and assured that the opening of these cyber centers is part of the process of the “computerization of Cuba.”

If in the national media they claim there are already around two million cellphone users, why not include these potential navigators who already have the tools to set sail? As always happens in dictatorships, the paralyzing fear, secrecy, rights violated with extremist caution, and the unjustified deception on the pretext that “the enemy is listening,” are already very fragile arguments in a globally interconnected world.

This Monday the 10th the newspaper Granma mentioned for the first time that there was a cybercafe in the Focsa Building, with 9 seats for internauts. Where are the others?

The bembé is a religious festival of the Yoruba pantheon inherited from ethnic groups uprooted from Africa and we incorporate it into the Cuban cultural monuments. The news of cybersurfing points, however, wasn’t the celebration that many had anticipated. We’re left, then, with continuing the long and patient wait because everyone uses that service with the tools at their disposal, without ridiculous prohibitive pattakíes or discrimination, to celebrate with all Cuban users the respect of one of the fundamental rights on the part of the Cuban dictatorship, which constitute a real national celebration.

11 June 2013

Oswaldo Paya: The Act of Serving / Luis Felipe Rojas

Note: I published this a year ago and have nothing to say I didn’t say them, I have reposted the text (on the anniversary of his death).

Still dazed and in shock I compose these words to Oswaldo. When I started to get the first messages about Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas’s death they were showing the film “War Horse,” and in one of the scenes a soldier leaves his foxhole to save his charger and before the imminence of his death he is praying parts of the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” as if nothing should be lacking now to someone who is and well be a man-bridge, man-dialog, man-country.

The messages clogged my phone with the hashtag #OswaldoPayá and the mention ©OswaldoPaya. The questions of friends from every corner of the island and of the world. The police cordon at the hospital in Bayama, the details of the fatal incident, the doubts of a witness about a supposed police chase, the construction crews in the middle of the road on the El Naranjo curve. The questions. The answers. The words. The damn words.

It’s difficult to think of Payá and not go back to the now well-known EFE Agency photo where he, Antonio Díaz Sánchez and Regis Iglesia, on that 10th of May 2012, are approaching the site of the National Assembly of People’s Power to deliver the 11,025 signatures of citizens who supported the Varela Project.

There was the map of tomorrow’s Cuba. I say that because now the faces of the three blend together for me with those of hundreds of anonymous opponents, without a visible mark for the “mass media” merrymaking, those who gave birth to and collected these desires.

The most insignificant of the Cuban dissidents saw pass through their hands a form, a copy, or a summary of the range of strategies that Payá wanted to tune into so that Cuba would be different. Along with virtues, defects and contradictions, there was his greatness. The Cuban regime had to move, in an acrobatic high-wire act to the people to amend those articles that gave a glimpse of freedom and that were a dead letter in the Constitution until Oswaldo Payá grabbed hold of them.

The Varela Project was a lever that moved the country

I think of Payá, but also of Osmel Rodríguez (The Chinaman Manicaragua), of Ezequiel Morales and Juan Carlos Reyes Ocaña, of the Ferrer-García brothers and of the hundreds of Cubans who armed with courage went out through our dark country to seek signatures for the Varela Project, to spark the desire to be free or to dream with this treasure that is freedom.

I didn’t support all of Payá’s initiatives, and for this I won his friendship. The first time we met he listened to my arguments without interruption. In 2007 he invited me to review the draft of something he’d been “cooking up” for months and I still appreciate that gesture, that cunning to get me to participate. From that time he called me and I him.

The first close people who talked to me about him were Father Olbier Hernández and Deacon Andrés Tejeda who described him as a contradictory being, helpful, a rebuilding. They and the way in which the former American president Jimmy Carter in some way presented him on that day in 2002* in the Great Hall of the University of Havana depicted the face of Payá Sardiñas in the tapestry of an inclusive Cuba for everyone. It will come, we will have to find it together.

*Translator’s note: Jimmy Carter was allowed to address the Cuban people on live TV and took the opportunity to praise Oswaldo Payá and the Varela Project.

22 July 2013

Everything Ready for Fidel Castro’s Funeral / Juan Juan Almeida

A group of Cuban-American congressional representatives has formally requested that Washington deny a visa to Fidel Castro’s heir, Antonio Castro Soto del Valle. Rather than being concerned about the son’s entry to the United States, the island’s government seems more focused on his father’s exit from this world.

Yes, the father’s farewell. The former Commander-in-Chief’s curious fascination with death and funerary trappings has reached such a level of outrageousness that some time ago he ordered the creation of a special commission (obviously headed by himself) to organize and supervise the perfect execution of what will be his funeral.

Though only in the planning stage, this adiós is already enough to satisfy the voracious appetite of even Francois Rabelais’ fictional giant, Pantagruel. Communism’s dying superstar loves to compartmentalize. As a security measure the various parties involved have not yet been allowed to meet to design what the deceased-to-be foresees as a ceremony replete with the solemnity and precision of a Swiss watch.

The key military component seems more than ready. The same goes for the twenty-one gun salute, the eulogies, the mournful ceremony, and the band fully outfitted with conductor and musicians, some of whom will be dressed in black while others will be in military fatigues.

Of course, as in any other official parade, popular participation will be obligatory and massive. On this occasion, however, there is sure to be a formidable contingent of mimes serving as portrait bearers, mourners and weepers who, between sobs, will be sure to spontaneously chant the characteristic slogans we must not forget. These include: Cuba yes, Yankees no; Long live Fidel; Fatherland or death; Socialism or death; The ten million will…* no, sorry, probably not that one.

To avoid surprises and keep the machine well-oiled, the Ministry of the Interior, the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution regularly review two chapters of a plan whose titles share a certain association with combat missions: “Actions to Safeguard the Physical Integrity of the Nation” and “Preserving Order.”

The author of Reflections has expended so much energy on this mega madness — one we hope will be his last — that Saturday, July 13 and today, Monday, July 14 he attempted to immortalize the spot once used as his speaking platform by closing the entrances to the José Martí Memorial in the Plaza of the Revolution to the public to carry out a pair of rehearsals for the Pharaonic entombment. This was done in spite of the fact that children’s activities had previously been scheduled to take place there the entire summer. In addition to reviewing details for the ill-fated ceremony, the not-yet-deceased sought to analyze, select and personally authorize the various pieces of film footage on his life and work to be broadcast on Cuban television during the period of national mourning.

What remains unclear is the proximity of the guests to the coffin. Every time there is a new rehearsal, he changes the arrangement — crowned heads, heads of state and heads of government — breaking all the rules of protocol, making adjustments based solely on the way that, according to the prophet, each will behave.

The gentleman designated to carry out the plan noted in a jocular and somewhat theatrical way that so much of the decision-making has been concentrated in the hands of the soon-to-be deceased himself that it was hindering his ability to respond to changes which — due to paranoia, superstition, belief or bi-polar disorder — have evolved from embalming to burial to that Olympian bonfire, cremation.

*Translator’s note: The Harvest of Ten Million was a failed 1970 campaign which marshalled all the island’s resources in an effort to produce ten million tons of sugar.

19 July 2013

10 Questions for the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) / Reinaldo Escobar

At the end of this morning’s TV news magazine, Buenos Dias, conspicuously absent in the official Cuban media was the issue of the North Korean ship loaded with missiles. I am absolutely certain that the coming days will produce nothing like a press conference with the Minister of the Armed Forces to respond to questions from foreign journalists accredited on the Island, not even with the accomplices of the national press. However, I would like to make public, in this small space, what my questions would be, should I be given the opportunity to present them to the minister in question face to face.

  1. Do you consider that contracting with North Korea for armaments repair services is consistent with the policy or replacing imports set out in the guidelines from the 6th Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC)?
  2. Does Cuba lack the technical facilities and personnel capable of maintaining combat readiness of the armaments available for the defense of the Homeland?
  3. To what point does the obsolescence of our munitions affect the often proclaimed military invulnerability of Cuba?
  4. What elements were taken into consideration in choosing North Korea as a destination to repair our armaments instead of contracting this service out to Russia, where they were built?
  5. Is it true that in the agreements signed by the Cuban government with the USSR there is a commitment established not to re-export the arms acquired?
  6. The note from the Foreign Ministry (MINREX) mentions that there were two complete rockets on board the North Korean ship. Were they so entirely broken that they had to be shipped in their entirety to be repaired?
  7. Is the fact that the weapons were covered with sugar an intent to mask the military cargo, or is it a new method of taking advantage of the space?
  8. To what extent does the Cuban government share the responsibility for not having informed Panama what was being transported in the holds of the ship?
  9. In the contract signed to repair these armaments in North Korea did the government of Cuba introduce any clause about the discretion, any warning, that would prevent the North Koreans from doing something else with these weapons?
  10. At what level was this high-risk operation organized? Was it your personal decision or was it known to president Raul Castro?

19 July 2013

In Cuba, Oswaldo Payá’s name lives on / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Rosa Maria Paya and Ofelia Acevedo at the funeral of Oswaldo Paya / Photo OLPL
Rosa Maria Paya and Ofelia Acevedo at the funeral of Oswaldo Paya / Photo OLPL

I waited in a queue of hundreds of mourners marching past the coffin below the chief altar. It was a deadly hot July day. The parish of El Salvador del Mundo in the Cerro municipality of Havana held a funeral wake for the founder of the Christian Liberation Movement Oswaldo Payá, 1952-2012.

I looked at Payá’s face. His left cheek was bruised. He was lying there – the man whom the Cuban exile accused of adherence to the Castro ideology due to his endeavor to achieve a peaceful transition to democracy “from law to law,” one that would redeem the truth and wouldn’t end up in a mock exchange of one military leader for another, this time wearing a suit and tie. Payá was also criticized by opposition members for defending his convictions too vehemently – a virtue they mistook for authoritarianism. His corpse was now lying there in solitude, so typical of martyrs.

Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero
Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero

I thought of the young MCL leader, Harold Cepero, who lost his life with Payá. At that moment I felt as if he had looked at me, guiltily, without opening his dead eyes. The heavy curtain of his eyelids has been dropped forever.

I had an overpowering vision inspired in a speech I had just heard, a speech made by Payá’s daughter, Rosa Maria (even younger than the deceased boy). Despite going through great pain, she announced quite calmly to the world that her father had been assassinated after decades of receiving threats and living under constant surveillance. To support her indictment, she also mentioned the text messages sent by the two survivors of the fake “accident” to their home countries, Sweden and Spain.

In my vision, Oswaldo Payá was taken out of the car he was traveling in and was put on an in situ trial by a military tribunal. He was sentenced to death without having a chance to defend himself. The commander-in-chief of the revolution, who had never forgiven Payá for living a free and happy life, thus completed the old personal vendetta against a man who was able to gather more than 25,000 signatures against the regime, a man who spoke fearlessly and without hatred in his heart upon receiving the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, a man who had won nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize – the award that Fidel Castro used to covet before he became a senile old man.

Quiet tears ran down my cheeks, and it was impossible to control them. I wouldn’t say I felt sad; I was just devastated. I realized that what started out as a guerrilla movement with barbaric executions without trial long before 1959 has now ended up in an assassination ordered by the government. And businessmen from the free world keep counting and recounting the money they are planning to invest here in the island to become saviors of the last leftist utopia in the world.

It should be noted that the Varela Project of the Christian Liberation Movement, whose idea was to reduce the tyranny of the totalitarian regime by forcing the government to comply with its own laws, is still valid, and no Cuban official will ever gain legitimacy unless the National Assembly of People’s Power complies with the legislative provisions and acknowledges the lawfulness of this public petition, which has been delivered to it in compliance with the Constitution. The Varela Project is Payá’s legacy that will survive both Castro brothers as well as their successor: the capitalism without human rights that they are currently testing in Cuba.

It is quite possible that the crime will go unpunished in terms of the law. Yet, the lives of Harold Cepero and Oswaldo Payá, regardless of whether they were ended as I envisioned or in any another cruel way, have become a kind of a gospel, a heritage shared by all Cubans symbolizing their desire to burn all violence perpetrated by the State on a pile of green uniforms of State Security executioners.

– Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo is a journalist and blogger living in Cuba.

Published in English in The Prague Post

18 July 2013

Independent March in Front of the Capitol Demands Gay Marriage / Lilianne Ruiz

Independent LGBT activists marched before the Capitol this weekend — photo by  Lilianne Ruiz

HAVANA, Cuba, July 2nd 2013, Lilianne Ruiz / www.cubanet.org — In concurrence with Gay Pride Day, celebrated worldwide every 28th of June, a dozen activists marched past the Capitol last Saturday, led by Leannes Imbert Acosta, director of the LGBT community’s Rights Observatory. Afterwards, they continued the march towards the Paseo del Prado, carrying the rainbow flag.

At this event, the protesters wore slogans supporting marriage between persons of the same sex.  Imbert Acosta had this to say:

“This year the march brings up the topic of marriage between persons of the same sex.  We are announcing the beginning of a campaign to collect at least ten thousand signatures, in order to later present a legal initiative before the National Assembly of Popular Power to grant the right to enter into matrimony to same-sex couples.”

The LGBT Observatory of Cuba since 2011 has called for the march around Gay Pride Day, not only for people in the LGBT community, but also for any citizen who identifies with the cause of ending discrimination on basis of sexual orientation.  Regarding this and other rights, Imbert Acosta stated:

“What we are asking for is not the right to be gays or lesbians… We demand that, being gays and lesbians, the State and society recognize the totality of our rights. One does not lose one’s religious dimension, nor political, nor legal personality by expressing a homosexual orientation. Sexuality is one human dimension, just as are all the others.  Historically we have been discriminated against for cultural, religious, and political reasons.  Nonetheless, a homosexual person must also have the right to share in culture, religion, and politics, as well as enter into matrimony, in the same way and for the same reasons as would a heterosexual couple.”

Asked about the role of the CENESEX official (National Center of Sexual Education) in this sense, Acosta comments:

“Mariela Castro, daughter of the Cuban president, serves more as a government spokesperson to the LGBT community than as a representative of the LGBT community to the government.  It is a means of maintaining control.  Hence many times the title of political group stigmatizes us because we are not in agreement with the Center that she directs.  Nevertheless, we have tried to build bridges for dialogue and they are the ones who have refused, alleging that we visit diplomatic offices, to which we respond that Mrs. Castro also does the same.  We have talked with transsexuals who are affiliated with the center and they tell us that they recognize that CENESEX does not authentically represent the interests of the LGBT community, but they allege that they need their operation (surgical sex change).

“On the other hand, Mrs. Castro does call on the march for World Day Against Homophobia to dance the conga with slogans in support of socialism, which as we all know is the political system which her family heads.  So, she is making a political campaign with the interests of the community.”

Mariela Castro is currently deputy of the National Assembly of Popular Power.  She has expressed on multiple occasions that CENESEX already put forth a draft bill before the National Assembly, “But,” comments Imbert Acosta, “in every case, it only contemplates civil recognition, not marriage as such.  And that is another of the matters that we wish to clarify today.  At the least, we, the non-officially allied LGBT activists of the island and many members of the community, want marriage, not just a civil union law which would leave us where we are situated, in a situation of disadvantage in matters of rights compared to heterosexuals.”

Although it is true that the authorities have not intervened directly against the protesters, it is known that they have made warnings to possible participants to keep them from marching.

A police warning can discourage many in a country with iron control by the State.

By Lilianne Ruiz

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Translated by Russell Conner

6 July 2013

Who Are the New Rich? / Rebeca Monzo

Painting by H. Catá

As I was reading a newspaper article in today’s Granma written by a journalist named de la Hoz, I could not help but smile at the apparent cynicism.

This journalist identified symbols of what he described as “the new rich” such as the use, and in some cases perhaps ostentatious display, of things that in other societies would be considered perfectly normal. These include taking a ham sandwich and cola to school for the afternoon snack, or perhaps wearing a pair of brand-name shoes like those for sale for hard currency in many of the city’s stores. These shoes are undoubtedly of better quality and more durable than most which are for sale also in CUC at much lower prices but which are of much poorer quality. I can understand how a parent who can make the sacrifice will try to buy the most durable items, the ones whose labels are not simply decorative but presumably indicate a certain level of quality.

This reporter seems to have forgotten that just a few years ago the only students taking nice snacks to school were driven there by chauffeurs and sported backpacks and clothes with foreign labels. They were the children of high-ranking officials, the ones people called “los hijitos de papá” or Daddy’s kids. I live in Nuevo Vedado, a neighborhood where I have always been surrounded by these children since they attended the same school as my sons, who enjoyed none of their privileges — a situation I always found myself having to explain to them but which they were never able to understand.

I still remember the look of astonishment on the face of my older son when, as an adolescent, he came home from school with stories he heard about a birthday party for the fifteen-year-old daughter of a comandante who had closed off their street, brought in a mechanical organ and filled the swimming pool at their house with flowers. There was also an enormous buffet shared with kids in military service who served as waiters. This happened during the worst of the Special Period. It was just one of any number of examples of similar neighborhood parties, which coincidentally all took place in the homes of high-ranking officials. These were the same officials who would later move to Miramar and Siboney* so they could be more discreet.

But getting back to the previous subject of school snacks, they are almost non-existent, so meager and of such poor quality that it is inconceivable that they could take the place of lunch, as has been proposed. It is for this reason that many parents — a majority, in fact — make sacrifices and jump through hoops to see to it that their children have a “decent” snack consisting of a ham and cheese sandwich and a soft drink. I do not understand why the journalist in question claims this is a privilege that only parents who own private businesses can afford, especially since entire families are engaged in these enterprises.

If we are witnessing improper and indiscriminate displays of so-called symbols of power, it is due precisely to the bad examples to which average citizens have served as onlookers and not as participants. One should keep in mind that today the difference is that they are paid for by working parents who are self-employed, artists, athletes and others, and not by those previously mentioned. It would also be useful to point out that, if they paid people decent salaries that reflected the actual cost of living and the country were economically productive, everyone would have the same opportunities to improve not only their children’s school snacks but the quality of family life too and, in the end, all of society.

*Translator’s note: Miramar is a neighborhood which was home to Havana’s wealthiest citizens before the revolution and today houses numerous foreign embassies. Siboney is an affluent neighborhood favored by members of the Cuban military.

18 July 2013