Month: June 2015

“The Municipal Baseball Commission doesn’t give anything. Let alone pay me a salary. Only when we became champions did they come up with a box of sandwiches for the boys’ snack. The coaches and parents do everything. Weed the field and patch it, get balls, gloves and bats. And pay for making uniforms. Many parents do it for two reasons: if your son doesn’t show up here, he’s off in the street with its harmful consequences: drugs, prostitution, and gangs engaged in stealing. If by his talent he is able to succeed, then the strategy is to leave Cuba and to join any professional league in the Caribbean or the United States,” explained the coach.

Sadly he told me how many children he had trained who at age 15 or 16 left the country with their parents. “In eighteen months, more than 20 young players left the country. It’s a tragedy. If we stay on this road, baseball will become just another game. Football [soccer] will surpass it. These people (the directors) are killing the national sport,” he said sadly.

I must confess I was a bit more optimistic. I thought the steady leak would lessen after the regime authorized players to sign with foreign clubs.

I guessed that the Asian professional leagues would hire a couple dozen players, who then wouldn’t be forced to risk their lives to leave their homeland.

But the apathy among the federation officials has been like a containment dike. Two years later, only three players have been recruited in Japan. And four in an independent league in Quebec, Canada.

Already this season, after a group of scouts from Japan and other Asian leagues visited Cuba, there was speculation that they would recruit around a dozen baseball players.

But negotiations didn’t flow. You might think that Asian clubs aren’t interested in Cuban raw material. I don’t believe it. A more selective league like MLB has signed more than 40 Cuban players who left in the past two years.

National commissioner Heriberto Suárez himself acknowledged that in the past two years around 60 players have fled. And he came up short. A few days later, another group of players escaped the island.

All categories are represented: little league, youth, and adults. No second-rate players leave. No way. It’s the most talented who aspire to play in the best baseball in the world.

And the news is not which ballplayer has left, but which one hasn’t gone yet. Established stars like José Abreu, Rusney Thomas Castillo, or Yasmany Tomás are easy picks.

But the stampede has been joined by promising players like Joan Moncada, Yusnier Díaz and recently two of the best pitchers, Cionel Pérez and Norge Luis Ruiz.

Every day there’s a new rumor. The absence of big stars was notable at the old Del Cerro Stadium during preselection training looking toward the Pan American Games.

And among the standouts, fans are betting on predictions of how much longer they will remain in Cuba. The disastrous policy on contracts doesn’t only affect baseball.

Arturo Dispé, a talented young soccer player, said in a radio interview that he lost the opportunity to try out for a second division club in France because he didn’t get permission from the local federation.

Dispé had paid for a plane ticket to travel to the club at the end of the month. But the mandarins of Cuban football decided to include him on the national team that will play a “friendly” game with the New York Cosmos on June 2.

In front of the microphone the boy tried not to be pessimistic. “I hope to have another opportunity,” he said. Not everyone thinks alike. Maybe the managers of sports and the nation, accustomed to governing without an expiration date, forget that the life of a high performance athlete is fleeting.

General Raul Castro, with his timid economic reforms of coffee without milk, and his favorite slogan, “slowly but surely,” has managed to win over politicians and entrepreneurs from the United States and other countries through liberal feints and fakes. Not so the ballplayers. Slowly and surely, they are jumping the fence.

Photo: Yasmany Tomás (born Havana, 1990) now plays for the Arizona Diamondbacks. His six-year contract is worth 68.5 million dollars. Taken from “Cuban Play”

According to the Census of Population and Housing, over 93% of households have one or more televisions and 100% have radios. The state controls information flow with an iron fist, and Radio Martí, the Miami-based broadcaster that provides feedback about the spectrum of opposition within Cuba, is electronically jammed, making it inaudible in many areas of the country.

So based on statistics, it would seem difficult for Cubans living in difficult times to inform themselves. But the numbers obscure the data. The devil is in the details.

In a personal survey of 50 people of both sexes, between 17 and 80 years of age, 85% had frequent or occasionally access to an illegal cable antenna, or rent the “package,” a clandestine audiovisual compendium circulating in Cuba, or have read articles by independent journalists in the Journal of Cuba, El Nuevo Herald, and Journal of the Americas, outlining critical analysis against the Castro regime.

If you navigate by Facebook, you’ll be amazed at the high number of Cubans who log in, even though an hour of Internet time costs a third of the minimum monthly wage.

Leyanis, a young woman with silicone breast and hip implants, spends about 40 CUCs a month on social networks. “My monthly salary as a food-packaging technician is 500 pesos (about $22). But in the underground economy, like many other Cubans, I ’score’ extra money. I use my Facebook account to contact friends living abroad. Political news doesn’t interest me. ”

Countless prostitutes access the internet to promote themselves or try to hook up with a foreigner. When you ask them about dissident leaders or inquire if they are aware of some opposition project, they respond with a forced smile.

“Antonio Rodiles, Laritza Diversent, Manuel Cuesta Morúa? I don’t know who they are, I’ve never heard of them,” admits Camila, a hundred-dollar-a-night prostitute who owns an iPhone 6, has two computers at home, and connects to the Internet three times a week.

28 of the 50 respondents remembered hearing something vague in passing about the Ladies in White, or Elizardo Sanchez, or Yoani Sanchez, usually in the pejorative terms used by the official press.

There is a great contradiction. When you talk with any Cuban, not less than 80% of them acknowledge that the system is shot, the economy does not function. And if they could, they would temporarily or permanently leave Cuba. Their favorite destination, paradoxically, is the United States, the enemy for 56 years of the olive-green autocrats.

The less glamorous dissidents, like Hildebrando Chaviano or Yuniel Lopez, elected in their neighborhoods to aspire to be municipal delegates of the National Assembly of People’s Power, thanks to their work in the community, have created strong links with their neighbors. Human-rights activists in the mold of Sonia Garro or the independent journalist Luis Cino, are respected by their neighbors, who nevertheless keep their distance out of fear.

Local dissidents still have not found the formula for connecting with the average hurting Cubans. They have failed to capitalize on popular anger.

It is very easy to avoid pointing the finger of guilt at citizen fear or repression at that distance. True, there is fear and repression. But opponents on the island have no legal means of communication that allows them to disclose their political projects. Nor they have editorial spaces on radio and television.

Since May 16, 1938, the Popular Socialist Party, the Communist Party at the time, had its own press organ. It was called “Today” and except for the years when it was closed by the government in power, it was printed until October 3, 1965. In the 40s it also had a radio station, 1010 or Mil Diez. And besides books, it published magazines such as Noonday and Dialectics.

Now dissidents can only meet in the rooms of their own homes, and when they decide to hold a peaceful action on the street or in a park, they are repressed, beaten, and arrested.

While the best-known dissidents travel halfway around the world and participate in international forums and events, in Cuba they are nearly invisible and their leadership is nil.

Of the 50 respondents, 46 were unaware of dissident projects like Manuel Cuesta Morúa’s Citizen Hour, or the Campaign for Another Cuba led by Antonio Rodiles, which calls for ratifying the UN Covenants on civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights that the regime signed in 2008.

Both projects seek to empower civil society and the ordinary Cuban who watches the game from the stands. But they have not yet succeeded.

Iván García

Photo: Taken from Wikipedia. The station Mil Diez (Radio 1010), “the radio station of the people” was founded thanks to a popular collection of 75,000 pesos. It moved to 314 Queen Street, in the heart of Havana. It aired for the first time on April 1, 1943 and the last time on March 12, 1948, when it was closed by the government of Ramon Grau San Martin. During its five years of existence, it was not only a propaganda vehicle of the PSP, but also a means of cultural dissemination. It helped launch various styles of music, such as Cuban jazz, danzón and the tango.

The following performed on Mil Diez: Benny Moré, the Matamoros Trio, Celia Cruz, Bebo Valdés, Olga Guillot, Elena Burke, Omara Portuondo, César Portillo de la Luz, José Antonio Méndez, Leonel Bravet, Aurora Lincheta, Miguel de Gonzalo, Pepe Reyes, Olga Rivero, Pacho Alonso, Frank Emilio, Barbarito Diez, Myriam Acevedo, Zoila Gálvez, María Cervantes, Alba Marina, Miguelito Valdés, Chano Pozo, Manteca, Orlando Guerra (Cascarita), the orchestras Casino de la Playa and Arcaño and his Marvesl with Arsenio Rodríguez, Félix Guerrero, Roberto Valdés Arnau y Rey Díaz Calvet, among others. The director of the station orchestra was Enrique González Mantici, and the musical director of Mil Diez was the incomparable Adolfo Guzmán. Among its announcers were two of the best of Cuba: Ibrahim Urbino and Manolo Ortega. (Tania Quintero)

“I had only seen Havana on television. I’d never seen so many cars or tall buildings, like the FOCSA or the Habana Libre hotel. The first pictures I sent my parents were in front of the El Capitolio, like all the peasants, and drinking beer from a can in a Havana bar. It’s true that the city is grimy and dilapidated, but compared to the eastern provinces, it’s Miami,” he says.

Like Yosvany, there are hundreds of easterners in Havana. In an unfriendly euphemism of official jargon, they are labeled a “floating population.” According to the last National Census of Population and Housing, half a million fellow citizens live in the city in true legal limbo.

Since 1997 a shameful Legislative Decree (number 217) has been in place that prohibits anyone not born in the capital from settling in it. Apartheid in its purest form.

While the campaigns of Cuban dissidents pound away against the arbitrary excesses of power, the repression of those who think differently, and the flagrant violations of political rights, this infamous legislation gets a pass.

An example. The spurious Law 88, which imposes a 20-year prison term on dissident journalists or human rights activists, remains on the books, but is not enforced. Quite the opposite occurs with Legislative Decree 217.

If you walk around in the shanty towns on the outskirts of Havana, crowded with filthy hovels made of aluminum and cardboard, without electricity or sanitation, you can find out what it means to live being hounded by a law.

These families live in no man’s land, in an undefined status. For them bureaucratic records do not exist. They are not listed in the Civil Registry or in the OFICODA, the organization that implements the rationing of housing.

14 years ago, Magda came from Mayari, in Granma province, 500 miles from the capital. Her life is comparable to that of a gypsy. “My three children are illegals at school. I’m in the paperwork to legalize a room I built in San Miguel del Padron. We don’t have a ration book to buy the official basic food basket and we can’t get work because we’re undocumented.”

Thanks to the underground economy, Magda earns money that she couldn’t even dream of in her province. “My husband collects money for the ’bolita’ (illegal lottery), and together with some friends we put on a cockfight every weekend. Every month that business earns you good money. I sell what shows up, from ground-peanut bars to bath sponges. Easterners are fighters by nature. We do jobs that Havanans avoid.”

Police harassment of the illegal Easterners is constant. In the overcrowded neighborhoods of Old Havana, police officers dressed in black with German shepherds are on the lookout.

“They look like Nazis. They’ve sent me back to Santiago three times. But I managed to return. There it’s really hard. The “empty pockets” and the people don’t have the means to thrive. In the capital opportunity abounds. There are lots of under-the-table businesses,” says Ernesto, an industrial technician who spent six years living illegally in Havana.

According to Ernesto, the police are the most dangerous. “Almost all of them are Easterners, but they won’t leave their fellow countrymen alone. But because there’s so much corruption, you can take care of it with money. The other problem is that many Havanans see us as intruders, saying we’ve come to take their jobs. They call us ’Palestinians’ and have given us a reputation as drunks and snitches.”

One afternoon in 2009, Ernesto decided to burn all his bridges. He sold his house in the Chicharrones slum in Santiago de Cuba, and put up a covered corral on the outskirts of Havana where he breeds more than 50 pigs.

“I make my living selling pigs. I fatten them with feed bought in state warehouses and scraps that are available from school cafeterias. The headache is the police, who will not let you live. To be a paperless easterner in Havana is to live in constant fear. Apparently Fidel and Raul don’t remember that they are easterners too,” he says.

In every municipality of Havana, illegal eastern refugees survive underground. However they can. Driving a bicycle taxi, raising pigs, or prostituting themselves. Always on the razor’s edge.

Iván García

Photo: Havana Train Terminal, arrival point for most Cubans arriving from the eastern provinces. Despite the existence of a decree-law prohibiting it, they are moving to the capital in search of a better future for themselves and their families. Taken from the blog La Santanilla.