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Month: April 2016
Obama Invades Cuba / Juan Juan Almeida
Juan Juan Almeida, 28 March 2016 — I do not generally like rehashing old topics. It tends to squash conversation. But I am making an exception in this case because a critical reader, who in a confrontational tone accused me of being one of Castro’s spies, asked my opinion of President Barack Obama’s speech at Havana’s Gran Teatro Theater.
Time is a better and much wiser judge, and in politics everything is a production, like a Rolling Stone’s concert.
I will try to remain impartial. But for me the visit was an historic event. No sooner had Air Force One touched down in Havana than the topic was trending on all the social networks. continue reading
It was an outstanding speech: direct, clear and inspiring. He captivated us when he said, “ I can’t force you to agree, but you should know what I think. I believe that every person should be equal under the law. Every child deserves the dignity that comes with education, and health care and food on the table and a roof over their heads. I believe citizens should be free to speak their mind without fear, to organize and to criticize their government, and to protest peacefully, and that the rule of law should not include arbitrary detentions of people who exercise those rights. I believe that every person should have the freedom to practice their faith peacefully and publicly. And, yes, I believe voters should be able to choose their governments in free and democratic elections.”
He later sweetened the sentiment with classic and well-known references to Cuban culture like ropa vieja, Celia Cruz, exile and Our Lady of Charity.
Cubans like myself — those who were born and grew up with the revolution and long expected an invasion by strong, blond Americans in camouflage fatigues, brandishing guns in one hand — were amazed. I do not know if that is the right word. But within one minute of his reference to one of Jose Marti’s most beautiful and famous poems, “Cultivo una rosa blanca,” this skinny little guy — with charisma to spare — demolished the myth that for years had been fabricated, inculcated and exported by our leaders.
Obama seduced. He clearly scored with his visit to Havana but, like it or not, so did Raul Castro. A few days before the start of the VII Cuban Communist Party Conference on April 16 and months before his long anticipated retirement in February 2018, a U.S. president visited the island without Cuba’s leader having to make a single concession.
I understand that an abundance of passion can cloud one’s vision. We have imagined an oasis where there is only desert. This is called a mirage.
At no point did I see Raul Castro looking uncomfortable, as some of my countrymen have claimed.
I believe that his arrogant response to the requisite (and anticipated) question on political prisoners was a very bad move by the Cuban president to stall for time. But at this point in the tournament, even a few seconds count. His cynical closing shot — “give me the list and I will release them” — made it very clear that “on the plantation, he is in charge.”
Rather than an out-of-control dictator, what I saw was really an octogenarian clown with hearing problems. It was the same situation during Obama’s speech at the theater. Assuming they were following the rules of protocol, the president hosting the event would have known in advance what his guest would say.
A close friend of mine says his sources in Cuba have told him that the former commander-in-chief is upset with Raul over Obama’s visit. I don’t buy it. If the ex-omnipresent one is complaining, he must be because no one has changed his Pampers. This development is one he had long hoped for, especially after an unfortunate event during a visit to Europe for a funeral.
Acknowledged for his incomparable skill at managing crises, albeit immodestly, Fidel Castro would have used the attacks in Brussels to his advantage. To gain attention, he would have declared three days of mourning in solidarity with the Belgian victims, discredited Obama’s meeting with Cuban dissidents, suspended the baseball game with the American team when it looked like the Cubans would lose and stolen the show. In this way he would have diminished the significance of the president’s visit to “his island.”
“In politics, it is all about production values, like the Rolling Stone’s outdated concert.
Costa Rica Calls Emergency Meeting on New Immigration Crisis On Its Border / 14ymedio, Mario Penton
14ymedio, Mario Penton, Miami, 5 April 2106 — The Costa Rican government has called an emergency meeting of the countries involved in the migratory flow that includes that nation as a transit point to the United States. The meeting of foreign ministers and representatives of the different nations involved will be held in the third week of April, with all of the affected nations from the United States to Ecuador.
As reported by the Costa Rican newspaper La Nacion, the Costa Rican meeting will aim to find solutions to the flow of undocumented immigrants coming mainly from Ecuador and Colombia, mostly Cubans, along with Asians and Africans. continue reading
At present, about 2,000 Cubans are stranded in the province of Chiriqui, on the border of Costa Rica and Panama. As reported by Hugo Mendez, governor of the region, 100 Cubans arrive in Paso Canoas every day, on average, coming from the eastern border with Colombia. Colombia is an unavoidable transit country for all Cubans who leave the island for Guyana and Ecuador, countries whose legislation is more flexible in granting tourist visas.
The number of Cuban migrants in Puerto Obaldia and other areas of the isthmus is unknown. So far, the expenses of accommodation and food are being shared between local governments and religious organizations. The difficult conditions in which these migrants live has led to several protests calling for international help in getting them to the United States, their final destination.
“The meeting has raised the hopes of the people here, because people are grasping at straws,” Silvio Enrique Campos, a Cuban stranded in Panama, told 14ymedio. However, he believes that the problem is not exclusive to the islanders, since there are dozens of migrants of other nationalities who also share the fate of the Cubans waiting to continue their journey to the United States. “I think this meeting is just going to serve the fatten the wallets of the coyotes,” Campos said, as he suspects the crisis is more of a business than a expense, and he doesn’t see an early solution.
Meanwhile, Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry denied last week that Cuban citizens are victims of discriminatory treatment by Rafael Correa’s government. An official press release noted that between 2012 and 2016 the country awarded 26,936 non-immigrant (temporary resident) visas, and 16,738 immigrant (permanent resident) visas to Cuban citizens. In addition, during the same period 697 Cubans have been naturalized and are now Ecuadorian citizens.
In a recent statement from the Cuban National Alliance of Ecuador (ANCE) it was announced that, as a result of negotiations with the Ecuadorian government the legalization of all those Cubans who entered the country before December 2015 has begun. The process of accepting applications will run for six months. However, Cuban citizens who entered after that date remain at risk of deportation.
With regard to efforts to achieve an airlift that allows the orderly exit of Cuban migrants from Ecuador to Mexico or the United States, the government made clear that it “does not deny the right of Cubans to emigrate but it cannot take responsibility for any negotiations,” according to comments to this newspaper from Rolando Gallardo, one of the coordinators of ANCE who attended the meeting. According to Gallardo the official response to the creation of a so-called “humanitarian bridge,” is based on the fact that Ecuador has never asked for anything like this for its own citizens who desire to emigrate.
As reported by US immigration authorities, last year 44,159 Cubans arrived at border posts and were automatically welcomed legally into the United States under the “Wet foot/Dry foot” policy. In the first five months of the 2016 fiscal year, some 27,644 Cuban citizens have been beneficiaries of the “Parole Program” after arriving by sea or by land. If the current rate of Cuban arrivals continues, this year the number of applications for political asylum could exceed 60,000, a figure surpassed only by the events of the Mariel Boatlift in 1980.
Three Key Proposals for Reforming the Cuban Electoral System / Laritza Diversent
Havana, Cuba, March 21, 2016 — On February 23, 2015 the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) announced that its VII Congress would take place in April 2016 and that the National Assembly of People’s Power would be asked to amend the electoral process and adopt a new law to govern the general elections of 2018.
Cubalex conducted an investigation of the Cuban electoral system and held discussions involving representatives of independent civil society organizations to identify obstacles to full and equal citizen participation in the political process. We consulted experts in Latin American electoral issues to take advantage of this region’s broad experience over the last 30 years. continue reading
In search of political openness and a peaceful transition, we have formulated three key proposals to reform the electoral system by promoting comprehensive elections and eliminating restrictions on the right to elect and be elected in order to realize the constitutional precept that “Cuba is an independent and sovereign state, organized as a unitary and democratic republic for the enjoyment of political liberty.”
As an independent civil society organization, we are proposing three key reforms as instruments to encourage democratic change in our society. These include reestablishing the rule of law, democracy, political pluralism and respect for human rights — especially for those groups interested in participating in the process established by the PCC — by promoting “elections with integrity” based on democratic principles of universal suffrage and political equality.
1. Citizens would submit names of candidates for Municipal Delegate positions to direct public vote (by show of hands) at local nominating conventions. In circumstances in which a candidate is someone other than one nominated by the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), the final choice would be made by the citizenry.
2. The system established by the current electoral law prohibits political campaigning and restricts the right of citizens to formulate and demonstrate their political preferences and obtain information from a variety of sources.
These proposals by civil society organizations would guarantee citizens the right to organize themselves into movements, political parties or civil-political associations based on ideological and political preferences for the formulation of proposals on public policy, the promotion of political debate and the observation of electoral processes.
3. Currently, the National Electoral Commission, the supreme electoral body, only operates during election cycles and is appointed by the Council of State. Its temporary nature and designation as a political body rather than an organization made up of professionals threatens its independence and impartiality. Furthermore, the Office of Voter Registration operates under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior, a military institution, which discourages citizens from requesting information necessary to exercise their political rights.
Our reform project seeks to generate confidence and guarantee the political rights of citizens as well as electoral integrity and transparency by means of a decentralized and permanent election commission and by charging the Office of Voter Registration with guaranteeing the full independence and financial resources of both institutions and of the officials which constitute it.
We are also soliciting help from the international community because of refusals by our government to listen to us or discuss this issue. The Cuban government responds to every civil society proposal with greater repression, stigmatization and discrimination. We need help in opening channels of communication with authorities. We need mediation and dialogue. We need help in achieving what all Cubans clearly want: a peaceful transition to a democratic, pluralistic, just and inclusive government.
It is worth noting that on May 1, 2013 the Cuban government underwent the Periodic Universal Exam and in a constructive manner agreed and voluntarily promised to adopt measures to promote effective participation by non-governmental organizations and civil society institutions and to adopt legislation to promote human rights.
About Cubalex
The Cubalex Legal Information Center — headquartered in Havana, Cuba — is a non-profit organization of attorneys and activists which defends human rights. Our mission is to promote and defend human rights in Cuba, establish the rule of law and democratize Cuban society.
We offer free legal advice in matters involving housing, immigration, inheritance, labor, criminal appeals, constitutional procedures and the defense of civil and political rights on a national and international level to Cuban or foreign citizens who request it.
We can be reached by email at centrocubalex@gmail.com or by telephone at (+53) 7-647-2216 or (+53) 5-241-5948
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Web address: http://centrocubalex.com/
Cuban Rafters Dressed In Police Uniforms Reach The Coasts Of Florida / 14ymedio, Mario Penton
A video posted Monday on the social network Facebook shows the arrival of 26 Cubans to the Florida Keys, aboard a rustic raft. The recording, published by the user Jose Carrera, reflects the moment when the raft touches land with the illegal immigrants on board, among them two men dressed in the uniforms of Cuba’s National Revolutionary Police (PNR).
Hector Joel Carrera, one of the rafters who appears in the video, commented to this newspaper by phone that the group left from Guanabo, on the coast north of Havana, at midnight last Saturday. There were 25 men and one woman on the boat, which was at sea for more than 30 hours, he said. During the crossing they tried to avoid the Cuban and United States Coast Guards, and so they used the engines only at night. continue reading
“The problem is that in Cuba building a boat is a crime, if you are caught taking it the sea you lose everything. That happened to us twice on land,” Carrera explained to 14ymedio, The rafter said that this was the group’s fourth attempt to get to the coast of the United States. On a previous occasion, the raft was intercepted by the US Coast Guard after traveling 75 miles from the island.
With regards to the two supposed police officers in a group of rafters, Carrera explained that the uniformed officers collaborated along with the rest of the migrants on the construction of the craft. One of the policemen was nicknamed “The Captain,” for his rank within the PNR, the rafter explained, and he added that everyone knows very well “the system in Cuba and what is happening, even the police themselves.”
This newspaper has not been able to contact any of the men in uniform.
Carrera says his main motivation to jump into the sea and reach US territory was “economic.” “In Cuba I was a rastero (truck driver), I didn’t live badly, however it wasn’t enough to support my family, to buy shoes for my children,” he adds. Remaining on the island are his four children and his wife.
“Over there, even though I work I can’t buy necessities for the family, because the work is not valued. Here, on the other hand, things are thrown away: clothes, shoes, backpacks,” he said with enthusiasm.
According to the rafter, who is currently living in Tampa with relatives who have taken him in, his main goal is “to learn English to be able to work hard,” and financially help the relatives he left behind.
The fear that the Cuban Adjustment Act will be repealed with the process of the reestablishment of relations between the United States and Cuba, has ignited the flow of migrants from the island. According to the Coast Guard, so far this fiscal year, which began 1 October 2015, 2,562 Cubans have been intercepted in the Florida Straits, including 269 in February.
Cuba’s Communist Youth Union And The Devaluation Of Its Militancy / 14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar
14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, 5 April 2017 — Social stereotypes have their moment. In the Cuba of the 50s, being baptized, making one’s first communion, or being married in the church, were the rites of passage that identified “decent” people. To have a diploma, a university degree, or belong to a Masonic lodge, opened many doors; behaving with urbanity at the table or knowing how to knot a tie denoted good taste and distinction.
A decade later, the important thing was to have participated in the people’s harvests, to have walked 66 kilometers, climbed the five peaks, attended the Schools of Revolutionary Instruction and, especially, to have shot the enemy, whether at the Bay of Pigs or in the Escambray. For a young man of 20 who wanted his reputation to be positively valued social, the top prize was to be a militant of the Young Communist Union (UJC). continue reading
Parents asked their daughters if their boyfriend “belonged to ‘the youth’” and in schools and workplaces carrying the organization’s ID card was a point of pride, to the point that in some spheres it began to generate concern about the emergence of a phenomenon that some called “revolutionary vanity.”
It is difficult to know the precise moment when young Cubans began to show resistance to being captured by the UJC. Educational institutions and administrations of state enterprises almost forced UJC members to become informers and began using this “organized vanguard” to entrap a covert homosexual, sabotage a religious activity or, as in the 80s, to be part of the mob in repudiation rallies.
Now everything is different. It is no longer possible to identify a militant communist youth by the way they style their hair or the clothes they wear. Boasting about the “merits” one accumulates or heroic tasks performed has irretrievably vanished. In fact, since the return of Cuban troops from Africa in 1991, 25 years have passed and the only opportunity to stand out is getting good grades or exceeding the plan targets at one’s workplace. What today’s parents want to know about the boy who dates their daughter is what business is he engaged in or whether he has a passport with a visa.
When you asked someone between 15 and 30 years if he or she is member of the UJC, the usual response is something like: “Yes, but …” or they raise their eyebrows in a gesture of resignation. Because when a stereotype is past its time, it can be taken as a stigma, or as Cuban-youth speak might say, a corny thing in need of a remake.
Panama Papers Reveal That Cuba Controls the Passport System in Venezuela / 14ymedio
14ymedio, 5 April 2016 – The Panama Papers have ended up splattering Cuba. The document leak confirms something that has been denounced by former Chavista officials and the opposition in Venezuela. The Cuban government maintains strict control over the system of customizing passports and electronic identity cards in that South American nation.
The Executive of Havana legally maneuvered to gain access to software that contains the data for issuing and updating these documents through the company Albet Ingeniería y Sistemas, as detailed in a contract that has come to light with the Panama Papers. continue reading
The leaked document clarifies that “all licenses for the use of computer applications” which are described as “specifications for the software, the hardware and the licenses,” would be transferred to the Cuban party involved in the contract, in this case Banco Financiero Internacional SA of the Republic of Cuba, known as “Banco de Albet” in the text.
In 2011, the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional had warned about the access of Cuban intelligence services to the system of preparing the new IDs, “thanks to a secret agreement that excluded Venezuelan technicians from participating in the process,” according to a former adviser of the Ministry of Interior and Justice.
The article revealed that the Cuban side had the ability to “include or delete information from databases and even to issue Venezuelan identity documents to citizens of other countries.” Anthony Daquin, who until 2009 was an adviser to the Venezuelan ministry on electronic documents, reported at the time that “Cubans manage the software and security guidelines, such as how to open the cryptographic box (an encryption mechanism in the electronic chip), how many times, and when the chip is destroyed.”
“These people have the ability to make a Venezuelan passport in Cuba and at the same time to enter that data into the system,” warned Daquin, and the Panama Papers are proving him right. The Cuban government, through “Albet,” acquired “a right of perpetual use, non-exclusive and non-transferable, through the software supplied with the system,” the papers revealed.
Documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca reveal other details of the framework of the Venezuelan passports, which use a German-made technology hidden through various companies owned by the Peruvian Banker Francisco Pardo Mesones.
The technology of the polycarbonate laminates of the Venezuelan documents was fabricated about ten years ago by the German company Bundesdrukerie, which feared that doing business directly with Cuba or Venezuela would damage its reputation. The company used a network whose major beneficiary is Pardo Mesones, recognized for his strong defense of private property but who earned huge sums of money as the owner of Billingsley Global Corp and other offshore companies, which served as a vehicle for Havana to resell the Venezuelan passport technology through Caracas .
In 2005, the Venezuelan Minister of Interior and Justice, Jesse Chacon, located companies to produce the passports and electronic identity cards. After ruling out the US and China, Pardo Mesones prepared in Caracas a triangulation of transfers and contracts through tax havens to hide the real source of the technology.
After several meetings in Venezuela, Peru and Panama, the team Mossack Fonseca designed the network that yielded at least 64 million euros for Pardo Mesones through his company: 40 million for Germany and the other 24 million for his own pocket.
The Voice Of Your Rights / 14ymedio, Generation Y
14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Generation Y, 4 April 2016 — What to do when you have a loudspeaker in your hand? Since 2007 when I started my blog Generation Y, this question has haunted me. Often the visibility does not benefit those who need it most and the protective umbrellas provided by access to international organizations only reach a few. To occupy the microphone to broadcast only your own speech is a wastefulness that is a monologue more than an informative work. The Voice of Your Rights, the new interview program I will host on the Deutsche Welle Latin American TV program seeks to bring the megaphone to those who need it most.
With 40 episodes filmed in Panama City, the new space hosts a guest list essential for those who want to know our region and learn about the stories of its people. Environmental activists, women who fight against femicide, human rights organizations that denounce prison overcrowding and groups addressing child labor from all viewpoints are some of the themes that will be addressed by the people with whom I will share the studio in the coming weeks.
My role in this program, which has as its protagonists those who are trying to open a window where the door is closed, is not only for a professional challenge in my career as a journalist, but part of a personal commitment to the most silenced in every society. The cameras and the power of audiovisual media will serve to make their projects more effective and their lives less dangerous.
With Regards to the Guantanamo Naval Base / Rafael Alcides
Rafael Alcides, Havana, 2 April 2016 — The government that has ruled us since 1959 insists that the American Naval Base in Cuba’s Guantanamo Province is illegal. Mistake. It is immoral, but not illegal. At a time when the United States did not hide its eye patch and peg leg it took advantage, before leaving the island, of four years of military occupation to get the impoverished Cuban government of the time to cede the 117 square kilometers where the base is located. Arrogant, it demanded a contract “in perpetuity.”
Resorting to sophistry, the authorities of the recently inaugurated Cuban government, after four hundred years of Spanish colonialism and a war lasting thirty years, got them to change the humiliating term “in perpetuity” for another that today would be comical if it didn’t move us to pity the precarious situation of those exhausted liberators. continue reading
Listen for yourself: In the document signed by both governments the territory that houses the Naval Base in held not “in perpetuity,” but for as long as the United States “needs it.”
Cuba, of course, has the duty to reclaim this territory. It is part of the Island. It belongs to it. But they should do so in polite terms, neighbor to neighbor, taking advantage of yesterday’s pirate, who today is, or tries to seem, sustained by democracy, the archetype of man dreamed of by God.
The Cuban government’s acting like a “tough guy,” is ignoring that while governments come and go, the conventions of one state with another state are the commitments of the nation. This is serious.
It would authorize Spain, for one example, to set aside the Treaty of Paris signed on Janaury 1, 1898 any time it wants, and to show up at mouth of El Morro with troops and the king, in person, to resume its former sovereign rights over “the Always Faithful island of Cuba.”
The Incredible Story Of Sad Gabo And My Beloved Grandmother / 14ymedio, Manuel Pereira
14ymedio, Manuel Pereira, Mexico, 3 April 2016 — One day in 1983 I took Gabo to see my grandmother, who lived in a tenement on Old Havana, at No. 105 Aguiar Street at the corner of Cuarteles. She was a Galician who had come to the island in 1926, the year of the devastating cyclone, the year another cyclone was born, named Fidel Castro.
I wanted Gabriel García Márquez to know the poor, to discover the other side of the moon, because I knew he was always entertained in hotels and protocol houses in Miramar, in Cubanacan… continue reading
At the foot of Loma del Ángel, I showed him the butcher shop of one of my grandmother’s countrymen, expropriated and turned into a dive; I also showed him several businesses confiscated years earlier: Cheo’s Juice Bar, turned into a Committee for the Defense of the Revolution; the bodega that had belonged to an Asturian transformed as an accessory to a rooming house, the Catalan bakery closed for good, the Chinese fruit and vegetable stand, transfigured into another hovel. On all sides, makeshift cinderblock walls, unplastered, with anti-poetic bars on the windows. The only picturesque thing left in the neighborhood was the clotheslines on the balconies.
The eyes of my admired writer – well trained by his long profession as a journalist – didn’t miss a single detail. We climbed to the first floor of the apartment building and went to the back, along hallways where in some places there was polychromatic stained glass already half-extinct.
Who was going to say it? A Nobel Prize winner in a Havana solar, a tenement, but my grandmother knew nothing about the Swedish Academy, she didn’t even know where Sweden was. Years ago she confused the famous Cuban writer Carpentier for a carpenter, and Sarte with some famous “sastre” – tailor – who visited the island. She was an almost illiterate villager who, on disembarking in Havana with espadrilles and a headscarf, had to bring up three children cleaning floors and bathrooms in promiscuous tenements.
We entered her home lacking a bathroom: a dining room, bedroom and tiny kitchen. My guest of honor looked at everything. She offered her rickety chairs and a broken wicker armchair. We sat at the table. Embarrassed, I didn’t show Gabo the malodorous toilets and the collective showers, which she never used, preferring to use a basin in her sooty kitchen, behind a plastic curtain.
My grandmother immediately took cold water from the vibrating refrigerator she called the “General Electric,” from ’58, with the white enamel now chipping off. She put on the coffee pot. When the kids upstairs ran across the floor, bits of the ceiling fell on us. Gabo looked at the peeling walls from the corner of his eye. He asked her about her daily life.
My grandmother showed him her ration book, and also her “magic box.” During the frequent periods of tobacco shortages she – like so many others – collected butts from the streets and then stripped them to get the shreds and with them made her “Tupameros.”
“Why Tupamaros?” asked Gabo.
“Because they are illegal,” I replied, and the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude smiled.
She explained the complicated mechanism of the “little machine,” which was like a dominoes box, where she put in the tobacco shreds and then pulled a little stick that served as a roller toward herself, as if it were a spring, with a rubber tongue that pushed out the freshly rolled cigarette.
Lacking cigarette rolling papers, she used the almost transparent pages of a Map of Spain brochure the embassy sent out. But as these were also limited, she tore pages out of the Bible she couldn’t read, but treasured as a talisman on her altar populated by saints. She smoked verses from Saint John and passages from Ecclesiastes.
When we left and were on the street, Gabo confessed, “I would very much like to write a book about the shortages in Cuba, your grandmother making her Tupameros, the lack of domestic bliss.”
“It would be a magnificent book,” I exclaimed.
He was sad and added, “I would like to write it, talk about the blockade and its consequences, the imagination Cubans bring to overcoming the difficulties, but I don’t want to upset Fidel. I can’t write it, because it is a book that Fidel would consider an attack, I don’t want to cross him.”
After that, I no longer insisted. Each writer chooses his destiny. Above us, as it got dark, my grandmother was smoking a chapter from Leviticus and the biblical smoke wafted from her little balcony to the moon.
The Changes Are Yet to Come / Fernando Dámaso
Fernando Damaso, 23 March 2016 — At an event with Cuban and foreign journalists on March 17, the Cuban foreign minister — one of the dullest and most lackluster persons to hold this position — once again stated that “all the changes in Cuba took place on January 1, 1959.”
The minister seems to take it for granted that the so-called “generation of the century” has the right not only to exercise power but to do so forever. He forgets that five generations of Cubans have been born since this one, many of whom feel no attachment to these “historic figures” or their actions, and that these younger generations have the right to change what they they feel should be changed for the good of the country and its citizens. There is no “historic debt” which must be paid. continue reading
Perhaps the minister thinks that selectively including some young faces in the leadership roster will indicate that a new generation is being allowed to participate. We all know that is not the case. They simply serve as props for those who really hold power. The most recent and striking case is that of the president of the University Student Federation who, at twenty-three, was a surprise addition to the Council of State. Does anyone with half a brain believe she will be allowed to decide anything?
The changes that Cuba needs did not take place on January 1, 1959. They are yet to happen and are up to the current generation and those that follow to carry out. To not understand that would be to deny the dialectic and development of society.
It seems that President Obama’s words yesterday at the Alicia Alonso Theater (formerly the Garcia Lorca Theater) have caused a rash on the thin skin of Cuban authorities. The speech was not published in the government-run press. It was, however, subject to critical analysis by well-known, unconditional supporters of the regime, who did nothing more than repeat the same old absurd arguments. On a scale of one to ten, Cubans on the street give the American president a ten and his Cuban counterpart a two. As in baseball, in which Cuba lost by four to one to Tampa Bay, the same thing has happened in politics.
“Otro18” Elections Project Presented in Madrid / 14ymedio
14ymedio, Madrid, 31 Mach 2016 – Like “a small crack in the Cuban political system” from which an opening coming. Thus did the attorney and activist Rolando Ferrer define the Otro18 (Another 2018) project during a meeting with journalists this Thursday at the Madrid Press Association. Four of the promoters of this process travelled from the island to present in Spain this initiative that promotes reforms in laws addressing elections, association, political parties and others.
Opponents are seeking, with their proposals, to influence a democratic opening that would take effect in Cuban with the elections to be held in 2018. This was emphasized by Ferrer, a member of the Anti-totalitarian Forum (FANTU), as well as by historian Boris Gonzales continue reading
, Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) activist Yusmila Reyna, and opposition leader Manuel Cuesta Morua. All of the participated in the press conference this morning, accompanied by the exiled journalist Carlos Alberto Montaner.
With the support of 45 independent organizations inside and outside of Cuba, the initiative demands that the international community follow the situation on the island. “The process of reforms initiated in Cuba should address not only the economic, trade and investment sector, but also the political sector,” Cuesta Morua declared this Thursday.
“We have included a candidate’s right to campaign,” declared Ferrer, in response to a question from 14ymedio about a possible reform that would allow candidate to campaign for votes. “We want to facilities the candidates having a work plan, proposals that they could take to the citizens, and we also want to insert independent candidates,” he added.
“Currently in Cuba the only access the voter has is to the candidates’ biographies, through their past, and this is not a program,” added Boris Gonzalez. To publicize the proposal among Cubans, Cuesta Morua believes that they have to try to reach the citizenry, so it will be perceived as a citizens’ initiative.
The proposed electoral reform, Reyna noted, “was already presented to the National Assembly” and now they are awaiting a response. Right now they are “training independent candidates, who are nothing more than social activists who have a certain popularity and recognition, in addition to the slanderous campaign that the government has undertaken against them,” he added.
“The Spanish transition [from dictatorship to democracy] was a process that favored going from the law to the law,” said Cuesta Morua, who has asked for Spain’s involvement in the process. Spain “has supported the process of the restoration of democracy in Venezuela and could do the same with Cuba,” he added. The European Union “in its political dialogue with the Cuban authorities should ask that they respect the will of thousands of citizens who are demanding free, fair, democratic, competitive and internationally observed elections.”
Cuesta Morua, the leader of the “Progressive Arc”, has stated that “this is a political proposal” and a “a project directed to the citizenry,” and he distanced himself from the process of electoral changes “made to order by the power,” which the government is pushing. The promoters of Otro18 are seeking that it be possible that “citizens can choose not only vote,” he said.
The opponents also stressed that the three strategic demands of the project are the demands for “an independent national electoral commission; that citizens can choose without the mediation of the national commission nomination; and at the same time that the President of the Republic is directly elected.”
The management group of the project is currently made up of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), Independent and Democratic Cuba (CID), United Anti-totalitarian Forum (FANTU), Cuban Youth Roundtable (MDJC), Progressive Arc Party, Citizens Committee for Racial Integration, Center for Support of the Transition, and the Cuban Law Association, but its promoters say they are open to the “incorporation of other civil society organizations and independent actors.”
Cuesta Morua insisted that this is a political process, not one more a Latin American revolution, and it is intended to allow the citizenry to assume their rights and choose who will be their representatives.
The opponents did not shirk the thorny issue of the unity of the opposition and organizations that have not joined the Otro18 project, such as the Christian Liberation Movement and the Ladies in White. Cuesta Morua said that “the perception of disunity no longer represents the current reality of how the opposition is organized in Cuba” and called the present time a “mature stage.”
“Today more than yesterday, the opposition is working together, coinciding in many respects and has put any irreconcilable differences in the past to work on concrete proposals for democratic change,” said Cuesta Morua.
The opposition denounced pressures, “threats and the confiscation of working tools” against the promoters of the initiative and cited the arrests that occurred around the first Forum of the initiative, held in early March at the home of an activist in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana.
A Battle For Democratization In Cuba / 14ymedio, Pedro Campos
14ymedio, Pedro Campos, Havana, 1 April 2016 – Cuban Communist Party (PCC) member Francisco Rodriguez Cruz, a journalist for the newspaper Trabajadores (Workers) and an activist against homophobia and for sexual rights, wrote an open letter to the first secretary of the Party Central Committee, Raul Castro, asking that the 7th Party Congress be postponed to give the organization time to allow the documents that will be approved there to be discussed ahead of time by the party base and all citizens.
This call from “Paquito de Cuba,” as he is know in the media, reflects the feelings of broad sectors of the PCC militancy and of the Cuban population, concerned that this Congress is going to approve specific documents that have a great deal to do with the immediate future of all Cubans. I am referring to the “conceptualization of the Cuban socioeconomic model” and the “prospective development plan for the year 2030.” continue reading
Since Raul Castro has risen to the top leadership of the Party and the Government, processes have been developed for consulting the party training bases, the unions, the Union of Young Communists (UJC) and the People’s Power, with regards to the general problems of the country and especially in relation to the Guidelines of the Sixth Congress of the PCC.
It has been a concern of many Party members and ordinary citizens that the proposals don’t take their concerns sufficiently into account, and that other suggestions appear in a limited and biased way, tied to the old concepts of state and bureaucratic control.
Specifically, it happened with self-employment, cooperatives, independent entrepreneurial self-management independent of state control of the workers, and with the need to democratize the political system with freedom of expression and association and free elections, and strengthening the independence, abilities and autonomies of the local organs of People’s Power. The political and economic essence of a democratic society with broad support from the bases of the PCC, workers and citizens, according to what it has been possible to confirm in the opinions of thousands of Cubans expressed in the media, meetings, official conferences and not only among family and friends.
Recently, the Party leadership acknowledged that a portion of the Guidelines approved at the last Party Congress had not yet been implemented and had played only a small part.
During the five years since the Sixth Congress, hundreds of thousands of critiques have appeared in the Party press and in blogs and leftist alternative pages from the moderate opposition, about the inability, lack of will and even the obstacles evidenced in the leadership of the PCC and the government to implement their own agreements.
Raul Castro invited the Party bases to offer their opinions; the leadership of the Party and the government organized vertical consultations in Santiago to learn what Havanans thought and vice versa, and later the higher bodies reached agreements that bore no resemblance to what people from below had said. And then come the laws and decrees to implement them laden with bureaucratic constraints. Where is democracy?
This “system of participation” has demonstrated its inefficiency, people are dissatisfied with what has been done, including with the agreements of the PCC, and now, on top of that, the thousand or so representatives (a minuscule proportion of the population) who will meet in the Seventh Party Congress, will approve what economic, political and social model that will rule the destiny of 11 million Cubans on the island and another three million of us outside the island, and that will be the development plan for the next 15 years.
All Cubans of good will, Party members or not, inside or outside, should unite their voices and support the request from “Paquito de Cuba” for the postponement of the Seventh Congress and the democratic discussion of its documents so that they are subject to open, horizontal and free debate of the entire Party membership and all the Cuban people.
The streets of Cuba are not free filled with these slogans, but indeed all the official and non-official websites from Granma, Trabajadores, Juventud Rebelde, Cubadebate, and the rest of the social networks.
It is not a battle within the Party, it is the Cuban people’s battle for democratization, and on its outcome will depend, to a great extent, the future of the homeland of all Cubans.
MININT Confronts What Could Be Its Worst Challenge: Information Theft / Juan Juan Almeida
Juan Juan Almeida, 31 March 2016 — Not so long ago there was a rumor that high officials of MINIT had been arrested by the Ministry. In agreement with those implicated in the event and making a clear allusion comparable to Case No. 1 of 1989 [a highly respected Cuban general was executed for drug trafficking], there was speculation about a new report. But the rumor faded away under a suspicious silence and a potent, air-tight cloak of secrecy.
Theories have flaws, and even the Roman Empire lasted four centuries longer than predicted.
What’s certain is that the Division General, Carlos Fernández Gondín, left his office in the MININT building accompanied by a doctor, after an attack of rage that gave him a stroke and left him hospitalized. continue reading
What could have made him so irritated, or what could be so serious that it could reduce the blood flow of someone who had been capable, without remorse, of ordering the “ready, aim, fire” and, furthermore, justifying it.
A little more than four months after the Army General, Abelardo Colomé Ibarra (alias “Furry”), resigned from the Council of State and as Minister of the Interior, the Ministry faced what could be its biggest challenge: information theft.
What’s certain is that the recent initiate as Minister, Division General Carlos Fernández Gondín, who also holds the “honorable” award as Hero of the Republic of Cuba, left his office accompanied by a doctor, after an attack of fury, which provoked a stroke and left him hospitalized.
The possessor of a sinister countenance, General Gondín is known for keeping himself in the vanguard of the struggle. His principles, as well as his doctrine, begin and end with the word “terror.”
But when he had the new appointment, when he felt part of those who call the shots, a group or an individual, still not identified, entered the warehouse where the ultra-secret rumors are guarded and ransacked a very important data base with privileged information.
What information was stolen? I have no idea! And those who know aren’t talking. However, the Cuban Government has let loose the largest operation ever seen in many years, and, by the aggression of the search, is showing desperation.
Officials of Internal Control, Intelligence, Counter-Intelligence, Military Counter-Intelligence and the Commission of Defense and National Security have been given the task of finding and questioning, completely, without exceptions, those who entered and left the Ministry in question.
And, as all computer networks are fashionable these days, despite assurances that the theft was not the result of any cyber attack, there’s a good group of investigators, working full-time, who are snooping around, with incisive scrupulousness, in the corners of cyperspace.
The fear and reprimand suffered by the sadistic, cowardly, possessed and insecure Gondín, weren’t because he didn’t have copies of the stolen archives, but for the fear and worry of not knowing into whose hands what some consider “delicate information” could fall.
Translated by Regina Anavy
Raul Castro and His Retirement Plan / Juan Juan Almeida
Juan Juan Almeida, 24 March 2016 — It is a few days before the start of the Cuban Communist Party Congress and Raul Castro is counting down the months until his retirement. He has everything more or less figured out. Almost. If you consider everything the president of both the Council of State and the Council of Ministers has said and done in the last two years, it quickly becomes apparent that it is all part of a plan in which he has weighed the possible consequences of an exponential loss of power. He knows that even if he wields power from the sidelines, as I anticipate will happen, there will be a handful of decisions about which he will not be consulted and, as happened to Fidel, he will find himself out of power.
Raul Castro’s plan is to retire while simultaneously reducing the very real possibility that a Baltasar Garzon will come along one day to stand in judgement over his many crimes. He is in jeopardy in Cuba; outside Cuba the risk is greater. continue reading
The only person with whom he can cooperate to guarantee some sort of immunity is His Holiness the Pope.
Unlike in journalism, what is important in politics is what you don’t see.
Let’s take a look at recent events. In the past year the president of France, the prime minister of Italy, the president of Austria and now Barack Obama have passed through Havana. In the midst of all the comings and goings of important and elegant visitors, the Paris Club wrote off part of Cuba’s external debt.
It would be logical to think that all this is the result of some great negotiation, especially since we know that the Paris Club does not give away four billion dollars without some kind of agreement.
Tourism in Cuba has grown by more than 20%. Havana is filled with visitors while both profits and remittances are increasing. Clearly, there is a lot of money coming into the country yet the streets are disgusting, street lamps are non-existent, stores go unstocked and people are broken.
Where is all this money going?
A good part is being siphoned off to create a large fund to support the royal family and its retinue of bodyguards in retirement.
The well-publicized battle against corruption allows the general to consolidate the funds into a single treasure chest while at the same time eliminating a certain number of “corrupt” individuals whom he could not trust.
Based on information they had, these individuals accused officials of dishonesty. They had either followed the trail of misappropriated funds or knew where they were ultimately being directed. Rather than being corrupt officials, they became the incarcerated elite.
Such was the case of Thomas Lorenzo, former director of credit card sales at BICSA, a man whose crime was never larceny. His transgression lay in the way he handled information, which is perhaps why he ended up dying in prison.
Another portion of the money is being used to pay creditors and, by paying, gain their confidence and protection. Russia, China and the Paris Club shelled out because there were demonstrations of an intent to pay and those actions warranted debt forgiveness.
The next person to visit Havana will be the recently elected president of Argentina, who has already warned his country that he will also commute part of the debt.
The strategy is effective but dangerous. It is very similar to the one used Nicolae Ceausescu before he was shot. He tightened Romania’s belt in an effort to begin paying down the country’s debts but his timing was bad. Misery had overtaken the country. It was 1989, the winds of freedom were blowing and the rest is history.
The only thing the general’s ingenious plan lacks is a successor capable of keeping him away from those like me who are always lurking. It should someone who is a loyal apprentice but not, in my opinion, his son. Or Miguel Diaz-Canel. No doubt we will begin to get some idea in the coming days after new appointments are announced during the upcoming VII Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba.