December 2016 – Page 9 – Translating Cuba

Lights After The Ashes / 14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez

Despite the mourning, some have dared to put up Christmas decorations. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 1 December 2016 – Timidly, without much noise or fuss, Havanans are shaking off the national mourning decreed for Cuba, as of last Saturday, for the death of Fidel Castro. Despite cultural activities having been cancelled, the closed theaters and the bars without alcohol, the first Christmas decorations are beginning to be seen in some homes.

The owners of these houses adorned with lights and garlands risk being reprimanded by those closest to officialdom or by the police.

In a city where the authorities have severely reprimanded those who play loud music in their homes, or who plan any kind of festivities, to install Christmas decorations is true defiance, a gesture of irreverence more daring and forceful than an opposition slogan shouted in the Plaza of the Revolution.

Thousands of families across the capital city are waiting for the end of this period of seclusion imposed by the powers-that-be to prominently display their tree with a star and snow made out of cotton. These are the symbols of the new times, of the holidays that will inevitably come after the great funeral.

The Death of Fidel Castro: What Awaits Us Now? / Iván García

One of the many billboards that went up all over Cuba after Fidel's death. Source: Infobae — One of the many billboards that went up all over Cuba after Fidel’s death. Source: Infobae

Iván García, 28 November 2016 — It was half past ten at night in the privately-owned Perla Negra bar in Havana’s populous La Viñora neighborhood and thirty minutes by car from the center of the city, where the locals were drinking mojitos, caipirinhas and even stout. No one had yet learned of the death of the Fidel Castro.

The dominant sounds were salsa music, reggaeton and Marc Anthony ballads along with the clinking of glasses, the shuffle of canapés and the whispers of couples in love.

No one thought to interrupt the party to announce the death of the old guerrilla leader. At midnight, Oscar Lopez —an engineer who was celebrating his birthday with his wife — was walking the nine blocks to his apartment in the Lawton neighborhood. He did not notice anything out of the ordinary other than a short line of four or five people waiting to buy ground pork patties for their children’s breakfasts. continue reading

As is customary at this time of the morning, sales clerks at small food service businesses were yawning in front of shelves of confections and cold-cut sandwiches, drunkards were lying on the covered sidewalks of Tenth of October Avenue, and a few gay and transvestite prostitutes were trolling for customers.

“I swear, nobody was talking a about the news. I didn’t even notice any extra police deployments. The night that Fidel Castro died was a night like any other. I found out about his death at two o’clock in the morning when my brother, who lives in Miami, phoned to tell me,” says Oscar as he waits in the line to purchase bread, which Cubans have bought from the state using their ration books since 1962.

When you ask ordinary Havana residents what they were doing when they heard the news of Castro’s death, they respond without any hint of drama. More than a few of them found out through text messages sent from Miami. This is not surprising given that a large segment of the Cuban population does not typically watch state television.

Most people watch TV through illegal satellite antennae or they rent a compendium of programming known as the Packet, which offers melodramatic Mexican soap operas and mediocre audience participation programs from the other side of the Florida Straits.

Unlike Miami, where Castro’s death took place on the day after Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and hundreds of people celebrated with bottles of rum and roast pork, the news here was received here with little notice or fanfare.

For Cubans, Fidel Castro essentially died on July 31, 2006, when an unexpected illness forced him to give up power. By the time his passing was announced on a cool autumn night ten years later, his death had been long expected.

Sahily Téllez, a sixteen-year-old high school sophomore, says Fidel was a distant figure to her. “Unlike my parents, I did not grow up seeing him as a dominant figure in my life. To me, he was old news, a man who led a revolution and built a society that barely works. Fidel and other elderly officials like him seem anachronistic, conservative. Among people of my age, Fidel and Raúl are not very popular. It’s just that many of us aspire to live in a consumer capitalist society. We associate Fidel with poverty and his speeches were full of ideology.”

What most worries Daniel Pereda, a self-employed taxi driver who drives a dilapidated 1954 Chevrolet, is what could come after the death of Fidel Castro.

“The situation isn’t pretty. There’s the crisis in Venezuela. If Nicolás Maduro loses power because he is shipping oil to Cuba at rock-bottom prices, it will impact Cuba and our lives. Then there is the victory of Donald Trump in the United States. He is an unpredictable guy who will probably not continue Obama’s friendly policies towards Cuba. This must be giving quite a few people in the Palace of the Revolution (the seat of government) anxiety attacks,” he says as he swerves to avoid potholes in Cerro Avenue.

Already the state press has begun broadcasting extensive special programming eulogizing the life and work of Fidel Castro. The funeral planning committee has announced that on November 28 and 29 people will be able to visit the José Martí Memorial in the Plaza of Revolution to pay their well-deserved respects.

People are also being called upon to do something that seems mind-boggling: “Sign the solemn oath to fulfill the concept of Revolution as expressed by our historic leader on May 1, 2000 as an expression of the will to give continuity to his ideas and our socialism.”

At 7:00 P.M. on November 29, a commemorative rally will be held in Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution. The transfer of Castro’s ashes will begin the following day, retracing the route that The Caravan of Freedom followed in January 1959. The journey will end with another rally in Santiago de Cuba on December 3, this time in the city’s Antonio Maceo Plaza.

The internment is scheduled for 07:00 A.M. on December 4 at Santa Ifigenia Cemetery in Santiago de Cuba. It was also reported that the Military Review and Combatants March, which commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Granma landing (December 2, 1956), and Revolutionary Armed Forces Day are being postponed until January 2, 2017.

Suspicions and rumors are spreading throughout Havana. Marino Ruiz, a grocery store worker, believes that “Fidel Castro died days ago. Everything fits perfectly. A weekend that correlates with December 2, the 60th anniversary of the armed forces and a month and six days after the 58th anniversary of the triumph of the Revolution,” he observes. But the truth is that Fidel Castro met with the president of Viet Nam, Tran Dai Quang, at his home on November 15. And photos of the meeting were taken by his son, Alex Castro, and his personal photographer.

According to Ignacio Gonzalez, a nurse, the memorial events will be a nine-day nuisance. “There will be dozens of programs on radio and television eulogizing the ’maximum leader.’ And all this racket will no doubt go on for one or two months. You have to wonder what awaits us. If only I could fly to the moon.”

With no power to rally supporters or a message that resonates with the average Cuban, Castro’s death has caught the divided dissident community off guard.

“Difficult days lie ahead,” according to Carlos Díaz, an independed sociologist.” I would not want to be in Raúl Castro’s shoes. He is faced with an ongoing economic crisis, a system that does not work, a very erratic Donald Trump as president of the United States and the impending fall of Chavismo in Venezuela. He will have to move very carefully to avoid being the one who brought down the revolution his brother Fidel led. I believe the government will accelerate new and more significant economic reforms. But the political process will remain closed and they will continue exerting iron-fisted social control as long as they can.”

Julio Aleaga — head of the opposition group Candidates for Change, which advocates nominating dissidents for the few elected offices for which private citizens can compete — believes that “the death of Fidel Castro, a very negative figure, can be the catalyst for profound change. The conservative wing of the ruling party has lost a powerful symbol. And in medium term change is unstoppable.”

Diana Armenteros, a political science graduate, is not so optimistic. “Castroism has a lot of life left in it. They won’t be able to bury Fidel just yet. Let’s not forget that the military controls 80% of the national economy. Untangling this mess won’t be so easy,” she claims.

At the moment it is too soon to analyze what effect the death of Fidel Castro will have on the current situation. The funeral ceremonies have only just begun.

The legendary Plaza of the Revolution is being prepared to receive millions of Cubans who will pay their last respects to Fidel. And the Communist Party propaganda machine will continue to run at full throttle.

For a few days — probably for a couple of months — the place Cuba will most closely resemble is North Korea.

Fidel Castro’s 13 Most Notorious Failures / 14ymedio, Zunilda Mata

“Now it begins, The Great 10 Million [ton] Harvest.” Fidel Castro promoting the 10 million ton of sugar harvest from 1969 to 1970. (Archive)

14ymedio, Zunilda Mata, Havana, 30 November 2016 – Cuba’s official press and, oddly, a good part of the international media, never stop repeating that Fidel Castro brought Cubans free education and healthcare for all. Cuba was already, however, one of the most developed countries on the continent before the Revolution, much more so even than some European countries such as Spain. Currently, the healthcare system is in a calamitous state since the USSR and Venezuela suspended their enormous subsidies for Havana, and education, despite being universal and free, is totally at the service of an ideology.

These are the 13 most notorious failures of the last 57 years, all attributable to the Maximum Leader.

1. One of Fidel Castro’s first promises in 1959 was to drain the Zapata Swamp, the largest wetland in the Caribbean islands, and to use it for planting rice. After investing substantial resources and mobilizing a large labor force, the project was abandoned. The failure of this idea of Castro’s was fortunate for the ecosystem, and today the area is included in the National System of Protected Areas and is a breeding ground with more than 10,000 rhombifer crocodiles, a species native to Cuba. A natural resource that would have been lost with the expansion of agricultural crops.
2. In a public speech in the sixties, Castro said that in a short time there would not be a single marabou bush to be found anywhere on the island. Five decades later, the advance of this invasive plant has hampered agriculture to the point that his brother Raul re-issued the promise in a speech in July of 2007, during the annual commemoration ceremony for the assault on the Moncada Baracks, but the problem remains unresolved.
3. In the early sixties Fidel Castro promised that milk production in Cuba would be so great that although the population was expected to triple, Cubans would not be able to consume all the milk that was going to be produced. Currently, milk is a rationed product distributed only to children under seven (and those with special medical needs), who receive a kilogram of powdered milk every ten days. In 2007, Raul Castro expressed a desire that all Cubans would be able to “drink a glass of milk” every morning.
4. The October Crisis, also known as the Missile Crisis, represented a major defeat for the Maximum Leader, when the Soviets ignored him and made an agreement with the United States to withdraw their nuclear arms without considering his opinion. The Cuban people were barely aware of how close they came to perishing in a global cataclysm. In the streets of the island people chanted, “If they come, they stay,” and “Nikita, pansy, what is given isn’t taken back,” (in a rhyming version in the original Spanish), an allusion to the withdrawal of the warheads.
5. Starting in late 1968 the island began preparing for a 10 million ton sugar harvest in 1970, but managed to produce only 8.5 million tons. The country turned its entire attention to the cane cutting, with the end of year holidays suspended to concentrate on harvesting and sugar production. The economy was left in ruins, fields dedicated to other crops were turned over to sugar, and the damages to the environment were never revealed.
6. The Alamar neighborhood to the east of the capital, built through a system of microbrigades – people diverted from their normal workplaces to construction brigades – was exposed as the Cuban model of socialist architecture. In Alamar’s concrete blocks would live the “New Man,” an individual without ambitions who would know nothing of markets or exploitation. Today the Alamar apartments represent the lowest price point in the capital’s housing market. Not only for their architectural ugliness, but because this bedroom community lacks an adequate cultural, economic and commercial infrastructure.
7. In 1967 it was proposed to create what would be called “the Havana cordon” around the capital, with the planting of coffee interspersed with pigeon peas, a miraculous bean to feed cattle. Thousands of Cubans were mobilized for the cultivation and the official press predicted a notable improvement in food supplies. The project was abandoned and its final fate never explained. [Ed. note: Among other problems, Havana does not have a climate conducive to coffee growing.]
8. In the late seventies it was planned that the Isle of Youth would be Cuba’s first communist territory. Experiments were established to eliminate money and extend free goods and services. Numerous schools were built to welcome students on fellowships from 37 countries. Today most of these schools are abandoned, their hallways and classrooms overrun by vegetation.
9. The genetically superior cow was one of the most persistent obsessions of the Comandante en Jefe. Crossing Holsteins with native cattle would create the F-1 and later F-2 animals that would guarantee the national cattle herd. The emblematic animal of this project was a single cow named White Udder, which set several records, producing more than 100 liters of milk a day. The year 2015 closed with slightly more than 4 million cows on the island, almost two million fewer than in 1958, while the population had doubled.

The Juraguá nuclear power plant in the province of Cienfuegos, is visible from the "nuclear city" where plant workers were to reside, and where now people are sunk in economic problems and labor inertia. (14ymedio)

1. In 1983, Cuban troops surrendered to United States troops in Granada. Cuban official television said that the Cubans had been slain wrapped in the national flag before falling into the hands of the “enemy.” Shortly afterwards they returned to the island, safe and sound, along with the officer in charge of the mission, Colonel Pedro Tortolo. Popular humor named a kind of tennis shoe sold in the rationed market after him, because they were able to “run well.”
2. The Juragua nuclear power plant, in Cienfuegos province, was proclaimed the “work of the century” in Cuba, but never completed. The project started in 1982 with technical and financial support from the Soviet Union, and was to have four Russian VVER reactors, with a capacity of 440 megawatts each, which should have become operational between 1995 and 1996. After the disappearance if the USSR, the project was paralyzed for lack of financial resources. The works were 50% complete at that time, with an investment of some 1.1 billion dollars.
3. As a solution to the food shortages of the Special Period, the so-called Food Plan was launched. Thousands of Cubans were mobilized to agricultural camps to produce, in particular, the so-called “microjet” banana. With a system of intensive irrigation they were planted as a solution to increase the food supply, but the costs of production and the low quality of the bananas ruined the plan.
4. In the environment of the “Battle of Ideas,” the idea was generated to create a social worker initiative, a kind of “Red Guards” of the Revolution who were assigned multiple tasks. They distributed energy-saving light bulbs during the so-called Energy Revolution, controlled the sale of gasoline at gas stations, but also served as the shock troops in acts of repudiation against dissidents or ideological reaffirmation. With the coming to power of Raul Castro, they were demobilized and many of them ended up joining the ranks of the Ministry of the Interior.