La Playita 16 has never been a place that is well cared for by the authorities. (14ymedio)
14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 16 August 2022 — “Don’t take off your shoes!” a mother yelled, this Monday morning, to her newly arrived son at Playita 16, a piece of coastline west of Havana that serves as consolation for those who cannot afford a trip to the white sands of Santa María del Mar or Boca Ciega, in the eastern part of the city. The precaution of keeping his shoes on is not only because of the sharp rocky stretch that appears before reaching the water, but also because of the garbage that fills the area, bottle tops, empty cans, paper and other waste.
An employee wipes a damp cloth over the counter of a coffee shop a few meters from the waves. There are barely a couple of customers in the place because, despite the heat, the high prices for beer and soft drinks scare away thirsty bathers. A young man asks the woman if the Comunales company — the public services provider — ever goes through the place to collect garbage. “Ah, I don’t know. This is my little piece and it’s clean,” she replies as she shrugs. Outside, the heap of varied packaging covers the ground, gleaming in the August sun.
La Playita 16 has never been a spot that is well cared for by the authorities. Rather, it is a vexing place where, in the ’70s, hippies, rockers and all kinds of people considered “uncomfortable” by the Cuban power structure and its desire to “parameterize” any hint of diversity, congregated. In that piece of coast in the municipality of Playa, the police were fattening themselves by issuing fines and taking away the long-haired youths. Also from there, innumerable and rustic boats departed during the 1994 Balseros [Rafters] Crisis.
Then, at the end of the last century, dollarization began to change the face of this coastline lacking sand and umbrellas. The appearance of several kiosks selling drinks and food attracted other visitors who alternated looking at the sunset with a cold drink or a slice of pizza. Perhaps from those years there are still some more gentrified bathers who parade their bathing suits, their colorful towels and their purebred dogs around the place, but they are few. Most of them have migrated from the beach or the country.
This Monday, almost at noon, despite the harshness of El Indio and his arrows, a drunk who spent the night on the concrete road continued to snore. Some children frolicked on the shore and a lady watched the horizon from under the protection of a huge hat. Around them, the torn bags, some tetrapack boxes that once contained juices or small doses of Planchao rum, and the empty bottles were also part of the scene.
A piece of cardboard flew from a nearby bench to land on one of the waste piles, right next to a couple with a baby stroller who were taking a photo with the little one’s red cheeks in the foreground, behind the already blue sea, and to the side was the motley mountain of debris.
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Ernesto Oliva Legra, the Cuban doctor murdered in Ecatepec, Mexico. (Facebook)
14ymedio, Havana, 15 August 2022 — Ernesto Oliva Legra, a 32-year-old Cuban doctor from Santiago de Cuba, was killed in Ecatepec, Mexico, in a shooting that occurred early Friday morning at the hospital where he worked. Along with him, two women were also shot.
The news, reported by several independent media, was released on social networks. Specifically, due to a Facebook post from Edgar Martínez Aguilar, who indicated that the deceased, who had arrived at the ISSEMYM Hospital in Ecatepec, was in that municipality in the State of Mexico, bordering the Mexican capital, known to be one of the most violent in the country. The condolences of his relatives also confirmed his death.
“My cousin left Cuba for Mexico, to be able to progress and looking so young, they have shot him,” Yarine Yoa Matos lamented on her Facebook wall. According to the El Chago news page, the young man from Santiago had been in Mexico for three years.
On Saturday, the local press was reported that the doctor had been “severely wounded” with a bullet in the head in an attack on the Maternal and Child Clinic in the Tierra Blanca neighborhood, and that a nurse named Abigail and a 60-year-old patient had also died. continue reading
Two armed subjects, details the note in El Sol de Toluca, arrived at the health center around 3:30 in the morning and asked “for a woman,” after which they began to shoot and hit the three victims.
The event coincides with the importating of 500 Cuban healthcare workers from the Island to Mexico, to remote areas of the country, such as the Mountain of Guerrero, which are not only extremely poor but where violence, as a result of the dispute between drug cartels, rages with impunity.
These doctors, a source from the Health Institute for Welfare (Insabi) explained to 14ymedio, will receive a salary similar to their Mexican counterparts, between 41,784 pesos (2,042 dollars) and 35,237 pesos (1,722 dollars) per month. With the usual opacity in these cases, the same source indicated that “it has not been established whether the money will be received by them or through the Government of Cuba,” and that “lodging and food will be covered by the municipal authorities [of the cities] where each hospital in which they will work is located.”
The Havana regime continues to bet on the export of medical services – its main source of income – to alleviate its diminished economy.
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Arrival of repressive forces to prevent the protest on the night of August 9 in La Esperanza, Cienfuegos. (Justice 11J/Captura)
14ymedio, Havana, August 17, 2022 — Cubans banged on pots and pans again on Tuesday night in protest against the long blackouts they are suffering. In San Antonio de los Baños, where the protests of July 11, 2021 began, the noise was heard in the neighborhoods of Hospital, El Palenque, La Punta and La Placita, among others.
“After ten hours without electricity, we were supposed to have power between eight and eleven at night, but our service was cut off again at about ten,” María de los Ángeles Alfonso, a resident of San Antonio, explains to 14ymedio. She joined the demonstration when she “heard the banging in the distance.”
“I went out with my daughter, and we started shouting to get the lights back on; we also shouted ’freedom’. A little later, some plainclothes police arrived on motorcycles and asked us to go home,” she explains.
The officials told the residents that they were “giving pleasure to the enemy and the empire,” but the warnings didn’t persuade them to go home and stop the cacerolazo.* “I told them that for me the enemy was the one who wouldn’t let me live a normal life,” says Alfonso.
Despite being threatened with consequences if they persisted, “no one went home, and they continued to bang,” Alfonso says. “We almost had another blackout in the early hours of the morning, and these are holy hours when they don’t cut off the electricity. So demanding works.”
Through social networks, the usual medium in these cases, some videos were published where you can hear, in complete darkness, the beating on metal. Reports also include a cacerolazo on Tuesday night in the Pekin neighborhood of Güira de Melena, the third protest in less than a week in this municipality of Artemis province.
To the cry of “Homeland and life!” dozens of residents in the city of Manzanillo, in the province of Granma, also took to the streets to protest continue reading
this Tuesday against the power outage. The demonstration forced the authorities to reinforce the police presence around the government headquarters, as reported on social networks by neighbors.
This demonstration joins the many that have occurred in recent days in several places on the island, such as Santa Clara, Bejucal, Holguín, Cienfuegos, Santiago de Cuba and Pinar del Río.
The legal platform, created to follow up on the hundreds of defendants after the demonstrations of July last year, has registered up to 59 protests on the island over power cuts since June 14.
Likewise, since they published their first report on the subject on August 4, as of this Tuesday, the organization counted 15 more protests.
“Despite the fact that the new events have been mostly peaceful (we have verified only one incident of property damage), we note the escalation of state violence,” they said in their text, which reports that there was “intervention by repressive forces to contain concentrations of people” on August 5 in Martí Park, and on August 9 in the La Esperanza neighborhood, both in the city of of Cienfuegos, and on the 8th in the Alcides Pino neighborhood in Holguín.
In La Esperanza, in addition, “people reported that they beat protesters and that a pregnant woman was arrested.”
They also warn that in San José de las Lajas (province of Mayabeque), where there were cacerolazos on August 1 and 12, agents from the Ministry of the Interior threatened the demonstrators with “years of prison.”
Justice 11J has had access to two judicial decrees imposing a precautionary measure for the crimes of public disorder and contempt issued by the Municipal Prosecutor’s Office of Palmira (Cienfuegos), which include information on 16 people, 12 with a measure of pretrial detention.
*Translator’s note: Cacerolazo is a word coined for demonstrations where people go out on the street, or from their doors, windows and balconies, and bang on “casseroles” (pots and pans) to protest.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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Up to 130 Cuban pesos are paid per dollar outside the official banks. (14ymedio)
14ymedio, Havana, 16 August 2022 — The price of the dollar continues to rise in Cuba’s informal market after the entry into force of the new foreign exchange rates decreed by the Government two weeks ago. There is no change in this trend after Monday’s announcement on State TV’s Roundtable show, of an alleged opening to foreign investment in trade under the control of the State.
Up to 130 pesos is paid per dollar outside the official banks, according to the independent media outlet El Toque in its daily chart. The euro has the same value in the informal market, and the freely convertible currency (MLC) reaches 134.5 pesos.
On August 3, the Government, desperate and in the midst of the worst economic crisis in the country’s history, announced the purchase of cash dollars at 120 pesos instead of 24, and as of August 9, Cubans can already withdraw national currency at ATMs with this exchange rate. Since Tuesday, one can also transfer funds through magnetic cards in MLC to accounts in pesos with the new exchange rate.
However, the rise in foreign exchange is dragging with it the prices of many products that are sold in the private market and also in the informal market in Cuban pesos (CUP). continue reading
“The bag of bread that I bought at 70 pesos last week already on Saturday cost me 90,” laments a neighbor of Los Sitios, in Central Havana. “The saleswoman says that they have to buy the euro to deposit it and then buy the flour in MLC, so now it costs them more.”
Goods such as soft drinks, juices and beer, which can only be purchased at the MLC rate to supply private businesses, are also increasing in price in private restaurants and cafes. The 12-oz. can of imported beer that was bought a couple of weeks ago at 200 pesos, is now around 250. Also the main dishes based on chicken, fish or seafood have increased their prices in the paladares, “private” restaurants.
For its part, the real estate market is increasingly expressing its prices in foreign currency, in the face of the instability of the peso. On classified sites, ads for homes for sale most often carry the amount in dollars, with the warning “to be paid in the United States.” Others clarify that “if you don’t have euros in hand, don’t even call.”
The best offer in the informal foreign exchange market contributes to further lowering the little enthusiasm that customers had to sell euros and dollars in bank branches. On Monday, an employee of the Metropolitan Bank located on the ground floor of the Ministry of Transport in Havana asked, on several occasions, while organizing the line in front of the office, “Is anyone here to sell foreign currency?” No one answered.
A few meters from that branch, a private cafeteria offered a more favorable exchange rate. “We accept payment in dollars, one at 130,’’ explained a young man to a couple of customers who wanted to pay with a ten-dollar bill. “We will give the change in pesos, of course,” the employee said. “Much better than at the Bank, where they are still asleep and haven’t raised the price.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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The attempt to promote development in the country’s business to boost wholesale trade through foreign investment faces the same problem as always: what to trade. (Granma)
14ymedio, Elías Amor Bravo, Valencia (Spain), 16 August 2022 — No one was calmed by the appearance on State TV’s Roundtable show of Betsy Díaz Velázquez, Minister of Internal Trade, and Ana Teresita González Fraga, First Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade. The officials used their appearance to announce alleged changes in the role of foreign investment in domestic trade and thus try to solve the problems of shortages in the wholesale and retail trade that afflict Cubans.
Badly, things are going very badly in Cuba, such that there is a leap into the void like this. Nor do they believe most of the things they said, and thus they were unconvincing and with an argument bordering on the most absolute lack of credibility.
Why do we say this and not believe that these new measures will achieve the positive effects on the functioning of wholesale and retail trade, as well as foreign investment in Cuba?
For the same reason that the “63 measures” haven’t served to stimulate agricultural production. Once again, Cuban communists believe that the main problem of the economic model that governs the country can be fixed with ’sake of appearance’ patches, ignoring the structural reforms that must change, update and modernize it. Let them forget about it: a house is not built starting with the roof, but with solid and firm foundations. That’s what the two Castroite leaders didn’t talk about on state television.
Several aspects deserve attention, in addition to this superficial way of addressing a more structural problem. The measures announced are temporary, which makes it difficult to achieve any interrelationship between them, no matter how much the communist leaders say otherwise. In fact, they can only be seen independently and in isolation, and they arise in a global economic context that is by no means the most suitable to adopt for this type of problem.
The measures, in addition, seem to be made, preferably, for state enterprises; in particular, the elimination of the foreign exchange restrictions with which they operate. Has the regime already found a way out for the dollars it started buying on August 4 with the exchange rate instrument? This is bad, like killing flies with a cannon. continue reading
This circulation of foreign exchange from the private sector to State entities to overcome the problems of shortages in the domestic market of goods, highly demanded by the population and by non-state actors, is a reckless decision, which won’t achieve the objective, no matter how flexible customs procedures and operations become. The first thing that has to be guaranteed is a stable framework for these operations to actually be carried out, without the need for promotion by the State, and here we have one of the evils of the Cuban economy.
The communist leaders were cautious and recognized that “actions are insufficient to curb the complex economic situation, since shortages in the domestic market are maintained, and the expected impact on the development of wholesale trade hasn’t been achieved.” So, what is the point of straining the domestic economic scenario, more than it is, with measures in which no one has the slightest confidence? Who will assume responsibility when in a few months the new failure of these measures is seen?
The idea of transferring the alleged benefits derived from the participation of foreign investment in the development of trade in areas like the access to supply markets, attracting financing, equipment, administration methods or the use of innovative techniques for logistics management, should be based on a prior analysis of the intention of foreign investors to participate in this “business.”
They might be surprised, because it’s difficult for foreign capital to have any motivation to make this contribution. Will this objective be achieved through direct interference by the State? Let them say it, because then foreign investment will leave the country. It’s that simple.
The two ministers should know that the attempt to promote the development of business throughout the country to boost wholesale trade through foreign investment faces the same problem as always: what to trade, and what production of goods and services can be directed to these operations? In addition, doing it with joint ventures is no less complicated, since this entity is the least used by foreign capital in Cuba. Let them wonder why.
The idea that businesses with foreign investment are mainly destined for the sale of raw materials, inputs, equipment and other goods that boost national production, as well as the supply of some finished goods — for example: food, cleaning products or electricity installation systems with renewable energy sources — is part of that obsessive mania of Cuban communists to control and direct foreign capital, a model that hasn’t produced revenue since the adoption of Law 118.
That there are entities that can finance domestic producers who have the conditions to become suppliers, with a differentiated financial scheme applied to these entities, which guarantees the stability of the supply chain, including the authorization to make sales in freely convertible currency (MLC). This creates confusion between the different agents and lays the foundations for a principle of political discretion in decision-making. Not good.
It is also intended to authorize the modalities of foreign investment established in the country for the provision of goods and services, which have the conditions for this purpose, that can be sold in the wholesale trade segment, including forms of non-state management, non-governmental organizations, embassies, business representations and branches in Cuba. It’s a crazy decision, which has very little to do with economic rationality and which falls into this area of “every man for himself” and the Regime’s lack of credibility that we talked about at the beginning of this article. Imagine an embassy in Cuba selling sanitary napkins or toilet paper to small businesses.
Entangling trade with foreign investment through these measures “carries a very high responsibility so that they have the immediate result that the population expects,” Ms. Díaz Velázquez acknowledged.
On a theoretical level, the minister believes that sales in MLC will increase products available in pesos and, with this, it will be possible to counteract the increase in inflation and stabilize supply. The problem is that this cycle has been in operation for more than a year and has not yielded any results. So, what reasons are there to expect that it can be different now? None. The figures for the sector are the same. Nothing has changed and will not change, so any transformation is impossible.
Cuban trade, modern, competitive and efficient before 1959, has become a useless waste after 63 years of communist domination. It’s probably one of the most inoperative and unfair trading systems in the world, with an aging, underutilized and deteriorated infrastructure, and without incentives to improve supplies. There is a lot lost, because the communists eliminated intermediaries and commercial agents from the beginning. Recovering trade goes beyond putting patches on foreign investment.
The Regime’s obsession with prioritizing the State market and interfering in the businesses that may arise to boost national production, achieve productive chains and offer goods and services to the population, leads to the very disaster of measures that lack experience in other countries of the world. Far from unblocking operating conditions, this will make them more confusing by authorizing only certain foreign investments and prioritizing what has to be done based on political and discretionary decisions, the worst thing that can happen to an economy.
And in the midst of this national environment of widespread shortages suffered by Cubans, the leaders who participated in the Roundtable came up with the idea that it’s necessary to export however and as soon as possible. Export what? Apart from the fact that the State has a monopoly on foreign trade, which implies absolute control of this activity and the execution by State entities of export and import operations, which “has not been renounced nor will it be renounced,” as one of the communist leaders said, in case anyone had the slightest doubt, there are still “risks” from applying these measures, because of that obsessive mania of the Cuban communists with everything that has to do with economic freedoms.
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Editor’s note: This article was originally published on the Cubaeconomía blog and is reproduced with the permission of its author.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López in a file photograph. (EFE/Rayner Peña R)
EFE (via 14ymedio), Caracas, 16 August 2022 — The Minister of Defense of Venezuela, Vladimir Padrino, inaugurated on Monday the “Border Sniper” competition, which is part of the international military games organized by Russia, using the Caribbean country, for the first time, as one of its venues.
“We embrace all nations, their delegations, their representatives, who have come to Venezuela to compete in a good fight, within the framework of these international games,” said the military leader during the opening ceremony of the tournament in the state of Lara (west).
He said that, in addition to Venezuela, representatives of Russia, Burma, Belarus, Abkhazia, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, China, India, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Indonesia and Cuba will participate in the competition, countries where “imperialist aggression against the people is condemned daily.”
The minister explained that this is the seventh edition of these games, in which Venezuela has participated since 2015.
The Defense portfolio said that the competition, which will last until August 27, “gathers together the best snipers in the world,” and “only expert soldiers in the art and precision of shooting participate.” continue reading
The so-called “Army Games” in Venezuela will include, in addition to the sniper competition, spaces that can be visited by those interested, among which are shooting ranges, obstacle courses and exhibitions of weapons and exercises typical of military life.
Russian President Vladimir Putin offered on Monday, at the opening of the “Armia-2022” forum on the outskirts of Moscow, to arm with modern equipment his allies in Latin America, Asia and Africa, countries that don’t submit to the dictates of the West.
Putin greeted the foreign delegations attending the largest military fair in Russia, including the Venezuelan one, headed by General Ricardo Ramos, Deputy Minister of Defense Education, who met with Alexandr Fomin, Russian Deputy Minister of Defense, who praised the “relations among allies” with Caracas.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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Güira de Melena has been experiencing protests for several days, since, last Friday, neighbors in El Pulguero and the central Calle Real demonstrated against the blackouts. (Captura)
14ymedio, Havana, 16 August 2022 — The neighbors of the municipality of Güira de Melena, in Artemisa, banged pot and pans again on Monday night in protest over the power cuts that prevent them from sleeping.
In a video broadcast on social networks, as usually happens in these cases, a woman is heard saying: “Corea launched,” referring to the neighborhood that protested this time. She says that the video was filmed on August 15, 2022 at “9:15 pm.”
“We’re sick of these blackouts,” “Homeland and life,” “We can’t take it anymore,” she also shouts behind the camera.
“It was quite punctual,” Raudel Espinosa, a resident of Güira de Melena, tells 14ymedio, reporting that the entire area has been without internet access since that moment. When the pans rang out this Monday in Corea, the neighbors had already been “hours and hours without electricity,” on one especially hot night, she says.
“People are very upset, not only because of the heat but also because of dengue fever,” which thrives in this kind of neighborhood.
Güira de Melena has been experiencing protests for several days, since, last Friday, neighbors in El Pulguero and the central Calle Real demonstrated against the blackouts.
It wasn’t the only demonstration on Monday on the Island, which suffers from an unprecedented energy and economic crisis. In Trinidad (Sancti Spíritus), according to several Facebook users, protestors attacked a bank branch. “Someone broke the windows of the bank on Colón Street in Trinidad with a hammer and got inside,” Carlos Sibello wrote. continue reading
Other comments alluded to the fact that the young man who broke the glass was being treated in the hospital, since he was “all beaten and bloody.”
“Last Thursday night, patience reached its limits in Bejucal, Mayabeque Province, where a neighbor in the municipality told this newspaper, “They shut down the power at eleven at night and turn it on at seven in the morning.”
Around midnight, several residents went out with their pots and pans to protest, and, says the same source, “at that moment they turned off the power, they shut down the Internet, they shut down everything, so that people couldn’t mobilize.”
“Some people passing by joined in, like a conga,” says the woman, “asking for freedom and that they turn on the power.”
The local officials, says this neighbor, sent people to “take videos of the demonstrators.” After the protests of July 11, 2021, it was these kinds of videos that allowed State Security to identify the protesters, arrest them and prosecute them, in manipulated trials that ended with disproportionate sentences.
So far, neither the Government nor the official press is reporting on the frequent protests that have occurred since mid-July, when the power outages happened every day. Two night protests against the blackouts took place this weekend in the neighborhood of El Condado, in Santa Clara, where neighbors took advantage of the darkness to demonstrate, shouting slogans and beating on pots and pans in front of the dreaded Fifth Unit of the Police of that city.
On July 15 and on August 1, the Luis Dagnes neighborhood of the Popular Council of Altamira, in Santiago de Cuba, went out on Los Palacios Street, in Pinar del Río.
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The Cuban government has not revealed the costs of the Matanzas fire, considered the worst in history. (José Ángel Portal Miranda)
14ymedio/EFE, Havana, 16 August 2022 — Specialized teams found more bone remains at the site of the large industrial fire recorded in Matanzas, the Minister of Public Health, José Ángel Portal, reported on Monday.
“The tireless search for bone fragments and objects that could have to do with any of the missing people thought to be at the scene of the accident at the time of the explosion continues,” Portal said on Twitter.
The fragments were found on Sunday in “several places in the area” of the fire and have already been sent to “the laboratories for identification.”
Last Friday, the Cuban Government reported that it had located at the site of the fire — which began after the alleged impact of lightning in one of eight fuel tanks with 50,000 cubic meters of capacity — the skeletal remains of four people, presumably firefighters.
Officially, 14 people are listed as missing, mainly firefighters who were working on extinguishing the flames when a large explosion occurred.
Forensic doctor Jorge González Pérez, who directs the work of the investigation of the remains of Matanzas, said on Monday that they haven’t located the place where the 14 victims disappeared, and calculated that this could take “two more days.” He added that he considers it “unlikely” that “there is some laboratory test, for example DNA” that can be performed in this case.
So far, the Government has not disclosed their identities, despite the demand of independent activists and NGOs, who have claimed that some were young people doing military service. continue reading
So far, the relatives of the missing are the ones who have gone on social networks to say that they have no information about them, and some who have been given as dead, such as the young Leo Alejandro Doval del Prado, 19.
The fire was officially declared extinguished on Friday.
The flames affected four fuel tanks in the industrial park, strategic for the country, causing serious explosions, with flares of over 30 feet, and a column of toxic black smoke that reached Havana, 60 miles away.
The Cuban Government has also not disseminated estimates of the economic cost of this event, which is already described as the largest industrial disaster in the country, nor the exact levels of contamination from the accident.
The total, to date, after the incident is two deaths, 132 people injured and 19 hospitalized, according to the daily report of the Ministry of Public Health.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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The victims of the collapse, disposed to set up their domestic barricade, prevent the passage of vehicles and pedestrians. (14ymedio)
14ymedio, Juan Izquierdo, Havana, 12 August 2022 — In Cuba, the walls speak as much as the people. Cracks, humidity, bricks, leaks, beams, shreds of clothing, clouds of dust — these are the words of a pained and urgent language: that of the collapsed buildings. They’re not exclusive to Havana, but in Old Havana, punished by salt from the sea air and overpopulation, the boundary between habitable and ruin is more diffuse and matters less.
It’s part of the daily drama that a family, subjected to blackouts and continuous shortages, sees the structure of their house suffer, checks how it trembles during a cyclone and observes how it falls apart due to lack of maintenance.
The roof of a building on Habana Street, between Aguiar and Muralla, in the oldest area of the capital, collapsed several days ago. Not knowing what to do, the inhabitants picked up their belongings and took to the streets in protest.
The faces of mothers, children and the elderly are so desperate that it’s frightening to see. There’s a lot of anger and visceral impotence, because the solution doesn’t depend on personal effort but on the parsimony of the bureaucrats. They tried to appease them with promises: guaranteed food, electricity, materials. But nothing happened.
This Friday they returned to the street again. The junk they have on the street contains their whole life: cribs, mattresses, springs, wash basins, wheelbarrows of bricks, furniture that has been in the family for decades, Soviet devices and Chinese fans, relics of all eras.
The junk they have on the street contains their whole life: cribs, mattresses, springs, wash basins, wheelbarrows of bricks, furniture that has been in the family for decades, Soviet devices and Chinese fans, relics of all eras. (14ymedio)
The victims of the collapse, disposed to set up their domestic barricade, prevent the passage of vehicles and pedestrians. They want the country to stop and listen to them. “No one will pass through here until this is resolved,” shouts a woman, who only agreed to the request to let an elderly woman clinging to her cane continue. continue reading
Local authorities don’t offer solutions or respond to dialogue, but they have already sent the usual gang of State Security agents, motorcyclists with police badges, ex-combatants ready to assert their collection of medals and traffic officers, to divert clueless drivers out of the area.
At the end of the street, a couple of agents try to discredit the screaming women. “They’re being stupid, they’re shameless,” they tell anyone who stops to see the panorama. “They know that they can’t be there and that there are people working to solve the problem. But no: what they want is to put on a show.”
Among those evicted is a woman dressed in white. She’s an initiate in santería and iyawo, but the State Security officers lie to passers-by, telling them that she is a Lady in White.* “No one here cares about whether someone is a saint or a dissident, kid,” someone who passes by answers them. The police are frustrated: the old techniques are of little use.
“Look how the Government helps,” says one woman, pointing to a squalid cardboard box with yellow rice and stale pumpkin, which was distributed in the neighborhood at ten at night. “That’s the food they’re going to help us with,” she says, “I’m supposed to feed my son with that?!”
“We are desperate,” explains another of the victims. “There’s no gas or electricity, and in addition, our kitchens also collapsed. What do we do?”
Those who watch, those who beat people, the bureaucrats, all of them often suffer the same shortages. However, that doesn’t prevent them from complying with the orders of those who live comfortably, without blackouts and fed with imported delicacies.
Meanwhile, a retired old man is preparing to fulfill his “duty” and juggles to interrupt a young man who is filming the scene. No matter where he focuses the camera, the old man harasses him, nudges him and stands in front of the camera, until the young man gets bored and leaves. “We don’t have blood in our veins,” says an angry man who witnesses the scene.
With the barricade and the people shouting, Habana Street is narrowed by sweat and despair. The claim of the evicted, shipwrecked in a country adrift, summarizes the pain of the entire island.
*Translator’s note: An opposition movement founded in 2003 by female relatives of jailed dissidents.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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The Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba includes Humberto López in its database of “violent Cuban repressors.” (Capture).
14ymedio, Havana, 13 August 2022 — In the midst of the growing reaction against the Cuban government for the deaths in the Matanzas Supertanker Base fire of several young people who were doing military service, regime spokesman Humberto López, in an attempt to appease the indignation of relatives and the solidarity of thousands towards those affected, returned with a new complaint that was orchestrated, as usual, by Cuban State Security.
López took advantage of his space on NoticieroEstelar, the state television prime-time news program, to report on an alleged act of vandalism that occurred in a store in the Diez de Octubre municipality in Havana, where two subjects were allegedly arrested. In addition, he accused several ’influencers’ of being behind the events.
The spokesman said that a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the metal door of a shop of the Caribe chain and also on the route later taken by the attackers’ vehicle. López said that after throwing the cocktail, they traveled nine blocks and parked to prepare another homemade bomb.
The alleged detainees are two unidentified men, one 38-years-old who travels between the U.S. and Cuba, and another 39, a neighbor in the Diez de Octubre municipality. Both were traveling in a vehicle owned by one of their fathers. López stated that the 38-year-old has made 20 trips between the island and the U.S. continue reading
López said he had many details about the facts and used the recurring words of the regime that the people are “the real ones affected by all these actions.” He also stated that there are links between the perpetrators in Cuba and “terrorists abroad,” alluding to Cubans residing in the U.S. who are on YouTube. In his speech, he said that he has evidence about the orders that one of them gives to an acquaintance of his.
“We have the messages, we have the calls, we have the actions that were indicated to him from the outside; we have the receipt for the payment of the cards, of what they received for each of the actions. What’s more, I was with him one of the times they contacted him,” López said, while stating that he recorded the Cuban with his consent.
“There is plenty of information, do you want it? Of course you do,” the spokesman added. However, he didn’t present any evidence, which suggests a manipulation of the alleged perpetrators by State Security itself.
While recounting the facts and the alleged links abroad, the official announcer showed fragments of videos showing the faces of three people on YouTube: Alex Otaola, Ultrack and Manuel Milanés, but he never said their names.
In April of last year, the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba (FHRC) included Humberto López in its database of “violent Cuban repressors,” because “he has become the spearhead of these smear campaigns against the opposition and emerging civil society.”
In the national television program he directs and presents, HacemosCuba, López defames artists, activists, opponents and independent journalists, accusing them of being “mercenaries” and not inviting them to have the right to reply on his program. Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Tania Bruguera, Yoani Sánchez, Luz Escobar, Iliana Hernández, Maykel Castillo Osorbo and many other citizens have been the targets of his media harassment.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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“That neighborhood is the trigger,” explains Enrique, a resident in the center of Santa Clara. “If El Condado explodes, the whole city will follow.” (Collage)
14ymedio, Juan Izquierdo, Havana, 15 August 2022 — Two night protests against the blackouts took place this weekend in the neighborhood of El Condado, in Santa Clara. Neighbors took advantage of the darkness to shout and beat on saucepans in front of the dreaded Fifth Unit Police Station
A video that circulated on Sunday on several social networks shows dozens of people shouting slogans in a park located on Estrada Palma Street, in the vicinity of the police station.
“El Condado is a prioritized circuit,” Enrique, a resident in the center of Santa Clara, tells 14ymedio, “and the Electrical Union avoids taking away the power. On Saturday they did it for the first time in some time, and people protested. After half an hour they reestablished service. Yesterday, not too late at night, the same thing happened.”
“That neighborhood is the trigger,” he explains. “If El Condado explodes, the whole city will follow.” He points out that the most significant thing about the protests is that they occurred “for the Police to see,” and in front of the Fifth Unit, which has the reputation of handling any incident in El Condado with a “strong hand.”
A recent example of this, Enrique recalls, was the death of the young Zinédine Zidane Batista, 17, at the hands of a police officer. In the middle of a fight, Batista was neutralized by an officer and shot several times, including once in the chest, which ended his life. Although El Condado is characterized by the people of Santa Clara as a “marginal” neighborhood, this episode of violence deeply moved the residents of the city. continue reading
To the discomfort caused by the repression are added the constant blackouts and the difficulty in obtaining food and basic products, even when this neighborhood of Santa Clara also functions as the center of the city’s informal market.
An article published in the local newspaper Vanguardia, on August 11, informed the people of Santa Clara that they would undergo a “rotation of the four energy blocks” to “distribute” the “effects” of the electric service.
The article specified that the province had “300,000 residential customers distributed on 159 circuits,” of which several receive “protection,” such as circuit 3, in the center of Santa Clara, “where services committed to the population are offered, in addition to radio and television transmitters, banks and ATMs.”
In addition, the provincial government announced two “proposals” for the planning of blackouts. “The first proposal consists of 12 hours divided into two periods of time, and the second, of up to 12 continuous hours, whose interruption time could be shorter depending on the conditions of the National Electricity System.”
The “new system of effects” began on Saturday, August 13, coinciding with the protests in El Condado. Some of the comments of readers, outraged by the article, escaped censorship by the Communist Party, of which Vanguardia is the provincial press organ.
“Are we a national vanguard in blackouts? Why are they so unfair to some and accommodating to others? Are we third-rate citizens?” asked one reader. “Impossible,” said another, “we can’t take it anymore. How long? They do repairs, maintenance, and when they start getting back up on the system they have problems again. The issue of programming, keep it in mind, is abusive. We went back to the years of the Special Period.”
“People are very upset in every way,” Enrique tells 14ymedio, “but the Government has been able to regulate the ’pressure’. In reality, very few people in Santa Clara dare to go out on the street, and those who do immediately give in when they turn on the power.”
“In my neighborhood,” the man continues, “very close to the city center, when the light goes out there are three ’security’ women who go out to see what people say. They have children abroad and their cards are loaded with dollars, a very comfortable position to be in for a ’snitch’. Recently, in the middle of a blackout, the banging on two pots and pans rang down the street, and they immediately went out to see what was going on. There are people like that in every neighborhood.”
Night protests against blackouts are becoming more frequent on the island. The explosion at the Matanzas Supertanker Base, on August 5, was a bad omen for a country that was already in the middle of a crisis. Since the night demonstrations against an energy cut in Los Palacios, Pinar del Río, on July 15, this type of protest has been repeated in dozens of towns and cities on the island.
During the most recent ones, in Güira de Melena, in the province of Artemisa, neighbors took to the streets with pots and pans, shouting “Turn on the power, dickhead,” a slogan that has become common to demand an end to the blackouts.
Translated by Regina a Anavy
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In recent months, protests have been happening throughout the island, which is suffering from an unprecedented energy crisis. (EFE)
14ymedio, Havana, 11 August 2022 — The Antonio Guiteras de Matanzas Thermoelectric Plant stopped working again this Wednesday due to lack of cooling water, hours after having reestablished its operations.
Two days earlier, the most important thermoelectric plant in Cuba had left the National Electricity System also due to the lack of pressure in the pumped water, as a result of the fire at the Matanzas Supertanker Base, located less than 5 kilometers away.
For its part, the Renté Antonio Maceo plant in Santiago de Cuba had a boiler break down and had to stop one of its units.
The result for this Thursday was, once again, more blackouts on the island. From Pinar del Río, Daguito Valdés said that in the province they will have only “three hours of power a day,” with 12 consecutive hours of suspension of electricity service. continue reading
This Wednesday, the Electric Union of Cuba (UNE) reported a capacity deficit of 24 hours that day, the greatest of which was 1,101 MW, at 8:20 p.m.
The maximum expected shortage for this Thursday is 1,071 MW.
According to the UNE report, units in the Mariel, Otto Parellada, Nuevitas and Felton power plants are out of service due to breakdowns.
A unit is also under maintenance at the Cienfuegos Thermoelectric Power Plant, with “limitations in thermal generation.”
The power cuts, permanent since mid-July, are exhausting the patience of Cubans, who have taken to the streets at night to protest. The last ones were on Tuesday night, in Santa Cruz del Norte, Mayabeque, and in the suburb of La Esperanza, Cienfuegos.
The day before, about 200 people demonstrated at the popular council of Alcides Pino, in Holguín, shouting “turn on the power, dickhead,” accompanied by banging on pots and pans and blaring of vehicle horns.
Since the first demonstrations against the blackouts, on July 15 in Los Palacios (Pinar del Río), protests have been added throughout the island, which suffers from an unprecedented energy crisis.
On August 5, the same day that the fire began at the Matanzas Supertanker Base, hundreds of people demonstrated in the Martí Park of Cienfuegos demanding an end to the blackouts, which in some areas last up to 14 hours.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
View of Vidal Park and the La Caridad theater, in Santa Clara. (CC)
14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 14 August 2022 — Rarely can an exile choose the city in which his days will end. Fortune intervenes, rolls the dice, and the cards are shuffled. Wherever we fall, we live, and we try to make sense of the trip. The city that welcomes the exile can be dizzying or peaceful, but one approaches it as one who caresses a cat. It can receive us but also bite us.
Reinaldo Arenas said that, upon leaving Cuba, he felt the same relief as those who escape from a fire. One is happy to have been saved, but then he understands that his house, his people, his island were definitively burned down. And not only because of the impossibility of returning, but also because the exile already abolished a territory from the map and turned it into a memory.
That distance that establishes the memory between you and your country characterizes the emigrant. And if, years later, we return, it is only to prove that the border is firmer than ever.
“Without a homeland but without a master,” José Martí repeats this decades later. That is why the furthest city is not the one that receives the exile, but the one that he leaves behind.
For me, that city was Santa Clara, compact, provincial, quiet. I spent my early youth between the Central University — isolated like a monastery — and the library of the former Passionist convent that is now the bishopric. I lit my first cigars in its cafes and became fond of smoking on the terraces of Vidal Park, wasting the Creole afternoon.
I was not bohemian nor did I participate in the literary life of the city, populated by vultures and poets. Disguised as an editor, librarian and vagabond student, I wrote novels in silence and let myself be carried away by the pirates, conquerors, ships and creatures of the bestiary.
Although my town was the space of myth and dreaming, in Santa Clara the memory of the Island opened up for me. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to write. In the library — the strangest space in the city — I held the only preserved cylinder of the organ from the Parroquial Mayor church, demolished by Machado in 1923. In that same place I browsed books and autographs of patriots, writers, presidents and illustrious people.
I used to sit in the park, looking at the old Gran Hotel Santa Clara Hilton, to guess in which of its rooms Cabrera Infante had spent his first honeymoon and in which other room the insomniac Lezama had stayed; if he had endured being far from Havana, would have been a professor at the Central University. All those characters met in memory with José Surí, the poet apothecary, the benefactor Marta Abreu and the old mambises troops [insurrectionists], who claimed a drink at the mysterious Café del Muerto.
During my last months in Santa Clara, however, everything shut down, like the country. Restaurants closed, the library stopped receiving visitors, smoking was banned, buildings collapsed. Diseases and violence came after the protests. Like many young people, the island crushed us until we had to leave.
Like Heredia on the ship that dragged him into exile, I last saw the contour of the city last winter. We picked up a few books, my great-grandfather’s pipe, two boxes of cigars, some family relics, and we landed in Madrid, a city that I never managed to fully appreciate.
Then I boarded a train that traveled along the Castilian plain to Salamanca. I arrived sad, and the cold prevented me from smoking. However, a walk through the city was enough for me to understand that, from all over Spain, this was a favorite place for exiles, pilgrims and wanderers, like Miguel de Unamuno. I now live next to the Roman Bridge that crossed the Lazarillo, over the Tormes, in front of the cathedral, the university and the orchard of Callisto, Melibea and the bizarre Celestina.*
Salamanca secretly and endearingly rhymes with Santa Clara, as Cuba does with Spain. It is also small and quiet, ideal for writing and retreat, and when I travel outside it, through the Peninsula, I long to return home. Here, between books and thinking about the Island, at last “the soul of the soul is the center.”
Exile, despite the distance, is also adventure and learning. I don’t know when we will be able to return to the furthest city, but — like the ancient Trojans after the invasion — I carry with me the relics of the Island, memory, cigars and old words: any place is my country.
*Translator’s note: Comedia de Calisto y Melibia, written by Fernando de Rojas and published in 1499, was a medieval novel in the form of a series of dialogues, usually performed as a play and considered the first work of the Spanish Renaissance.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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A line at the doors of a bank in Havana after announcements in changes in the system. (14ymedio)
14ymedio, Elias Amor Bravo, Economist, 14 August 2022 — In the second year of the Ordering Task,* the Cuban communist regime has gone a step further in the line of formal banking procedures for economic transactions with the publication of Resolution 123/2022 of the Central Bank of Cuba, which updates the processes of issuance, use and the processing of payment card transactions. In essence, a set of mandatory rules is established for those who want to operate with “plastic money.”
The focus on banking [versus all cash transactions] in the Cuban economy has been announced on numerous occasions by communist leaders, who are obsessed with the high ratio of money in circulation — known as ’M2’, a measure of the money supply that includes cash and readily available deposits — relative to the GDP. This ratio reached as high as 91% in 2020, to fall to 57% in 2021. However, this data has to be evaluated with extreme care, since it includes the combined effects of monetary unification and inflation, so it likely was not, in fact, so low, but it continues to worry the leaders.
Why do communists want to ’bank’ the economy — that is shift from an economy that operates primarily in cash?
Basically, for two reasons, and both are in the interest of the regime and have little to do with the well-being and prosperity of Cubans.
The first is that the expansive circulation of paper money is a dangerous part of the inflationary spiral. In fact, in the Cuban economy, the acceleration of the GDP or CPI deflator since 2019 had a lot to do with the abundance of cash, especially in the hands of the public. continue reading
Much of the responsibility for this situation lay with the communist regime in authorizing wage increases without concurrent increases in productivity, which increased the amount of money without increasing the availability of goods and services. Inflation produced from this situation became the economy’s response to very serious errors in terms of wages and pensions.
Therefore, the reduction of cash in circulation, through moving money to banks seemed an option to be developed. Unfortunately, there is no information available on what percentage of monetary circulation continues to materialize through cash in the hands of the public, and what percentage flows through banks, but it’s estimated that the former can be around 80% of the total. The interest of the regime is to control the latter, where higher value-added products and services move. They believe moving to magnetic cards makes it easier, or so they think. It remains to be seen if they succeed.
The second reason is in the DNA of the communist regime. Banks are an instrument of party and state control. They inform, control, and handle customers’ personal information at will. There is no level of protection for personal data in Cuba as in other countries of the world. Cuban banks are empowered to ask customers about the origin and/or destination of the funds they are going to dispose of, a practice that breaks with the elementary principles of bank secrecy.
So, having most of the productive money in the “banked” economy, allows the regime to tighten its control mechanisms over the banks in question. This is one of the aspects that causes widespread mistrust among Cubans towards the banking system, regardless of bank runs, confiscations and other similar practices in these 63 years of communist rule.
The truth is that the leaders want to get away with it, and in recent years they have done their homework regarding how to shift the economy to banks (versus cash), paying salaries and pensions by transfers in a large part of state companies and agencies in the budgeted sector, thus breaking the dependence on the “cash envelope” that was the main monetary link of the population. But is that payment by transfer enough for people to use payment, debit or credit cards?
As always happens with these things, the communist regime wants to impose, through resolutions, economic behaviors that don’t exist in reality, and, as a result, instead of achieving the objective, it ends up encountering the most absolute rejection of the measures imposed by economic agents.
This time the same thing is going to happen, no matter how much the state press supports the campaign. Cuban communists don’t quite know that before imposing a mandatory legal framework, you have to take a moment to see if what you want to regulate already exists in reality. They don’t. They throw themselves into the dry pond and then crash. Resolution 123/2022 of the Central Bank of Cuba (CCB) will be a good example.
The rule is redundant, and, so to speak, it says things that are already known. For example, everyone knows that the power of the Central Bank is to “exercise the regulation and surveillance of the country’s payment systems and dictate the rules of operation, in order to ensure that they function efficiently, within adequate levels of security for participants and the general public.” But is it really dedicated to it or is it just print on paper? Is there a study that reveals the efficiency of the Central Bank in ensuring the proper functioning of payment systems? I don’t know of any.
The relevance of the bank card in its different modalities, which the resolution has opened to the maximum, should be based on a prior knowledge of what percentage of Cubans use that means of payment and, above all, which segments of society, and going a little further, what they use the card for. And more importantly, the state of banking technology that allows operations with plastic money should be investigated. That way no one would get surprises.
The resolution refers surprisingly to “participants who act under license as issuers, payment transaction processing centers and payment card acquirers” as if they want to convey the idea that in addition to banks there may be others that issue cards. It may be causing a real proliferation of plastic money that ends up generating more problems than solutions. The procedure is also simple, if other standards within the Cuban communist regime are taken into account.
In this sense, the concern for the prevention and detection of operations in the fight against money laundering, financing, terrorism, the proliferation of weapons and the movement of illicit capital boasted by the regime should be extended to all types of banking operations and not just cards.
This will be a process to follow over time, because it has just begun. The Cuban communists’ objective of ’banking’ the economy is hampered by the logical and justified fear of citizens of the banking system, and what is even worse, the scarce tradition of Cubans’ relations with their banks. A tradition that was broken in 1959 with the confiscations and expropriations of funds, deposits and all kinds of financial operations of Cubans in the banks that existed in Cuba at the time. Wanting to erase all that with the stroke of a pen, as if it hadn’t happened, will not be easy. There are still many of us left to remember that dark episode of our history.
*Translator’s note: The “Ordering Task” is a collection of measures that include eliminating the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC), leaving the Cuban peso as the only national currency, raising prices, raising salaries (but not as much as prices), opening stores that take payment only in hard currency which must be in the form of specially issued pre-paid debit cards, and a broad range of other measures related to different elements of the Cuban economy.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
During a visit to Bombay in 2004, Rushdie received death threats from several protesters. (VISHAL OLWE/EFE)
14medio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, 14 August 2022 — He is balanced between life and death but the official Cuban press has hardly said a word. He is an enemy of the Iranian regime and that is enough for Havana to remain silent in the face of the attack that has seriously injured a writer who uses metaphor and his extensive knowledge of history as tools to connect with millions of readers. He is the irreverent child of every party, the one who throws the cake in the face of the strict organizer of the fake festivity.
Years ago Rushdie was the subject of a fatwa, pronounced by Iranian clerics, who sentenced him to death for blasphemy. If any inhabitant of this Island was asked what such a curse means, they probably could not explain much beyond some clumsy babbling. Our mestizo and insular roots may have saved us from certain religious extremes, but we are no strangers to judging sectarianism. We may not be immersed in certain debates, but common sense suggests that exterminating those who think differently is never a good idea.
Rushdie was attacked by a lunatic with a knife while lecturing in upstate New York. This is the latest chapter in decades of harassment in which the writer, who long ago deserved the elusive, capricious and fickle Nobel Prize, has had to change his name, hide, and go underground to avoid the extremists who persecuted him, not only to liquidate his libertarian spirit but, incidentally, to win the juicy reward of more than three million dollars placed on Rushdie’s head.
Why is the word confronted with weapons? How is a writer right now in intensive care just because of what he put on paper? No matter what he has said, his freedom of expression is above everything that we can oppose. I don’t care if his name is Rushdie, he is Indian and has declared himself a questioner of all dogma. He puts one syllable after another with unsurpassed beauty and neatness. That puts him on the Parnassus of creativity.
Climbing onto a stage to try to kill a man who is talking seems like one of the most emblematic scenes of human folly. Can the word be assassinated? Is a voice extinguished by stabbing it in the neck with a dagger? Please, leave us with your blindness and go somewhere far away, to another galaxy if possible. Stop being so difficult and so lacking in self-esteem, the name of writers like Salman Rushdie will be repeated long after some police report notes the sad name of the person who tried to kill him.
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14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 16 August 2022 — “Don’t take off your shoes!” a mother yelled, this Monday morning, to her newly arrived son at Playita 16, a piece of coastline west of Havana that serves as consolation for those who cannot afford a trip to the white sands of Santa María del Mar or Boca Ciega, in the eastern part of the city. The precaution of keeping his shoes on is not only because of the sharp rocky stretch that appears before reaching the water, but also because of the garbage that fills the area, bottle tops, empty cans, paper and other waste.
