14ymedio

Ham and Tobacco Reappear in Havana Stores on Fidel Castro’s Birthday

A line outside a store in Central Havana on August 13, 2021.

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodriguez, Havana, 13 August 2021 — On Friday two competing events — the official celebration of what would have been Fidel Castro’s 95th birthday and a national strike called by the Cuban opposition — were overshadowed by something unexpected: the sudden return of scarce products to store shelves along with their usual by-product, endless lines.

“The stores brought out a few things like cooked ham that I had not seen for a long time,” said an astonished Central Havana resident, who was at the Amistad market on Friday.

“They had hams like these at the start of the pandemic but I haven’t seen them in over a year and a half,” adds the woman, who invests several hours a day looking for food in Central Havana. “At the time they were also selling some very expensive ham salami along with other products but, as usual, no more than a day.”

“If you don’t want to wait in line, you have the option of going to continue reading

private neighborhood delicatessens where they sell smoked meats that will poison you little by little because we don’t have any other choice,” she jokes sadly.

The Amistad market in Central Havana was selling cooked ham, an item that had not been available at retail stores for more than a year and a half. (14ymedio)

There is another long line of people — this time outside the Cupet Servicenter on the corner of Infanta and San Rafael streets — waiting to spend their pesos on H. Uppman and Populares filtered cigarillos. “They have several items for sale, which is very rare because usually there’s only one and that’s it,” says another customer waiting in a line that extends for four blocks.

For months H. Uppman and Populares products have only been available at foreign currency stores (known as MLC). The network of state-run stores and cafes that accept payment in Cuban pesos stopped carrying these and other brands, such as Criollos, Aromas and Titanes. in June. They had been available “exclusively” at neighborhood stores “upon presentation of the ration book.” Authorities announced, however, that sales had been suspended “due to problems with the availability of raw material.”

Among the items for sale at the Plaza Carlos III shopping mall on Friday were laundry detergent, cooking oil, canned fruit, ground meat, chicken and hot dogs. Many of those waiting in line held out hope of at least being able to buy a bottle of cologne.

“Cologne is never anywhere to be found,” says one Havana resident who decided to wait in line outside the capital’s largest retail establishment. The line to get in stretched all the way to Belascoaín Street, some seven blocks away.

“I have never experienced a line like the one I am seeing at Carlos III,” says a resident who lives very close to the plaza. Dozens of people sit in the shade on the curb, trying to avoid the sun and heat as they patiently wait in hopes of buying something.

Just a few streets away from Carlos II, homes in Central Havana have been transformed into informal storefronts. Some of items purchased on Friday at state stores are on display in people’s windows — packages of chicken, bottles of cooking oil and cigars — ready for resale to those who did not manage to get inside or who were not willing to spend hours waiting in the endless lines.

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Cuban Experts Try to Clear Doubts About Covid Vaccination With New Data

The level of immunization in Havana is currently 63.8%, compared to the rest of the island, with 25.3%. (EFE)

14ymedio, Havana, 11 August 2021 — Covid-19 indicators improve in Havana as immunization is completed. This is indicated by the data offered this Tuesday on television during the Roundtable program in which the authorities strove to make clear the effectiveness of the vaccines in a devastating context of widespread infections and mortality on the island.

Despite an unclear presentation, the numbers show that the complete vaccination schedule with Abdala and Soberana 02 vaccines very slowly improves the outlook.

In the four municipalities of the capital that began immunization in May, the accumulated infection rate has visibly fallen compared to the 11 that began later. The authorities have segmented Havanans into three groups based on the start date of the vaccinations — May 12, May 29 and June 22. The rates are similar in the three groups at the beginning, but the lines begin to separate as the pattern is completed. continue reading

Accumulated infection rate in Havana. (Cubadebate)

The authorities of the Ministry of Public Health and BioCubaFarma, present in the program, recalled that the immunity process is complete, when 14 days have passed since the last dose.

According to these figures, the fatality data also improves — the most relevant for the serum, called to lower the number of sick and deceased — but the data on infections are not the same, rather they are on the rise throughout the world as the Delta variant is spreading. Mortality rates (deaths in relation to the population) and fatality rates (deaths in relation to the percentage of positives) decrease. The first fell from 0.90 to 0.41 from June to July and mortality from 4.4 to 4.2.

“All these data are preliminary and we must continue working on them, but they are encouraging, because they are consistent,” said Pedro Mas Bermejo, vice president of the Cuban Society of Hygiene and Epidemiology, who insisted that the vaccines work.

The level of immunization in Havana is currently 63.8%, compared to the rest of the island, with 25.3%. Cuban experts insisted yesterday that the data provided was only an approximation and more details are needed. To this end, the Andariego-Higía program is being developed, prepared by GeoCuba with the collaboration of other institutions and with the database of the Ministry of Public Health, to detail the deceased, critical and seriously ill.

“It is a team effort, which allows us to search this database and know if a person is really vaccinated, and with how many doses, which offers consistency to these results.”

Fatality rates in Havana and Cuba. (Cubadebate)

The officials went on television in the midst of a gloomy outlook for the Island and when the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) was warning of the worrying situation. The intention was to clear up the doubts that have arisen with the vaccination program, which is progressing without perceiving a priori encouraging results.

Last week Ileana Morales Suárez, director of Science and Technological Innovation for the Ministry of Public Health, indicated that 72% of the positives in recent days have received the three doses of Abdala, and of them, 42% have already completed the total immunization cycle, “effective 15 days after injecting the last dose.” Although the figure is very high, the information provided yesterday indicates that there is an improvement, but the data remains to be fully analyzed and offered to the population.

The program focused on comparing the Cuban situation with the international one, where the Delta variant is also compromising the optimism of the first months of vaccination, as well as the population’s confidence in the sera.

That a resurgence is being experienced around the world is a fact, with a strain that is transmitted 1,200 times faster than the originals. Delta’s ease of spread has forced countries to recalculate group immunity, which was estimated at 70% and in recent days began to rise above 90%.

This Wednesday, the father of the Oxford vaccine, Andrew Pollard has insisted that the Delta variant makes it impossible to work with that idea and asks that vaccination programs are not based on achieving this objective because, once the strain is generalized, “it will continue to infect to people who have been vaccinated.”

Death rates Havana and Cuba. (Cubadebate)

The information available in most countries, which is offered in detail, by age group, prevalence of infection among those vaccinated and not, and so on, is making it possible to verify that transmission is much higher in unvaccinated age groups (many countries have immunized by population blocks from older to younger) and that severe cases occur mainly in these.

There is also evidence that the majority of those admitted are among those who refuse to be vaccinated, something that many governments try to put an end to through different techniques that range from stimulation to penalization, due to the collective risk that it entails.

Little is known about this level of detail in Cuba, despite the fact that the process continues to advance, and this lack of transparency prevents locating the problem and generating trust in the most suspicious population. “Currently, 29.4% of the Cuban population already has three doses administered. These figures are growing day by day in our country, at a vaccination rate almost double the world average, but there is still much to do,” recognize.

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Cuban Opposition Harshly Criticizes Island’s Coverage by Spanish Newspaper ‘El Pais’

In 2011, Cuba’s International Press Center withdrew the accreditation of Mauricio Vicent, who has now recently returned to be a correspondent for ‘El País’.

14ymedio, Madrid, 10 August 2021 — The Council for the Democratic Transition in Cuba has addressed a letter to Pepa Bueno, the new editor of the Spanish newspaper El País, in which it criticizes the coverage of its Havana correspondent, Mauricio Vicent. Specifically, they refer to the article entitled The Cuban government takes a mass bath to reaffirm itself after the protests, which reports on the demonstration called by the Cuban government last Thursday, the anniversary of the Maleconazo, in which it mentions that “tens of thousands of people” participated. The Council believes this “does not reflect reality.”

To illustrate this, the letter, signed by Manuel Cuesta Morúa and Elena Larrinaga, includes a link to the 14ymedio article on the same event, highlighting its headlines: “Lots of police but few ordinary people, in the official caravan on the day of the ’Maleconazo’. The cameras, which sought to amplify the event, could not hide a meager caravan of bikes, scooters, mopeds and cars.”

“We have been observing with some concern that the articles that arrive from Cuba lack, on many occasions, the objectivity that a correspondent should have, which compromises and reduces the credibility of the newspaper that you direct,” says the text.

The signatories noted that the newspaper has been defined, since its creation in 1976, as “a global, independent, quality newspaper and defender of democracy” and that it continues to be continue reading

“the Spanish media of reference inside and outside of Spain.” For this reason, they say, they turn to the director, to whom they offer “any collaboration and supplementary information.”

“The Cuban people are living through extremely difficult times and we consider unrestricted support for the just demands for freedom of the population to be of vital importance,” they continue. “Certain euphemisms can lead to errors of appreciation that could have a very negative impact on the course of a legitimate process of political change in Cuba that is openly demanded by society.”

The Council is not the only one that has protested the articles by the Spanish correspondent. This weekend, user Ricky Castillo launched a petition on the Change.org platform “to denounce the coverage given by El País and Mauricio Vicent,” which has half a thousand signatures.

“With embarrassment and frustration we have seen the painful way in which your newspaper has covered the popular protests of July 11 and 12 in Cuba and the subsequent brutal repression against its participants,” says the petition, which regrets that despite the prevalence of the shouts “freedom” and “down with the dictatorship” in the demonstrations, “most of the reporters and commentators of your newspaper have made an effort to present them as a circumstantial reaction to the economic difficulties imposed by the embargo and the restrictions of the Covid-19.”

“The desire for freedom of so many Cubans after suffering the limitation of their most basic rights for more than 62 years is reduced by their newspaper to mere physiology,” it asserts.

The harsh text also says that “for years, El País has persisted in keeping as its main informant on Cuban affairs Mauricio Vicent, a poorly disguised apologist for the Cuban regime,” whom it comes to compare with the whitewashing of the worst years of Stalin in the Soviet Union by The New York Times journalist Walter Duranty.

Resident in Havana since 1984, Mauricio Vicent was a correspondent for El País, in a first stage, from 1991 to 2011. That year, a change in the editorial line of the Spanish newspaper caused him to slightly harden the tone of his chronicles against the Government of the Island, for which he had never hidden his sympathies.

Cuba’s International Press Center (CPI) cancelled, then, his accreditation as a correspondent and the official media lashed out against him. For Cuban officials, according to what El País published at the time, Vicent had offered “for a long time ’a partial and negative image’ of the Cuban reality, which had ’worsened’ in recent times.”

Despite this, he continued to live for a season on the island with his Cuban family. After rejoining the Newsroom of the newspaper in Madrid, he began to work in Culture. The return of El País to a more leftist line, starting in 2018, resulted in the newspaper and its correspondent being welcomed back on the Island.

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This Has A Name, It Only Has One Name

Reinaldo Escobar holds Fidel Castro responsible for all the ills of the Island in this text for Castro’s birthday. (Marcos Evora)

14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, August 13, 2021 — I heard your voice for the first time when I was eleven years old. It was 1958 and Radio Rebelde (Rebel Radio) broke the censorship that the brief dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista imposed to keep what was happening in the Sierra Maestra Mountains from becoming known.

In January 1959 I imagined I saw your face in each of the bearded men who paraded through Camagüey, and from whom we children asked for a “balita” [little bullet] as a souvenir and as a symbol that peace had arrived.

I keep one of those projectiles.

I learned that “Triumphal March of the Rebel Army” by the Indian Naborí and I knew how to lower my voice to recite the verses where it was said “and this has a name, it only has one name”* and then came the cataract of your speeches, from which I got to memorize phrases that I repeated aloud while I slept.

Little by little disappointment came: over Prague; over the failure of the sugar harvest; and one good day in 1970, as a university student, I had my first and only discussion with you where I indicated to you my sincere disagreement, and I could no longer remain the same.

I cannot pinpoint the exact date when you entered my past, “in the past of my life,” as the tango says, but I can say that I finally had to give in to the arguments of those who preferred to demonize you. Always, out of academic petulance, I preferred to put all the blame on the system, which it has, and it cost me a lot of work to understand the dose of personal evil that was hidden behind each of your decisions.

Cuba owes you its misfortune. This country should have saved you from coming into the world on a day like today 95 years ago. It will not be possible to describe our sad reality without putting all the blame on you.

I hope this gets to be told one day, and that afterward you will be forgotten, and that no one will remember your name.

*Translator’s note: This is the penultimate line of the paean to Fidel, “Triumphal March of the Rebel Army,” by Jesús Orta Ruiz aka “El Indio Naborí.” The next line of the poem is simply: FIDEL CASTRO RUZ

Translated by: Tomás A.

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‘He Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About’, a Doctor from Placetas Responds to the Cuban Prime Minister

Cuban hospitals can no longer care for the sick with the resources they have. (Capture)

14ymedio, Madrid, August 13, 2021 — “Since the community transmission phase was declared, we are all on the red line, we’re soldiers in a nuclear war going into battle with slingshots.” Dr. Kenia Castellón works at the North Polyclinic of Placetas (Villa Clara Province) and knows first-hand the reality of Covid-19 patients on the Island. That’s why she exploded against the statements of Prime Minister Manuel Marrero, who appeared on national television last Tuesday blaming part of the responsibility for the increase in Covid cases on healthcare workers.

“This province is the same as the others with the lack of antigen tests, the lack of medicines, the same objective problems. But there are more complaints of subjective problems than objective. When you add up the lack of medicines, this, that and the other, they’re lower than the number of complaints and reports of abuse, neglect, lack of visits. That’s incredible,” said Marrero at a work meeting on the pandemic.

Although the prime minister’s statements referred to Cienfuegos, the outrage has spread among many healthcare workers from different parts of the island, aware that the situation of shortages is the same throughout the country.

“The shortage of medicines and other things, which he glossed over quickly without continue reading

going into details, are what have our health personnel (to whom I belong) exhausted, terrified, and disappointed. Those other things, which he didn’t mention, include lack of adequate means of protection,” the doctor says reproachfully, revealing that healthcare workers are even forced to resort to the black market to purchase masks, since the ones provided are not sufficient for the long hours of work.

Castellón lists the endless shortages that hospitals face on a daily basis: oxygen canisters; diagnostic measures for critical patients, including antigen testing and PCR [polymerase chain reaction tests for Covid]; coffins; transportation, including hearses for the collection of the bodies of the deceased; even health professionals themselves, many of whom are absent due to infections.

Every one of these shortcomings is constantly being pointed out, both by the independent press through complaints from family members and health workers, and by provincial officials, who no longer hesitate to resort to the same media outlets to relate the desperate situation being experienced during this summer of the pandemic peak in Cuba.

Yet the Government, while recognizing the material shortages, diminishes their importance, unless they can blame them on the embargo, and prefers to highlight the violations of protocols, which, although they occur, are not the greatest of evils in a “battlefield medicine” context.

“When indiscipline starts, when established procedures are not complied with, we add an extra impact to that produced by the pandemic, and the consequences are worse then. We have to be ashamed of that. And here mistakes are being made, here there are indisciplines,” exclaimed a scandalized Marrero.

“Make a list of the subjects responsible for the problem and I’m sure the doctors will be fine in the end,” says Dr. de Placetas.

“It’s obvious he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Before so calmly criticizing doctors, put yourself in our shoes. View things from our perspective. We’re conditioned to save, alleviate, improve, and reduce suffering. If you’re going to look for the guilty parties, leave the healthcare personnel out of it. We’re literally laying down our lives in this, and we see that we’re now alone. First brave, then applauded, and now . . . guilty? It’s true that when the shipwreck happens, the rats are first to abandon ship.”

The message of Kenia Castellón, who also works at Villa Clara Medical Sciences University and was previously a specialist in caring for AIDs patients in Placetas, has been highly applauded by hundreds of beneficiaries who extol her bravery for answering the challenge from within the system and exposing herself to its possible consequences.

Others are also grateful that she is among those who dare to raise their voices. “There are many other things that the healthcare system needs: hospitals free of rodents, cockroaches, extreme dirt, plumbing problems and more, so that doctors and other health workers can care for a sick person. It’s necessary to have the required medicines, equipment, sutures, gloves, surgical supplies . . . But first you need dignity.”

Translated by Tomás A.

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More than Fifteen Days Sleeping in Line to Buy a Refrigerator in Santiago de Cuba

The measure was announced in July, when the province began seeing more than 300 Covid cases a day, as reports from the Ministry of Public Health indicated. (El Chago-Santiago de Cuba / Facebook)

14ymedio, Santiago de Cuba, August 11, 2021 — Measures adopted in Santiago de Cuba to reduce capacity in foreign currency stores have only resulted more lines and more coleros.” The provincial government ordered stores to limit the number of people allowed inside to fifty a day during the hours of 8 am to 3 pm. Shoppers are allowed in after presenting an ID card. But every law has its loophole.

“The coleros* notice someone wanting to enter the store. You arrive at the time they are collecting ID cards and that’s it. Then you have to wait several days until it’s your turn. A friend of mine spent more than fifteen days waiting to buy a refrigerator,” explains Norma.

The Santiago resident recently got married and is trying to buy some home appliances. She has discovered, however, that this is the only way to get them other than “dying at the hands of resellers.”

The measures, which were adopted to discourage crowds from forming, took effect in early July, when Covid transmission was rising in Santiago de Cuba. They have also created new business opportunities.

Yamilé, a friend of Norma who has also been trying to shop at hard currency stores recently, claims the cost of buying someone’s place in line has risen from 200 pesos to 500 pesos. “When I got to the Cubalse store, the wait was more than twenty-one days. People were sleeping outside so they wouldn’t lose their place in line. It reminded me of the waiting list for trains during the Special Period.”

The ordeal of waiting your turn is continue reading

just one of a series of problems. Once you’ve paid for a spot, there is no guarantee you’ll be able to get inside to make a purchase. “You have to anticipate there might be blackouts. You could get up early, decide to buy a spot, then — as it happened to me — the power goes out just as you’re about to enter the store. When it comes back on hours later, the whole system has shut down,” relates Yamilé. “It is torture, an ordeal, arrogance you have to put up with.”

Although hard currency stores (known locally as MLCs) bill themselves as the only places to purchase the full range of home appliances, supply shortages are also affecting these stores, forcing many Cubans to turn to the informal market. “What little they have here goes to the street vendor,” a young man reports.

“They advertise on Facebook and Telegram, and provide home delivery, which is included in the purchase price. They give you all the documentation, such as the ownership certificate in the name of the person who bought the equipment and a receipt from the MLC.”

On August 6, the El Chago-Santiago de Cuba Facebook page, which is run by independent journalists, denounced what it described as a smuggling network operating in retail establishments which officials find “difficult to see and dismantle.”

Comments on the page mention a lucrative business that has sprung up involving several people and related to the sale of household appliances that are marketed in MLC stores. Another user posted photos of washing machines that had come from the La Violeta store in the city center.

According to a woman identified as Teresa Cobos, employees began removing washing machines from the sales floor after only ten people had been allowed into the store. “Who were the others for?” she asks. “Doesn’t the province have police who can investigate what laws are being broken and press charges. Or could it be they are ignoring it because someone at the top is benefitting economically?”

A month after mass protests on July 11, city officials reactivated “worker guards” to keep watch over places of employment and MLC stores.

The official press did not indicate if guard duty was voluntary but made clear that its objective was to “respond to any destabilizing attempt,” and to any action that disturbed national calm or that tried to “seize by right of conquest that which belongs to the revolutionary people.”

According to official figures, the number of hard currency stores in the province has grown to thirty since the government instituted the new retail model in October 2019. Limited supplies, very long lines and a collateral business of resellers characterize these stores, which have garnered widespread criticism throughout the country. They are the only ones, however, that still have more than a dozen products on their shelves.

*Translator’s note: A colero is someone who waits in line for others. See “Coleros are winning the propaganda battle against the Cuban regime.”

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Cuba Activists Demand ‘Justice’ for the 11 July Detainees and ‘Transparency’ in Their Criminal Proceedings

So far, the Cuban government has not recognized official figures of detainees, injuries or deaths. (Marcos Evora)

14ymedio, Havana, 12 August 2021 — A letter signed by Cuban activists, journalists, intellectuals, and artists asks the Government of the Island for information on more than 800 people who were detained, and others who remain missing, after the protests of July 11.

The signatories also demand justice and transparency in the legal processes that have been carried out against the protesters.

This initiative was published on the Justicia11J Facebook page and on the Change platform, demanding the approval of the Decree Law on the right to assembly and demonstration. Both norms are provided for in the legislative schedule approved by the National Assembly of People’s Power for the year 2021. The letter specifies that these regulations must be drafted together “with a framework that regulates and does not penalize this right, in accordance with the letters and treaties of which the Cuban State is a signatory.” continue reading

The text asks the authorities to repeal Articles 208 and 209 of Law No. 62 of the Penal Code, which restricts the rights of free association and demonstration. Similarly, it asks for a law to claim constitutional rights before the courts.

They also ask for an Amnesty law for political prisoners, a national reconciliation commission and a public apology from President Miguel Díaz-Canel for promoting the use of force and repression against citizens.

Among the signatories of the letter is the director of the Cubalex Legal Information Center Laritza Diversent, who has provided legal advice to opponents and political prisoners and in this particular case to the families of detainees seeking justice.

Cuban artist Salomé García Bacallao, journalists Ivette Leyva Martínez, Luz Escobar, Cynthia de la Cantera, Darcy Borrero Batista and María Matienzo, art historian and activist of the San Isidro Movement (MSI) Anamely Ramos, as well as researchers Eilyn Lombard Cabrera and Camila Rodríguez, complete the initial list of rubrics to which more than 700 names have already been added.

The July 11 protests began in San Antonio de los Baños, Artemisa province. After learning about this demonstration through videos that circulated like wildfire on social networks, the streets of Cuba became a hive of people, and protests were added in Matanzas, Camagüey, Santiago de Cuba, Cienfuegos and Havana. Shouts of “Cuba Libre,” “Patria y Vida” (Homeland and Life) and “Down with the Dictatorship” echoed through the most important streets of the country.

So far, the Cuban government has not recognized official figures of detainees, injuries or deaths. It has only admitted the death of one person, Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, 36, a resident of the Arroyo Naranjo municipality of Havana.

Along with hundreds of anonymous citizens who came out on July 11 are several of the main figures of the Cuban dissidence and they also ended up in detention. Among them, the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, leader of the MSI; Félix Navarro, from the Democratic Action Unity Roundtable; and José Daniel Ferrer, leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba.

Ferrer’s wife, Nelva Ortega Tamayo, from the city of Santiago de Cuba, told 14ymedio that she has gone several times to the Versailles State Security investigation center to speak with the opponent, but she has not been able to communicate with him a single time, only once in the last month.

“As long as we do not see him and they don’t give him the right to a phone call, we report him as kidnapped and missing,” said Ortega Tamayo.

According to the list made by several volunteers under the coordination of Cubalex, of the more than 800 detainees, 377 remain in jail, 10 of them in a state of enforced disappearance.

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Cuba’s Looting of Venezuela Continues, From Oil to Beans

In Havana, two one-kilogram packages of mung beans are distributed in the basic ration basket along with other products. (Collage)

14ymedio, Havana, 10 August 2021 — The Government of Nicolás Maduro benefits Cuba, in addition to the oil sent, with shipments of mung beans, rice and soup; this is demonstrated by the Venezuelan products that are distributed in the basic ration basket on the island and that the official media reports are a part of the donation of 240 tons made by “friendly nations.”

The mung beans that are being distributed are part of what Maduro acquires in Venezuela from local producers and are included in the boxes with products from the Local Supply and Production Committee (Clap), which began to be delivered to Venezuelans in 2016 and which have been questioned as a means of winning voters.

“The Clap box is prioritizing beans because they are the grains that are obtained here, since lentils come from cold and high climates and are mostly imported from Argentina and China,” said Ramón Elías Bolotín, director of Legumes and Oilseeds of the Confederation from Agricultural Producers of Venezuela (Fedeagro), speaking to Chronicle One.

But in Venezuela, mung beans are not abundant. The Venezuelan Society of Agricultural Engineers (Sviaa) recorded last year a production of 48.61% of the 72,000 hectares available for legumes, which would barely cover continue reading

12.95% of the needed supply.

Meanwhile, in Havana, two one-kilogram packages of mung beans are distributed as a part of the basic ration basket, packed by the La Dulce Carmelita company in Barquisimeto, in the Venezuelan state of Lara.

In Santiago de Cuba, as in the capital, there are two kilograms of the same grain, but these packages were prepared by the company La Tierra Bendecida, which is located in the Venezuelan state of Portuguesa. The consumption of mung beans is not common among Santiago residents, which has raised doubts about how to prepare them and what they taste like.

“They say it tastes very similar to lentil; many WhatsApp and Telegram groups are sending recipes to prepare them,” says a housewife. “You have to bring them to a boil and change the water twice and finally put them in the pressure cooker with the seasonings.”

In a country where beans are traditionally used to make stew, it is still a mystery how to process this grain. Right now, housewives are warning not to give them too much time on the stove because “they fall apart and do not taste like anything.” However, the precise recipe remains to be defined.

Mi Ángel is the Venezuelan brand of mung beans which the Cuban Government sent to Ciego de Ávila. The beans have been widely criticized in Venezuela for their poor quality. In 2020, a columnist for the newscast Aporrea claimed that this product became “pig food.”

“Having no other option to eat, we are forced to waste minutes and minutes separating a few grains from so much rubbish, dirt, insects … we have even been forced to wash them not only five or ten times, but up to twenty times and more,” Brígido Daniel Torrealba complained. “The irony is that front and center on the package, it says in large type: ’Selected grains’.”

Something similar happened to several people from Santiago who complained through the El Chago-Santiago de Cuba page about the poor quality of beans. In some shared photos “it is observed inside the packages and outside of them, what they identify as earth and a white fungus,” describes the publication.

Another looting, perhaps the main one, is the shipment of oil from Venezuela to Cuba, an “agreement” that is almost 22 years old and remains in force despite the economic crisis in which that South American country finds itself and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. In July alone, Venezuela sent a total of 713,097 barrels to the island.

The shipment of tankers with oil from Venezuela is consistent with the bilateral agreement since Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999. The supply of crude oil was given, first, in exchange for the provision of Cuban medical services, and was expanded to cover services in numerous sectors of the economy, such as mining, sports and electricity.

The benefits that Cuba receives from Venezuela have also been evidenced by the former Venezuelan ambassador to the United States, Carlos Vecchio, who denounced in 2020 the shipment of some 348 million dollars to Cuba in oil while 9.3 million Venezuelans live in severe and moderate food insecurity.

The diplomat said that the Nicolás Maduro regime sent 33 tanker ships to the island, loaded with just over 13 million barrels of “the best Venezuelan light crude, Merey.”

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Cuban Opposition Calls for a National Strike on August 13

Protesters on July 11 in front of the Cuban Capitol, in Havana. (EFE / Ernesto Mastrascusa)

14ymedio, Havana, August 12, 2021 — Cuban activists, inside and outside the island, encouraged by the success of the July 11 demonstrations and the apparent weakness of the regime, faced with its worst crisis since 1959, have announced a national strike this August 13th. This decision does not attract unanimity within the opposition, and not just because it coincides with the 95th birthday of Fidel Castro.

On the one hand, this is the call launched through the Twitter account identified with the name of the well-known philosopher and political scientist Gene Sharp (@ GeneSharp11J), who posted on August 10: “National strike from August 13 until we achieve what we want.” On the other, the call from Miami from the coordinator of the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance, Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat.

The first call includes a group of demands such as the requirement for the Government to “release without charge the participants in the #11J protests” when thousands of Cubans took to the streets of various cities in the country and shouted “freedom”, “homeland and life” and “down with communism.”

It also demands “that [the government] stop the media campaign to discredit independent creative artists, political, cultural, and civic activists” and end “the repression of those who disagree.” Similarly, it asks for continue reading

an update to the Criminal Procedure Law “to provide those accused with greater guarantees than currently exist.”

Another of the demands of this call is to develop “a plan to support the Cuban private sector that takes into account its needs, its potential, and the current needs of the country as determined in a previous meeting.”

That “the media of the independent press be legalized” and “the right of association be respected and not coerced” are other demands, which conclude with a call for “a binding plebiscite as soon as possible through which the people choose whether they want the country to be run by the Communist Party or not.”

Saily González Velázquez, the young founder and director of the first co-working space for entrepreneurs in Cuba, shared the initiative on her social media networks with the tags: #QuedateEnCasa #SOSCuba #SOSCubaLibreDelComunismo.

In conversation with 14ymedio, González commented that the idea seems “very good” but that so far it “has not had the reach that it needs for it to really happen.”

“I don’t think Twitter is the social network where most of the Cuban people are, rather it is Facebook, where it has been shared in some buying and selling groups, but it hasn’t been enough,” she laments.

She also explains that “due to people’s fear of being judged guilty of incitement to commit a crime,” the call has been shared “from new profiles with few followers and little engagement,” which in her opinion “limits its scope.”

Nevertheless, she says she and her team are going to strike. “I believe that even if it doesn’t come off, at least it would remain as a precedent for future calls.”

For his part, Gutiérrez Boronat, coordinator of the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance, a platform that brings together opposition organizations in Cuba and outside Cuba, declared this Wednesday from Miami that July 11 was “a national rebellion that shows the world the deep desire that the Cuban people have to live in a state of law.”

The activist expressed his conviction of the need to move to a “new stage of civic struggle” that ends with a “national strike” and the organization of “protests,” and included in his appeal phrases such as “homeland and life,” “we want freedom and the end of communism” and “we want the dictatorship to fall.” Those goals, he asserts, are “the center of our struggle.”

In his opinion, the exile at this time is “more united than ever” and also identified the “national strike” with a “state of conscience” that means “not cooperating” with the Government of the Island.

The dissident and academic Manuel Cuesta Morúa, a member of the Unity Roundtable for Democratic Action (MUAD), considers that “strike announced strike aborted,” especially if they take place “in totalitarian societies like ours.” In his opinion, when “there is no civic space for civil society” this type of call has to occur as happened on July 11, and that “since that date the bet should be on spontaneity and authenticity based on the awareness of people.”

And he concludes: “I don’t believe that a national strike announced with great fanfare on social media will occur.”

The activist and journalist Boris González Arenas views the current scenario with a little more optimism: “We’re on the crest of a wave” and it doesn’t matter where you want to see the beginning, whether on January 2019, when Díaz-Canel “left running from Regla” after a tornado where people rebuked him saying he was a fraud, or on November 26 or April 4, “now we are on a peak and, as always, still more initiatives and more forces are coming.”

“Though I don’t really know where this thing for August 13 is coming from,” he acknowledged, “for me it’s clear that it’s part of that huge wave, and I applaud all these initiatives.”

But the call comes at a time when the workday in state centers is practically paralyzed, with classes suspended for several months in schools, and a good part of the bureaucratic procedures suspended as a result of Covid-19, a situation that will make it difficult to measure the results of this strike.

Translated by Tomás A.

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Cuban Tobacco Growers Denounce State ‘Manipulation’ of Their Prices

Cuba authorities have notified producers that they can charge for the product at the current price, without committing in any way to making a later retroactive payment. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Havana, August 10, 2021 — The tobacco farmers of San Juan y Martínez have run out of patience. With the product picked and without news of the announced price increase, Pinar del Río farmers have sent a letter to the country’s top leaders denouncing a possible manipulation of the information provided to them in order to keep them calm and prevent them from scrapping the planned harvest.

The producers, who supply the State with threaded black tobacco and shade-grown tobacco, to be rolled into cigars and exported, explain that the rise in prices that occurred at the beginning of the year with the Ordering Task* affected the entire sector. As they have complained on numerous occasions, January 1, 2021 arrived without a price having been provided, and it was decreed without having the cost sheet (the model where the necessary data is collected to calculate the planned unit cost of a product or the provision of a service).

Production prices skyrocketed throughout the supply chain: fuel went from 2 to 14 pesos, motor oil from 3 to 55 pesos, machinery tripled in cost and, of course, the wages of hired workers increased. But tobacco only doubled, from 2,560 pesos to 5,641.

The growers explain that, in the midst of this scenario, delays in bank loans during the first quarter of the year ended up sinking them, because, in the best case, most of them had to go into debt or continue reading

sell assets in order to push on.

“We took all these economic measures in order to be able to continue the harvest — despite the fact that it was easy to see the low profitability between costs and the established price — because we were already in the middle of a process that is our reason for being, and our livelihood as farmers,” they say.

But their effort was not rewarded. Although they submitted their complaints described above, the officials of the Saiz Brothers Collection and Benefit Company, the leaders of the Agriculture of San Juan y Martínez and the cooperative assemblies assured them that the State was going to create a new cost sheet to set another price more in line with the reality of the country. Producers relied on this and continued to work amid the growing difficulties.

Tobacco harvested in San Juan y Martínez this year, when it was still not known what price the State would pay for it. (Facebook)

When, in February, the increase in some stockpile prices was announced “in order to increase production,” according to the authorities at the time, the tobacco growers were asked to be patient and wait until May due to “the complexity of the sector.”

“It was reported in various places that a new cost sheet and price proposal have been prepared by the state company since June, and that this was already in the hands of the ministries that are responsible for preparing and approving the resolution,” the producers wrote in their open letter to Miguel Díaz-Canel and the Minister of Finance and Prices, Meisi Bolaños Weiss.

But August has arrived and, more than a half-year having passed, patience has reached the limit, since the new prices have not only not arrived but the authorities have notified the producers that they can charge the product at the current price, without committing themselves in any way to making a later retroactive payment.

“This creates great uncertainty and distrust among the farmers as to whether the promised price increase is a serious commitment for this campaign or was a manipulative stratagem by the institutional framework that sought to avoid a decrease in production without taking into account the damages that it would cause to the producers and their families,” they charge.

The farmers categorically reject being paid at the current price and feel they are victims of a manipulation designed to make them work and produce normally, incentivized by a profit that is now not going to be realized.

“The State has an ethical, economic, and legal obligation to the producers, and to its own process of economic reorganization, to legislate a new pricing law that responds to the commitment assumed by the state company that represents it before the farmers,” they assert.

The signers demand that at least the two final conditions they set are met. First, an official statement about their case and situation; and second, the promulgation of the promised new law on tobacco prices, which will take effect with the payments to producers for the 2020-2021 campaign.

Last May, a producer from Pinar del Río told 14ymedio about their precarious situation. In his opinion, the Ordering Task left them “to face the peak of the campaign with credit based on a previous price deficient by 70%,” which “left people without money.”

The signers of the letter include several members of the Pérez family, who for at least three generations have grown tobacco on the La Isleña farm, located in San Juan y Martínez. The municipality is internationally known as the mecca of tobacco in Cuba for the quality of its product, which in the 1950s employed more than 5% of the island’s working population.

One of the most valued cigars in the world is produced in the Hoyo de Monterrey area, although since the 1960s the decline of the industry has been slow but unstoppable. In 2020, the last year with reported results, the Spanish-Cuban company Habanos earned 507 million dollars, 4% less than in 2019.

*Translator’s note: The so-called ’Ordering Task” — Tarea ordenamiento — is a collection of measures that includes 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 others, including measures relating to agriculture as discussed in this article.

Translated by Tomás A.

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Cuba’s Provincial Press Reports on the Drama in Ciego de Avila Hospitals

For some time, healthcare workers in Ciego de Avila have not been able to fully attend to the needs of their patients. (Screen capture)

14ymedio, Havana, 11 August 2021 — In Ciego de Ávila they know what is happening and the local press no longer holds back on reporting it. “I knew we lost my cousin due to problems with oxygen therapy. And it wasn’t just hime,” reports a family member in Morón whose relative died of Covid-19, speaking to the local press Invasor.

While the printed edition of the national State newspaper Granma opens with a display to commemorate — two days in advance — the anniversary of the birth of Fidel Castro and continues to recount the worsening of the pandemic in Florida on page 2, the provincial newspaper offers a lesson in journalism to the propaganda organ of the Communist Party of Cuba, recounting the drama within the walls of the area’s hospitals.

The problem with oxygen is becoming worrisome. According to 14ymedio sources, in Ciego de Ávila’s Antonio Luaces Iraola Hospital there is a shortage, one of the most necessary treatments for patients with pneumonia caused by Covid-19. As a result, on Tuesday night the hospital began transferring patients to another facility. The problem? The referral occurs to Morón, where according to the official press itself, the same problem exists, with its worrying consequences.

In the Invasor report, entitled Morón Hospital, Trojan Horse, an engineer explains that the problem is one of pressure. “The medical gas system of a hospital is not built with a pandemic in mind in which one in five patients may need ventilation. There is a limit on oxygen continue reading

pressure (4 bars) for mechanical ventilators to work, and the large number of people linked in by the non-invasive route make the pressure drop (to 3 bars) every three hours below this limit, so patients go into apnea and it’s an emergency,” he says.

The system isn’t working. It has reached a point where daily oxygen consumption is 2,220 liters, due to leaks or a shortage of pressure gauges, an unaffordable waste when life is at stake. Repairs and optimization of the systems is a constant now, since the hospital estimates that the amount that it really needs for the patients it has is 1,500 liters per day.

The article does not skimp when reciting the litany of problems that accumulate in the Morón hospital. “Six hours of waiting for an X-ray, two days without changing a sheet, three buses of sick people that nobody wanted somewhere else, 48 hour medical shifts with no relief, two hours asking for them to give you Captopril (an ACE inhibitor for high blood pressure), a little boy who they even assigned you to bathe if necessary, a feeling of suffocation more common than it should be, a nurse searching the entire hospital for a cannula” to place an IV. The complaints that run through social networks now appear in black-and-white in an official newspaper.

Ciego de Ávila, yesterday, once again logged 1,000 infections and the figure has become a constant for days. The 14-day incidence rate in the province is the highest on the island, with 3,152.5 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. To care for this volume, it has been necessary to mobilize new beds in all the hospitals in the province, 185 alone in the Antonio Luaces Iraola hospital, and to reorganize spaces to accommodate those in isolation and mildly ill patients.

In addition, medical supplies are arriving from abroad, but also from other Cuban provinces, which send everything from thousands of sheets to X-ray or CT machines. And although help is not lacking, neither are those who take advantage of the situation to steal medicines or even to sell the beds.

The newspaper Invasor reports that a rumor is running through the province according to which entering Morón may “cost” 3,000 pesos and, although it has not been able to verify it, it warns of a possible basis in reality: “For some reason (…) Rafaela García, Head of Medical Records and Statistics, has had to get stronger and toughen the oversight on the admissions,” they say.

In the midst of the difficulties, health professionals also face non-compliance with the protocols within the hospital, both by workers and relatives of the sick, who many times, they claim, circulate needlessly through the facilities, or remove their masks.

It is common for the local authorities to deny the seriousness of the situation, but the fact that the local press contrasts it with the testimonies of people affected by reality is a novelty in a provincial press, which slowly awakens to the shock of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Granma dedicated half a page 5 this Wednesday to reviewing the bureaucratic meeting of the previous day in which the extreme situation of Cienfuegos province was analyzed, having already reached the incidence level of Ciego de Ávila in just 14 days, with 3,152.2 cases per 100,000 inhabitants but with a difference. While Ciego de Ávila has a strong and active tourism sector that has contributed to the seriousness of the health situation, Cienfuegos is a quieter area.

“When presiding over a meeting aimed at evaluating the scenario and proposing strategies to reverse it, Manuel Marrero Cruz of the Party’s Political Bureau and Prime Minister of the Republic, highlighted the main causes of the complicated situation: non-compliance with the provisions, accumulation of subjective problems and committing errors and indiscipline,” recites the official newspaper. A speech that has gone down badly with healthcare workers, who perceive a willingness on the part of the Government to divert responsibility for the disaster to them.

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Santiago Lorenzo Hernandez Caceres, Another High Ranking Military, Dies in Cuba

In 1957, Hernández Cáceres was part of the 26th of July Movement. (Granma)

14ymedio, Havana, 11 August 2021 — Reserve Colonel Santiago Lorenzo Hernández Cáceres died this Wednesday in Havana at the age of 82. His death marks the seventh high-ranking military official that dies in Cuba in less than a month. The cause of death has not been released in in any of the cases.

According to Granma (the Communist Party newspaper) Hernández was a founding member of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). Born in the municipality of San Juan y Martínez, in Pinar del Río province, in a family of modest farmers, and “from a very young age he carried out agricultural work.”

In 1957, he joined the “26th of July Movement,” where he successfully “carried out several missions of clandestine actions and sabotages,” noted the official newspaper.

While in the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), he worked with the Communist Youth Union (UJC) and the PCC, in addition to directing the political sections of continue reading

the Central and Western armies and being the political director for the military troops that Cuba sent to Angola and Ethiopia.

The passing of Hernández Cáceres comes after the deaths in July of five generals who were part of the Cuban military leadership: Agustín Peña, Marcelo Verdecia Perdomo, Rubén Martínez Puente, Manuel Eduardo Lastres Pacheco and Armando Choy Rodríguez, in addition to Commander Gilberto Antonio Cardero Sanchez.

Martínez Puente died at the age of 79 and is thought to be the one who transmitted Raúl Castro’s order to fire the missiles from Cuban Air Force Mig fighters, to shoot down the Brothers To The Rescue planes in 1996, where four American civilians were murdered. The attack occurred over international waters, although the Cuban Government justified the shooting down of the small planes by claiming that the ships had entered the island’s airspace.

Verdecia Perdomo was Fidel Castro’s bodyguard in the Sierra Maestra, and Peña was the head of the Eastern Army of Cuba. Choy Rodríguez was promoted to commander in 1962, when he was head of the anti-missiles troops, Reserve Brigadier General Lastres Pacheco joined Fidel Castro’s guerrillas in 1957.

Translated by: Mailyn Salabarria

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Military Continues to Guard the Streets of Cuba One Month after 11 July

Two “red berets” on guard outside the Plaza Comercial Carlos III, in Centro Habana. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, 11 August 2021 — One month after the protests of July 11 (11J), the Police and the military continue to guard the streets of Cuba. In Havana they are especially concentrated in areas where there are often crowds or long lines.

Although the usual movement of people in the streets on any given day continues, 14ymedio also confirmed a large number of uniformed soldiers outside the Plaza Commercial Carlos III in Central Havana.

The presence of the “red berets” is notable, as they are known within the Armed Forces as “prevention troops,” who stand guard in groups of two and even four soldiers. Above all, they are seen in the portals and the surroundings of the capital’s markets, whose display windows facing the outside are walled up with wooden planks.

“Something strange is happening, in the stores of the Latin American Stadium and that of Aranguren and Panchito Gómez, I have not seen lines of people waiting to enter. They are not selling anything. Is it a coincidence because today is the 11th and they do not want riots in the streets?” asked a Havana resident who continue reading

went out this Wednesday morning to buy food.

The “red berets” guard in groups made up of two and up to four soldiers. (14ymedio)

This newspaper was able to verify that the scene was repeated in stores such as Trimagen, on Ayestarán Street. In that establishment they only sold one bottle of soda per person and two packages of ‘Pellys’ snacks.

Thousands of Cubans took to the streets on Sunday, July 11 (11J) to protest against the Government, shouting for freedom on a historic day. In response, president Miguel Díaz-Canel went on TV to make a call for people to go out into the streets to confront the protesters and defend the Revolution.

Central Havana was an area where thousands of protesters concentrated that Sunday, and from several streets tried to reach the Capitol building without success, and others succeeded, although dozens of them were repressed by police and State Security agents along the way.

The demonstrations took place with the country mired in a serious economic and health crisis, with the pandemic out of control and a severe shortage of food, medicine and other basic products, in addition to long power cuts.

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Cuba Increases Police Raids to Confiscate Satellite Dishes

Satellite dishes have always been hunted, but in recent years the raids to detect them had decreased in Havana. (DirecTV)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 10August 2021 — The illegal satellite dishes, used by Cubans to access television from Florida, are once again the target of censorship to prevent the dissemination of images of the protests of July 11 on the island. Although they have always been persecuted, in recent years the raids to detect them had decreased significantly in Havana.

“We have been without service for days,” Juvenal, a retiree living in Cayo Hueso, Centro Habana tells 14ymedio. Juvenal had been enjoying, for more than ten years, service through a cable hidden in supposed water pipes that reached his home.” This neighborhood is all wired, this is a satellite dish area and there are families here who only watch those channels.”

Lately, police operations to detect these devices have become more frequent, to the point that in large areas of the city the owners of satellite dishes have preferred to suspend the service while waiting for better times. “They cut it off until things settle down,” Juvenal explains.

Among the crowded streets and densely populated cuarterías of Centro Habana, these antennas abound, one of the first technological elements, at the end of the nineties, which caused a change in the consumption of audiovisual content on the Island. This was followed by the “weekly packet,” USB memories and, for almost three years now, internet connections from mobile phones.

After more than two decades of the reign of clandestine satellite dishes and continue reading

ten years with the weekly packet centralizing content, many Cubans now prefer to take control of what they want to see and make their own programming list, but DirecTV devices, with their corresponding dish to capture the television signal, continue to dominate in the poorest neighborhoods.

“Here there are people who cannot afford a data package to surf the internet or to buy the packet every week, but in almost every house you see the antenna because those who do not pay directly have someone who gives them an extension so they can watch it,” explains Mary, a resident near the church of Carmen, on Infanta street at the corner of Neptuno.

“It has always been something that has to be done in secret but for some time they have not carried out police raids,” explains this woman from Havana. “Since I live on a rooftop, as soon as we saw the police patrols arrive, we cut the cables and pulled them down so they wouldn’t know which house they were connected to.”

The owners of the satellite dishes are the central node, and they decide which programs are seen at what time. From a decoder device, a tangle of cables reaches other homes that pay a monthly fee that currently does not exceed 300 pesos for 24 hours of continuous transmissions. “I have at least two cables from two different sources, because with one I see some channels and with another the others,” explains Mary.

“Here what is watched the most are the Miami programs of América TeVé, also Telemundo, CNN in Español and others that offer series, documentaries and soap operas,” the woman points out. “I haven’t changed to Cuban television channels for years because I’m used to seeing these and the ones from here bore me.”

“The owner of the antenna told us that we were going to be without the service for several days because the police sniffing around here and she decided not to risk it and uninstall hers until the operations are over,” she said. “They said they don’t want people to see the images of the protests.”

In Cayo Hueso there are also technical problems “because the signal is outside the neighborhood, and accessibility to the equipment has been reduced” and “you have to be inventive,” one of the young people who has been in the business of parabolic antennas or as he says, “up on the rooftops,” for 16 years, told this newspaper.

Through the news programs of América TeVé, Univisión, Telemundo and other US channels that extensively cover the Cuban issue, many Cubans have accessed the videos with the demonstrations and police repression, for example. This way they have also learned of the international condemnation of official violence and of the numerous arrests.

For the owner of one of these antennas that provides service to more than thirty families in the neighborhood of Los Sitio, the relationship between the operations to dismantle these devices and the protests of July 11 is evident. “They want to keep people away from that version of popular protest so that they can tell them what they want on their newscast,” he explains to this newspaper, speaking anonymously.

The small businessman has several antennas with their decoder boxes placed in different houses and a brother sends him the activation cards for the DirecTV service from Miami. With that and yards of cables, he distributes the signal across the rooftops, from one balcony to another, and even with the ingenious trick of passing them through false water pipes.

“A few months ago I had a client who complained when I put on a lot of news, because they preferred to watch reality shows or soap operas, but since the protests happened, people called for more news and current commentary,” says the business owner.

“In this neighborhood you could almost walk down the street and connect the phrases of the Miami programs as you listened to them from the windows or the doors,” he says. “It was a matter of time for the police to jump, because people were finding out a lot and that does not suit them.” However, he believes that “this will happen because they can no longer control it nor can they continue to irritate people even more.”

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Havana Auxiliary Bishop Alfredo Petit Vergel, Dies at 85

In 2005, Petit denounced that due to the impossibility of building new churches on the island, Catholics had been forced to create so-called ‘houses of prayer.’ (Facebook)

14ymedio, Havana, 8 August 2021 — The auxiliary bishop of Havana, Alfredo Petit Vergel, died this Saturday in the Cuban capital, at the age of 85, according to a note released by the San Julián De Los Güines parish.

Born on July 24, 1936 in Havana, Petit studied at the College of the Brothers of the Christian Schools until entering the seminary El Buen Pastor, where he completed studies in Humanities and Philosophy, details the text published on the Parish Facebook website.

“The Pío Latinoamericano College in Rome welcomed him until he graduated with a Bachelor of Theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, after which he received priestly ordination on December 23, 1961.” Back in Cuba, he served as parish priest of the Havana Cathedral and later of the El Salvador del Mundo parish in Havana’s Cerro neighborhood.

On November 15, 1991, Pope John Paul II appointed Petit bishop of San Cristóbal de La Habana, just at a time when the economic crisis after the fall of the socialist bloc worsened continue reading

on the island. Beginning that year, the number of Cubans who approached the churches also grew after decades of fierce atheism.
In addition, Petit attended the Nueva Gerona parish on the Isle of Youth and at the time of his death he was pastor at the San Francisco de Paula parish in La Víbora and at the Santa Teresita chapel in the Santa Amalia neighborhood, in the municipality of Arroyo Naranjo.

In 2005, during the Congregation of the Synod of Bishops held in Cuba, Petit denounced that given the difficulty and “practically the impossibility of building new churches” on the Island, Catholics had been forced “to create the so-called ’houses of prayer’ or ’mission houses’, located in the peripheral neighborhoods and in the small towns and hamlets.”

Also in an interview he lamented the obstacles that limited the actions of the Church, such as the fact that the Government “has always controlled the number of priests in the country and there have never been enough to cover pastoral needs. Another difficulty has been the difficult access to the media.”

Petit was also one of the victims of the so-called Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP), the concentration camps that existed in Cuba between 1965 and 1968, intended mainly for homosexuals but also religious people and all those rejected in the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

In June 1966 he received a summons and was transferred together with a Jehovah’s Witness and common prisoners to a camp in Camagüey. In the aftermath of his stay in the countryside, his hands had lacerations caused by forced labor, such as when he had to erect a barbed wire fence without protective gloves.

A Bible, which the military allowed him to keep, was his ally to celebrate clandestine masses at night attended by the Catholics in the concentration camp. Petit hid the consecration wine in medicine bottles and his mother took on the job of bringing him the hosts.

Petit remained in detention until 1967, when all those over 27 years of age were ordered to be removed from the UMAP camps. Other beneficiaries of this actions were Fathers Jaime Ortega and Armando Martínez. Upon his departure, Archbishop Evelio Díaz entrusted Alfredo Petit Vergel with the parish of El Salvador del Mundo in El Cerro.

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