Author: 14ymedio

In spite of the warning, the brothers decided to go to José Martí International Airport in Havana anyway, where they tried to board the plane. “We asked the officers to show us some documentation that said we were prohibited from leaving the country. But since they told us they didn’t have any, we decided to exercise our rights,” said Alfredo Pérez González.

“At the airport they told us that National Identification System records indicated we are restricted,” adds Pérez González, but “they didn’t provide any reason for this restriction.” The authorities confiscated the brothers’ tickets after they had already checked in at the American Airlines counter.

The two men have stated they will file a lawsuit demanding explanations for the travel ban, especially since neither of them has a criminal record or is currently under criminal investigation.

“Major Joaquín told us yesterday that they were informing us that our exit visas were being denied so that afterwards we could not publicly claim we had not been warned,” says Alfredo Pérez González.

The farmer says this is the first time something like this has happened to them. Both brothers had planned to give a presentation at the CEC conference on their work at La Isleña, the family farm they run at San Juan y Martínez, where they grow everything from tobacco to vegetables to flowers.

After being prevented from traveling, Alfredo and Ariel Pérez were arrested, handcuffed and taken to a police station while agents went to their house. Major Joaquín — the same one who had previously dealt with them — told them that the act of going to the airport in spite of the travel ban was taken as a provocation.

At this weekend’s CEC event, which was labeled “counterrevolutionary” by the police, the two topics to be discussed are agriculture and the press.

The director of CEC, Dagoberto Valdés, also had difficulties traveling to Miami on the scheduled date. He could not board his plane last Wednesday because he was “restricted.” However, after filing a complaint, he was allowed to leave for the United States two days later.

The travel ban, along with arbitrary arrests, threats and confiscation of work-related assets, has become another one of the government’s tools of repression according to independent organizations such as the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation.

The Travel and Migration Reform that went into effect in January 2013 resulted in a broad presence of Cuban dissidents in international meetings and forums. Over time, a growing number of government opponents have faced restrictions on their ability to travel in response to the invitations they have received and accepted.

Police kidnappings on route to the airport, exit visa “regulations”, legal cases that prevent activists from leaving the country and threats of reprisals for “misbehaving” while abroad are some of the pressures reported by activists who have tried to travel overseas.

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The 14ymedio team is committed to serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for joining us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time by becoming a member of 14ymedio. Together we can continue to transform journalism in Cuba.

In order to untie the knot, the government approved a decree-law in January 2015 to transfer the functions of the National Housing Institute (INV) to other state entities, such as the Institute of Physical Planning (IPF). The measure sought to “resolve the centralization of functions and reduce the excess of procedures for the population, as well as numerous restrictions on the housing system,” in addition to “dealing with violations and illegal constructions.”

However, three years later, the INV continues to operate, leading to a duplication of functions and procedures that have have had an effect opposite to the desired one.

In the first half of 2017, the IPF responded to more than 104,000 filings, most of them related to technical descriptions and appraisals, and urban regulations, but the backlog remains.

Luisa María is one of the most alarming cases. “I’ve been running from one place to another for 15 months,” she complains. Nearly seven years ago the pensioner was filled with joy when the sale of homes between private parties was legalized, after decades of prohibition.

“Right away, I started to take steps to sell this to buy something smaller,” she tells this newspaper. Her two children had emigrated, her parents died some time ago and the big house with a patio, four rooms and an immense kitchen took ever more work to clean and maintain. “I decided to put this house uo for sale and look for something that does not need repairs, not so much as a nail in the wall,” she says.

The lack of agreement between the data included in some documents issued by the Housing Institute have forced her to repeat the process several times. To proceed with the registration of a property, it is necessary to engage a community architect who visits the property and certifies any changes that modify what is described in the property document, something very common in Cuba, where the structures of houses are altered many times because of the housing needs.

Outside the Santa Clara Property Registry Office the line forms very early on the days when it is open to the public: Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Some are here for the first time, but there are also long faces that have returned again and again. Each day only 12 people are seen, while people stand in line since dawn.

The place has become a target of ’placeholders’ who get in line from the night before and then sell their places. “If you do not pay between 1 and 3 CUC it is very unlikely that you can enter before 11 in the morning,” explains Luisa María.

An employee of the Registry attributes the errors and differences between documents as the source of the delays. “We see many differences between the records containing the findings of the community architects and those of the Institute of Physical Planning (IPF),” she says.

The differences between the previous method and the current one have involved several clashes between institutions and some users end up entangled in the back-and-forth, which is the situation when one state entity blames the other for the problem.

“If we find errors we have to return the papers to the owner so that he can make the corrections with the issuing agencies,” laments the registry specialist consulted by this newspaper. “Sometimes they have to wait six months to a year to correct the mistakes” at the Housing Institute.

Some, to shorten the bureaucratic deadlines, offer to give money to the employees. “It cost me almost 100 CUC to resolve everything and fix the errors in my house papers but I couldn’t stay in Cuba any longer and had to accelerate the process,” says Maikel, a Cuban resident in the United States who recently repatriated to Santa Clera.

“I had to repatriate to be able to take ownership of the property of my grandmother’s house who is already very old, and now I am going to sell it and buy a small apartment for her, but the house will continue to be in my name,” the emigrant says.

Others do something more dangerous: they buy and sell without papers, waiting for the future to remove the obstacles and legalize the situation. It is what is popularly called “a gentleman’s agreement” but it is fraught with risks, including a dispute that ends up with the police until one of the parties backs down.

“I could not wait any longer because my husband lost a leg last year and we needed to sell our second floor apartment and buy something on the ground floor,” explains a woman who on Monday was waiting outside the property registry. “So I sold and bought and now I’m going to do the paperwork.”

After being seen, the woman’s dreams collapsed. “For my property it says that I have an open terrace but in fact many years ago they gave me a permit to enclose it with aluminum and glass.” Now she must again request that the community architect vist her house, although she insists that she registered the modification with the Housing Institute at the time it was made.

“At the Registry I have been warned that this may take months, so I will live with a lump in my chest the whole time, without papers for my new home,” she says.

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The 14ymedio team is committed to serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for joining us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time by becoming a member of 14ymedio. Together we can continue to transform journalism in Cuba.

Previously, the authorities of the Cuban Radio and Television Institute had told Cruzata that “it is not in the interest” of that state entity to promote the work of the two singers.

Besides the presence of both reggaeton artists, the video does not seem to have anything else that bothers officialdom. The song is accompanied by tourist images of beaches and mountains, as well as a good measure of aerial views of Havana’s Malecón and the city of Santiago de Cuba.

The scant presence of young artists in general on the official television network, of which this new case is one example, seems not to have been communicated to the Ministry of Tourism, which still the promotes video on its Facebook page, where Música Vital  already has 5.9 million views.

From its Facebook page, the Buena Fe duo shared with its fans this Sunday their anger at being “excluded from the musical programming of Cuban television and radio.”

The group defended itself arguing that the lyrics of the song “do not have offensive, disrespectful verses” and that “Omara Portuondo, Buena Fe, Yomil and El Dany and Lía Rodríguez” are “active and totally legal artists. Perhaps we are legal to be invoiced in Cuba, but not to sing?” they ask.

Israel Rojas and the musician Yoel Martinez, also a member of Buena Fe, describe what happened as “sad” and regret “that these things are happening at this point, in the digital age.”

Yomil and El Dany are part of the Ignacio Piñeiro music company and belong to the catalog of the Cuban Institute of Music (ICM). They recorded six albums between 2015 and 2017, all independently, and have started 2018 with new proposals.

The music of both singers is a hit especially among those under 20, who share their songs through mobile applications such as Zapya to get around the absence of the group in the official media.

Their albums Sobredosis and M.U.G., available from multiple online stores, were number one and six respectively on the Billboard charts and Ambidiestro reached number two, behind the popular Colombian singer Shakira.

In 2012, then president of the Cuban Institute of Music, Orlando Vistel Columbié, told the official press in reference to the spread of reggaeton that “neither vulgarity nor mediocrity can dent the richness of Cuban music.”

To avoid this, the official said that work was “coordinated from cultural institutions with all the elements involved in the promotion, dissemination and social use of musical productions.”

Officialdom has launched a war against “the banality” of some musical genres and the current Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, has said that “much of the victory in the battle is in the audiovisual.”

More recently the authorities have reacted to the popularity if the musical genre trap by some articles in the official press in which they accuse it of presenting women as mere objects of desire.

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The 14ymedio team is committed to serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for joining us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time by becoming a member of 14ymedio. Together we can continue to transform journalism in Cuba.

Etecsa asserts that the satellite service of the Luxembourg company, which provides communications services to telephone operators, governments and institutions, provides, in some aspects, a quality very similar to that of fiber optics.

Silvia Moschini, an expert in information technology, told the news channel CNN earlier this year that Internet access in Cuba is via satellite, which caused it to be very expensive. “But there is submarine cable that circles the Island and if the political decision to allow its use is made, access to the Internet would be as good as we can see in the United States or in Latin American countries,” she said.

In February 2011, Alba-1, a fiber optic cable between Cuba and Venezuela, was announced by the Island’s authorities as a step towards greater autonomy and connectivity for domestic Internet users.

The Cuban ambassador in Venezuela, Rogelio Polanco, assured that the island would benefit from less expensive internet access and high quality telecommunications service. Meanwhile, Waldo Reboredo, Vice President of Telecommunications Gran Caribe, described the installation as the first step towards communications independence.

The cable was delayed for two years before showing its first signs of activity, when in 2013 an expert from Renesys, an American firm that analyzes Internet traffic, reported that his firm had detected that the Alba-1  cable had started to function.

The installation of the cable cost almost 52 million euros and experienced successive delays, while the Cuban government continued to rely on the services of satellite internet providers.

In 2016, Google and Etecsa signed an agreement to improve access for Cuban users to Google’s content, such as Gmail and YouTube. However, the island’s authorities declined the American giant’s offer to extend the infrastructure for connectivity across the country, contained in a proposal made by its directors.

At the end of December Mayra Arevich, president of Etecsa, announced that this is the year the internet will arrive on mobile phones. “We have prepared ourselves to start selling the internet on mobile phones,” the official told the YouTube channel Cuba Hoy (Cuba Today). “We are working to accomplish this type of access.”

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The 14ymedio team is committed to serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for joining us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time by becoming a member of 14ymedio. Together we can continue to transform journalism in Cuba.

Last Wednesday, Daniel Llorente, who as of March 1^st will have been imprisoned for ten months, went out into the hospital’s courtyard with a sign that said “No to injustice, down with the dictatorship of Raúl Castro.” The protest action occurred after he was held incommunicado for several days, unable to go to the common area or use the facility’s telephone.

Days before, Llorente had been subjected to a meticulous search in which a mobile phone was taken from him; he had managed to smuggle the phone in to maintain communication with his son. “They are also annoyed by some pencil writings he has put on the walls of his room with texts by José Martí,” the young man reports.

This weekend Eliezer Llorente demanded to speak with the institution’s higher-ups and was received by the deputy director. The official explained that his father’s punishment was only for one day and that next Wednesday he could come to visit him “without problems.”

“My father is acting like that because in locking him up there they are not complying with the law, but she told me that they already sent their request to release him to the court but it was denied,” says Eliezer.

On Thursday, the young man was summoned to the police station in Santiago de Las Vegas where they returned his phone card and threatened to take him to court and accuse him of “disobedience,” he says. He had to sign a warning document with the commitment not to re-enter the facility with the telephone card.

Daniel Llorente is caught in a legal limbo because the hospital authorities can’t discharge the activis from the psychiatric hospital without first receiving the approval of the court. However, despite not being prosecuted for any crime, the legal authorities still have not signed the authorization.

Daniel Llorente Miranda has been prominent for the activism he displayed alone after the diplomatic thaw between Cuba and the United States. His image traveled through social networks and the covers of many international newspapers when he hoisted the US flag during the May Day parade in 2017 in Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution.

Seven security agents jumped on him and took him to the ground him by force. Since then he has been detained, although during the first month the authorities kept him in the State Security Operations Directorate Security (Villa Marista) and later he was transferred to Mazorra.

Considered an “independent” opponent, Daniel Llorente is known for appearing at public events with the North American banner to demand a closer relationship with the neighboring country and democracy for Cuba.

The first time he publicly waved the US flag was during the reopening of that country’s embassy in Havana in 2015. The following year he did it again during the visit to Cuba of US president Barack Obama. Later he was detained for several hours after welcoming with his flag the first cruise ship arriving from the United States in half a century.

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The 14ymedio team is committed to serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for joining us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time by becoming a member of 14ymedio. Together we can continue to transform journalism in Cuba.