14ymedio

Cuban Faces of 2016: Yomil and El Dany, Reggaetoneros (b. Havana, 1991 and 1989)

Yomil and El Dany, reggaetoneros. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Havana, 25 December 2016 – Cuban Faces of 2016: Roberto Hidalgo Puentes (Yomil) and Daniel Muñoz Borrego (El Dany) reached the status of the most listened to reggaetoneros in Cuba this year. Previously known for being part of projects like Los 4 and Jacob Forever, respectively, both young men joined last year in a group that has not stopped gaining space in the clubs, private parties and the music section of the weekly packet.

The growing popularity of Yomil and El Dany is partly due to the fusion of electronic rhythms hovering between hip hop and more Cuban rhythms, and all that mixed with the catchy reggaeton. Their most recent album, Overdose, reached first in sales on Google Play last March, on the Top Albums of Latin Music, while their musical theme Tengo debuted in 8^th place in World Top Albums.

In the middle of this year, the duo recorded the song Enamorado with Amaury Pérez Vidal, a version of the song Tonada Enamorada, composed by the troubadour in the ‘90s.

Bus Terminals Overwhelmed By Hundreds Of Travelers Without Tickets / 14ymedio, Marcelo Hernandez

14ymedio, Marcelo Hernandez, Havana, 27 December 2016 – Hundreds of people are crowded right now in the “last hour” bus terminals, or are on the waiting lists. With the regularly scheduled seats sold out, travelers sleep in the floors of these places and eat frugally, while dreaming of a vehicle that will get them home to spend New Year’s with their families.

In mid-December, the newspaper Granma reported that the Voyager Company would put on sale new seats for interprovincial transport for the end the year. However, the tickets sold out in a couple of days and thousands of customers have been left stranded at “last hour” terminals throughout the country. continue reading

This time, unlike other years, the so-called “waiting list” was not addressed with a greater number of vehicles. The Business Group of Automotive Transport Services preferred to sell in advance the additional tickets to travel between 22 December 2016 and 7 January 2017.

The state transport company sold 9,000 seats above those offered by the regular National Bus Service, but only the most forward-thinking were able to get the tickets. The agencies that sell the tickets experienced days of huge crowds, and five days after the official announcement, tickets to Camaguey and Guantanamo were sold out.

Private transport companies provide only a little relief. Their high prices make it difficult for many travelers to use their services, because they can only afford the state rates.

The scene at a “last hour” bus terminal crowded with Cubans wanting to get home to their families for New Year’s.

“I know the face of almost everyone here, because most of these people have been here for many days,” confides the employee who takes care of the men’s toilet in the Villanueva last hour station in Havana. Chaos and discouragement reigns in the facilities, where the average stay is “four or five days” according to the worker.

“The police are coercing people to get them to leave,” he explained to 14ymedio freelance reporter Juannier Matos Rodriguez, who was waiting in Villanueva Monday to travel to Baracoa, Guantanamo. Entire families have placed cardboard on the floor to sleep and the uniformed police patrol the place.

Private carriers relieve the situation, but only for those who can afford to take one of their expensive vehicles. (14ymedio)

“Several passengers have approached the employees asking for them to arrange extra buses so that all these families can travel, but they do not respond,” says the young man. “The waiting list for Santiago de Cuba is not moving, it’s been stuck on the same numbers for two days,” he adds.

The most desperate, with the resources available, pay between 14 and 15 Cuban Convertible Pesos (CUC) for a ride on a private truck bound for Santiago de Cuba, twice as much as the state bus. These are cargo vehicles re-configured for the transport of passengers. The best ones have cushy seats and even air conditioning, but in most cases they are uncomfortable and hot.

The National Bus Company serves 132 routes and in the first nine months of this year it moved 7.6 million people, but when holidays approach, the system collapses in the face of high demand. Most of the state-owned equipment is Yutong brand buses from China, with a decade of overuse and poor mechanical conditions.

The deterioration of the vehicles has combined this year with cuts in fuel consumption that affect the entire country. Passenger transport has been among the sectors most affected, although the government has also imposed restrictions on electricity consumption and a drastic reduction in the state sector’s quota for gasoline or diesel.

Earlier this year, a discussion on the Roundtable TV program confirmed that interprovincial transportation only meets 70% of demand.

“Why doesn’t ‘Cuba Says’ come here now?” a woman at the Villanueva last hour station complained Monday afternoon, in an allusion to the official television program critical of the bureaucracy and laziness. Several passengers recorded scenes with their mobile phones and from time to time a shout was heard over the general murmur: “A truck arrived for Holguín!”

After an announcement like this many throw themselves into the race, pushing and shoving to the point of small brawls, to board the vehicle. The police pull some people out of the melee and put them in their patrol cars. Everyone wants to get out of the hell the Villanueva station has become.

Cuban Economy in 2016: GDP Contracted 0.9% / 14ymedio

A session of Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power, showing the deputies voting unanimously, as is the norm.

14ymedio, (With information from EFE), Havana, 27 December 2016 – The Cuban economy closed the year with a 0.9% contraction in GDP, well below the 1% growth forecast, according to an announcement from Ricardo Cabrisas Ruiz, Minister of the Economy and Planning, during the final 2016 session of the National Assembly on Tuesday, 27 December.

The minister acknowledged that the island experienced “financial constraints” throughout the last 12 months, due to the decline in income from exports, the economic difficulties of some of the country’s main partners, which were related to the fall in oil prices and the reduction in the amount of fuel supplied from abroad, as well as the ongoing trade embargo imposed on Cuba by the United States. continue reading

In 2016, mining revenues fell by 5%, and the minister also confirmed that there is “a tense situation with the availability of hard currency, a shortfall in earnings predicted from exports, and an insufficient supply of fuel,” caused by the reduction in shipments of crude oil from Venezuela.

Cabrisas, however, predicted that GDP would grow by 2% in 2017, thanks primarily to the growth of the sugar industry and the hotel sector, as well as transport, warehousing, communications, supplies of gas and water, agriculture, forestry, trade and manufacturing.

The minister stressed that in 2016 electrical energy generation grew 4.2%, and he estimated that in 2017 the use of renewable resources could grow up to 4.65%. With regards to food imports, according to official forecasts the year’s total will reach 1.75 billion dollars, an increase of 82 million dollars compared to last year. He insisted that the theft of fuel must be avoided, but that “unfortunately it is happening” in the state sector in Cuba, which “comes to light in the controls.”

Cabrisas acknowledged that the share of foreign investment remains very low and represents just 6.5% of the total desired.

The Minister of the Economy also stressed the need to develop a medium-term program to “reverse the critical situation of the food industry” and to “avoid the payment of wages without productive support.”

After growing by 4% in 2015, the Cuban government forecast a GDP growth of 2% for 2016, a target that was lowered midyear to 1% due to “short-term financial difficulties.”

The current crisis in Venezuela caused that country to reduce its shipment of subsidized oil to the island in the first half of 2016, forcing the Government of Havana to contact allies such as Russia, Algeria and Angola in search of new business partners.

Given this situation, economic analysts have predicted a probable economic recession in the country, which could delay the progress of Raul Castro’s reforms.

However, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) predicts that in 2017 Cuba’s economic growth will gradually accelerate due to the regularization of fuel shipments from Venezuela and improvements in telecommunications, tourism, construction and farming.

Fidel Castro’s Name And Image Are Enveloped In Prohibitions / 14ymedio, Mario Penton

Castro with a photocopy of the newspaper Granma, with the headline “Absolved by History,” on August 12, 2006, a few days after he underwent an intestinal operation. (Networks)

14ymedio, Mario Penton, Miami, 27 December 2016 — The Cuban parliament unanimously approved a bill on Tuesday stating that the name of the deceased former president Fidel Castro cannot be used to designate public spaces and it is forbidden to market his image.

“They want to keep the image of Fidel Castro with that halo of mystery that always characterized him. They were in charge of presenting him to the people as a superman, about whom we had little information regarding his private life; we have to pay attention because they could be trying to maneuver into converting him into one more national symbol,” said the columnist Miriam Celaya from Havana. “They don’t want it to be the same as what happened with Ernesto (Che) Guevara,” she said.

Che’s image has been indiscriminately commercialized and turned into a symbol of rebelliousness and belonging by the entire world’s left wing movements. You can find everything from underpants to national flags with his image. In Cuba, a good share of the handicrafts sold to tourists bears the image of the Argentinian guerilla. continue reading

The law, the discussion of which had been announced at Castro’s funeral rites, supposedly corresponds to the will of the deceased, who asked that his name not be used for plazas and avenues, and also prohibits the raising of statues or the minting of coins with his image.

Although the deputies believed that Castro deserved “these traditional forms of homage, or even greater ones,” they decided to abide by his will as proposed by his brother, Army General and President Raul Castro.

“Only the sacred respect for his will, an expression of the humility and modesty that characterized him, and the fact that he always honored Marti’s preaching that all the glory of the world fits into a kernel of corn, leads us to adopt a legal text of such nature,” said the deputies, according to the official press reports.

The National Assembly, however, excepts the use of the name of Castro for the creation of some educational institution on “his invaluable trajectory.”

“They want to avoid the fact that once the tyranny is destroyed, his statues would be torn down by a free country,” says José Daniel Ferrer, leader of the Patriotic Union on Cuba (UNPACU), an opposition organization in the east of the island.

For Ferrer, the approved law seeks to “justify” the cult of personality that the government has imposed on the nation, a cult that the UNPACU leader describes as “sick.”

“The country has been filled with his images and slogans for decades. As Castro knew, when tyrants fall their symbols disappear; it seems he wanted to avoid a spectacle like what happened in the former USSR,” he commented.

For Elisa Valdés, a housewife in Cienfuegos province, the law puts the name of Fidel almost on a par with that of God. “It’s like it’s sacred,” she says on the phone. Instead of “you will not take the name of God in vain, we will now have to say: you will not take Fidel’s name in vain,” she says wryly.

The legislation also prohibits “the use of names, images or allusions of any nature referring to the figure of the Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz for use as a trademark or other distinctive signs, domain names and designs for commercial or advertising purposes.”

It is not clear if all the artistic photos and images of Fidel Castro that are sold in the tourist areas, from postcards recalling the deceased leader to T-shirts with his effigy, will be eliminated.

According to the Cuban press, it would be a question of “avoiding the use of the figure of the leader of the Revolution in commercial traffic or for commercial advertising purposes,” although it would not limit artistic use or the photographs and banners used up until now in state companies, walls, propaganda billboards, and even stones on the edges of the streets.

“For all those who are grateful that they will always accompany compañero Fidel, the homages they render him will be few,” said the more than 600 deputies who make up the unicameral body, speaking in the last session of this year.

Reggaeton, Reality’s Soundtrack / 14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez

Videoclip from Maluma’s ‘Cuatro Babys’. (Youtube)

14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 27 December 2016 — The car is about to come apart at the seams every time it hits a bump in Havana’s crumbling streets. The passengers in the shared taxi vibrate with the rattling of the vehicle and the reggaeton blasting from the speakers. It is the music of the early 21^st century, a genre of raw lyrics and explicit sexuality that accompanies every minute of our reality.

With a paternity shared between Puerto Rico and Panama, this urban sound marks the birth of the millennium. It has added a naked touch and a certain lascivious rhythm to the times we live in. The lyrics of the songs venerate ostentatiousness as a virtue, celebrating a world where the size of your watch and the thickness of your gold chains are ever more important.

Reggaeton has won out over the protest song of so many social dreams born in Latin America, most of them failed. Its raw materiality has also displaced those anthological boleros that had us weeping on our bar stools, and the carols that overwhelm us at the end of the year. The singers of this fierce music don’t want to be seen as heroes nor as broken-hearted lovers. Rather, they want to convey an image of cynical survival, of calculated lightness. continue reading

Hence the fuss kicked up by some in response to the impudent lyrics of Cuatro Babys, a song from the Colombian Maluma, where he brags about having four women at his beck and call. The repulsion gets buried in the 200 million (and counting) views the video has enjoyed on YouTube. These are times of hits… not of indignation.

Maluma’s assertions do not scandalize the followers of the rhythm, who see him as the chronicler of a tangible and known reality. It is not reggaeton, it is life that has not taken hold as it should. The Colombian is only the loudspeaker of such a distrubing but common message that doesn’t raise a single eyebrow around here. Blushing does not change the environment.

Reggaeton has become a way of looking at life, in a cosmogony lacking in delicacies or half-tones. It doesn’t matter whether you follow it or not, if you like it or not, there is no way to cover your ears and ignore it. It is here, there, everywhere. Our children hum its choruses. “Tengo money,” repeats a seven-year-old girl in a Cuban classroom, using the English word for cash; and her classmates complete the phrase of a popular reggaeton song. A few minutes earlier they had been shouting a slogan in the school’s morning assembly: “Pioneers for communism, we will be like Che!”

Speaking and understanding the codes of reggaeton is essential to communicating with the younger generation, but also with many of their parents. Minimizing and censoring it only strengthens it, because it has become the compass that expresses rebellion. It has lasted longer than any other genre pushed by record labels or cultural policies.

At the end of the last century, very few would have predicted that for nearly two decades already this urban rhythm would dominate the music that is played at nightclubs, private parties and on the devices we attach to ourselves with earbuds. But it has stayed with us, grabbing us with its wild impudence. Perhaps it only interprets what beats down below, far from the lights of the ceremonies, the outfits for special occasions and the opportunism.

Who would have said it? From the songs of Victor Jara to the catchy phrases of Don Omar, from the utopian Silvio Rodríguez to the emaciated Cuban musicians Yomil and El Dany. “My Blue Unicorn” grazes now in a meadow of minuscule bikinis and hundred dollar bills. Those who hummed they would “give their heart” have decided to trade it in for swimming pool in which a thousand and one nymphs frolic and don’t say a word.

To reject reggaeton, this rhythm incubated in the “New World,” is like rejecting the potato domesticated in the high plateaus. Sooner or later you will end up eating it, sooner or later you will end up dancing. Even at the most glamorous parties, the dresses are hitched up, the makeup runs, and the social climbers, the nerds, the “good kids,” end up dancing doggy style, sweating in a spasm of lust and oblivion.

Fought against far too often with the dictionary, the academy and too much café con leche, the reggaetoners are teen idols and set the styles, the customs and the forms of speech. They do not travel in yellow submarines but rather in luxury cars, surrounded by alcohol and kisses. These are not the psychedelic years, but the years of touching down, when the lower the fall and the deeper the plunge into the abyss of excess the more tracks they will sell.

Reggaeton is also a lingua franca, a common language like Esperanto once hoped to be, like HTML code did manage to be. All its followers descend or ascend to the same level when they dance. The hips that touch under its influence don’t understand ideologies, social classes, the exploitation of man or capital gains. It is the universal language of sheer pleasure, the jargon learned before birth, which we pass on with confidence.

Not by chance did Barack Obama, in his historic speech in Havana, allude to the contagious rhythm when he said, “In Miami or Havana, you can find places to dance the Cha-Cha-Cha or the Salsa, and eat ropa vieja. People in both of our countries have sung along with Celia Cruz or Gloria Estefan, and now listen to reggaeton or Pitbull.”

A lyrical battle, where reggaetoners tackle the stage and confront the microphones, fighting for the audience as if it were a reality show. The crude lyrics and machine gun blasts in their productions reinforce the sense of combat. A contest where everything is achieved with pelvic sweat.

Reggaeton has proved to be the unexpected antidote against the malaise of a culture diagnosed by Sigmund Freud. It represents, like few phenomena, the end of innocence. Was there any left? A workhorse that returns us to the state which perhaps we never left, a moment when we are only flesh and guts.

_______________________

Editor’s note: This text was published on Tuesday, 27 December 2016 in the newspaper El País.

Cuban Faces of 2016: Eusebio Leal Spengler, Historian of Havana (b. Havana, 1942)

Eusebio Leal walking the streets of Havana. (screen capture)

14ymedio, Havana, 25 December 2016 – Cuban Faces of 2016: With a doctorate in Historical Sciences and a specialty in Archaeological Sciences, in 1967 Eusebio Leal Spengler was appointed Director of the Museum of the City of Havana. He is considered to be the main promoter of the restoration of Old Havana and has a figure very closely tied to officialdom, and especially to the former President Fidel Castro.

For decades the historian controlled the restoration works of the Cuban capital’s historical center, an area that has experienced a sustained growth in tourism. In August of this year, Habaguanex and other companies under his management were transferred to the Business Administration Group to the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

In October Leal Spengler received the title of doctor honoris causa of the University of Havana. For years the historian has had diabetes and in February underwent a surgical operation to extract stones from his gallbladder. In the last months his health has deteriorated and while the tributes to his professional work have increased.

Raul Castro’s Hourglass is Running Out / 14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar

Cuban General-President Raul Castro accompanied by Miguel Díaz Canel, vice-president, on the first of May. (Archive)

14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, 26 December 2016 — A popular joke inquires about the color of a train that arrives late at the station. The answer is a play on words: de morado.* Raul Castro has dressed in just that tone in relation to his obligations for the end of the year. The delay in keeping certain commitments threatens the image of punctuality and pragmatism that the General President has wanted to present.

The plenary session of the Communist Party Central Committee planned for this December still doesn’t have a date. The partisan meeting should approve the expected Conceptualization of the Economic and Social Model, as well as the 2030 Economic Development Plan, but there are only five days remaining for it to fulfill its promise. continue reading

A telephone call to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) clarifies few doubts. The secretary for Olga Lidia Tapia Iglesias, a member of the Secretariat responsible for the Department of Education, Science and Sport, confirmed to 14ymedio that “they have not set a date” for the pending meeting.

Both documents were debated by the PCC membership and the Young Communist Union (UJC), as well as the leadership of the mass organizations and trade unions. The official press emphasized that currently there is massive agreement with the texts as presented, although it reported several proposals to modify or add to them.

Point 104 of the Conceptualization document raised a stir; the point reaffirms an idea raised in the PC Guidelines. The cold water for local entrepreneurs focuses on the statement that “concentration of property and wealth in natural or non-state legal persons is not permitted.” A proposal that must be accepted or rejected this December.

If the plenary session is not held, the seriousness that Raul Castro has wanted to imprint on his official acts would suffer a serious blow. He would also be obliged to publically justify the informality. Hurricane Matthew, the surprising election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the death of Fidel Castro could be among the official excuses.

The number of days remaining in December is the same as the number of fingers on one hand. At least two of them will be used for the upcoming session of the National Assembly of People’s Power. Given the traditional confusion of roles between the Government, the Parliament and the Party, perhaps in the sessions with the deputies the date of the party conclave will be reported.

But if it does not happen before the end of the year, Raul Castro will need to show a very convincing explanation.

*Translator’s note: “Morado” means purple, and “de morado” means delayed.

The Second Cold War / 14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner

The icy look with which Barack Obama demonstrated the state of bilateral relations to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. (EFE)

14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami, 25 December 2016 — Exactly one quarter of a century ago, the Soviet Union disappeared. The hecatomb occurred on Dec. 25, 1991, the direct consequence of the prior (and failed) coup in August of that year. Vladimir Putin believes that it was the worst disaster that has happened to his country, but at the time most of the Russians perceived it as something convenient.

I remember it clearly. Around that time, I visited Moscow rather frequently to take part in academic acts leading to discuss the convenience of ending the costly subsidy to the bellicose Cuban satellite. continue reading

I remember being considerably intrigued after repeatedly hearing a nationalist slogan that ended up as a political reality: “We have to liberate Russia from the weight of the Soviet Union.”

The USSR had been born in 1922, stimulated by Lenin in the midst of a hopeful All-Russian Congress of Soviets. He added Marxist ideas to the imperialist spasm that, in a few centuries, had turned the small Principality of Moscow — then animated by the superstition of being the “Third Rome,” the heir of Bizantium’s Christianity — into the world’s largest nation, roughly speaking twice the size of the United States or today’s China.

To Lenin and his communists, the USSR did not intend to abandon the Russian imperial momentum, of which they were secretly proud, but to refocus it on a new ideological project of world conquest based on the harebrained ideology of Karl Marx, a German philosopher who lived much of his existence in London, a city where he died in 1883.

Naturally, the newly created structure — Russia plus Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Byelorussia and later Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tadjikistan — served for that purpose and for another one, of a defensive nature. The USSR would protect communist Russia’s conquests and would be another obstacle to impede a hostile reaction from nations that opposed the bloody revolutionary experiment that emerged in 1917.

To that end, Lenin and later Stalin (after Lenin’s death in 1924) helped to create a worldwide federation of communist parties whose primary objective was to protect Moscow, the motherland of communism, even if their national interests were in conflict with those of the distant Russia. Beyond staging a revolution carbon-copied from the Bolshevik upheaval, the grand task of the local communist parties was to serve the Russian Big Brother.

As things stood, the national communist parties, Moscow’s shields, took on the task of persecuting Trotskyites and exterminating those who disobeyed the directives from the Comintern, as people called the Third International, the structure also created and financed by the Russian communists for their own benefit, as they had done with the USSR.

This was seen very clearly in Spain during the Civil War (1936-1939) and even before, when the Cuban communist leader Julio Antonio Mella, a dissenter from the official line, was murdered on a Mexican street in 1929, a prelude to what would happen to Trotsky himself in 1940. Trotsky was assassinated by Ramón Mercader, a Spaniard in the service of Stalin, son of a fanatical Cuban communist woman.

A quarter of a century after the USSR disappeared, Vladimir Putin is threatening to rearm Russia’s nuclear arsenal to foil the shield of protective missiles with which the United States has endowed the West’s defenses and its own. His words were not only those of a nostalgic former communist but also those of a Russian convinced of his homeland’s hegemonic fate.

According to the former KGB agent, now his country’s political leader, the U.S. and the European Union cannot prevent the total destruction of their defensive barriers (and the E.U.’s) by an attack by the so-called triad: the effect of land-based nuclear missiles, the action of submarines carrying atomic bombs, and bombs dropped from planes.

Oddly, Putin’s bullying will have a positive strategic effect on the West. To begin with, Trump will realize that Vladimir Putin is not his friend, to the extent that Putin repeats Russia’s old imperial habits. Likewise, he will realize that NATO continues to be the best instrument to keep the planet from being incinerated by Moscow and will refrain from weakening or demolishing it.

Evidently, we’re at the start of the Second Cold War.

Note: English text is directly from CA Montaner’s blog.

‘Feliciadades’: The Word the Taunts the Official Sobriety

On Cuban streets, the word “felicidades” is heard everywhere. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Havana, 24 December 2016 — Few details reveal that it is Christmastime for Cubans. The austerity imposed this year-end, promoted from the Government due the recent death of former President Fidel Castro, but also because of the economic situation that has citizens worried. Faced with high food prices many opt for more low-key celebrations.

However, the word “felicidades” is heard everywhere in the streets. As if it were a “watchword,” Cubans offer good wishes accompanied with a complicit smile when they pronounce the word. Is it a way to mock the official sobriety? A sign of the desire not to let the Christmas festivities fade completely away?

Said in an undertone, shouted balcony to balcony, or intoned to the rhythm of Mexican music, like the “mariachi” in the photo, the phrases of this happy greeting take the place of the lack of garlands, the few houses in Cuban streets that display seasonal lights, and the absence of public dancing, otherwise typical of this time of year.

Cuban Faces of 2016: Carlos Lechuga, Filmmaker (b. Havana, 1983) / 14ymedio

The Faces of 2016: Carlos Lechuga, filmmaker. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Havana, 24 December 2016 – Cuban Faces of 2016: The film Molasses (2013), director Carlos Lechuga’s debut, garnered much applause, but it was his second feature which placed him at the center of public attention. The film Santa and Andrés was excluded from the 38th edition of the Havana Film Festival, for political reasons.

The film tells the story of a homosexual writer who, at the beginning of the 1980s, is isolated from society in a remote spot on the east of the island. The authorities there assign a peasant woman to watch over him, but after a time, an unforeseen relationship between them is born.

Lechuga spoke out against the censorship of the film from his Facebook profile and also raising their voices were the directors Jonathan Jakubowicz, Fernando Perez, Enrique Alvarez and film critic Dean Luis Reyes, among others. However, the president of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), Roberto Smith, claimed a “question of principles” to prevent its distribution.

Santa and Andrés has been exhibited in prestigious festivals such as Toronto, San Sebastian and Chicago, but in the native country of its director it will have to circulate by alternative methods through the popular “weekly packet” in which Cubans receive much of their entertainment.

Cuba’s ‘Weekly Packet’ is Caught in the Crossfire / 14ymedio, Luz Escobar

A Cuban accessing the packet from his laptop. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Luz Escobar, Havana, 23 December 2016 – “Over my dead body!” echoes across a living room in Florida, Camaguey, Cuba, the day Jorge Angel discovered his family absorbed in the weekly packet. Now the wife sneaks to watch the reality shows that come in the weekly audiovisual compendium so as not to annoy the family’s Communist Party militant.

Criticized by officialdom, and in ever growing demand among customers, the packet is caught in the crossfire. After several weeks of programming on national television marked by tributes to the recently deceased Fidel Castro, demand for movies, TV shows and documentaries has skyrocketed in the informal market, while institutional hatred against the packet has intensified. continue reading

In Central Havana, the most densely populated municipality in Cuba, the impact of the packet is everywhere. Outside La Candeal bakery, two women were talking this Thursday about a Colombian telenovela that arrives in one of the 40 folders included in the popular compilation.

“This is the zone of satellite dishes and the packet,” explains a messenger for Copypack, a place that sells the product put together by an enterprise calling itself Omega. The young man says that over the last three weeks the number of clients has grown, as they “come looking for anything, so long as they don’t have to watch [state] television.”

Distributors have avoided including in the latest compilations material critical of the former president and the popular programs on South Florida channels. “There’s no reason to stick your finger in the eye of the beast,” says the employee.

The caution of the informal producers and distributors has not prevented the authorities from renewing their offensive against the most important competitor to official programming.

This Thursday the newspaper Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth) published an article on the subject, signed by journalist Miguel Cruz Suarez under the title The Sweet Poison In The Ostrich’s Hole. The author acknowledges that “thousands of Cubans” prefer audiovisual content that is distributed on flash memories and DVDs, a practice that exposes them to the “disparate scenarios of capitalist entertainment,” he says.

The reporter also points out the dangers of “cultural naiveté” opening the doors to “the guest of banality and consumerist egotism,” although he acknowledges that there are already “some manifestations” of this scourge on the island.

Among the bitterest enemies of the packet is Abel Prieto, Minister of Culture, and Miguel Barnet, President of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). Both have complained about the poor quality of content consumed, versus that of the state television programming, is content they consider “junk” and “pseudo-cultural products.” Prieto recently warned that the phenomenon could end up expanding in the country “the frivolity of the culturally colonized,” people who “have already given up the pleasure of intelligence.”

However, among ordinary people on the street there are other critics whose voices are also being heard. “The packet has become very cowardly, I don’t watch it,” says Jonathan, who has a degree in History. He explains that “it used to include more interesting and controversial topics, but now it is a little lightweight.”

Wilfredo and Niurka, a couple residing on Monte Avenue in Havana, share this view. “We decided to buy the satellite dish because we want to watch the news and Miami programs that no longer come in the packet,” the wife says. Both believe that the compendium “has become annoying, it’s already as ‘controlled’ at the (state) Cubavision channel.”

Youth Club Launches A ‘Special Backpack’ Dedicated To Fidel Castro / 14ymedio

‘My Backpack’ is the program created by the Youth Club to counter the success of the Weekly Packet (screen capture).

14ymedio, Miami, 22 December 2016 – “My Backpack,” which was created by the Youth Club to counter the influence of the Weekly Packet, will launch this coming December 27, with a wide variety of materials about the recently deceased former president Fidel Castro.

The idea of including materials about Castro started in the Youth Club network in Artemisa, a province in western Cuba, according to the local newspaper, El Artemiseño.

According to Lisandra Garcia, institutional spokesperson for the Provincial Directorate of the Youth Club of Computing and Electronics, the special Backpack includes a catalog for easy access to all content, with “historical content” games, “poems and TV shows.” continue reading

The catalog “will contain allegorical music, celebrity interviews, series like Memoirs of a Grandfather and 90 Reasons, the route of the recent “Freedom Caravan,” taken by Fidel Castro’s ashes between Havana and Santiago de Cuba, the political event in the Plaza, documentaries about Fidel’s impact on sports, health, education, culture… and in different countries,” says the newspaper.

“This program (My Backpack) is being created at the central level in Havana and distributed to each of the provinces, so if Artemisa makes a special about Fidel, it will be distributed throughout the island,” said a lab technician from a Youth Club who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisals.

The lab technician also said that the purpose for which My Backpack was created is still far from completion. “Most people prefer the Weekly Packet because it is more fun and has more options,” he adds.

“The Packet is the internet of the poor, but My Backpack is still far from being done, it is like the internet of those who don’t even have the one for the poor,” he added.

Due to the strong ideological slant of programming on national television, the Weekly Packet — considered one of the largest sources of alternative employment on the island — has become indispensable in Cuban homes. It has been tolerated, more than accepted, by the powers-that-be, who on occasion have intervened to eliminate any kind of political content in these informal distribution networks.

In the days following Fidel Castro’s death, many of the audio-visual products distributed by private individuals omitted any critical reference to the figure of the former president.

“We have to compete with ‘Our Latin Beauty’, with concrete proposals, with ideas, with the coordinated work of teachers, artists, editors, journalists… giving people tools so they do not get ripped off,” said the minister of culture, Abel Prieto, referring to the Weekly Packet in April 2014 at the Eighth Congress of the Writers and Artists Union of Cuba (UNEAC).

“We have not yet succeeded in creating the cultured and free people [envisioned by] José Martí,” he added.

Cuban Faces of 2016: Gilberto ‘Papito’ Valladares, Barber (b. 1969) / 14ymedio

Gilberto ‘Papito’ Valladares, barber. (EFE)

14ymedio, Havana, 24 December 2016 — Cuban Faces of 2016: At 16, Gilberto Valladares, known as Papito, began to work in hairdressing, self-taught. At the beginning of the nineties he worked as a hairdresser in the Habana Libre Hotel, but with the relaxations allowing Cubans to work for themselves, he decided to set up his own business in Old Havana’s Barrio Santo Angel.

Papito leads the ArteCorte project, popularly known as the Callejón de los Peluqueros, Hairdressers’ Alley, which involves several neighborhood entrepreneurs and promotes small-scale development. The owners of the private businesses devote a part of their earnings to improving the neighborhood and solving problems such as unemployment, the lack of recreational opportunities for children, and alcoholism.

In March of this year, Papito spoke with US President Barack Obama during the latter’s visit to Havana. In the Cuba-United States Business Forum, attended by business owners from both countries, the entrepreneur related his experience and said that the private sector is growing among Cubans, despite all the impediments and obstacles.

Cuban Faces Of 2016 / 14ymedio

14ymedio, 24 December 2014 — Putting a face to a year like 2016, in which several historical events indelibly marked the Cuban reality – for better or worse – is a task as difficult as it is risky. This newspaper has selected 14 people who stood out in the last twelve months, in science, activism, sports, politics or entrepreneurship, among many other sectors.

From today and throughout the week, we present to our readers these 14 faces, which contributed to make this year a singular compendium of achievements and failures, projects completed and others indefinitely postponed. They are those who chiseled the peculiar physiognomy of a year that is about to expire.

Cuba’s Ration Book Survives For Another Year / 14ymedio, Marcelo Hernandez

A bodega of rationed products in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución municipality (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Marcelo Hernandez, Havana, 22 December 2016 — At the end of this month the ration market quotas for January 2017 will go on sale. Cubans who depend on products distributed at subsidized prices will gather outside the bodegas, in long lines, for the 55^th anniversary of the ration book, whose elimination continues to be one of Raul Castro’s unmet projects.

In 2014, the average monthly salary on the island increased by 24%, to 584 Cuban pesos (some 24 dollars). Despite this increase, many families still depend on the subsidized prices maintained by the ration card. Their income does not allow them to pay the prices in the supply-and-demand markets or in the retail network of stores in Cuban Convertible pesos. continue reading

Different analysts and official functionaries have warned that the elimination of the ration book could cause a fall in the standard of living in the most vulnerable sectors of the population, among whom are the retired and families who don’t receive any additional income beyond their state salaries.

Among the Guidelines approved by the Seventh Communist Party Congress, last April, it was agreed “to continue the orderly and gradual elimination of the ration book products.” However, so far, the proposal has not gone into effect, in part because of the poor economic development experienced by the country in recent years.

Cuba’s gross domestic product will grow only 0.4% this year, its lowest level in the last two decades, as recently confirmed by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Faced with this reality, the government has not been able to improve people’s purchasing power or dismantle the rationed market.

The Government is faced with the dilemma of maintaining the enormous infrastructure and the hefty costs of prolonging the life of the ration book or suppressing it, with the consequent deepening of poverty for various social groups. Such a measure would have an undeniable political impact on a process that has been defined as a revolution “by the humble and for the humble.”

Officialdom has repeated on several occasions that it is preferable to “subsidize people rather than products,” but the rationed quota is still given to every citizen equally, even those who have reached an above average level of income. The practice has focused on removing products from the subsidized basic market basket.

Rice, grains, oil, sugar, salt, eggs, chicken and bread are some of the foods that are still subsidized, while other goods have been removed from the ration book altogether, including liquid detergent, bath and washing soap, toothpaste, beef and cigarettes.

During the 1970s and ‘80s it was virtually impossible to live without ration book products. This phenomenon resulted in, among many other ills, low internal migration and a greater control of the State over the citizens.

Currently, the mobility of the population to provincial capitals and especially to Havana has increased as a result of the easing of the policy on rental housing. The ability to purchase food and hygiene products outside the rationing system has also contributed to the phenomenon.

The emergence of a parallel market that includes state establishments and private bakeries has also been hugely important to the process of citizen independence. Ration book bread, a recurring theme in the “accountability meetings” of the People’s Power, a topic of critical analysis in the official press and a target of mockery for the majority of Cuban comedians, has lost its importance.

Families with better incomes have given up standing in the traditional lines to get bread for 10 centavos in national currency (less than one cent on the US dollar). They prefer to go to the private bakeries that offer a wide variety of products at unregulated prices.

The bodegas with empty shelves and a blackboard listing the products of the month have become, along with the old American cars that still circulate on the streets of the island and the billboards with political messages, among the photographic trophies taken by tourists as part of the social landscape of Cuba.

The disappearance of the ration book will have to wait until the completion of the gradual reforms announced by the authorities. There will probably be more who mourn its end than those who will celebrate it, but the day will come when some incredulous grandchild will listen to his grandfather repeat stories of “that era when everyone ate the same thing on the same day in the whole country.”

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