Author: Iván García

1980 was an extraordinary year in Cuba. On April 1, the #79 Lawton-Playa bus, travelling at full speed, smashed through the security barricade at the Peruvian embassy on 5th Avenue and 72nd Street in Miramar. The police crossfire caused the death of one of their comrades, Pedro Ortiz Cabrera, who worked there as a guard.

It was a period in which Fidel Castro and his regime were in complete control of civic life. Insincerity and hypocrisy were at their height. Many people energetically applauded his speeches in the Plaza of the Revolution even as they relished leaving the gray, uniform setting in which an all-powerful state rewarded or punished those it governed by edict.

The jails were full. Anything could be a punishable offense: having dollars, sailing on a rubber raft to Florida or telling a neighbor you had a dream that Fidel had died. And there were also dangerous guys like Randolfo, individuals with short fuses who moved through life with a knife clenched between their teeth.

After Castro’s miscalculation — he never imagined that over ten thousand Cubans would storm the Peruvian embassy within a few hours after his decision to remove police protection — the strategy became one of carrying out a full-scale social cleansing of the country by clogging American society with murderers, the mentally ill and violent criminals. It was a collection of humanity that would have had no place even on Noah’s ark.

At a processing center near the Lucero highway south of the capital heading towards Mariel, homosexuals, silent dissidents, prostitutes, rockers and social misfits were hastily dispatched.

Castro branded them as “scum” and shipped them off in boats owned by Cubans living in Florida, who came out hoping to find their relatives. Before leaving, eggs, insults and punches were hurled at the “repulsive worms” at Fascist-style rallies in which their neighbors or work colleagues happily participated.

Randolfo has a different story. He was transferred from the prison to the processing center and in little more than an hour he was on a boat headed north.

“It was a rainy afternoon,” recalls Randolfo. “I arrived at Key West at the end of May, 1980. The government had released about four thousand inmates and criminally insane individuals. We were processed by immigration officers and the FBI at a detention center in Florida. Those who had no family in the United States, or who were determined to be prisoners or psychiatric patients, were sent straight to prison in Atlanta.”

In 1987 Randolfo participated in a massive prison riot in the southern state of Georgia.

“It was like a movie. We took hostages and things got ugly. Many Cuban prisoners didn’t want to return to the island. We wanted to serve out our sentences and then settle in the United States. But it wasn’t possible, at least in my case “

Randolfo’s was one of the 2,746 names that made up a list of people to be repatriated to Cuba after agreements reached between Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro in 1984.

“I landed at a Havana airport in night in late 1990. They took off the handcuffs and handed me over to the Cuban guards, who put handcuffs back on and transferred me to Eastern Consolidated. I was a prisoner there for another year. I had not been a free man since 1978. All I knew of the United States was its prisons. I’ve changed. I have a family and my dream is to emigrate to the U.S, to work hard and to get ahead. It’s a society that gives you that opportunity. But my past is holding me back. The U.S. immigration authorities will never give me a visa,” says Randolfo.

Thirty-four years after events at the Peruvian embassy and the mass exodus through the port of Mariel, U.S. customs and immigration authorities continue to deport criminals and the criminally insane sent over by Fidel Castro in 1980. There are five-hundred and two awaiting repatriation.

Iván García

8 June 2014

“All of us who believed in the USSR assumed that the short-term future was Communism. And that the disappearance of capitalism was a question of time. But it wasn’t. Now Putin’s Russia is as imperialistic as the United States,” says the nostalgic Havana Communist

There is very little left of the USSR among ordinary Cubans. Some Slavic names, drinking vodka and orange juice, and hundreds of marriages that still remain from that Red era.

Not a few of regime’s officials feel nostalgia for the past. It was a golden era where rubles were wasted and the armies had the most current versions of conventional Russian armaments.

From the USSR came oil, fertilizers and tractors. Magazines, books and movies flooded the country. Then, it was in good taste to hang portraits of the current Soviet leader at the same level as those of Fidel Castro.

The current president, Raul Castro, had an enormous portrait of Stalin, the butcher of Georgia, in his office at the Ministry of the Armed Forces.

What remains to be seen is if the Castros were Communists of convenience, or chose the ideology to cling to power. The quirky Euro-Asiatic system had irresistible charms for any apprentice autocrat.

There were no presidential elections. Nor free press. Nor independent unions. Justice was administered by the State. And they created a competent political police, dissident citizens could complain only in their own living rooms, or leave on a raft.

The love story between the USSR and an intellectual and political sector of Cuba is longstanding. Many who swear they are firm nationalists, accuse those who admire the U.S. lifestyle are accused of being “annexationists.”

But Communism is the first of all annexations, the importing of Marxism-Leninism and wanting to clone the Soviet model on a Caribbean island 6,000 miles from Moscow.

And it wasn’t the illiterate or stupid who were applauding the theory of a Soviet Cuba. Within the ranks of the People’s Socialist Party (PSP), intellectuals such as Juan Marinello, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Salvador García Agüero and Nicolás Guillén stood out.

With the coming to power of Fidel Castro, political opportunism coupled the Communist imagination of tanned men of Cuban unionism, and the Marxist proselytizing in various academic and intellectual sectors.

Before 1959, the PSP branded Castro a gangster, sucker, and petty bourgeoisie. According to Anastas Mokoyan’s son, who accompanied his father on the visit of a Soviet delegation to Havana in February 1960, witnessed the following dialog between Fidel and Ernesto Guevara:

“They (Castro and Guevara) said that they could only survive with Soviet help and would have to hide this from the capitalists in Cuba… Fidel said: We have to cope with these conditions in Cuba for five or ten years. Then Che interrupted him: If you don’t do it in two or three years, it’s over.”

The rest of the story is known. Castro Sovietized the island and 55 years alter, the main political institutions of the State continue using their methodology. From the special services to diplomacy, which when it aligns itself with a partner, approves political expansionism like Putin in Crimea, or joins with repugnant dictatorships only because they are the enemies of their enemy.

The current labor legislation — which still hasn’t been officially published — or the aberrant Foreign Investment Law, demonstrated that the current Cuban government only considers its people as an instrument to legitimate their tepid economic reforms and not to benefit them.

Separating from an ideological faith is too costly. Even when the reality shows its inefficiency.

Iván García

Photo: January 2009. Then Russian president Dmitry Medvedev buttoning the coat that he had just put on his counterpart, Raul Castro, before the beginning of the informal talks at a residence in Zavidovo, north of Moscow. It had been 24 years since a high Cuban leader had visited the former Soviet Union. Taken from Listín Diario.

18 May 2014

The problem in Cuba is that from 2005 until now prices for a variety of goods that can only be bought with hard currency have risen between 20% to 60%.

In 2005 beef, chicken, cheese, milk, yogurt, oil, sausages and toiletries for a family of three cost $100. Nine years later the price has almost doubled.

Some increases happen without any warning. “One fine day you go to the store only to discover that cheese which cost 4.40 CUC the day before now sells for 4.95. It’s really galling. Everything is blamed on the economic crisis, on the U.S. blockade (embargo) and rising food prices worldwide,” says a woman outside a store on San Rafael Boulevard.

It is true that since 2007 the prices of certain foods have soared in the global marketplace. But Cubans wonder if this has also caused the prices of plasma TVs, computers and refrigerators to go up.

A 32-inch television that cost a little over $200 in Miami is priced between $640 and $750 at hard-currency stores in Cuba, where the average monthly salary is no more than $20.

An LG dual-temperature refrigerator cost $571 in 2004. The same model is now worth 760 CUC, about $850 at the official exchange rate.

Detergent, oil and soap have also risen between 20% and 35% in the last ten years. These actions were taken by an irate Fidel Castro after the United States discovered in 2005 that the Swiss bank UBS had been retiring old banknotes in an account worth more than $4 billion controlled by the Cuban government.*

Castro then imposed a 20% tax on the Yankee dollar. With an innkeeper’s mindset, he jacked up prices on items sold in hard currency by 200% to 500% in order to subsidize his social programs.

It proved to be a windfall. Following Robin Hood’s playbook, dollars were taken from those who had them in order to finance government programs such as school lunches, the energy revolution and the “Battle of Ideas.”

With abject hatred towards Cubans who have left their homeland for political or economic reasons, the military autocrats have (now underhandedly) imposed outrageous fees on goods and services purchased with remittances from overseas. These include telephone services, internet access and exorbitant surcharges on car sales.

With the recent price rise powdered milk is the latest to be added to this list. But the explanation for this does not stand up to scrutiny. If we go online, we find that the price trend worldwide is down.

According to the Uruguayan daily El Observador prices for powdered milk have dropped 10% over the last two months from $5,005 to $4,439 a ton. The decline is expected to continue until year’s end when it could reach as low as $4,200. That would amount to a roughly 16% drop from the beginning to the end of 2014.

Recently, a reporter for Martí News, Pablo Alfonso, published an article which exposes the Cuban regime. Alfonso reports that Global Dairy Trade — an auction platform for internationally traded commodity dairy products which holds an auction twice a month in which over 90 countries participate — reported that in the last twelve months sales of milk powder fell 8.4%. In the latest transactions the commodity sold for $4,033 a ton.

In the case of skim-milk — the kind sold on the island — the decline was 9.6%, equivalent to $4,126 per metric ton. Global Dairy Trade’s figures also indicate that the price for powdered skim-milk on the international market was $4,372 a ton in January 2014 and $4,452 in February.

According to official figures released in Cuba, however, the price for a ton of powdered skim milk was set to increase from $4,720 to $5,563. One might ask the country’s foreign trade officials where they are buying powdered milk because what they are paying does not match the published purchase price.

Even the official Cuban newspaper Granma has published comments highly critical of the price increase for powdered milk. A Cuban doctor serving in Saudi Arabia noted that a one-kilogram bag of the best quality powdered milk costs her only about five dollars.

Orestes, a Cuban living in Hialeah, is at a loss for words to describe the regime’s arbitrary pricing schedule.

“It’s robbery,” says Orestes. “In Brazil, bus fares rose 20 cents and people took to the streets. Here in the U.S. not many people buy powdered milk. A gallon (3.8 liters) of fresh 2% fat milk or skim-milk costs $3.89. All these price increases are designed to get emigrants to pay up.”

In Cuba only children up to seven-years-old and people on medically prescribed diets have the right to consume milk at the modest prices set forth in their ration books. In a speech in 2007 in Camaguey, Raul Castro stated, “We have to erase from our minds this up-to-age-seven idea that we have been carrying around for fifty years. We have to produce enough milk so that anyone who wants a glass of milk can have it.”

Seven years later Cubans are still waiting for this promise to be fulfilled.

Iván García

* Translator’s note: U.S. officials discovered that UBS had allowed countries such as Cuba, Iran and Libya to retire old banknotes by replacing them with new ones. This was a violation of an agreement with the Federal Reserve which stipulated that the bank would not accept cash from or transfer cash to countries on which the United States had imposed sanctions. (Source: The New York Sun)

25 April 2014

It’s a human drama with obvious political overtones. The regime wants to tell the story their way. People leave the island, they say, encouraged by the Cuban Adjustment Act that awards automatic residence to Cubans who step on United States soil.

It’s true. The frivolity of the U.S. wet foot/dry foot policy, seems like a macabre game. If the gringo coast guard catches you at sea, you’re returned to Cuba. If you manage to touch land, you won the lottery.

Although absurd, the share of moral responsibility remains with the olive green autocracy. Only the despair, the lack of a future, and the economic burden could drive a person to plan this dangerous journey across the sea.

People leave Cuba because things are going badly. Those who don’t have relatives in the United States, or who put off the family reunification paperwork, risk their future on a raft.

Let me tell you a story of rafters that happened in my neighborhood. Since Christmas 2013 Gregorio (name changes) was persuading relatives and friends disposed to change their fate with a marine adventure.

After 1994 when the Fidel Castro regime decriminalized illegal departures to the North, the future rafters plan their projects without too much discretion.

Gregorio was obsessed with the idea of leaving the country. Part of his family lives in Miami. He spent years doing the legal paperwork: “I don’t want to get to Florida when I’m 60.”

Finding allies for such an undertaking is not hard in Cuba. Young people without a future swarm every corner of the island. A priority: people with nautical knowledge.

Guys with experience who failed in other attempts. People with money to build the safest craft possible. Human traffic from Cuba to the United States is a buoyant industry.

But not everyone can afford the $10,000 for a ticket. There are different kinds of immigrants. There are those who choose to cross land borders, jumping from one nation to another in long and dangerous journeys from Ecuador, or paying cash to a Mexican coyote to put them across the border.

Then there are the rafters. According to José,”We are the most desperate. I have friends who have tried dozens of times. If they’re caught by the Cuban or U.S. coast guard, they always intend to try again. Many have become old salts.”

Gregorio had never tried. After recruiting twelve partners (everyone brought something, one sold a Moskovich car, another, two HP computers), they contacts an expert in designing marine craft.

The job isn’t cheap. A powerful and reliable engine is no less than four or five thousand dollars on the black market. They got three GPS for a possible localization, among other goods.

Friends were being added to the adventure. In April 2014 they were 22 people. Gregorio alerted family and friends who have yachts in Miami, so at any given moment, if they washed up on a key, they could be towed to the shore.

The GPA is essential. The artisanal craft designer had to be top of the line. They chose an ex-mechanic of a merchant boat who boasted he knew remote river passages in the Florida keys.

Before departing, at 2:30 in the morning on Wednesday, April 23, they said goodbye to their loved ones with a couple quarts of cheap whiskey.

They were carrying food and water for two weeks in case of shipwreck. A chessboard, Spanish cards and a game of dominoes. As if instead of a risky sea journey they were going on a peaceful safari.

Family in Havana tracked them through an illegal antenna on the cable news updates on Miami TV. Apparently, on Friday at lunchtime good news arrived.

The mother of one of the rafters called his family to say that Channel 23 had aired a story about the supposed boat with a child traveling. The rumor spread like wildfire. The Miami family of the rafters called Krome and other immigration detention centers in Florida. They could not confirm the event. They toured hospitals and coast guard offices. Nobody knew anything of the rafters. They began to panic.

The family members in Cuba called the rafters cellphones insistently. For now, the only signal is a laconic request from a recorded voice saying, “The number you are calling is turned off or outside the coverage area.”

Neighbors and friends try to encourage the rafters’ relatives. “An uncle was twelve days at sea until landfall in Key West.” Or, “You have to wait, they’ve only been at sea for 6 days.” Family members on both sides of of the Strait sleep poorly, eat little and suffer from nerves. They pray to their saints and pray for the lives of their own. Each day that passes without news is synonymous with bad omens. And the death of a rafter, usually, no one can confirm it.

Photo: One of the many rickety boats that came from the Havana coast towards the coast of Florida during the so-called “Rafter Crisis” in August 1994. In these twenty years, despite an increase in the chances of emigrating by legal means , Cubans continue to jump into the sea to try to reach the United States. Taken from Latin American Studies Group.

Iván García

6 May 2014

Freedom of expression, information and access to the internet are inalienable rights of any citizen. If the government of a country denies them, it is not a punishable crime to allow another person to inform them in some way.

Authoritarian and vertical societies like Cuba possess a bunch of rules that allow them to manage the flow of information at will. This control allows them to govern without hiccups, manipulating adverse opinions or hiding them.

The White House can implement policies that contribute to Cubans having diverse sources of information. But with transparency. And not designing strategies that could be interpreted as interference.

It is positive that the United States Interest Section in Havana operates two free internet rooms, where anyone can go, dissidents or otherwise.

Washington’s policy toward Cuba is generally public and transparent. On the internet it is not difficult to find help or money awarded to opposition groups on the island. A good way to bury this obsessive mania for espionage and mystery.

It must be a goal of the United States that the Radio Martí programming is becoming more enjoyable, analytical and professional. Since the 1960s, the Cuban regime used Radio Havana Cuba as an instrument to sell its doctrines to foreign countries.

With the petrodollars of the late Hugo Chavez, Telesur was created, television dedicated to openly spreading and supporting the most rancid of the Latin American left. That’s their right.

But each person should also be respected, according to his opinions, able to freely access the TV channel he desires, listen to the radio station he prefers, and read his favorite newspapers and digital sites.

For the olive-green autocracy, the 21st century is an ideological struggle. And it has orchestrated a campaign called “the battle of ideas.” But on the national scene, opinions that diverge from the official line are not accepted.

Cable antennas are illegal. Internet costs a price unattainable for most ordinary people. Foreign newspapers and books critical of the status quo are censored.

All that’s left is to listen to shortwave. Or sit in the bar of a hotel, spend four dollars to drink a mojito and watch Spanish CNN. The censorship even goes beyond politics.

Although it’s fair to recognize that Raul Castro has allowed Cubans to see NBA and MLB games, foreign games in which players from the island participate are still banned.

It’s the same in the literary, intellectual and musical fields. The singing Willy Chirino, the composer Jorge Luis Piloto, the poet Raul Rivero, the columnist Carlos Albert Montaner, or the writer Zoe Valdez, are prohibited from visiting their homeland for being convinced anti-Castroites.

The Castro brothers suffer from a rare mania: they consider themselves the legitimate owners of the nation. And know how to sell themselves as victims. And mor than a few times, U.S. and European institutions, with their Cold War mentality, give them ammunition.

Iván García

Photo: Flags of Cuba, United States, United Kingdom and the European Union, among others, waving on the balcony of the Hotel Saratoga, where in April 2013 Beyoncé and her husband , rapper Jay -Z stayed. The pretext for the couple to spend three days in Havana was celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary. It was speculated that behind the visit could be Barack Obama, friend of the artists. True or not, the journey was questioned in Cuba and in the United States. Taken from Cubanet .

29 April 2014

It’s said that the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén spoke to him of an inexperienced lawyer recently released from jail. He was called Fidel and had assaulted a barracks in Santiago de Cuba. What isn’t known is in what terms Guillén referred to Castro.

The author of Negro Bembón, convinced Communist and member of the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), probably described the seditious man from Birán as a petty bourgeois, a screw-up, or a baby gangster. At least that was the PSP profile that  fit the then unknown Castro.

One morning in April 1998, the fiftieth anniversary of the Bogotazo, the bearded one, mythomaniac, published what was perhaps his best journalistic chronicle, intending to demonstrate that a young reporter who stubbornly insisted on kicking an Underwood typewriter, after the death of Eliécer Gaitán in Bogota, was Gabriel García Márquez.

Castro, according to his chronicle, went to help him and solved the problem in the easiest way: slamming it against the wall. In the many late nights that Fidel Castro and García Márquez chatted with a thermos of coffee in Protocol Residence No. 6, in Laguito to the west of Havana, the Comandante always tried to sneak in his outlandish theories.

The Colombian, who only made revolution with a pen, out of courtesy, didn’t contradict the guerrilla. Of far off Bogota, he only remembered the literary circles, the editing of The Spectator newspaper, the whores and the three nights and four days of partying drinking like a fish with his friends, between vallenatos and boleros.

Gabo said that he first saw Castro at the airport in Camaguey, a province 500 kilometers east of Havana. Be that as it may, the reality is that the two men were friends.

In 1959, Gabriel made a living through journalism, and from Caracas made landfall on the island, looking for fresh news about the Revolution. García Márquez had not yet given birth to Macondo, nor Aureliano Buendia. Some minor stories and a novella, Hojarasca, were his entire literary opus.

With his friend Plineo Apuleyo he was a correspondent for Prensa Latina. Later, already a giant, after his Nobel in 1982, when extolling magical realism in Latin America and showing that Macondo wasn’t an invention, but a continent that was born in real time after Rio Bravo and extending to Patagonia, more than friends, Fidel and García Márquez were accomplices.

A couple of times Castro used his favors to send messages to Bill Clinton. To Gabo’s residence on the outskirts of the capital, Castro would arrive without warning. It’s said that the author of Chronicle of a Death Foretold gave his writings to the Comandante to edit.

In exchange, the Cuban strongman offered the choice bits that a first-rate journalist like Gabo knew how to use. Operation Carlota, about the Cuban troops in Angola, or Shipwreck on Dry Land, about the child rafter Elián González, were the fruits of these confidences.

Criticized by his adversaries for his friendship with an autocrat, against all the storms, Garcia Marquez maintained his affection for Fidel Castro. But he wasn’t too keen on the new caudillos and revolutions of the 21st century. He kept his distance from Chavez, Evo Morales and friends.

Gabo did not like clones. He preferred the original. And Castro, like it or not, was. His death hit the island. Although there might be the impression that people carried on. Trying to buy potatoes, milk powder or engage in polemics about the end of the baseball season. But no. His departure hurt.

Ordinary Cubans had the privilege of reading his books at affordable prices. The man from Aracataca always donated his copyright to Cuba.

When Love in the Time of Cholera was sold in Havana the lines to purchase it were a block and a half long. In not a few of the slums, three glasses of brown sugar, two packs of cigarettes and a can of condensed milk (all luxuries in a Cuban jail), rented in prison News of a Kidnapping or No One Writes to the Colonel.

Cubans saw him as theirs. He was a friend of Pablo Milanes and Silvio Rodriguez. He had a retrospective collection of Cuban music. In December 1986, in San Antonio de los Baños, he inaugurated the International School of Film and Television, a subsidiary of the Foundation of New Latin American Cinema, his legacy in Cuba.

Fidel Castro loses another friend. In one year, God has taken Nelson Mandela and Hugo Chavez. And now Gabo goes. A friend in every meaning of the word.

The only known argument was a denial that Castro demanded when García Márquez said that one afternoon under a blazing sun, Fidel arrived at his house and after devouring a huge sea bass, without stopping for breath, ate 18 scoops of ice cream.

Fidel Castro didn’t like it. And he asked that the page be amended. Gabo didn’t do it. Like he didn’t ask him to correct the historical mistake, wanting to introduce it in the scene of the Bogotazo riots.

The Comandante’s life was long ago. Partners and adversaries of the Cold War are already in the other world. And he ’s still here, in the capital of the Caribbean Macondo.

No one better than Gabo profiled a continent of loafers, the lit-up, revelers and drunkards. Around here, whoever doesn’t know how to dance, sings without crying on hearing a bolero or a ranchera, drinks a liter of spirits without getting drunk , tells stories of whores and respects only the wife of his friends, obviously, is not a native of Hispanic America.

A place where democracy is often a faded word that everyone manipulates at will. The State, a hunting trophy. And watching the clock or half hour appointments are things of gringos and Europeans.

García Márquez asked old Europe for patience. In a speech on receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, he recounted that democracy and its institutions were established in Europe after 300 years of barbarism. Switzerland, he said, is what it is today after centuries of mercenary soldiers and crushing poverty.

The world lost one of its best Spanish-speaking writers. A reference for journalists and for his readers. Fidel Castro lost more. Perhaps his last friend.

Iván García

Photo: Havana, 3 March 2000. Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez talk animatedly during the dinner for the Havana International Festival. Taken from the Dominican paper Hoy.

20 April 2014