Author: Iván García

Photo: Víctor Manuel Domínguez

For someone from Havana, the best thing is to walk the streets in spring. These March days, Jorge Olivera Castillo, 52, poet and journalist, is delighted by the green of the trees, the salty aroma, and the gentle sun.

On any weekday morning, he traces his own journey. Aimlessly wandering through a maze of alleyways crammed with the facades of propped up tenements: in these sites reside in the subjects of his stories and poems. He likes to walk the streets of Central Havana, and places not on the tourist postcards.

It was in another spring, that of 2003, when the State wanted to break a handful of peaceful men and women, making arbitrary use of its absolute power. And sentences were handed out to Cubans, like Jorge Olivera, who disagreed and disagree with a regime that confuses a nation with a farm, and democracy with loyalty to a commander.

Olivera was one of 75 prisoners of the Black Spring. Ten years later, without drama, he recalls those days. “About two o’clock in the afternoon of March 18, 2003 I was arrested. I had returned from the hospital, to be seen for a gastrointestinal problem, when a troop of about twenty violent soldiers appeared. At that time I was director of Havana Press, an independent press agency. They conducted a thorough search of every piece of paper I had. They seized books of literature and my stories and articles. An old Remington typewriter. Family photos, letters from friends, electric bills and even my phone bill. A clean sweep. Everything was confiscated by state decree.”

When a government says that a man who writes must be prosecuted, something is wrong with this society. The weapons of free journalists like Jorge Olivera, Ricardo Gonzalez, Raul Rivero and other reporters sentenced to 24 years in prison, were the words, typewriters and landline telephones through which once a week they read the news and their texts about the other Cuba the regime tries to ignore.

In April 2003, a Summary Court sentenced him to 18 years’ imprisonment. “The trial was a circus. Without legal guarantees. The defense attorneys were more afraid than we were. The definitive evidence showing that I was a public threat were my scattered internet writings and recordings of my participation in programs of Radio Martí,” says Jorge.

He slept 36 nights in Villa Marista, headquarters of the secret police, a former religious school transformed into custody for opponents. Located in the Sevillano neighborhood, in the 10 October municipality, Villa Marists is a left over from the Cold War. A Caribbean imitation of Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison from the Communist period. In March 1991, He was there thirteen days, accused of ’enemy propaganda’. When you enter the two-story building, with walls painted bright green, a watch officer sitting behind glass receives you.

They use techniques of intimidation and psychological torture. You’re not a human being. You become an object. A property of special services. Before a gray dress uniform they undress and humiliate you in front of several officers. They force you to do squats and open your anus. As in Abub Ghraib or imprisonment in Guantanamo Naval Base. But in Cuba it has been applied much earlier.

“They were terrible days. In the cells minimum of four people were boarded. The beds were a zinc plate fixed to the wall with a chain. The medicines are placed on a ledge outside the cell. You are called by a number. I was not Jorge, but the prisoner 666. You sleep with two light bulbs that never go off. At any time of day or night you can be called for lengthy interrogations. They lead you through long and gloomy passageways of packed cells where you do not see any other detainee. It’s like being in the mouth of the wolf,” says Olivera.

Some dictators often have a macabre sense of humor. After extensive tortures, Stalin used trials and self-incriminations as a spectacle. Sometimes there was no show. They put your back to a wall and gave you one shot to the temple. If they wanted to prolong the agony and break as a human being, they sent you to a Gulag.

In Cuba, the agents of the State Security have modeled these methods. Except the shot to the temple. One of those strokes of ridicule that the repressive apparatus of the Castro likes, Olivera keeps fresh in his memory. The condemned of the Black Spring were spread out among the island’s prisons in comfortable air-conditioned coaches, the same ones used for tourists.

“The height of cynicism. We traveled that day watching movies and they gave us good food. We were treated like royalty as we deposited in prisons hundreds of miles from our homes. I was detained in Guantanamo Provincial Combined, six hundred miles from where my wife and my children live,” he recalls.

The worst experience Jorge Olivera lived through was the prison. “The food was a mess. Officers beating common prisoners in common. Inmates self-mutilate. Or commit suicide. Poetry saved me from madness.” It was in prison where Olivera began writing poems. In 2004, due to a string of illnesses, he was granted a parole.

Technically he is still not a free man. If the government decides, the Black Spring prisoners remaining in the island can go back behind bars. Of the 27 independent journalists imprisoned in March 2003, Jorge Olivera is the only one left in Cuba. Abroad he has published four books of poetry and two of short stories.

Right now he gives shapes to his latest poems. “Systole and Diastole”is the working title. He writes for Cubanet and Digital Spring, a weekly where for six years the best independent journalists have performed.

Along with fellow journalist Víctor Manuel Domínguez, he leads a writers club. He is an honorable member of the Pen Club of the Czech Republic and the United States. If people could receive a grade for the human condition, I wouldn’t hesitate to shake his hand to give a ten to Jorge Olivera. His priorities remain information, describing the reality of his neighbors in Central Havana, the crisis of values, prostitution and official corruption.

The author of “Surviving in the Mouth of the Wolf” rejects the ’amnesia’ of newly minted dissidents. “You can not forget history. The rebellious generation that dominates the new technologies is welcome. But they should be honest and admit that before them, we were there. Looking at news on hot news and under constant police harassment. We did not have Twitter or Facebook, we wrote with pens on the back of recycled paper. But we never stopped reporting on the precarious life and lack of a future for the people in Cuba. That can not be relegated or forgotten. The history of dissent is very long. And before us, were those who were sentenced to death in La Cabaña. If we forget these stages, mutilate or distort an important part of the peaceful struggle against the Castro regime,” says Jorge Olivera.

His dream is to do radio, be healthy and live in a democracy. He hopes the day is not too far off when he can reunite with Raul Rivero and Tania Quintero, two fellow exiles. Not in Switzerland or Spain, but walking the streets of Havana in the spring.

Iván García

31 March 2013

Neighbors witnessing the arrest of a dissident in 2003 — see more detailed note below.

2003 was an incredible year. Harassment, arbitrary detentions, acts of repudiation and verbal assaults against the opposition by the government were rising.

There was an escalation by the government against peaceful dissidents and independent journalists. Castro called a referendum to shore up his olive-green socialism. It was a response to the Varela Project petition, which had been submitted to the National Assembly by the opposition figure Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas. The petition was backed up by more than ten thousand signatures and, following procedures enshrined in the constitution, called on the legislature to undertake constitutional reforms.

In 1999 Castro had promulgated Article 88, a legal hodgepodge that mandated sentences of more than twenty years for dissidents and independent journalists under the pretext they were undermining the status quo.

Fidel Castro himself appeared on television and read a list with names of opposition figures who allegedly had contact with diplomats from the United States and the Czech Republic.

One could see that something was brewing in the sewers of power. The regime’s attacks in the media were missiles specifically directed at opposition leaders Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, Martha Beatriz Roque, Oscar Elías Biscet, and the poet and journalist Raúl Rivero.

Months before the raid on dissidents, a furious Fidel Castro threatened the opposition in a speech at the Karl Marx Theater. “Don’t say later that you were not warned,” he told them. “We will not allow mercenaries to carry out their work with impunity, though we won’t kill butterflies with cannon fire.”

On March 18, 19 and 20, 2003 violent lightning raids were launched on the homes of more than eighty dissidents across the island, marking the beginning of surgical detentions intended to destroy the opposition.

It was a well-designed move. The international press corps was lining up to go to Iraq, where all signs indicated that war was imminent. According to Castro’s calculations, the administration of George W. Bush would soon be bogged down in a costly and exhausting war with the dictator Saddam Hussein.

It did not happen that way. In a devastating offensive lasting little more than a month, troops from the United States and its allies pulled down a statue of the tyrant in Baghdad. In spite of the clamor of war, the imprisonment of dozens of the island’s opposition figures did not go unnoticed by the world’s press.

International criticism was considerable. The government in Havana had not anticipated such a reaction. Some of Castro’s friends such as Portuguese writer José Saramago and Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano criticized the detentions. Saramago’s reaction was extreme. “This is as far as I go,” he said, abandoning ship and the fellow travellers who supported the bearded Cuban.

Initially up to a hundred dissidents were detained. Later the number was reduced to seventy-five. Settling accounts like an old wine merchant, Castro’s calculations were based on the assumption that the Bush administration would negotiate the release of ’his mercenaries’ by exchanging them for the five Cuban spies imprisoned in the United States.

To Castro this seemed like a reasonable exchange — fifteen “wretched worms” for each spy. Perhaps he was thinking back to 1961 when Kennedy exchanged baby food and cereal for more than two-thousand anti-Castro fighters imprisoned on the island after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

The move came back to bite him. It was a crude political error. World leaders demanded the dissidents’ freedom, and the United States and the European Union further tightened the screws on the economic sanctions against Cuba.

Castro upped the ante. Taking advantage of the case of three Cubans who had commandeered a transport vessel, he decided to send a message to frighten the population. At the time, in their eagerness to reach the Florida coast, people were escaping any way they could. At a summary trial three black youths, who were living in poor neighborhoods of Havana, were sentenced to death.

It was bad. Dissidents and ordinary Cubans alike thought Castro had lost his mind. Meanwhile, dissidents and independent journalists like us lived in a constant state of anxiety. I walked around with a spoon and toothbrush in my back pocket.

I felt that at any moment I could be arrested. Luckily, this did not happen, though the phone was cut off for several days. We were all afraid. I still remember a distressed Blanca Reyes, wife of Raúl Rivero, describing his arrest and subsequent detention.

The evidence against him consisted of his articles and poems, an Olivetti typewriter, books by universally acclaimed authors and photos of his children, friends and family members. He was arrested in his apartment in La Victoria, where he had lived since his wedding. It is a rough neighborhood, a breeding ground for hookers, pimps and hustlers. People with no future who do not enthusiastically applaud Castro’s rants. It was in one of these poor central Havana neighborhoods where the disturbances of August 1994, known as the Maleconazo, the Malecon uprising, broke out.

On the afternoon of March 20, when Raúl Rivero was arrested, the street was filled with neighbors and onlookers. When he was put into a Russian car, his hands shackled as though he were a terrorist, some outraged neighbors began to shot “abusadores” and “libertad.”

Ten years after the Black Spring, efforts to destroy opposition groups, independent journalists and alternative bloggers have increased. Those of us who have worked for democracy and freedom of expression press on. Here we are.

Iván García

Photo: Neighbors from the block where Raúl Rivero lived — on Peñalver between Franco and Oquendo streets in Central Havana — witnessing the arrest of the director of Cuba Press, an agency for independent journalism established on September 23, 1995. Among its founders are Iván García and Tania Quintero.

6 April 2013

The statistics are troubling. For more than thirty years the average Cuban woman has given birth to less than one daughter during her entire reproductive life. A population that does not regenerate gets old. And decreases. This means that in absolute terms Cuba has begun to lose inhabitants.

There was a report issued by the National Office of Statistics in 2011 which notes that the cumulative age of the country’s three strongmen – Fidel Castro, his brother Raúl and José Machado Ventura – is 250 years.

More dramatically, more than twenty thousand people between the ages of 10 and 45 emigrate each year. One of the government’s solutions to counteract the aging and decline of the population has been to raise the retirement age to 60 for women and 65 for men.

A pension in Cuba – between 150 and 300 pesos (6 to 12 dollars) — barely covers even 25% of a retiree’s basic needs. If a citizen hopes to have breakfast and two decent meals a day, he will need at least 2,600 pesos (100 dollars) a month.

Added to this is the serious housing problem. Some 62% of homes in Cuba are in a fair to poor state of repair. Three or four generations must live together under the same roof. When more space is needed, it is often the aged person who is displaced. The best option is for grandparents to live with their grandchildren. The worst is for families to send them to some decrepit state institution.

With its lack of sanitation, poor treatment and even worse food, death’s worst waiting room is a state-run hospice.

By 2012 more people were dying than were being born in the country. The weak economy does not guarantee a comfortable life for the two million people over the age of sixty. Today the median age is 38 years. By 2025 it will rise to 44 and almost 26% of the population will be over the age of 60. By 2030 more than 3.3 million people will 60 or older.

Currently, the percentage of Cubans over the age of 60 is 17.8%. The segment of the population 14 years or younger is 17.3%. The ideal solution would be to adopt policies that encourage women to have two or more children.

European countries with a welfare state pay a stipend to mothers who have more than one child, but public funds for this in Cuba are minimal.

Since Raúl Castro inherited power from his brother, the number of construction projects  that do not turn a profit, such as social service and leisure facilities, has declined to almost zero. Investments are made only in buildings that generate hard currency, like those in the tourism industry, or which are strategically important, such as petrochemical plants and waterworks projects in the eastern region.

We should not have to wait for a session of the one-note national legislature to announce financial incentives to encourage women to have more than one child. Otherwise, Cuba’s accelerated aging problem will be an issue that a future government will have to address.

Life dictates that by 2025 the Castros will be either resting in some mausoleum or will be two very sickly old men nearing the century mark. In addition to encouraging spectacular economic growth, the next president will also have to renegotiate the country’s external debt and try to create a coherent, inclusive and democratic society

All such efforts will have to be taken up with an aging human capital. A growing segment of women, both professional and non-professionals, are postponing starting families due to material shortages. Convincing them that Cuba needs to rejuvenate itself by increasing the number of girls will be a vital task.

It is yet to be seen if within ten years leaving for Florida will still be the chief priority for many Cubans. We hope not. Otherwise, if you are the last one to leave, please turn out the light in El Morro.*

Iván García

Photo from 100 Photos of the Older Generation

*Translator’s note: The iconic lighthouse at the Morro fortress overlooks the Havana harbor.

2 April 2013

Freedom gives light, color, harmony, life to a dark dead society. Freedom-Democracy for Cuba.

A year ago, while preparing the official pomp to receive Pope Benedict XVI, elite troops from the Ministry of the Interior violently assaulted the house of the dissident Sonia Garro Alfonso, in the Los Quemados neighborhood of Marianao, in western Havana.

It was a spectacular operation. All the neighbors still remember what happened. “There were guys dressed like anti-riot troops from American movies. They used rubber bullets. They employed exaggerate violence, arresting Sonia and her husband Ramon. They took them and almost all their belongings. It was incredible. They treated them like they were terrorists,” one lady commented.

Sonio Garro’s path towards dissidence is marked by poverty and racism. “In my childhood, the happy moments could be counted on the fingers of one hand. I was the tenth daughter of a poor family of twelve siblings. I grew up in a violent slum. I never had toys at Christmas. I always had worn out second-hand clothes that were given to my mother by charity. I went to school with old broken down shoes, but with an immense will, thinking always about studying and bettering myself to change my fate,” Sonia told me in 2009.

She suffered racial discrimination while pursuing her lab technique studies. “I lived racism first hand. I remember one day I wanted to lodge a complaint at school and the vice principal of the center told me, “Go where you want, you’ll always be black.”

When I graduated, with a gold diploma, there was a ceremony in the Astral Theater. The Minister of Public Health came to deliver the award for the most outstanding student and an official came over and told me another person was going to collect it for me because my skin was so dark I wouldn’t look good in the photo. ’No offense, it’s not racism, but you’ll spoil the picture,’ he said. I never collected that award,” she told me in an interview I did with her at her home.

Later she was expelled from the polyclinic where she was working for having married an opponent to Fidel Castro’s government. She learned to sew on an old machine from the ’50s, to make a living and support her daughter, Elaine.

“And from the door of my house, while I sewed, I could see girls of 13 and 14 prostituting themselves. I also saw several accidents with children who were playing without their parents watching them. So from there was born the idea of creating a community project, where the little kids could entertain themselves, play and interact with others without danger,” Sonia said.

On February 27, 2007, Garro created the first independent center. In her home. She had some 20 kids between 7 and 15. It was free. And it didn’t matter if their parents were revolutionaries or not.

“The first rule was no talking about politics. I organized activities of drawing and sewing and my husband, Ramón Alejandro Muñoz, a musician, was in charge of choreographing dancing and teaching the kids to play musical instruments.  On the weekends we had parties and shared children’s books and toys. Foreign NGOs helped us with materials and medicines, as did embassies and individuals in a modest way, giving us what they could,” explained Sonia while showing me photos of the activities.

After that initial experience, Garro went for more. She opened another center in the slum area of Palenque, in the municipality of Marianao itself. What seemed like a noble action within society, which would bring more benefits than problems, triggered an earthquake on the part of the State Security. “The government’s response to my social work were three acts of repudiation and a couple of beatings. The last act of repudiation did not work, no one in the neighborhood attended. They left empty-handed.”

Much happened in those four years. Her community projects closed due to harassment by the Special Services. Sonia Garro then joined the marches of the Ladies in White. And also half a dozen seasoned women, who featured in street protests demanding respect for political rights and demanding democracy.

Her husband Ramon was not far behind. In May 2010, desperate because he didn’t know where Sonia was being detained, he climbed to the roof of their house, still under construction, with a machete and began shouting slogans. The indignation of this Havanan was recorded and uploaded to YouTube. Recently, from the Combinado del Este prison he wrote a letter (they are kept separate).

It has been 12 months that this couple has been in jail. They live in an authentic legal limbo. Officially they are accused of public disorder and attempted murder. But there is no trial date.

Yamilé Garro Alfonso is the mother of two young children. She was a simple housewife, who now takes the place of her sister in the marches of the Ladies in White. Every week or every two weeks, according to the visits, she loads heavy bags of food and toiletries on her shoulders and heads for sometimes to the women’s prison, Black Mantle, other times to the Combinado del Este prison. In her tenement room in San Leopoldo, she also cares for Elaine, the daughter of Sonia and Ramon who will soon turn 17.

The controversial dissident of the barricade is strongly suppressed by the tough guys of State Security. Raul Castro does not want the opposition to take to the streets as public platform for their demands. The General knows that could trigger a domino effect among ordinary Cubans, tired of living with a future in quotation marks.

The only way to pressure the regime to release Sonia Garro and Ramon Munoz is a strong international campaign. There is no other way.

Iván García

22 March 2013

It is unprecedented. For the first time in Catholicism’s more than two thousand year history, we have a pope from the Americas. The news did not go unnoticed in Havana, although the faithful did not gather euphorically at the doors to the cathedral, located in the  historic heart of the city.

Ricardo, a 43-year-old attorney and moderate Catholic, has other priorities. Within 72 hours he will become a Cuban emigrant. Yet another one. A few days ago he posted a hand-written sign on the balcony of his apartment announcing the sale of his furniture, a 32-inch plasma TV and a Sony Lenovo laptop. With the proceeds he hopes to buy a plane ticket to Costa Rica.

Surprised by the news, Ricardo thinks the challenges facing the new pontiff go beyond those of the Catholic faith. “Benedict XVI left behind a host of unresolved problems – from corruption within the Vatican itself to the troubling issue of pedophilia. I am happy that for the first time we will have a pope who is South American and Jesuit.”

Without access to the internet or cable TV, Ana Luisa, a 37-year-old primary school teacher, learned that the Argentine cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the new pope while watching the eight o’clock TV newscast.

“I go to mass often. I was at the ceremonies in the Plaza of the Revolution during John Paul II’s visit and last year during Benedict XVI’s. I hope Pope Francis visits Cuba too. Cardinal Jaime Ortega’s participation on these occasions has been criticized. They accuse him of not being deeply involved in political issues and they might have a point.  But a priest’s job is to be a messenger of faith, not a politician,” says Ana.

In front of Iglesia de Paula, in Havana’s Sevillano district, a priest shares biographical details about the recently elected Holy Father with two neighborhood housewives. One of them notes the coincidence of Bergoglio having been born on December 17, a date charged with religious significance in Cuba.

On the eve of December 17 thousands of devout Catholics, santeros, paleros, animists and buyers of promises often walk a kilometer or more through a narrow, dark street and gather at El Rincón to venerate St. Lazarus.

It is a massive pilgrimage which people attend of their own free will. Since the Castro brothers came to power 54 years ago, official media outlets have never published a route or called upon people to venerate Lazarus, the patron saint of Cuba’s beggars.

The dissident community greeted the news of the selection of an Argentine pope coolly. Rolando, a human rights activist, recalls how in March 2012 Benedict XVI offended some by failing to meet with a single dissident or anyone from the Ladies in White.

It is not the best of times for relations between the opposition and the nation’s Catholic church. But there is no getting around the fact that Cardinal Ortega, at the request of military regime and in conjunction with Spanish ambassador Miguel Ángel Moratinos, played a decisive role in freeing almost one hundred political prisoners in 2010.

Although the majority felt compelled to flee to Spain, the jailed dissidents and their family members gave high marks to the role played by the church. A church which at a distance seems more comfortable talking to the government than to the opposition.

Cuba is by no means a country with a high percentage of Catholics. But in the last 25 years the number of people attending mass has multiplied. There is another reality – the proverbial religious syncretism. Afro-Cuban religious sects are not in agreement with Vatican policies which they consider discriminatory.

“Neither of the two popes who have visited the island have wanted to meet with practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions. In a country where the number of people who practice Santería or other versions of indigenous religions is significant, I feel it is counterproductive on the part of the church not to enter into dialogue,” says a Babalawo priest from Havana.

Nevertheless, nearly all those interviewed approved of Bergoglio’s selection. “America, and Latin America in particular, is the region of the world with the greatest number of Catholics, almost 480 million. It is a good signal that the conclave in Rome took us into consideration,” says Gloria, a practicing Catholic.

Bergoglio the Argentine will have to display his diplomatic skills, patience and wisdom in a continent that is a political stew. The Castros with presumably try to keep a pope born in Buenos Aires on their side and to get him to overlook the lack of democracy and freedom in the country.

Christians who have only one meal a day and who breakfast on coffee without milk hope that the new pope might be the voice of the dispossessed. “He didn’t pick the name Francis just because he liked it. It was allusion to Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of the poor,” explains Ignacio, a retiree who, in spite of poor nutrition and material scarcity, has never wavered in his religious devotion.

These are trying times. To play the devil’s advocate, trying to banish vice and corruption within the Holy See will be a complex task. As God’s representative on earth people throughout the world will be asking him to get involved in their problems and to try to resolve them. Both Catholics and non-Catholics in Cuba believe the pope might be able to fulfill their expectations.

Neither the pope nor the church has the know-how to fill the void left by the economic disaster created by Fidel Castro, which has now been aggravated by the death of Hugo Chavez and the question mark hanging over our future. That is not its purpose. But if it could facilitate a dialogue among Cubans with different ideas and persuasions, this could begin to set a historic precedent,” says Ricardo, the attorney who in 72 hours will be flying to Costa Rica.

Perhaps the bar has been set too high for Francis, but we all believe we have the right to ask more of him than masses and prayers.

Iván García

16 March 2013

For Joel, a 29-year-old engineer, the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez marks a before and after moment in the Cuban political landscape.

“It’s too soon to be able to analyze the consequences, positive or negative, of someone new in Miraflores. Even if elections are held soon and Nicolás Maduro wins, the exchange of oil for Cuban medical specialists could be adversely affected. Being an optimist, I hope Maduro keeps sending oil to Cuba at favorable rates. On the other hand we are entering a new period of crisis within a crisis that has been going on for 22 years,” says Joel while following developments on TeleSur.

To people waiting in line at a bakery in Sevilano, a neighborhood in Havana’s Tenth of October district, the passing of the Venezuelan leader is also a concern, especially if the flow of oil to Cuba is cut off. Among ordinary people on the island the concept of Chavismo is an abstraction.

The reality is that, after he took power in 1998, his open checkbook policy towards the Castro brother’s revolution and the sale of 100,000 barrels of oil a day at wholesale prices was the main reason Cuba did not suddenly revert to the Stone Age.

A large segment of the population has not forgotten the stark years of the “special period.” Power outages lasting twelve hours. Factories closed down. Economic development projects cancelled due to a shortage of hard currency and empty coffers preventing the purchase of fuel on the world market.

For Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez was a Santa Claus from the south. We now know what this political alliance between the commandate and the Bolivarian represented – a new type of political platform and torrents of petrodollars, which advanced the outlandish theories of socialism, now disguised using different rhetoric.

If you asked people on the streets of Havana what they thought of Chávez, you would probably find he has more devotees than Castro. “The man is more jolly and cheerful than Fidel and he sings boleros and rancheras,” observes a taxi driver.

The other reason is simple. The average Cuban sees him as the man who brought us light. Because thousands of our countrymen also worked in different missions set up by the former parachutist from Barinas, hundreds if not thousands of families on the island have been able to repair their homes or start a small business selling cheap merchandise acquired during their relatives’ sojourn in Venezuela.

This is the case for Lourdes, a 32-year-old nurse. She has travelled half a dozen times to Venezuela. With the money she saved, she was able to start a small business selling clothing with counterfeit labels, whimsical costume jewelry, and electronic equipment such as plasma screen televisions and computers, which she acquires through contacts in Caracas and resells in Havana.

Since the end of December Lourdes has not been able to travel to Venezuela. “The Ministry of Public Health told me, ‘Not until further notice.’ Maybe it is because of Chávez’ illness. Now with Hugo’s death I am afraid the business will fall apart. I don’t trust either Maduro or Cabello. They are from the same party. But if you take Cuba as an example, you will see that Raúl, although faithful to his brother Fidel, has brought new people into his government and eliminated obsolete restrictions.”

At 8:55 PM the Cuban government released a letter of condolence and declared a state of national mourning, to be officially observed from March 7 to Friday, March 8. It is striking that, unlike Rafael Correa, Evo Morales or Sebastián Piñera, General Raúl Castro did not give a televised address.

Moves are made in Cuba at the pace of a slow, rhythmic dance. The margin of error for every word is carefully calculated, as are the repercussions that a speech might have. While we wait for funeral services to begin in Caracas, which Castro II is predicted to attend, the main topic of conversation on Cuba’s streets is the death of the Venezuelan president.

A death announced. A bomb squad silence characterized information on Chávez’s state of health. The lack of transparency in news reporting meant people had to read between the lines of the few and cryptic reports issued by Caracas.

In Havana, sympathizers and detractors alike were respectful during this painful time for the family and followers of the Venezuelan president.

The fate of Venezuela is intimately linked to the future of Cuba. Because its leaders have performed their economic duties so poorly, the island is now more dependent than ever on external factors.

With the death of their leader many Venezuelans are going through an emotional earthquake whose seismic shockwaves could reach all the way to Havana.

Although not unexpected, the demise of Hugo Chávez Frías might lead to more profound economic reforms in Cuba. General Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz Canel, his second-in-command, will find their ability to maneuver put to the test. We will see if they are up to the task.

Photo: A Cuban walks in front of a large portrait mural of Hugo Chávez. From informacion.com

6 March 2013