14ymedio – Page 219 – Translating Cuba

Exodus of Reporters Strikes a Blow to the Independent Press in Cuba

The exiled Cuban journalists Mónica Baró, Víctor Ariel González, Yariel Valdés y José Ramírez Pantoja. (Collage)

14ymedio, Havana, January 30, 2022 — Cuban independent journalism has had to reinvent itself several times. The police repression and draconian laws against freedom of expression maintained on the Island are not the only obstacles. Emigration is one of the biggest threats to a press that is also still being persecuted and demonized.

Work teams must rebuild themselves every so often because of the exodus of journalists, editors, and contributors. The bloodletting is constant and in the next months the phenomenon could accelerate due to the new Penal Code, which plans to punish, in a stricter manner, any project that receives financing from abroad, such as independent newspapers and magazines.

Many reporters do not continue practicing journalism once they are away from the Island. The numbers of exiles in the trade could even exceed one hundred in the last three years.

In 2016, the journalist José Ramírez Pantoja was the center of one of the most-talked-about cases of censorship within the official press. The reporter was fired from his job at Radio Holguín after being accused of reproducing on his blog the words of the vice president of the official newspaper Granma, Karina Marrón, who showed visionary concern over a possible social outbreak. continue reading

Out of work in the official sector, the reporter contributed to independent media, including 14ymedio, under a pseudonym to avoid major retaliations. However, State Security continued watching him closely. In 2019 he requested asylum in the United States. “They left me without work or sustenance without caring about the years that I worked as a journalist,” he said then.

Now, Pantoja is employed at the Cano Health Clinic and tells this newspaper that he would be delighted to take up once again his “full time journalistic work at a press outlet.” He believes that “from abroad there is greater freedom and security to practice a journalism in favor of a democratic Cuba without dictatorship.”

Pantoja enumerates the list of colleagues who have recently left the Island, including a well-known reporter, a “furious defender” of the Cuban regime, who now lives in Miami.

On his list there are even directors of provincial radio channels. “In sync with the social exodus, journalists are not remaining behind,” he stresses.

Mónica Baró graduated with a degree in journalism in 2012 from the University of Havana, and has contributed to sites such as Periodismo de Barrio and El Estornudo. She left Cuba in January of 2021 for Spain and from there keeps her eye and her pen on the Island. Her reports, in fact, have been key to assembling the scattered information about the detainees of July 11.

Baró has been able to keep practicing her profession on the site CiberCuba and feels “privileged,” because she knows other colleagues who haven’t been able to break into a media outlet. “It’s really difficult when you leave Cuba to find a job as a journalist to support yourself. There are a lot of stigmas regarding the capabilities of Cuban journalists.”

“Distance, of course, poses an obstacle to the practice of journalism, because nothing compares with the terrain, with living that reality. As much as you remain up to date with what’s happening, you have family in Cuba, or you are empathetic, I think that the experience is irreplaceable.”

However, “it’s necessary to ask what it is to practice journalism and what is Cuba. Is Cuba only a geographic territory or all of the Cuba that is spread all over the world? Is Cuban journalism only what is practiced on the Island or is it also what is practiced from exile?” she asks.

“The ideal for me to is practice journalism in Cuba but when I left it was practically impossible to practice the type of journalism that I was doing. What I was doing in my last months there was activism or resisting.” Baró felt that she could no longer continue reporting as before and recounts: between “becoming an activist 80 or 90% of the time or practicing journalism from a distance, I chose the challenge of distance.”

She warns that “when you leave you stop being attractive for many spaces; training programs expect you to return to Cuba to practice what you learned and that in some way cuts off your career and your training. They are basically asking you to return to a context where your safety is at risk.”

“I don’t know if journalism can be sustained much longer,” she stresses in face of the material scarcity that marks the lives of emigrants in their first years.

Entire editorial departments, internationally award-winning journalists, and even directors of media outlets are on the list of those who have settled abroad. Agencies like Hablemos Press succumbed in face of the exit of practically all its reporters, while other news sites have had to relocate their headquarters to Madrid, New York, or Mexico City.

This January, the reporter Yariel Valdés González recounted on his Facebook that he was joining the team of Telemundo 51 in Miami. “Every time that I passed on the highway near that tower I would tell myself: One day I will arrive,” he wrote in front of the channel building. “A great dream made reality since I came to this country, less than two years ago.”

Valdés was freed in March 2020 from an immigration center in Louisiana, after an Appeals Court ratified his political asylum case. While he was living on the Island, he was a contributor to the magazine Washington Blade, the United States’s oldest publication aimed at the LGBT community. Now, he smiles in a photo while holding in his hand his identification as an employee of Telemundo 51.

In other cases, emigration has served some to take up their original professions again. Víctor Ariel González was one of the founders of 14ymedio in May 2014, but previously he had graduated as a civil engineer from the José Antonio Echeverría Technological University of Havana, known as la Cujae. Several arrests and police operations led him to request asylum in the United States, where he arrived in 2015.

González got a job as an editor for the site Cubanet. His time with that outlet, headquartered in Miami and founded in 1994, kept him in contact with independent journalists on the Island. “The change was radical” in the manner of practicing journalism, he recalls. “For me journalism had been making the story” in contact with reality, something that wasn’t possible being abroad.

As an editor, it was his role to apply the editorial “scissors” to the texts that were arriving from Cuba and also to write informative notes. “I chose engineering since I was pre-university, afterwards I discovered journalism and I liked it, but when I arrived in the United States I was impressed by the highways, the buildings, and the structures. I knew that I didn’t want to dedicate myself forever to editing.”

“It was a beautiful moment because it also ended up being a personal rediscovery, like taking out of a drawer all that knowledge I had acquired during my engineering studies and realize that I still had it.” As time was passing engineering “took precedence over journalism,” he concludes.

The regime provokes this exodus by hindering journalism work with regulations, in the style of Decree 370, the dreaded Law 88 and a long list of regulations that penalize the independent exercise of journalism. State Security is dedicated to reinforcing the harassment of reporters and suggesting that they leave the country to put an end to so much pressure.

For Abraham Jiménez Enoa, leaving the Island was full of drama. For five years a travel ban weighed on him and finally at the beginning of 2022 he managed to travel the country for the first time and land in Madrid and then travel to Barcelona. In an article about his exile, which he published in Gatopardo magazine, he defines Cuba as a place where “independent journalists are treated like terrorists.”

Although the column he maintained in that publication was entitled From the Malecón and Jiménez Enoa always thought that “it would last until he left Cuba for the first time, and once he set foot in another place, this repository would have to be closed,” now he considers continue to collaborate with Gatopardo. “But no longer about my ’confinement’, I will leave that room closed and I will go to another.”

“Leaving Cuba is not the same as leaving any other country for the first time,” the journalist points out about the act of crossing national borders, perhaps in a nod to what, almost 80 years earlier, the poet Virgilio Piñera masterfully defined as “the damn circumstance of water everywhere”.

While Jiménez Enoa never ceases to be amazed by the lights he finds in the streets of Barcelona, the bookstores full of titles and the variety of yogurts in the market, thousands of kilometers away, Rafael, a reporter who writes under a pseudonym for an independent media who tries to make his way through the convulsive legal waters of the Island, prepares his escape.

“Training a reporter is something that takes a long time,” says one of the editors of the project Rafael works on and who prefers to remain anonymous. “You must learn to collect information, manage data, take care of sources and get used to the editorial line of a media outlet. When a journalist leaves, you have to start from the beginning when a new one arrives. That is, if he arrives, because each day people are more afraid.”

After almost a year narrating the streets of Havana, the young man has decided to head for Nicaragua to reach the United States. His previous profession was a cook and a cousin awaits him in Miami who drives a truck for a living. Journalism could be just a brief chapter in his life. For the team that remains, his departure leaves a hole with a difficult solution.

Translated by: Sheilagh Herrera

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Cuban Prosecutor Adds ‘Alleged Previous Crimes’ to Lengthen Prison Sentences

The artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, with a Cuban flag, behind El Funky (left) and Maykel Castillo ’Osorbo’ (right), in a scene from the video clip of ’Patria y Vida’. (Screen capture)

14ymedio, Havana, 8 April 2022 — “This starts now.” With that phrase and a laugh, the rapper Maykel Castillo Osorbo responded when he was informed in prison this Thursday of the prosecutor’s request for ten years in prison that he faces, according to art curator Anamely Ramos speaking this Friday .

Ramos details in a Facebook post all the charges against both Osorbo and the leader of the San Isidro Movement, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, who has a request from the public ministry for seven years in prison. The first is accused of attack, contempt and public disorder; the second, of outrage against national symbols, contempt and public disorder.

Ramos argues that “It is obvious, the search for alleged previous crimes to extend the time they asked for,” noting that the “outrage against national symbols” does not even correspond to April 4, 2021, when according to the legal file there were the events for which they are accused, but rather to two years ago, when Alcántara performed the work Drapeau, with a Cuban flag. continue reading

In addition, she explains that it must be taken into account that the day before the date in question, on April 3, the police beat Osorbo “at the entrance of the Cuba y Chacón station, with several activists who accompanied him to look for Luis Manuel, who are witnesses and who were also beaten.” As a result, the rapper had to go to the polyclinic “when he was released at dawn.”

When they tried to arrest him on April 4 and handcuffed him, continues Ramos, “they didn’t [succeed]* and Maykel began to complain and the discussion began.”

Far from behaving violently, as stated in the prosecutor’s petition, in the video made public on social networks at that time it can be seen that the violence “begins with the policeman grabbing Maykel by the neck while he practically kept his hands up or behind him.”

“What Maykel reacted against that day, what the neighborhood people who defended him reacted against, was against the police violence that is a fact in Cuban streets and that was seen in all its crudeness on July 11,” Ramos asserts. .

The activist also mentions that “when people began to spontaneously gather in San Isidro and sing,” that same April 4, “State Security arrived,” which, Ramos says, “meant that the police would be sanctioned for trying to arbitrarily and violently stop Maykel, the same police officers who are accusing them today.”

Ramos notes that in the year that both activists have now been in prison, “many international organizations, personalities, governments and coalitions have demanded their release… When the court judges and sentences Maykel and Luis, it will not be doing so in the shadows, it will be doing it in front of the world and against the world.”

One of those organizations, Amnesty International (AI), also ruled this Friday on the prosecution requests for Osorbo and Alcántara. Erika Guevara-Rosas, director of AI for the Americas, tweeted that both “conscientious opponents” face these sentences “for protesting, making anti-establishment art, denouncing the repression and authoritarianism of a government that despises its people.”

Guevara-Rosas attached to his message the document with the request of the Cuban Prosecutor’s Office, which among other “crimes,” also speaks of insulting the country’s president, accusing the Government, in a live broadcast, of “the lack of medical resources ” during the pandemic and insulting the Ministry of the Interior and the security forces, among others.

The Ministry considers in the brief that its investigation has concluded and requests the Ordinary Criminal Section of the People’s Municipal Court of Central Havana to open the oral trial against the accused.

*Translator’s note: Maykel was handcuffed on one wrist when the crowd intervened and ‘rescued’ him. The image of him raising a single handcuffed fist has become iconic. The video linked to above, and again here, shows the scene.

____________

Apropos of “Ideological Deviation”

Maykel Castillo ‘Osorbo’ is in prison for singing and being one of the authors of the song ‘Patria y Vida’. (Screen capture)

14ymedio, Alexis Romay, New Jersey, 9 April 2022

I will be brief. These terrifying words began many of the interminable speeches of the Mansplainer-in-Chief who, pistol in hand, took control of Cuba 62,000 millennia ago. With this introduction to my new column in 14ymedio, I propose to do exactly the same. (I’m referring to being brief, not to taking over the Island. I hope the results are not so devastating.)

The column will appear weekly under the banner Ideological Deviation, which in addition to being the title of my book of décimas, is a horrible legal concept with which the government frightened me in my childhood and youth in Havana, and for which any Cuban can still be imprisoned in the land I fled. The décima is a style of Spanish poetry created in the XVI century by Vicente Espinel. The format is 10 lines, eight-syllables each. It rhymes ABBAACCDDC. Jorge Drexler did a beautiful TEDx talk about it.

Does this mean that I am going to write an opinion column exclusively to the rhythm of the décima? Well, yes. The reason is simple: the meter and rhyme —and, hopefully, the content— will render them memorable. This will make it easier for them to be recited in morning assemblies at schools throughout the nation. From preschool to sixth grade! To infinity… and beyond! Pioneers for dropping bars, we will be like Espinel!

My octosyllables will come in a variety of tones and registers —lyrical, nostalgic, satirical, parodic, animal, vegetable, and mineral— which are my ways of thinking and feeling Cuba from a distance. Thinking and feeling are crimes in totalitarianism, and the Cuba that the Castros took for themselves is no exception. (Ah… and I aspired to write a presentation without mentioning that last name that produces gagging, nausea, hives).

I escaped in order to be, an action that in Spanish is split into two verbs: ser and estar. I fled in order to think and to feel. Beyond the seas and decades later, I admire those who are, who think, and who feel in Cuba. I could not imagine my life in my land, but I celebrate that there are those who can do it and do it every day, against the winds and the tides of an implacable regime. These verses, and those to come, are for you.

“The People,” “the Cuban Nation”

“The people,” “the Cuban nation”
is not the same as “the State.”
(No need for you to debate.
Go on. Have a revelation.)
The “Revolution,” that station
in Dante’s Hell, is a trap:
the government does kidnap
the Cubans who dare protest;
at Díaz-Canel’s request,
they get erased from the map.

____________

Author’s note: This text is my recreation and condensation, in English, of my décima(s) published this week in the Spanish edition of 14ymedio. Remember: this post is considered a crime by the Cuban government.

____________

More Than Half of the Buses in Havana are Out of Service

The general director of transportation in Havana, Leandro Méndez Peña, admitted that only 45.7% of the buses are available in the capital. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Havana, 8 April 2022 — The Havana authorities have not yet found a solution to the serious mobility problem that afflicts the capital province. This week, the general director of transport, Leandro Méndez Peña, admitted that only 45.7% of the buses are available, which means that there are more out of service than circulating on the streets.

To alleviate the situation, the Government plans to have the agencies with assigned cars contribute* to the transport of passengers, which would increase the available seats by 40,000 every day. However, the measure – which Méndez Peña recognizes as insufficient – does not work due to the refusal of users of state vehicles to comply with this obligation.

The General Directorate of Provincial Transportation of Havana warned that the measures to be taken will be more severe with those who fail to comply with the order. “We are forced to increase the demand on the cars assigned by state entities so that they comply with what is established in these situations and provide service to the stops,” said Mendez Peña.

According to the official, the situation worsened with the fuel deficit of last week, when it was necessary to ration precisely to cover the needs of public transport. The work and school transport companies were affected, when they contribute 255 vehicles to the mobility of the province. continue reading

To ensure that the requirements are met, the authorities have provided for the presence of 290 inspectors and employees of the General Directorate of Transport in the 311 busiest pick-up points.

According to what they said, the Gacelas — shared/routed minivans — and private boteros [literally ’boatmen’ — taxi drivers] are being used to complement mobility, but the official press, present at the event, wanted to know more about the rates. The answer was that new prices are being studied stretch-by-stretch to “compensate private carriers for the expenses,” which will mean an increase in the cost of the journeys. Months ago, when the prices per route came up, the drivers began to use new tricks, such as dividing the routes, so as not to lose money.

The boteros complain that, with the fixed prices, they cannot cover the costs; while citizens complain about how expensive it is to travel and the tricks that drivers do to get more money from them than before.

*Translator’s note: One way this would be done would be through semi-formal ride-sharing/hitchhiking with drivers of government-owned cars obliged to stop and pick up passengers at established stops.

____________

Doctors Leave Cuba and it Affects the Infant Mortality Rate

In 2019, infant mortality in Cuba increased by more than 26% compared to the previous year. (Cubahora)

14ymedio, Madrid, 8 April 2022 — The infant mortality figures in Ciego de Ávila were very bad news last year, when the province closed 2021 with a rate of 13.8 dead babies per thousand births. For the first quarter of 2022 up to March 24, according to the authorities, six newborns died and there were 911 births, a mortality rate of 6.6 per thousand, Invasor reports this Thursday.

The official newspaper, which interviewed the director of Health in Ciego de Ávila, Nilka Pita Alemán, said that the outlook is bleak if one starts from there. “For the start, these numbers are not encouraging either, especially when the country’s purpose is not to exceed, as a rate, four deaths per thousand in 2022,” says the text, which as the only positive data reveals that there has been no maternal death.

The official outlines a problem: the exodus of Cubans leaving the Island is influencing the lack of specialized health professionals in the maternal and child area. Although there are obstetricians, there is a lack of pediatricians and clinicians, whose functions are being covered by general practitioners. “It happens that the very dynamics of the sector implies ups and downs in what we now consider an achievement, whether, for example, due to the exodus or maternity leave,” she explains.

Pita Alemán says that secondary care is the area with the worst situation, since it is impossible to cover the shifts. “Three people are needed to guarantee the third medical criterion and define the conduct. (…) Also, the number of nurses available is few,” she warns. As a consequence, neonatologist nurses and even intensive care nurses have had to change positions. “This year in the plan we request more places for nurses, in the medium-technical modality to guarantee speed in training,” he adds. continue reading

The specialist points out as a worrying cause the data that indicates that the number of babies born with low weight are increasing, although they survive longer than expected with those ranges. As the doctor explains, work has been done to improve the application of the protocols that control those born with low birth weight and the results are relatively positive.

“To date we have regressed in terms of low birth weight, we have 19 more children than in the same stage of the previous year. According to experts, this condition is exponentially proportional to death.

Pita Alemán says that the state authorities traveled to the province at the end of the year to discuss what was failing and, from there, the staff was trained to change some things. One of the factors that has been monitored the most in pregnant women as a result of this is heart disease and anemia, she reveals, since there is high maternal morbidity in women with these pathologies.

The specialist also points out that strategies are reviewed, such as checking whether women need income or material support due to their economic situation, as well as cases of teenage pregnancies. “We know that part of the success lies in increasing control over the processes, the clinics and the maternity homes,” she says.

Pita Alemán reveals that at the end of the year there was an outbreak of sepsis at the Antonio Luaces Iraola Provincial Hospital that led to the death of several children. The poor conditions of hospitals, especially with regard to hygiene, have been pointed out for a long time by the independent press, but the authorities have a hard time accepting that these conditions are the cause of deaths, as in this case

“In the Neonatology room, difficulties related to water, leaks in the delivery rooms and cesarean sections were eliminated,” says the official, who assures that the problems are being solved and there are better conditions, also in terms of sanitary material, but lacking is “the control so that everyone complies with what is established.” As an example, she gives the Morón hospital, where there was also an outbreak of sepsis that was resolved without deaths.

“When a lack of control or administrative negligence has been demonstrated, severe measures have been taken, among them, the removal from their posts of people in charge and specialists,” says the expert.

The interview corroborates what Ernesto René exposed in December in a comment on Invasor. René, a worker in the Pami maternal and child program for 34 years, spoke about the precarious situation of the project, due to disinvestment and lack of professionals “due to policies and decisions of its directors in the province, in a totally mistaken way and lacking in science and experience.”

“Valuable professionals such as obstetricians, pediatricians or clinical nurses, from primary and secondary care, have not been looked after and I believe that the motivations and barriers of the personnel who work in this sensitive area should be reviewed.”

____________

The Mother of All Lines Extends Almost 20 Blocks in Havana

People lined up in the vicinity of the Cuatro Caminos market, Centro Habana, this Thursday. (Facebook/Eraisi León)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 7 April 2022 — Thousands of people formed a line this Thursday near the Cuatro Caminos market in Havana. Neighbors of the place confirmed to this newspaper the unusual line, which can be seen in videos and photos on social networks.

“A thing never seen before: the line began in Matadero, went along Omoa to the corner of Tejas and went down Monte,” a resident of Centro Habana said in surprise. A total of 16 blocks.

All of them waited, in a muffled murmur, to hand over their cards and be put on a list that determines what day they can go shopping within the next two weeks. Outside of the day they get, they can’t shop, and on the day they get lucky, there may not be what they need in the stores.

“The Special Brigade does not enter that mob,” joked a young man who witnessed the crowd. “The Cuatro Camino Revolution is drawing near.”

Another neighbor is not so optimistic: “Can you imagine if the cause of those people, instead of chicken, was democracy? Chicken has won the battle for us.” continue reading

“This line forms every 14 days, but it has been getting longer and longer for some time,” explains another resident of the neighborhood, who says that on March 24, the area was heavily guarded by the security forces.

“The never seen before: the line began in Matadero, went through Omoa to the corner of Tejas and went down Monte.” (14ymedio)

That was the day that the island suffered a general outage of internet service for about an hour, which Etecsa attributed to an “energy failure.” At that time, there were many who, on social networks and in the streets, feared that the reason for the blackout was something else, as happened during the protests on July 11, to prevent information about the demonstrations from continuing to circulate.

In the surroundings of the Plaza de Cuatro Caminos , the connection problems lasted several days, according to several residents.

_____________________________

Cuban Prosecutor’s Office Asks for Seven Years in Prison for Artist Otero Alcantara and Ten for Rapper Osorbo

Artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara (left) with rapper Maykel Castillo ‘Osorbo’ months before his imprisonment. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Havana, 7 April 2022 — The Cuban Prosecutor’s Office has informed, after months of waiting, of the sentence request that they will make to the court that judges Maykel Castillo — the rapper known as ‘Osorbo’ — and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara: ten years for the first and seven for the second.

The information has been released by the rapper’s Facebook account. Imprisoned since May 18, he will offer more details about the crimes charged to both, as well as the other three defendants, present on April 4 when Osorbo was arrested.

“For now it is difficult to even think, but we will do all the analysis and the pertinent calls. We will not abandon you. How miserable that power that stops at nothing! How profoundly miserable the reality of death that they extend to everything they touch !” says the note.

Both artists share the same case file, in which they are accused of aggravated contempt, public disorder and instigation to commit a crime by going out on the street , in front of the headquarters of the San Isidro Movement in Old Havana to sing Patria y Vida along with the neighbors, on 4 April 2021. Alcántara also faces the accusation of outrage against national symbols, charged against him for making the work of art Drapeau. continue reading

However, neither of them was arrested at the time. Osorbo was arrested the following May 18, and was ‘disappeared’ until he was sent, on May 31, to the Kilo Cinco y Medio maximum security prison.

Alcántara, for his part, was arrested on July 11, before being able to join the demonstrations that took place that day in dozens of places throughout the island.

Until now, they have remained in preventive detention, and numerous international organizations, such as the Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America, Freedom House, International PEN or Prisoners Defenders, have demanded from the Cuban government the immediate release of both artists.

____________

Three Cuban Youths are Sentenced to Prison for Conversations Intercepted by State Security G2

Leodán Pérez Colón, 22 years old, was sentenced to five years in jail in Sancti Spíritus for associating to commit a crime and contempt. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Havana, April 4, 2022 — Leodán Pérez Colón, Yoel Castillo Cervantes and Yanderley Quesada Marín, sentenced to several years in jail in Sancti Spíritus for protesting on July 11, did not even set foot on the street that day.

According to the sentencing document, signed on January 18th and accessed by 14ymedio on Monday, it was proven that on that day Pérez Colón, from within his home on July 16th, streamed a video “to his contacts”–not even on social media–in which he referred to leader Miguel Díaz-Canel as a “motherfucker,” “snot-nosed dick,” “son of a bitch,, and “dickhead bastard,” which he, according to the document, “continued for several minutes.”

Along with him were his friends Cristian Enrique García Rodríguez, Ernesto Alexis Rojas Pérez, and José Antonio Rojas Pérez, who were also arrested but not convicted, and who testified against him, as per the judicial document.

That video in particular was used by Cuban national television to smear the protesters. In a post published before the trial of the three detainees, which took place on December 27th, Sancti-Spíritus-based activist Néstor Estévez denounced that the images, as well as the messages used to incriminate the defendants, “came from private audios in a WhatsApp group accessed by G2 after tapping the phones of the group’s members.”

The sentencing document states, in effect, that thanks to “the certifications of the telecommunications company,” Etecsa, “we became aware of the ownership of the telephone lines belonging to the accused, devices which were used by them in the perpetration of these events, and we learned, through the opinions of experts in criminal informatics, of the resources and content published on the internet.” continue reading

As stated in the legal document, 22-year-old Pérez Colón, created a WhatsApp group called “Todos por la libertad” [“Everyone for Freedom”], to which he invited the other two accused, 21-year-old Yoel Castillo and Yoanderley Quesada, 25, who accepted the invitation. In that group, the first convict [Pérez Colón], sent messages “encouraging the use of incendiary bottles named ’molotoff [sic] cocktails’, screws, rocks launched with bows or sharpened forks against members of the Ministry of the Interior and other institutions charged with preserving the social order in the city.”

In this way, the text continues, ” the user named ’Yuma Walter’ to whom he sent a message that said ’I am finding people to form a good team’,” and through Messenger, he wrote to user “Irete Amir Olmo Eleguasito Bernal” telling them ’I am looking for people from Bayamo Kilo 12, this is fire against the PNR, Díaz Canel motherfucker.”

Another group he created on WhatsApp, still according to the sentencing document, is “Todo por la libertad EUA” [“All for Freedom USA”], to which he added “citizens Lisandra Enrique Guerras and Pedro Amir Tanquero Bernal, both of whom live abroad.”

The woman named Lisandra, the sentencing document states, “accessed the group and published several photos in which molotoff [sic] cocktails, screws and bows can be seen and wrote, ’use this, don’t be intimidated, you don’t have weapons, but there are ways, do not allow anyone to be taken, throw arrows at them, stab them with knives, there are more of you than the lot of those police snitches.”

There is no evidence that any of those who were summoned organized any violent acts, except for, as announced in the group, heading “to Villalla’s house, everyone” (as written by Biyaya, the nickname by which Pérez Colón is known). Neither is there any trace of these accusations among those compiled in the list of prisoners maintained by Justicia 11J, according to which Pérez Colón had thrown stones at a nearby MLC (hard currency) store.

Nonetheless, Pérez Colón, who has a history of armed robbery for which he had served several years in jail, was sentenced to a total of five years for associating to commit a crime and contempt, and Quesada Marín and Castillo Cervantes, to two years and one year and ten months, respectively, only for associating to commit a crime (reduced in the cases of Castillo and Pérez for their time served in pre-trial detention.)

In addition, all of their cell phones were confiscated.

In a separate case, 14ymedio also accessed another unpublished sentencing document from Sancti Spíritus, which on October 18th sentenced Luis Mario Niedas Hernández to three years in jail for “contempt of a continuous nature.”

The events described in the document indicate that what he did was to stream three different videos on January 29, July 10 and on the following day, in which he uttered, among other phrases, “that he’d arrest all of them, that the Minister of Culture is shameless, that the State Security agents are State Insecurity and state terrorists,” “that the country’s president is a thief and a demagogue,” or referring to Cuba’s leaders, “that they are freeloaders, shameless, corrupt, they steal all of the country’s resources and deposit them abroad, the sons of bitches that rule this country, who live like capitalists.”

Niedas Hernández, as Sancti-Spíritus-based activist Néstor Estévez explained to this daily, was the only one of the 42 detainees in Sancti Spíritus who truly took to the streets on July 11th.

His sentencing document says that outside his house, he streamed a video where he said, “Díaz-Canel, motherfucker, we want a country, not a farm led by four sons of bitches,” and that, later, “he headed toward nearby buildings located in Olivos I, in the municipality and province of Sancti Spríritus and from there walked toward the multi-family buildings number 2 and 3 located near the Provincial Government offices and began loudly shouting other phrases ’down with Díaz-Canel, Díaz-Canel son of a bitch, I shit on Díaz-Canel, Díaz-Canel motherfucker’.”

In the Nieves-Morejón prison, where he is currently held, Niedas has experienced isolation and mistreatment in punishment cells.

The 31-year-old young man was arrested on July 11th, but he had previously been harassed and pressured for being politically active. He told the story himself in a chronicle published by Yucabyte just days before the protests that Sunday. “My activism, like that of many others, began with the pressures of the regime,” he wrote. “It was enough for me to support the causes defended by Movimiento San Isidro [San Isidro Movement] and 27N (27 November) on social media for all the weight of the arbitrariness of the dictatorship to come down upon me. Because, yes, publishing a simple Facebook post in Cuba that does not have the approval of the government, implies almost the same thing as standing in front of the provincial headquarters of the Communist Party with a sign demanding the president’s resignation. There is no freedom, not even in cyberspace.”

Translated by: Silvia Suárez

____________

Criminal Code Project Will Provide Tools for the Cuban Regime to Legalize Arbitrariness

Cilano highlights that the context for approving the new legislation is clearly marked by the July 11th protests, and its objective is to limit citizen participation. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Madrid, 23 March 2022 — If, as predicted, the draft of Cuba’s new Criminal Code is approved as is, independent activists and journalists will be “extremely exposed” to the arbitrariness of State Security. That point is stressed in a report published by the Observatorio Legislativo de Cuba [Cuba’s Legislative Observatory], an initiative of the Demo Amlat network which analyzes new norms on the Island as a result of the Constitution approved in 2019.

The document, presented on Wednesday at an online event in which specialists Johanna Cilano and Carlos Hernádez participated from Mexico, highlights the tight control and the opacity of the government on the Island with regard to the Criminal Code. This contrasts with the publicity given, from the highest authorities to provincial-level state press, to the Family Code, which has been out for “popular consultation” since February 1st.

Furthermore, the document denounces the new norms which criminalize activities that are legal in any other country such as practicing independent journalism or associating with others to protest or change a law, as well as leading a civil society, which is not permitted by the Cuban State.

For example, the report mentions Article 143 of the draft norm, which establishes penalties of up to ten years in jail for anyone who receives funding “themselves or as representatives of non-governmental organizations, international institutions, associations or from any natural or legal person of the country or of a foreign State” to “defray activities against the State and its consitutional order.” This, said Johanna Cilano during the presentation, includes paying for mobile phone minutes from outside the country. continue reading

Also, denounced DemoAmlat, “it assaults the right to finance organized civil society, as well as the legitimate limitations to freedom of expression according to the American Convention on Human Rights.”

Cilano highlighted that the context to approve the new legislation is marked by the July 11th protests and its objective is to limit citizen participation in public matters.

As stated in the report, the draft “proves to be a product of the moment, offering the regime tools that will allow it to legalize arbitrariness; deepen criminalization of independent media, journalists and human rights activists; inhibit citizen participation in social activism; censor and promote self-censorship of journalists, activists and defenders of human rights.”

Similarly, as Reinaldo Escobar analyzed for this daily, the death penalty will continue to be in effect in the new norm as a “latent threat from the regime against opponents,” according to the DemoAmlat report.

The network concludes, in summary, that the draft Criminal Code, “presumed to be approved in April 2022, without public consulation, represents a danger to the citizenry.”

Translated by: Silvia Suárez

____________

Diaz-Canel Appeals to Fidel Castro to Call for a Dialogue between Cuba and the United States

Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel at the Seventh Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba. (Cubandebate)

14ymedio, Havana, 6 April 2022 — This Tuesday marks 13 years since Fidel Castro wrote – from the forced retirement of his illness – one of his famous “Reflections” in which he called for dialogue with the United States. Miguel Díaz-Canel recovered, for the anniversary, a phrase from that text that has been interpreted as a call for dialogue with Washington.

“It is not necessary to emphasize what Cuba has always said: we are not afraid of dialoguing with the United States. We do not need confrontation to exist either, as some fools think; we exist… because we believe in our ideas and we have never been afraid of dialoguing with the adversary.” The president wrote on his Twitter account.

Castro was responding at that time to a proposal from then-Senator Richard G. Lugar who urged Barack Obama, then US president, to begin negotiations that would bring about a thaw in relations between the two countries.

The leader of the Revolution pointed out: “The senator from Indiana walks with his feet on the ground. He does not start from philanthropic positions. He works (…) with the United States Chamber of Commerce and other business groups, other state governments and human rights groups,“ he said, in line with an article by Lugar in The Washington Post asking for an understanding between both nations. continue reading

Castro added: “I am sure that Richard G. Lugar does not fear the nonsense of being described as soft or pro-socialist.” Finally, the announcement of a certain recovery in relations finally took place in 2014, although it began to take shape some time ago.

Díaz-Canel’s intention to be open to dialogue in this case is more like crying out in the desert. Although the Cuban regime had hoped that a Democratic administration in the US would be more favorable than the Republican one of Donald Trump, who reversed some thaw agreements and imposed new sanctions, the illusion is fading like a sugar cube.

Both Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris, promised during the campaign to review some of the policies applied by their predecessor in office, such as the recovery of functions of the embassy in Havana and regarding the sending of remittances and travel.

However, once installed in the White House, the messages were directed more towards delaying that review. There was no rush in Washington when other, less controversial issues seemed more urgent to many potential voters in Florida.

Faced with the attitude of the Cuban regime after the anti-government protests of July 11, from which it imprisoned more than a thousand people and has sentenced them to prison terms of up to 30 years in some cases, the Biden Administration began to back down, stating that “circumstances changed.”

According to the Cuban Attorney General’s Office, 790 people have been prosecuted in the country for the July 11 protests, of which 55 are between 16 and 17 years old.

In the midst of a world storm that moves between the war in Ukraine and the economic problems that it will entail, with runaway inflation and lack of energy and food, Cuba may be the least of Joe Biden’s worries.

____________

More Than 46,000 Cubans Have Arrived in the US by Land in Five Months, More Than in the 1994 Rafter Crisis

The Coast Guard intercepted 1,067 Cubans in the first five months of fiscal year 2022, while in the same period of the previous fiscal year there were 838. (EFE)

EFE (via 14ymedio), Miami, 6 April 2022 — More than 46,000 Cubans arrived by land in the US in the five months from October 2021 to the end of February 2022, a figure higher than the 35,000 of the 1994 Rafters Crisis — which lasted five months — according to a report published this Tuesday by the newspaper Miami Herald.

The five-month figure exceeds that of the 12 months of 2021, which had already been a record (39,303), according to data from the Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP).

The newspaper, which links the increase in the migratory flow of Cubans to the hardening of economic and social conditions in Cuba and the repression unleashed after the 2021 anti-government protests, indicated that arrivals by sea are also at record levels. continue reading

The Coast Guard intercepted 1,067 Cubans in the first five months of fiscal year 2022, while in the same period of the previous fiscal year there were 838.

Most of the Cubans who arrived across the border with Mexico have been admitted to the US, unlike those who arrived by sea, who are mostly deported, says the newspaper.

The Miami Herald mentions that Cuba is in first place in the Misery Index compiled annually by Johns Hopkins University, due to rising inflation, widespread shortages of basic goods and little prospect of recovering from the economic impact of the covid-19 pandemic.

Added to all this is the “general assault on civil liberties” that the Government launched after the protests of July 11, 2021, which led to the arrest of more than 1,400 people, including minors, adds the information.

____________

Iclep Director Accuses Cuban State Security of Aggression

Images released by Alberto Corzo of his state after the attack on Friday. (Iclep)

14ymedio, Havana, 4 April 2022 — Alberto Corzo, executive director of the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Press (Iclep), was attacked this Friday in Colón, Matanzas, by two individuals who, according to complaints, had training in martial arts. The activist links the attack with State Security, since he was leaving an interrogation when he was beaten.

According to his wife, Martha Liset Sánchez, Corzo was treated at the Mario Muñoz Monroy hospital, where he was taken by a coach driver who found him on the road, with his left arm immobilized due to a possible injury to his collarbone and elbow, in addition to prescribed painkillers.

The statement, written by Sánchez, indicates that the medical center did not have X-ray capabilities and could not diagnose properly, so no injury certificate was issued. This Sunday, the activist was at the Faustino Pérez Surgical Clinic university hospital in Matanzas, where it was certified that he had a clavicular dislocation and he was hospitalized.

“He is in a daze, he can barely speak and can’t be understood. They have an intravenous drip and compresses on one eye and a bandaged shoulder. Last night his blood pressure rose a lot,” said Sánchez, who expressed her doubts this time due to hospitalization. continue reading

“Why do they have an IV on him? What medications are they giving him? Why is my husband barely able to speak? Why isn’t there a doctor to answer all the questions we want to ask and only a nurse who gives us very little information. Why is the person hospitalized next to my husband supposedly being investigated by the police, which means that where they have him it seems that he is imprisoned by the police presence 24 hours a day?” asks his wife.

The note published by Iclep affirms that Corzo wanted to file a complaint on Saturday, but he was not allowed to and says that both he and his wife have suffered “systematically, different types of aggression by the Cuban regime.”

In 2021, Corzo was attacked 33 times and Sánchez suffered “the repression and harassment of the dictatorship” on 25 occasions, including arbitrary arrests. According to the same note, the children of the marriage also suffer the consequences of their parents being independent journalists.

The members of Iclep have denounced the State’s actions against them on numerous occasions. In 2017, several of them experienced episodes of this type, such as the arrests of Raúl Velázquez, then its executive director, and María Mercedez Benítez, one of its activists. Also then, Corzo was threatened with being taken to prison for his reporting work and was reminded that he was accused of the alleged crime of contempt against a police collaborator.

____________

Cuba: “They Have Declared Me An ‘Enemy’ But I Am Not Going to Abandon the Cause”

Alexander Fábregas with his mother Luisa María Milanés. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 6 April 2022 — For Alexander Fábregas, 32, everything is a surprise this Wednesday. He has been on the street for a few hours since being released after serving nine months in prison for calling a protest on July 11 through social networks. From his home in Sancti Spíritus, he talks to 14ymedio on the phone about his time in jail and future plans.

“It is very frustrating to go to a prison to serve a sanction imposed without deserving it, for something that is not a crime anywhere in the world,” he explains to this newspaper. “I didn’t do anything to have that punishment. Until today I was in a place where I only saw walls and bars and now everything seems strange to me: the colors, the sounds, the voice of the people.”

Fabregas received no penal ‘mitigation’. “The authorities say that there are no political prisoners in Cuba, but if I had really been a common prisoner, I would have received parole in the middle of my sentence, but they did not give it to me. Only once did they allow me to go home for three days.”

“Several times the State Security officials came to visit me in prison to threaten me, but I have nothing to talk to them about. They have declared me an enemy of the supposed Revolution,” he says. “Now I am going through a difficult situation because I have a lot of stress because of the lockdown.”

“I am very worried about Luis Mario Niedas Hernández, who is like my brother, and who was denied the right to be transferred from prison to a work farm,” says Fábregas. Niedas was sentenced to three years in prison for “continued contempt of character” due to his criticism of him through Facebook against several high-ranking officials, including Miguel Díaz-Canel. continue reading

Now, Fábregas insists on the importance of the solidarity that both he and Niedas have received since the first day of their arrest: “Thank you to everyone who has contributed and I feel very honored to have been part of July 11… Patria y vida [Homeland and Life].

“I’m not going to abandon the cause, I’m not going to give up, but I have to be careful because I already have a criminal record and they will surely want to continue citing me and harassing me. But I will continue to be a defender of human rights in Cuba and, especially here in Sancti Spiritus.”

Fábregas’s mother, Luisa María Milanés Valdés, 58, also experienced this time as an ordeal. “These have been the most terrible nine months of my life,” says the woman who has maintained the complaint about the case of her son. “We have been through very difficult times and sometimes I thought they were not going to release him on the date that was planned.”

“He’s a little depressed because everything he’s had to live through has affected him psychologically, but at least he’s here, with us,” says Milanés.

Fábregas was arrested on the night of July 11 at his home, for transmitting on his social networks his call to take to the streets of Sancti Spíritus to accompany the protests that took place that day in other provinces of the Island.

Nine days after his arrest and in a summary trial, Fábregas was sentenced to nine months in prison for the crime of “incitement to commit a crime,” although he did not set foot on the street that July 11. He only managed to have a defense attorney one day before the trial, his family denounced at the time.

Although the young man belonged to the United Anti-Totalitarian Forum (Fantu), at the time of his call to take to the streets he was “an opponent on his own account,” according to his mother. In December 2020, he had already spent three days in detention, after he published a photo on social networks where he appeared with a sign that said: “No More Misery.”

Luisa María Milanés Valdés also suffered pressure from State Security and after her son’s conviction she was forced to leave the house she rented in Sancti Spíritus. The threats even made her fear that she was going to lose her job at a hospital for mentally handicapped children.

This Wednesday, the mother does not take her eyes off Fabregas, fearing that the police will knock on the door again and take him away.

____________

Cuban Artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara Suffers Eye Damage Since His Last Hunger Strike

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara during a forced stay at a hospital to which he was subjected by the Government and in images released by officialdom.

14ymedio, Havana, 5 April 2022 — After several hunger strikes, the last one between January and February of this year, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara “is trying to recover his physical constitution by putting his best effort into exercising and trying, as far as possible, to eat,” according to art curator Claudia Genlui speaking on Monday.

The curator posted a new update on the status of the artist, imprisoned for more than eight months in the maximum security prison of Guanajay, who was able to see his family last Friday after two months without having physical contact with her.

“Luis told his family that during the time he was on strike he was paralyzed and had to be urgently transferred to a hospital,” the activist wrote on her Facebook account. As a result of this latest hunger strike, the leader of the San Isidro Movement has sequelae in his sight, with the constant presence of a black spot that his loved ones are worried about.

Although Otero Alcántara has allegedly requested medical assistance that has been denied, Genlui says that he has low hemoglobin and dermatitis. “They don’t allow him to go out in the sun or have hardly any contact with other prisoners,” Genlui denounces.

The artist, however, seems to have recovered the right to phone calls and communicates twice a week. “From there he tries to transmit strength to us,” says Genlui, who is alarmed by the terrible circumstances in which Otero Alcántara finds himself, whose health is at “constant risk.” continue reading

The leader of the San Isidro Movement has been in prison since July 11, when he was arrested before he managed to join the anti-government protests, and is accused of public disorder, incitement to commit a crime, and contempt.

These crimes were charged to him for events in April 2021, when he attended a birthday party in which the residents of the neighborhood where he resides ended up singing Patria y Vida. Although he was released pending trial, he was arrested and imprisoned on the day of the protests throughout the country and, according to his lawyer, his case is still plagued by irregularities, including lack of access to documentation or the prosecutor’s request.

“Let’s remember that Luis Manuel is an artist whom the Cuban government tries to discredit and whom it keeps in prison for charges that have been built from ignorance and censorship of art. Luis is innocent and will not rest until he is released, taken to his home, accompanied by his family, which is where he should be,” says Genlui.

Otero Alcántara is considered a prisoner of conscience by international organizations and the US government. In recent years he has become one of the most relevant voices of Cuban activism, art and opposition. Time magazine included him in its list of most influential people of 2021.

“Despite the circumstances, Luis Manuel continues to create. His ability to cling to art as a way of surviving and resisting is admirable. Luis is not alone. He knows it and is willing to continue the fight for Cuba’s freedom from all scenarios,” Claudia Genlui concludes.

____________

‘The Body Never Forgets’, an Essay on the Concentration Camps in Cuba

The official Cuban press extolling the work of the UMAP camps in the 1960s. Headline: Where work makes the man.

EFE (via 14ymedio), Jorge I. Pérez, Miami, 5 April 2022 — The forced labor camps in which, as in the Soviet gulag, dissidents, religious, homosexuals and artists were confined in the Cuba of the 1960s, left “a lot of pain and trauma” not yet healed, affirms the Cuban historian Abel Sierra Madero, who has just published an essay on this subject with the title El cuerpo nunca olvida [The body never forgets].

Subtitled Trabajo forzado, hombre nuevo y memoria en Cuba (1959-1980) [Forced work, new man and memory in Cuba (1959-1980)], the book brings together, for the first time, memorabilia, personal photos, testimonial sources and fictional literature on what was officially called Military Production Assistance Units (UMAP), “Because it must be said that I handle fiction as truth,” Sierra told Efe in an interview.

A specialist in studies of sexuality, concentration camps, the Cold War, memory and trauma, Sierra, who has lived in the US for years, interviewed more than 30 people or relatives of people who between 1965 and 1968 were in the UMAP. The interviews were conducted between Cuba, Miami, New Jersey and New York.

According to Sierra (1976) in the book’s introduction, “the UMAPs formed part of a more complex economic system within a broad project of social engineering.”

For this purpose, dozens of forced labor camps were created in the Camagüey plain, the Cuban province where sugar cane was best grown, and some 30,000 people passed through them between 1965 and 1968, according to data from the author. continue reading

“The UMAPs had a double meaning: re-educational, political and ideological, and also an economic one,” he comments.

“They were plantation enclaves. In the book I call it ’the development of the socialist plantation’, based on a colonial market which was that of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” he says.

“The implementation of these camps allowed the State to appropriate a large part of the workforce without having to compensate them financially,” he says.

“There is still a lot of pain and trauma. An interesting part in this book is the theme of silence; you can see how silences speak. I was interested in taking the witness to that place of remembrance and denunciation,” Sierra details.

The volume shows “how the notion of the ’New Man’, which was the fundamental term to establish the revolutionary ideological structure and architecture, also served to implement forced labor camps, to manage power and create control mechanisms.”

Retrieving “los escombros,” something he prefers to call, in English, “the debris,” processing the information and writing a 528-page essay took him about a decade, he confessed shortly before presenting his book this Saturday at the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, in Miami.

The cover is an image by Canadian photojournalist Paul Kidd taken at the entrance to one of the camps in 1966. It shows an armed soldier next to a fence of 21 strands of barbed wire.

Sierra comments that the photo is the product of Kidd’s audacity, who appeared there alone and without warning.

Hundreds of homosexuals were taken to these gulags to be “cured” according to the concept of the Cuban revolution that saw the nation as a sick body and the State as a medical benefactor, the book’s publisher, Rialta, said in a presentation on Facebook.

Benjamín de la Torre, “a boy who moved in art circles, committed suicide after that experience,” Sierra points out.

Singer-songwriter Pablo Milanés entered the UMAP at the age of 23, but according to Sierra his stay there “was an open secret until he considered it important for his career to unfreeze this issue.”

About the experience, Milanés wrote the song 14 pelos y un día, in which he invokes the wire fences, which were reduced from 21 strands to 14 when international criticism began to surface, according to 14ymedio.

Sierra was unable to interview Milanés after two attempts. “He was so traumatized that when everything was ready for the interview he canceled at the last minute,” he says.

The few available sources, beyond the official newspaper archives that “tell a different story from the UMAP,” were texts written by religious inmates of the camps “from a narrative of forgiveness.”

“Then I realized that I had to carry out a deep investigation that collected the before and after of the camps, the inside and the outside,” explains the author, who included a bonus track touching on the Mariel exodus in his essay (1980).

“An archive is created to be able to be destroyed, and that is the logic in which the Cuban regime has operated: Create a mystique around the archive, create a morbidity about its existence or disappearance to make believe reconstruction is an impossibility.”

“It has been shown how a history without an archive can be reconstructed, and that is what I have done, a history of the UMAP without an official archive. I have created my own,” says this professor at Florida International University (FIU).

____________

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: