14ymedio – Page 563 – Translating Cuba

We Don’t Buy Anything Here / 14ymedio, Zunilda Mata

”Stop. In this building we buy and sell nothing”: The warning fails to stop the sellers who knock on the door of families offering everything from eggs to appliances. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Zunilda Mata, Havana, 2 November 2016 — In a speech in front of foreign businessmen at the International Fair of Havana (FIHAV), the Foreign Trade Minister Rodrigo Malmierca, emphasized the country’s urgency to receive “high rates of investment.” However, outside the Expocuba fairgrounds, the speech’s echoes are barely heard and the informal market continues to set the pace of life.

While the national press talks about a portfolio of opportunities, the Cuban people immerse themselves in illegality to survive.

“In this building we buy and sell nothing,” reads a sign at the entrance to a concrete block with more than 100 apartments located in Havana’s Plaza district. The warning, placed by the neighbor’s council in collaboration with the Communist Party militants, fails to stop the sellers who knock on families’ doors offering everything from eggs to small appliances. Now, they just have to do it with more discretion.

The official rhetoric is having a love affair with foreign investors, whom it wants to convince that the island is a good place to build an industry, run a hotel or produce cigarettes, but within the country, the local entrepreneur is viewed with suspicion by the authorities. With the outlawing of selling imported clothing and footwear, the capping of prices in agricultural markets or the recent end to the issuance of licenses for private restaurants, many small businesses have turned to the illegal networks to offer their products. All that’s left for them is to go door to door, knock quietly and offer their merchandise.

Marx, Human Rights And Freedom / 14ymedio, Mauricio Rojas

The issue of human rights is comprehensive and explicitly developed by Marx in his essay 'On the Jewish Question'. (CC) — The issue of human rights is comprehensive and explicitly developed by Marx in his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’. (CC)

14ymedio, Mauricio Rojas, Santiago de Chile, 2 November 2016 — Recently I sent a tweet that surprised some people. In it I said: “G[uillermo] Teillier, president of the PC [Communist Party], criticizes defense of human rights in Venezuela. Nothing unusual. Marx wanted to abolish them for their selfishness and opposition to the collective.” The surprising thing was not, by the way, the part about Guillermo Teillier, acknowledged admirer of dictatorships such as North Korea and Cuba, but about Marx. Thus, I would like to expand on this issue, a key to understanding Marxism, in a way that the brevity of Twitter did not allow me to do.

The issue of human rights is broadly and explicitly developed by Marx in his essay On the Jewish Question (Zur Judenfrage), published in early 1844 in the Franco-German Annals. In this text, Marx directed harsh criticism at the beginning of the significance of human rights such as those embodied in the celebrated American and French declarations of the same. These rights are criticized for being, in his judgment, the expression of man as a selfish being, the quintessential superior right of the individual versus the collective or society. continue reading

Marx’s words, in this regard, deserve to be quoted at some length because we are in the presence, here, of the anti-liberal essence of the paradigm that will form the nucleus itself of the future Marxist ideology:

“Above all, we note the fact that the so-called rights of man, the droits de l’homme as distinct from the droits du citoyen, are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society – i.e., the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community. […]None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence.”

For Marx the only important rights are political rights, that is, those of the citizens in their capacity as such. In this way, and like Hegel, man ceases to exist in himself, to be reduced to a member of the State (or the politically organized community) and the rights that are recognized are as a citizen. That is why Marx can not understand how the French could create a kind of rights that are only obstacles to collective political will, rights that create a sphere that is beyond politics or the collective:

“It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections, and to establish a political community, that such a people solemnly proclaims (Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the community.”

What Marx wants is the total society, encompassing everything without barriers – that is without individual rights that impose limits – between man and the social collective represented by the state. That is, exactly, the essence of the original definition of the concepts of the totalitarian state and totalitarianism, as Mussolini had already used it in the 1920s: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

It is precisely this totalitarian way of seeing things that makes Marx manifest a particular distaste for the idea of freedom, as individual freedom, as expressed in the French Constitution of 1793 where it says (Article 6, which is just a repetition of the famous declaration of 1791, that “freedom is the power of man to do anything that does not prejudice the rights of another.” In the face of this, Marx says:

” Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no one else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.”

For this very classic freedom, which is the essence of liberalism, neither Marx nor the Marxists have the slightest sympathy. Nor will other totalitarians such as the Italian fascists, the German Nazis or the Islamic fundamentalists.

The obvious continuity between Hegel and Marx in this area should not, however, hide the important difference between the conservative realism of totalitarian thinking of Hegel and revolutionary utopian totalitarianism of Marx.

The totality of Hegel is a heterogeneous, differentiated and hierarchically organized society, i.e. social diversity organized as an organic whole within the “rational State.” Individuals continue to be different and therefore unequal, according to the social role and their place in this totality.

Marx cannot accept this solution, which for him does nothing but keep the divisions of the past. His totalitarianism is radically leveling and is expressed by him and the idea of a future society in which the abolition of all difference and heterogeneity is achieved. It is about, in other words, the dream of a “homogenous society,” to use the expression that the Italian philosopher Lucio Colletti used to describe Marx’s Utopia, that is a society without classes, hierarchies or interest groups, in which State and civil society are reunified like the collective and individuals. This totalitarian and egalitarian Utopia is, apparently, the framework of the communist dream of Marx and his followers.

Marx, however, goes beyond the pure idea of the emergence of a homogeneous mass society. He also raises the idea of renewal of the human being and the birth of a new man, to use the expression popularized Che Guevara. In a manner reminiscent of medieval messianic mysticism he raises the emergence of what we might call the “man-kind”, that is, a man amalgamated with the human species, with the collective of men. This is the radical disappearance of the individual as a unique and irreducible reality. Thus, disappearing the individual will disappear individualism and with it, all social division. His words deserve, for all they say about the mystical-religious essence of Marxism, to be carefully meditated on:

“Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.”

To achieve the goal of definitively emancipating man from all alienation and creating this new man who is the “man-species” for Marx there is not other option but to eliminate the true essence of modern society that is none other than private interest and profit motive, and its base is the power of private property and money. This is what Marx at this point in his evolution designated with the expression Judenthum (Judaism), since according to him the very essence of Judaism is none other than this capitalist attitude taken to its extreme. His words, which seem straight out of a Nazi anti-Semitic pamphlet, are strong (the emphases are Marx):

“Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”

That is why, in his view, the suppression of all this will involve the final elimination of Judaism:

” Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible.”

With this, according to Marx, the Jewish religion itself would end with this change as “[The Jew’s] religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society.”

In the final paragraphs of On the Jewish Question all the ends are tied up. The idea of the end of the Jew as such merges with the idea of the end of the individual in what would be the grand finale of the divided and troubled life of the human species and the emergence of the man-species (emphasis Marx):

“Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism – huckstering and its preconditions – the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man’s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished.”

These are the ideas that will be reflected in the proposal communist of Marx and his followers, and this is why they despise democracy. In his view, this political system, with its diversity of parties and its competitive elections, is nothing but an expression of “bourgeois society” in which individualist selfishness reigns and opposes various classes and interests. They speak, therefore, disparagingly of “bourgeois democracy” and confronting it will rise the Utopia of the society-community, society of comradeship, altruism, the new man and the only party, as in Cuba or North Korea.

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Editor ‘s note: this analysis has previously been published in the online journal El Líbero. It is reproduced with the permission of the author. Mauricio Rojas is director of the Adam Smith Chair of the University of Development (Chile).

Translator’s note: Translations of Marx are taken from this site.

A Lot of Noise and Few Investments / 14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar

Entrance to the International Fair of Havana (FIHAV 2016). (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, 3 November 2016 — Oggún is one of the orisha warriors of the Yoruba pantheon, but a tractor that bears his name is losing the battle for the Cuban market. The Cleber firm has failed to establish itself in Cuba, although a year ago it was heralded as the vanguard of US investments in the island.

The tractors designed by Saul Berenthal and Horace Clemmons jumped to the front pages of the newspapers as a symbol of the economic rapprochement between Cuba and the United States. However, at the International Fair of Havana (FIHAV) it has been announced that the project was terminated for not having met “the requirements of technological innovation” required for the Mariel Special Development Zone (ZEDM). continue reading

In the halls of the fair contrasts abound. Officials dressed in impeccable guayaberas smile and encourage the exhibitors to showcase their products. The number of delegations has grown this year and Japan has come with its sophisticated equipment from Panasonic. But one also gets the feeling that the trade event is a useless showcase without concrete results.

What happened with the Oggún tractors recalls other cases in which expectations of doing business on the island have remained intentions or headlines. A situation that contradicts the economic emergency in the country, where the economic growth forecast for this year has fallen below 1% and there is a need to attract foreign capital at a rate of two billion dollars a year.

The process of investment is marked by slowness and timidity. So far, the ZEDM has only laid the first stone of the joint venture to produce Brascuba cigarettes, formed by Brazil’s Souza Cruz company and Cuba’s Tabacuba. If they meet their objectives, it will be the end of 2018 before the industry produces 15 billion cigarettes a year.

Among business groups, frustration and impatience is growing. “They don’t know how to do business, everything goes very slowly and many have become tired of waiting,” a businessman of Cuban origin based in the United States commented outside the ExpoCuba fairgrounds, on one of his occasional visit to Cuba. “I’m about to throw in the towel,” he added.

“They promise a lot, but little has materialized after two years,” he explained, under conditions of anonymity. He notes that he came looking for “something more than words.” After several months of exploring the opportunity to position his firm in the domestic market, the entrepreneur believes that “it is still cheaper and faster to install a factory in Mexico or in Jamaica. What would be the advantage of doing it here?”

In his speech to present the new version of the Business Portfolio, Foreign Trade Minister Rodrigo Malmierca Diaz, was forced to chase away the fears: “Foreign investment is not a necessary evil, we want it for the country’s development. It is a sovereign decision of Cuba that no one is imposing on us, we are doing it because we are committed.”

However, the ideological discourse of recent weeks has risen in tone and become more belligerent against the US administration. Television alternates reports in which there is talk about investment, businesses and joint ventures, with other material in which capitalism is demonized and the neighbor to the north is accused of “overthrowing” the Cuban system.

“Companies complain, with reason, that the negotiations need to be sped up,” Malmierca admitted to the investors. However, the slowness is also established in Guideline 64 approved by the 8^th Communist Party Congress, where it establishes that “who decides is not negotiable” in international economic relations.

The Cuban officials attending FIHAV can appear to be in the best mood, with the widest smiles and business cards filled with responsibilities, but the foreign entrepreneurs know they are powerless intermediaries without the ability to make any decisions. Their task is simply to explore the proposals and generate illusions among the people they speak with.

It is not only bureaucratic sluggishness that makes investors lose momentum. “The dual currency system and the state monopoly over payrolls* are discouraging many people,” a Guatemalan businessman attending FIHAV explained to 14ymedio. “We are not used to not being able to contract directly* with our own personnel,” added the visitor.

The restoration of relations between Cuba and the United States has been one of the main causes of the flood of entrepreneurs who have visited the island in the last two years, but that undeniable push does not constitute a source of permanent energy. Every day that the Cuban government fails to take advantage of the momentum from the rapprochement between the two neighbors, it drags the country towards economic inertia and sinks it in failure.

*Translator’s note: The Cuban government acts as the employer in this situation, hiring the workforce, assigning individuals to jobs, and collecting the wages for their work. In exchange for this ‘service’ the government retains a large share of the wage income, passing on only relatively small portion to the workers. International firms are not accustomed to working in an environment where they have no ability to choose their own workers or to motivate them through the incentive of salaries.

Repatriating, Yes. Settling In Is Another Thing / 14ymedio, Luz Escobar

Iliana Hernandez says she feels no regret for having returned to Cuba. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Luz Escobar, Havana, 2 November 2016 — “I swore I would never set foot in this country,” recalls Lazaro, age 48 and from Camaguey, who emigrated in the late nineties to Miami. However, a few months ago he changed his mind and began the legal process to return to Cuba. “The land pulls me,” he says with a smile while showing off his brand new identity card.

At the end of 2012, the average number of emigrants who chose repatriation that year barely reached 1,000. However, after the immigration and travel reforms put in place by Raul Castro’s government in January of 2013 – including the elimination of the often-denied permit needed to travel outside the country –the number has skyrocketed. continue reading

During a radio interview, the Cuban ambassador in Washington, Jose Ramon Cabañas, said that as of the beginning of 2015 until today, some 13,000 Cubans resident in the United States have returned to the island. This phenomenon is repeated among émigrés in Europe and Latin America.

The reasons for return range from buying a home, to coming and spending one’s old age with one’s family. Returnees also recover their right to an allocation of goods on the rationed market, and the right to vote, which Cubans living abroad cannot do.

The common denominator among the returnees is that most opt for repatriation only after acquiring a foreign nationality. “It’s not the same to return as a sato Cuban,” a phrase that roughly translates as a ‘garden variety’ Cuban, “as to return with a yuma passport,” i.e. a foreign one, “in your pocket,” explains Lazaro, who has had US citizenship for a decade.

Although Cuban authorities do not recognize dual nationality, having a foreign passport streamlines paperwork, facilitates traveling from the island, and can open many doors in the convoluted management of daily life.

In the case of Lazarus, the motivation to return goes beyond nostalgia. “I want to buy an apartment and if I’m not a resident of Cuba I can’t do that,” he says. The law governing the sale of property only recognizes this right for citizens who are permanent residents of the country.

Since getting his identity documents, Lazaro has spent a few weeks in his native land. “Right now I don’t want to live in Cuba,” he explains, and adds, “What I’m doing is an investment for the future, for when ‘the thing’ changes and it really makes sense to return.

“I have a retired friend who has done all the paperwork to repatriate because he has a pension that is very low for Miami, but here he can live like a king,” he adds. Among the reasons that motivated the pensioner, says Lazaro, is to find “a younger woman, because he feels very lonely over there.”

The ability to inherit property, open a private business or to get free medical care are also among the incentives for return.

Returnees also enjoy the prerogative of one-time opportunity to import a large volume of belongings. For the General Customs of the Republic, Yipsi Hernandez says, moving a “household has no weight limit” and is “tax-free.” The official confirms that you can import “two of every kind” of appliance.

Iliana Hernandez just repatriated from Spain. Her process lasted five months and to start it was only necessary to go to a notary with the person she planned to live with, her mother, who took responsibility for her return to the country.

“With this letter from the notary and a stamp costing 100 convertible pesos you have to go immigration,” she explains. “After filling out some forms, the authorities send you a notice to collect your ID card, which takes an average of six months.”

The reason for Hernandez’s return focuses more on social activism. “I want to fight to bring a quality of life here that is the same as abroad,” she says. Recently, the athlete, who left Cuba legally after a failed attempt to swim to the US military base at Guantanamo, has created Lente Cubano, an audiovisual project that brings together news and views on various topics.

She says she does not feel regret for having returned. “Sometimes when I am riding on a bus, I miss my little car. It is hard here,” she says, because “your quality of life is completely lost.”

Cuban Human Rights Group Denounces “Unstoppable Deterioration Of Civil And Political Rights” / 14ymedio

From today your life will be "very difficult", Dagoberto Valdes was warned by Cuban State Security (@mariojose_cuba) — From today your life will be “very difficult”, Dagoberto Valdes was warned by Cuban State Security (@mariojose_cuba)

14ymedio, Havana, 2 November 2016 — The arbitrary arrests of peaceful dissidents in Cuba marked the highest figure in the last three months in October, with 620 cases, according to the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation’s (CCDHRN) monthly report, released Wednesday. The report also cites 17 physical assaults, 39 acts of police harassment and three instances of “repudiation” by the secret political police and vigilante groups.

“The repressive actions in recent months are indicative of a visible and unstoppable deterioration of the situation of civil and political rights and other fundamental rights in Cuba, despite the countless gestures of goodwill towards the regime that has ruled the island for nearly 60 years,” laments the document. “Meanwhile, the vast majority of the Cuban people continue to survive amid a lack of freedom, poverty and despair,” it.

In the first 10 months of 2016, 9,125 arrests were registered, a figure that exceeds the totals for each of the last six years. The CCDHRN is led by Elizardo Sanchez, who predicts that this year’s final count of arbitrary arrests will exceed 10,000 cases.

The CCDHRN mentioned the secret political police raid of October 21 on the hom e and office of a legal aid center in Pinar del Rio, also the site of the newsletter Panorama Pinareño, sponsored by the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Press (ICLEP).

The report also addresses the threats against the Catholic layman Dagoberto Valdes, director of the Center for Coexistence Studies (CEC) of Pinar del Rio, which publishes a magazine with the same name.

A Cuban Doctor Fights To Stay In Brazil Free Of Cuban Government Contract / 14ymedio

Dr. Karem Guadalupe Saboit Valdes is fighting to stay in Brazil beyond the three years allowed on her contract with the Cuban government. (Courtesy)

14ymedio, Miami, 31 October 2016 – She worked for three years at health centers in Dourados, a region of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, as part of the government program Mais Medicos (More Doctors). Karem Guadalupe Saboit Valdes is fighting to stay beyond the three years allowed under the contract between the Cuban government and the Pan American Health Organization PAHO), according to reports in the Brazilian newspaper O Progresso.

Saboit Valdes was the first doctor to reach the city, but her contract expires on November 9 and she must return to Cuba. The doctor, in love with the local people, is looking for ways to stay in Brazil without the mediation of the Cuban government. continue reading

The Mais Medicos program was announced three years ago as a “bonus mission” for Cuban doctors. Many were sent to third world countries where they completed their service to fill the quotas offered by Dilma Rousseff’s government to Havana.

A week has passed since a court in Brasilia, in Saboit Valdes’ case, made the unprecedented decision that the Ministry of Health could renew a contract directly with a Cuban doctor, without the mediation of PAHO or the Cuban government. This decision means that, from now on, the doctor will receive the total value of the agreement that the Ministry of Health offers to foreign doctors who work in remote areas of Brazil, some 11,500 reales (3,587 dollars). Until now, their salary has been 2,976 reales (928 dollars), with the difference pocketed by the Cuban government.

In Dourados, the decision was seen as a victory for the doctors against the authorities of the Cuban Medical Mission. Saboit Valdes, one of the 12 Cuban doctors serving in the city, believes that ruling will become a source of inspiration for other doctors who want to stay in Brazil.

According to figures obtained by 14ymedio, so far this year 1,439 health professionals have escaped from Brazil to the United States through the Cuban Medical Professional Parole program, established by the US specifically for Cuban doctors. Others have chosen to stay in Brazil and revalidate their credentials. During the first ten months of this year more than 1,600 Cuban doctors took the Brazilian medical licensing exams.

According to the Saboit Valdes, a native of Camagüey, the Cuban professionals who establish families in Brazil should have the option of staying in the country. “I’m married to a Brazilian and I have strong emotional ties here. I am in love with this country. Despite not having anything against Cuba, I would like to stay in Brazil. It is a matter of choice,” she says.

But marriages with foreigners are a taboo subject for the Cuban government. The disciplinary regulations that all Cuban civilian workers abroad must accept state that “if there is any loving relationship with natives, [the Cuban government] must be informed immediately and it must be in accord with the revolutionary thought of our stay and no action can be excessive” (sic).

Saboit Valdes told the Brazilian newspaper that adapting herself to the Brazilian reality is very easy, because there are few differences between Cuba and the South American country. She has overcome the language barrier and her intention is to continue growing professionally.

“There is a completely free and very organized structure, both in health and education,” she says.

The doctor, who as part of the Cuban contingent completed the preparation course to work in the Brazilian Health System, plans to revalidate her credentials to work for herself and even, in the future, to open her own practice.

caption caption — Medical personnel taking advantage of the United States’ Cuban Medical Professional Parole program since 2006

cation caption — Concentrations of foreign doctors in Brazil. 11,240 doctors in the program. 11,400 Cuban doctors. 6,840 doctors from other other countries.

Chocolate Store or Museum? / 14ymedio, Yosmany Mayeta Labrada

A box of 80 chocolates costs 68.25 CUC, three months salary of a professional. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Yosmany Mayeta Labrada, Havana, 31 October 2016 – For weeks, astonished and laughing faces have surrounded the display windows of a candy shop in the Plaza Carlos III shopping center in Havana. The excitement has come with the sale, for the first time at that center, of the Italian-made Ferrero Rocher chocolates. However, a box with 80 wrapped pieces costs 68.25 Cuban convertible pesos (CUC), the equivalent of three months’ salary for a professional.

For those who just want a quick taste of the treat, there is an option to buy a box of three for 2 CUC, still high for a country where the average wage doesn’t exceed 25 CUC a month.

The arrival of the exclusive delicacies generates curiosity and cries of alarm among customers, but also a certain doubt among employees about the possibility of marketing merchandise at such high prices. Three months after they went on sale, the only ones buying them have been “foreigners, but we’ve only sold six or seven boxes,” according to a clerk at the establishment.

“I couldn’t even dream of buying them,” says a lady who has joined the group raising their eyebrows at seeing the figure affixed to each box of Ferrero Rocher. Rather than a store, the place looks like a museum these days, with an exposition that combines sugar with the absurd.

Cuba’s Cienfuegos Refinery Reduced Production By Half Due to Cuts In Venezuelan Oil / 14ymedio, Mario Penton and Nora Gamez Torres

The Camilo Cienfuegos refinery in Cuba. (EFE)

14ymedio, Mario Penton and Nora Gamez Torres, Miami, 31 October 2016 – Cuba’s Cienfuegos refinery, operated by Cuvenpetrol SA, a Cuban/Venezuelan joint venture, has been forced to cut production by half due to cuts in shipments of crude oil from Venezuela, according to comments made on Monday by an official of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC).

Plans to build a neighboring petrochemical complex with Venezuela’s participation are also on hold, said Lidia Esther Brunet, first secretary of the Cienfuegos Provincial PCC.

The official admitted that the Camilo Cienfuegos refinery, a plant from the Soviet era, will not meet its targets this year “as it had done since its reactivation in 2007” and will process about 9.43 million barrels of oil, just 53% of the plant’s planned production. Brunet attributed the causes to “contract issues, Venezuela and other questions,” as she explained to the Chinese news agency Xinhua. continue reading

“Right now it is not processing Venezuelan crude. Shipments decreased substantially since last year,” said a specialist at the refinery who requested anonymity.

This month marks 16 years since the signing of the cooperation agreement between Venezuela and Cuba under which oil is exchanged for Cuban doctors and other services.

A worker at the refinery said the plant is refining crude oil from Algeria. “The situation is unstable, we start again Sunday, but sometimes it stops and restarts. We are all very afraid that in the end we will be lout of work. It would be a tremendous blow,” he said. The plant has a payroll of 780 workers, according to official data from 2010.

“The managers are saying that the joint venture could be closed due to the economic situation of Venezuela, and Cuba would wait for another country to assume their 49% of the shares. The big problem is that the refinery has never been profitable, because there were a number of needed investments that were never made,” said the refinery specialist, adding that “there has not been a reduction in the workforce yet, but it has already been announced. ”

In July of this year,Luis Morillo,general manager in Cuba for the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSZ, announced that the refinery would partially shut down for 120 days in various periods of the year “for maintenance.”

“The statements confirm what was already announced. Cienfuegos is not operating, but not because of technical problems, but because Venezuela does not have enough crude oil to send to refineries in Cuba. It is not about Cienfuegos, but about Venezuela,” said Jorge Piñón, acting director of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.

The expert, who monitors the movement of tankers in the Caribbean, said that in the last three or four months “there has been almost no traffic to Cienfuegos.”

The refinery’s expansion plans included increasing oil processing capacity to 150,000 barrels per day, the construction of a plant for olefin and aromatics, expanded storage capacity, and reactivating the pipeline between Matanzas and Cienfuegos.

According to Piñón the impact of the decrease in oil supply from Venezuela has not been even greater because the country continues to import oil from other sources, which comes in primarily to the port of Matanzas.

On Monday, Foreign Trade Minister Rodrigo Malmierca, admitted that the Cuban economy, severely hit by the crisis in Venezuela, would not grow even the 1% expected.

Starting in the second half of this year, the government announced cuts in fuel and electricity consumption, mainly in state enterprises. Under this plan, the central government assigns each company a monthly allocation of kilowatts of electricity. If the company exhausts its quota before the end of the month, their supply is cut off and workers go home “on vacation.”

The authorities have also cut public lighting and the distribution of fuel to companies, a part of which was diverted to the black market for private transport, the prices of which have risen as a result of this decision.

During a televised speech in July, President Raul Castro confirmed the decline in oil shipments from Venezuela. According to Reuters, citing internal PDVSA data, Venezuela supplies fell 40% in the first half of 2016. Jorge Piñón, the expert from the University of Texas, estimated that the reduction is 25% since the beginning of this year. The government has no recent statistics on the total refinement and extraction of domestic oil.

Robbed, Arrested And Beaten By Cuban State Security / 14ymedio, Juannier Matos Rodriguez

A man stands in the street in the city of Baracoa, in Guantanamo. (EFE)

14ymedio, Juannier Rodriguez Matos, Baracoa, 30 October 2016 — On Wednesday, October 12 at 5:40 pm, when I was on my way to the phone company in downtown Baracoa, the voice of Capitan Alfredo Oliveros ruined my afternoon, “Juannier, let’s go to your house for a moment, we want to talk with you […], we’re going to do a search,” he told me in an arrogant tone of voice.

A patrol car came up the road and the driver and a soldier from the Special Troops got out, handcuffed my hands behind me, and made me get in the back of the car. He got in with me and looked at me so long and fixedly I had to say to him, “Compadre, don’t look at me any more.” He responded, “You wouldn’t want me to pick you up and beat you.” continue reading

They took me back to my house and waiting there was Dieser Castro Pelegin (formerly a deputy of the Ministry of the Interior, MINIT, in Baracoa, now I don’t know what he does), the State Security agent Eliner Leyva, an official from the Cuban Revolutionary Police with the ID number 25513, the investigator Diorvys Odelin Lamoth, a van with some six or eight soldiers from the Special Troops, the informers from the Vigilance Committee, Diosmarys Infante Palmero (president of the Federation of Cuban Women) and Meydi Duran Navarro (agent from MINIT’s Special Protective Services Company), along with Alfredo Oliveros.

They showed me a search warrant signed by Elier Lopez Carcases, currently a MINIT deputy in Baracoa. They did not tell me the reason for the search.

They took my computer, a phone, a hard drive, two USB memories, several books and magazines, among other things.

Those hands took my books and threw them in a dirty sack, and with some copies they mockingly said: “This is burning my hands.” They took books that did not even mention Cuba, it was enough that the title would include the words freedom, rights, ethics, civic, transition, journalism and democracy, any of those words that are always repeated in international settings by the experiment called Revolution that is Cuba.

The officers claimed they were subversive books, but they were mine and they had no right to steal them from me. I don’t go to some communist’s house and say, “Hey, that book 100 Hours with Fidel is useless. Give it to me, I’m going to toss it out, it’s 100 hours of lies.”

What hurt me most was that the flash drives and the computer had years of research for my degree in Biology, my diploma work, a recent several months long research project collecting information on a population of polymita brocheri (land snails) in Punta Maisi on which I will publish new results, hours of work in the hot sun in Maisí, dozens of gigabytes of literature on the subject and specialty, as well as personal information.

I begged them to let me keep the items about biology, which is professional work, about those beautiful snails that are a threatened species, that was done for Cuba, I didn’t even know what to say, but as if it was nothing, they didn’t understand they were taking a part of my life.

They took two Cuban flags, one of which I flew from my roof as a gesture of solidarity with the neighbors who lost everything and in appreciation for my brothers all over the island who prayed for us during Hurricane Matthew, which I’m convinced made God protect every human life; and one of which was on the wall at the head of my bed, which made me dream every night about a more just and fraternal country with room for everyone.

Then I was again handcuffed with my hands behind my back and without saying anything they took me to a cell in the Baracoa police station. There I refused to eat and continued to do so the next day, when they took me out again, handcuffed, to a jail in La Maya, in Santiago de Cuba, passing through Imías, San Antonio del Sur and Guantanamo.

The next day in the morning, a MINIT major went to the jail, apparently the second in command in the La Maya unit, and I told him, “Officer, you are violating my right to a phone call.” He responded, “Yes, and we will continue to violate it.”

I told the officer who was guarding the cells I was feeling sick and would he please take me to a doctor. I heard a senior officer reply: “The one from Baracoa, he’s a disgrace, he’s a counterrevolutionary, let him die, it’s not your problem, it’s CI’s (Counterintelligence) problem.” I was in that filthy cell without eating until Saturday morning, when a police official came and put me out on the street.

I arrived in Baracoa the next morning. I went to the MINIT delegation and they told me they weren’t going to return anything, that everything had to be reviewed in Guantanamo and then they would give me an answer.

In Cuba ‘Raulismo’ Follows The Fine Print Of ‘Fidelismo’ / 14ymedio

The state model promoted by Raul Castro is incapable of sowing the crops needed to feed the population. (EFE / Señal Instucional)

14ymedio, Havana, 27 October 2016 – In recent weeks several alarming news reports about the Cuban economy have filled the front pages of newspapers. The attitude of the government in monopolizing the aid for the victims of Hurricane Matthew and its cutting off of new licenses for private restaurants have raised fears that the country is heading down the path of “counter-reform,” accompanied by an aggressive political rhetoric.

The first signs of this backtracking were felt in the “Guidelines for Economic and Social Policy of the Party and the Revolution,” updated during the 7^th Communist Party Congress last April. These guidelines not only refuse to accept “the concentration of property” in non-state forms of productions, but added that the concentration of wealth would also not be tolerated.

For those who were waiting for the Party Congress to lead to greater flexibilities for national entrepreneurs, this strengthening of the most orthodox line increased their frustration.

“Raul Castro’s government seems more willing to lose the income from taxes on entrepreneurs than to allow entrepreneurs to exist with positive results,” laments an economist at the University of Havana who asked to remain anonymous. “Although the foreign media has exaggerated the similarities between the reforms undertaken on the island and the Chinese and Vietnamese style models, in practice, Cuban officialdom strives every day to do the exact opposite.” continue reading

The national press is full of calls to use the maximum “reserves of productive efficiency” that supposedly exist on the island, but this is just an empty phrase if they don’t start opening the Cuban economy instead of closing it.

After officially ascending to power in 2008, Raul Castro initiated a process of changes in the economy that he called “structural” and necessary for the country. Among those that had the greatest impact on daily life was the push for the private sector, which had been corralled with excessive controls, rules and high taxes during the presidency of Fidel Castro.

The leasing of state land under the terms of usufruct generated hope for advances toward greater flexibility in production and trade in agricultural products. The creation of urban cooperatives also helped to fuel the illusions of an economic recovery and an improvement that would be felt on Cuba’s dinner tables and in Cuban pockets.

There were also the relaxations to allow Cubans to buy and sell homes and cars, to travel outside the country and to be able to have cellphones, which achieved greater political impacts, lauded in the headlines of the international press as it highlighted “the Raul reforms.”

Eight years after the beginning of that impulse for renewal, officialdom is determined to divert attention from the main problems facing the country. In the streets there is a palpable sense that the country is returning to the early years of this century, with an imposed economic arbitrariness.

The former Minister of the Armed Forces, now president, has not met his commitment to push transformations “without haste, but without pause,” a much-repeated phrase that has become a touchstone of his supposed intentions. In recent years, instead of advancing, the flexibility measures have stalled and only 21% of the Guidelines have been met, according to the authorities themselves.

Recently, the private sector in the dining industry has begun to suffer new pressures. The announcement of a freeze in the issuance of new licenses to open private restaurants has been read as an unmistakable sign of a slowing, and even a backtracking, in the reforms.

Instead of concentrating its facilities to create a wholesale market, the state has chosen to dedicate all its efforts so that entrepreneurs cannot acquire the products and raw materials needed for their businesses in the informal market. Monitoring and control absorbs more resources and energy, in this case, than enabling and empowering.

Something similar has happened with private transportation, which, since the beginning of the year, has been under intense scrutiny by the authorities, with the government canceling of licenses in an attempt to regulate rates already established by supply and demand. Price caps have affected the population and doubled the time passengers spend in travel.

When logic suggested that the authorities should turn their efforts to providing carriers gasoline and oil at wholesale prices, they inverted the logic with inspectors demanding receipts from the drivers of shared-taxi services to prove they bought their fuel at state outlets. This, at a time when it is an open secret that private transport is only profitable if fuel is supplied through the informal market.

The ever louder beating of the drums by the most recalcitrant targets the accumulation of wealth, but without announcing the definition of what is acceptable and what is not. A practice of confusion and permanent anxiety that was very effective for Fidel Castro in keeping the country on tenterhooks for five decades.

The question many are asking is why doesn’t the government turn its energy to working with private businesses to make the state sector more efficient. Why not decentralize this mammoth network that produces more costs than benefits?

The little progress that has been made in this direction is felt in the country’s development. According to official estimates, in 2016 economic growth will be less than 1%, a figure dominated by the state sector that employs three-quarters of the labor force.

The state model driven by Raul Castro has chosen, in recent months, to spend huge resources on political mobilizations, but is incapable of sowing the crops needed to feed the population.

What country does he intend to bequeath to his successor?

Those who applauded his reforms look out over a Cuba today that is turning to the past, and a government that redoubles its rhetoric against independent journalists, bloggers and academic critics. A nation that continues to put the brake on its productive forces and looks grudgingly on entrepreneurship and prosperity.

Does Economic Development Lead To Democracy? / 14ymedio, Jose Azel

The political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. (Wikicommons)

14ymedio, Jose Azel, Miami, 27 October 2016 – For decades the statement that “the more wealthy a nation is, the greater the chances that it supports democracy” has been a conventional view and a centerpiece of United States foreign policy. This quote is from a seminal work from 1959, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy” by the political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset.

Lipset was the first to raise, on empirical grounds, a correlation between development and democracy. His thesis continues to guide US foreign policy and is often cited in discussions of how to promote transitions to democracy. continue reading

In what is known as the Lipset hypothesis, the professor theorized that economic development supports the consolidation of democracy, expanding levels of literacy, information and access to the media, expanding the middle class, activating independent civic organizations, emphasizing legitimacy and other sociopolitical values. Sadly, he is one of the most cited authors read.

Lipset noted that the correlation between politics and democracy is a wide list of factors that change social conditions, enabling the reception of a democratic culture. These elements, among them industrialization, urbanization, wealth and education, are the conditions, not the causes, of democracy. As suggested by the title of the article, the relation between economic development and political democracy is correlative, not causal.

US foreign policy errs when it ignores the contingent nature of history and relegates the complex social and structural conditions that lead to democracy to a simplistic economic variable. The error is multiplied when correlation is confused with causality. As Lipset shows, economic prosperity is often accompanied by personal freedoms, but that does not mean that economic growth causes political reforms.

The fact that the two events are frequently observed together does not meant that one causes the other: that the rooster crows every morning does not mean that the rooster makes the sun rise. In logic, the principle that correlation does not imply causality is known as the cum ergo propter hoc fallacy, which in Latin means “with this, therefore because of this.”

The most important political implications of the Lipset hypothesis have become one of the most researched topics in the social sciences. Recent studies don’t support the affirmation that economic development brings democracy. The most that can be obtained from empirical evidence is that development facilitates the permanence of this form of government, but does not make it more likely.

However, the US foreign policy will continues to depend on the false causality of the “development first, democracy later,” approach.

Atypical cases flow in both directions with wealthy autocracies like Saudi Arabia and poor democracies like Costa Rica. In the case of totalitarian regimes, it is clear that economic development does not lead to political reforms, as is shown in China and Vietnam. In totalitarian societies the elites have a lot to lose and choose oppression.

In the case of authoritarian regimes, the experience is mixed. The divergent cases of South Korea and Singapore illustrate the limitations of the claims that development furthers democracy. South Korea seems to exemplify circumstances where the increase in wealth contributed to the later democratic consolidation. Singapore, for its part, turns the thesis on its head, because the country remains authoritarian and has become more repressive with the increase in prosperity.

Our understanding of the relationship between the type of regime and economic development remains, at best, probabilistic. But we have learned that in previous communist societies it wasn’t the economy that generated the pro-democracy movements. In those countries, the essential struggle between the population and the elites was about human rights and civil liberties.

Therefore, to promote democracy US foreign policy should be updated and better informed, to understand how citizens adopt democratic values and push for democratic reforms.

____________________

Editor’s Note: José Azel is a senior researcher at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies at the University of Miami and author of Mañana in Cuba.

Camilo Cienfuegos, Nowhere to be Found / 14ymedio

Each October 28 the commemoration of Camilo Cienfuegos has become a tradition in primary schools across Cuba. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Havana, 28 October 2016 – Every October 28 the action is repeated, already converted into a tradition in the elementary schools throughout the country. Children bring flowers to their classrooms and from there leave to through them into the sea as a reminder of Commander Camilo Cienfuegos, who disappeared in 1959 in strange circumstances. Over time, the historical details have become blurred, the official version of events has become highly schematic, while students made comparisons or ask uncomfortable questions.

This morning, at a school in Havana, a preschool teacher tried to explain to her five-year-old students that “the Gentleman of the Vanguard” was lost at sea and they never found “anything at all” of him, not a single trace. The response of one of the little children disconcerted the energetic teacher, “Yes, teacher, I was at the beach once with my cousin and he lost a toy in the water that never came back… we looked everywhere and we never never found it.”

For new generations of Cubans, Camilo is that gentleman of the big hat and diaphanous laughter… of whom there is “nothing, nothing” left.

The Blockade Again… Fidel’s War Against Windmills / 14ymedio, Pedro Campos

Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez defends the UN General Assembly resolution against the embargo to which, in 2016, no country voted no. (@Minrex)

14ymedio, Pedro Campos, Havana, 28 October 2016 – Launching an advertising campaign, deploying a costly diplomatic action charged to the Cuban people against a “blockade” that doesn’t have a single opponent in the United Nations, because even the United States government abstained, is at the very least to make yourself a laughingstock to the world.

This happens when politics is not structured based on rational thought, nor even on your own interests, but on the remains of pride, madness and fear.

We discover, one more time, that this campaign is directed against the Cuban people whom it tries to continue to disinform and shut up with nonsense seeking justifications for suicidally clinging to obsolete methods and ideas, superseded by history, even at the cost of international credibility. continue reading

The world doesn’t care about fidelismo, about the Castro regime. It is demonstrably tired of it. The regime’s goal is to maintain power within. An absolute power that makes room for any nonsense, so corrupt is it, so addicted and brutish.

The US government’s intelligent abstention in the periodic vote in the UN General Assembly on the American embargo on Cuba, left the Cuban government, as we say colloquially, with the rifle on its shoulder ready to swing at a ball that hasn’t been pitched, or falling under the cannon fire of a ghost ship on the high seas.

Now how are they going to keep blaming Obama and his government for the permanence of some strings of the blockade (as the Cuban government likes to calls it), or the embargo (as it is, in fact).

The overwhelming media and mobilizing campaign against the “blockade” reached its zenith on the eave of the UN vote on the repeated Castro regime proposal stating the “need to put an end to the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.”

Cuba’s press organs spent several days trying to demonstrate that the blockade-embargo is the cause of all our ills. For weeks, the repudiation rallies have been unending in work and study centers, led by the likes of television talking-head Randy Alonso, against a policy that never diminished one iota the well-being of the political elite and which, instead, has served to justify its disasters, repressions and phobias toward democracy.

People, meanwhile, play at the Soviet era game in Russia: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” Which translated in this context would mean something like “they try to deceive us and we let them think we believe them so they’ll leave us alone.”

If anything has demonstrated once again how useful fidelismo is in maintaining what is left of the embargo, it is precisely this beardless social mobilization to entertain people and the rigged domestic measures to counter the “imperialist penetration,” which at any particular moment they identify with the policies approved by the last congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) regarding self-employment, cooperatives and foreign investments.

The policy of rapprochement with the United States, developed in the last years of the Obama administration, which has been taking steps since the last Bush administration, has reached the reestablishment of relations, the signing of several presidential orders modifying nearly everything that is not codified by Congress, and even the visit of the US president to Cuba, whose people did not hide their joy at possibly the most momentous visit by a head of state in the last half century.

The US president has been very clear: he wants to live the blockade, but it doesn’t depend on him. He is doing everything he can to dismantle it from the office of the president. It’s clear that he would like a democratic government in Havana with whom the US would have better relations, but he does not intend to meddle in Cuban affairs. He said this in Cuba: this is a matter for Cubans.

But it doesn’t matter, the campaign against the blockade will continue. Fidelismo cannot live without enemies, and even though the adversary vows, promises and acts constructively, he must continue to be blamed for all wrongs and his “fifth column” must be repressed. If not, on whom is going to fall the historic blame for the disaster? Because history “must absolve” it*.

Fidel’s war against the windmills will continue.

*Translator’s note: A phrase taken from Fidel Castro’s defense in court (according to a version later published by he himself) for the 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks, which is considered the start of the Revolution that ultimately triumphed in 1959: “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.”

From Today Your Life Will Be “Very Difficult,” State Security Tells Dagoberto Valdes / 14ymedio

Dagoberto Valdes was summoned on Thursday at one in the afternoon to the headquarters of the State Security Pinar del Rio. (@mariojose_cuba)

14ymedio, Havana, 28 October 2016 — The director of the Center for Coexistence Studies (CEC), Dagoberto Valdes, summoned to a meeting with State Security on Thursday, received “an official warning” which anticipates “the possibility of committing crimes against State Security as defined in the Penal Code.”

Valdes, who remained at the police headquarters on the San Juan road for two hours and fifteen minutes, explained to 14ymedio that the officials threatened him that “as of today” his life “would be very difficult” if one day “he was to incur one of these crimes.” The police mentioned as possible violations of the law the receipt of money from the United States for his activities, or the lack of a contribution to the treasury. The director of Coexistence affirmed that he had “received not even one cent from the United States government.” continue reading

Despite these warnings, Valdes affirmed that everything happened “in a serious and respectful climate” and that “there was no physical abuse” at any time.

“I came to this place [the headquarters of the State Security] on time and within minutes of the hour I was received by Lieutenant Colonel Osvaldo Labrador, head of the unit, and Major Joaquin” said Valdes in a statement received by this newspaper.

According to the director of Coexistence, on entering the unit he was led to “an interrogation room where the entire conversation was filmed.” In it, he said Lt. Col. Labrador told him that for “all these years” he had remained “at the razor’s edge between being a layman of the Church and being a counterrevolutionary.”

Accordingly, Valdes added by telephone, they advanced that if he “engages in counterrevolution” he would be “treated” accordingly, but not if he continues with “his profile as a Catholic layman and cares for the social objective of Coexistence” and he mentioned “2003, when the 75.”

At the end of the declaration, Valdes was taken to the “technical” room where they took his “finger and palm prints, an odor print of his pelvis and photos from the front and side,” and later took him to the infirmary. Despite telling Major Joaquin that he felt “in very good health,” they insisted on taking his blood pressure, which was stable.

Dagoberto Valdes is thankful “with all his heart, for the immense solidarity received from friends and brothers of many countries and institutions, as well as for the prayers of pastors and brothers of different faiths.”

The Coexistence Studies Center focuses on training for citizenship and civil society in Cuba. Among its activities is the publication of the magazine Convivencia (Coexistence), the discussion of proposals for the future of the island and the exchange ideas about our current situation.

Last September the members of Coexistence denounced that at least nine of them had been subjected to police interrogation. The activists were forced to suspend the My Neighborhood One Community program due to pressure from State Security, which included operations around several of their homes, arrests and the cutting of the cell phone service of event organizers.

Based in the province of Pinar del Rio, the independent entity is conceived as a think tank to “think about the national home we desire, to contribute to the reconstruction of the human person and the fabric of civil society.”

“It Is Not Because You Write In ‘OnCuba’, It Is What You Write,” University Professor Told / 14ymedio, Mario Penton

Juan Antonio Fernández Estrada, a professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Havana. (Cubaposible)

14ymedio, Mario Penton, Miami, 26 October 2016 — “It’s not because you write in OnCuba, it is what you write,” were the words used by the authorities of the Faculty of Law of the University of Havana to tell Juan Antonio Fernández Estrada that he could not continue to be a university professor. This measure “put the lid on the jar” and provoked a reaction from the teacher, who says he will not stay silent about this new outrage.

“I do not want to make a media show of this. I am submitting demands through the relevant channels and waiting for the responses to a situation that I consider unjust,” Fernandez told 14ymedio by phone, after an email he shared with friends explaining his situation went viral on the national servers. He further clarified that had never asked anyone to share or make public that communication which was meant to be private. continue reading

As of March 2012, the professor has contributed articles to the American magazine OnCuba, a publication with correspondents in Cuba that is widely disseminated through informal networks on the island.

The magazine is permitted by the Government and is a refuge for journalists and academics who see their contributions as a way to increase their meager income working in the state sector. Fernandez has published twenty columns ranging from opinions, history, politics and other topics of interest to Cubans.

“They informed me that my contract as a guest lecturer at the Faculty of Law could not be continued because I had been asked to resign from the Center for the Study of Public Administration (CEAP), and having done so, I had resigned from all of the University of Havana. I told them that other teachers had continued on as guest lecturers after having resigned as professors, but they explained to me that my resignation from CEAP had been for personal problems, the University considered it was because of my writings for OnCuba, and especially for an article about President Obama’s visit to Cuba,” reads an email that Fernandez sent to his friends.

The article referenced said, “I don’t want to know anything about the Industriales (baseball team) or Obama,” published at the beginning of April of this year, after the visit of the US president to Cuba. In this opinion column, Fernandez lambasted “the cries that warn us of Obama’s deception” and, putting his finger on the wound, wrote, “We, the people, we are not the one approaching the United States, nor like sovereigns did we talk in secret for more than a year with that government, nor did we invite President Obama to Cuba, nor did we invite him to speak live on national television.”

Given the impossibility of being hired, the professor told them that teaching was his only work, but the officials, undaunted, spit out that “you should have thought of that before writing those things.”

“I am telling you this because my silence is over this time,” said Fernandez in his email. “The University has not respected my silence all these years. I didn’t complain in 2008, I didn’t complain in 2012, but this time they can’t eliminate me without my speaking and responding.

The pressures of the Cuban authorities so that journalists and academics don’t collaborate with the private press and the emerging digital platforms has intensified over the last year. Presenters on radio and television were told in a circular transmitted verbally that they were prohibited from cooperating with these other media. According to a witness to some of the meetings, they were reminded “within the Revolution, everything, but outside of the Revolution, nothing,” which motivated everything from letters of protests to continued desertions to the independent press.

“The confusion of some has been to think that all my problems at the University of Havana have been because of errors,” concluded Fernandez, “because of naiveté, but it’s not like that, my problems have been for telling the truth, for being dignified and honest, for defending socialism and criticizing the opportunists and the shameless. These are my crimes and I will continue committing them.”

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