14ymedio – Page 114 – Translating Cuba

Two Hours a Day of ‘Total Blackout,’ the New Rule for Cuban Companies’

A state establishment in Sancti Spíritus that sells in pesos and belongs to the Caribbean Store Chain. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Mercedes García, Sancti Spíritus, 15 April 2023 — “Between 11 in the morning and one in the afternoon you have to disconnect the central electricity and have zero consumption.” This is the information that state companies in the province of Sancti Spíritus are receiving. The measure, implemented a few days ago, aims to drastically reduce energy expenditure in search of a desperate palliative to the fuel deficit that Cuba is experiencing.

“Now the guidance, unlike other times when we were asked to turn off some lights and air conditioners, is that we must shut down the central power to avoid consumption between those hours,” explains an employee of a branch of the Cimex Corporation, managed by the Cuban military, which deals with part of the retail trade in the province.

“In our office, from 11 in the morning until one in the afternoon, the central electricity must be cut off, which complicates all our work that involves computers, printing invoices and other tasks that need electrical equipment,” laments the worker.

In a nearby office of the state telecommunications monopoly, Etecsa, the panorama is repeated. “When last year we were told that we had to turn off the lights and air conditioners, people looked for solutions,” says a young employee who prefers anonymity. “In order not to have to suffer from the heat, the workers brought their own fans.” continue reading

Instead of saving electricity in the two regulatory hours of blackout, in many of these premises consumption remained unchanged. “We went from using two air conditioners to having eight or nine fans connected. What was saved on the one hand was spent on the other,” acknowledges the man, who works in the area of attention to the population.

“We closed and did not accept more customers at that time, but we had to stay inside the office, which was hellish because of the heat, especially in the summer,” he says. “Apparently they realized that a lot of electricity was not being saved, and now the administrator will be in charge of turning off the central power. No one will be able to connect their fan or charge their cell phone.”

The measure joins others that have been taken in the province and throughout Cuba due to the fuel crisis that the Island is going through. “We have a very diminished fleet of merchandise delivery trucks; we have had to change the hours of supplying the stores, and now there are two hours a day when we will not be able to do anything,” says the employee, summarizing the situation in the provincial subsidiary of Cimex.

Sancti Spíritus, a territory that connects the flow of vehicles arriving from the west to the east of the Island and vice versa, has experienced a notable decrease in traffic. “Now you spend hours to get from the city of Sancti Spíritus to Trinidad because the drivers don’t have fuel,” says Mirna, age 59, whose family is divided between the provincial capital and the beautiful Valle de los Ingenios.

“Sometimes I go for days without seeing my daughter, as if we lived in different provinces. If you look at a map, her house is right there. With no cars or trucks, we are incommunicado within the province itself,” she adds.

Mirna does not seem very worried about the repercussions that the new energy-saving measure will have on the lives of workers in the state sector. “They don’t do much anyway,” she concludes. “Here it’s been a long time since you could do paperwork or budgets during those hours, so it’s more of the same.”

Next Monday, Mirna’s husband, who has an administrative position in a municipal office, will have to “turn off the electricity” at work. “He can’t do anything else. It’s what they’ve told him and what he has to do, but he already told me that during that time he’s not going to stay inside the premises, which is an oven. He says he’s going to sit in the park.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

____________

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 Catharsis in a ‘Jacuzzi’

14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Madrid, 15 April 2023 — We went to see Jacuzzi, a play which premiered in Cuba. Our group was not at all majestic. It was four people: Linda (my wife), Gina (our daughter, also a journalist) and Rogelio Quintana, an illustrator and painter, who escaped from Cuba and has lived in Spain for more than 40 years. The fourth, of course, was me. It was a Tuesday night. The Teatro Lara was bursting at the seams. The actors, Yunior García Aguilera, who wrote the work and plays himself, Claudia Álvarez, who plays Susi, and Yadier Fernández, who plays Pepe. All three of them were magnificent. They are prodigiously “naturals”. So much so that they were met with an ovation and had to return to the stage three times.

Yunior is an idealist who wants to be a friend to revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, because he cannot accept the premise that any child ‘per se’ is opposed to the values of friendship and decency.

It wasn’t a jacuzzi at all – just a simple bathtub or, as Cubans say, a “bañadera”, full of water and soap suds. Susi has worked abroad and saved enough money, which allowed her to buy a house in Cuba, “jacuzzi” included. (There is no doubt that Raúl has been better than Fidel in this regard, or at least less stupid.) Susi has returned triumphant from her blessed jobs. She complains about the Revolution in concrete terms: how expensive “everything” is, and especially, that it is impossible to work to improve your quality of life, “except for daddy’s children”, who have everything going for them.

Pepe is the revolutionary, the child and grandchild of those who have defended the “process”, and accuses all the “gusanos” [‘worms’] of acting against them, but admits that the situation is exasperating as it inevitably deteriorates. Yunior is an idealist who wants to be a friend to revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, because he cannot accept the premise that any child ‘per se’ is opposed to the values of friendship and decency. He wants to be a free person and choose his friends beyond the narrowness imposed by the Revolution. However, it is Pepe who requests and constantly says, “let’s not talk about politics anymore.” It is a declaration imposed by the Revolution and that he allows without question.

There are two high points in Jacuzzi. One when Yunior tells Pepe that, despite the hogwash he must listen to when he defends the Revolution and the gratitude people are supposed to feel when they speak of the apparent “achievements”, Pepe is still his “best” friend. The chatter Pepe has learned by heart doesn’t matter. There is always and will always be a place in Yunior’s heart to admire his friend. continue reading

The second high point is when 40-year-old Yunior creates Archipiélago in Havana, along with Diana Prieto, his wife – a monologue apparently written outside of Cuba – and develops a strategy to get Cubans to demonstrate as if Cuba were a free country. It is not. The regime went to their modest home and organized an “act of repudiation”, in which their neighbors did not want to participate because to their neighbors they seemed like a couple of decent, hard-working, young people. And it is not to the point that he ended up exiled in Spain, betrayed by the very people who seemed to help him, accused of being a “CIA agent”, and plotting something unspeakable with Felipe González.

Welcome to the exclusive club of the “CIA agents”. I hope that after so much trash talk from the Castrist regime it has completely lost its effectiveness.

Welcome to the exclusive club of the “CIA agents”. I hope that after so much trash talk from the Castrist regime it has completely lost its effectiveness. Cuba is the only country in the world that gave the order in writing, in the 70s, before the Archipiélago generation had even been born, of breaking relationships with the Revolution’s “disaffected”. And the only society that dared to comply. Husbands and wives who never again heard from their spouses and partners. Children who never heard from their parents and vice versa. Brothers and friends who pretended not to see their relatives so they wouldn’t be associated with them.

At the height of machismo, the secret service spied between the legs of women of the higher ups to surprise them during their comings and goings and demand that they spy on their husbands or divorce them. The slogan was clear, “Never had a revolutionary leader been cheated on.”

I hope that Yunior García Aguilera realizes that the only favor State Security did for him was to expel him from the jail and the Island of Cuba. A dilemma presented itself to the regime: kill or exile Yunior García. It opted for the latter, but not before or simultaneously creating an atmosphere of suspicion. In exile, there is no doubt, creative freedom exists. Last Tuesday, Yunior proved it by stirring up the Cuban catharsis in a jacuzzi.

Translated by Silvia Suárez

____________

Sorolla, Hijacked in Havana

The regime does not want to risk another international fight and has blocked the loan of several of the painter’s works to Spain

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 14 April 2023 – After arduous negotiations with the government in Valencia over a period of seven years, Havana has given its reply: the paintings of Joaquín Sorolla, currently in the custody of the city’s Museum of Fine Art, and whose journey to Spain for the centenary of the death of the artist had been anticipated, will remain in Cuba. The rebuff was to be expected. This is all about a country which is troubled by numerous debts and murky deals, and which robbed from its legitimate owners almost all of the art kept in its galleries, and whose regime doesn’t want to risk another fight on the battlefield of international law.

Valencia, for its part, has had to give up its fight. Carmen Amoraga, director general of Culture and Heritage in the Generalitat, announced publicly that the Cuban government had decided to suspend the loan, saying that the “international situation” wasn’t favourable.

Upon contacting Amoraga’s office directly, the response – “on the instructions of the director general” – was even more terse: “We do not have any information on this issue”. There was silence also from the other side of the Atlantic, where requests for an explanation from curators and experts in Havana fell on deaf ears.

Finally, a collector of Cuban origin, well informed on matters of Sorolla’s works, diagnosed the problem: “No one at the museum will dare to talk, because their specialists don’t have any control over international art loans. That decision was taken in higher circles, between the Ministry of Culture and the Chancellery. The reason for the silence on both sides is simple: they want to to avoid a scandal, bad press and other complications”. continue reading

In 2016, a delegation of Valencian business owners, headed by the president of the autonomous community, Ximo Puig, travelled to Havana. The political atmosphere was tense but very promising. Fidel Castro, in terminal decline, would die one month after this visit. His brother Raúl appeared to be open to an economic opportunity and had begun a process of thawing diplomatic tensions between Cuba and the United States. And Eusebio Leal, the frenzied Havana Historiographer – and quick-witted manager – had brought relations with Spain to their most positive level.

Puig returned to the Iberian Peninsular in a state of ease. As well as achieving his commercial agenda, his Havana business counterparts had – amongst all the cigar gift-boxes and meetings dressed in light guayabera shirt-jackets – esteemed it perfectly fine to hand over some thirty Sorolla paintings, along with other works by Valencian artists such as Mariano Benlliure and Julio Vila Prades. Once the loan of the works was secured, Spain would agree to clean and restore them, as well as bear the cost of their transport from the Island.

‘Regatas’ (‘Regatta’, 1908, 121 x 201cm) forms part of the Spanish Art collection at the Universal Art building. (National Museum of Fine Art)

The plan was to surpass even the 1985 exhibition, to which Fidel Castro, as secure then in power as ever, had given consent: The Havana Sorollas, which had been held over one month in Madrid and another month in Valencia.

In 2019, it was Carmen Amoraga who went to the Cuban capital. It was the city’s 500th anniversary. Eusebio Leal, very ill, was in his last days, and Miguel Díaz-Canel was now the visible pompous-jerk president, appointed from the invisible powers above him – a dependent of the Castro dynasty clan. Inside of only three years, the rules of the game had changed. After a review of the condition of the paintings, Amoraga didn’t manage to seal an agreement with the Cuban government, but everything did appear to indicate that the works would be making their way to Spain in 2023, in time for the anniversary.

However, now there wouldn’t be thirty paintings, but only ten. Some of the others, she explained, were subject to dispute and couldn’t leave Cuba. On top of that, all those works by other Valencian masters had been kept out of the discussion.

The whole business was made worse by the 2020 pandemic. And following that, the Havana regime was overtaken by profound crisis – underlined by the huge protests of 11 July 2021 and then the emerging international disgrace of its alliance with the Kremlin and its support for Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. But the most suffocating dimension of the country’s problems was that of the multi-million dollar outstanding payments accumulated by Castro after several decades of subterfuge in trying to evade the creditors.

At the High Courts of Justice in London in February, the investment firm CRF I claimed a debt of 72 million Euros from the National Bank of Cuba. Faced with a possible ruling against it – which did then come to pass on 4 April when the British court partially ruled in favour of the creditor – Havana decided not to go ahead with the loan of the Sorollas: most of them illegally confiscated after 1959 by Castro. This, then, is the “international situation” that, according to Amoraga, ruined the Valencian government’s celebrations.

It’s thought that Cuba holds the third most important collection of Sorollas in the world, after those of Spain and New York. Collectors, millionaires and cultural institutions were acquiring his works from 1923 onwards, sometimes directly from the artist himself. At the Universal Art building of the Cuban museum – an impressive manor house located on Paseo del Prado in Havana – one can admire Pescadores Valencianos (Valencian Fishermen, 1908), Haciendose a la mar (Going to the Seaside, 1908), or Verano (Summer, 1904) – this latter one perhaps the most valuable of Sorolla’s works on the Island, and, doubtlessly, the one most ingrained in the visual memory of Cubans.

Around 1950, almost all of the Sorollas in Cuba were owned by sugar magnates – the Lobo, the Cintas and the Fanjul Gómez-Mena families, whose names don’t appear in the Havana catalogues. Nor is there any talk of their theft – dressed up as a transfer to the socialist state – which the Ministry for the Recuperation of Embezzled Goods brought to a head after the triumph of the Revolution.

‘Elena entre rosas’ (‘Elena Amongst the Roses’, 1907, 76 x 118cm) in the Spanish Art collection at the Universal Art building. (National Museum of Fine Art)

The Fanjuls, connected via marriage to the Gómez-Menas – who went into exile in the United States and rebuilt their fortune there – had hidden a number of paintings behind a wall, constructed expressly for the purpose in their mansion in El Vedado. The revolutionary government converted the building into the Museum of Decorative Arts and seized all its master works, including those that were hidden. Many were auctioned at prestigious auction houses, such as the British Sotheby’s, or ended up in the hands of officials and associates of Castro.

When, at the end of the nineties, the impresario José Fanjul discovered that Puerto de Málaga (The Port of Málaga, 1910) – one of his family’s Sorollas – had been sold in London, he put together a team to find out who the buyer was. Sotheby’s washed their hands of it and tried to exit gracefully from the investigation but the alarm was raised in Havana. The Fanjuls, worried that Castro would sell all the works confiscated from the family in order to help him get out of the economic tight spot which the fall of the Soviet Union had put him in, set about making international demands for stopping the trafficking of art organised from the Island. The Cintas’ foundation had done the same thing in 1995 when they found out that two of the Cuban magnate Óscar Cintas’s Sorollas were on sale at Sotheby’s.

The former legitimate owners of the pictures brought to light an intricate network of dealers, peddlers, curators, spies and agents of the regime. In 2009 when Havana discretely loaned two Sorollas to the Prado Museum – one of them being Verano – the Fanjuls once again launched a judicial challenge. Protected by the Helms-Burton law, which penalises the traffic of goods expropriated by Castro, they sued the the museum. However, they couldn’t get the pictures back.

The intransigence of Fidel’s political heirs, the rupture of power in anticipation of the death of Raúl Castro (who will be 92 this June), and the debacle of the national economy, have all put off even further the happy ending which the Valencian authorities had been hoping for since 2016. With these precedents, and the high profile media attention on the ‘Year of Sorolla’, it’s unlikely that the painter will be able to avoid his being hijacked by Havana.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

____________

‘What Has Happened to Gasoline in Cuba?’ Asks President Diaz-Canel Without Offering a Solution

After recognizing that there was no clear and long-term strategy to address the problem, he suggested that it was best to be resigned to it. (ACN)

14ymedio, Havana, April 15, 2023 — Miguel Díaz-Canel found this Friday a new scapegoat this Friday to justify the fuel crisis in Cuba. “What happened to gasoline?” was the question that was asked in a confessional tone during a meeting with leaders of the Communist Party in Villa Clara. “The countries that have certain commitments to supply us with gasoline are also experiencing a complex energy situation,” he concluded.

The “non-compliances” of others — which seems to point, above all, to Venezuela — can be translated into figures: “From between 500 and 600 tons of gasoline per day that the country consumes, at the moment we have coverage of less than 400,” he calculated. In addition, the Government “is not very clear” about how it is going to “get out of the situation.”

After recognizing that there was no clear and long-term strategy to address the problem, he suggested that the best thing was to be resigned to it: “This does not have to do with inefficiencies of the country or with problems of our energy institutions, but with non-compliances that have also occurred for very objective reasons that the countries that supply us have,” he said, without going into details about the problems faced by Venezuela.

Regarding diesel, he assured that the cause of its deficit was “different,” and that it could be attributed to “temporary problems.” “The loading was guaranteed, but the ship broke down in Santiago de Cuba, and this prevented the unloading in time for it to continue to other ports. That has caused a delay in the way we have been able to distribute that fuel,” he explained, without specifying if he was talking about the oil tanker Nolan, which was loading 1.53 million barrels (400,000 barrels of fuel oil and 13.13 of diesel) destined for Cuba.

He also referred to the “strategy to avoid blackouts in the summer,” since most of the Island’s thermoelectric plants are “resolving breakdowns or under maintenance.” “We have had to depend more on distributed electricity generation, which usually consumes diesel,” he said. continue reading

The official press welcomed Díaz-Canel’s visit to Santa Clara, the city that nominated him for the new legislature of the Cuban Parliament and in which he carried out a sustained campaign during last March’s elections. Cubadebate admitted that the president arrived in the center of Cuba “in the midst of a complex energy situation, which has generated a lot of concern in the population,” and celebrated Díaz-Canel’s contrition in the face of the successive crises that “complicate the lives of Cubans.” In addition, it applauded his criticisms of “the deficiencies of the Party’s work in Villa Clara” and that he himself performed a “self-criticism.”

Despite Díaz-Canel’s “resignation,” the fuel crisis continues to worsen as the summer arrives. The imminence of the hottest months augurs a reoccurrence of the long blackouts that only gave Cubans a truce in December 2022, but that regained strength in January of this year.

So far, the most serious symptom is manifested in transport, since a large part of the Island’s vehicles are paralyzed or must face long lines in front of gas stations and are also required to have accreditation that they belong to an authorized ministry, company or to embassies.

However, data published by Reuters reveal that Cuba receives a constant supply of fuel. In March, Cuba received 980,000 barrels of oil from Russia, Panama and Uruguay, another sign of the increasing economic ties between the Kremlin and Havana.

The new rules of rationing at gas stations show that this supply rarely benefits Cuban drivers, and that despite the failures of the last harvest, Russia seems determined to reactivate sugar production on the Island and other agricultural activities by sending its oil to the country.

In addition to Moscow, Havana has its oil partner par excellence in Caracas. Several agreements, which a recent visit by Raúl Castro to the Venezuelan capital was in charge of reactivating, guarantee that the Island is the port of arrival for numerous oil tankers from Venezuela.

To this panorama is added the traffic of the patanas along the Cuban coast, the floating generators sent by Turkey to alleviate the energy deficit on the Island. The Erin Sultan left Havana on Tuesday for Santiago de Cuba and should arrive this Saturday to replace the Irem Sultan, which arrived in the capital of the East less than a month ago.

Meanwhile, other ships of the Karadeniz Powership company, the Suheyla Sultan and a small tugboat, are still anchored in the Bay of Havana. The most evident sign of Cuba’s energy instability is the blackouts that Cubans are already suffering, and that their duration is increasing.

Translated by Regina Anavy

____________

Cuban Prime Minister Marrero Attributes the Terrible Results of Cuban Agriculture to the ‘Non-State Sector’

Cuba’s vice president, Salvador Mesa, wants to increase the production of free-range hens. (Archive/Granma)

14ymedio, Madrid, 14 April 2023 — Barely two days had passed after learning that the authorities had invested 12 times less in the agricultural sector than in business and real estate services, when the country’s top authorities urged farmers to look for “alternative solutions” due to the lack of “money to import all the resources required by the sector.”

The prime minister, Manuel Marrero, did not have the slightest embarrassment in accusing the workers of bad results, saying that the results of the measures put into practice “are poor, in a sector in which only 20% of production is in the hands of the state sector, and the other 80% is under non-state management.”

The reproach came to light in the annual review meeting of the Ministry of Agriculture this Thursday in Havana. The dismal results of the famous 63 measures to stimulate agricultural production were shown; although reluctant to recognize them, the leaders alleged, without any proof, that if the measures had not been approved “the situation would be worse.”

Among the star proposals of that package, announced in April 2021, was the possibility of charging excess production in foreign currency, a system that has never worked well due to arrears and non-payments, something recognized this Thursday at the meeting. continue reading

“The defaults to producers, at the end of December, reached 16,842,385 pesos [$701,766] showing a downward trend compared to previous periods,” reported the official newspaper of the Communist Party this Friday.

Given this lack of payment, which is what mainly motivates producers, it is understood that the results of 2022 were catastrophic. But the losses were not specified, and the authorities limited themselves to saying that “most productions did not reach the planned volumes.”

Among the products whose forecasts were met were corn, sorghum, beans and soy, but the same did not happen with complete groups of food, such as meat, vegetables, citrus fruits and fruit trees, in addition to the so-essential rice, basic in the daily diet of Cubans.

The detail of animal protein products is bleak, especially when a few days ago the Government mentioned its intention to maintain the goal of reaching a monthly consumption of 5 kilos [11 pounds] of these nutrients. Neither beef, nor pork, nor equine, nor eggs nor milk reached the planned projections. On the other hand, it was reached by a product that in recent times stands out, uniquely, for its lower price: mechanized tobacco.

However, the plans for agricultural tobacco, the twisted, black and blonde varieties and the total cigar were not fulfilled.

The excess of bureaucracy, which the leaders don’t consider their fault, also hindered the delivery of idle lands, which amount to 258,288 hectares [638,244 acres].

The State newspaper Granma completes the information with two other articles dedicated to the agricultural sector in its edition this Thursday, where the same authorities encourage exploiting “the potential” of the municipalities and self-sufficiency, something that in the conditions of absolute scarcity that the country is experiencing is less than a patch.

The third article calls attention to the tour of Salvador Valdés, vice president of the Republic, through the free-range hen farms, stating that they can help replace imports. The eggs have higher nutritional value and receive a high price in rich countries, compared to the eggs of caged hens, whose advantage is the massive production that a hungry country needs.

The president urged, as if that were not enough, “overcoming all limitations,” and he asked companies to “catch up” with their debts to producers. “It is not possible,” he said, “to stimulate production if money is owed to the producer.” However, he avoided any responsibility despite being the country’s second highest authority.

So much informative emphasis and urgency to produce more contrasts with the money invested and decisions made at the highest level. Although the Cuban economist living in Spain, Elías Amor, believes that concern exists despite appearances, no one wants to make the necessary decisions.

“There is more desperation with agricultural production than it seems. Behind inflation and closely related to this problem, Cubans complain about the lack of food and the prices of products. Agricultural production doesn’t succeed, and communist solutions don’t work. They have to think about taking a 180-degree turn and starting over. The longer it takes, the worse it will be,” he said in his blog, Cubaeconomía.

Translated by Regina Anavy

____________

Cuban Writer Eduardo Heras Leon, ‘Counterrevolutionary’ and Loyal to Fidel Castro, Dies

Heras’ definitive approach to Castro took place during the Special Period, as the head of one of the televised courses of the “University for All” project. (Trabajadores)

14ymedio, Havana, April 13, 2023 — Cuban writer, journalist and publisher Eduardo Heras León, National Prize for Literature in 2014, passed away this Thursday in Havana at the age of 82. Founder of the Onelio Jorge Cardoso Literary Training Center, he was one of the intellectuals “parameterized”* during the so-called Grey Quinquennium, the Five Grey Years defined by cultural censorship, despite which he always defended Fidel Castro’s cultural policy.

Heras, known from a young age as El Chino, was born in the Cuban capital in 1940 and had different jobs until 1958, when he entered the Normal School of Teachers in Havana, where he participated in different conspiracies against Fulgencio Batista organized by the 26 of July Movement.

In 1961 he joined the militias and fought as a volunteer gunner in the Bay of Pigs, about which he wrote the book La guerra tuvo seis nombres [The War had Six Names] (David Award, 1968). After the tension of the first years of the Revolution, Heras began to study journalism at the University of Havana and continued to write short stories, then collected in Los pasos en la hierba [Footsteps in the Grass] (Honorable Mention of Casa de las Américas, 1970), which received disapproval from the magazine El Caimán Barbudo [The Bearded Caiman], where he was accused of being “counterrevolutionary” in the article Otra mención a Los pasos [Another Mention of The Steps],” by Roberto Díaz.

After the example-setting arrest of the poet Heberto Padilla by State Security in 1971, the regime began a witch hunt against all the authors and works that departed from ideological orthodoxy and homosexuals involved in cultural positions. From the National Council of Culture, directed by Luis Pavón, the abrupt dismissal of numerous intellectuals was organized, including Heras himself, whose stories showed the “human” and unheroic side of the Castro guerrillas. continue reading

Decades later, in an interview in a confessional tone offered to the singer-songwriter Amaury Pérez, Heras tried to attenuate the story of his desperation during the Grey Quinquennium, when he was expelled from his journalism career and sent to work in a steel foundry.

A former colleague of Heras at the School of Journalism of Havana, evoking his expulsion, told 14ymedio that, during the summer of 1971, the secretary of the Union of Young Communists, Arsenio Rodríguez, went through the classrooms explaining that the writer “was no longer the school’s candidate for the elections of the University Student Federation (FEU), and that he had, in addition, been expelled for being a counterrevolutionary.” Faced with the disagreement of several students, Rodríguez explained that the announcement was merely “information and was not subject to discussion.”

In those years Heras began to think about suicide — using the revolver that Fidel Castro had given him after his time as a militiaman — and he encrypted his experience in the volume Acero [Steel], which was not published until 1977.

After a partial rehabilitation in 1976, Heras served as director of the narrative section of the newly founded publishing house Letras Cubanas [Cuban Letters] in addition to serving as director of the Casa de las Américas Editorial Fund and vice president of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC).

His definitive approach to Castro took place during the Special Period in the 1990s, at the head of one of the television courses of the University for All project. There, Heras led a course in narrative techniques that later led to the creation of the Onelio Jorge Cardoso Literary Training Center, in which numerous storytellers from the Island received advice.

In 2007 he was involved in another cultural controversy, during the so-called “little war of e-mails.**” During the convalescence of Fidel Castro, who had left the political arena the previous year, and in a climate of political tension, Televisión Cubana issued several interviews with the cultural commissioners in charge of the 1971 parameterization. The debate of hundreds of intellectuals and artists who had suffered the harassment of characters such as radio and television censor Jorge Serguera or Pavón himself set off the alarms of State Security and motivated the transfer of the controversy to a more “controlled” environment.

Heras, along with the critic and editor Desiderio Navarro, in addition to other “victims” of the Grey Quinquennium such as Fernando Martínez Heredia and Ambrosio Fornet – author of the expression – were appointed to bring the debate towards orthodoxy and absolve the regime, giving a conclusion to that period and freeing Fidel Castro from all responsibility.

The lectures at conferences offered during those days were gathered in the volume The Cultural Policy of the Revolutionary Period: Memory and Reflection (Theoretical-Cultural Criteria Center), which did not see its second volume edited. Heras said then that his whole life, including the episodes lived in the seventies, constituted the “testimony of a loyalty” to the Revolution and to Fidel Castro, of which he was proud.

In the last two decades of his life, Heras won numerous distinctions and medals awarded by the Cuban government, in addition to the National Publishing Prize in 2001 and the Literature Prize in 2014.

Translator’s notes:

*Fidel Castro’s “Words to the Intellectuals” in 1971: “Within the Revolution everything, against the Revolution nothing.” A year later came ’parameterization’ (enforcing rigid cultural parameters): “It is not permissible that through artistic quality homosexuals gain influence that affects the formation of our youth.” Outside these parameters, artists, intellectuals and homosexuals were considered “misfits” who must be parameterized, or “marginalized.”

**English translations of these emails can be found on Wikimedia Commons in Cuba: The Intellectual Debate, or The Little War of Emails, 2007. The original Spanish emails are on the Consenso website.

Translated by Regina Anavy

____________

Continuity in Cuba Will Continue

The first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and former president Raúl Castro raises the arm of Miguel Díaz-Canel after his appointment in 2018. (EFE/Alexandre Meneghini)

14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, 14 April 2023 – “If they remove the one who is there, who are they going to put in?”

In these terms of interchangeability, as if talking about a spare machine part, many people consulted by 14ymedio venture to discuss whether Miguel Díaz-Canel — will be re-elected on April 19 – or, more accurately, re-appointed — to occupy the position of President of the Republic.

When asked if this is what is most likely to happen, most of those consulted agree that it is, that repetition seems inevitable. But nuances arise when the question is raised regarding whether it is convenient for the interests of the dictatorship.

On the one hand, it is argued that “up there” they must be aware of the degree of discontent that the population has with the management results of the current occupant of the job, even though the majority of the dissatisfied have the perception that he is not the one who decides the measures but rather the one who meekly executes them. continue reading

To put in another person could open the hope of substantial changes, but for that the new figure would have to refrain from pronouncing the word ’continuity’, which has been due north in the compass of the job’s current occupant. In any case, the designation of a new character would not be to make changes, but to buy time.

On the other hand, there is a perception that removing Díaz-Canel would be an acknowledgment of the resounding failure of his administration and, therefore, of the decision of Raúl Castro, who was ultimately the one who put him in office. Díaz-Canel’s success is summed up in having opted for continuity. He has gotten on well with Raúl, although he has gotten on badly with the population. And if Raúl Castro continues to be the voice that calls the shots in Cuba at this level of decision-making, Miguel Díaz-Canel will begin his second presidential term, despite everything.

If Díaz-Canel falls, it is said, it could be a sign that Raúl Castro is no longer the one who decides or that, despite his 91 years, he has the capacity to realize that the ’baby of the family’ has not managed to achieve the prosperous and sustainable socialism that he promised when he was left in charge of the ship.

But the most disturbing question remains: if they remove the one who is there, who are they going to put in his place? According to the constitution, the person must be a deputy and under 60 years of age. The list is short and putting in an unknown person would show even more that we live in a country where citizens find out who is going to be their president without first having known who the candidates were.

In these so-called elections there will be no winners. We will all be defeated.

____________

‘It Would Never Occur to Me to Put My Dollars in a Cuban Bank’

Customers waiting in line outside a bank in Central Havana. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, April 12, 2023 — None of the many people waiting in line outside a bank in Central Havana on Wednesday were there to deposit dollars, something they had been able to do since Tuesday thanks to a decree by the Central Bank of Cuba. On the contrary, they were suspicious of the government’s new measure, which does away with a temporary ban on dollar deposits issued in 2021.

When a young man in his thirties mentioned he was there to deposit a hundred dollars, an elderly man in line tried to dissuade him. “Once it’s deposited, it’s automatically converted to MLC [freely convertible currency] at a one-to-one exchange rate,” he explained, adding that the black market offers a much better rate for the U.S. currency. “An MLC is a virtual dollar; it’s not the same. For me at least, it would never occur to me to put my dollars in a bank. I exchange them on the street for pesos and use that to buy food.” Convinced, the young man left the line, but not before the older man joked, “The dollar was taken prisoner and now it’s been set free.”

Meanwhile, over on San Rafael Boulevard, black-market currency traders are doing a brisk business, as were the official Cadeca currency exchage bureaus like the one on Neptuno Street. “I don’t know if it’s because of that measure or what but nothing like this was happening here before,” observes one neighborhood resident. “It’s like everyone is desperate to buy dollars from foreigners.”

The experts, for their part, have criticized this most recent monetary about-face by the Cuban government and attribute it to the failure of the 2021 currency unification process which, during the early months of its implementation, included a ban on dollar-denominated deposits. “The components of this ’regulation’ (monetary and exchange unification, macro-devaluation of the peso, the end of subsidies, increases in wages and prices) ended up enhancing the effects of the pandemic and leading the country to ’stagflation,’ for which there is no end in sight,” writes Cuban economist Pedro Monreal in a Twitter thread. “Capped prices, partial dollarization, online import rackets, atrophied exchange markets, inspectorates, and now re-acceptance of the USD at banks are actions that are not only marginal but also at odds with the accepted model of regulation,” he says. continue reading

Several economists consulted by the Spanish news agency EFE have expressed similar doubts. “What sense did currency unification make given the associated economic and social costs?” asks Madrid-based Cuban economist Elías Amor Bravo.

Mauricio de Miranda, a tenured professor and researcher at the Javeriana Pontifical University in Cali, Colombia, states, “Currency unification has been a complete failure. [It was] poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly implemented.”

Monreal believes there never was a true monetary unification. As evidence, he points to the opening of MLC stores in 2019. “It is a very serious problem because the population is paid in one currency (CUP) which they cannot use to buy many of the goods being sold. This is unacceptable from a social and political point of view,” he says.

Officials claimed that currency unification, which began taking effect in January 2021, would end the dual currency system which, at the time, was made up of the Cuban peso (CUP) and the convertible peso (CUC), which was artificially set at one-to-one to the dollar.

Both the ban on greenback deposits and the reform itself gave a boost to the informal hard currency exchange market. The exchange rate on the street went from 70 pesos to the dollar in mid-2021 to 185 on Wednesday, a far cry from the official rate for individuals of 120 pesos to the dollar.

____________

Cuba’s Central Bank Reverses Course and Accepts Dollar Deposits in Cash Once Again

Economists warn that the dollar will cross the 200-peso threshold. (EFE)

14ymedio, Madrid, 11 April 2023 — There has been another sudden change of course in economic policy. As of Tuesday, Cuban banks will once again be accepting dollars in the form of cash. News of the Central Bank’s decision was published in the Official Gazette a few hours earlier. Independent experts worry that the new policy, which takes effect immediately, could lead to higher inflation.

This action overturns a June 2021 resolution that prohibited banks and other Cuban financial institutions from accepting cash deposits in U.S. dollars. The previous policy was initially intended to be a temporary measure but, in the intervening two years, the black-market currency exchange rate reached as high as of 200 pesos to the dollar before settling down to a level between 160 and 180 pesos. Meanwhile, the official exchange rate for individuals went from 24 to 120 pesos.

The Central Bank’s action is attributed to a change in the “current circumstances and priorities of economic policy.” Things have changed since then. The country is past the worst phase of the pandemic, when the measure was introduced, tourism and industrial production have improved slightly and, most importantly, Western Union resumed wiring remittances to the island in early March after the Trump administration had suspended the company’s operations in Cuba in 2020.

The bank defends its decision “even though pressures from harsh sanctions related to the economic blockade remain in force, particularly those intended to impede Cuba’s foreign cash flow and U.S. dollar deposits overseas.”

The bank’s announcement mentions “the exchange market established in August 2022, a reference to the exchange rate of 120 pesos to the dollar for individuals. The exchange rate of 24 pesos to the dollar for companies remains unchanged. That decision did not have the intended effect. The government had been hoping to capture some ot the dollars circulating in the informal market at a rate that was rapidly climbing and about to reach 200 pesos to the dollar. continue reading

Although the announcement claims that the “confidence generated by this step will be beneficial for national economic activity and for the population,” it adds a plot twist: warning that given that the underlying problem — the U.S. trade embargo – has not been resolved, “it will be necessary to monitor the evolution of banking and financial activity.”

Madrid-based Cuban economist Elías Amor notes that the most obvious potential consequence of this action is that it could threaten the revolution’s stated commitment to social justice.

“From this moment on, Cubans with family members overseas need only collect money in the form of remittances from a wire transfer company, or informally from foreign toursits, to enjoy a higher quality of life, and more spending opportunities, than those who only receive their income in the form of Cuban pesos. And no matter how you look at that, this is inflationary,” he writes in his blog, Cubaeconomía.

The expert admits that these anomalies existed before, but that they will now become visible. He is sorry to see the 2021 currency unification measures being questioned again without anything happening. He also warns of the risks of this decision in a climate of runaway inflation that is approaching 70% annually in some essential sectors such as food.

Also pointing the finger at currency unification is economist Pedro Monreal. In his Twitter account he mocks the governments policy lurches. “Luckily they studied monetary unification for ten years,” he writes, describing the measure as a “laundering” of the black market exchange, which led to “partial dollarization resulting from an increasing use of the dollar in private transactions.”

This decision has not gone unnoticed by news consumers, who have inundated government media outlets with comments. Many ask critics not to question decisions by the government which, in their opinion, is trying to deal with a very complicated economic situation. For this alone, they argue, we should be thankful for any action officials take, no matter how misdirected it might be. But a significant number of readers stress that the dollar deposits should never have been banned in the first place, as evidenced by this about-face.

“Dollar deposits should never have been prohibited in the first place but, at this point, the decision creates problems. First, the official exchange rate is much lower than the unofficial rate. Seondly, people have recently needed to withdraw dollars from the bank but this hasn’t been possible because the bank itself doesn’t have them. Consequently, this leads to a loss of confidence among bank customers. Lastly, dollars are in high demand from privately owned companies, which need them to pay for imports. But the banks don’t have them, which forces [customers] to look for them in other markets,” reads one post.

This loss of confidence is echoed in other posts. “A serious question borne of personal experience: What guarantee do individuals who have made dollar deposits have that tomorrow they will be able withdraw that money from their bank accounts if ’conditions’ change?” asks one commenter whose doubts are quickly echoed by someone else: “That’s the real question. And what if they change their minds? The dollar has been an erratic presence in Cuba’s economic landscape in an unstable, illegal way. They gave it the okay, then later it was no cash. Now it’s being welcomed again. In my opinion, this is not a measure that will build confidence. Changing course abruptly is not the way to stabilize the economy.”
____________

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Will Tour Cuba and Other Kremlin Allies in the Region in the Second Half of April

The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Sergey Lavrov, on April 7, 2023 in Ankara. (EFE/EPA/NECATI SAVAS)

EFE (via 14ymedio), Moscow, 13 April 2023 — The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, announced on Thursday that he will carry out a Latin American tour in the second half of April that will take him to Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, the Kremlin’s main allies in the region.

“We advocate for strengthening Russian-Latin American cooperation on the basis of mutual support, solidarity and our interests,” Lavrov wrote in two articles published by the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo and the Mexican magazine Buzos de la Noticia.

In his articles, reproduced by the Russian Foreign Ministry on its website, he highlighted, in particular, the strategic relationship with Brasilia, Caracas, Havana and Managua.

“The rapidly changing geopolitical landscape opens up new possibilities for the development of mutually beneficial cooperation between Russia and Latin American countries. The latter play an increasingly prominent role in the multipolar world,” he stressed.

Lavrov insists that Moscow does not want Latin America and the Caribbean to become a source of discord between the powers, since it bases its foreign policy not on ideology, as was the case with the Soviet Union, but on pragmatism. continue reading

As an example, he highlighted that, despite sanctions and political pressures, Russian exports to the region increased by 3.8%, while wheat supplies increased by 48.8%.

Lavrov highlighted that at the moment 27 Latin American countries have signed visa-free agreements with Russia, in addition to the fact that the number of Latin American students studying in higher education centers in Russia has skyrocketed.

The Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, showed Putin his support in his confrontation with the West by visiting Russia in December 2022, and he also condemned the arrest warrant issued against the head of the Kremlin by the International Criminal Court.

Recently, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, and the head of the largest Russian oil company, Igor Sechin, traveled to the Island.

At the beginning of the month, Russian President Vladimir Putin invited his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to Moscow upon receiving a visit from the special adviser for International Affairs of the Brazilian Presidency, Celso Amorim.

Subsequently, Lula said that during his visit to Beijing he will propose to the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, to promote dialogue to restore peace between Russia and Ukraine.

The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Madurdo, offered Putin “all my support” since the beginning of the Russian military campaign in Ukraine in February 2022.

On March 14, Russia and Venezuela celebrated the 78th anniversary of their diplomatic relations, ties that were strengthened with the arrival of the so-called Bolivarian revolution in 1999.

At the end of March, the Nicaraguan Foreign Minister, Denis Moncada, met with Lavrov and defended Moscow’s right to guarantee its “integrity and security.”

Lavrov also decorated Laureano Ortega Murillo, son of the Nicaraguan president, Daniel Ortega, with the Order of Friendship.

In the new Russian foreign policy, marked by the growing political, military and economic antagonism toward the West over Ukraine, Latin America is one of the priority regions.

In that sense, Lavrov’s tour is part of Lavrov’s recent trips to twenty countries in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, from the Maghreb to the Sahel and the south.

Translated by Regina Anavy

____________

More Cuban Rafters Arrive in Mexico Because of Difficulties Entering the United States

A group of 34 Cuban rafters detained on the high seas awaits a response to their request for asylum. (Semar)

14ymedio, Ángel Salinas, Mexico, 13 April 2023 — The crew of the Mexican Navy ship Comet notified the captain of Puerto Juárez last Tuesday about a “raft” drifting 90 miles north of Isla Mujeres, one of the illegal landing points for Cubans in recent years, a fisherman told 14ymedio.

According to a statement from the police, 34 Cubans were traveling on the home-made boat, including a woman and 33 men, who were trying to reach Mexico when they were intercepted by two coast guard boats.

The Cubans were treated by naval health personnel, who indicated that they were all in good health. They were transferred to the naval station of Puerto Juárez, where they were handed over to agents of the National Institute of Migration.

A municipal security officer identified as Horacio Márquez, confirmed that the Island’s nationals requested asylum. Migration picked up their identity cards and seven passports. “When applying for asylum, the law allows them to remain in Mexico until the case is resolved.” Article 7 of the Law on Refugees, Complementary Protection and Political Asylum emphasizes that “no sanction will be imposed” for illegal entry.

Márquez specified that this group of Cubans is the first known to arrive in Isla Mujeres this year. “The last week of October 2022, a similar group arrived. On that occasion, 30 rafters, who were linked to coyotes, were detained, but nothing was verified. Most continued on their way to the United States.” continue reading

The Migration Law establishes in article 69, paragraph V, the possibility of “regularizing their situation,” but several Cubans have denounced extortion, arbitrary detentions and imprisonment in Mexican immigration stations.

This arrest of 34 Cubans comes a week after journalist Fátima Vázquez said that at least 15 nationals of the Island had disembarked on San Miguelito beach, located near kilometer 13.5 of Kukulcán Boulevard, the main avenue that connects with the hotel zone of Cancun.

Municipal security officer Horacio Márquez said he did not know of any investigation by the Attorney General’s Office on the routes taken by migrants. “There is nothing out of the ordinary. We see it with this group, which was sighted by sailors on the ship Comet, but not through surveillance.”

Another rescue of rafters was recorded this Thursday. The Norwegian ship Bow Summer provided assistance to seven Cubans whose boat was adrift 100 miles from the Yucatan. “They were without food or drink, about to be swept even further offshore. We took them on board and provided them with dry clothes, food and drink,” said Captain Tor-Gisle Bjerknes.

The arrival of these 49 Cuban rafters in Mexico occurs just when the United States Coast Guard has reiterated that the borders are not open. The agency specified on its social networks that “a strong maritime presence is retained to detect and intercept anyone who tries to migrate illegally by sea.”

This Thursday another group of 28 people were returned to the Island aboard the ship Isaac Mayo. According to official figures, in the last six months the United States has returned more than 2,200 Cubans.

Translated by Regina Anavy

The Center for a Free Cuba Denounces the Use of Emigration ‘As a Political Weapon’

A group of Cuban migrants in northern Honduras on their journey to the United States (14ymedio)

EFE (via 14ymedio), Miami, 1 April 2023 — The Center for a Free Cuba, an organization of the Cuban exile in the United States, affirmed that the round of immigration talks between Cuba and the United States “will only encourage Havana to continue weaponizing migration to increase its influence on the Administration of President Joe Biden.”

“Cuba’s problem is not emigration, it’s the dictatorship,” the organization, based in Washington D.C., warned in a statement in response to a new round of immigration talks between the two countries.

This migratory round, which was held yesterday in Washington, D.C., was marked by a sharp increase in the arrivals of Cubans to the U.S. coasts.

The number of Cubans detained (6,202) when they tried to reach the United States by sea since last October 1, already exceeds that of the entire previous fiscal year (6,182), according to information from the U.S. Coast Guard.

The country’s serious economic crisis has intensified an unprecedented mass immigration exodus, especially to the United States, where authorities detained more than 313,000 Cubans on the southern border with Mexico, which represents about 3% of Cuba’s total population.

According to the statement of the Center for a Free Cuba, an organization whose objectives are to “promote a peaceful transition to a Cuba that respects human rights and political and economic freedoms,” Havana has used Cuban emigration “as a political weapon to repeatedly leverage negotiations with Washington.” continue reading

According to the organization, after the first round of talks on migration between the Biden Administration and Havana, in April 2022, “the State Department announced a series of unilateral concessions” that included “the expansion of authorized travel and educational exchanges.”

“The first benefit is to the Cuban Army through its conglomerate, the Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (Gaesa), and its sub-entity Gaviota, which supervise and benefit from Cuban tourism,” the statement says.

The second, he adds, “benefits the Cuban intelligence service, which has used educational exchanges to recruit spies, insert intelligence officials into academic conferences and compromise visitors to the Island.”

He also affirms that all the migratory crises in Cuba “have occurred during administrations that sought to improve relations with Havana,” and cites among other crises the mass exoduses of Camarioca (1965), Mariel (1980) and the so-called “Crisis of the Rafters” of 1994, in addition to the current one.

“No negotiation with the Cuban dictatorship, manipulated by Havana and using migration as a weapon, can succeed for the Cuban people or the interests of the United States, while the Castro regime imposes an internal blockade on Cubans and more than a thousand Cubans are imprisoned for exercising their right to express their desire for a free Cuba,” said John Suárez, executive director of the organization.

The United States defended on Wednesday that the measures it has taken have allowed the reduction of irregular immigration from Cuba, but this country considers, on the contrary, that Washington is “stimulating” illegal immigration.

Translated by Regina Anavy

____________

Cuba’s Diaz-Canel, Five Years as Hand-Picked Dictator

Díaz-Canel’s international policy has placed Cuba on the side of the most infamous causes (EFE)

14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera, Madrid, 5 April 2023 — That April 19, 2018, when deputies had to “elect” the president of the Republic, there was only one name on their ballots aspiring to the position. Raúl Castro himself cleared away all doubts by declaring that his appointment was not a coincidence, that it was planned and foreseen by the Party’s leadership. Díaz-Canel was the only survivor of a dozen “test-tube” leaders who had been training to inherit the throne.

The electronic engineer and lieutenant colonel had slowly climbed from the Union of Young Communists. His ascent was meticulously calculated, without haste, so as not to repeat the mistakes they had previously made with Roberto Robaina, Carlos Lage, Feliz Pérez Roque and Jorge Luis Sierra Cruz.

The “star of Placetas” fulfilled an international mission in Nicaragua. He next became the highest authority of the Party in Villa Clara, his native province, and then was given his litmus test: Holguín. In the “city of parks” he earned the nickname of Miguel Díaz-Condón [condom] for preventing peasants from smuggling milk. And it was also there that he met Lis Cuesta, broke up his marriage and fearing that his promotion would be frustrated.

I remember that on one occasion they both attended the premiere of one of my works. At the end of the show, they stayed for the toast and told us about the adventures of their romance. The then-first secretary of the Party in Holguín feared that the scandal would affect his image and asked for advice from the most experienced boss in the province.

The old man, Miguel Cano Blanco, was familiar with local customs and situations and suggested to his namesake that he grab his lover by the hand and take her everywhere. For a couple of weeks there would be no talk of anything else in the city, but over time, the gossip would run out, people would end up getting used to the new normal, and his career would not be affected. Creative resistance, is what Cano Blanco recommended. Lis Cuesta would take his advice to the letter, to this day. continue reading

There’s not even a shadow left of that guy I once met in Holguín. His face has hardened, giving him a robotic appearance. Paranoia has made his hair turn white in a very short time, and his belly increased at the same rate as his blunders. Pigeons never landed on the new dictator’s shoulder, only vultures. The crash of a passenger plane, a tornado in Havana, the pandemic, the explosion of the Saratoga Hotel and the fire at the Supertanker Base at Matanzas are just a few examples of the unluckiness (salao) that is Díaz-Canel, according to his own words.

But not everything has been a consequence of misfortune. His obstinacy in giving continuity to a perverse and dysfunctional model makes him a direct culprit for the destitution suffered by the Cuban people. The Ordering Task* was a catastrophe and plunged the country into unbridled inflation. And his international policy has placed Cuba on the side of the most infamous causes, such as Putin’s imperialist war and Daniel Ortega’s criminal extremism.

This has also been a five-year period of protests. On July 11, 2021, more than 40 cities took to the streets in a domino effect, and Díaz-Canel decided to stain his hands with blood. His combat order unleashed violence that left a young man shot in the back and killed, several wounded and more than a thousand political prisoners. The 11J was a definitive watershed moment, and the dictator earned the worst nicknames in Cuba’s history.

Then would come the biggest migratory wave of all time in the archipelago, a mass exodus that has left the country without young people and without a future. The popular disenchantment has been clearly reflected in the polls. The regime’s placebo votes have recorded the highest rates of abstention, apathy and rejection.

It is clear that his government has been disastrous. Not even in healthcare, which has always been the regime’s banner, can they boast of anything. His plan to build 1.7 homes a day per municipality went by the wayside. And Parliament itself gave him a standing ovation when he confessed that his management was a disaster.

In any democratic country, someone with his record would have already resigned or would be swept from power at the polls. But Cuba is a dictatorship. Díaz-Canel has received the order to hold the fort as long as Raúl is alive. And no one would be surprised if his name, on April 19, is again the only option on the deputies’ ballot.

*Translator’s note: The “Ordering Task” [Tarea Ordenamiento] is a collection of measures that include eliminating the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC), leaving the Cuban peso as the only national currency, raising prices, raising salaries (but not as much as prices), opening stores that take payment only in hard currency which must be in the form of specially issued pre-paid debit cards, and a broad range of other measures targeted to different elements of the Cuban economy.

Translator: Hombre de Paz

____________

Jorge Edwards in Cuba: A Spy in the Land of Slogans

From left to right, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Edwards, Mario Vargas Llosa, the literary agent Carmen Balcells and José Donoso. (Those ‘Boom’ Years)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 9 April 2023 – The apathy of Cuban intellectuals after the death of Jorge Edwards contributed to the fact that the regime’s censorship managed to render him invisible.

The machinery of the Cuban press lives by a certain law of fiction, and that fiction selects, redacts, patches over and twists the reality of any news story. When the Chilean novelist Jorge Edwards arrived in Havana as a diplomat in December 1970, he discovered that the predictable workings of journalists, photographers and spies were already up and running. The regime’s newspapers received him with a scattergun of allusions towards an ‘Edwards clan’ – protagonists of the ‘reactionist conspiracy’ against Salvador Allende.

These were the veiled instructions for Cubans (smart people, when they want to be) in how to deal with this visitor — a literate man, disguised as a negotiator, representative of a socialist government, but one which Castro viewed with suspicion: Allende had committed the tactical error of achieving power through the ballot box, not, as Castro had done, through war.

A few weeks ago, upon Edwards’ death (in Madrid), the business of rewriting history began all over again: despite being one of the foremost writers in the language (winner of the Cervantes Prize), not one official Cuban newspaper published an obituary, the columnists and critics all fell silent, and the bureaucrats of Casa de las Americas — he was even one of the judges for their award in 1968 — were finally able to delete him from their list of undesirables.

Nevertheless, the most troubling aspect of his death was that even Cuban exiles — apart from the odd exception — neglected to pay their respects towards Edwards’ memory. There was a certain indifference, a certain mental laziness which obliged them to leave on the bookshelf his Persona non grata — an assessment of Castro’s perversions just as thorough as Before Night Falls or Map Drawn by a Spy.

It was also odd that neither was he properly mentioned in the work of Chilean writer Pavel Giroud — that is, in any depth, and aloud, rather than in private reflection — during the tensions which produced El caso Padilla (The Padilla Affair). His presence in the film came to shed light on the era — it provided an external viewpoint on Castro’s reign and his authoritarian anachronism in a world which demanded more democracy. Edwards, who had travelled to Havana as Allende’s envoy, left the country proclaiming it to have converted itself into a ship of fools. continue reading

Persona non grata makes certain progress, via digressions, as a volume built entirely from personal memories. The narration dithers, and forms a hypothesis, falls down through paranoia; it thrills, and it mulls things over. Edwards believes that, in 1970, Castro had drilled down into all the excess opened up by the Revolution and had managed to submerge the country into a destiny of collective obfuscation. His crazy delusions were already evident in his physical appearance — bags under the eyes, unkempt beard, a compulsion for clouds of tobacco smoke — and he aspired to the achievement of perfect surveillance/security, which the Chilean interprets as being one of his “Jesuit disorders” — a hangover from his Belén* schooldays.

As Castro diverted the course of history in Cuba in 1959 — says Edwards — he thought he could twist the country’s destiny time and time again, and also its laws of nature. The image of the Leader as mad scientist à la Victor Frankenstein, who dreams of practising genetic recombination in cows whilst he harpoons sharks in his private paradise at Cayo Piedra — is one of the most grotesque in the book.

A re-reading conjures up new questions about another spectre, Manuel Piñeiro, the ubiquitous Barbarroja [redbeard] whose microphones and spies — chauffeurs and beautiful secretaries from Havana — didn’t miss a single move made by Edwards. Piñeiro’s authority over the secret police, his influence over where even Castro could or couldn’t go, turned him into the leader’s confessor, and, without him realising it — the author notes — his puppet-master. Perhaps this suppressive control, which lasted right into Fidel’s decline, might be the key to explaining Barbarroja’s unusual death — he crashed his car into a tree in 1998.

In the midst of all of the tale’s tremors we find Padilla and his wife, Pablo Armando Fernández, Norberto Fuentes and César López, the first Miguel Barnet and the ghost of Cabrera Infante. The spring in the trap which power held in reserve for them was triggered when the Chilean abandoned the Island for Paris, where his teacher, Neruda, awaited him.

“Fidel Castro’s repression didn’t have the Steppe-like coldness (with simultaneous convent-like coldness) of Josef Stalin’s”, Edwards summed up in a commemorative prologue in Persona non grata. Nevertheless, he knew how to quickly identify the enemy — “the ladybirds, along with the poets, the long-haired, the mystics and the mystic-types, and all variety of social scourges” — who deserved, in his olive-green hell, “a slow death, though, in some cases, a less slow one”. Edwards, traveller to an irreconcilable Havana, understood first and foremost what others derived from Cuba and he anticipated what someone called — with an anesthetic malice – a Grey Five Years.

*Translator’s note:

Belén Jesuit Preparatory School was founded in 1854 in Havana. Fidel Castro attended this school, an institution renowned for its strict Jesuit discipline.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso
____________

Drivers Assaulted, Houses Looted and Cattle Stolen: Insecurity Grows in Villa Clara, Cuba

In such an isolated enclave, the horse-cart drivers maintain an indispensable link with the neighboring towns. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Yankiel Gutiérrez Faife, Camajuaní, 9 April 2023 — Jinaguayabo is near the sea. To the north are the luxurious keys of Villa Clara; to the south, Remedios, at the end of a run-down road, where the horse carts circulate, at a slow pace and under the sun. It is a poor, rural town, with fewer than 700 inhabitants and from which everyone ends up leaving. In such an isolated enclave, the cart drivers maintain the indispensable link with the neighboring towns, but their routes, usually quiet, are now infested with assailants.

Gerónimo, who owns a passenger cart, leaves for work at seven in the morning. “At that time it’s easy,” he explains to 14ymedio. “It’s when the people of Jinaguayabo travel to Remedios, to study or to work. Then I have another route to bring them back, from three to seven at night, when they return to town.”

Several weeks ago, he says, he found three people waiting on the side of the road, and they asked him for a ride to Remedios. They got into the cart, two in the back seat and one next to him. “When we were coming to the bridge, the one behind me put a belt around my neck and forced me to park in a ditch,” says Gerónimo, who immediately obeyed his attacker.

The others were in charge of checking his pockets: they took his phone, some bluetooth headphones, his watch and the proceeds of the day, 2,500 pesos [$100]. “At least they left me the horse and the cart,” he says with some relief. “Now I have to see if I can buy what I lost again, because the police are not going to find the thieves.”

Despite the isolation and poverty, Jinaguayabo has always been close to the most tense events in Cuba. Located near the first settlement of the Spanish conquistadores in Villa Clara, besieged by corsairs and pirates and centuries later by insurgents, the town has not been oblivious to violence. However, its inhabitants complain that the atmosphere is electric, and they feel afraid being on any road at night. continue reading

“You can no longer go by bike to Remedios, as before,” complains Daivel, a 19-year-old whose parents have banned him from traveling at night the three miles that separate Jinaguayabo from the so-called “eighth village” of the Island. “I used to pedal there on weekends, but now they won’t let me go for fear that something will happen to me along the way. If I go to Remedios, I have to sleep with friends and come back in the morning,” he says.

The situation is repeated in other rural towns, such as Taguayabón — to the west, between Remedios and Camajuaní — where thieves prey on people during the November carnivals. At two in the morning, when everyone is drunk and their senses dulled in the dark, it is easy for bandits to take a wallet or watch, or to corner a clueless villager.

They also manage to force the doors to houses, which are less protected because, as Maria points out, “in the countryside everyone knows each other.” She and her husband returned from the festivities in the early morning and discovered a broken window in their home. Inside, she says, “everything was a disaster. They had taken a cell phone and cash, which I had hidden in the closet.”

Crime is so widespread that you can no longer trust even the workers you hire. Daniela, a housewife from Remedios, hired a bricklayer known by the family, 26-years-old, to change the tiles and the sink in the kitchen. “He came to work for a single day and didn’t finish. He told me that he had a fever and a cold,” she says. That same night she was robbed of a powerful LED light that she had in the yard. “My husband, who knew that the boy was in bad company, went to his house. He himself had stolen the lamp, taking advantage of the fact that he knew the house, and exhibited it very brazenly in his yard,” the woman says.

In the marginal areas of the cities or in the rural towns the situation is unacceptable, but it is even more serious in the homes of the farmers. Francisco, a guajiro whose farm is in the vicinity of Rosalía, near Taguayabón, had two oxen with which he worked on his plot.

After working and taking a bath, Francisco used to have lunch and take a nap, while the animals grazed near the house. “In short,” he says, “when I was sleeping very peacefully, the bandits had been ’paying attention’ to me for many days and knew my routine. They had studied me.” At nightfall, he saw that the oxen had disappeared.

A television program funded as propaganda by the Ministry of the Interior, “Behind the Footprint”, shows a police squad that quickly solves criminal cases. “But real life is not like that,” says Francisco, who didn’t wait for the authorities to take action on the matter.

Some neighbors helped him organize a search party, and they found a broken fence and tracks. Beyond, near the town of Palenque, they discovered a scrub where the drunken thieves were butchering the animals. The second ox, tied to the fence, tried in vain to free itself.

“We caught three thieves and the police took them,” says Francisco. “But they have already freed one of them. Usually they are released for lack of interest in the investigation, or the police don’t even bother to come.”

Woman talking on the phone in front of a motorcycle workshop that was robbed last month. (14ymedio)

No one is safe. Not even in the center of big cities like Santa Clara. Ernesto, owner of a motorcycle repair shop not far from Etecsa’s offices — just one block from Vidal Park — was robbed of one of the vehicles he had in the warehouse at nine at night, while his family was watching the telenovela.

The thief broke the fiber cement roof of the workshop and took a motorcycle with just two and a half years of use, which needed paint and a new battery. However, he did not realize that Ernesto had installed cameras and did not have his face covered. “It wasn’t difficult to identify him,” he says. “A week later, the police caught the thief and recovered the motorcycle. However, I know I was lucky.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

____________

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: