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The official newspaper, which reproduces a text by Invasor, explains that “although it is true that not all of us could determine with the naked eye whether imported rice has 15% broken (Vietnamese) or 4% (Brazilian, Uruguayan), several consumers interviewed say they gladly pay the difference, because, indeed, the quality when cooked is superior.”

Manso García grew rice in wild lands for decades. “I would go out, to open country and plant it there, hoping that no one would steal it from me at night when I had to go home to sleep.” But, even those clandestine times are a thing of the past. “It no longer makes sense, there is not enough rain and people no longer value Creole rice,” he laments.

With time and the lack of national production, imported rice for the rationed market was gaining ground, but the local taste and the parameters to measure it remain the same. “The rice has to be shelled in most Cuban recipes, be it simply white, congris and even those mixed with meats, they like it more if the grain is distinguished”, says Alexander Flores, a young chef who until the pandemic began was an assistant chef in a Havana paladar (private restaurant).

“When the rice does not work, all the food seems bad to you,” he acknowledges. “People evaluate the entire menu based on the rice and it shouldn’t be that way, but the culinary culture has narrowed so much in this country that this product has become the standard for evaluating any restaurant.”

The situation is not much different inside the homes, although the standards are not so commercially high. “Vietnam is sending us the worst, I have no doubt that they have good rice, but I no longer want to buy when they tell me that it is from ’that friendly country’,” says a retiree from the La Timba neighborhood in Havana.

“It is a mud and it smells bad,” he alleges. “At other times it would not be so serious, because one could mix it with better things, but now my family eats rice with sauce or rice with bouillon cubes several times a week, and if the base is not good they are still hungrier.”

Uruguayan rice enjoys better opinions. Without trying, the small South American country has managed to fit into the complex ecosystem of grains in Cuba where some traditional recipes are very demanding with the way in which the grain should be cooked. “This is the last straw, in Uruguay they harvest Cuban rice,” jokes Manso García.

In their house in Rhodes, because of the flies, they have spent months “opting for the sweet potato and taro” that they plant in the backyard and in the clandestine lands that they borrow from Mother Nature. “Rice makes your food, but if it does not cook well, it will be unfortunate for you. For that, it is better to go for the vegetables.”

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Last Friday, and after hundreds of complaints on social networks by users, the authorities said that these faults, “together with other effects on the national electricity system,” were the origin of the service interruptions.

Directives from the Ministry of Energy and Mines announced on the Roundtable TV program last Friday that the blackouts, which they avoided referring to with this name, could increase over the weekend, before which the Government took drastic measures such as stopping work in companies and institutions “that do not provide essential services to the population.”

Before that program, the explanation given by the Cuban Electricity Union (UNE) was vague. On Friday morning, an operator of the customer service number explained to this newspaper that “there was a deficiency in the demand for power for electricity service.” When asked if there is a lack of oil to produce the current, she hung up the phone.

The power cuts were especially annoying on this occasion because, in several areas of Havana, they coincided with problems in the water supply also due to repairs in the hydraulic networks.

In addition, in the country’s markets the shortages are so deep that some Internet users were concerned because the little food they had been able to get was at risk of spoiling due to the lack of refrigeration.

Many wondered about the causes of these blackouts because whenever they occur, they bring to the minds of Cubans the interruptions during the Special Period that lasted up to 12 hours and that became part of life in the 90s. Those who knew that time cannot avoid thinking that it can return.

Journalist Abraham Jiménez Enoa summarized the situation on his Facebook account. “A friend [tells me] that it’s a meltdown. How is it possible that in a country one gets up on Saturday at 8 in the morning and does not have electricity, water, bread (ad infinitum),” he wrote. “What kind of country is this? This is not even a country anymore, I told him.”

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To date, to calculate the pension or retirement a limit of up to 90% of the average salary has been established. “With the application of this Decree Law 36, this changes if the interested party remains for five years after their reinstatement,” explains the official press.

On the one hand, those of retirement age have the right to receive, in general, salary and retirement jointly. Also, when the time comes to retire, their retirement pay will be increased by 2%.

Virginia Marlén García Reyes, general director of the National Institute of Social Security (Inass), told the official press that there is “avidity” among managers to implement the rule. In addition, he pointed out that the authorities intend to “make the procedures more flexible.” With the new rule, retirees may be hired again, even in the same position they held when they retired.

But, as usual, the majority of citizens do not find advantages in the proposal. Eduardo Moreno, 67, a resident of Old Havana, considers the “invitation” “an abuse” and “a lack of respect” for all those who for years worked for the State. “I spent 45 years working as a civil servant in a ministry, it was hard, very hard, and now I want to be at home with the grandchildren,” he says.

The fear, among some of those consulted, is that, in the midst of the economic and social crisis that Cuba is experiencing, there will be older people who will be forced to accept the proposal out of necessity.

“Everything is painted very nicely in the newspaper but with the prices as they are now, even if you have three salaries you cannot buy the basics you need. A friend of mine says that it suits her, but also because she lives alone and has no-one to help her, they are going to take advantage of those people. What they need to do is raise their pensions,” says Georgina, age 51. The woman, a resident of the Plaza de la Revolución municipality, is still able to work but does not even consider doing so after what is necessary. “They don’t think of people like me,” she says, adding that she will stay at home even if the country “is falling apart.”

Adriana Ramírez is retired, but at 62 she is not thinking about going back to work either. “I worked 35 years dispatching behind a counter and now I want to rest even though I don’t have the wherewithal. I have my son and a nephew who help me a lot and I can afford to say (to the Government), roundly, No. Unfortunately, there are many whose only economic support is their pension [she makes a gesture with her hand expressing how small these are] and they will have to think twice before refusing.”

“The young people are all leaving because of the lack of opportunities and now they want to exploit us to the last,” adds Ramírez, a resident of Nuevo Vedado. The problem of emigration from Cuba joins the imbalance between births and deaths, aggravated by the pandemic. In 2020, the number of deaths exceeded the number of births, 105,000 children were born and 111,000 people died, and demographers believe the trend will continue.

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According to the contract revealed in last May’s Official Journal of Algeria (equivalent to the Cuban Official Gazette ), the Cuban regime receives almost 65 million euros per year. The four hospitals included in the agreement are strategically located in the four cardinal points of the North African country, to offer viable access.

The largest of them, the primary national center for Ophthalmology — the specialty that contributes the most money — is in Djelfa, 300 kilometers from the capital, Algiers, and is the first of the hospitals founded for us to work. Located there is the head of the national Maternal and Child Care Program (PAMI), as well as the head of the national Communist Party of Cuba, and there is a transit house, that is, accommodation for professionals when stopping off from other places (because distances they are huge). To the east is the Bechar hospital (where the Urology program takes place), to the west, the El Oued hospital, and to the south, the Ouargla hospital (the Oncology program).

The Cuban personnel who work in these hospitals answer to a double leadership. On the one hand, the Cuban leadership, an extensive chain of useless people who roam the centers with no other task than to point the finger and note the merits sweated by others. These bosses should demand from their Algerian counterparts the supply of the necessary inputs for the full operation of the center, since according to the signed agreements these are the responsibility of the Algerians, but the opposite phenomenon occurs, very similar to what has happened in Cuba: they do not demand the means of work and opt for the benevolent whip of the persuasive verb to fall into the great stupidity of doing more with less.

With shortages all year round, with obsolete and poor quality surgical instruments, with old equipment that constantly needs to be repaired, with questionable statistical requirements, protected for eye surgeries in a classification, of greater or medium complexity, made by someone who is not even a doctor and much less an ophthalmologist, they prefer the complicit silence that guarantees a position and its benefits over demanding a correct classification based on international standards. But of course, it would be putting your personal interest at risk.

It is much easier to demand that a doctor operate with a lamp and degrade his professionalism because for this mission, the doctor, more than a person, represents a number of benefits that later become fresh and green money, the kind that the regime likes. The working conditions are bad, the demands are high and the discourse, victimizing and old-fashioned, is that this money is needed by the country.

As for the PAMI, it is in the worst conditions, since it is spread over so many places in this desert geography, that on many occasions the closest town where another Cuban lives is several dozen kilometers away.

Those who work in Ophthalmology live in residences near the hospital and with very good conditions, but those who work in the other programs, specifically those of the PAMI, stay in homes that are very bad and with a total lack of resources.

The mother-child program is a crude attempt to copy a primary health care system like the one we have in Cuba. The high command’s eyes shine from trying, because it would mean more staff here and, therefore, more money in their pockets. They do not take into account the precarious conditions to which they subject professionals: non-sterile neonatal rooms, delivery rooms where cats roam like people waiting for a fleeting placenta to fall to the ground and serve as food for their offspring, rooms of supposed intensive therapy where sterilization protocols are not followed and where the constant passage leaves the doors open to any bacteria.

Algeria’s public health system is quite disastrous, even if it receives a lot of money. Good professionals generally emigrate or go to the private environment at the slightest opportunity, where conditions are much better. We Cubans are where Algerian professionals do not want to be for obvious reasons: complex places, difficult to access or hostile climates.

For the rest, most of the population that is cared for by us is quite grateful and we do not have serious problems with our Algerian colleagues (at most, some affairs of skirts and jealousy).

Although we work side by side with Algerians, we must adapt to their slowness. When our hands are not enough to save a life, even knowing that we have done everything possible and the relatives themselves touch our shoulders and do not scold us, the questions from those who should give us more encouragement rise so much that they hurt us deeply.

They do not taking into account the shortages, the late payment for transport, that we did everything we could, or that a hospital should have five doctors including three Algerians, and those places are not occupied, and only two of us take on all the work. It simply makes us feel worse than we already do by not being able to exercise the art of keeping someone alive.

With all this, they give themselves the luxury of lying to us like children and in many cases keeping us here because no relief appears, as if it were our fault, as if we were condemned to remain in the eternal fire of exploitation.

The truth is that everyone already knows what this is and this mission is far from being the paradise they paint it to be. To make matters worse, and it well known, the salary that we earn and that they must pay us monthly is never paid in a timely manner. In 2020 we were paid only four times with absurd justifications for unexplained delays and surrounded by complicit silences. Nobody stops working, operating, keeping watch and, in the same way, nobody should stop eating or having personal hygiene. In addition, they require you to be connected by a telephone line that you pay for yourself. How do we do it?

Now, a new phenomenon increases our sorrows and worries. With the monetary unification, automatically and without absolute awareness of the effects, our accounts were changed from CUC (Cuban convertible pesos) to Cuban pesos and new astronomical rates appear on the horizon and in MLC (freely convertible currency such as dollars and euros) to send to Cuba the boxes with the household items that we buy here with our sweat and sacrifice to make our homes (in Cuba) a little more comfortable.

The most realistic conclusion that can be drawn is that this mission is led by profoundly incompetent people, starting with the top boss, Dr. Reinaldo Menéndez García. Defining himself as strict and revolutionary, he accepts bribes, for example, from those in comfortable positions who prefer to stay here longer than stipulated by law, in an exercise of double standards.

With an always wild speech, he hides his total contempt for us, blatantly lying and wanting normality to appear where there is none, supposedly taking steps to benefit us and that, coincidentally, do not bear fruit, while we all know the good life that he gives himself.

Human rottenness advances, and when you see so many human miseries together you become disenchanted and, either you join that or decide, as Nietzsche said, to leave the herd. That is why I write and make known what here is a hidden reality for the world: this mission is, as Estela Reynolds said, a large poop painted in glitter.

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The legal advisory firm Cubalex presented a petition for habeas corpus for the entire group, but the Supreme Court rejected it, alleging that both in form and in substance the detention was completely legal.

In the resolution, the court explained that in the Obispo street protest, “slogans were uttered against the main leaders of the nation combined with expressions of hunger and deprivation,” actions for which the agents tried to arrest them and encountered resistance. “They sat on the ground and interlocked their hands, which caused the public order to be altered in that place, and these are the reasons for which it was necessary to take them to the Police Unit, and from there proceeding to file the corresponding complaint,” the Cuban justice wrote.

The human rights organization Amnesty International has been one of the most recent to join the voices of those who demand their release from the Government.

“Mary Karla and other journalists, artists and human rights defenders remain in prison or under strict surveillance in their homes in Cuba, just for the fact of protesting and defending rights. We demand their release and an end to the repression,” wrote Erika Guevara-Rosa, director for America of the NGO, on her Twitter account.

Days before, Human Rights Watch, another of the largest international organizations for the defense of human rights, had done the same through its regional delegate in Latin America, José Miguel Vivanco: “Cuban journalist Mary Karla Ares has been detained for several days. They accuse her of “public disorder,” a charge that the Cuban regime routinely uses to persecute critics and dissidents. We demand her release.”

Vivanco linked in his demand to the statement released by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) to support the writer of Amanecer Habanero on May 3, international press freedom day. “Today, when the world commemorates World Press Freedom Day, the Cuban authorities detain a journalist and are investigating her for the simple fact of covering a protest,” said Ana Cristina Núñez, a researcher for the Central America and South America Program from CPJ.

The Ares case has been continuously denounced by the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and Press (ICLEP), which is following up on it. The medium for which the detained journalist writes is one of the seven that make up its network. The Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) is also demanding her immediate release.

On the same day, another opponent punished for his support of Otero Alcántara was serving a week’s arrest: Adrián Curuneaux Stivens, a member of the Opposition Movement for a New Republic (MONR).

The activist was arrested on May 4 when he tried to approach the Calixto García Hospital to find out the state of health of the artist who was hospitalized against his will on Sunday, May 2. There he encountered a large police fence and, when trying to pass them, he was taken to the Technical Unit of Criminal Investigation of Picota, in Old Havana.

The MONR coordinator, Luis Díaz Silva, reports that not even his wife was allowed to see him and that a very reliable source has told them that he was beaten. They were, however, able to deliver some personal effects that the Police initially also rejected.

At the time of his arrest, Curuneaux was accompanied by other people who were also being detained and, says Díaz Silva, one of them even had his phone taken away and the images he had taken around the hospital erased from it.

Curuneaux Stivens was released in February this year after posting a bail of 1,500 pesos and after serving nine months in Valle Grande Prison. The opponent was convicted of allegedly performing work as a self-employed person without having a license.

“He is a poor carpenter who strives every day to put something on the table for his children to eat. But, above all, what bothers the dictatorship the most is that a poor black person has the courage to confront them with ideas, that’s why they are cruel to him,” denounces the leader of the organization.

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Just a week later, this Thursday, there was an electrical failure that damaged the Cuenca Sur source, harming the municipalities served by those water channels: Plaza de la Revolución, Centro Habana, Cerro, Diez de Octubre and Old Havana, as well as the Miraflores and Altahabana districts, in Boyeros. La Víbora suffered double damage: that was one of the three days that it was its turn to receive water.

The Provincial Council announced there was no water. The breakdown has caused the mobilization of more tanker trucks to the affected areas, and those that have been affected would see “their delivery cycles lengthened.”

It could be worse, according to the authorities, who said last night on the Roundtable program that losses from leaks have been reduced from 58% in 2011 to 42% today. “If we did not lose so much water, we would not have to look for new sources. Today we have more than 5,000 leaks, of which 2,000 are in Havana,” they affirmed. To solve it, 3 billion pesos in investments and 2 billion in maintenance are planned.

Beyond the capital, in Sancti Spíritus they have also offered explanations for the “irregular behavior” of the water supply.

“The fundamental problems of the water supply in the city of Sancti Spíritus today are related to continuous failures that we have had in the supply system to the city, especially in the pumping station known as Manaquitas, which is the one that sends the water to the Macaguabo water treatment plant,” Franklin Lantigua, director of the Provincial Aqueduct Company, told the Escambray newspaper.

From there, he detailed the amount of work carried out to solve the breakdowns in the pumping equipment and the suppression of leaks, an annual speech that is usually accompanied by phrases such as: “The city of Espirituana has been growing and augmenting the domestic and socioeconomic consumption of water during the last decades, despite maintaining the same hydraulic infrastructure for 40 years, a reality that deteriorates the service in some areas.”

Despite the great national plans, the entire sanitation network of the Island is almost half a century old and the patches are not working to solve the constant problems that citizens find in turning on a tap and having the water flow. The outlook is bleak in the midst of a pandemic and scientists have concluded that the transmission of the coronavirus is especially high by droplets or aerosols, and hand washing remains one of the essential weapons to combat any epidemic.

This Thursday, the Venceremos newspaper also offered reasons why there is less water in Guantánamo. The level of the reservoirs has dropped, but there are also pressure problems due to poor infrastructure and the higher elevation municipalities suffer.

“One of the alternatives is the installation of the missing connections of the Bano Sur conductor, an investment in the approval process by the Institute of Hydraulic Resources that, if implemented, could improve distribution in the towns of María and Esperanza, and the Primero de Mayo and Pastorita neighborhoods, “said the deputy director of the Municipal Company of Aqueducts and Sewers.

Not a month ago in Santiago de Cuba, residents complained about breaks in the main pipeline that supplies various neighborhoods, which  the official newspaper Sierra Maestra had spoken about about as early as 2020, still cannot be fixed .

In Villa Clara it is only necessary to go back to the month of February to see another case of residents alarmed by the lack of the most basic of services provided by a Government. “The representatives of the entities involved explained that there are currently problems with a pump in the Minerva-Ochoíta system, which is in the process of being repaired at the Mechanical Plant factory. As long as this situation persists, it will be difficult to meet with the supply cycles in some popular councils,” according to the local news mediaVanguardia.

In the midst of all these breaks, last night the participants at the Roundtable did not hesitate to look for the usual culprit: “the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America.”

“An example of this is the siege of suppliers, the requirement that the resources we import have no more than 10% American components or the inability of shipping companies to transfer resources to our country. Raw materials that we could acquire in the region have to be sought in Europe or Asia, with an increase in costs between 30% and 40% of the original value,” they pointed out.

Despite this, the official press highlights the “good news.” In Victoria, it was celebrated that, on the occasion of World Water Day, on March 22, in Isla de la Juventud more than 98% of the population had a quality water supply that was accessible to all.

In Camagüey, the local newspaper Adelante reported the imminent completion of new infrastructure and did so by recalling a time when Luis Palacios Hidalgo, a local engineer, asked to speak during a meeting on water supply. He raised a transparent bottle of water from the local shopping center and assured that “when the inhabitants served by the aqueduct received a similar liquid, the results of so many efforts of many generations would be recognized.”

“And although even for him that proposal seemed a total utopia, an impossible dream, today the implausible sentence is closer and closer to reality,” the newspaper concluded. It does not seem to matter that the events throughout the island deny the optimism of the official media and even demonstrate the opposite.

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Martínez affirms that anyone who “can get the money” will also buy a tractor. “And more so now that the farmer can even export his production. That means improvement for the farmer and development for the country. The Revolution is giving new offers and possibilities to the farmers and eliminating obstacles, allof which favors production. Improving technology means producing more.”

This Monday, in Pinar del Río, the farmer Emiliano Hernández Rodríguez also acquired a tractor of the same brand in freely convertible currency (MLC). The Logistics Business Group of the Ministry of Agriculture (Gelma), which is dedicated to the commercialization of vehicles, reported the purchase on its social networks.

The Belarus 82.1 tractor is manufactured by the Republican Unitary Enterprise Minsk Tractor Plant of Belarus. It has a capacity of 81 horsepower and the engine runs on diesel. Havana has a long history of agreements with the Alexander Lukashenko regime and, recently, the State newspaper Granma reported the sale of 14 tractors from that nation, which were destined for seven provinces of the country.

María del Carmen Fages Plasencia, vice president of Gelma, then explained that the vehicles are the result of an agreement between the Central Company for Supply and Sales of Heavy Transport Equipment and its Parts (Transimport) and are destined for stores that take payment in MLC. The vehicles are characterized by being “small power” and some have air-conditioned cabins.

To buy the tractors, the interested parties must meet some requirements: present a document issued by the municipal delegation of agriculture that proves that they are an agricultural producer and have an account in MLC with the necessary balance for the purchase.

In 2018, the American tractor manufacturing company Cleber was excluded from the projects approved to locate in the Mariel Special Development Zone. The firm offered a compact, light piece of equipment, nicknamed Oggún, very close to the needs of the island’s farmers.

Two years later the authorities promoted the national Magric 80.2 prototype in the official press, for which, according to one of its creators, they “took advantage of the experience acquired with the rebuilding of Yumz tractors in the 90s and the availability of resources related to the manufacture of hopper.”

The equipment “will be tested soon,” added an article on the subject published in Granma at the time, without further details being known.

Since last September, farmers have been able to buy in foreign currency part of the inputs and equipment — including machetes and oxen yokes — they need to work the land. Gelma justified the decision by saying that, amid the “shortage of marketing networks, the sector requires a system that facilitates producers access to inputs, equipment, parts, pieces and accessories of a specialized nature, and other assortments, which allow the increase in agricultural production.”

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“It is difficult for us to deal directly with patients, because when it comes to washing our hands we have to go to a facility down below, and it is precisely there where the clogging is accentuated and therefore where there are more mosquitoes,” an employee of the physiotherapy area tells 14ymedio.

As if this were not enough, the deterioration of the equipment is evident and medical supplies such as cotton and lidocaine are lacking. “Alcohol, gauze and syringes are in short supply,” says another healthcare worker. “We understand the situation in the country, but this is not the way to work,” he laments. “Sometimes patients take us to task for it and I really do not think we are to blame, but we are the ones who stand up. Add to that the working conditions have become difficult. Many cases with Covid come to the respiratory area that we improvised for the issue of the pandemic and the situation with water is not resolved. “

Last March, they removed the X-ray equipment, and if a patient needs an X-ray, they have to be referred to another location.

In the polyclinic, which provides primary health care services and is also one of the campaign centers for the clinical trials of the candidate vaccine against coronavirus, Soberana 02, reagents for the laboratory are also lacking.

For this reason, sources from the center report, they are only collecting samples in a limited way. When a patient urgently needs a blood test, they send them to another hospital.

“A few days ago I went to be given an aerosol, because I am asthmatic, and they had to change the mouthpiece twice because it did not nebulize,” complains Ernesto, a regular patient, who claims to have witnessed a nurse demanding from a doctor for prescribing medications that were not in the inventory. “I only have tramadol for pain, he told the doctor.”

The polyclinic, which serves a neighborhood where a little more than 18,000 people live, has a university character. In its consultation and of care areas, classes are taught to Medical and Nursing students. The health authorities consider it as a “provincial and national benchmark,” but complaints about the center have accumulated in recent years.

The crisis in the hospitals of Havana goes back a long time. Before the arrival of Covid-19 on the island, there was already a shortage of materials in centers such as Calixto García, where it was usual to find the emergency room crowded with patients, but without gloves, serums or needles.

The Joaquín Albarrán Clinical Surgical Hospital was another of those that revealed their lack of supply and some patients even told 14ymedio that they brought their own materials. “I brought everything, various sizes of disposable syringes, alcohol and the sterile cottons that my daughter sent me from Miami,” said a woman with a leg injury.

At the beginning of 2019, a reader of this newspaper wrote a letter to denounce the unfortunate state of the Abel Santamaría Hospital, in Pinar del Río, where a foreign friend on vacation on the island was poorly treated and was only able to find the best care at the Cimeq (Research Center Medico Quirúrgircas), which can not be accessed by ordinary Cubans. However, even at this exclusive hospital, considered the jewel in the Cuban crown, the roof collapsed in 2015.

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In the statement, it is emphasized that the artist entered the hospital on May 2 with a diagnosis of “referred voluntary starvation,”,which contrasts with the information provided the day after, when it was said that there were no “signs of malnutrition” and that his “clinical and biochemical parameters” were normal.

Around that date, the pro-government media published multiple opinion columns in which they even attributed the good data of an alleged analysis to a high consumption of meat. In its intense campaign of discrediting, Cuban Television had also said in the previous hunger and thirst strike that the opponent carried out in November that there was evidence that he had bought large quantities of food.

The Havana Health authorities take advantage of the case to praise the Calixto García hospital, which has been widely criticized recently for the poor condition of its facilities, and refers to it as an “institution of high level of specialization and tradition in services” which “guaranteed the recovery of his health, complying with the hospital care protocols established for these cases, the principles of Cuban medical ethics, and taking into account the guidelines contained in the Declaration of Malta.”

This Tuesday is a week since the opponent was exhibited by the authorities in a video in which he was heard saying: “The medical staff has been spectacular, beyond that I will continue to demand my rights as an artist, but we cannot To say that the treatment has been bad, you have to know how to differentiate between the profession of doctor and other occupations such as State Security.”

The event was interpreted in a different way, because while some understood that he was giving up his combative attitude by lending himself to make those statements, others affirmed that he had been threatened, coerced or even over-medicated for the recording.

Days later, last Friday, Otero Alcántara appeared in the area outside a pavilion and made a subtle gesture with his hand, the “L” that opponents use to demand freedom.

On the other hand, the San Isidro Movement assured this Monday that they know, from the only relatives who are allowed visits, that Otero Alcántara ingests liquids but “maintains his demands.” The artist is also not allowed to use his cell phone or make calls from the facility’s phones. “Outside the immediate family, any type of contact or communication has been prevented, and we have testimonial information that any person who tries to visit him is subject to police arrest and questioning,” the opposition group denounced.

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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.