Category: EFE

The Network, made up of young people from 20 countries, reiterates that its members will participate in the Social Summit that will take place as a complement to the presidents’ meeting, and expresses its hope that “the Peruvian authorities will be able to guarantee the security” of its members and delegates from Cuban and Venezuelan civil society.

The president of the Network, Rosa María Payá, and the coordinator, Jatzel Roman González, urge the Peruvian authorities not to “tolerate” what they say happened at the previous Summit in Panama, in 2015, “the ‘neighborhood bully’ attitude of the Castro delegation.”

The letter emphasizes that in Panama “shock troops of the Castro regime, led at that time by the current Minister of Culture of the dictatorship, Abel Prieto, attacked with blows and shouts formally accredited members of civil society of the Americas.”

“Three years later, the goal of the Cuban regime remains the same: to prevent the Civil Society Summit from being held because a dictatorship cannot tolerate sharing space with those who peacefully oppose their repressive actions and dare to express it,” the letter adds.

The Latin American Youth Network and the delegation of independent Cuban civil society at the Social Summit are already suffering “aggressions by the Cuban regime,” they point out.

The letter mentions an episode with the Cuban ambassador at the Hemispheric Dialogue in Lima, who “lashed out against Jorge Vallejo, the Peruvian representative who served as spokesman for Coalition 26 and director of our Network.”

The letter also refers to a message on the official Twitter account of the Cuban Foreign Ministry in which it warns that “Cuba will not allow offenses, disrespect or provocation” from the Latin American Youth Network during the Summit.

“Given all the threats and aggressions launched from the institutions and the Castro media, we are obliged to hold the Government in Cuba and the Peruvian authorities responsible for the physical integrity of all of our members,” the signatories of the letter write.

Payá and González also warn of the “dangerous error and incoherence of extending an invitation [to the Summit] to the representatives of the Cuban dictatorship,” after praising the exclusion of representatives of the “Venezuelan dictatorship.”

At the end of the letter, the Network’s directors state: “Our young people are not controlled by fear, we will continue peacefully fighting dictatorships from one end of our region to the other.”

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The persistent rumors about the imminent unification of the two currencies, reflecting the Cuban government’s plan to eliminate the CUC which it began working on in 2013, has caused hundreds of Cubans to go to banks and currency exchanges in recent weeks to get rid of Cuban convertible pesos and exchange them for Cuban pesos (also known as “national money”), dollars or euros.

The official statement insists that “the CUC will continue in circulation until such time as its withdrawal is decided on as a part of the monetary unification process, an event that will be officially announced.”

“The date for the beginning of the process of monetary unification has not been set,” stresses the agency, which also insists on the permanence of the current rate of exchange.

Finally, the Central Bank noted that during the 7th Congress of the Communist Party of  Cuba there was “once again, the decision to guarantee deposits in bank accounts in foreign currencies, CUC and CUP, as well as the cash held by the population.”

Last December, during his most recent speech before the National Assembly, President Raúl Castro urged that the unification process be completed and described the elimination of the double currency as “the most important process” that needed to happen to advance his reforms.

“No one can calculate the high cost that the persistence of duality has meant for the state sector, which favors the unfair inverted pyramid: where there is greater responsibility, there is lower remuneration,” Castro said in his remarks.

He also warned that the situation promotes the migration of skilled workers to the non-state sector, which pays higher salaries and pays them in CUC.

Although the CUC is officially quoted at a value of 24 CUP, several official exchange rates coexist in the accounts of State enterprises in Cuba, which, according to some analysts, generates strong distortions that make it impossible to caculate the real state of the Centralized Cuban economy.

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Chicken, one of the most consumed foods, will be reduced by up to 30% compared to its price in the retail network, says Granma, which acknowledges that the Cuban government is responding to “one of the most repeated demands of those who exercise the new non-state forms of management in the country.”

“To the extent that conditions permit, this experience will be extended to the self-employed in units leased” to the State, explained the Minister of Domestic Trade, Mary Blanca Ortega.

For now available only in the capital city, the next wholesale markets will open “gradually” in the rest of the island, “once this initial proposal is in optimal operation and depending on the places where more self-employment exist,” said the article.

In Cuba today there are more than half a million private or “self-employed” workers, who are engaged in categories of work permitted by the Cuban Government.

More than 12,000 are members of non-agricultural cooperatives, which already number about 420 throughout the country, the vast majority of them dedicated to food services, commerce, other services, construction and industry.

Located in the Havana municipality of Plaza of the Revolucion, Mercabal will open from Monday to Saturday with products from ten direct suppliers, which will replenish the market according to the customers’ monthly orders.

In order to use the services of the new market, the self-employed person must have updated their client file and have an account with a magnetic card, issued by the state-owned Banco Metropolitano.

The 2010 expansion of private work — which includes non-agricultural cooperatives — has been one of the key reforms of the government of the outgoing Cuban leader Raul Castro to update the socialist model and reduce the overlarge workforce of the state sector.

As of last August, the Island began a process of reordering “cuentapropismo” (self-employment), as a part of which the issuing of licenses to private restaurants and tourist rentals, among other activities, has been temporarily halted to curb illegalities, “deviations” and “correct deficiencies.”

The licenses no longer being issued are precisely those in most demand among the would-be self-employed.

Although it promised that the new measure would not be in effect “for a very long period of time,” the Cuban government has not yet resumed the delivery of licenses to Cuba’s self-employed, who already represent 12% of the country’s labor force.

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In fact, in the last eight years, the use of remittances has broadened to cover some of Cubans’ other needs, such as the costs of mobile phones, internet accounts, vacations and business investments.

Today even the purchase of cars, spare parts, mortgage payments, medical insurance and private tutors for college entrance exams are necessities that are paid for with remittances from the US, where more than 90% of them originate.

THCG predicts that remittances from the United States will rise to 5.285 billion dollars in 2025.

However, this economic landscape of family remittances — characterized as one of “transformation, diversification and growth” — is impacted by a banking system that lacks the infrastructure to offer adequate payment services and delivery channels.

“More than half a million private sector Cuban business people generate thousands of financial transactions daily that do not go through Cuban banks because the conditions do not exist to handle them,” writes Emilio Morales, president of THCG, in the company’s extensive report, which sheds light the Cuban consumer market.

Morales adds that a large part of these transactions are handled through “payment networks of remittance agencies and other informal channels.”

A financial activity that, according to the expert, costs Cuban banks tens of millions of dollars in potential profits every year “because they do not have the technological and digitized infrastructure capable of offering these services.”

There is currently no banking transfer system between US financial institutions and Cuban banks, and Cubans have “limited access to tools” that allow them to receive money directly from their bank accounts.

In this context, Cuban banks have a “great opportunity to insert themselves into the remittance payment networks” and to “create formal channels for Cuban entrepreneurs to conduct commercial transactions through banks.”

In addition to the fourteen existing categories, the firm has identified seven new ones for the use of remittances in the next eight years: water, electricity and mortgage payments, cruise vacations, medical insurance, car purchase or rental, and payment of cable or satellite television.

In Morales’ opinion a number of new “modalities” will have “a strong impact on the market and represent a great oportunity for Cuban banking.”

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On September 29 the Department of State asked Americans “not to travel to Cuba” because of the alleged acoustic attacks on the island between November 2016 and August of last year against 24 Americans (embassy staff or relatives), attacks of which the USA has not yet found the cause or the guilty parties.

In addition, the Trump Government withdrew 60% of the staff of the Embassy of Havana and expelled 15 diplomats from the Cuban Embassy in Washington.

“The consequences of the actions of the Department of State have negatively affected not only US companies and institutions that send travelers to Cuba for educational purposes, but the lack of Embassy staff in Havana has also made obtaining visas very difficult,” said Kate Simpson, president of Academic Travel Abroad.

In January, the government changed Cuba’s destination category and included it in Category 3, a rating that according to the tourism sector is “unjustifiable” due to the lack of real evidence that these attacks even happened.

For nations in Category 3, the United States recommends its citizens “avoid traveling due to serious security risks.”

This group also includes five other Latin American countries: Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

On the other hand, the State Department is facing a deadline this week for the requirement that, six months after the reduction of the Embassy staff in Cuba, that staff must be reassigned to another location or returned to the same site.

In 2017, almost three times as many Americans traveled to Cuba compared to the previous year, according to data from the Cuban Foreign Ministry.

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Comparing the ancestral genome of this native of the Bahamas with those of current Puerto Ricans, the researchers found that they were “closer to the Taíno ethnic group than to any other group of indigenous people in the Americas.”

However, the researchers consider that these characteristics are not unique to the inhabitants of Puerto Rico and hope that future studies will find “similar genetic legacies in other Caribbean communities.”

“It’s a fascinating discovery. Many history books say that the indigenous population of the Caribbean was almost entirely annihilated but people who think they resemble the Taino have always argued for their continued existence,” said Hannes Schroeder, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the study.

“Now we know they were right all along: there has been some form of genetic continuity in the Caribbean,” said Schroeder, who led the research as part of the Nexus 1492 project.

The investigation includes the testimony of Jorge Estévez, a Taíno descendant who, despite growing up in New York, remembers the stories of his grandmother and his ancestors. The results of the study confirm what Estevez heard as a child.

“This shows that the true story (of the Tainos) is certainly one of assimilation and not total extinction,” said Estevez who works at the National Museum of American Indians and participated as an assistant to the project’s research team.

Another important aspect contributed by the study is the possibility of confirming the theory that many of the natives who inhabited the Caribbean islands have their origins in the Arahuacos, originating in the north of South America.

“I am truly grateful to the researchers, although this may have been a subject of scientific research for them, for us the descendants is truly liberating and stimulating,” Estévez concluded.

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Since the approval of the first reforms in 2010, the Cuban government has applied a total of 100 Guidelines — as the new economic directives are officially called — which have always been accompanied by education and training for the intermediate levels in charge of carrying them out, said Murillo.

“But the quality has not been good,” admitted Murillo, Minister of the Economy from 2014 to 2016 and currently head of the Permanent Commission for the Implementation of the New Economic Policy, charged among other things with defining the conceptualization of the new Cuban socialist model.

Murillo noted that in the area of human resource training there were “flaws” in the content and in the selection of participants and he stressed the importance of holding new seminars to raise awareness of the new legal rules governing the business system.

The two fundamental pillars of the reforms to “update” socialism are the new arrangements for foreign investment and the opening of the private sector, by expanding the professions in which individuals can work autonomously, “cuentapropismo” (literally ’on-your-own-account-ism’) as self-employment is officially referred to. Currently this form of employment now involves more than half a million entrepreneurs.

In August, the government halted the granting of new self-employment licenses for the most widespread professions, such as restaurants and renting lodging to tourists, reportedly in order to improve and correct irregularities.

Since then the sector has been waiting for a new regulations, which it is feared will be more restrictive.

As a positive aspect in the progress of the reforms, Murillo stressed that the relationship between the directors of state-owned companies and government boards has been tightened when allocating the budget to “maximize” production.

One of the pending reforms on the island is the monetary unification — that is ending the dual currency system consisting of Cuban pesos and Cuban convertible pesos — which, according to Murillo, should create a “more favorable” environment for state-owned companies, since the two currencies currently ciculating on the island are regulated under different exchange rates according to the sector.

In Cuba, the Cuban peso (CUP) circulates as the national currency and the convertible peso (CUC) is considered a hard currency (roughly equivalent to the dollar and worth 24 CUP), a monetary duality that has persisted since the 1990s and that has generated serious distortions in corporate accounting and macroeconomics, as well as led to two standards of living among the population.

Most Cubans collect their salaries and pay for basic services with the national currency, the CUP; the average monthly salary is about 672 Cuban pesos (equivalent to about 28 dollars).

The timetable — without dates — to complete the unification has been announced since 2013, but has not yet been implemented. However, according to several analysts it is likely to be realized this year, since the lack of a single currency is also one of the main obstacles to foreign investment.

In his closing speech at the last plenary session of Parliament in December 2017, Raúl Castro stressed that the end of the dual currency system “cannot be delayed any longer” and it is the “process that will be most determinate” in advancing the reforms promoted during his mandate.

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Although Cuba, the only country in the Americas that continues to bar access to Amnesty International, continues to “expand access” to the network and has reduced the price to connect, the cost – one dollar per hour in wifi-enabled parks– is still “prohibitive” for the majority of the population in a country where the average monthly salary is less than 30 dollars.

The organization also stresses that “harassment, intimidation and arbitrary detention” of political and human rights activists continues, although the figures are lower than in 2016.

According to data from the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation – the only organization that keeps a full count of these incidents on the Island – in 2017 there were 5,155 arbitrary detentions, compared to 9,940 in 2016.

Among the main targets of the repression, Amnesty International cites the Ladies in White, an organization of women who have relatives being held as political prisoners.

The report notes that Dr. Eduardo Cardet, who replaced the late dissident Osvaldo Payá as head of the Christian Liberation Movement and who is named a prisoner of conscience, is serving a three-year sentence imposed in March for publicly criticizing Fidel Castro.

It also cites, among others, cases such as that of graffiti artist Danilo Maldonado, known as El Sexto, who spent two months in prison for writing “He left” on a Havana wall hours after Castro’s death, and that of urban artist Yulier Pérez, “arbitrarily detained after months of intimidation and harassment by the authorities for expressing himself freely through his art.”

“The authorities continued to present false charges for common crimes to harass and detain representatives of the political opposition, which means that there were probably many more prisoners and prisoners of conscience than those documented,” the report said.

The firings for “discriminatory and for political reasons” are also included in the document, which notes that the State is still the largest employer in Cuba and also regulates the incipient private sector, which it uses to “repress even the most subtle criticism,” practices that are reinforced by the absence of independent labor unions.

Despite the thaw with the United States, now reversed by the Donald Trump Administration, the report emphasizes that a high rate of Cuban migration persists, driven by the “exceptionally low” salaries and the “control of free expression.”

This bilateral change in direction also makes the possible lifting of the US embargo on the island less likely and “continues to weaken economic, social and cultural rights.”

Finally, the report’s Cuban chapter notes that in 2017 the first visit to the Island by an independent United Nations expert on human rights took place, although the expert was refuses “access to the whole country, its prisons to the majority of independent human rights organizations.”

Cuba has not ratified either the international Covenants on Civil and Political Rights, and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (2008) nor the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

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Eleven injured were referred to provincial hospitals and ten are under observation in other health institutions. It is the fifth serious traffic crash in Cuba this week.

Last Friday a triple collision between two trucks and a tractor left a dozen injured in the central province of Villa Clara, and in previous days there were three other incidents, one of them in the mountainous area of ​​Santiago de Cuba, also involving an overturned truck, leaving twenty injured.

Among the injured are five adults in serious condition and a child who suffered fractures in one leg and a foot injury

A passenger bus also overturned on the central highway of the island, causing 40 injuries, and there was another serious crash that killed six people when a car and a cargo truck collided on the National Highway as it passed through Villa. Clear.

Traffic crashes, which average 31 a day, are the fifth leading cause of death in Cuba, and in the first half of 2017 (the latest official data available) there were 1,070 of these incidents, resulting in 314 deaths and 3,478 injuries.

The main causes are related to the lack of attention of the driver, the breach of the right of way and speeding, but other factors include the poor state of the roads, and the aging vehicle fleet, in a country where cars are routinely more than 50 years old.

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“Working with the mountain people is exhilarating, as is enjoying the genius of the children of this community,” said the artist, who is confident that the exhibition space “will influence how art is approached in the future, due to the the beauty and comfort of this place, which is conducive to creation.”

Estudio Galería Molino Rojo, the name of the cultural institution, is part of Galerias Rurales, one of the most ambitious projects promoted by Domínguez with the aim of creating creative spaces in rural areas with a perspective towards economic development.

Domínguez said that two other rural galleries will be located in similar areas, one of them in the town of Baire, in the province of Santiago de Cuba, and the other in the town of Minas de Matahambre, in Pinar del Rio province.

This community cultural space joins other projects that the artist has undertaken involving painting, jewelry and sewing, also dedicated to stimulating the popular collection and creation of ceramic murals to donate to hospitals on the island.

The gallery is part of the Jobero Verde cultural project, installed on the 80 acres of a rural farm, where a library, a computer room and an amphitheater, attached to the side of a hill next to a river, have been built. The amphitheater is the main stage of the theater group Los Elementos.

Nelson Domínguez (1947) is a native of the rural area, having grown up in the mountains of the eastern Sierra Maestra. He graduated from the National Art School of Havana, and has participated in more than a hundred personal and collective exhibitions.

His works appear in institutions in Cuba and in public and private collections in countries such as Japan, the United States, Spain, Italy, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Sweden.

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The Ibero-American Special Prize for Environmental Journalism and Sustainable Development is one of the categories of the King of Spain International Journalism Awards, organized by the EFE agency and the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation for Development (AECID), under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The jury, which granted the award unanimously, highlighted the difficulty of carrying out this kind of reporting in Cuba and also noted that Periodismo de Barrio is a non-profit organization whose primary aspiration is “to do journalism.”

The work of the Cuban journalist was selected among this year’s 44 aspirants for the sixth edition of the award.

Julio Batista (b. 1989), graduated in Journalism from the School of Communication of the University of Havana, has been a sports reporter in the weekly Trabajadores (Workers), as well as collaborating in several digital magazines such as Progreso Semanal, Cuba Contemporánea, On Cuba and Cubahora.

The prize is endowed with 6,000 euros (7,465 dollars at current exchange rate) and a bronze sculpture by the artist Joaquín Vaquero Turcios, and is sponsored by the Aquae Foundation.

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Apretaste! has 40,000 registered users in Cuba and works through email. Cuba is among the countries with the lowest internet connection rate in the world (only 5% of Cubans have actual connections to the World Wide Web according to research from the NGO Freedom House).  Given this reality, Pascual, who has a master’s degree in computer science and divides his time between the United States and Spain, has always challenged himself to find ways to connect his compatriots.

“It is very difficult for ordinary people to understand that we work based on emails, but that’s the way it is, and our input and output (from Cuba) is encrypted,” he says.

Around 300 users already use Pizarra to communicate with friends and relatives on the island. The vast majority of them, explains Pascual, live in the United States, the place “with the greatest number of Cubans outside Cuba.”

Right now, he and his team — which includes a “good hacker” who lives in Cuba and works under the pseudonym Kuma Hacker — are finishing an application of Pizarra for mobile phones that will be available at the end of March.

The name of the social network, “Blackboard” in English, was chosen because “it is a kind of synonym for learning and knowledge, a place where everyone can write and read openly,” explained the programmer.

Pascual says that his new software, which works “free of any political color,” has a function that can block or call out people who misuse it.

“We did not block any content, not even the Granma newspaper, so we have made some people unhappy,” he lamented.

Although the mobile phone version of application may or may not be accessible to users from within the island, the new social network can be used there through the platform Apretaste!

The Cuban government says that 35% of the population is connected to the Internet, but Freedom House research reports that the actual number is only 5%, some 560,000 people from a population of just over 11 million inhabitants.

Data from Apretaste! finds that 25% of the population (about 2.8 million users) receive emails even if they do not have Internet.

Pascual relies on state accounts and state servers, such as those used by university students, diplomats, radio amateurs and doctors, who can access email through the government domain “cu.”

But the computer scientist based in Miami wants to go further. His Pizarra, he said, is also being created to function as a tourist guide.

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The renovation includes three new facilities, the reconstruction and expansion of the access road and the improvement of the patrimonial complex with “allegorical components” such as ten royal palms as a reference to the date, the 10th of October, on which the revolt began, and a lighting system with the colors of the Cuban flag (white, blue and red).

A “mount” of twelve flags will also be added in memory of the number of men who stayed with independence hero Carlos Manuel de Céspedes after the failure of the first military clash, the capture of the town of Yara, according to La Demajagua’s director, Carlos Céspedes, speaking to Granma.

All the improvements and the new features “will respect the patrimonial design dictated by the existing museum,” he added.

La Demajagua was a sugar plantation belonging to Céspedes who is considered Cuba’s “Father of the Nation.”  The ruins of the sugar mill and the curved stone wall are preserved, along with the original bell, which is the one the pro-independence hero rang the day the uprising began.

On that date, which marked the beginning of the Ten Years War against Spain, Céspedes shouted the island’s first pro-independence proclamation — “Independence or Death!” — and also freed his slaves.

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